About five months ago the head psychiatrist at the clinic where I work approached me about starting a peer supervision group for the Interns and Externs training there. He wanted to construct a space where they could present and discuss their cases, receive feedback from their peers and also raise any issues that they were having in the clinic. As a 5^th year psychology Intern, I was the most senior training clinician (it feels as much as an oxymoron as it sounds) and we agreed that it would be my responsibility for creating this space. Our initial discussions outlined the goals of the group, that it would be voluntary, confidential, open to all the trainees, run for twelve weeks, and that each week a different clinician would present a case for discussion.

However, we were less clear when defining my role and exactly how I would create the space for this to occur. We contrasted the pros and cons of the traditional group supervisor role to the supervisor as a group facilitator. While the former provided more in the way of structure and boundaries we were concerned about it feeling like a therapy group or clinical rounds. Indeed, having established collegial and friendly relationships with the clinicians it was important to be clear that the supervision group was not a therapy group. Alternatively, the latter appeared to engender more space for open discussion but provided less structure and clarity around roles. After going back and forth over the differences, we agreed to use a facilitator model. In this model, I was responsible for bringing the group to a beginning and an end, ensuring that there was a presenter each week, and generally facilitating discussion. We also decided that I would not present my own cases and that I would generally try to allow others to answer questions so that they would not be directed at me. Having established the framework, we ended our conversation with the psychiatrist sounding the ominous and prophetic warning that he had never participated in a successful peer supervision group.

As the group started and began to meet weekly, some of the outlined aspects worked well. Notably, some members appeared to benefit from presenting cases and being given an open forum to ask questions. Furthermore, clinicians felt they could discuss issues they had in the clinic in a confidential area. However, as predicted by the psychiatrist, for the large part the group did not feel like it ever took off. Attendance was spotty from the second week onwards, robust discussions were sparse, and much of the group process seemed to go through me.

Succinctly, the group never seemed to take ownership over itself. While there are likely many reasons and contributing factors for this, reflecting back over the course of the group I am struck by how much my own role influenced the development of the group. Specifically, I believe that I failed to commit to the role of group facilitator. Instead, I moved back and forth between supervisor and facilitator and by not being consistent limited the group’s growth. In hindsight (which is not always 20/20) this is not surprising and seems to me a product of the ambiguity inherent in peer supervision groups, and my own ambivalence towards authority.

There are two important differences to peer supervision groups and other forms of groups, including regular supervision groups, therapy groups, and even support groups. The first is that in peer groups, the members either already know each other, or will at some point through their interactions come to know each other. Thus, unlike other groups, where members maintain little contact with each other outside of the group, in a peer supervision group they frequently interact outside of the group. Secondly, in other groups, the supervisor or leader is typically a more experienced clinician, whose role and position is defined, however in peer groups all members are expected to contribute equally.

The result of these differences is that the boundaries established in other groups to ensure safety are less pronounced and more ambiguous, meaning that the peer supervision group members themselves have to establish trust amongst each other. Although this may seem easy, it is as I learned actually a complicated process requiring a lot of faith and an ability to tolerate vulnerability. Without a supervisor to orientate around (more on that in a minute), group members are asked to establish trust through the act of discussing cases with their peers. This is potentially frightening, case discussions reveal aspects of us as therapists or individuals that we may not be aware of. Doing so in an ambiguous setting, with colleagues we trust, but perhaps not entirely, is daunting, difficult, and anxiety provoking for even I imagine experienced clinicians. Compounding these obstacles, is that many of the trainees were just starting to gain clinical experience and may have felt vulnerable and out of place discussing their experiences with others. It is not that the members did not explicitly trust each other, as much as the valence of the group pulled them away from easily building trust with each other.

One of the ways of lessening anxiety – or countering this valence – is for the supervisor to take an active role in running supervision, establishing boundaries regarding member interaction and a consistent structure for the group to follow each week. In doing so, individuals come to know what is expected of them less through their interactions with each other, than with the supervisor, who acts as an anchor for them to orientate around. Two of the most likely configurations are that either supervisee’s develop trust in the supervisor and it expands towards the other members, or alternatively, they develop trust in each other and perhaps later the supervisor. In either case, the supervisor’s role is defined by stability and consistency.

Notably, while trust can develop amongst all the parties, the power differential of supervisor and supervisee remains. Peer supervision offers the opportunity for a greater balance of power. Each individual can temporarily step into different roles, each taking turns at supervising, facilitating, being supervised, etc. In other words, by giving up the traditional role of supervisee (or group member) and managing the anxiety that comes with it, other interpersonal relationships are possible.

However, not only does the supervisee have to give up their role, but the supervisor as well. Indeed, while I thought that I was ready to do this, in retrospect it proved more difficult than I anticipated. In trying to establish the space for peer supervision I was also (although likely unaware of it at the time) moving away from my own basis of security. In this sense, much as I was asking the supervisee’s to handle anxiety by giving up their role, I was also asking myself to deal with anxiety of not having a clear role either. This process seemed to entail an interesting paradox whereby in order to give up authority I first had to use it.

Broadly speaking, initiating a group already entails a certain relationship between supervisor and supervisee’s (initiator and initiates), although as already described the aim of this group was to move that relationship into the background and place peer relationships in the foreground. In order to accomplish this, I originally thought it would be enough to describe the aims, goals, rules, etc. However, as described earlier, this did not work – and indeed, may have likely contributed to increased anxiety and ambiguity in the group. Looking back, I now wonder if it would have been more effective to use the authority present from initiating the group, being senior, etc to attempt and remove that authority. While I am not entirely certain of the form that this process would take what seems clear is the need to act, as an authority to communicate that there is no authority. In other words, by actively placing my trust in the group (only something the supervisor/authority can do) I would have more fully taken the role of facilitator.

