In circles of experimental existential psychology, authors have recently found renewed interest in the distinction between me (my ascriptions I have about myself, often also called self-concept) and I (the current whole of experiencing within our never-ending stream of consciousness at any given moment in time), an idea that dates back to founder of American psychology, William James.

In a series of experiments (among others, priming studies), Elizabeth Pinel and her colleagues found that during interpersonal encounters me-sharing (e.g., my perceptions of being similar to another female German who likes Wagner music) is actually acting as a proxy for I-sharing (e.g., a spontaneous shared deep breath when suddenly hearing the Tannhaeuser theme), which in turn reliefs us temporarily from our sadness resulting from our unavoidable existential loneliness in the world (existential isolation).
In other words, we seek me-sharing experiences with others because we (whether rightfully so or not) believe that me-sharing increases the likelihood for I-sharing, which, in turn, gives us, for a moment, the illusion that we are not existentially isolated beings who cannot ever know the other literally. And, vice versa, when being faced acutely with the awareness of our existential isolation, we actually seek out I-sharers rather than me-sharers.

Translated into Gestalt therapy's langue, the me corresponds to a person's personality function of selfing, the relatively speaking more stable ascriptions I hold about myself at any given moment and which have become sedimented in my background, and the I to the ego-function of selfing, the agentic force during contacting and full-contacting episodes within a particular contact cycle in the here-and-now. While the authors do not mention what, in Gestalt terms, we call it-functioning or, in contemporary discourse possibly also aesthetic and relational functioning (while they look at both aspects of self in a relational context), they conclude:

"We may never experience existential connectedness in a literal sense, but I-sharing brings us breathtakingly close."

and

"[C]linical jpsychologists might find value in developing ways to reach their clients at the level of subjective experience." (p. 372)

In this respect, Gestalt therapy has seemingly found that value from the start. I remain curious what further information about that value experimental existential psychology will bring into our awareness as therapists.


Source:
Pinel, E. C., Long, A. E., Landau, M. J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2004). I-sharing, the problem of existential isolation, and their implications for interpersonal and intergroup phenomena. In J. Greenberg, S. L. Koole, & T. A. Pyszczynski (Eds.), Handbook of experimental existential psychology (pp. 358?374). Guilford Press.

"[I]t is interesting to note that our ability to represent our own thoughts and represent another's thoughts are intimately tied together and may have similar origins within the brain. The fact that there seems to be a partial overlap between self-processing and processing of others fits well with the old adage of 'putting ourselves in another person's shoes?." (p. 532)

Decety, J., & Sommerville, J. A. (2003). Shared representations between self and other: A social cognitive neuroscience view. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 7 (12), 527-533. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2003.10.004

"As you embark on this journey [of understanding consciousness, ahc], be kind to yourself. Be aware of the self-limiting beliefs that we allow to weigh us down and rebuke them daily. You are not the sum of your past, and you are certainly not stuck in the state of consciousness that you now live. If there is one thing that we do know about consciousness, it is that it is constantly changing. Perhaps it is this fluidity that has caused our great challenges, as a species, in pinning it down, but it is definitely this changeable nature that we should celebrate. If our consciousness today does not have to be the same tomorrow as it is today, then the possibilities are endless.The most likely scenario, looking at all of the various theories, philosophies, and schools of thought around consciousness, is that the truth about consciousness lies in an amalgamation of all of these things. How we piece together those answers may not be a group journey, but rather an individual one. Although our consciousness may be linked as a species, it is certainly still very individual and based on our own experiences, lenses, and biases. Therefore one perception of consciousness will never be the same as another, and, indeed, would we want it to be? Perhaps we don't need a final definition for consciousness? Maybe its definition is its changeable nature. The idea that we all see life through our own lenses is a very empowering one, because that means that you can change those lenses. Like a kaleidoscope, you can switch the lens and change your view."

From the conclusion of:
Browne, J. (2020). Understanding the human mind. The pursuit of consciousness. Jason Brown.

[first entry after Corona-break]

...and what makes a good therapist anyway?

