Chapter IV Reality, Emergency, and Evaluation

Reality, we have been saying, is given in moments of “good contact,” a unity of awareness, motor response, and feeling. Let us now begin to analyze this unity more closely and relate it to our method of psychotherapy. In the present chapter we shall argue that reality and value emerge as a result of self-regulation, whether healthy or neurotic; and we shall discuss the problem of how, within the framework of the neurotic’s self-regulation, to increase the area of contact. We shall answer this by defining psychotherapy as self-regulation in experimental safe emergencies.

1: Dominance and Self-Regulation

Let us call the tendency of a strong tension to stand out prominently and organize awareness and behavior, its dominance. When there is difficulty and delay in reaching equilibrium in the field, the dominance and its attempt to complete the organization are conscious (indeed they are what consciousness is).

Each most pressing unfinished situation assumes dominance and mobilizes all the available effort until the task is completed; then it becomes indifferent and loses consciousness, and the next pressing need claims attention. The need becomes pressing not deliberately but spontaneously. Deliberateness, selection, planning are involved in completing the unfinished situation, but consciousness does not have to find the problem, rather it is identical with the problem. The spontaneous consciousness of the dominant need and its organization of the functions of contact is the psychological form of organismic self-regulation.

Everywhere in the organism many processes of ordering, withholding, selection, and so forth are always going on without consciousness, for instance the ordered discharge of certain enzymes to digest certain foods. This non-conscious internal organization can be of the utmost qualitative subtlety and quantitative accuracy, but it always has to do with fairly conservative problems. But when these processes require for completion new material from the environment — and this is the case in turn with every organic process — then certain figures of consciousness brighten and become foreground; we have to do with contact. In a situation of danger, when the tension is initiated from outside, wariness and deliberateness are similarly spontaneous.

2: Dominance and Evaluation

Spontaneous dominances are judgments of what is important in the occasion. They are not adequate evaluations, but they are basic evidence of a kind of hierarchy of needs in a present situation. They are not “impulsive” and are necessarily vague, but systematic and often quite specific, for they express the wisdom of the organism about its own needs and a selection from the environment of what meets those needs. They provide an immediate ethics, not infallible and yet in a privileged position.

The privilege comes simply from this: that what seems spontaneously important does in fact marshal the most energy of behavior; self-regulating action is brighter, stronger, and shrewder. Any other line of action that is presumed to be “better” must proceed with diminished power, less motivation, and more confused awareness; and must also involve devoting a certain amount of energy, and distracting a certain amount of attention, to keeping down the spontaneous self, which is seeking expression in self-regulation. This is the case even when self-regulation is inhibited in the obvious interests of the self: e.g., when a child is kept from running in front of automobiles, a situation in which his self-regulation is fallible — and the way we run our societies seems to consist largely of such situations. The inhibition then is necessary, but let us remember that to the extent to which we agree to situations in which self-regulation rarely operates, to that extent we must be content to live with diminished energy and brightness.

The question that most obviously strikes the average person is how far in our society and technology, and perhaps in the nature of things, organismic-self-regulation is possible, allowable, riskable. We believe immensely more than we now deliberately allow; people can be much brighter and more energetic than they are, and then they would also be shrewder. A great part of our troubles is self-inflicted. Many both “objective” and “subjective” conditions can and must be changed. And even when the objective situation cannot be changed, as when a loved one dies, there are regulating reactions of the organism itself, such as crying and mourning, that help restore equilibrium if only we allow them to. But let us defer this discussion for a later place. (Chapter 8)

3: Neurotic Self-Regulation

Now, neurotic experience is also self-regulating. The structure of neurotic contact is characterized, we have said, by an excess of deliberateness, fixing attention and with the muscles set in readiness for a particular response. Then certain impulses and their objects are kept from becoming foreground (repression); the self cannot flexibly turn from one situation to another (rigidity and compulsion); energy is bound in an uncompletable (archaically conceived) task.