Of course, this is easier said then done, particularly in a peer setting. Indeed, early in the group, the question of authority was raised and despite my wish to move away from these traditional group issues, by spreading authority around I found myself more often then not responding from a place as the supervisor. While this involved using authority it was in the form of maintaining a more conventional relationship. Instead, I wonder what it would have been like to use my authority to let it go. By constraining the extent to which I would reply (perhaps less as supervisor and more as a peer?) would that have facilitated a more effective peer group experience?

I believe that my difficulties doing this, reflects some of my own ambivalence to authority and hesitancy to fully embrace a facilitator role. Indeed, much like supervisee’s look to quell their anxiety through the supervisor, I was doing the same. Retreating into roles makes managing anxiety easier but also limits some of the opportunities for novel experiencing. In this respect, my movement between facilitator and supervisor limited the extent to which I committed to either and thus the extent to which a genuine peer interaction could develop.

For me, anxiety around authority stems from the possibility of overly constraining self and other. Accordingly, my response is to make space by either reluctantly (or inconsistently) accepting authority or alternatively challenging it. Although at times effective and important it can also be confusing and prevent roles and novelty from becoming fully developed. Instead I find it necessary to remind myself that authority much like other roles can be taken up, released, and modified, and that constraint enables action, which of course modifies constraint. Being more flexible at doing so may allow for more productive peer supervision groups!

Anyway, my friend said she’d noticed that, when academics talk about other academics, they are likely to use the first and last name when referring to a woman academic, while men academics often get mentioned by last name only. This to her was entirely part of everyday life, undesirable but obvious.

But I was taken somewhat aback by this claim, and I think the other guy there was too. I realized afterwards, to my shame, that our common reaction was one of doubt. We wanted to think of counterexamples. Exceptions that would disprove the rule. Isn’t Judith Butler pretty reliably called Judith Butler? we were asked. But isn’t Butler a pretty common name? Well, but there aren’t any other famous academics called Butler, now are there? Or take Simone de Beauvoir. Pretty much always Simone de Beauvoir, isn’t she? Well, yes. Who could deny that? While on the other hand Sartre, it came to my mind, is indeed pretty much always just Sartre. Or take Hannah Arendt. Is Hannah Arendt always Hannah Arendt? Well, yes, pretty often, though I think maybe at the philosophy department in Paris-8 she may occasionally become just Arendt. But other mid-century German male philosophers seem to go by their last names far more often. Marcuse is just Marcuse. And “Adorno” also seems to travel pretty well by itself, as a practically self-contained sign of pessimistic dialectical prose convolution. Or take Eve Sedgwick. She’s pretty often called Eve Sedgwick, no? But not really Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, that’s a mouthful. We didn’t reach agreement about that.

A client speaking to his Rogerian therapist says: “I am so depressed, I just don’t feel like is worth living.” The therapist replies: “I hear you saying that you are in pain and that you are not sure how you will ever feel better.” The client replies by saying: “I really feel I would be better off dead.” To which therapist comments: “You really are at your wits ends about what to do.” The client stands and moves to the window of the office and opening it up, the therapist says observes, “You are showing me how much pain you are in, how desperate you are.” The client then jumps out the window – the therapist says, “Splat.”

The therapeutic approach of Carl Rogers (1995a; 1995b) is one of empathy, listening, acceptance, and minimal intervention. For Rogers, person-centered therapy is based around two related concepts: reflective listening and unconditional acceptance. In this manner, the therapist is able to listen and reflect the client’s narrative in a space where the whole of their experience (affective, content, etc.) is unconditionally accepted by the therapist. This allows the client to become increasingly comfortable with aspects of themselves that may be threatening, shameful, scary, anxiety-causing, etc., which facilitates growth and eventual change. Rogers stated this process as follows:

“I can state the overall hypothesis in one sentence as follows. If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur” (Rogers, 1995a p 33, my emphasis).

Accordingly, two aspects of person-centered therapy are immediately clear. First is that the therapeutic moment is relational, involving an interaction with an “other” and second that this interaction is markedly different than most other types of relationships. While it is generally understood that the therapist’s unconditional acceptance of the client is what makes this relationship different than others, I would like to briefly argue that this is only a part of the story. Instead, I will make the case that it is the reflective listening of the therapist that provides the groundwork for a type of relationship that is therapeutic and helps the client to achieve a greater subjective sense of understanding.

I would like to begin by simply noting that the above quote is preceded by the word “if”. To me, this signifies that the type of relationship that Rogers is talking should not be taken for granted but should instead be seen as a goal that the therapist is working towards. Indeed, in addition to unconditionally accepting the client, Rogers also stressed the importance of having a genuine and real relationship with the client. Accordingly, it seems clear that he was aware that the idea of having a real, unconditionally accepting relationship is paradoxical. The “if” then puts the onus on the therapist to work to create a relationship with the client, where they become a companion who is both idealized (accepting) and real (genuine) to the client. It is worth noting that this is an extension of the typical therapeutic alliance, in that there is not only an alliance but it is of a certain type – idealized and real.

This paradoxical relationship is established through the use of reflective listening, whereby the therapist tries to sensitize him or herself to the phenomenological moment-to-moment experiencing of their client. Importantly, despite the mirroring connotations, reflective listening is not so much a matter of reflecting back a mirror image of the client as it is about altering it in subtle ways. In this manner, the therapist joins the client not only in the construction of their narrative but also helps to deepen and broaden out certain aspects of it, which the client may or may not have been aware of. Accordingly, the “real” quality of the therapist is revealed in their ability to be an “other” to the client who is able to express a full range of human thoughts and emotions in an integrated and comprehensive fashion

One way of seeing this process is through the metaphor of the therapist acting as a scaffold for the client’s subjective experiencing. Through reflective listening the therapist not only embraces the client’s subjectivity but in a manner deepens it by giving voice to other aspects of the client’s experience, which for whatever reason are not being stated. Clearly, the therapist is never able to mirror phenomenologically the experiences of the client but he works to co-construct with the client a richer subjective world. In this manner, the therapist scaffolds – or provides a structure, which both supports and extends the client’s experiencing. That this experience occurs in a space where they feel they will be accepted unconditionally helps to enable them to become more comfortable with their narrative.

