Ego Psychology and Communication

Theory for the Interview

Norman Polansky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351312103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Writing in a lively straightforward tone and offering numerous examples, Polansky demonstrates that verbal communication plays a major role in mental health and is essential to preventing and curing emotional disorders. He shows why the inability to achieve effective speech reflects neurosis, interferes with self-healing potentials in the personality, and hampers patients in their efforts to make use of any of the talking therapies. He also makes clear how verbal expression leads to the growth of intimacy between people on a mature organized level and guards the individual against the existential anxiety of being completely alone in a potentially meaningless universe.

Synthesizing basic theory that underlies skilled interviewing, the book serves as an introduction to ego psychology. It offers an appraisal of the role of verbal communication, especially in casework, individual therapy, and counseling, as well as in most group treatments situations. The author covers such topics as the resiliency of the ego, the logic of defenses, coping mechanisms, and the theory of object relations. He provides numerous illustrations of specific security and distance maneuvers found in everyday practice. He also describes techniques for dealing with these maneuvers by patients in face-to-face situations.

This book is as vital to the field as when it first appeared in 1971. Polansky summarizes major concepts of modern ego psychology and relates them to what is known today about the process of verbal communication. It will be especially useful for those who seek to understand and treat the human personality through speech. Ego Psychology and Communication is designed for courses in social work, clinical psychology, educational counseling, guidance, and psychiatric nursing. Practitioners in social work, psychology, and psychiatry will find it to be a valuable addition to their personal reference libraries.

Chapter 1
Scientific Method and Ego Psychology

IT IS PRESUMED THROUGHOUT THE FOLLOWING PAGES THAT a theory about why people act and feel as they do is worth learning. It is worth learning because it can be used to bring about important changes in the lives of patients and clients, in their all-too-real worlds. In my experience, not too many students in the helping professions really believe that the learning of concepts and laws is worthwhile. One could accuse them of being too concrete-minded to take in such subject matter, but usually this is not the reason for their reluctance. Rather, they have been rendered sensitive and then allergic by undergraduate courses of the wrong sort.

In too many courses, psychological theories are treated as pawns with which academicians play mental chess. Their students are required to learn the rules in order to know when to applaud—and how to pass examinations. Some young people prove gifted at weaving concepts into peculiarly provocative incantations of turgid prose; they are encouraged to go on into fields dedicated to training more undergraduates to pass more examinations. People who want to make things happen in the real world are not typically that fascinated with their own thought processes, as such. They enter such fields as social work or clinical psychology with the thought of trying to do some good in their own lifetimes. And here we await them, once again urging them to take an interest in “theory.” Is there more than one way to go about the building of theory in psychology? If there is, what criteria do we use in selecting theories for practice?

The Role of Theory

To answer these questions, let us begin with the aim of the game. The aim of theory in the helping professions is to improve our ability to control events. I will assume that anyone who involves himself in a clinical profession has a desire to ease the lot of others and to make them happier. This is one reason we should like to be able to exercise control. There is another reason, which becomes the more pressing as one matures in the field, and it has to do with pride of workmanship. We, too, would like to construct bridges in the lives of our clients and remark with satisfaction their ability to bear weight. Unless we are unlucky, our ability to do so gradually increases with experience in the work, with or without a formal knowledge of theory. The effect of a really good theory, however, is to put succinctly at the student’s disposal much of what generations preceding his have been able to glean. There is no substitute for experience in the development of a first-rate practitioner; there is also no reason the student should not avail himself of all the knowledge he can get from the experience of others.

Theory that markedly increases our ability to make things happen has certain characteristics. First, it helps us to predict. Second, it simplifies our lives. After a quarter century in the field, I find this a most pleasant sentence to be able to write. Once again, however, I doubt it is believable. The student usually finds himself foundering under a mass of precepts, injunctions, formulations, half-digested facts, not to mention agency policies and regulations. It is hard to image that this is about to simplify his life. Before he entered graduate school, the student used to have conversations with people, and he enjoyed them. Indeed, he was not lying when he said on his application that he wanted to be in social work, for example, because he liked people. Now that he is conducting interviews, however, he feels uncertain; he is tongue-tied, he makes furtive notes (written and mental), he watches the client like an Indian snake charmer. He cannot wait for the end of the hour, and neither can the client. To the weight of responsibility which he already carries, all he needs to add is some “theory.”

