Communicative Exchange, Psychotherapy and the Resonant Self

Roads to Realization

Anthony Korner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429515576
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Communication & Public Speaking
• Index: Psychology

In Communicative Exchange, Psychotherapy and the Resonant Self, Anthony Korner demonstrates how important communication and resonance are to the development of a sense of self. This process of realization is embedded in social relatedness and is intrinsically tied to language.

Uniquely presenting a collaborative approach to research, this book illuminates the potential for change that lies in therapy that engages both heart and mind between patient and therapist, as well as demonstrating how language and relating are fundamental to psychotherapy. Korner explains how language engenders growth through communicative processes that shape lives and personality. Korner helps the reader see how communicative exchanges can be transformative. Brimmed with emotive clinical material, literary illustrations and reports of first-hand life experience, Korner demonstrates how the combination of knowledge and evocation of feeling in human connection is central to psychotherapeutic process.

An intersubjective approach to research is put forward as exemplar of how the minds of both patient and therapist might be employed in furthering understanding of psychotherapeutic process. This book will be an essential resource for mental health clinicians involved in psychodynamic psychotherapy, as well as more generally to people interested in understanding human connections.

Chapter 1
Cry and response

Overview

Being is not something any of us do in isolation. Humans grow as communicants from the infant’s first cry, or look and gesture of focused interest, and the different responses they bring from an attentive parent. In the cry we see human vulnerability, and in focused eye-to-eye contact and play a wish to share experience, the beginnings of participation in communicative exchange. Significance is found in our closest relationships as we engage in a spiral of play and communication. Language entwined with feeling allows growth in the sense of significance over time. Our nervous system is to be understood as providing a facilitating interface with the environment. Such facilitation involves the guiding of body movement and reception of feedback from the outset. Complex neural networks underpin a system of exchange that always has feeling as its representative in consciousness, a touchstone for well-being of self. The expansion of consciousness and the growth of self necessarily involve a gift for engaging in language. The singularity of self may be understood as an embodied text. We develop as living symbols in stories of relation to one another. We have evolved through care, play and conversation. Role transformations have evolved as age-related transformations to support these functions. In healthy relationships there is an element of giving in the exchange between two compassionate selves. We grow in conversations of feeling.

Communicative exchange

Imagine a time before money was a medium of exchange, before writing became a means of communication or before painting became a form of human representation. Stretching a little further, imagine an era when language in its human form was just beginning. What would we have in common with these early humans? We can be pretty certain that humans had a capacity to feel in interaction with the environment. Interpersonal interactions within the tribe or early social grouping would have been associated with a felt sense of significance as it is with other species who display complex and purposeful social behaviour. It’s not difficult to imagine feeling-based communication as the primary vehicle of exchange for humans. We still see it with every newborn child, from the first cry and the response it evokes.

Feeling gives a sense of the situation we are in. It is also accompanied by a need for expression. Human communication took another step as language became symbolic, coming to represent more than just the immediate situation. As it developed, language must have done so in concert with feeling. Humans have an evolutionary investment in language and communication involving emotional investment renewed in each life where our sense of who we are and who we become is so intimately tied up with how we communicate both to ourselves and others. Born immature, we are shaped by the communicative environment. It provides pathways for the growth of relationships and skill acquisition. Human flourishing occurs through the relationships and communication that give our lives meaning. On the other hand, traumatic experience disrupts our ongoing sense of existence and bodily functioning. Trauma requires healing. For psychotherapy, a compassionate exchange of feeling through conversation is the vehicle for personal growth, healing and recovery.

Resonant selves and resonant worlds

This form of exchange that shapes human lives also keeps resounding within the body of the individual. Humans have a gift for “languaging”, a creative process occurring within and between people. This relates to the musicality of language as it is performed. “Languaging” has been used to denote a “manner of living” dating back into pre-history:

Indeed, our human identity is a systemic phenomenon, and in our opinion it arose in the primate evolutionary history to which we belong some three million years ago when languaging as a manner of living began to be systemically conserved generation after generation.

(Maturana & Verdan-Zoeller, 2009, emphasis in original)

The property of musical resonance is that the resonating chamber helps sustain and transmit the notes within its body and towards the environment. For humans, our bodies are resonating chambers that not only sustain and transmit notes but also meaning that is held in enduring forms that go beyond the experience of the moment. Hence, we recall, in the flow of our associations, a line from a poem or a song, a famous speech, words from a loved one, images that speak to us or fictional characters who have captured our imagination. These all represent meaning potentials that are experienced in a felt way that is trans-modal and transtemporal rather than being determined by a specific sensory system or a single moment in time. This is a complex organization realized in “forms of feeling” that involve a total organization of experience rooted simultaneously in body and mind (Hobson, 1985).

