Dr. Leon James
(c)1973
Contents The Interpersonal Saorogat (continued) |
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| Back to PART 2 |
Transactional work involved in interpersonal interaction is largely carried out within the medium of conversational activity. It should be made clear at the outset that there is a relative degree of independence between the topic of the conversation (its surface meaning and encyclopedic content) and the nature and type of the on- going transactions. A proper transactional exchange will have two broad components: an initiating proposal and terminating reaction which consists of either a legitimizing assent or a refusal ritual, the latter being expressed variously as a direct refusal, or an implied refusal (e.g. through lack of acknowledgment), or a victimizing attack (e.g. disagreement, denial, or invalidation). The transactional nature of the initiating proposal or the terminating reaction is specified by the rules contained in the transactional code in force. In many instances, transactional idioms, embedded in the stream of utterances, provide a clue as to the nature of the on- going transactions (e.g. "I don't agree with you," "But...," "In my view..." etc. are transactional idioms that peg Disagreeing Transactions). In other instances, the rules of the code will specify the nature and significance of the on- going transactions. These rules are cast in various specific forms to allow the participants to draw proper inferences as to the transactional significance of particular utterance exchanges. An important type of rule has the following logical shape: "if it is assumed that X, then it follows that Y" where Y is an entity similar to X such that "if it is assumed that Y, then it follows that Z" according to a recursive process. Consider, as an illustration the following conversational exchange reported in Garfinkel (1968, pp.38-39):
1. Husband: Dana succeeded in putting a penny in a parking meter today without being picked up.
2. Wife: Did you take him to the record store?
3. Husband: No, to the shoe repair shop.
4. Wife: What for?
5. Husband: I got some new shoe laces for my shoes.
6. Wife: Your loafers need new heels badly.
An examination of this conversational exchange reveals a number of important organizational features of plain talk. These are as follows: (a) the verbalized utterances participants produce become understandable only if what is actually being said is related in appropriate ways to matters participants understood they were talking about but did not mention. This fact can be clearly seen in the following expanded version of the exchange provided later, by way of explanation, by one of the two participants. In connection with (1), the husband's initial utterance, the participant gave this elaborated, non- natural version:
1. Husband: This afternoon as I was bringing Dana, our four- year- old son, home from the nursery school, he succeeded in reaching high enough to put a penny in a parking meter when we parked in a meter parking zone, whereas before he has always had to be picked up to reach that high.
Thus, the husband's initial utterance is understandable only if a number of assumptions are made about the other matters that his utterance is related to but to which he does not directly refer: that Dana refers to their son and not to some other person by that name; that Dana has attempted in the past to feed the parking meter but never succeeded in doing so without help; that putting a penny in the meter, unassisted, is important to Dana and therefore his success in doing so today,for the first time is a noteworthy event to be reported; that the wife would be interested in knowing about it; that no other event occurred that would be more noteworthy to report at once (e.g. that no car accident took place, otherwise it would have taken precedence as an opening topic to be reported), etc.
(b) that in order to render what is being said understandable to participants, they must jointly know and agree upon the nature of the probable implications of what is being said in relation to what could have been said but wasn't- - as is shown by the expansion given for (2), the wife's utterance coming right after the husband's initial statement:
2. Wife: Since he put a penny in a meter that means that you stopped while he was with you. I know that you stopped at the record store either on the way to get him or on the way back. Was it on the way back, so that he was with you or did you stop there on the way to get him and somewhere else on the way back?
Thus, a conversational utterance, to be understandable, must not only be related to other pertinent matters not mentioned, but in addition, cer~ain inferences must be drawn which presuppose knowledge of the practical problems involved in performing social activities- - in this case, the details involving the temporal organization of picking up Dana from school and stopping at various places before bringing him home. All these details must be known to both partners, which includes the husband's knowledge of the kind of inferences the wife is making, but not overtly saying.
3. Husband: No, I stopped at the record store on the way to get him and stopped at the shoe repair shop on the way home when he was with me.
4. Wife: I know of one reason why you might have stopped at the shoe repair shop. Why did you in fact?
5. Husband: As you will remember I broke a shoe lace on one of my brown oxfords the other day so I stopped to get some new laces.
6. Wife: Something else you could have gotten that I was thinking of. You could have taken in your black loafers which need heels badly. You'd better get them taken care of pretty soon.