Yet we know that an interview is a conversation with a purpose, and this makes a crucial difference. It is not forbidden that client and worker enjoy their conversation, but immediate enjoyment is not enough. Something useful is supposed to come of it (not that it always will, no matter how long you work in our field!). The practitioner’s task is to make something happen merely by talking. He must know on which conversational keys to play, which to let alone. Above all, he has to know what to attend to in watching the client and in listening to him. There are myriad facts, after all, from the client’s age, to her hair color, to her mother’s depression at age forty-one. Which facts matter? More precisely, which matter the most if one wishes to help her? We need a precise basis forjudging relevance. Let us face it: raw reality is simply chaotic. Therefore, a cardinal aim of a good theory must be to reduce the chaos of raw experience.

The sequence by which clarification occurs is straightforward. A good theory consists of a series of statements that are actually dependable predictions. If A happens, B will follow—if not always, at least usually; if not immediately, eventually; if not at all, for good reason. Let us call A the cause, and B the effect. A clinician who needs to produce a given effect will be alert to see whether he can introduce its cause. This is all we mean by a planned intervenlion. Planned intervention requires dynamic theory—ultimately simply a network of highly dependable predictions.

Not all theories have this dynamic quality. For centuries people thought a scholar had nicely reduced the chaos of raw experience if he found a way to arrange ideas (usually), objects (often), and events (infrequently) into neat and mutually exclusive pigeonholes. I recall as an undergraduate being taught that there were three types of itinerants: the tramp, the hobo, and the migratory worker. Each type had his own characteristics, and I dutifully memorized the textbook definitions. Subsequently, Ï had some experiences which I doubt the writer of our textbook had ever had. I spent more than two years as a caseworker in civilian and military prisons; 1 interviewed “Veterans Administration bums” (inadequate personalities created by act of Congress); I worked in family agencies. Never did I find any use for the distinctions I had learned to help me with these men. Not one had taken a course in social pathology! In this way, I learned to distrust theory that is purely classificatory in its intent. While it may put to rest the obsessiveness within the textbook author, it does not ease the mind of the social worker confronted by a situation that demands action.

A concept is a term or symbol for a class of objects or events having something in common. Unfortunately, it is not at all difficult to invent concepts. Select two objects at random in the room and demonstrate to yourself that you too can think of an abstraction which will subsume both of them. It is similarly easy to erect systems of terminology which permit you to categorize types of people, expression, or behavior. We have all listened to the man who has managed to acquire age without wisdom as he says, “Basically, my friend, I find there are two kinds of people….” (After seventy-five years, he still cannot count to three?)

Setting up idea systems for classifying is not hard. What is hard is to find a system for classifying that reflects regularities of occurrences in our world. For it is this dynamic theory that enhances our ability to predict and therefore to control the real world.

The Rule of Parsimony

A theory that will simplify rather than clutter our professional lives should be parsimonious. The rule of parsimony is meant to guide those who work at trying to adapt or create theory, it can briefly be summed up: the ideal is to encompass a maximal range of phenomena within a minimal number of statements.

During the Middle Ages, if one asked why water runs downhill, he would be answered in terms of the “essence” or the “idea” of water. He was told, in effect, “It is in the nature of water to run downhill.” If Newton asked why an apple falls from a tree, he might be told also that it was in the nature of the apple to fall from trees. We owe it to the genius of Galileo and Newton that these many droppings were compressed into one principle, the Law of Gravity. At its more general level, the law covers not only falling bodies but also more universal phenomena. It states that there is an attraction between any two bodies, and that the attraction is inversely proportionate to the distance between the bodies, but directly proportionate to their masses. This is hardly a thought that, under ordinary circumstances, makes one wake up and shout with glee in the morning. But if you are in the business of making objects move through space—which seems to be one of mankind’s morbid preoccupations—it is a convenient law to have. Certainly, it is simpler than memorizing a long list of objects, each of which has it “in his essence to run downhill.”

