Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Dr Jim Byrne - The roots of the "individual" are "social and relational"

http://zoecarnate.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/integral-map1.jpg

Interesting paper - I tend to agree, in part, with this assessment. Obviously, we are also partly genetic beings, as well as environmental beings, and social beings (as is products of our societies: laws, governments, means of production, etc.).

This paper is based in the CENT (Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy) model of psychology developed by Dr. Jim Byrne. I like the idea behind this approach.
Integrating cognitive, psychodynamic and narratives approaches to counselling and therapy, in a social constructionist and moral philosophy framework

Welcome to the Institute for Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy Studies, which was formed in April 2007, with the overall aim of developing REBT, integrating it with some important complements, combining it with moral philosophy, and taking the best of Dr Albert Ellis's ideas forward into the 21st century.

Over the past three years we have been busy, researching, writing and developing Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy, including the writing of twelve research papers which are available below. In June of this year we will publish the first post-Ellis book on this development, which is titled 'Therapy After Ellis, Berne, Freud and the Buddha: The birth of CENT'. That book will be available from this page very soon.

Dr Jim Byrne, May 2010

~~~

AIMS

The Institute for CENT studies was founded with the following aims:

1. To build upon the early writings of Albert Ellis (especially his 1957 paper to the American Psychological Association, and his 1962 book, Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy); to develop a more complex ABC model which includes the models of mind developed by Freud (id, ego, superego) and Berne ('Parent/Adult/Child' ego states); to explore some ideas from the Object Relations school (e.g. Klein/Fairbairn); to consider the role of narrative approaches to therapy, and a contextual constructionist form of Zen/Taoism.

2. To promote an explicitly moral form of psychotherapy which acknowledges both the unfairness of existing society, the possibility of developing a more just society; and the importance of developing ‘good character’ as a condition of responsible citizenship.

3. To promote studies into the value of incorporating elements of the following systems into the original writings of Albert Ellis:

  • Virtue ethics; and general moral philosophy;
  • Transactional analysis and other forms of brief psychodynamic therapy;
  • Critical thinking skills, and moral reasoning abilities;
  • Zen Buddhism;
  • Other forms of philosophy and psychotherapy.

4. To develop a fusion of Rational-Emotive, Cognitive Behavioural, Narrative, Relational, Philosophical and Transactional therapies, to be called Cognitive-Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT).

5. To provide a ‘spiritual home’ for practitioners of moral forms of therapy which broadly fit under the CENT umbrella.

EVOLUTION

Since our founding in April 2007, we have continued to develop our ideas, and to produce papers on the foundational elements of CENT, as shown below. Here are some foretastes of the ideas you will find in the CENT Papers, below:

1. CENT posits that there are probably a few key narratives that control most of the thinking, feeling and behaviour of most normal, adult human beings, by providing the frames through which they interpret their environmental stimuli. These include, most obviously, stories about our (family and community) origins; our (family and peer and love) relationships; our (teen/twenties) separation from family; our various transitions; our work, career, success, and money/wealth outcomes; and so on.

2. Instead of trying to “forget the god-awful past” (as recommended by Dr Albert Ellis), individuals who have come from difficult family histories should “process their past”. Individuals who have had reasonable parenting experiences should avoid the trap of focusing on the minor difficulties they experienced in their lives, because doing so will just induce a sense of loss, injustice, unfairness, failure or deprivation. However, individuals who had significantly dysfunctional mothers and/or fathers, or who came through unusually cruel or neglectful experiences do need to digest those experiences. Much emotional distress is caused by ‘refused pain’. Whatever you resist, in your past, will persist, in the psychological present. Therefore it is important to conduct ‘narrative analysis’ of your personal history, to make sense of where you came from, what you experienced, and how to untie the knots in your psyche caused by unhelpful or painful narratives which you constructed about your difficult past. In CENT, we use a combination of written and spoken narratives for the purpose of re-authoring the client’s life.

3. The core model used in CENT is the Windows Model. This model is an expression of 'frame theory' in practice. Frame theory posits that all human perceptions are driven by 'frames', which are built from collections of nested inferences about a stimulus. Every time a particular stimulus impinges on our senses, a typical, habit-driven frame is triggered, which shapes our interpretation of the stimulus. And we only notice our interpretation, not the stimulus. Thus we are always dealing with subjective interpretations of 'external events/objects'. For example, two individuals who are fired from their job in the same way, on the same day, may trigger different frames in their minds, which result in different emotional and behavioural responses. The first frame may be built around the idea of the inevitability of personal loss, and produces a lethargic form of resignation. The other person's frame may be build around the ideas of entitlement and fairness, and results in an angry outburst, and a promise to seek revenge on the boss. Same stimulus → different frames (or lenses) through which the experience is viewed/experienced → different emotional/behavioural response.