When extreme deliberateness is reasonable, in the face of chronic present dangers, we cannot speak of an “excess,” but we might well speak of a “neurotic society” whose arrangements are out of human scale. But the neurotic has a hair-trigger sensitivity to the danger; he is spontaneously deliberate when he could safely relax. Let us put this more accurately: The neurotic cannot safely relax with regard to his actual situation, including his archaic estimation of it, for to that he spontaneously adjusts by his self-regulation, finds it dangerous, and becomes deliberate. But with help, that actual situation can be changed to his advantage. It is useful to express it in this complicated way rather than to say simply, “The neurotic is making a mistake,” because the neurotic is self-regulating, and it is in order to complete a true unfinished situation that he comes to the therapist.

If the therapist regards the therapeutic situation in this light, as part of the on-going unfinished situation of the patient, which the patient is meeting with his own self-regulation, he is more likely to be helpful than if he regards the patient as mistaken, sick, “dead.” For certainly it is not by the therapist’s but by his own energy that the patient will ultimately complete the situation.

We are then led to the thorny question that we want to discuss in this chapter: what is the relation between the neurotic patient’s ongoing self-regulation and the therapist’s scientific conception of healthy organismic self-regulation? With respect to this question, we do well to pay careful attention to the following words of Kurt Lewin:

It is particularly necessary that one who proposes to study whole-phenomena should guard against the tendency to make the wholes as all-embracing as possible. The real task is to investigate the structural properties of a given whole, ascertain the relations of subsidiary wholes, and determine the boundaries of the system with which one is dealing. It is no more true in psychology than in physics that ‘everything depends on everything else.’[^1]

4: Healthy Self-Regulation in an Emergency

Let us consider first a fairly healthy incident of dominance and organismic-self-regulation:[^2] Corporal Jones goes on patrol in the desert. He loses his way but finally, exhausted, he arrives back in camp. His friend Jimmy is glad to see him and at once bursts out with the important news that during his absence Jones’ promotion has come through. Jones stares at him with glazed eyes, muttering, “Water,” and perceiving a dirty puddle that ordinarily one would not notice he drops to his knees beside it and tries to lap it up, but almost at once, choking, he gets up and staggers on to the well in the center of the camp. Later Jimmy brings him the sergeant’s stripes and Jones asks, “What shall I do with these? I’m not a sergeant.” “But I told you about your promotion when you came into camp.” “No, you didn’t.” “Don’t be a fool, I did.” “I didn’t hear you.”

In fact he didn’t hear him; he was oblivious at that moment to everything but water. Yet, while he was in the desert, just an hour before reaching camp, he had been attacked by an enemy plane. He was quick to take cover. Thus he did hear the plane; the water could not have claimed his whole attention.

We see that there was a hierarchy of dominances: the acute threat dominated the thirst, the thirst dominated the ambition. All immediate efforts were mobilized to the dominant unfinished situation until it was finished and the next task could assume dominance.

We have purposely chosen an example of emergency, because in such a case the underlying hierarchy appears very simply. First things come first and we commit ourselves to them without holding back. It is the common feeling that in emergencies we find out “what a man is.”

This is the wisdom of the contemporary school of Existentialists, who insist on exploring “extreme situations” for the truth of reality: in extreme situations we mean what we do. But of course a man always means it, if we analyze his situation correctly. Paradoxically, it is just because our times are a chronic low-grade emergency that our philosophers declare that it is only in an acute emergency that the truth is revealed. Conversely, it is our general misfortune that we do not obviously act with more of the urgency and vividness that we sometimes show in emergencies.

5: The Hierarchy of Values Given by the Dominances of Self-Regulation

We have already seen that the evaluation given by self-regulation occupies a privileged position in ethics, because it alone marshals the brightest awareness and the most vigorous force; any other kind of evaluation must act with diminished energy. Now we may add to this that in fact, when the actuality is pressing, certain values oust other values, furnishing a hierarchy of what does in fact marshal brightness and vigor in its execution.