What both limits and enables this process is the therapist’s inactivity within other spheres of the client’s experience (as illustrated by the joke above). By existing primarily as a scaffold for the client the therapist is able to maintain the illusion of being both unconditionally accepting and real. Through limiting their activity to reflective listening the therapist lessens their own subjective experiencing giving the illusion of an idealized other. In turn, the client becomes able to more fully develop the reflective qualities of subjective experiencing, which the therapist reflectively supports (via scaffolding). In this manner the client brings increasingly richer subjective experiences to the forefront that receive the support and validation of the therapist.

What differentiates the properties of reflexive listening from those of the therapeutic alliance is the manner in which they are used. For Rogers the increased reflective capacity of the subjective self became the main motivation for change. Accordingly, he was able to limit the activity of the therapist towards working on his or her own unconditional acceptance (no small task!). Other therapies, while stressing the importance of the alliance, augment it through increased interaction with the client. This speaks to the romantic and in my opinion endearing and permanent aspects of Rogers’ view of human growth as able to overcome the distance individual subjectivity.

References:

Rogers, C. R. (1995a). Client Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications, and Theory. Philadelphia, PA: Trans-Atlantic Publications.

Rogers, C. R. (1995b). On Becoming a Person. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.

In my case having worked extensively at one clinic in addition to other sites, preparing to start internship meant terminating not only with the patients I had seen over the year, but also with patients whom I had been seeing for the past three years. Having never terminated with patients who I had seen for even close to this long, and certainly never having terminated with so many patients all at once, I was unsure what to expect both from my patients and myself during the termination process. Given this, perhaps it is not surprising that much like I have found throughout my clinical training, my expectations and thoughts about what terminating would be like did not match my experiences. This seemingly common – at least to the training experience – phenomenon creates in my mind an interesting gap, created not by poor expectations, but rather by the inherent difficulties of training. In other words, despite the fact that I had been taught and even experienced when completing previous externships what termination would be like (i.e. see above) it remained difficult to know how it would be when it was this different.

The hardest part of termination for me has been trying to assess the effectiveness of therapy and to evaluate how I performed as a therapist. Going through the termination process I remember voicing doubt to fellow classmates and supervisors about how I helped my patients. While many had made progress towards goals they also often remained stuck in certain places. From my perspective it was difficult to ascertain that what I did during sessions helped them achieve their goals, as opposed to it just being a product of time and their own growth.

Reflecting upon my uncertainty and ambivalence I think it is in some ways part of the tension that is a part of therapy. Both the therapist and the client have an idea of what they are working on, or what the “problem is”, but how they approach it and work at it may not be so clear. Indeed, as a student I feel that this uncertainty may even be exacerbated as there is a propensity towards trying new techniques or representing the material in ways that reflect recent readings, discussions, ideas etc. That this process of working in different therapeutic frames is likely normal if not central to the training, does not necessarily alleviate the feelings that the patient would be better off with a more established therapist, or generally that they deserve better.

Despite this, during the process of terminating one of the most consistent and perhaps surprising observations was how deep my relationship was with my patients and vice versa. While going through notes I was amazed at how much had transpired in their lives and my own over the course of my sessions with them. Not only did I feel tuned into their lives but it also felt as if I had actively participated with them. In this sense reading through notes about their stories I found myself at times thinking in terms of “we”. For example, how “we” handled a certain issue or “we” achieved certain goals. The feeling of connectedness in some ways belies the uncertainty, almost by saying that this was “you” in the relationship and that your effect was real.

This is in some sense the actualization of the gap that I described earlier. The role of the therapeutic frame and theory is meant to structure the therapeutic space providing the tools to help the patient work and make changes. However, this space does not in effect account for the human-to-human interaction that comprises all of the therapeutic interactions. Indeed, as described above, while talking with my patients about our relationship what was striking was how much they valued the relationship. That to me the frame more often than not felt ambiguous seems to have had a minimal bearing on them. What mattered more to them was that I was there, and that they knew that I would be there to listen, to share, to acknowledge, to discuss and to explore. As my patients discussed with me the aspects of myself that they valued and found effective during therapy, it was amazing how little they had to do with approach or technique. Carl Rogers knew this of course and orientated humanistic psychology around it. Cynically, I feel that in some ways the parts of me that worked the hardest for example to conceptualize them or to make certain interpretations were the least acknowledged.

What terminating has helped me to begin thinking about is how to minimize this gap. One way that comes to mind is how theory can be orientated and utilized around the actual interactions in the office. I understand this personally as a deepening and extending of my thinking about interpersonal approaches to psychotherapy that work off the therapeutic relationship. What I have come to appreciate in terminating is the need for the therapist to present himself or herself in an authentic manner so that the aspects of themselves, whether they are warmth, honesty, directness etc can be felt and understood clearly by the patient.

In many ways this feels both very obvious to me and is also somewhat of a revelation. To me it means both working as myself but doing so in ways that are clearly conveyed to my patient. Theory then becomes a way of looking at the ensuing interactions between my patients and me, providing a perspective to both elaborate upon our shared experience and create new ones. In other words, in therapy a space is created to have experiences that are real but can be explained in ways that allows for the growth of the therapist and the patient.

As a final thought it is probably not a surprise that I felt this gap while terminating with my clients. Termination is not only a time of reflection, but it is very obviously the end of the therapy. This can lead to a sense of safety where both the therapist and the client knowing that their time is ending can act more like themselves in therapy. While throughout termination I was thinking about theories about what is happening for the patient and myself, it still nonetheless felt as if my interactions with my patients were more genuine and less a matter of us participating in social role playing. Experiencing these authentic interactions, while also hearing about what my patients were taking from therapy has not only helped make terminating with them a meaningful experience but also an educational one as well.

