Dialogue and Paradox, a Discussion (Part One)

Lynne Jacobs, Ph. D.
Transcript of lecture-discussion at the Portland Gestalt Therapy Training Institute, on March 7, 1998.

Lynne: I'll start by explaining some core notions about the I-Thou relationship in Gestalt therapy, and then I want to show how it's not just that relating with a dialogic attitude toward our patients is a moral good-you know, a sweet altruistic value-it also matches other basic concepts in Gestalt therapy: contact in process, field theory, paradoxical theory of change, and our phenomenological approach, (that is) awareness and phenomenology. They're all of a piece, and the dialogical approach, dialogical therapeutic relationship, embodies all those things, so it is also a really good theoretical match with other concepts in Gestalt therapy.

That's just one of the amazing things about Gestalt therapy as a theory - how the original thinkers in it created a new gestalt by pulling from what was in the zeitgeist of the day. They made this new gestalt called Gestalt therapy, and they were just elegant at feeling their way through what in current thinking (at the time) could be taken and modified to form the coherent whole that Gestalt therapy is.

The meaningfulness to me, and to other Gestalt therapists, of Buber's philosophy of dialogue is that Buber places a specific form of contact at the center of human being. We're a humanistic therapy. For Buber, he was asking the question all the time, "What is it that makes a human being?" Which is sort of the question, the way we psychologists would dry it out and ask, "What is self? How does one's self develop?" But I like Buber's question better, " What is a human being?" What is it that is uniquely human in human beings? His answer is, human being-ness is found in relation. Now, this is no longer hot news! All good therapies are moving in the direction of acknowledging that the human psyche, if you will, is born and developed in relation. There is no "human" without relation.

Buber didn't have the advantage of being part of that zeitgeist; he was drawing on Jewish tradition which had been fundamentally relational all along.

I rode up on the plane last night and sitting next to me was a woman who started to have a conversation with the woman who was sitting next to her about the graduate class she was teaching. She was struggling in this class, because of the men (there were seven men and ten women in the class); she found herself engaging constantly with the men in the class because they were the ones who were actively engaging with her in what she was teaching. And the women were more passive, and the professor was trying to figure out how to change that class dynamic. So I couldn't resist asking what this was all about, and it turned out that this was a class on "Feminism and Theology." She teaches something called "process theology." One of the issues in process theology is a commentary, an approach to Christian theology which, among other things, tries to make God a non-represented god. If you represent God, you end up with a white male, and so one of the things that process theology tries to do, because of the subtle, but profound psychological consequences of having a white male god on women and minorities, is to make God a process rather than a representation. That's where this idea of Jewish tradition vs Christian tradition came up. So she's my authority on the subject, and she agrees with what I'm about to say...(laughter)

Maya: (laughing) That's a long way to pack yourself up, Lynne!!

Lynne: So this thing is that Jewish thinking, Jewish religious thinking, has always involved engagement in dialogue. The Torah involves statements from God and commentary from (I think they're called) prophets (but I'm not sure). So when you study the Torah, you study multiple interpretations of what God might have meant. So that there is always dialogue...am I getting this wrong?

Student: I think it's the Talmud.

Lynne: I'm sorry, the Talmud. Right. You can tell how much I know about religions. (Laughter) And these commentaries occur at different points in history, so the commentaries are always historically based as well, which means that they are always a part of an evolving process, and they're always in dialogue.

Maya: And they always reflect the zeitgeist of the time.

Lynne: Right. Or an attempt to critique the zeitgeist, and you cannot do that without representing the zeitgeist, because you are in what you're critiquing. And that is the tradition that Buber comes from, the tradition of having a dialogue. Also in Jewish tradition, whenever you engage in dialogue with another human being, you are engaging in dialogue with God. Now, I'm saying this in a very simplistic way, but that's part of what Buber's ideas on dialogue are built on, and Buber was an Hasidic scholar. So, his Jewish roots are part of the context of understanding him. I think his ideas can be applied way beyond Judaism, which you can tell, because I'm not Jewish and love his ideas.