Sickness and somatic deficiencies and excesses rate high in the dominance hierarchy. So with environmental dangers. But so also do the need for love, someone to go out to, the avoidance of isolation and loneliness, and the need for self-esteem. Also maintaining oneself and developing oneself: independence. Acute intellectual confusion is attended to. And whatever relates closely to the way a man’s life-career has been organized and habituated: so that sometimes heroism and bearing-witness dominate the fear of death. In an important sense, these values are not chosen; they simply loom. The alternative, even of saving one’s life, is practically senseless, it does not organize behavior and it lacks spirit. Certainly one does not get the impression that heroism or creative sacrifice or creative achievement is much an act of will or deliberate self-constraint; if it were, it would not release such power and glory.

Any ordered collection of such dominances in actual situations is capital for ethics and politics. It is really nothing less than an inductive theory of human nature; the theory of human nature is the order of “healthy” self-regulation. Let us speculate about this for a paragraph. Considering the simple example of the thirsty corporal, we might conceive a rule, stated negatively: “Whatever prevents any behavior of a kind dominates a specific behavior of the kind, the genus comes before the species,” e.g., avoiding sudden death before quenching thirst, or preserving the creature-comfort before the ego-comfort; or, to give a political example, it is stupid for a society to inhibit any feeling whatever and then to cultivate the arts. Or this rule might be cast as an affirmative principle: “the basic law of life is self-preservation and growth.” Or again we might conceive the rule that “the more vulnerable and valuable is first defended” — as that a speck in the sensitive eye is the most acute pain and claims attention; this is the “wisdom of the body.”

6: Theories of Psychotherapy as Hierarchies of Value

However it may be, every theory of medicine, psychotherapy, or education is based on some conception of organismic-self-regulation and its corresponding hierarchy of values. The conception is the operation of what the scientist considers in fact to be the chief dynamic factor in life and society.

In the psychoanalytical theories, developed after the work of Darwin, the dynamic factor is usually deployed genetically as a history. For example, to Freud, who attended closely to the libido and its somatic development, human nature is an order of the oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages. (One does not have the impression, in Freud, that women have a complete human nature — but to be sure they are therefore somewhat divine.) Other important behaviors are related to these developments, such as sadistic-anal, oral-anal-cannibalistic, phallic-narcissistic, etc. And the goal of therapy is to re-establish the natural ordering in a viable social whole, of fore-pleasure, sublimation, final pleasure. Harry Stack Sullivan, to give a contrary example, finds the social whole to be the essentially human thing; it is interpersonality and communication that release energy. So he deploys his infantile stages as prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic, and defines the Freudian erotic characters in these terms. The goal of therapy is to overcome loneliness, restore self-esteem, and achieve syntaxic communication. Horney and Fromm, along the same lines (after Adler), are impressed by the growing to independence of the infant; they find the neurosis in regressive power-relations in the individual and society, and they aim at the autonomy of the individual. And so we could go on.

Every school of psychotherapy has some conception of human nature, which in neurosis is repressed and regressed, and it aims to “recover” it or “bring it to maturity.” According to the conception, there are certain drives or behaviors that ought to be dominant in healthy self-regulation, and the aim is to create an actuality in which they are dominant.

The point of detailing differences among the schools is not to choose among them, nor contrariwise to reject them one and all; nor certainly to discredit psychotherapy as sectarian. Indeed, by and large the various theories are not logically incompatible and often neatly supplement and indirectly prove one another. Further, as we have already indicated, it is not surprising that responsible scientists can reach such disparate theories if we bear in mind that for various reasons of personality and reputation different schools of therapists get different kinds of patients, and these prove to be empirical verification for their theories and the basis for further hypotheses along the same lines. Let us briefly illustrate this. As was natural in the beginning, Freud dealt with a range of chronic patients with spectacular symptoms: hysteria, obsessions, phobias, perversions. Both as a result of this and then as a cause of it, he used the interpre-tation of symbols as his method; and therefore he was bound to arrive at a certain theory of childhood and of human nature. But the Jungians came to treat on the one hand institutionalized psychotics and on the other hand middle-aged “nervous-breakdowns,” and they accordingly developed artistic therapies and conceived a theory full of the ideas of high and primitive culture, with a diminished emphasis on sexuality. But Reich has dealt mostly with younger people often not yet married; and both his patients and his insights dictated a more physiological method. Sullivan, again, dealt with ambulatory schizophrenics, and had little recourse except to use conversational methods and to try to build up the assurance of his patients. Moreno, dealing with delinquents in a boarding-school, evolved a method of group-therapy, a situation that in principle should de-emphasize the phenomena of transference and make for a more amenable sociality.