Stern’s contextualization of mutual enactment is an interesting example of the process of studying the progress of psychoanalysis that Levenson himself utilizes in The Fallacy of Understanding. Echoing Thomas Kuhn and also in many ways Foucault, Levenson utilizes a historical and paradigmatic reading of psychoanalysis to develop his structural theory. Levenson identifies 3 paradigms of psychoanalysis, mechanical, informational, and ecological, identifying himself as part of the latter. Reflecting on the differences between these paradigms leads him to make the observation that behind each paradigm shift are the changing meanings of key terms (i.e. transference, defense, repression). He traces these changes to the need for them to represent more accurately the current socio-political context, as delineated by world events and the population being treated. Indeed, it is this insight about cultural influence extending to even psychoanalysis that fueled Levenson’s thinking about an ecological view of psychoanalysis. The impact of this thought is noted by Marylou Lionells, a contemporary of his who observed that:

“Levenson goes on to outline an approach to psychoanalysis that breaks every rule, violates every tenet, turns both theory and method on their heads … He further argues that as the treatment relationship unfolds, patient and analyst are inexorably intertwined in an elaborate recurrence of unconscious patterns, and that the recognition and elaboration of these patterns constitutes the experiential information that will be ultimately helpful” (Marylou Lionells, “Commentary: Psychotherapy of the Young Adult: The Fallacy of Understanding,” Center For Innovation in Psychoanalysis, 2006).

Here, we see the revolutionary or paradigm shifting impact of Levenson’s work, especially that of mutual enactment. To both Lionells and Stern, mutual enactment lead to changes in the meanings of terms like countertransference and the unconscious. These changes have become so engrained within contemporary thought and practice that Stern feels the need to remind the reader to appreciate how revolutionary they were when originally articulated. Despite their mainstream status and the popularity of Levenson much of the work he did on developing an ecological psychoanalysis appears to have been left unexplored and undeveloped. In fact, in the years that followed, psychology as a whole (likely spurned on by advances in cognitive science and neurology) seemed to endorse an increasingly reductionist view of the individual. Thus, while the idea of mutual enactment remains in psychoanalysis, much of the comprehensive and ecological view of the underlying psychological processes described by Levenson and others has until recently been forgotten. It is my contention that revisiting Levenson’s structural and ecological thinking has much to offer for both psychoanalysis and psychology as a whole. Accordingly, in what follows I would like to offer a brief overview of this view, paying particular attention of his movement from a structural approach initially closer to psychoanalysis to a structural approach that utilizes the science of semiotics or signs. Given that this is a topic I hope to revisit in future writings my intent here is more to lay out the theory and point to areas of conversation than to necessarily explore it in depth.

Levenson initially articulated his theory in The Fallacy of Understanding and as noted by Stern, it is decidedly structural. As mentioned above, he developed his theory by examining the previous paradigms of psychoanalysis and identifying in each of them an archetypical patient (the neurotic for Freud, the schizophrenic for Sullivan). He identifies his generation patient as the “drop-out” (also labeled “the contemporary patient”) who we would recognize as a member of the “tune-in turn-on dropout” of the 1960’s. What makes this generation unique is that although they rebelled from their parents they did so with the intent on showing how rigid and hypocritical they were. In this sense they rebelled while also staying related to what they were rebelling from. Levenson explains that this was possible because the “drop-outs” were parents who though appearing to value mutuality and open communication did not actually support independent thought and activity. This created a sense of inauthenticity, from which the contemporary patient was rebelling, but required relating to be validated.

Accordingly, Levenson noted that when brought into therapy these patients no longer wanted to be “cured” as in the traditional sense this meant returning or re-conforming to society. Indeed, he goes on to suggest that as a result of the actions of the “drop-out” so much of traditional society was being challenged and changed that perhaps the therapist himself or herself would require changing. He asks: “But what if the problem defines both the therapist and the patient? Perhaps one stops helping and begins a different kind of participation” (Levenson, 2005b p 138). In this manner, Levenson demonstrates a willingness to depart from the view of therapist as scientist to one of artist, or in other words from one of knower to one of constructer.

Building off this view he claims that the analyst who interprets is guilty of a “fallacy of understanding” whereas instead an analyst needs to embrace the “drop-outs” perspectives on the world. Drawing upon the concepts of holism, transformation, and relationships, Levenson argues that since experience and knowledge cannot be viewed outside of context and since context implies relationship then psychoanalysis must focus on relationships. Moreover, since relationships are not necessarily stable or determined (due to both changing context as well as the subjectivity of the other) the self in some senses strives for and constructs stability, which in large part is supplied by social order/structures. The way in which the societal structure influences individual construction of self, i.e. reflection, isomorphism, and transformation, is viewed as a type of “aesthetic structure”. This structure is what is recreated or altered in therapy and thus necessarily involves the therapist, who willingly or not partakes in its re-construction. Accordingly,

“In the larger society, patient and therapist are transformations of each other. But in addition, the patient has his own structure which is not only a construction, that is, part of the larger patterning of his society, but also a reflection of his biological givens (talents and flaws) and his idiosyncratic experience. It is this aesthetic structure which is the key to therapy” (Levenson, 2005b p 39).

What is of note in this early conceptualization is how Levenson thinks about the role of society in structuring an individual’s mental life. While acknowledging individual subjectivity, Levenson appears primarily concerned with the argument that psychological processes are rooted in system participation. Of course, it is this view that enables him to develop the idea of mutual enactment, as his structural theory requires that both therapist and patient be active in recreating patterned behaviors. It is not until The Ambiguity of Change that he begins to flesh out how his structural approach can also be used to think about intra-psychological processes.