As Garfinkel points out, plain talk consists of an involved and expanding web of interrelated matters, some of which are directly mentioned, others being unmentioned but known, while still others relate to inferences about the significance of mentioning an event or omitting mentioning others that could have been mentioned but weren't (cf. "No news is good news").
At first blush, it may appear that ordinary conversational exchanges are so involved and "elliptical" that it is a wonder that persons can succeed in communicating at all. Yet the fact remains that day- to-day ordinary talk is smoothly successful in the majority of cases and participants show no evidence of being hampered by all of this complexity and seeming obscurity. The impression of bewildering complexity belongs to the analytic investigator in his attempt to explicate how the processes of ordinary talk operate and there is no evidence that participants feel a comparable degree of bewilderment in acting out, automatically and unconsciously, the practical business of social transactions, no more so than the other complex, rule- governed activities they routinely perform (e.g. performing the complex phonological and syntactic transformations involved in language use). (For a more detailed study of the nature of transactions in conversations see, in addition to the adjoining articles, Jakobovits, 1973, particularly chapters 2 and 4).
The interpersonal saorogat technique practiced in TEC Workshops relates to the question, What is going on?, in the transactional activities of interacting participants. The type of answers that can be given to this question include, among others, such things as: A and B are engaged in a Disagreeing Transaction; A is initiating a Transactional Request; B is expressing hostility towards A; A is giving information to B; B is claiming that he is speaking objectively, while in fact, he is making a subjective inference in the impersonal register; and so on.
A parallel question can be asked about What is going on?, referring to the intrapsychic transactional activities of the domain that belongs to the third manager, in which case we are dealing with what might be called the "intrapersonal saorogat" or "self=saorogat". This is a method of analysis applied to discourse thinking, and as has been mentioned earlier, it is a derivative technique based on the analysis of conversational material and in which the "participants" are redintegrated experientially through the reification of the pronominal "I", "you" and "(s)he." It should be made clear at the outset that the analysis of discourse thinking through the intrapersonal saorogat involves public accounts given by a person about his intrapsychic transactional activities. As investigators we have. no direct observational access to the mental activity of others. This is clear. But the significance of this fact must be properly understood. Thus, it is not the case that we are studying mental activity indirectly, through overt indices such as introspective reports- - a technique traditionally employed in modern psychological investigations. This is important to note in view of the methodological difficulties inherent in thc mediational strategy of so- called objective classical behaviorism or of neo- behaviorism. There is no evidence that these inherent difficulties can be surmounted and, hence, the behavioristic or mediational study of mental processes must remain an inherently invalid enterprise. Given our purpose here, which is scientifically serious in nature, we must reject the indirect, inferential study of intrapsychic transactional activities. We must instead focus our attention on the direct study of accounts persons can produce, and in the present instance, the topic of the account is restricted to the intrapersonal transactional activities of the third manager (discourse thinking accounts).
We should discuss at this time the practical value of studying discourse thinking accounts. If our purpose were to determine the actual on- going psychic events for person A at time X under conditions M, it is clear that it cannot be accomplished, in a serious way, through the study of discourse thinking accounts, for the latter would only represent an indirect inference of the hypothetical and unknown "real" mental activity. Thus , the requirement of scientific (observational) objectivity would be vitiated. A lesser goal has to do with the question of what kind of discourse thinking activities are possible for a person and how variations in these activities are related to specifiable contextual conditions. The claim I wish to make here is that the study of discourse thinking accounts can provide non- trivial information about the properties of the hypothetical "real" discourse thinking activities. I am not making any specific claims about the relationship that may be involved, whether for instance one underlies the other in a "causative" generative link or whether one is a semantic transform of the other (as in paraphrasing, labeling, or referring), or perhaps something else (e.g. that the account is a description or a report or an interpretation of the activities themselves). I must therefore justify in other terms why it is that I believe that the study of discourse thinking accounts is of practical relevance to discourse thinking activities.
One simple, but important, argument takes note of the fact discourse thinking accounts are in and of themselves discourse thinking activities. Another way of putting this is to define discourse thinking activities as partially, but non- trivially, composed of accounts produced by the third manager. A person's account of intrapersonal transactions can thus be seen as a transformation in medium rather than content (i.e. from private experience to speech sounds) and such a transformation in medium introduces no serious distortious for a large number of significant facts about the structure of the content. This principle is used in educational psycholinguistics where significant aspects of conversational structure can be investigated adequately through written transcripts of oral speech. Many important aspects of content are unaffected by the switch in medium.