In every school, the bias, the range of patients, the method, and the theory cohere. This is not scientifically scandalous. One might wish that the theorists were less ready to extrapolate from their own practice to “human nature” — and indeed for all medicos to be less ready to extrapolate to “human nature,” as if mankind were by nature a patient; but contrariwise, one might wish that lay critics and logicians would better inform themselves about the empirical grounds of the theories they belittle.

7: The Neurotic’s Self-Regulation and the Therapist’s Conception

But any one who sympathetically surveys the various schools and methods of psychotherapy, as we have been doing, however superficially, also thinks a new thought: the basic human nature is in part given, as they assume, but in part, adjusting to the various therapies, it creates itself; and this creative adjustment in favorable circumstances is itself an essential of the basic human nature. It is the same essential power that is prima facie evident in any worthwhile human experience. The problem of psychotherapy is to enlist the patient’s power of creative adjustment without forcing it into the stereotype of the therapist’s scientific conception.

So we come to our question of the relation between the neurotic’s on-going self-regulation and the therapist’s conception of what human nature to “recover.” For the patient will largely truly create himself according to the therapist’s conception, but he no doubt also has other possible directions. Therefore we can see the importance of the warning of Lewin that we quoted, not to analyze the structure of the actual situation in terms of too far-reaching a whole.

For consider it a moment in the following way: the common “human nature” (whatever the conception is) is a sharing of not only animal but cultural factors, and the cultural factors, especially in our society, are very divergent — the co-existence of divergences is perhaps the defining property of our culture. Besides, there are undoubtedly original eccentric dispositions of individuals and families. And more important still, the self-creation, the creative adjustment in various circumstances, has been going on from the beginning, not completely as an extrinsic “conditioning” that can be “de-conditioned,” but also mainly as true growth. Given all these factors of variation and eccentricity in the patient, it is obviously desirable to have a therapy that establishes a norm as little as possible, and tries to get as much as possible from the structure of the actual situation, here and now.

Often, it must be said, the therapist tries to impose his standard of health on the patient, and when he cannot, he exclaims: “Be self-regulating, damn you! I am telling you what self-regulation is!” The patient tries hard and can’t do it and then he does not escape the reproach, “You’re dead,” or “You don’t want to,” said partly as a therapeutic technique and partly in frank irritation. (Probably the irritation is better than the technique.)

The usual situation is as follows: the therapist is using his scientific conception as the general plan of treatment, adapting it to each patient. By this conception he chooses the task, notices what resistances there are, when to follow them up and when to let them pass, and according to his conception, he hopes or despairs at the progress. Now every such plan is of course an abstraction from the concrete situation, and the therapist necessarily puts faith in this abstraction. For instance, if his dynamic factor is vegetative-energy and his method is physiological, he hopes when he sees the muscular releases and the flowing of currents, and he despairs if the patient can’t or won’t do the exercise. The currents must, he believes, indicate a progress. Yet, to an observer of another school, the situation might look like this: the patient is indeed changed in the context of lying submitting his body to manipulation by a therapist, or manipulating himself under command; but in the context of “being himself” outside the office, he has merely learned a new defense against the “threats from below,” or worse, he has learned to bracket off “himself” and to act as if he were always in that office. The patient himself, of course, is generally soon convinced of the same abstraction as his therapist, whatever it is. In his capacity of observer of the goings-on, he sees that exciting events do occur. This gives an entirely new dimension to his life and is worth the money. And in the long run something works somewhat.