This is the ninth of ten papers written by Dr. Byrne so far - and my guess is that they are the foundation for the forthcoming book (which will be released as an e-book first).

Jim Byrne has now written nine papers on Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy. They can be found on this website at the links shown below:

Paper No.1(a): Rethinking the psychological models underpinning Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT)

Paper No.1(b): Beyond REBT - The case for moving on

Paper No.2(a): What is CENT - A preliminary description

*NEW* Paper No.2(b): Justice, Fairness and Morality in REBT and CENT

*NEW* Paper No.2(c): Self regard, self acceptance, and individual morality

Paper No.3: Re-framing Problems Using the Windows Model in CENT

Paper No.4: A Story of Origins - by Dr Jim Byrne

Paper No.5: The Status of Autobiographical Narratives and Stories

Paper No.6: How to Analyze Autobiographical Narratives in CENT Therapy

Paper No.7: Some Questions and Answers About CENT and Dr Jim Byrne

Paper No.8: Re-numbered as Paper No.1(a) above.

Paper No.9: The "Individual" and its Social Relationships - The CENT Perspective.

Paper No.10: The Story of Relationship: or coming to terms with my mother (and father).


With that foundation, here is the beginning of the article listed in the title of this post. I like this as a nice explanation of the interpersonal nature of self identity.

The "Individual" and its Social Relationships - The CENT Perspective

Copyright (c) Dr Jim Byrne, 30th December 2009

1. Introduction

Somewhere around the beginning of 2009, I was working on the development of a set of models that were taking shape as the core of Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT). I had reviewed my earlier work, from 2003, on the complex A>B>C model and was still unhappy with the way the "individual" shows up in my models as isolated and separate from others. (See CENT Paper No.1(a)[1])

I had begun with the Stimulus-Organism-Response model, and then built up a model of the A>B>Cs which included overlapping cognitions and emotions at point B in that model, as follows:

Figure-2b-ABC.gif

Figure 1 - A complex A>B>C model

In this model, the beliefs are assumed to be in the head of an individual, but note that the model does say that the A1 is "socially agreed". However, how this social agreement comes into effect, or gets represented at point B in the model is not discussed.

Much later in that paper, I went on to present a model which takes account of the body of the individual, as follows, but still no real social dimension:

Figure-8-Y-lifter.gif

Figure 2: The A>B>C Model Related to the Y-Model

Figure 2 shows a weight lifter, thinking-feeling-behaving in relation to his task. This image suggests that, when something happens at A1, it is interpreted at A2 (not shown), which triggers cognitive-emotive processing of the A2 signal at B (1, 2 and 3). At the same time, the B1 (unconscious cognitive-emotive processing) sends a signal to the Y-model (visceral, facial, physiological arousal), which responds by sending a signal to the C1 (not shown) where it combines with the output from B, and together these signals produce the emotional-behavioural response at C. As it stands this could seem to be a fairly straight restatement of the James-Lange theory of emotion. (Kagan and Segal, 1992, pages 321-322).

However, this still shows no connection of the individual to the social background from which he sprang.

I had lived my own life - at least up to the age of thirty, and a little beyond - as an (emotionally) isolated individual who did not understand relationship - or so it seemed to my analyst and me (back in 1968) - and yet I now (1980 onwards) knew from Zen philosophy that every "thing" is just a small distinction within "everything". In other words, Zen sees the individual as being distinguished from, but not separate from, everything else. There is only one "life" and it is all of a piece. So why did my psychological models show "separate individuals".

I had written to Dr Albert Ellis (probably around summer 2000) to say that, because REBT did not have a personality theory, I normally used Transactional Analysis (TA) when trying to understand the personality structure of my clients. TA postulates that we each have a number of ego states, primarily the Parent, Adult and Child ego states; and that our thinking, feeling and behaviour is determined by whichever ego state we are ‘occupying' (or ‘acting from') at any particular point in time. However, I still could not quite see how the TA Ego State model could be incorporated into the A>B>C> model of REBT, and I kept returning to that challenge from time to time. (This will be described in detail in Section 7 below).