A principle in psychology that has shown a rewarding capacity for reducing the chaos of nature is: the organism will seek to re-establish internal equilibrium. This principle is closely related to one found in physiology, Cannon’s principle of homeostasis. Using the notion that the body seeks to re-establish the equilibrium it had before some insult or injury occurred to it, Cannon was able to explain a number of symptoms by offering a reason for their occurrence. Similar processes seem at work, by the way, in group psychology. What happens, for example, if you have a group of people closely bound to each other, and one is seized with an idea at variance with an attitude important to the others in the group? The first effort the group will make will be to pressure this individual to change his attitude and to think as the rest of the group. Should this fail, the group will eventually eject the person. In effect, they establish a group with little internal tension by redrawing their boundaries to contain only like-minded persons. Occasionally the majority will move its attitudes to resemble that of the deviant, but he must be very important to them for this to happen.

When we refer to individual reactions, we talk about drive reduction and tension reduction. These notions are but shorthand for saying the individual does what he does in order to achieve an equilibrium with minimal tension. More interesting, perhaps, is the manner in which psychological symptoms follow the same principles. A psychological symptom may seem extremely painful, but it too is dedicated to keeping the organism in a state of equilibrium which seems better with it than without it. Obviously, we have here a statement about human reactions which is extremely powerful in its ability to organize and simplify a broad range of things that happen. Would that we had many more of like potency!

The formulation of each new guiding principle in psychology seems to reflect an act of genius, and how it is done by a particular individual still remains something of a mystery. Something is known, however, about the approach a science should follow in order to lay the foundations for any major breakthrough. The rule of parsimony is generally accepted to be an essential part of the approach.

From the rule of parsimony we derive that one should never introduce a new hypothesis without examining whether an established one will not cover the case in point. We constantly hope to add generalizations, of course, if science is to cover more and more of the world about us, but the mood is to give ground stingily. When a new explanation is offered to fit one new instance, it is called an ad hoc hypothesis. Often it is just as it sounds—a notion volunteered on the spur of the moment to cover an unanticipated research finding.

While ad hoc hypotheses are particularly common in chapters of Conclusions in masters’ theses, they are not unknown among scholars whose ideas are greeted more seriously. There was a psychologist named McDougall, for example, who was strongly convinced that all behavior is purposive—a notion now generally well accepted. He was also fascinated with the notion of instincts and when specific explanations of some behavior were called for, he was likely to offer an “instinct” as the explanation. It is from him and his confreres that we have such concepts as the maternal instinct, the paternal instinct, the filial instinct which still survive in literary psychology. Obviously, it does not greatly simplify life if, whenever we are faced with a pattern of human behavior, we ascribe it to a newly-coined “instinct.” Freud, too, used the idea of basic instincts, but rather than proliferate them, he sought to determine the smallest number he had to postulate in order to explain all behavior. Eventually he settled on two: pleasure seeking or libido, and aggression. These are still widely accepted and used in analytic circles. Freud, however, seems to many of us to have speculated too far beyond his data when he offered the notions of Eros (life force) as opposed to Thanatos (the death instinct). One still occasionally sees references to “death wishes” in clinical as well as popular writings, but the general view of these conceptions is that they represent an instance in which the attempt to reach a high level of abstraction in order to synthesize theory did not succeed.

Scientists are Human

Science is a social undertaking. The systematic growth of knowledge is the most impressive monument to man we have thus far been able to erect. A contribution to this growth is considered by most scientists to be one of the few ways to defeat mortality. The task is inspiring, but it is given to men. Where there are many ambitious scientists, each struggling with an admixture of dedication and vanity, self-discipline and group discipline are absolutely essential. Only in this way can work be coordinated and grand simplicities emerge from buzzing confusion. The desire to discover a new principle that will be identified with one’s name is enormous. It is countered by the rule of parsimony.