A personal example may serve as illustration. As a pre-school child I remember my mother singing to me. There were many such songs. One that keeps resonating in my mind is the traditional song, “Early One Morning”.

Early one morning, Just as the sun was rising, I heard a maiden crying in the valley below, O don’t deceive me, O never leave me, How could you treat a poor maiden so?

As a child, I felt the song to be beautiful, especially because it was my mother singing it for me. Although my mother died a few years ago, I still hear her voice singing. It is an old song, so these days I also have a sense of many generations singing this same song. Beyond that, it speaks of meaning that arises in relationships of love and the suffering of the forsaken. My heart goes out to the maiden, this imaginary character who I never met. It seems the song could resonate through eternity. It’s a personal legacy from my mother as well as a link to bygone days. A small thread in the intimate weave of culture and being that shapes my personal world.

Being human

How shall I live? Surely this question confronts us all over the course of a life. Answers prove hard to find, particularly in modern pluralistic societies lacking uniform beliefs and values. How shall we live? Phrased in the plural we are reminded of our essentially social nature. This question makes being human seem possible. It also has claim to an a priori significance in that individuality is preceded by the sense of being-in-relatedness. The earliest experience of significance occurs in the asymmetric relatedness of the carer-infant dyad. It lies at the core of human feeling throughout life.

The kind of existence we hope for is one where the individual has the opportunity to grow, respected within a community of people, each of whom has a uniquely realized life. Person and self are terms that are neither completely subjective nor objective. They are not things but rather refer to lives shaped in communicative interaction with the environment. From this perspective the evolution of self involves the investment of feeling in interaction with significant others in an environment of symbolically enriched exchange: a place of myth, narrative and possibilities. A person has a voice that is heard, to which there is a human response. This process of exchange takes centre stage in the process of psychological growth. This is in contrast to situations where human beings are treated as “non-persons” or “sub-humans”, a situation all too often occurring today as it has throughout history. Here the individual is subject to a symbolically impoverished environment where communication tends to be reduced to command and punishment with little space for thought, action or imagination and hence limited opportunity for the development of mind.

Throughout life, the cry, the smile, laughter and the protest, amongst other natural signs, retain power to evoke and enliven human interactions. They herald participation in a relational world. The expression of human vulnerability is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the capacity to cry. It is symbolized in the image of the crying child or, to put it more dynamically, in the moving images of the crying child and the responding mother. It is essential to mental well-being not only for the infant but throughout life. Natural signs and affective expression enliven speech and the symbolic medium of language. They also convey something beyond words:

I remember the expression on my seven-year-old step-daughter’s face. I had taken her to task for some minor matter, now forgotten, that had annoyed me. What I remember is the steely determination of her refusal to concede an inch. I knew I faced a choice: to enforce my authority or to let it go. The strength of feelings she conveyed was such that it was as if I’d “seen” her , as her own person, for the first time. I let it go. I doubt she remembers it.

Human stories unfold around countless episodes of this kind, mostly unremembered. There is always an element that is more than the events themselves, requiring symbolization and placement not only in the literal context of what happened but in the symbolic context of the myths and legends of each culture.

Our myths can be considered the truly symbolic dimensions of existence in that they pertain to that which does not correspond precisely to what is actually found in objective existence. They relate particularly to the area of significance linked to the system of cry and response or self and other. They deal with the experience of desire and care, intuitively recognized by self. In contrast, the world of science, involving facts and logical relations, can be seen in terms of propositions and concepts that exist, to a considerable extent, independently of self.

No one person can claim ownership of language. It is common property. Yet the individual development of complexity arising through the experience of communicative interaction in relationships of significance underpins the growing person. Her private flux of experience is the basis for the emergence of self, beginning in reciprocal interplay with significant others. Natural affective-expressive signs contribute in increasingly differentiated ways to human relatedness. Feeling retains a crucial importance in motivating people to communicate and realize their potential. Living in a world of reciprocal engagement requires constant adjustment and accommodation with experiences of integration, disintegration and mobility. Such is the non-linear path of personal realization.

