Counselling Conversations

No scientific theory, however 'abstract' or 'objective' makes sense independently of its being part of a conversation, and a conversation requires more than one participant. Our intuitions about the independence of theory is possibly a consequence of our phenomenological encounters with reality, and its intransigence in the face of our common desires for it to be other than it is. And perhaps also our habit of writing things down, so rendering them, apparently, and misleadingly, independent of any specific interlocutors.

It is because of this that an intense therapy session can feel like a productive seminar - new ways of talking are being explored in both. Also, in both circumstances, our private phenomenological spaces and our capacity to interact with one another seem to meet, or to engage most fluently. We acquire important insights and misleading metaphors here.

What has this to do with validity? (For which we always seem to seek an 'external' validation, of all things ...)

Well: Validity is grounded in the playability of the game, and 'reality' restricts the games that we will, or can, find playable. I'm in inclined to think that this is the only epistemological role that some conception of reality has (or needs to have). That it is, in Bob's words, 'parsable' - though not, obviously, in any completely determinate way.

So, in our intense conversations, we find three 'worlds' (as Karl Popper might have agreed, though about little else here ...) - the world as we talk about it, the private phenomenological world which we feel drives our talk and actions, and 'reality' - the invisible and intractable generator of barriers and trips that, sometimes unexpectedly, appear upon our field of play.

And all this is fine, and, as I have argued, not only supplies an intelligible epistemological groundwork, but is the only way such a groundwork can be made intelligible.

What else does it have to say, though?

There are normative aspects of this - not only with respect to the attitudes we must take to interlocutors (for them to be interlocutors) - e.g. that we regards them as, broadly (and in context), honest and competent. This is not an easy norm to render as a set of rules, of course, so some of what follows may be implied by it anyway. However, I'm going to articulate a few thoughts I have:

Rogerian counselling (much mocked by the 'Eliza' caricature) is based on attitudes of positive regard, empathy, and congruence. The 'counsellor' takes the 'client' completely seriously, tries to see their world as they see it, and exhibits a kind of holistic honesty of practice that is more fundamental than literal truth telling. It is the relationship between this counsellor and the client that does the therapeutic 'work', and this relationship requires the whole presence of the counsellor.

Rogers drew his conclusions from what he saw in effective therapy, but believed that the 'person-centred' attitudes suggested a powerful approach to social and political conflicts.

I have worked as a person centred counsellor, and would make the following observations:

(1)

A conversation in which one participant is the arbiter of sense quickly becomes unintelligible to all. This is because 'I am the arbiter of sense' can only make sense in its own terms, which are systematically opaque (we have to keep asking the arbiter how to make sense, to the point where even our questions do not make sense independent of the arbiter's adjudications ...).

In a person-centred counselling relationship, the counsellor is not an 'expert' - he or she does not diagnose, prescribe, or advise. (If there is an 'expert' in the room, it is the client - who knows much more about his or her own internal world than the counsellor does.) Instead, the counsellor is an interlocutor - a real person with whom the client can have a real conversation, which includes tacit negotiation of meanings and linguistic rules. Potential failures of intelligibility - if they are consequential for the relationship - are negotiated mutually. The participants explore new ways of talking.

(2)

Bertrand Russell is meant to have said that you should only criticise the strongest version of your opponent's position that you can construct. (There is some dispute about whether he followed his own advice, but sometimes it is hard to distinguish malice from cognitive failure.)

In a real conversation, we must engage with the motivations and emotional concerns of our interlocutors. This cannot be empty - condescension would be damaging to the relationship. We have to do this, because without some understanding here we do not know what they mean by the things that they say.

A good public example of what goes wrong here is the vacuous debate between fundamentalists on both sides of the 'god' debate. If each tried more seriously to understand what was going on for the other, there would be less stone-throwing and more discovery. (I am reminded of Desmond Tutu's remark that 'God is the potential for goodness that exists in humanity'.)

Even (!) among philosophers, it is clear that some positions (both positive and negative) have an appeal that is hard to justify in theoretical terms alone. Some empathic recognition of the emotional needs which drive these preferences might really help to clear the air.

(3)

The capacity for congruence is acquired through practice. It is acquired experientially, just as the capacity to speak is acquired experientially. We become honest and competent interlocutors through participating in conversations.

There are no external criteria of congruence, although incongruence is likely to reveal itself as a kind of 'bad faith'. That is, as an attempt to achieve some subterfuge - not always as clear cut as a lie, as it can often be, in a sense, 'unconscious'. Incongruence can arise from unprocessed conflicts in the counsellor (e.g. suppressed shame related to issues which the client wishes to explore). An important danger of incongruence in a counselling context is that it can lead to the counsellor responding to the client in a way that is not connected to the client's distress, but to the counsellor's.

In fact, of course, there cannot be any external criteria if congruence is closely related to honest competency, for exactly the same reasons that there can be no absolute criteria for successful translation (Davidson and Quine) or for rule-following (Kripke). Similarly, the possibility of congruence cannot be dispensed with without dispensing with the possibility of honest and competent interlocutorship (and so, unintelligibly, with the possibility of language).

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There will be more on this. There is some relationship between the productivity of counselling conversations and the establishment of the semantic basis for formal reasoning that is worth exploring further.