Much has been made about the historical splits, the secessions and ejections from the Orthodox Freudian movement. Left out, finally, were Adlerians, Jungians, Rankians, followers of Karen Horney, and others. Because the ideas represented by many of these great figures often foreshadowed what we now call ego psychology, a word is in order about this facet of psychoanalysis.

I have heard the events involved described as though Freud, the old bull of the herd, simply could not tolerate competition from the men about him. Whether or not this is true, there is more at stake, just as there is more to each of us than his toilet-training. Freud was rather insistent that the development of ego psychology not take precedence over the analysis of the id. By id, we refer in a general way to the great unconscious strivings, the primeval sources of energy and emotion of the personality. It was as if he feared that by tackling parts of the personality closer to the surface, frequently conscious, related to the current culture, psychoanalysis might shirk its more basic, more difficult task. Freud’s insights were not at all popular, and there is always the danger a group of scientists will too readily re-repress the hard-won insights into the unconscious, because they are unpleasant.

Adler, for example, proposed as a major explanatory principle his notion of overcompensation for felt inferiority. Of this and kindred insights, Freud is said to have remarked, “There will always have to be a psychology for the Hausfrau, and Adler has created it.” Indeed, the idea that a boy who puts on superior airs may be covering up deep feelings of inferiority is not unfamiliar to high school youngsters. It should not be necessary to travel to graduate school in order to learn a psychology which simply accords with common sense. For the truth is that common-sense psychology does not stand the test of parsimony; worse, common-sense psychology can usually contain only those explanations that the conscious mind can readily tolerate. It becomes my duty to record at this point, therefore, that the simplicity inherent in an elegant theory is a great convenience to the busy or even the slothful; but it does not open many doors to the simple-minded. So, one concern we must have about a system of theory is whether it offers the illusion of simplicity at the cost of failing to illuminate anything at all obscure.

No Adlerian analysts 1 have ever met impressed me as simple-minded, so I believe there was a more profound reason for their being read out of the analytic movement, one having to do more with how a science develops. In the early phases of building a theory, all is in flux—concepts to be employed, their definitions, basic assumptions, and so forth. From time to time, however, it becomes desirable that things be encouraged to settle down, at least temporarily. One has to say, “Let us agree to define the ‘ego’ as such-and-such for the next few years, and see where that leads us in our attempts to build theory.”

The greatest difficulty the various schisms presented to the mainstream of psychoanalysis was that basic assumptions were constantly reopened to question, familiar terms were used with new nuances, new terms were being introduced seemingly ad I ibidem. For a newly emerging theory, the danger is always that the chaos within the science will come to match that within its subject matter. When that happens, one can say there has been absolutely no progress. Freud felt that a number of the schismatics were, in effect, pushing ideas that would make it unlikely for a parsimonious theory to emerge. Moreover, there had to be agreement on the terms to be employed.

No one man is able to do enough work in his lifetime to advance each of our sciences very far through his unassisted efforts. Even the prima donnas, and there are many, grant the need for cooperative effort. But, in order to cooperate, scientists must be able to agree on the meanings of the terms they are using. Only in this way can they communicate readily, and share their discoveries with one another. It is for this reason that we assess the inter-observer reliability of any instrument we use in research.

Inter-observer reliability represents the degree to which two or more observers, using the same method of observing, come up with similar pictures of the persons or groups they are studying. If agreement is great, inter-observer reliability is said to be high; if they disagree much of the time, it is said to be low or poor. This is no casual issue, for without reasonably high inter-observer reliability ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Ego Psychology and Communication
• copy
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Scientific Method and Ego Psychology
• 2. Symptom and Defense
• 3. Resilience and Energy in the Personality
• 4. Character as Personality Structure
• 5. Familiar Character Formations
• 6. The Theory of Object Relations
• 7. The Pursuit and Dread of Love
• 8. Verbal Accessibility
• 9. Verbal Accessibility and Character Structure
• 10. On Duplicity in the Interview
• 11. Ego Functions in Psychodrama
• 12. Verbal Communication and Healing
• Name Index
• Subject Index