Interpersonal experience precedes personal growth in knowledge and understanding. There is a change from semantic, or general, understanding of an issue towards a personal, emotionally invested understanding coupled with its social expression. Paradoxically for self, this involves movement from the abstract to the concrete, from something known “in theory” to something felt to be real.

Humans depend for a long time on the asymmetrical relationship between infant and carer, requiring extra parental care relative to other species. The impetus for this development seems to have been “provided by the evolution of a game the mother could play with her baby, which gave her pleasure, so rewarding her behaviour” (Meares, 2016, p. 10). People may seek and find significance in this game and its cultural elaborations at any age. It is the human calling.

Cry and response

The cry, an evocative synonym for call, is paradigmatic as an emotional gesture oriented, initially unconsciously, towards the need for connection and relatedness. It is an important beginning to the life of participation in a social network, a life of felt significance.

All states of mind have an element of feeling. The need for relatedness generates both powerful and nuanced feelings as part of self-experience in the interpersonal domain. In medical literature there is a tendency towards a mechanistic conception of emotion understood as a component of mental life. Recognition that feeling arises in a network of relatedness provides a different emphasis:

The most significant historical change in the conceptualization of emotions by Western commentators has been the replacement of the implications of an agent’s feeling for the integrity of, and their relation to, others in the community as the criterion for classifying emotions with each individual’s sensory pleasure and biological fitness.

(Kagan, 2007, p. 19)

In an historical sense there has been a shift away from fluctuations of feeling as a gauge of integrity in human relationships, towards attention on the individual as isolate, rendering emotion a “thing” to be associated with pleasure, pain, or biological advantage over others (ibid.). Such reification of emotion becomes empty, because it has no external referent or point of shared understanding. Given that affects arise in lived contexts, the aliveness of felt experience is lost.

Human feeling develops in relatedness where we “can’t help but mean” (Halliday, 1975), despite the fact that clarity of meaning eludes us much of the time. Interactions are felt to be significant, even when that significance lies in what is lacking. From the outset there is a drive to seek what is needed from the environment. For humans the seeking of response and relationship is crucial to well-being.

Self emerges from a matrix of mutual relatedness where integrity grows through a dialectical process involving mutual responsibility (Samuels, 2015). This occurs through establishment of a sign-process with an affective-expressive and gestural basis, well before the subsequent emergence of symbolic language with its basis in conventional signs. This process is known as semiosis, a linguistic term introduced by C. S. Peirce to denote “any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning” (Bains, 2006). It adds significance to the spoken word and continues to operate throughout life.

The birth scene is surely one of the central moments of human life, transformative both literally and psychologically. Despite huge cultural variations in birthing practices, the basic facts of the scene are held in common. The emotional stakes are high and there is an awareness of the risk to the life of mother and baby. Where the birth proceeds well, there will have been a first step taken in the establishment of a bond critical to the infant and his or her subsequent development. Where there are complications, parents and the supporting community become involved in remedial action. Where this fails, it is catastrophic for personal development. The effort, across cultures, is towards the inclusion and induction of the infant into the family and community.

The sequence that occurs at birth can be taken as representative of cycles of communication that occur between infant and carers, subsequently iterated with enormous variation leading to the development of particular personalities and relationships. The infant is born and with the first breath cries. This is paradigmatic as a mood sign in terms of its interpersonal significance. Although the infant is not aware of doing anything in an intentional sense, unconsciously this is a communication, shared with other mammals, referred to as the separation or isolation call (MacLean, 1985; Newman, 2007). From the carer’s perspective this cry is usually at the forefront of the consciousness of parents and other attendants. It is an “image given and received” (Buber, 1947), even though the “giving” of the infant occurs unconsciously. A healthy first cry will typically elicit a response that includes relief and joy at this announcement of new life.

The power of the human cry motivates those in the vicinity to act by taking measures to comfort and settle the infant, involving being held, warmed or assisted in any manner necessary at the time. Such measures are characteristic of the way, under reasonable conditions, that carers respond to distress in the infant: care must be provided. These can be contrasted with the responses that characterize states where the infant is expressing well-being, or interest in the environment, when the carer tends to match, amplify or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Cry and response
• 2 Living language and the resonant self
• 3 Heart and soul: the feeling body
• 4 Making meaning together: the realization of value
• 5 Two minds greater than one: an intersubjective approach to research
• 6 Becoming who we are: personal realization
• 7 The long conversation
• References
• Index