So, he comes from this tradition where knowledge through discourse is, essentially, godly, is exalted, but it is also the pathway to realizing your human being-ness. So he puts dialogue at the ontological center of life, meaning that you cannot come into being except through dialogue. I'm really underscoring this, because I'm about to tell you about his two ways of conceiving dialogue, or his two ways of conceiving self in relation, and they're not nearly as important as this fundamental thing, which is that there is no self without other. Self comes into being with other. The mind is formed and developed in relation.

This may be instinctive to you. My context is I also talk about this with psychoanalysts, and to psychoanalysts this is a harder concept to grasp. They're used to thinking of the mind has having formed and developed in response to biology alone and all of the interactions that an infant and a toddler and a young adult may have don't do much really to shape the mind. We've always had a much more interactional understanding of these things.

So anyway, Buber has two notions about kinds of relatedness, and they're both about the process of relating, and that's one of the reasons it's so compatible with Gestalt therapy. One kind of relating he calls "I-It;" another kind of relating he calls "I-Thou." Is there anyone who's never heard those words before?

In the process of I-It relating there is a subject/object split. Some of us remember Descartes from high school & college philosophy classes-a split between subject and object. We are also centered in time; we have an awareness of time. We use judgment. We use orientation. We think. We reflect upon. We can say what we're feeling. In other words, it's the means of relating, the means of interacting with the world that we live in 99 per cent of the time. And, without "It" one cannot live; that's a famous Buber saying. It's the mode that you're in right now, and it's the mode that I'm in right now. Then, there's this other mode called "I-Thou," where Buber would say, "but without Thou, without being able to say, `Thou' to another, one is not fully human." So, this is where he gets into what it is that makes a human being. And it's not our skills at It-realm relating, the process of relating with thought, and awareness of a separate subject and a separate object. It is the process of relating I-Thou, which is, among other things, one of the qualities that adheres in the I-Thou moment of relatedness and is something he calls confirmation. In confirmation, the heavenly bread of self being (as Buber might say) is passed from one to another. He talks about all of us longing for a "Yes!" coming from somebody else. The "Yes, you are recognizable and you exist." In the moment of I-Thou the confirmation of your existence as a unique subject occurs. It's a moment that is not necessarily a sweet moment; for that kind of confirmation can come in a heated argument. It's the recognition that is the confirmation - recognition, and it's a moment where you recognize the other, and in a mutual I-Thou moment are recognized by the other. Where your singular being is grasped, is recognized, accepted for what it is without for that moment any wish to change the other. So, it's quite a powerful moment, or can be quite powerful.

What are the qualities that could give rise to this moment, this possibility of what we call an I-Thou moment? And by the way, these moments are self limited; you cannot live in I-Thou. Our self-reflective consciousness won't allow it. Which is also one of the things that is said about human beings, that they have the capacity for self-reflective consciousness, which is a capacity we use in the I-It mode. Buber sort of neglected that part, but in a moment of I-Thou, in the experience, these things (immediacy, directness, presence, and mutuality) come into view.

This is so much the focus of our work in Gestalt therapy; in the immediacy it is so much in the here-and-now, and it's also the unmediated-ness; there is in this moment no mediation by thought, by agenda - no aim. In the moment of an I-Thou meeting there is no aim. The meeting is complete in and of itself.

Maya: One of the ways I think about that is of a surrender to the moment.

Lynne: Yes.

Maya: It's not confluence; it's surrendering to the moment, momentarily.

Lynne: Yeah. It's surrender to the moment, because you have confidence in an ongoing process, an ongoing mutual and self-regulatory process, so that you don't have to think about where you're headed in the next moment. And that's part of what allows the surrender again.

Student: Then, in a popular way of talking, a dialogical moment, or a dialogical relationship, wouldn't be an "intervention."

Lynne: Absolutely not! I don't think you can aim at I-Thou moments. I'm going to differentiate in a few minutes between a momentary I-Thou, which is what Buber wrote about, and a process of being in a dialogical relationship where that issue will be clarified.

Student: Would you say, then, why Buber says that moment can't last? You made mention of that; in reality that's obviously true, but why is it that it can't last?

Lynne: It is because of self-reflective consciousness that it can't last.

Student: You mean because that would just kick in?

Lynne: Right. Right. That's what he would say (he wouldn't know what those words were, but yes)...

