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Modified version of a paper presented at the University of East Anglia Philosophy Society, October 1998.
Psychotherapy, philosophical privacy and knowing what we feel
ABSTRACT This paper addresses a tension between two otherwise appealing
lines of thought. The first line of thought is that in most schools of psychotherapy
it is crucially important that the client attend to their own felt experiencing, with a
view to articulating it accurately. It is natural to picture this ‘looking inside’ at
one’s own experiencing as an essentially private activity concerning which the
client has privileged access. The client as it were inspects what is taking place on
their ‘inner screen’. The second line of thought, deriving from Wittgenstein, is that
what the psychotherapy client is doing cannot be essentially private, since there
could then be no criteria for deciding whether the feelings thus articulated were
correctly articulated. It is argued that the resolution of this tension is to be found
in thinking about the psychotherapeutic process in a way that does not become
ensnared by the picture of the ‘inner screen’, while retaining the crucial reference
to immediate experiencing. [1]
In many schools of psychotherapy there is a strong emphasis on the importance
of giving attention to what we feel, of attending to our immediate felt experience.
In the client-centred tradition of psychotherapy [2] - the tradition with which I am
most familiar - it is put like this: much psychological disturbance arises from a
lack of congruence between the way we feel and the way we think we feel. What
we feel, our actual experience, may for various reasons be unacceptable to us,
and so we develop a view of ourself, a ‘self-concept’ that is more acceptable, but
does not correspond accurately with what our experience really is. The process
of psychotherapy is then seen as a process in which the self-concept changes so
as to reflect more accurately the person’s experience. It is, in a sense, a process
of acquiring self-knowledge, a process in which one is freed from illusory
perceptions of oneself. In the psycho-analytic approach something similar is
expressed in different terms. Freud said that his aim was ‘to make the
unconscious conscious’, but insisted that a merely intellectual formulation of
previously unconscious contents was of little value. One has to ‘work through’
and fully experience those contents before their conceptualisation in
psychodynamic terms will be therapeutic. It is the raw experiencing that has to be
related to its conceptual articulation.
If these ideas are roughly correct then the idea of one’s concept of oneself being
out of step with one’s actual experience is fundamentally important to
psychotherapy [3]. It-seems to follow that in order to be clear about what is going
on in psychotherapy we need to be clear about the relationship between our
experience and our conceptual formulation of our experience, between, for
instance, this vague feeling of anxiety I have now and its accurate articulation. In
therapy, or in everyday life, we may pause to look at a feeling like this, this sense
of being a bit anxious, or sort-of-guilty, or kind-of-excited, and wonder what is
going on. Or we may say to ourself, “This situation gives me a strange feeling. I
don’t quite know what I’m feeling about this”. And then we may keep our
attention on the feeling, stay with it for a while, and see what comes to mind.
Perhaps we try various possibilities: “It feels like it has something to do with how
people see me, its almost as if I’m feeling ashamed of myself. Yes, that’s more
like it. Feeling a bit ashamed.”
What I am concerned with in this paper is how we are to think about this matter of
our looking at our feelings and trying to identify or articulate them. In practice it is
something that people quite commonly do, but like many common things it can
become very puzzling once we reflect on it more deeply. The central puzzle I
want to work with is how to reconcile the existence of introspective knowledge of
our feelings, with certain philosophical arguments that seem to show that
knowledge is never of something essentially private. Before coming to the
difficulties with the idea that we can know what our feelings are by turning
inwards and looking’ at them, let us first get a fuller sense of how plausible the
idea initially is.
In his Treatise (1, 6), Hume remarks while discussing his inner search for the self:
“When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some
particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain
or pleasure”. This passage is usually quoted in connection with discussions of
the self and personal identity, and the problem of identifying a ‘self’; but the
‘stumbling on feelings’ of heat or pain or hatred is usually passed over as
uncontroversial. It may be dubious whether we can discover a self when we look
within, but it is not at all dubious that we discover the other things which Hume
terms ‘impressions’. For Hume, as for Descartes, our ‘impressions’ are clearly
there, even if nothing else is.
