Note: These excursions in thought are for those of us who enjoy thinking about the structure and dynamics of psychology.  The questions at the end of the primary reading are designed to verify that you have read the primary reading  for  Continuing Education Credits. There will be no questions asked regarding these additional readings that will apply to gaining Continuing Education Credits.

Our psychologies (the word used in both specific and broad terms) are split. Some fall to the subjectivist side, others are opposed in Hegalian fashion. As we struggle to build our egos into grand positive thinking-things we wall ourselves up in a feudal alliance with our world. The need to know for certain still dominates our primordial fear of the shadowy shape beyond the castle wall. And so we proclaim that, "I am the creator of my world" . . . .  I think, therefore I am.

This Cartesian asymmetry joins forces with the market in goal-oriented therapies: "We want to be well," "We want to be happy," "We want our marriages to work," "We want . . . . We want . . . .  We want . . . .  to order our environment, to beat back the realities of a world that limits our desire. We cater to the market’s ego as it struggles to order its economic blood flow. The Cartesian ghost is here as well, scratching out meanings with literalizing nails, mapping into definite, discrete, and fixed blueprints, the modern equivalent of the clockmaker’s instruction sheet. Nature is still imagined as something we can assemble or disassemble, the quintessential analogue originating in the cybernetics engineer’s attempt to understand how computers think. The most complex physical systems here are considered to be atomic and subatomic equivalents of springs and levers (Briggs & Peat, 1989). We still reduce the "outside" world to the status of object. Observed through a disembodied rationalism, the System’s therapist sits dispassionately behind a one way mirror observing the cogs and levers of a family’s behavior. There is no difference. It is the same. We still offset our subjective world by this objectivist fantasy through alternative images of interpersonal psychology proclaiming that the objects of perception define our reality. Again, there is no difference. This is the ghost’s way of seeing that places a window between the perceiver and the world perceived. We gaze through this window and we are transformed into spectators, the world into a spectacle (Gaston Bachelard, 1964). We distance ourselves each time we abstract our original perceptions to represent the happening itself. The experience of the immediate then disappears into the Cartesian chasm leaving all but the latent representation forgotten. Our sciences, drawn from this strange amalgam, amounts to a creative refusal of the world, arriving at generalities by detaching itself from the immediacy of the situation (Arnheim, 1986). One sees what the ghost sees. Cartesian "seeing" rests upon this act of withdrawal that makes of the world a matter for the eye, and for the eye alone (Brooke, 1991).

In this scheme, feelings are the first to go. We ask our psychologies to eradicate them, to alter them, to judge them away. They only get in the way of our ego desires, so we lull them to sleep with Prozac, and outwit them with strategies that name in apotropaic defense. We charge upon them violently, plucking from their hearts the one ambiguous name that will sum them up forever (Barthes, 1965, p. 12). We modify them through more science, building big strong minds with the power to whip them into shape. Our attitude toward work betrays this splitting as we embrace the dictum to leave our feelings at home "Where they belong." Work, after all, does not need to be enjoyable, "That's why it’s called work!" By so doing, external stuff is set off once more against internal stuff, to be compensated by a split-off life of weekend duck-hunting or water-skiing. To reflect upon this is important when approaching intersubjective spaces. For when we near these places through Cartesian paradigms that close rather than opens their portals, should we wonder why we get our noses caught in the doorway?

Descartes, in fact, has been challenged many times through the centuries, and as a result modern science has become reluctantly modest. Instead of proclaiming scientific theories to be irrefutable laws of reality, science accepts hypotheses that permit some falsification (Popper, 1959). This, however, does little to really modify the basic paradigm (Hoover, 1980). Theory building only becames more sophisticated. The next section will briefly explore one of these sophistications.
 

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Michael Staples