Student: Does that suggest that one possibility is to try to suspend for longer so that you can try to remain in that moment?

Lynne: No. Because once you're trying anything, you're already out of the moment. It's an existential occurrence, and it's cool when it happens, and it's over when it's over!

Student: So the confidence exists in the moment so you don't have to worry about where you're going, per our discussion last night about support, so the support would be fostering the confidence in the moment.

Lynne: Right, right. People who have poor self support for contacting, or for identifying with their own ongoing, moment by moment experience, will be estranged from the possibility of I-Thou. And that's one way to think about why people come for therapy - because their capacity for dialogue has been impaired. We all seek intimate relatedness, and that has been impaired, and we feel estranged from, or cut off from what Buber would call the latent I-Thou.

If you all take a moment and just reflect on certain experiences you've had - with a tree, with a piece of art, with an animal, with another human being -where in that particular moment, when you reflect back on the moment you realize that it was a moment that was eternal, in the sense that it was timeless. There was no sense of time, and although paradoxically there was no sense of a separate self and a separate other, you also look back on that moment as a moment when you felt more fully YOU than the moment in which you're now reflecting back on it. And you, on reflecting back, realize that you weren't aiming at anything in this very brief moment that you're reflecting back on because it was so cool you wish you could go back and get it. You weren't aiming at anything. You weren't pretending anything. You weren't defending anything. You were lost to the moment, but more like surrendered to the moment, and your attention, paradoxically, although you felt yourself on reflection most fully you, was not on you. You were fully absorbed with that with which you were engaged.

Maya: I'm thinking of a moment when my granddaughter came to visit, and walking into the house and running toward me, and my dropping to my knees, and our meeting. And my experience of that meeting, upon reflection, is that in that moment I knew God. It was just the joy of meeting.

Lynne: One of the keys in this that I want to underline is that where you are absorbed is over there. You are, in a sense, at one with the object of your attention. It's sort of a tricky way of talking about it, but it just has to do with the fact that that's entirely where your attention is, without you being thoughtful about where your attention is. The moment may last a split second; it may last a little longer, but it's not going to last much longer than a split second.

And if you aim at it, you can't get there. It happens by what Buber calls "grace," and what I prefer to think of as surrender to existential trust. Since one of the ways that the ground for an I-Thou moment is prepared is that you're willing to accept what you find in that which engages you, without judgment, without a need to change what you find, if you're aiming at I-Thou, you're trying to change what you're reaching for, so you can't aim and lay the ground for I-Thou at the same time. You can't do it, but you can do therapy with someone, never have an I-Thou moment, and consider it a dialogical therapy. It isn't the moment that matters, and I want to underscore this; don't go back to your training groups and ask, "Was this an I-Thou moment, was that an I-Thou moment?" Irrelevant! The question to ask is, "What in how I'm working would prevent the emergence of an I-Thou moment if it should be a potential?" What in how I'm doing gets in the way of genuine dialogue?

Now, here's the thing: genuine dialogue is a rubric, and there are two subsets to the rubric, the I-Thou relating and the I-It relating. Genuine dialogue accomplishes both of those modes. What brings people into therapy is not that they don't have those small I-Thou moments, but that even their I-It relating doesn't have in it the possibility for I-Thou to ever emerge. Neurosis can be understood, from a dialogical perspective, as an estrangement between the realms of I-It and I-Thou. See, one of the ways to think about I-Thou is that it is a latent, or background possibility; it's really, I think, a latent process that occasionally emerges in this moment, but it's a latent possibility unless your I-It way of being has so much defensiveness, or self-protectiveness around it that the chance of non-judgmental acceptance of yourself and others, and the chance of surrender to a moment where you can't predict the outcome, is so far removed that you feel increasingly deadened and inhuman (because you're cut off, then, from I-Thou as a possibility).

Student: So, according to Buber, in what you just said, if you're cut off from the possibility of the I-Thou moment, then you are cut off from your humanity.

Lynne: That's correct.

Maya: There's another quality here that I would like to interject, which is that a dialogic psychotherapy includes meeting the client where they are, not asking them to move into "the moment." Rather, a dialogic psychotherapy can be about meeting in an I-It modality.