Later writers have talked of what Hume calls ‘impressions’ in terms of ‘sense
data’, or the ‘phenomenal field’, or ‘the given in experience’, or just ‘our
experiencing’, ‘our subjective awareness’. Eugene Gendlin, a psychotherapist
who is also a philosopher, writes: “Experiencing refers to the directly given
stream of feelings. An individual may refer to it in his own phenomenal field” [41].
But this talk of ‘the phenomenal field’ or ‘the directly given stream of feelings’ is a
rather ineffective gesturing at something that somehow cannot be adequately
expressed. The trouble is that what we are gesturing at is not something that can
be gestured at: it is not in the public world at ail; it is our experience of the world,
We can perhaps indicate what we mean only by examples, and I will give just one
more of these before trying to elucidate the problem with which we are beginning
to tangle. I have abbreviated the example from Gendlin’s book Focusing [15]. It
involves, in part, a tape recording of an actual therapy session with a client who is
referred to as ‘Evelyn’.
‘Looking within’
Evelyn believes that going to college would be a good thing to do, but, she
remarks in a therapy session, she “just doesn’t want to”. She pauses and
then says “The thing is, I’d have to give up everything else, and get a full-
time job to pay for it, and - like, I’d never have time just to live. Everything
would be tense and - “ She interrupts herself. She knows she is just
talking around the problem, repeating familiar reasons that have long been
in her head. It is time to be silent to focus, and wait quietly to see what
comes.
She sighs, and there is a long silence. Finally she says, “Well, all
that about making a living and not having time, that isn’t what it’s about,
not really. “ She starts to cry. “It’s that it takes such a lot of faith, or
something, to believe I could take that part of me seriously - I mean the
thinking part, you know? The brain part, the creative... I want to take this
thinking part of me seriously.... “ There is another pause... “Well it isn’tt
exactly that. I mean about taking this part seriously. I could do it, but the
thing is, school is just what’s in the way of doing it. School would prevent
me from doing it.... I need thinking people to tell me ‘Yes, you’re okay, you
can think’. But teachers never do that. Nobody ever wanted this part of
me at all. ...It was like I shouldn’t come out. That’s what going to school
feels like. It’s that feeling of - you know - not letting myself out’. She
pauses and cries. Then something shifts again: “It’s not really what the
teachers think. It’s - well, this unsureness is in me, this keeping myself
from coming out. That’s me. I mean, I’ll go to college expecting a lot, and
it will be the same as school always was, and I’ll be disappointed and hurt
all over again.... Yeah, that’s what the feeling is now. It’s this feeling of ....
that’s not going to change”. She sighs. She is silent for a time. Then
another shift occurs. “Ah, yeah, it’s - ‘it’s not just that. This thing about
not coming out - it isn’t school, it’s all the time. I’ve felt that way about me
in almost everything. It’s been there so long... “
Another pause. She is listening inside again. Finally she says “Yeah, it’s
like I keep myself inside because - because there is something I have to
not see. If I come out, I’ll see it. Yes, that’s right”. She cries for a long
time. “I don’t know what it is, but there is something I mustn’t see, and if I
come out I’ll see it. No….people will see it and I will see it. So I have to
not see anything or hear anything... I have to stay confused and not
see....something. And I have not to come out so people won’t see it...”
Gendlin comments at this point: “There is a long silence as she focuses on the
felt sense of that something. For a long time there is only silence on the tape.
Some unknown something that she mustn’t show people has made her keep
herself locked inside.....She cries again “Something is wrong with me! That’s it -
and people will see it if I come out..... That’s what it’s all about... it’s an old feeling
way down there, that something’s terribly wrong with me.”
What is Evelyn doing in this session? It seems natural to say that she is looking
within’ or, as Gendlin puts it she is ‘listening inside’. As she does so her
experience changes. She becomes aware that what she is feeling is not quite
what she thought it was. Initially, she thinks that she is feeling concerned about
not having time to herself, but then realises that it’s not that. Later she thinks that
the feeling she has is a feeling about school, but then realises it is a much more
general feeling than that. Then she becomes aware that she is filing that there
is something that she, and others, must not see. She doesn’t know what the
‘something’ is but she can feel that there is a something. And then the
‘something’ begins to acquire a form - it is the feeling that there is something
terribly wrong with her. That is the feeling that is preventing her from going to
college: if she did, the ‘something terribly wrong’ would be revealed.