2. Back to Freud

Somewhere around Easter 2009, I returned to reading some of Freud's papers to see if I might find some clues there. See in particular Freud (1940 [1938])[2], and his papers in Gay (1995)[3].

Freud's model of the psyche, or mind of the human, has three essential parts:

1. The "it", or the physical/psychic baby, just as it is born, with no cultural experience. This was translated as "the id" by his English translators. (The "it" is not a "who", which it will eventually generate through cultural experience).

2. The "I", or "ego", which begins to emerge from the id when the baby is a few months old, as a result of social contact with the mother (or mother substitute). (Cf: Gay, 1995: 724-725).

3. The "over-I", or "superego", which emerges because the ego internalizes social rules and expectations. The superego is the seat of the conscience, and also includes the self ideal, or "what I should become or be".

Here is how Freud imagined those three elements of the psyche to be interrelated. (This model originates in Freud, 1933[4]).

Fig3b-Freuds-model.gif

Figure 3: Freud's model of the psyche

In this model, the id is shown to be unconscious, which is an unfortunate term that I find quite confusing. We normally think of somebody who has been knocked out as being "unconscious". And by that we mean, incapable of functioning as a normal human agent. However, what Freud meant by the "unconscious" was actually "non-conscious processing"; in so far as it was possible to reach that conclusion in his era[5]. That is to say, a part of our mind processes information in ways that help us to adapt and adjust to external reality - the ‘adaptive unconscious' - without any conscious awareness arising within us that this processing is occurring. (See Gladwell, 2006 - below - for further elaboration of this concept of ‘adaptive unconscious'). When Freud proposed the "unconscious mind", he was derided by philosophers, who considered any mental processing to be necessarily conscious. (Freud, 1995:19[6]). However, there is much modern evidence for the existence of non-conscious information processing, as an essential explanation for human functioning. (Cf: Bargh and Chartrand, 1999[7]; Gladwell, 2006[8]; Gray, 2003[9]; Maier, 1931[10]; and Haidt, 2006[11]). I explored that evidence in my doctoral thesis, and summarized much of the results in Byrne (2009e[12]). Here is a brief extract from that paper:

"...humans are both conscious agents and nonconscious automata. Not either/or. Both/and. At this point in time, it is the proportions of each that matters most to me. Gray (2003: 66) argues that we are not able to be more conscious of our environmental stimuli because of the small bandwidth of conscious processing of the data of our senses.

"This (bandwidth) is much too narrow to be able to register the information we routinely receive and act on. As organisms active in the world, we process perhaps 14 million bits of information per second. The bandwidth of consciousness is around eighteen bits. This means we have conscious access to about a millionth of the information we daily use to survive".

That is a startling statistic. So my research respondents - and my CENT therapy clients - probably have access to about one millionth of the data they routinely process in order to orient and move themselves through their daily environmental challenges. Not all of this is in principle ‘knowable' of course, such as how do I beat my own heart? How am I digesting my food right now? How much do I need to adjust my blood pressure and body temperature? And so on. But Bargh and Chartrand (1999: 464) quote Tice and Baumeister as saying that consciousness "...plays a causal role (in guiding our behaviour) only 5% or so of the time". (And Tice and Baumeister were trying to defend consciousness.)

So my research respondents - and my CENT clients - are probably unconscious (meaning non-conscious processors of information) for at least 95% of the time, including most of the time they are interacting with me."

Returning to Freud's model of the psyche, above, we can see that the ego straddles the unconscious, the pre-conscious and the conscious. The conscious is what we are aware of, and the pre-conscious is what we can readily become aware of. There is also a division on the right of the model which represents material which has been repressed out of conscious awareness, into unavailable unconscious material.

On the left hand side of Figure 8.1 we see the division called the super-ego (or over-I), which is the internalized moral codes of the parents and significant others, and the models of an ideal self which are both taken over from parents and others, and self constructed. Although this model does contain this internalized social influence, the model still feels and looks like a model of an isolated individual, cut off from the world.

The next model I want to consider is a more detailed version of Freud's original model. It's normally referred to as the ‘iceberg model':

Freuds-iceberg-model2.jpg

Figure 4: The iceberg model (By Anthony A. Walsh)[13]

This version of the model provides some more detail. The super-ego is shown as the ‘social component' of the individual. The ego is labelled as the ‘psychological component'. And the id is shown as the ‘biological component'.

