Between Objectivism and Experientialism

Is abuse something that a perpetrator does, something that a victim experiences, or a matter of their interaction?

As process work moves out of the field of psychotherapy and begins to deal with social issues, it is forced to take stands on values, morals and ethics. This appears to bring process work into conflict with its Taoist roots, which accept anything that happens as part of the right direction. Although values have always emerged in process work through disposition of the individual practitioners, big public events like the worldwork seminars force us to take stands on issues like abuse, power and rank which we would sometimes prefer to let unfold organically.

Those approaching process work from the standpoint of the early writings might see it as tainted with moral relativism. For instance, in my book, The Dreambody Toolkit, I make the statement, "What is happening is right and ought to be supported" (1987: 10). As useful as this may be in the privacy of the psychotherapeutic practice, where the process worker may have to suspend judgment long enough to help his client unfold even the nastiest-seeming processes, it cannot be applied without modification in outer-world situations where it might be thought to justify abusive acts. There are certain acts which society as a whole has agreed are impermissible: physical and sexual abuse, child abuse and slavery. I would consider it a tragedy if the precepts of process work were used to justify the abuse of even a single individual.

On the other hand, thousands of years of moral precepts have not succeeded in eliminating these evils from our modern world, although many would argue that, through the worldwide abolition of legalized slavery, or the enactment of child labor laws in many countries, definite progress has been made.

The crux of the matter comes when we wish to use process work to address transgressions against commonly held values. Must we simply condemn the offender? Does unfolding the universe of experience surrounding the immoral act constitute its advocacy? Although we may speak cavalierly of the need to support the offender as well as the victim in the interest of deep democracy and the need to avoid backlash, we must only look at the approbation heaped upon Jung for his interest in and tangential involvement with the Nazi movement in wartime Germany. Decades of subsequent disclaimers and analysis have failed to convince the world that his fascination with National Socialism was merely academic, and not an outright espousal, no matter how brief, of its values. It is desperately important that as we bathe in the waters of equality, we do not unconsciously sanction unpardonable acts.

As serious as this problem is in moral and political terms, the conflict that it raises in the sphere of action runs clear to the philosophical roots of process work. It is my contention that a sustainable solution to the surface problem can be achieved only by working on the philosophical paradoxes that lie at the foundation of process work.

These paradoxes revolve around a central question about human experience: Do we experience real objects in an outer world, or do we experience only experience itself?

The former position holds that the world is real, if, perhaps, unknowable. There is something objective "out there," whose nature can be inferred from enough observation, reasoning and even creative guesswork. Even if the objects of the world are always filtered through our senses and our understanding, they are knowable in principle, given enough time, patience and research.

The second view says that there is no reality at all beyond our understanding of it. We live immersed in a sea of experience that is always self-referential. There is no truth beyond understanding. What appears to be objective in the world is merely a matter of mutual understanding. When enough people experience something as such, it is so. In this view, objectivity is simply one more kind of experience. It is not that things which we call objective are any more real than those we call subjective; it is merely that we experience them as being objective.

At the risk of being philosophically inaccurate, let's call the first position "objectivist" and the second "experientialist." Whether we adopt one or the other position has immense consequences for how we view psychology in general, and values, morals and ethics in particular. I take the liberty of being casual with my philosophy because the distinctions that are useful in understanding practical problems are often far coarser than those needed for accuracy in philosophical argument.

An objectivist view of the world holds that:

• The world is made up of real objects, whose existence and properties are independent of our understanding of them. Thus a statement like "Snow is white" refers to a real substance, snow, and an objective color, white, both of which exist independently of anyone's understanding of them.

• A statement can be true only if the circumstance it refers to is itself true. Therefore the statement "Snow is white" is only true if snow is, in reality, white.
• Since statements, concepts and experience all rest on a foundation of objective facts, meaningful statements and concepts must be consistent. They must agree with one another, since they all refer to the same objective reality. Thus if I say "Snow is white; it absorbs all the light that strikes it," this is an inconsistent and therefore meaningless statement. "White" and "absorbs all light" are mutually inconsistent properties. Things which absorb all light appear black, and things which appear white reflect pretty much all the light that strikes them.

An objectivist world view values objectively verifiable statements most, and subjective experience least. For instance, if I say "Snow is yellow with blue polka-dots," an objectivist would say that I am deluded, or trying to provoke him.