The changes going on Evelyn are in some sense ‘private’. We only know that
these events have taken place because she has spoken about them. That is
how we know about her feelings. But how does she know? It might be said that
that question makes no sense: she doesn’t know about her feelings, she has
them. And yet, it does seem to make sense to speak of knowledge here. Initially
Evelyn did not know what her feeling was about going to college. She thought
she knew (she thought ‘it was fear that college would leave no time for herself),
but she was wrong about this. That was how it seemed at the start, but now she
realises that her feelings are to do with not wanting to be seen as having
something wrong with her. But if that is the right way to put it, we are
distinguishing between how her feelings seemed and what they really are, and
where that distinction can be made we can also distinguish between what she
now knows about her feelings and what, initially, she only thought she knew. So
talk of knowledge really is in place here.
These last remarks are really just an elaboration of what, since Freud at least,
has become a commonplace: that we can misidentify our own feelings. We can
be angry or jealous without knowing we are angry or jealous, and we can think
that we are feeling irritable when realty we are feeling resentful. It is because we
can be wrong that it makes sense to talk about being right in connection with our
feelings, and where we can talk in terms of getting things right or wrong there is a
place for talk of knowledge and illusion.
It also seems plausible to say that Evelyn comes to know more about her feelings
through ‘looking within’ or listening inside’, through what has often been called
‘introspection’. This ‘looking within’, or ‘staying with one’s immediate experience’
is a very common aspect of psychotherapy, although it has for a long time been
disparaged as a method of investigation in experimental psychology. I will come
to the difficulties with the notion shortly, but first would like to make it as plausible
as possible that there is such a thing as introspection. Consider as an example a
situation where I feel anxious. I feel this anxiety inside me, and if I give some
attention to it I may find that the feeling is localised, perhaps mainly in my chest or
stomach. ‘Where do you feel this?’ is a quite common question in some schools
of psychotherapy, and clients can often answer such questions without any great
trouble. When focusing on the anxiety I am focusing in my body, experiencing
this feeling in my chest or stomach. It is right there, and if I stay with it a bit I may
find that is has more structure than was at first apparent. It is not just anxiety, but
a sort of dread or foreboding. Here am giving my attention to the feeling, and
trying to find words or phrases that will articulate it better. Characteristically,
when people find a word or phrase which fits, they experience a certain sense of
relief. ‘Yes, that’s what it is!’ Sometimes we have feelings that are very hard to
identify or articulate. We may meet a new person and there is something about
them that feels a bit odd. What is this funny feeling I get when I see so-and-so?
It’s not fear, and it’s not exactly suspicion; but it is a very definite uneasy sort<»f
feeling. I may want to have a closer look at this feeling. It is definitely there; I feel
it in myself, perhaps not very specifically localised, but still a definite sense of
almost physical unease. If I stay with it something may emerge - yes - I know
what it is - he makes me feel sort of clumsy, not very ‘together’. It is a ‘being
made to feel clumsy’ sort of feeling.
What I want to draw from these examples is that we can be aware of feelings
within ourselves, yet not, initially, be able to articulate or identify them. But
through staying with them, through giving them our sustained attention, we may
come to know what they are. To psychotherapists as well as to many other
people all this may seem entirely uncontroversial, but there are deep problems
lurking, to which I now turn.
Identifying feelings
The notion which I want especially to examine is that of ‘identifying something’.
We are especially interested in the matter of identifying feelings, but it will be
helpful to look at what is involved in identifying things in general. I will take a very
ordinary sort of example, that of identifying birds, in order to get dearer about
what is involved in identifying things generally.
Identifying something, whether a bird or a feeling, involves being right about what
it is. Or at least getting it right is required for identifying the thing correctly.
Sometimes we identify a bird incorrectly - we misidentify it; that is the case
where we get it wrong. It seems clear that there can be no place for talk of
identifying things in situations where there cannot be talk of getting it right or
wrong. The concept of identification brings with it the notion of some kind of
standard of correctness in terms of which it can be decided whether a claimed
identification is correct or not.
