The Accesses to Oneself
4.10 Theoretically Oriented Psychotherapies
In accordance with this attitude, factual experiences are not conceived in terms of what they actually are in people’s lives, but in the light of those determinations imposed by the theoretical perspective through which they accessed. The view which is presented to the patient interprets lived experience as though it were the particular instance of a general law, and in doing so inevitably discards or flattens all effective occurrences. In the light of an a priori systematics, the therapist identi- fies broken mechanisms and distills other people’s experiences as though they were the constitutive elements of an unbroken process: the self in process. This unfolding of this process in time is guided by fundamental meaningful trajectories that the therapist alone is capable of recognizing.
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by the patients, who by accepting the therapist’s interpretation end up applying his theories to their own lives. Consequently, in line with the philosophical tradition of healing based on the principles of reason, the therapeutic relation always takes the form of a (pedagogical) relationship that requires the patient to identify and learn a series of practices for managing present experience in the light of those supratem- poral principles which the therapist alone can access by virtue of his knowledge.
A therapist, for example, may pass from an ongoing critical situation to an analysis of the patient’s childhood behaviors and experiences, connecting them to the sentimental relationships of his adolescence and youth, and his present relationship with his spouse and parents. He will then interpret the therapeutic relationship itself according to the same interpretative key, identifying in each of these passages the same form of attachment as the invariant which, by enduring from the cradle to the grave, governs the construction and dissolution of the patient’s ties of affection and emotional organization.
Alternatively, the ongoing situation of crisis may be understood as the consequence of the poor functioning of a system of information processing which through the therapist’s a priori template is isolated, analyzed in its effective articulations, and corrected in the light of rational parameters for the implementation of efficacy or adjusted in such a way as to restore the patient’s mentalizing capacities.
All this is even more evident in the metacognitive approach, which may be regarded as the most extreme form of this mode of operating, and hence the poorest one from the point of view of the understanding of lived experience. According to this perspective, it is assumed that every relation (with one’s own lived experience) as such belongs to a particular class of objects—the class of relations—which entails a kind of access that is even more radical from a theoretical perspective: one based on an original distinction that is seen to characterize every relation in general.
According to this mode of operating, the patient is required by his therapist to grasp and modify the way in which he relates to his own relation with lived experience, i.e., with the metacognitive beliefs that are said to be the beliefs underlying the individual’s experiences, thoughts, and procedures. The implementation of this
“therapeutically” determined cognitive behavior transforms the patient into a reclas- sifier of his own cognitive processes, creating an enormous distance between him and actual experience.
Therapeutic interventions of this sort become both a theory of knowledge and a destiny for the patient: a theory of knowledge through which to reformulate one’s lived experience by resignifying it in the light of the principles learned from psycho- therapy, but also a destiny, insofar as in each case concrete experience is newly understood precisely in the light of those invariant principles guiding one’s personal development.
This process is also clearly reflected by the “historical” method shared by a large number of apparently different “schools.” The most simple case is that of the techno approaches which regard each patient’s ongoing problem as a kind of malfunction (corrupted file analysis, information processing, the substitution of narrative sce- narios, the improvement of metacognitive skills, rational-irrational computation, pattern and systems analysis, etc.) and treatment as a way of repairing this
4.10 Theoretically Oriented Psychotherapies
malfunction by fixing the broken mechanism. Leaving this case aside, all those therapeutic practices that analyze one’s personal history do so guided by the genea- logical reflex. In other words, the problematic quality of the present situation is dealt with through an archaeological reconstruction of those invariants that, by remaining constant throughout the various stages of the patient’s life, provide the coordinates for understanding why his current existential dimension is what it is.
The genealogical reflex, which owes its consolidated and unprecedented success to psychoanalysis, is the crudest expression of that fundamental orientation which psychotherapies have drawn from the ontology of presence and according to which what changes can only be explained in the light of what remains unchanged.
4.11 The Primacy of Theory in Constructivist Psychotherapy Also proceeding along the same trajectory, but with a greater methodological emphasis, are those therapeutic practices—mostly constructivist ones—that pro- mote a reflective focus graded according to different degrees of magnification and distinction, with the aim of reconstructing lived experience so as to gain access to its immediate dimension. In different ways they all unwittingly follow Natorp’s (1912) attempt to regain the subjective sphere through the painstaking reconstruc- tion of experiences: a reconstruction that purports to provide access to the immedi- acy of the sense of lost experience.
As is widely known, the reconstructive method was Natorp’s answer to the limits of the intuitive-descriptive approach of Husserlian phenomenology. Natorp’s criticism—the only kind of criticism to have put forward scientifically relevant objections to phenomenology, as Heidegger was to note—was chiefly directed toward the immobilization of lived experience brought about by phenomenological analysis. According to Natorp, phenomenological observation entails the objectivization of subjectivity and is therefore incompatible with that principle above all principles, the return to things themselves, by which it claims to be guided.
The core of Natorp’s criticism of Husserlian phenomenology lies in its attempt to restore the foundation and mobility of individual lived experiences, which the reflective-descriptive attitude of the phenomenologist inevitably immobilizes.