Lynne: Right. In fact, a lot of your meeting will be (I-It), but here's the thing about the dialogical attitude: Buber was describing this thing as a two-person process; it's a mutuality. For him, he was most interested in this moment of full mutuality, meaning both parties to this are absorbed in each other, as I was describing before, but then he said teachers, therapists, other people who want to help in the development of the humanity of another do something he would call, "one sided." I'm going to describe some qualities of this in a minute that will help make sense to you, but in the one-sidedness of it one person in this relationship assumes the dialogic attitude, and for it to be dialogical in his (Buber's) sense, you have to not require it of the other person. And that's sort of a paradoxic therapy here - one of the paradoxes in therapy: I meet my patient with a dialogical attitude, which by its nature lays the ground for the possibility of I-Thou without ever aiming at I-Thou. I'm aiming at meeting the patient when I'm in I-It mode of this dialogical relationship. There may be times when my aim is surrender, and it's at those times when the possibility of I-Thou can happen, but whether or not it happens is not so nearly as important as my relating in ways that honors the patient. That's my way of saying, "Thou," to the patient, whether or not there is ever an I-Thou moment.

Student: I want to clarify. Are you saying that this is an I-Thou process or attitude that fosters a potential for an I-Thou moment?

Lynne: I would say it a little differently, but you're very close.

Student: Okay, I want to clarify also, how is this different from I-It? I hear you saying that we operate in an I-It mode, but if I am approaching my interaction with my client, it seems that there is also the possibility in which I can, in what I used to think of as I-It, that I can really operate in the sense of roles. I'm a therapist; you're a client; this is the thing that we do here today from this hour to that hour; I dispense so many interventions and it's supposed to result in these conclusions, you know. That seems to be very sterile...

Lynne: And to me that's estranged I-It. You know this may get more clear when I talk about the qualities of a dialogic attitude, but it's true that most of our relating to each other is going to be in I-It mode, but there's a difference between I-It that stands on the ground of the dialogic attitude and I-It which is more technical. Like assessing somebody, deciding what interventions they need, then doing those interventions and watching the results is a very technical mode, and I would say that's a mode that's divorced from the dialogical attitude. I'm going to describe the dialogical attitude, and you're going to begin to see, I think, how you can have an I-It way of relating for the moment but that it's standing on the ground of the dialogic, or the I-Thou attitude, and it's that ground which does lay the possibility for I-Thou moments, if such a thing is going to happen (but that's not what's vitally important about it). What is vitally important is that the patient is being apprehended in their humanity, and that coming to their humanity will infuse their daily living with more of the dialogic attitude. If they take to this; if they like it, that's where they'll go with it and then that lack of estrangement in the dialogic attitude will enrich their life, whether or not they ever have one of those moments. But they're likely to have one of those moments, if not in therapy, then outside of therapy.

Student: So, would a dialogical relationship, as you hear the term, would that be essentially one in which people are approaching each other with a dialogic attitude?

Lynne: Yes.

Maya: It would not be approaching each other. In other words again, and especially in psychotherapy, the therapist's position and attitude is dialogic; the client we don't know.

Lynne: Well in the one-sided relationships that's right, but I think you were asking more generally - in general, when you...or were you asking about therapy, because if you were asking about therapy, Maya's point is very well taken?

Student: I was trying to clarify what I have commonly heard to be the dialogical relationship, as one of the tenets of Gestalt therapy. What is that?

Lynne: Okay. That's what I'm going to describe now, and then I think these pieces will come together. There are certain disciplines that I, as a therapist, bring to the dialogical relationship in psychotherapy. I bring a dialogical attitude, and I do that through these disciplines, (points to written down visual aids), these things, and I'm going to describe them. See this is the moment, and these are process qualities that you bring from moment to moment. This is the discipline that you bring, and it's what I call, then, the dialogical attitude (and, by the way, I made that up. You'll see that in our book as if it's a real thing, but we made it up).

Student: How does anything get to be a real thing? (laughter)

Another Student: And what does "real thing" mean? (more laughter)

Continue to Dialogue and Paradox (Part Two)

© 2005 Pacific Gestalt Institute