It will be important for my argument to note that no claim to have identified
something by itself constitutes identification, if I say the bird is a kestrel that does
not guarantee it is a kestrel, even if I know a lot about birds and I see this one in
good conditions of visibility. In making identificatory claims we can always be
wrong, sometimes for reasons that we had never even contemplated. For
example, you insist that it it looked just like a kestrel. Yes, but what you didn’t
know is that this morning a kwango bird escaped from a traveling aviary, and
kwangos, which you have never even heard of, look just like kestrels. You can
only tell the difference by fine measurements of wing and beak size (and of
course from the fact that they mate with other kwangos and not with kestrels).
The world can always come up with something quite unexpected that can
undermine our confident claim to have identified an object.
Now the same applies to feelings. I may feel perturbed, but deny that what I feel
is jealousy. For all that, it may be jealousy, and I may later come to acknowledge
this fact. We can be wrong about what our experiences are just as we can be
wrong about what kind of bird this is. In the case of some experiences it has of
course often been denied that we can be wrong. It has often been said that while
it makes sense to doubt whether this pillar box is red, it makes no sense to doubt
that it looks red to me now. People who argue this way insist that if I say it looks
red to me, then it does look red to me. But this goes against the thesis that no
identificatory claim by itself constitutes identification. This thesis was meant to
be a completely general one, and indeed I think that we can be wrong about what
colour a thing looks to us.
How so? Well, following a line of thought in Austin [6] there are two ways it can
happen, two ways of being wrong about how something looked to me. One is
the sort of case where I haven’t given enough attention to how it looked. In the
bird case I say the bird looked like a kestrel to me, but the bird expert says “Oh
come on, take another look, does it really look like a kestrel to you?” and after
another closer look I say sheepishly “No, not really - I wasn’t really looking at it
properly - no, it doesn’t look like a kestrel at all”. The other kind of case, the
other kind of way of being wrong about how it looks to me, is that where I haven’t
an adequate grasp of what counts as a thing of this kind. In the bird case I might
confidently assert that this bird looks to me like a kestrel, but then it turns out that
I don’t have a clear idea of what kestrels are; perhaps I think that all birds that
hover like that are kestrels. When I find out more about birds I come to realise
that it didn’t look to me like a kestrel: nothing at that stage could have looked to
me like a kestrel, for at that stage I didn’t really know what kestrels are. I used
the word quite ignorantly.
For convenience, let me refer to these two ways of being wrong about it’s looking
like a kestrel as involving either (a) a defect of experiential view, or (b) a defect of
conceptual grasp. Under ‘defect of view’ I will include not only cases where I
didn’t give enough attention to what I was leaking at but also all those other sorts
of possible defects involving tricks of the light, hallucinations and so on. In all
these cases I go wrong because of some sort of trouble with my experiencing, not
with my understanding. By contrast, by ‘defect of conceptual grasp’ I will mean the
kind of case where I misidentify something because I don’t have sufficient grasp
of what it is for something to be a thing of that kind.
Making use of this terminology, we can now say that we can be wrong about what
colour something looks to us in both these ways. I can be wrong about whether
the colour looked red to me because my view is inadequate. Possibilities such as
hallucination do not apply here of course, but lack of attention is a possibility, just
as in the kestrel case. For when I say it looked red to me, it is not inconceivable
that someone might respond with “Oh come on, it can’t have. Look again”. And
again I may concede that, no, it doesn’t really look red, its much more a sort of
brown. I did for a moment really think it looked red, but I wasn’t paying enough
attention.
But there is also the case where the reason for my misidentification is a defect
of grasp. I say confidently that it looks turquoise to me, but then it transpires that
I don’t have a good grasp of what counts as turquoise - in lots of cases it turns
Out that I identify things as turquoise which everyone else agrees are green. I
have somehow mislearned the concept.
So it seems that even in cases such as what colour a thing looks to us, we can
be wrong. These cases are not after all counterexamples to the general thesis
that in any case of identification we can turn out to be wrong. The general thesis
can stand, with its specific implication that we can be wrong about our own
feelings.