We are saying this satirically, yet everybody is in the same boat, perhaps inevitably. Even so, it is good to call a spade a spade.

8: “Following the Resistances” and “Interpreting What Comes Up”

Let us put it, again, in the context of the classical controversy between the archaic “interpreting whatever comes up” and the later “following the resistances” (ultimately “character-analysis”). But these are inextricably related.

One usually begins from “what comes up” — what the patient spontaneously brings as he walks in, either a nightmare, or a dishonest attitude, or spiritless speech, or a stiff jaw — whatever it happens to be that strikes one. Even here, though, it is the case (usually conveniently overlooked) that for him to walk in at all is partly a “defense” against his own creative adjustment, a resistance against his own growth, as well as a vital cry for help.[^3] In any event, the therapist starts from what the patient brings in. Yet it is universally felt that if he long continues to follow what the patient brings, then the patient will evade and run circles. Therefore, as soon as one notices a crucial resistance (according to one’s conception), one “hammers” at this. But while the hammering is going on, the patient is surely busily isolating the danger point and setting up another defense. Then comes the problem of attacking both defenses at once, in order that one cannot substitute for the other. But this amounts, does it not, to following what comes up, what the patient brings in? But of course the new situation has great advantages: the therapist now understands more, for he is involved in a situation that he himself has partly created; the reactions that occur either confirm his guesses or alter them in a certain direction; the therapist is himself growing into a real situation by giving in to what is brought in and defending himself against the neurotic elements in it. And the hope is that one day the structure of the neurotic elements, progressively enfeebled, will collapse.

What are we driving at in giving this curiously intricate picture of what goes on? We want to say that “interpreting what comes up” and “following resistances” are inextricably combined in the actual situation; and that, if there is any growth, both the patient’s spontaneous deliveries and his neurotic resistances and the therapist’s conception and his non-neurotic defenses against being taken in, manipulated, etc., are progressively destroyed in the developing situation. Then it is by concentrating on the concrete structure of the actual situation that one can best hope to dissolve the neurotic elements. And this means, certainly, a less rigid clinging to one’s scientific conception than is commonly to be observed in this profession.

9: The Double Nature of a Symptom

The structure of the situation is the internal coherence of its form and content, and we are trying to show that to concentrate on this gives the proper relation between the patient’s ongoing self-regulation and the therapist’s conception.

One of Freud’s grandest observations was the double nature of a neurotic symptom: the symptom is both an expression of vitality and a “defense” against vitality (we shall prefer to say a “self-conquering attack on one’s vitality”). Now the common sentiment of the therapists is “to use the healthy elements to combat the neurosis.” This sounds very pretty: it means the desire to cooperate, the innate honesty, the orgasm, the wish to be well and happy. But what if the most vital and creative elements are precisely the “neurotic” ones, the patient’s characteristic neurotic self-regulation?

This matter is very important. The ordinary notion of using the healthy elements implies that the neurosis is merely a negation of vitality. But is it not the case that the self-regulating neurotic behavior has positive traits, often inventive, and sometimes of a high order of achievement? The neurotic drive is obviously not merely negative for it has indeed exerted a strong shaping effect in the patient, and one cannot explain a positive effect by a negative cause.

If the basic conception of healthy human nature (whatever it is) is correct, then all patients would be cured to be alike. Is this the case? Rather it is just in health and spontaneity that men appear most different, most unpredictable, most “eccentric.” As classes of neurotics men are more alike: this is the deadening effect of sickness. So here again we can see that the symptom has a double aspect: as a rigidity it makes a man into just an example of a kind of “character,” and there are half a dozen kinds. But as a work of his own creative self, the symptom expresses a man’s uniqueness. And is there some scientific conception, perhaps, that presumes a priori to cover the range of human uniquenesses?