Natorp’s argument may be summed up in two points: (1) if experience coincides with the relation between subject and object, in order to experience himself, the subject must reflectively grasp his own experiences as an object and (2) if, however, the individual grasps himself as an object, he cannot experience himself as a subject, since through reflection all that he grasps is a frozen version of the flowing of sub- jectivity. Natorp’s solution is to circumvent the immobilizing and distorting aspect of reflection by grasping lived experiences as an objectification of subjective experi- ence. Lived experience is the object on the basis of which it is possible to restore—
through the reconstructive method—the immediacy of the very subjectivity that engendered it. The method, then, consists in retracing the process of objectivization of knowledge “down to what constituted the living element in consciousness prior to any objectivization” (p. 38, 1912).
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Leaving aside the evident problem of how we may return to the sphere of immediacy through the mediation of reflection (GA 56/57), the point which links the reconstructive approach—shared by psychologists ranging from Kelly (2003) to von Glasersfeld (1995) and Guidano (1991)—to the other perspectives based on the primacy of theory is the notion that reconstruction only becomes possible on the basis of the objectivization of experiences accomplished according to an a priori order, understood as that to which history is subordinated.10
In other words, the breakdown of experience into discrete, punctuated elements, with the aim of retrieving the original life of one’s consciousness, is achieved on the basis of objective criteria, which constructivists have striven to epistemologically justify from the very beginning. For example, over the course of the analysis of a relationship, the identification and detailed definition of different episodes related to the development of such emotional bond and of the experiences related to it are car- ried out in the light of a series of natural-scientific principles—e.g., cybernetic or ethological-evolutionary ones—that make it possible to lend shape to constellations of categories (constructs, meanings, organizational or motivational invariants, etc.) through which to articulate the patient’s subjectivity. Unsurprisingly, the various currents of the twentieth-century constructivism have widely drawn upon evolutionary biology, general system theory, and the epistemology springing from it to find a justification and foundation for their a priori criteria.
The next step lies in actual reconstruction, which restores the continuity and unity of the selected experiences by reintegrating them as a more articulate and abstract sum of points, thereby enabling the restoration of the subject who has gen- erated these lived experiences: the more the “immediate” elements of consciousness have been distinguished, the more effective is this step. As emphasized by Arrien (2009), for Natorp, it is a matter of tracing the various discrete moments (concrete lived experiences) back to a function expressing their possible continuity (con- sciousness); hence, his reconstructive psychology may be seen to rest on the math- ematical model of the resolution of an integral.11
The determination of the subjective sphere being the purpose of psychology, neo-Kantism and the popular constructivist approach (stemming from it) reach this sphere starting from the logical determination of the multiplicity of experience, of immediacy, on the basis of which they then reconstruct the subjective domain. The reconstruction of lived experience therefore amounts to the grasping of immediate experience through the mediation of theory. As the determination of the subject fol- lows upon the distinction of its immediate experiences—according to (scientific)
10 The latest example of this mode of operating in psychotherapy is Guidano’s techno-constructivism, which translates Natorp’s reflections into a technical instrument, the “moviola” method. In the light of the orienting principles adopted in order to access the past, the “application” of this method to the flowing of memories slows down the sequences of images, making it possible to study them and bring them into focus through individual frames, as though lived experience were present and available to one’s consciousness.
11 In mathematical analysis, the integral is an operator which, in the case of a single-variable function, associates the function with the area bounded by its graph within a given interval (a, b) in the domain.
4.11 The Primacy of Theory in Constructivist Psychotherapy
laws—the reconstruction itself is subject to the supremacy of theory. But what attests to the fact that the reconstructed consciousness matches that of the lived experience prior to the analysis? The only certain thing is that the theoretical access structurally rules out all possibilities of grasping experience if not through its objec- tivization, de facto allowing the reconstruction to access exclusively the logical, objectifying sphere. The reconstruction thus determines the modelization of the knowing subject—for instance, according to a hierarchy of constructs, as in Kelly;
a system of knowledge, as in von Glasersfeld; or an organization of personal mean- ing, as in Guidano. The method of reconstruction leads from the unity of the multi- plicity of facts, and hence the objective domain (e.g., the facts pertaining to the relationship analyzed during therapy), to the unity of consciousness (the system of knowledge which has generated it). The logic of knowledge is thus what grounds psychology. On these bases, all the various currents of constructivism, bar none, have made epistemology the foundation of psychology, as Kelly’s metaphor of man as scientist emphasizes.
Consequently, attaining a greater, more abstract, or indeed inexhaustible knowledge of one’s own cognitive processes has become the chief aim of treatment.
Both empiricist and transcendental psychology, but also descriptive and analytical psychology and phenomenological-eidetic psychology, while being based on distinctive modes of grasping the immediate data of experience and hence on differ- ent ways of approaching the study of the subject, ultimately all grasp the latter as a nobody, to use Ricoeur’s wonderful expression: for they all grasp the subject accord- ing to a theoretical configuration which inevitably rules out the prereflective domain of life. So the forms of therapy deriving from these psychologies also adopt the underlying view of subjectivity that guides them and which justifies and orients their practice. In other words, the therapist’s modelization of the patient’s mode of being according to the guidelines of a general subjectivity—articulated in different ways according to one’s epistemological perspective—shapes the practice of heal- ing and hence the delineation of the patient’s experiences.
From the patient’s point of view, then, to undergo treatment is to reorder one’s experience according to impersonal guiding principles and to upgrade one’s system of functioning according to the more effective template provided by the therapist.
This is how lived experience becomes theoretically warped in psychotherapy.
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