The ‘inner screen’ picture
Now what is the problem with this? It is that we seem to have established two
incompatible points. One is that we can identify our feelings by introspection, and
the other is that no identificatory claim by itself constitutes an identification. Why
are these incompatible? Because in introspection it seems that there is no
distinction to be made between identificatory claim and identification. I look within
and focus my attention on a feeling, and it becomes clear to me that this feeling is
dread. I say it is dread, but because it is an introspectively observed feeling,
something within me, something on my ‘inner screen’ as it were, there seems no
way anyone could set me right were I to be wrong. Here it seems that what I say
goes. But if that is how it is, then talk of my being right or wrong doesn’t apply,
and if these notions don’t apply then what I am doing doesn’t count as identifying
anything.
It may be objected that the possibility of my being wrong, which we need for my
assertion to count as an identification, does not necessarily involve anyone else
being able to correct me. No one else can see what is on my ‘inner screen’, but
can’t I find out myself that I have made a mistake? Certainly I can. So far as
mistakes involving ‘view’ are concerned I may realise that I haven’t been looking
very closely at the feeling. I thought it was jealousy, but now that I stay with it a
bit more I see that it is envy. Regarding mistakes of ‘grasp’, I may discover in
talking with other people that although I thought I knew what irony was I now
realise that I have been mixing it up with sarcasm, so that when, the other day, I
thought I had identified an ironic attitude in myself, I now see that it was a
sarcastic attitude. As with birds and colours, both errors of ‘grasp’ and errors of
seem quite possible in connection with our own feelings.
So I can go wrong, but how do I come to realise this? The cases where I go
wrong because of inadequate grasp clearly have to be corrected in the
interpersonal world. I can’t sort out all by myself whether I have an adequate
grasp of the notion of irony. I have to get a feel for this concept through
discussions with others, or reading books, and comparing what I would say in
certain situations with what others would say. It is only by such means I can
reach a point where I can be reasonably sure that I have an adequate grasp of a
concept. However, I then apply the concept to my own inner experience,
and pay sufficient attention to that experience, doesn’t that ensure that I have
made a correct identification? If I know, for example, what shame is, and I look
carefully at the feeling I have, and I say its shame, then it is, isn’t it? I could have
been wrong, but in fact I’m not. Isn’t it enough then, for me to be able to identify
my own feelings, that I have an interpersonally-secured grasp of the relevant
feeling-concept? If I have that, and give the feeling my full attention, then surely
the feeling is what I say it is.
I want to argue that this won’t do. It still contravenes the principle that an
identificatory claim does not by itself constitute an identification. For what we are
now saying is that in certain circumstances, namely those of adequate ‘grasp’ and
‘view’, the claim does constitute an identification. And in a sense that is true, but
it is a tautology. If ‘grasp’ and ‘view’ are adequate then the identificatory claim
will be correct, but that just explicates what ‘adequate’ means here. It doesn’t
enable us to say that given what we know of the person’s conceptual grasp, and
given what we know of his experiential view, there is no longer any possibility that
he could be wrong. It works the other way round: if he turns out to be wrong
then we know there was some flaw in either his ‘grasp’ or his ‘view’ and we need
to look into what has gone wrong.
This may be clearer if we examine the same line of argument in the bird
identification case. If someone has an adequate grasp of what kestrels are, and
has an adequate view of a bird which is a kestrel, then, tautologically, the person
will identify the bird as a kestrel. But it does not follow that someone who on all
the available evidence has an adequate grasp and view will necessarily turn out
to be right. Consider a person who has spent all their life bird-watching and seen
thousands of kestrels; suppose that the bird in question is seen in good light, and
close up. It still doesn’t follow that they will make a correct identification.
Something quite unexpected may go wrong either in connection with grasp or
view. Regarding grasp, there is the kwango-bird kind of possibility; regarding
view who knows what post-hypnotic suggestions or unusual neurophysiological
events might result in an unconsciously distorted view. All of which is to say
again that we can always be wrong; but the question now is how we deal with
such cases of being wrong. The competent, well-placed bird watcher says its a
kestrel, but he’s wrong: we know it is a kwango, or we know what the hypnotist
suggested to him last night. To sort out what has gone wrong we have to get
together and look at the whole situation. It is possible that we will discover no
reason for his misidentification of the bird. How he got it wrong may remain a
mystery, but the fact is he did get it wrong. How do we know? Through the
publicly agreed standards for what is to count as a kestrel, and their application to
this particular case. For example we catch the bird and give it a full examination
and that settles the matter. The competent, well-placed bird watcher was wrong.