10: Curing the Symptom and Repressing the Patient

Lastly, let us consider our problem in the context of the patient’s anxiety. In order to “recover” the human nature, the therapist hammers at the character, increases anxiety, and, in so far, diminishes self-esteem. Confronted with a standard of health that he cannot measure up to, the patient is guilty. He used to be guilty because he masturbated, now he is guilty because he doesn’t enjoy it sufficiently when he masturbates (he used to enjoy it more when he felt guilty). More and more the physician is in the right and the patient is in the wrong.

Yet we know that underlying the “defensive” characteristic, indeed in the defensive characteristic, there is always a beautiful affirmative childlike feeling: indignation in the defiance, loyal admiration in the clinging, solitude in the loneliness, aggressiveness in the hostility, creativity in the confusion. Nor is this part at all irrelevant to the present situation, for even now and here there is plenty to be indignant about, and something to be loyal to and admire, and a teacher to be destroyed and assimilated, and a darkness where only the creator spirit has a glimmer of light. Of course no therapy can extirpate these native expressions. But we are saying that the native expressions and their neurotic employment now form a whole-figure, for they are the work of the patient’s ongoing self-regulation.

What must be the result of hammering at the resistance? Anxious and guilty, assailed by a frontal attack, the patient represses the entire whole. Supposing that in sum there has been a gain, bound energy is released. Yet the patient has importantly lost his own weapons and his orientation in the world; the new available energy cannot work and prove itself in experience. To a sympathetic and intelligent friend of the patient the result looks as follows: that the process of analysis has either been a leveling and adjusting one, or a narrow and fanatical one, depending on whether the basic scientific conception has laid more stress on interpersonal or personal releases. The patient has indeed approached the norm of the theory — and so the theory is again proved!

11: The Requirements of a Good Method

Let us collect and summarize what we have been saying on the relation of the neurotic’s self-regulation and the therapist’s conception of organismic self-regulation:

We found reason to believe that the power of creative adjustment to the therapy is present in every method. We saw that it was advisable to postulate normalcy as little as possible, in abstraction from the situation here and now. There is a danger that the patient will approach the abstract norm only in the context of the treatment. And we have tried to show that “what comes up” and the “resistances to treatment” are both present in the actuality, and that the involvement of the therapist is not simply as the object of the patient’s transference, but is his own growing into the situation, putting his preconception at stake. Again, we called to mind that the neurotic symptom is an intrinsic structure of vital and deadening elements and that the patient’s best self is invested in it. And lastly, that there is a danger that in dissolving the resistances, the patient will be left less than he was.

In all these considerations we saw reason to concentrate on the structure of the actual situation as the task of creative adjustment; to try for an altogether new synthesis and make this the chief point of the session.

Yet, on the other hand, it is absurd to think even for a moment of not combating the resistances, of not rousing anxiety, of not showing that a neurotic response does not work, of not reviving the past, of withholding all interpretation and discarding one’s science. For the results will be superficial, no bound energy will be released, etc., and humanly speaking, what is the reality of an interview in which one of the partners, the therapist, inhibits his best power, what he knows and thereby evaluates?

The problem then comes down to the detailed one of what is the structure of the interview: how to employ and deploy the conflict, the anxiety, the past, the conception and the interpretation, in order to reach the climax of creative adjustment?

12: Self-Awareness in Experimental Safe Emergencies

Now, going back to Corporal Jones and his hierarchy of healthy responses in an emergency, we propose as the structure of the interview: to excite a safe emergency by concentrating on the actual situation. This looks like an odd formulation, yet it is exactly what is done in moments of success by therapists of every school. Consider a situation somewhat as follows:

1.The patient, as an active partner in the experiment, concentrates on what he is actually feeling, thinking, doing, saying; he attempts to contact it more closely in image, body-feeling, motor response, verbal description, etc.

2.It is something of lively interest to himself, so he need not deliberately attend to it, but it attracts his attention. The context may be chosen by the therapist from what he knows of the patient and according to his scientific conception of where the resistance is.

3.It is something that the patient is vaguely aware of and he becomes more aware of it because of the exercise.

4.Doing the exercise, the patient is encouraged to follow his bent, to imagine and exaggerate freely, for it is safe play. He applies the attitude and the exaggerated attitude to his actual situation: his attitude toward himself, toward the therapist, his ordinary behavior (his ordinary behavior in family, sex, job).