In German probably most people know the saying “Practice creates the master.” While the general idea of this saying immediately feels correct, upon closer look we probably have to admit that only correct practice makes perfect. In their editorial work “The cycle of excellence” Rousmaniere, Goodyear, Miller, and Wampold (2017) hang on these questions and provide ideas on how to improve one’s skills as psychotherapists.
They create the concept “deliberate practice” to explain the phenomenon that most therapists will stay on one level of expertise throughout their careers – it seems that only those therapists with routine work experience will become better and better experts who also engage in sufficiently many hours of deliberate practice – actually 4,5 times more hours than less effective therapists (p. 9). We also learn that, in the US system, graduate students are highly motivated to learn how to become therapists, but that after they enter independent practice with some level of competence they only develop their curiosity very diffusely and find deliberate practice (e.g. in form of ongoing supervision, additional training of specific missing skills, and self-tracking of performance) not only challenging but also much less pleasant than graduate school (p. 13). In the literature, extremely highly-achieving therapists, however, showed “perseverance and passion for long-term goals” (Duckworth et al. as cited in Rousmaniere et al. 2017, p 13).
So what makes a good therapist? Or, asked in a more research-oriented way that is: Which therapist variables predict psychotherapy effectiveness?
The list of characteristics and actions of effective therapists is long: the ability to form an alliance across a range of patients, facilitative interpersonal skills visible with “difficult” clients are most prominent. But what does “facilitative interpersonal skills” mean? Besides the classics, warmth and empathy, emotional expression, hopefulness, problem focus and alliance-bond capacity, we find the interesting elements persuasiveness, delivery of a cogent treatment, professional self-doubt and deliberate practice (Wampold in Rousmaniere et al., pp. 56ff). That means, those therapists have better outcomes who are persuasive about their treatment modality (and thereby also convinced of it), who stay focused, and who still keep a certain level of self-doubt whether what they do is beneficial. The theoretical orientation per se is, however, unrelated to outcome (as are age, gender, profession, adherence to treatment protocol, and other elements).
This is not the place to summarize all recommendations of this intriguing book, but to answer the questions posed above based on its main ideas: no, more client hours do not make us better therapists per se. Fore and foremost we are to find the orientation that makes us passionate and convinced of what we do, to stay curious about other modalities, and to engage in career-long professional development (deliberate practice) which we should also model to our students. And while deliberate practice does not make perfect, it brings us closer to our goal of serving our clients the best we can. At present, this is the best available option a therapist can choose.

Rousmaniere, T., Goodyear, R. K., Miller, S. D., & Wampold, B. E. (Eds.) (2017). The cycle of excellence. Wiley Blackwell.

"[...] I think an explicitly anthropomorphic approach is unsatisfactory, and worth reconsidering. If body and environment form constituent parts of what we call 'mind,' it becomes very difficult to see how other animals, with other kinds of bodies, living in other kinds of environments, will 'mind' in ways sufficiently like our own to permit the attribution of humanlike mental states. After all, if the ideas of the umwelt, Gibson’s ecological theory, and embodied sensorimotor theories have something going for them, then we have to accept that we don’t see the 'world-as-it-really-is'; we see it only as it reflects our human needs and physical capacities." (p. 223)


from:
Barrett, L. (2011). Beyond the brain: How body and environment shape animal and human minds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[Crumbs]

In their book “A passion for specificity: Confronting inner experience in literature and science”, Caracciolo and Hurlburt, (2016) use a conversational method attempting (1) to describe the characteristics of mental experience (when reading literature) and (2) to determine where experience as conveyed in literature and experiences apprehended by the scientific method might be able to meet.
Here is how they close their discourse:

“In Lieu of a Conclusion
[....]
That’s it? You’re just stopping?
Here, as in most relationships, there is no real end. We have opened ourselves to dialogue, paid uncompromising attention to phenomena, and tried to let go of our presuppositions, and now have paused to share what has happened. It is up to you, dear reader, to determine the extent to which our struggles resonate with your experience.” (p. 316)

I found that a surprising conclusion as this sentence could have equally said by a Gestalt therapist summarizing what s/he is doing with clients. Speaking with Laskowska (2017, p. 96, transl. ahc) I would add: “...and what of that you want to put into practice in your daily life.”



Caracciolo, M., & Hurlburt, R. T. (2016). A passion for specificity: Confronting inner experience in literature and science. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

Laskowska, B. (2017). Worte finden – Die Nöte einer Gestalttherapeutin [Finding words – A Gestalt therapist’s woes]. Gestalttherapie, 31(2), 75–97.