The modern industrialized world is through-and-through objectivist, even in areas that deal primarily with human understanding. Psychiatry is fundamentally objectivist in its treatment of schizophrenia and other "disorders of thinking." Thinking is called "disordered" when it does not reflect reality. People who hallucinate see things that "aren't really there." Physical medicine is an objectivist discipline, even though the entities it deals with, such as symptoms and diseases, are themselves grounded in human experience and understanding.

But objectivism is not just a utilitarian construct of the mechanistic modern world; it is the way many of us actually experience the world. We experience snow, madness and physical symptoms as though they really were "out there." In fact, if we did not experience things that way, there would be no need for process work!

Experientialism, on the other hand, sees everything as an aspect of human experience. It holds that:

No matter what the world is made up of, we have only our experience of it on which to rely. Experience is grounded not in "reality" but in itself.

• Truth, itself, is also a matter of experience. If things appear objectively true, it is because we experience them that way, not because they refer to any objective state of the world.
• Meaning, in an experientialist framework, comes not from consistency, but from coherence: how well do the various aspects of an experience hang together? An expression like "Time flies" is inconsistent in that time has neither wings nor propulsion, but is coherent, because "flying" as an experience hangs together with the way we experience time as passing quickly when we are enjoying ourselves. The way we experience time and the way we experience flying are sometimes similar. Therefore the metaphor "Time flies" makes sense to us. To say "Snow is white" is meaningful not because snow is white, but because our experience of "snow" and our experience of "white" hang together. They are coherent with one another.

Experientialism values experience as highly as it does "objective reality." It does so because it sees objective reality as merely one further aspect of experience. The kind of hierarchy of values that objectivism creates is seen as one further kind of experience! One important aspect of the experientialist world view is that it is deeply democratic; if everything is seen in terms of experience, then anyone's experience is as valid as anyone else's. This is thought to be one of the chief difficulties with experientialist thought. It seems to lead to either anarchy, in which all truth seems completely arbitrary, or else to solipsism: since we can not know another's experience with any certainty, we are all radically isolated from one another.

Mutual experience

Despite these objections, we can and do communicate coherently with one another. When I say "Time flies," you know approximately what I mean, since flying time is a shared experience. It seems to go along with being human. Nevertheless, accounting for shared experience in an experientially oriented philosophy is a challenging problem that has occupied philosophers for at least the last 400 years. An empirical but incisive inroad was made by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By (1980). Lakoff and Johnson suggest that the metaphorical structure of language gives us a window onto the world of shared experience. Starting from the fact that we understand and communicate in metaphors like "Time flies," they analyze the world of shared experience through the coherence of the metaphors we use to describe it. Lakoff and Johnson's work is important because it puts experientialism on a firm empirical basis, giving us a way to evaluate the relative coherence of either each individual's world of experience, or the world of experience shared by a group.

Process work and experientialism

Process work is experiential in several senses. Mindell's original formulation of the dreambody concept was experiential because it put human experience on an equal footing with objective fact. He found that his clients' subjective experiences of their symptoms and illnesses provided a kind of knowledge that complemented their medical diagnoses. He found that people typically experienced two aspects of their symptoms, a "victim" and a "symptom-maker" part. The victim part was the sum of experience with which they could readily identify; another component, which appeared mostly in their nonverbal signals, was identified with the creator, or "maker," of the symptom.

Viewed from a medical-causal standpoint, the symptom was caused by some objective circumstance, such as a microorganism, a toxin or a mechanical problem. From the dreambody, or experiential, standpoint the symptom was the manifestation of the conflict between two contradictory or mutually incoherent experiences. Each of these viewpoints suggests methods of dealing with symptoms, which are abundantly described in the literature of medicine, on the one hand, and of process work on the other. The dreambody concept does not preclude causal explanations of symptoms; it offers an alternative viewpoint which has, empirically, shown itself to be effective in dealing with many aspects of physical symptoms. But these two viewpoints do form mutually independent "spaces," in each of which the complementary viewpoint becomes largely irrelevant, not because it vanishes, but because we understand it in terms of the framework from which we view it.