The giving of accounts is a specialized communicative skill that can be developed through appropriate practice. Practical autodidactic learning strategies are sufficient to improve this skill, the only instructional requirement being that the individual receives adequate feedback from others as to tlle common public intelligibllity and consensual fidelity of the attempted account. With the interpersonal saorogat technique employed in TEC Workshops, this feedback is provided througll group discussion of a participant's "observations." At appropriate times in the saorogat group, workshop participants are encouraged to interrupt the group conversation by saying out loud Observation! and proceeding by giving an account of the on- going interpersonal transactions (e.g. "B failed to legitimize A's request for support"). In the ensuing discussion of the observational statement, feedback is provided concerning the corroboration status of the observational account (e.g. A states that he doesn't feel legitimized by B; B states that he was not aware he didn't do it but now recognizes that he didn't and various other participants may state their agreement with the substance of the observation). With practice, participants develop the skill of giving accounts that have a high degree of corroboration status.
Similarly, with practice, a person can learn to produce discourse thinking accounts that have a high degree of practical transactional value. By the latter notion I mean to indicate the fact that the production of certain accounts (called "of practical value") can enhance the capacity of the person to engineer interpersonal transactions in a way that some other accounts (called "of little practical value") do not. The development of the ability to give accounts of practical value is ordinarily accomplished by a corresponding increase in the person's ability to "control" both intrapersonal and interpersonal transactional activities, the increased control being attributed to the increased awareness that observational practice produces. In this final section, I shall elaborate some didactic strategics that a person may use to develop his observational capacities for the successful production of discourse thinking accounts that have a practical value. Previous discussions in the literature dealing with techniques of meditation, visualization, imagery, and the exploration of inner spaces are not directly related to the self-saorogat technique to be described presently.
The saorogat technique is a practical method available to all socialized persons by virtue of their routine capacity to perform transactions as specified by the transactional code. The self- saorogat is a variant of the interpersonal saorogat described earlier. It is the technique that can be practiced by the third manager to improve his skills of constructing accounts that provide specific answers to the question, "What's going on?", referring to the person's intrapersonal transactional activities within the context of simultaneously on- going interpersonal transactions. It is this contextual dependency that most fundamentally distinguishes the self- saorogat from other techniques of intrapsychic observations and reports. The following dyadic conversational exchange illustrates how the technique can be practiced.
1. John: I am glad we have this opportunity for a self- saorogat exchange. It will allow me to get to know you better and it will allow me to show myself to you so that you can know me better.
2. Martha: I am glad, too. Furthermore, I am glad that you are glad about our getting to know each other better, even though I am anxious about what we're about to do.
3. John: Oh, don't be anxious. I won't bite you, promise!
4. Martha: My anxiety is intensifying. I am concerned about the fact that you fail to report any anxiety on your part. Is it the case that you are not experiencing any or have you broken the rule of reporting your feelings objectively?
5. John: Now wait a minute! I am not aware of feeling of anxiety. Why are you assuming that I must necessarily experience any anxiety?
6. Martha: I hear you saying that you are not aware of any anxiety. I understand and accept your report. I also hear you implying that I am assuming that you necessarily must be experiencing anxiety. I cannot corroborate your subjective inference about my assumption. Insofar as I'm aware I am not assuming that you must necessarily be experiencing anxiety. At this point, I can report a perceptible, and relieving, reduction in the intensity of my anxiety.
7. John: I am glad of that. Thank you for rectifying my error about your assumption. Your clarification is helpful in that it shows to me that I had been defensive, and consequently, attributed to you feelings that you cannot corroborate. I feel a sense of relief, at this moment, which leads me to realize that I must have been more anxious than I was aware of being. I feel trusting towards you and am having agreeable feelings of anticipation at the thought of moving closer to you.
8. Martha: Your feelings are reassuring to me. I feel a warm glow between us. What are you feeling now? Please report.
9. John: I am all involved in doing well at this. I am aware of the tape recorder...or rather, I am aware that "John" is concerned about the recording. I am seeing him discussing the tape with the other workshop participants at some future date and he is acting very defensive. He feels threatened and on the spot.