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„By aiming at making world available, the world encounters us postmoderns as a ‘point of aggression’ or as a series of points of aggression, i.e. as objects that need to be known, to be reached, conquered, controlled or used, and precisely in this way, ‘life’, that, which accounts for the experience of liveliness and encounter – that, which enables resonance-, seems to elude us, which in turn leads to fear, frustration, anger, yes even despair, which then, among other things, is reflected in impotent political aggressive behavior.” (transl. ahc)

Rosa, H. (2019). Unverfügbarkeit [Unavailability]. Wien: Residenz Verlag.

[Crumbs]

So-called “mismatch diseases” are “defined as diseases that result from our Paleolithic bodies being poorly or inadequately adapted to certain modern behaviors and conditions” (chapter 7).
According to David Lieberman, many non-infectious mismatch diseases are mental disorders, like
Alzheimer’s disease
Chronic fatigue syndrome
Depression
Eating disorders
Fibromyalgia
Hypertension
OCD
and possibly many more (Table 3).

Lieberman’s elaborations neatly fit into the organismic self-regulation within an organism/environment space. The author gives many examples about how exactly our evolutionary-shaped bodies get in trouble with modern ways of living (“having paleolithic bodies in a post-paleolithic world”), including topics like cancer, wearing shoes vs. running barefoot, disuse of mental capacities, overweight, overexceeding hygiene (“just because we can live lives of exceptional cleanliness and comfort doesn’t mean they are good for us”), diabetes, short-sightedness, etc.

For example, about sitting in a chair (chapter 12):
“When you sit in a standard chair, your hips and knees are flexed at right angles, a position sitting can permanently shorten the hip flexors. Then, when you stand, your shortened hip flexors are tight, so they tilt the pelvis forward leading to an exaggerated lumbar curve. Your ham-string muscle along the back of the thigh then must contract to counter this curvature, tilting your pelvis backward, leading to a flat-back posture, which hunches your shoulders forward. Fortunately, stretching effectively increases muscle length and flexibility.”

Concluding that “hunter-gatherers use their backs moderately–neither as intensively as subsistence famers nor as minimally as sedentary office workers”.

Another fascinating result is the possibility that painful wisdom teeth may be related to not chewing enough during early childhood (leading to the development of smaller jaws that then cannot provide the necessary space). Yet another, that bone strength seems to be mainly determined until age 20-25 based on a “no strain, no gain” principle (“[a]fter then, there is little you can do to make your bones bigger, and soon thereafter your skeleton starts to lose bone for the rest of your life”; chapter 11)

Lieberman, D. (2013). The story of the human body: Evolution, health, and disease. New York: Pantheon Books.

[Crumbs]

“Perhaps，as Buber suggests, an I-Thou relation is a more fundamental way of accessing the way things are than an I-it relation. In any case, there are, I suggest, no good grounds for assuming that the impersonal, objective stance is the only one through which things are adequately revealed.” (p. 243)

One answer philosophy professor Matthew Ratcliffe (University of York) provides for the circularity that arises from assuming that a theoretical stance of the world should have priority over experience:

"Why should certain cognitive processes have authority?
Because the world is such and such way.
Why do you think the world is like that?
Because those processes reveal it to be."
(ebd.)

Ratcliffe, M. (2007). Rethinking commonsense psychology - A critique of folk psychology, theory of mind and simulation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

The author also wrote an account of the phenomenology of depression, claiming that "despite the vast amount of research that has been conducted into the causes and treatment of depression, the experience of depression remains poorly understood," offering a new view.

Ratcliffe, M. (2014). Experiences of depression: A study in phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (click here for chapter 1)

I haven't read the book, yet, but maybe it's not so new to Gestalt therapists...

[Crumbs]

Pennebaker, Mehl, & Niederhoffer (2003):

"The reality is that in daily speech, emotional writing, and even affect-laden poetry, less than 5% of the words people use can be classified as emotional. From an evolutionary perspective, language did not emerge as a vehicle to express emotion. In reviewing the various word use studies, it is striking how weakly emotion words predict people’s emotional state." (p. 571)

Do people simply
not have the habit (because other means are more useful)
not have the language
do not wish to reveal
emotional terms in writing?

And if people (independent of the reason) do not write emotional terms, may they also not speak them often (and convey emotions via other channels)?