Once we start attending to a client's subjective experience of her symptoms, for instance, we find that we listen with a different ear and see with a different eye than when we listen to medical diagnoses. When a client reports that he has been diagnosed with a malignant tumor, we focus first on his experience of the tumor. But should he turn from his personal experience to recounting the diagnosis itself, we would then focus on his experience of the diagnosis. Why, paradoxically, does he smile as he reports this frightening (to us) diagnosis? How much stock, we ask ourselves, does he put in his doctor's competence? How well does he trust the doctor's estimate of his chances of recovery? Of his expected lifespan? We find ourselves, as process workers, in an "experiential space" in which we speculate about the patient's experience, even while he is reporting on the causal aspects of his illness. In this act we see the beginnings of a radically experiential position emerging from an empirical dreambody concept, as we attempt to understand the "objective facts" he recites to us as aspects of his experience.

This thoroughly experiential viewpoint has gone beyond work with physical symptoms to form part of the very structure of process work. We see it most clearly in the way we view past, present and future experience. When a client speaks of past experience, for instance, we sense that although he refers to an objective past, he also refers to a present experience that he largely disavows. We commonly see this in interpersonal relationships. When a friend tells me, "You used to be a real bastard, but you're much nicer now," I may feel that he continues to harbor ill feelings toward me in the here and now of our relationship. If we challenge people who make such statements to tell us what they have against us now, they will either, with some reluctance, find a present complaint, or else will show the signs of distraction and discomfort that typify people grappling with disavowed aspects of their experience. When we choose to focus on the form of the statement, rather than its content, we adopt a view that sees statements as windows onto a world of present experience, in addition to being statements about actual matters of fact. This decision brings us very close to concepts of experience proposed by the Idealists, by Kant and by Husserlian phenomenology.

This shift is subtle but profound. Where the objectivist sees a subject having experience of an outer, objective reality, our new viewpoint is that of a "world" of experience which encompasses all and excludes nothing; it is reality itself. Once we adopt the experientialist viewpoint, we are no longer free to consider experience as being of the real, objective world without completely sacrificing our new framework.

Two views are better than none

Normally, we are not aware of "having a viewpoint" when it comes to the distinction between objective reality and experience. We slide back and forth between one and the other as the occasion calls for, without necessarily being aware of the transition.

This is perhaps clearest when we think of dreams. If a client of mine has a positive dream of me, I am apt to think that the dream reflects an objective quality of mine, whereas if the dream is negative, I think that it is my client's personal and subjective experience, having nothing to do with me.

To adopt either of these positions necessarily hides a portion of my experience. If I consider his dream to be purely subjective, I must disavow the brief moment of uncertainty during which I measure my experience of myself against my figure in his dream. And if I consider his dream to be purely objective, I must disavow everything I know of psychology. At least as important as finding out which position is "right" is to notice what leads me to adopt the position I take!

I know, from bitter experience, that I am prone to the objectivist position at times when I am insufficiently sure of myself. Knowing that another's dream says that I am objectively in good shape makes me feel supported by the universe. After all, nobody can argue with a prophetic dream! On the other hand, if my client's dream seems to suggest that I am not all I would like to be, I find I cannot defend myself against such an objective judgment, and must make my experience coherent by disavowing any hint of objective truth in the dream's commentary.

As long as I remain unaware of this shifting viewpoint, I fail to notice that I have any viewpoint at all, substituting for it an elaborate theory of dreams that makes them objective at times and subjective at others. Such a theory, by leaving my own psychology out of the equation, rapidly loses any relationship to my client's dreams. A more realistic approach would consider that both positions are views of one world of mutual experience, in which my and my client's experiences are inextricably blended into one potentially coherent whole.

Implications for abuse processes

We are now in a much better position to consider my initial question:

Is abuse something that a perpetrator does, something that the victim experiences, or a matter of their interaction'?

I first counter with another question:

Who is to say?

Or to say it more directly, before answering the question, I would look at the consequences of my answer.

I adopt an objectivist view of abuse when I feel too weak to back up my own abhorrence of abuse with action. I then find myself reverting to a view that makes abuse an absolutely intolerable act, situated in the perpetrator, quite independently of what the victim may feel. When I find the clarity to reflect on this, I realize that I judge abuse as objective from the knowledge that in all too many cases, the victim's experience is too complex, or their position too weak, to permit them to have much of a viewpoint on their own abuse.