10. Martha: And what are you feeling right now? Can you report your feelings right now?
11. John: I am not aware of any particular feelings.
12. Martha: You feel flat. I notice that you are very immoble. What are you feeling in your legs?
13. John: My legs feel very stiff. So does my neck... and shoulders.
14. Martha: Can you move about?
15. John: Yes. It feels good. I feel a relief. I feel trusting towards you. I feel the glow between us. What are you feeling? Please report.
And so on.
This exchange occurs in a highly specialized register. It usually takes many hours of supervised practice with the interpersonal saorogat before participants can talk objectively and openly (authentically), as is done in the above exchange. I would like now to point out some of the relevant features of this brief exchange.
a) Objective reporting Whenever a participant reports a private experience through direct observational awareness, he is doing 'objective' reporting (e.g. "I am glad..."; "I am anxious"; "I am assuming..."; "I accept..."). Whenever a participant refers to another participant's intrapsychic activity, he is doing subjective inferencing (e.g. "You are flat."; "You are being defensive. " ; "You are assuming that..."). In ordinary everyday commonplace talk subjective inferencing occurs with high frequency relative to objective reporting. In the self-saorogat group, this ratio is gradually reversed so as to minimize doing subjective inferencing and to maximize doing objective reporting.
(b) Legitimization. When the listener makes it a point to let the speaker know that he understood the latter's statement and accepts it without evaluation, he is performing a legieimization transaction. For instance, in 6., Martha legitimizes John's statement in 5 that he is not aware of any feelings of anxiety. Some forms of legitimization consists in reporting to the other the successful effect of a previous intervention, as intended by the intervening participant. Thus, in 7., John reports to Martha that her clarification given in 6. has helped him see the error he committed in 5. in which he denies feeling any anxiety.
(c) Invalidation and Disagreement. An instance of disagreement or invalidation occurs in 3., where John invalidates Martha's feeling by not accepting it without evaluation ("Oh, don't be anxious."). A cottrasting validating or legitimizing comment may have been, instead, "I hear you saying you are anxious" or, "I experience you as anxious." When a saorogot group participant cannot legitimize a statement, he is expected to state this fact directly and objectively, as in 6. ("I cannot corroborate your subjective inference about my assumption."). A contrasting invalidating reaction might read, instead, "You are wrong in assuming..." or, as in 5., "Why are you assuming..." which has the same force of invalidation. I have had numerous occasions to observe that frequent subjective inferencing (as in ordinary everyday talk) leads to a relatively high rate of invalidation and disagreement, both of which are drastically reduced when the rate of objective reporting increases (as in the saorogat register). I consider this discovery important and of fundamental significance for the understanding of interpersonal transactions. The significance of this fact for improving the success of bargaining and instructional transactions does not escape me (see the next issue of BOTEC for a discussion of this).
(d)The Relief Reflex. Legieimization by the other and awareness by the self are as a rule accompanied by an intense feeling of relief , a distinct and easily perceptible decrease in tension, a physical relaxation and a 'breathing more easily.' Thus, in 6., Martha's 'clear' awareness of what is going on is followed by the relief reflex. Similarly, in 15., John's awareness of his tension deactivates it. Lack of awareness of on- going processes and invalidation by the other or disagreement has the contrasting effect of producing increased tension (as for Martha in 4., after John's invalidation in 3., and, for John, throughout the early exchange until 7.).
Continued successful practice of the self- saorogat frees the individual from 'background' tension by increasing his awareness of on- going intrapsychic transactions and provides him with an increased ability to engineer interpersonal transactions. As the ego image work becomes more and more transparent to the third manager, he is able to disentangle the etiology of behavioral manifestations in terms of - ego image, persona, or essence type. The individual comes to experience himself more fully, can achieve a perspective upon his behavior and thoughts which is more detached and independent (cf. John's use of the third person, referring to himself, in 9. in the above illustration). At the point where he can actually experience himself as a third person, seeing and knowing, without reacting or evaluating, he has reached a state of consciousness that is referred to in the relevant literature as "satori" o "liberation." For these advanced human beings, life on earth is experienced as Nirvana.
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Why Can't they Do It another Way? Thought Preoccupations on the Daily Round