5.Alternately he exaggeratedly inhibits the attitude and applies the inhibition in the same contexts.

6.As the contact becomes closer and the content becomes fuller, his anxiety is aroused. This constitutes a felt emergency, but the emergency is safe and controllable and known to be so by both partners.

7.The goal is that in the safe emergency, the underlying (repressed) intention — action, attitude, present-day object, memory — will become dominant and re-form the figure.

8.The patient accepts the new figure as his own, feeling that “it is I who am feeling, thinking, doing this.”

This is surely not an unfamiliar therapeutic situation; and it does not prejudge the use of any method, whether anamnestic, interpersonal, or physiological nor of any basic conception. What is new is the expectation of anxiety not as an inevitable by-product but as a functional advantage; and this is possible because the interested activity of the patient is kept central from the beginning to the end.

Recognizing the emergency, he does not flee or freeze, but maintains his courage, becomes wary, and actively realizes the behavior that becomes dominant. It is he who is creating the emergency; it is not something that overwhelms him from elsewhere. And the toleration of anxiety is the same as the forming of a new figure.

If the neurotic state is the response to a non-existent chronic low-grade emergency, with medium tonus and dull and fixed alertness instead of either relaxation or galvanic tone and sharp flexible alertness, then the aim is to concentrate on an existing high-grade emergency with which the patient can actually cope and thereby grow. It is common to say to the patient, “You adopted this behavior when you were really in danger — for instance, when you were a child; but now you are safe, grown-up.” This is true, so far as it goes. But the patient feels safe, indeed, just so far as the neurotic behavior is not involved, when he is lying, talking to a friendly person, etc. Or conversely, the therapist attacks the resistance and the patient is overwhelmed by anxiety. But the point is for the patient to feel the behavior in its very emergency use and at the same time to feel that he is safe because he can cope with the situation. This is to heighten the chronic low-grade emergency to a safe high-grade emergency, attended by anxiety yet controllable by the active patient. The technical problems are (a) to increase the tension by the right leads, and (b) to keep the situation controllable yet not controlled: felt as safe because the patient is at a stage adequate to invent the required adjustment, and not deliberately ward it off.

The method is to employ every functioning part as functional, to bracket off or abstract from no functioning part in the actual situation. It is to find the context and experiment that will activate them all as a whole of the required kind. The functioning parts are: the patient’s self-regulation, the therapist’s knowledge, the released anxiety, and (not least) the courage and creative formative power in every person.

13: Evaluation

In the end the question of the right use of the therapist’s conception comes down to the nature of evaluation.

There are two kinds of evaluation, the intrinsic and the comparative. Intrinsic evaluation is present in every ongoing act; it is the end directedness of process, the unfinished situation moving toward the finished, the tension to the orgasm, etc. The standard of evaluation emerges in the act itself, and is, finally, the act itself as a whole.

In comparative evaluation, the standard is extrinsic to the act, the act is judged against something else. It is to this kind of evaluation that the neurotic (and the normal neurosis of society) is especially prone: every action is measured against an ego-ideal, need for praise, money, prestige. It is an illusion, as every creative artist or educator knows, that such comparative evaluation leads to any good achievement; the illusion in the cases where it seems to be a salutary spur is that the comparison stands for needed love, guiltlessness, etc., and these drives would be more useful (less harmful) if not concealed.

There is no use in the therapist’s ever making comparative evaluations against his own conception of healthy nature. He must rather use his conception and other knowledge descriptively, for leads and suggestions, in subordination to the intrinsic evaluation emerging from the ongoing self-regulation.

[^1] In Willis D. Ellis, Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner&Co., Ltd., London.

[^2] We say “fairly healthy” because the military context of the incident is itself dubious; and any actual context that one chooses will be dubious in some way.

[^3] And vice versa: in our society with its neurotic isolation and need “to do it by oneself,” not to ask for help is a resistance.