But I adopt an experientialist view when I find that my experience of abuse is centered on the victim, particularly in situations that are not only excluded from a consensual definition of abuse, but form part of the accepted social order. When people are humiliated in public, I tend to bring my own empathy into the equation. I must ask myself if their silence is mere acquiescence to their attacker's viewpoint, or if it masks a deep sense of shock, perhaps exacerbated by a previous history of neglect and humiliation.

I cannot say where abuse is really located; I do know that by noticing where we place it, we can gain a much deeper insight into its structure and dynamics.

Reality as a third party

Put someone in a bad spot, and he will likely enlist objective reality as an ally (much as in some contexts, and in earlier times, he might enlist God). This is such a pervasive feature of everyday interaction that we hardly notice it when it occurs. Consider this interaction, which might take place in February in my native New York City:

He: Snow is white.

She: No it isn’t, it's dirty grey.

He (looking in the dictionary): It says here that snow is a white substance. ...

Most times when we refer to a higher, impersonal and objective authority, we do so out of a sense of weakness; we can neither stand by our own perception, nor accede wholeheartedly to the other's.

Appeal to a higher power or authority may be absolutely necessary where someone's life or spiritual, psychological or physical integrity are at stake. But if we do so without acknowledging that there is an experiential, as well as an objective, basis for our act, we risk taking the role of the abuser at a later time, by marginalizing others in the role of victim.

This happens because one-sidedly supporting any hierarchical system, even if it is currently beneficial to the endangered or disadvantaged, beneficial to the endangered or disadvantaged, condones a framework that supports power over experience. However good-hearted our attempts to save the abuse victim from further pain by appeal to objective standards, we must realize that some other person, who experiences the full brunt of abuse without presenting a convincing perpetrator, will feel abused by our refusal to include him in our conceptual framework.

There has been recent heated controversy over whether or not memories of abuse recovered under hypnosis really refer to actual past abusive situations. From an objectivist viewpoint, this question raises horrifyingly complex problems of verification. No matter how scientific the investigative procedure, we are left in the end with a war of words by the participants to the situation. Scientific theory and the hypnotic technique are enlisted as an objective third party to explain the often vague but paralytic sense many of us have that when we were young, "something happened" which left us scarred for life. Because, for decades, public opinion has more often shielded accused parents and relatives than abused children, it was inevitable that the weight of objective proof be enlisted on the side of those who have been without power for so long. But subsequent developments showed that authority is a two-edged sword, as available to the accused parents as to the abused children. So it is really a no-win situation; it all devolves to a power struggle in which each side tries to prove its alliance with a stronger objectivity than the other. In the end, everyone loses.

Objectivity within an experiential framework

We can now address the questions I posed at the beginning of this article. Abuse in all forms must be condemned. There is no place for moral relativism masquerading as "experientialism" when it comes to child abuse, rape or other acts that violate our most basic human rights. But the process-oriented approach adds something: it puts teeth into our personal reactions by helping us unfold our full range of experience when confronted by these acts. Just as abusive acts render their victim unable to defend herself, they often paralyze observers who feel that they have neither the authority nor the strength to stop that which is so clearly wrong. All too often, abusive acts are seen as impermissible in principle, even as the perpetrators do their work under the unseeing eyes of whole communities of responsible adults.

When we agree to remain in an experiential rather than an objectivist framework, we do not sacrifice our principles, but add to them the spice of immediate awareness. We then focus not only on the acts themselves, but on the effect they have both on their victim and upon us, as observers. By confining the judgment of abuse to those acts which fit collectively established standards, the objectivist approach thwarts none but the most heinous of abuses against basic human rights.

Like any other system of thought, the experiential framework can itself be misused so as to appear to condone overly abusive acts. It remains in the spirit of the experiential viewpoint to notice and name such misuse, and to broaden our awareness of abuse and injustice, rather than to narrow it.

References

Goodbread, Joseph. The Dreamboay Toolkit. London: Rout-ledge and Kegan Paul, 1987.

Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Joe Goodbread, Ph.D., co-facilitates the Extreme States Clinic held annually on the Oregon Coast. He practices and teaches process work at the Process Work Center of Portland and throughout the world. He is the author of The Dreambody Toolkit and numerous articles and manuscripts on various aspects of process work.