Here, Levenson presents the reader with a question about psychological process, asking whether it is dynamics or semiotics. Underlying his question is a move away from thinking of psychological problems being caused by distortions of an inner reality that is conflicting with the real world to one that views the individual as being unable to solve the mysteries present in the world. These mysteries result from the complexities of cultural and semiotic life that the child is born into. More specifically, Levenson feels that “Psychological difficulties arise because of difficulty in sorting out the nuances of social experiences, especially as it is mediated through language … neurotic difficulties arise from semiotic incompetence” (Levenson, 2005c). In other words, cultural tools such as language are continuously mediating experience and that failures of mediation can cause psychological difficulties!

This is of course no small claim, especially for a psychoanalyst and opens up a number of ways of thinking about mental life and its relationship to mental difficulties. Levenson himself further explores the issue by discussing the differences between neuropsychology in Freudians day and in his own. The key difference to Levenson is one of holistic networks of mind versus hierarchical topologies of systems emphasizing different layers of control. Here we see how his thinking has progressed. In The Fallacy of Understanding, he thinks about social structures as being hierarchical with one controlling an other and so on, such that the individual was enmeshed some place in between. Now he thinks of control moving laterally and spatially in addition to vertically. This is of course possible due to the multi-faceted nature of signs, which have an over abundance of potential meanings. In this manner, novel meanings are continuously constructed by the individual. The openness of meaning making becomes an asset to therapy, as no longer does the therapist have to focus on an interpretation (a traditionally vertical process) but can instead explore the lateral and spatial aspects of meaning making. This shifts therapy from one of “cure” to one of “enrichment of networks”. Therapy now can focus on the novel and creative aspects of human meaning making as opposed to the destructive and conflictual.

When brought into the realm of mental life the construction of psychological problems can be thought of in a more open manner. Levenson draws our attention to the ambiguity about meaning and experience, (especially in the therapeutic relationship can itself) which is central to human beings. Indeed, it is precisely this ambiguity that semiotics both minimizes and maximizes. Towards this end, semiotics mediation involves or implies an ongoing relationship between the individual and their environment that is continuously being mediated by cultural tools, such as language. In addition to Levenson’s suggestion that psychological problems can result from not only not knowing how to use these tools, it is also possible that individuals are not able to appropriately navigate and/or regulate one’s cultural experiences. In this manner, semiotics can be used to trap individuals in meanings, by providing too much information to be navigated or even too little. Similarly, the individual becomes capable of constructing their own semiotic traps that can limit their meaning making (perhaps causing depression) or over extend it (leading to anxiety). Alternatively, psychological problems can be thought of as failures to interact with other individual’s patterns – or to be able to regulate self-other relationships. The idea of semiotic regulation (see for instance, Rosenbaum, 2008 attempts to articulate thoughts about how this fails in the case of depression) seems to fit nicely into Levenson’s network of mind.

While trying to put together a conclusion for this foray into Levenson’s thinking, I consistently got side tracked by thinking about why his ideas of psychological process have not been developed. While his key contribution of mutual enactment is almost universally accepted, it is generally located within psychological theories that have become increasingly reductionist. As far as I can see, despite his best effort at putting forth a unique structural and semiotic view of mind his ideas were transformed in such a way that still preserved the whole he was breaking away from. Perhaps what is necessary is to first unravel why certain dominant thoughts about thinking characterize the relationship between psychoanalysis and the individual and then think about providing alternative theories.

For example, in his recent ESPN the magazine article the sometimes sports journalist Bill Simmons documents a recent conference at MIT on the future of statistics in the NBA. Simmons’s article is notable because it reflects a relatively new idea about the use of statistics, specifically that they can be used to measure a player’s impact on the team as a whole. Unlike in baseball, where statistics measure individual players and their talents, basketball is thought to be more of a team sport. Accordingly, analyzing a player’s individual performance does not necessarily help teams win. Instead, it is necessary to develop statistics that capture how individual players contribute to the team’s emergent identity, which is what leads to victories. Given the complexity behind building a team, Simmons implores basketball teams to release the data they have so statisticians can develop new statistical measurements of a diverse number of basketball plays. He writes:

“I want “mega-assists” (passes that create a layup or a dunk) and “half-assists” (for each made foul shot). I want “unforced turnovers,” like in tennis (Tony Allen would be Wilt Chamberlain in this category), and “nitty-gritties” (some combination of charges taken, deflections, balls saved from going out of bounds and rebounds tipped to teammates). I want “Unselds” (a long outlet pass that leads to an assist for a layup or a dunk) and “Russells” (a blocked shot directed to a teammate).”

This quote reflects a general idea underlying the use of statistics. Namely, that it is possible to completely catalogue the different interactive or team related talents of players. By doing so, one could then presumably draw upon an index of players (mega-assist guys, nitty-gritties, scorers, defenders etc) in such a fashion to construct teams with the best chance at winning. Obviously, putting together a team where different player’s talents contribute to the team’s chance of winning is the goal of every General Manager as well as every want to be General Manager (of which we all secretly are).

The use of statistics to measure performance and build teams in sports is nothing new. In his popular book Moneyball, Michael Lewis details the use of statistics by the Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane in drafting and trading for baseball players. Beane, who was greatly constrained by the limited payroll of the A’s, used statistics to help find players who had underappreciated talents. The most famous of these is On Base Percentage (OBP), a simple measure of how many times per plate appearance a player gets on base. His argument was that measurements such as OBP (as well as Slugging Percentage) were better indices of successful players (in specific those who score and drive in runs) than traditional descriptive statistics such as Batting Average (BA), Home Runs (HR) and Runs Batted In (RBI). Beane, utilizing primarily OBP successfully built teams around players who were undervalued by other teams. His model of using statistics to help identify undervalued talents has served as a model for other teams and as a result baseball statisticians have become increasingly en vogue. Currently there is a plethora of statistics used to evaluate players, ranging from the mildly simple, i.e. OPS (on base plus slugging) and WHIP (Walks and Hits per inning pitched) to the fabulously complicated, i.e. VORP (value over replacement player) and WARP (wins over replacement player).