Freud had begun by seeing the id as biological, and all of its fragmentary developments, including ego and super-ego components, as being driven by biological urges or drives.

In theory, Freud's model could have been developed to inquire into how the socialization processes in general resulted in a particular kind of ego development; how tensions could build up between the three components of the model from many sources to do with power, distorted perceptions, maladjustment of relational factors between parents and their children; and so on. However, Freud narrowed his focus down to one phenomenon: the sexual history, and especially sexual maladjustments. This is how he announced his conclusion:

"I now learned from my rapidly increasing experience that it was not any kind of emotional excitation that was in action behind the phenomena of neurosis but habitual ones of a sexual nature, whether it was a current sexual conflict or the effect of earlier sexual experiences": (Freud, 1995[14]). He then went back and re-examined his earlier patients records and came to the conclusion that: "I was ... led into regarding the neuroses as being without exception disturbances of the sexual function, the so-called ‘actual neuroses' being the direct toxic expression of such disturbances and the psychoneuroses their mental expression. My medical conscience felt pleased at my having arrived at this conclusion". (ibid, page 15).

This seems to me to be an overgeneralization of the most extreme kind. There are so many things, of a nonsexual nature, that can go wrong in the power relations between children and their parents, and children and their peers, that it is unthinkable that such malfunctions play no part in the development of emotional disturbances - all of which have already been accounted for by one source of disturbance - sexual experience. There is no doubt that sexual experiences of an unnatural or distressing nature must be one of the sources of human disturbance; but only one. And I have no doubt that frustrations of the amorous and love-seeking urges of the child will often result in emotional disturbances.

Annoyingly, Freud goes on to redefine sexuality in a way that makes it virtually non-sexual - unconnected with the genitals, and incorporating "...all of those affectionate and merely friendly impulses" which we normally call love - which must logically include virtually all normal positive human motivations within his concept of sexuality. If sexuality is thus defined (by Freud) as the virtual sum of positive human motivations - (plus a bit of the negative ones) - then sexuality becomes almost the only potential source of human disturbance; because sexuality has come to subsume almost everything that is characteristically human. When Freud and (some) Freudians then say that all human disturbance is linked to sexuality, what they apparently mean is that all human disturbance arises out of their human urges to cathect (or grasp) elements of their world/environment. Or, slightly more generally, all human emotional disturbance is caused by being human and interacting in human ways with other humans. Which explains nothing!

Among Freud's followers there were some who could not go along with his psychosexual overgeneralization, and who wanted to take a more general view of human disturbance. Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler were amongst them. This is how Freud describes their deviations from his scheme:

"Jung attempted to give to the facts of analysis a fresh interpretation of an abstract, impersonal and non-historical character, and thus hoped to escape the need for recognizing the importance of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex as well as the necessity for an analysis of childhood. Adler seemed to depart still further from psycho-analysis: he entirely repudiated the importance of sexuality, traced back the formation both of character and of the neuroses solely to men's desire for power and to their need to compensate for their constitutional inferiorities, and threw all of the discoveries of psycho-analysis to the winds". (Freud, 1995, page 33).

I have to say that I agree with much of what is said by Jung and Adler; and I am convinced that, though sensuality and a desire for love - and even the desire to ‘possess the mother', in a non-genital way - seems to be central to the motivations of all infants and toddlers[15], the idea that every child experiences a full blown Oedipus Complex seems like a gross overgeneralization. Power relations of a more general nature within the family seem to me to be a much more fruitful domain to investigate than sexual desire per se. And this is the domain of the Object Relations school of post-Freudians.

(However, this sense of the centrality of relationship also seems to be broadly accepted by modern Freudians, as indicated by Storr [2001: 38][16], when he says that: "Where Freud was wrong was in making psychosexual development so central that all other forms of social and emotional development were conceived as being derived from it. ... Today, most students of childhood development regard sexual development as only one link in the chain, not as a prime cause. Difficulties in interpersonal relationships may be derived from early insecurities which have nothing to do with sex, but which can cause later sexual problems..." Here, Storr betrays his over-influence by Freud by omitting to say "and those early difficulties may also cause later non-sexual problems; and that most neurosis probably has little to do with sex per se!" Of course, we still have to accept that actual difficulties in the sexual development of an individual "...may cause subsequent social problems"[17], which is a million miles from Freud's formulation.)
Read the whole article.


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