The use of statistics in basketball is much more recent. In a recent NY Times article, Michael Lewis describes the unique case of Shane Battier, the Houston Rockets starting forward. According to the Rocket’s General Manager Daryl Morey, (who was also at the statistical conference attended by Simmons not to mention highlighted in his article), despite a lack of visible statistical evidence, Shane Battier, makes his team significantly better when he plays than when he does not. Moreover, he has made every team he has played on significantly better. According to Morey, this is because Battier plays such effective defense against the opposing teams best player and is himself an unselfish offensive player. As a result, Battier limits the other teams scoring while not detracting from his own teams scoring.

Much like Beane, who used statistics to find underappreciated players, Morey has worked to develop statistics to help him find undervalued players. While the secrecy about the nature of these statistics (as well as the data behind them) is what infuriates Simmons, what is of note in the case of Battier is that according to Morey, he recognized Battiers effectiveness but not why he was effective. The recognition according to Lewis, involved a variation of a relative simple measurement known as “plus-minus”. Simply put it “measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court.” Though not perfect, it is in many ways a descriptive statistic similar to that of OBP, as it expands the analysis to include a wider range of behaviors.

The fascinating part about of the Battier story is the eventual recognition of what he was doing that was making him effective. Morey describes it as an accumulation of different abilities Battier had developed that minimized the abilities of the other teams best scorer. One of these was Battier’s intelligence and capacity to assimilate a large amount of information given prior to the game about the tendencies of the other player and then to use them to play the odds. Lewis traces how Battier developed his abilities as a result of growing up between two cultures, a privileged white private school culture and a more street orientated black culture. As a result, he was forced to develop his game as a flexible hybrid of the two. It was his ability to stick (in some senses literally, he is referred to as a “lego” in the article and a “glue guy” by others) between these two games that made him successful.

Battier’s unique “sticking” abilities add intangible elements to the Rockets, such that when he plays they become greater than the sum of their parts. In order to discover this Morey used a statistic that looked at more than an individual’s box score performance (i.e. Field Goals, Shots blocked). While understanding what he is doing to be successful necessitated close observation, allowing for the development of new statistics. It is exactly this process that Simmons hopes to use in order to quantify the talents and impact of other players to construct a team that wins.

The question to me is whether statistics can ever really be effectively used to create a team where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The phenomenon here is one of emergence. From watching sports we know that over the course of a season a team can almost develop a personality that they did not necessarily have at the beginning of the season. This personality becomes greater than the individual players themselves and is often credited with helping them win. While each teams emergent traits are unique there have certainly been similarities in the narratives of championship teams. For instance, there are “underdog teams”, “goofy teams”, “professional teams” etc. The goals outlined by Simmons and Morey is how to use statistics to construct a team with one of these emergent personalities.

The paradox here is that statistics themselves are necessarily reductive – by definition they measure the probability of an event happening given a set of circumstances. Their use restricts events to what is normative not capturing the events that lie outside of the norm. This is why in his article Simmons lists a variety of statistical categories, because any one category only looks at some aspect of behavior. In order to get all of behavior one needs increasingly diverse range of statistics. Indeed, almost all behavior can be subjected to statistical analysis, especially if there is a trend that the researcher is looking for. What is less clear is that it can be successfully applied to the construction of the team, such that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Interestingly, this problem mirrors the historical tension surrounding the use of statistics in studying social phenomenon. In my opinion this tension has been described most clearly by the social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1932) as the difficulty of developing general laws in science. Lewin recognized, that any attempt at establishing general laws (or abstracting out from individual cases) made it difficult if not impossible to go back to the individual cases. He relates this problem to the traditional method of classification in science, where phenomena were grouped according to similarity. According to Lewin, this only ended when genetic/constructive accounts became viable, as they allowed for the grouping of phenomena according to the way they can be produced or derived from each other. The focus moved from forming classificatory categories (making it difficult to look at specifics) to genetic accounts that provided laws for understanding idiographic cases.

In his article, Simmons discussion of the individual nature of baseball statistics (i.e. the ability for any baseball trait to be measured) maps out nicely to the classificatory use of statistics in social science. Essentially, the view is that if there is a baseball related activity, there can be a statistic for it. The event driven nature of a baseball game (a pitch, an at-bat, etc.) lends itself nicely to this sort of approach. As a result, statistics often highlight the individualized nature of baseball.

The brilliance of Billy Beane was not so much his use of statistics as a whole, but rather his use of a particular statistic, OBP, which allowed for a more genetic view of the player. Specifically, players with high OBP generally did many things better than players with just a high batting average. Some of these things, such as taking more pitches even help the team as a whole, by letting other players see more pitches or tiring out the pitcher quickly. Beane’s use of OBP in effect switched lenses, from one that only looked at hits to one that examined at-bats as a whole. It is crucial to also keep in mind the reasons why Beane was looking at OBP, namely his relative need versus what he could afford. In other words, OBP was great not only because it was more holistic but also because it was undervalued. Relatively, it provided greater bang for the buck.

Looking at Beane’s effectiveness in constructing a winning team using OBP, the early “Moneyball” Oakland Athletic teams on the one hand consistently made the playoffs, while, on the other never advanced to a World Series. Indeed, mixed results are the norm for other teams that have focused on building their teams around statistics such as the Dodgers and Blue Jays.  The explanation for this at least in part, is that statistics due to being inherently reductive only capture some aspects of the game. What is not captured often is minimized. The classic example of this is how Beane’s teams stole relatively few bases because stolen bases are thought to be statistically inadvisable. Yet, it was a stolen base, by the 2004 Boston Red Sox that is credited with propelling them to winning the World Series. While statisticians point out all the other things that happened during the year and the playoffs without that single event the Red Sox would have lost to the Yankees.

This matters because while Beane’s use of OBP while more genetic, still reduced the whole of a player into certain aspects of worth. This reduction, was far from an objective measurement, but instead was defined in relationship to the more traditional and highly valued statistics. Indeed, since OBP has become more popular it has become less cost effective for Beane to build a team around OBP players. Instead he has switched to looking at more holistic defensive statistics as well as base running statistics. These skills, which were undervalued to him in the 1990’s, have become more valuable as the market has changed.

To Simmons and Morey, the goal for basketball statisticians is balance the tension between measuring a player’s individual effectiveness and their impact on the team. Morey described how in baseball individual statistics almost always benefit the team, whereas in basketball good individual statistics do not always equate to team success. It is this line of reasoning that has them looking measures to capture the emergent properties that make the whole greater than the sum. To Morey, basketball needs “to measure the right things … meaningful statistics” about how certain players help their teams. It is this idea that led Morey to identify Battier as a valuable player as he had a high plus/minus and a relatively low salary. Accordingly, this theoretically represents a shift from thinking about the player’s statistics as directly helping the team to how their overall play fits in with and helps the team.

At first glance, this appears to be a move towards exactly the genetic type of thinking endorsed by Lewin. However, the question remains to the extent statistics are able to assist with this matter. Identifying Shane Battier as a significantly better player than reflected by popular statistics involved using a different lens (specifically, plus/minus) than commonly used by General Managers. Understanding why Battier was so effective required intense observation and knowledge of his developmental history. To Lewin, such idiographic study is at the heart of science. He sees two possible paths. One is to attempt and genetically understand how Battier does what he does in an order to develop certain that can be applied to other players. Much like understanding why he is effective, this approach emphasis subjective observation and comparison. By observing how he interacts and influences the play on the court it is possible to qualitatively describe his play in such a way that rules can be generated and applied to others. Indeed, this is very much like Morey does when talking about Battier with Michael Lewis. Alternatively, we could abstract outwards the specific traits (i.e. getting his body in front of players, or using his hands in a certain manner) that make him effective, give them names and then statistically measuring them in others. This process will inevitably reduce Battier to certain traits and more importantly limit the extent of observation in other players. Exactly like OBP excluded stolen bases, the defining act of categorizing in basketball would do the same.

While it would certainly be interesting and likely elucidating to attempt and develop statistics that are more sensitive to how players interact with each other and thus their impact on the team the nature of sports is such that this can only capture parts of the whole. This is not reflective of one sport being more team orientated than another sport but instead a question of the locus of analysis. Any attempt at statistically analyzing an action, interactive or otherwise (and I would argue that even the more individual aspects of baseball are still interactive and team orientated) limits the field of study. Though this analysis can generate useful and insightful data it is at best only complimentary to other subjective and qualitative methods of inquiry.

Lewin, K (1932). The Conflict Between Aristotelian and Galileian Modes of Thought in Contemporary Psychology. Contemporary Psychoanlysis; 23, 517-554

Visualization of the frequency of the words 'socialism' (orange) and 'capitalism' (green) in New York Times articles since 1981. (by Jer Thorp)

Jo Guldi of Inscape has a provocative post up describing how she used available web-based tools to produce a rather sophisticated analysis of the use of the word pseudoscience in Wikipedia entries. Her hypothesis, to paraphrase, is that “pseudoscience” is less a rigorous, ‘scientific’ term than a discursive ‘marker’ for attempts to delegitimize opposing arguments.

I started on a hunch, and that hunch involved one of my favorite twentieth-century words for starting a fight. The word “pseudoscience” was one of the twentieth century’s most powerful tools for turning a pleasant argument into an all-out jam-throwing mud-in-your-eye punch fest. Establish something as a “pseudoscience” and you dismiss the evidence offered out of hand. The processes to which pseudoscience refers are very modern: expert communities, institutional truth, public discourse, and the body of scientific thinking. [...] I suppose I’m attracted to things labeled pseudoscience in part because they represent communities whose thinking is out-of-time or out-of-place, and twenty-first-century interlocutors frequently have problems determining which and why. Take acupuncture. The elemental metaphors relating bodily organs to the seasons appear to be whacked out-of-time from the perspective of twentieth-century western science. But acupuncture’s reliance on communities of practice, responding to the experience of the patient, frequently surpasses western medicine in its skills of communicating with the patient, treating the physical ailment, the psychological, the psychosomatic, and the patient-doctor relationship as parts of an entire whole. If anything, acupuncture isn’t out-of-time, it’s out-of-place, the creature of a tradition external to the west and frequently misunderstood by western practitioners. That doesn’t stop western pracitioners from labeling acupuncture a “pseudoscience,” or cultural anthropologists from accusing the category “pseudoscience” of incorporating western bias. Pseudoscience is a great term for pointing to fissures.

Guldi’s methods for identifying rhetorical instances of the word could just as well be used to identity other ‘fissures’. To be sure, a more robust (and affordable) means for sifting through, and refining, the large sets of data to which humanities scholars now have access, has long been overdue. (The whole ‘tag cloud’ phenomenon shows just how desperate we are for a handy, user-friendly data visualizer.) Here’s what she did:

I asked DevonAgent (a personalizable search agent for automatically pulling big sets of text from the web without cut and paste, ~$25 education rate) to find me all the Wikipedia articles that reference pseudoscience, either in the class heading, the article itself, or the backboard discussion. Those articles range from articles explaining Popper’s definition of pseudoscience to clearly discredited theories (phrenology, flat-earth theory) to controversial subjects from the borderlands of western institutional knowledge (e.g. acupuncture).

The resulting database of articles is a collection of knowledge fissures: places where one group of researchers has attempted to tell another to shush.

So I asked the machines who was involved in the fights. ManyEyes, a free collection of visualization tools from IBM, will let anyone look for recurring grammatical relationships between certain words in a given piece of text. When ManyEyes looked at the Wikipedia Pseudoscience database, it quickly recognized certain names coming up regularly. It knew that they were names only from the grammatical construction of a personal relationship, i.e., the word was followed by an apostrophe-s, e.g. Freud‘s book, Sheldrake’s claim, Popper’s hypothesis. So I asked ManyEyes for a list of the players who appear in the fights over pseudoscience. Here they are, to the best of the machine’s knowledge.

Guldi’s general thesis – that certain words or phrases mark disciplinary fissures — is compelling, if limited in application. Not every fissure, of course, manifests itself with semantic markers, nor does every regular accusation suggest a deep break, but generally speaking a great deal of authoritative research could be done with a method such as this one.

Guldi also points the way to scholarly uses of web-accessible archives for purposes other than mere ‘visualization’, and her timing couldn’t be better. Over the last five months or so, The New York Times has been rolling out a series of APIs for interacting with its 158-year corpus, an ambitious project that culminated recently in the February 20 Times Open developer seminar. Artist-developers like Tim Schwartz and Jer Thorp have since produced some interesting visualizations of the archive — of the frequency of “socialism” vs. “capitalism” between 1984 and 2009, for instance — and there are other artists doing similar work without APIs –  Jeff Clark‘s News Spectrum or Dave Bowker‘s “One week of The Guardian” — but, again, these projects are for the most part aimed at producing visually-pleasing representations of data and take little interest in identifying discursive ‘fissures’ or mining historical archives for definitive ‘macro’ patterns. But it’s only a matter of time before social scientists and historians like Guldi turn their attention to archive APIs like the Times‘ and begin making all sorts of interesting discoveries.

Avoiding the more obvious, conspiratorial answers to this question (where ‘personalization’ would be just another devious market ploy), Vargha unravels a more fundamental problem, one that cannot be so easily attributed to ‘late capitalism’ per se. Rather, the conflicts or tensions between the face-to-face encounter and the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system informing that interaction are shown to reflect a more philosophical tension — between structures and nodes, processes and moments, sets and elements. Customer-client interaction, in other words, cannot be so easily whisked away as a ‘symptom’ of systemic exploitation. For, and this is perhaps the central methodological point of her paper, interaction itself raises the question of how structures interact with individuals, of how a given system manages to appropriate (in the cynical view), or engage with (in the more positive view), a ‘subject’.

Speaking to this point, Vargha spends some time early in the paper pointing out the relevant literature’s over-attention to macro structures. If given too much weight in the model, they assume precisely what’s in question: namely, the relation between the individual and the system. Vargha, by contrast, focuses on the individual, face-to-face encounter with the system. She notes that the very concept of embeddedness — that one is ‘embedded’, socially, in a market — diminishes in advance the importance of interaction between the one embedded and the system in which one is embedded. After all, if outcomes are programmatically determined, interaction cannot matter very much.

In contrast to this model, she turns to Webber’s view of market exchange as a struggle between opposing interests, of which exchange is the negotiated outcome rather than the pre-given result of a macro, top-down operation. She compares this perspective to some recent work on doctor-patient interaction, and how certain structures or patterns to the conversation tend to result in more prescriptions. All told, the general effect here is a restoration of particularity, the site, and negotiation — interaction not just between the client and the bank but between the micro and the macro. Which is why “mass personalization” — a wonderful phrase that demonstrates, in microcosm, her central point — results in hybrid forms, a word that recurs throughout. The CRM profile and the client meld, or mix — one can sense in her paper a small struggle to find the proper language — rather than one completely ‘subjecting’ or ‘determining’ the other. (Vargha is trying, with much success I think, to move us beyond the terminology of ‘appropriation’ and ‘subjectification’, and on to something more subtle and nuanced.)

We’ve read much of a former age’s penchant for standardization — of homes, products, dreams, — but will new intellectual equipment be required to make sense of the the standardization of interaction? Is such a feat even possible — or does the advent of CRM, in particular, and customer service, in general, represent a failed attempt to extend to people an apparatus meant for objects? “Ironically,” Vargha quips, “the most personal mode of exchange—the face-to-face interaction—becomes the least personal in the attempt to further personalize it.” (3) This is a profound thesis with far-reaching consequences. For one, it destabilizes the purity of presence, of live, ‘unmediated’ interaction, even as it focuses on the structural importance of information systems. There is, you could say, a ‘normalizing function’ at work in the CRM, and it hangs over every turn of Vargha’s logic. There is a refreshing ‘total’ aspect to Vargha’s approach, as well. Interaction, as a concept, is shown to cut across a number of areas otherwise studied in artificial isolation: interior design, capital, consumption, and of course information. We can only hope the final work will delve deeper into their strange collaboration. Its completion, unfortunately, couldn’t be more timely.

To concretize my concerns, it will prove helpful to consider the example of some recent work of the economist Edward Castronova, whose influential research I often cite with great approval in my own. In his article “On the Research Value of Large Games: Natural Experiments in Norrath and Camelot,” Castronova (2006) draws upon large datasets from two online games on develop fascinating insights about interpersonal coordination. Castronova rightly sees in this approach possibilities that have “never before existed in the long history of social thinking” and are “of incredible power and value” (p. 183).

As the title of his article indicates, Castronova explains this power and value by asserting that online games allow us to conduct “natural experiments,” explaining that, “Until now, it has not been possible to take all of society as a research object; such a thing is too big to fit in a lab . . . Now however [. . .] it is indeed possible to replicate entire societies and allow them to operate in parallel” (p. 163). (5)

Castronova’s position draws on the popular suspicion that because Second Life is a virtual world — i.e., a program, which suggests a kind of artificial delimitation — it is more coherent, unified, and available to analysis than is the world proper. The error here, as Boellstorff points out, lies in thinking that a virtual world can only produce virtual culture, that it is not part of the world per se and is therefore simpler, more contained, and open to easy surveillance. In fact, what Boellstorff shows first and foremost is just how unimportant the self-enclosed finitude of SL really is. If anything, the popular image of virtual worlds as less than real and less than able to capture or express real, cultural phenomena has the unintended effect of inhibiting genuine virtual anthropology.