We understand his amazement, we are baffled by how he, in these
circumstances, could have got it wrong, but there it is. His certainty about it’s
being a kestrel has in the end to give way to what we agree is not a kestrel. The
important point here is that for the game of kestrel-identification to be played,
there has to be not only agreement about what kestrels are (in terms of their
characteristics as set out in the bird books and so on), but also agreement that
particular birds are or are not kestrels. In the problematic cases, there usually is
agreement about what kestrels are, but initially disagreement about whether this
particular bird is a kestrel. And, crucially for my main argument, the matter of
whether this bird is a kestrel can’t be settled by what any one person says, any
more than what kestrels are can be settled by what any one person says. It is
not a purely private, individual matter what a word means, but nor is it a purely
private individual matter whether a word applies in a particular case. This, I
think, is what Wittgenstein meant when he said “If language is to be a means of
communication there must be agreement not only in definitions, but also (queer
as this may sound) in judgements” [7]
Returning now to the identification of one’s own feelings, the question is what the
analogy is for catching the bird and settling the matter of whether it is a kestrel.
Even in what seem the most favourable circumstances, what a person says does
not guarantee that they are right. Even in what seem the most favourable of
circumstances, then, I may judge that I feel ashamed, yet the feeling I have may
not, for all that, be shame. Granted the logic of identificatory claims which we
have explored, I am not the final authority on whether this is shame. Whether it
is shame or not requires some kind of interpersonal confirmation. But that
requirement clashes with the notion that a feeling such as shame is something
private which I, and only I, observe through introspection. It clashes with the
compelling picture we have that we know our own feelings by looking inside, or
listening within’.
Something has to give here, and since it seems to me that the Wittgensteinian
argument about the interpersonal requirements of identificatory claims is
unassailable, it must be that there is something wrong with our picture of
introspection as a kind of looking at a private inner screen’. In the examples I
gave in the first part of this paper the ‘private inner screen’ metaphor seemed a
good one. We turn our attention inwards to this funny feeling we have. We
(metaphorically) look at it. It is there; we are aware of it, and no one else can be
aware of it unless we tell them. Yet if we take this seriously we end up having to
admit that there can no place for talk of being right or wrong about what is on our
screen, and therefore no place for talk about identifying what is on the screen,
and therefore no possibility of identifying our feelings by introspection. Yet our
examples seemed to show that people often do identify their feelings through
introspection. It is a quite common thing to do, and until we think about it
philosophically there seems to be no great problem about it.
In this situation I suggest we take account of another remark of Wittgenstein’s:
“Don’t think, but look!” [8] The trouble may be that we are thinking compulsively
in terms of the picture of the private inner screen. We need to remember that this
is a picture, a metaphor. Can we stop thinking in terms of the picture and took at
what actually happens when people introspect?
Consider again the example where I am feeling anxious. The picture of the ‘inner
screen’ immediately reframes the anxiety as a private inner state to which no-one
but myself has access. But that isn’t actually how it is. Anxiety is often quite
easily observable in another person, and a close observer may not only be aware
that I am anxious, but also, perhaps from the way I hold myself, that the anxiety is
localised mainly in my chest, if we let go of the inner screen picture for a minute
we can see that anxiety is better described as a pattern in someone’s life, an
aspect of the way they are right now, rather than a private inner state. But what
about this feeling I have in my chest? I can feel it. right there, and surely that
feeling is a private inner state? But again, we need to look, rather than think
about what ‘must’ be so. In my anxious state I may or may not be aware of
tensions in my chest; when we are anxious we are not always conscious of what
is going on in our bodies. This tension in the chest is not to be identified with the
anxiety, although through noticing the chest tension I may become aware that I
am anxious. Being anxious is a matter of feeling that I am in some way under
threat, although I may have little or no idea of what the threat involves. What is
happening when I notice my own anxiety is that I am catching a glimpse of a
particular aspect of my life-situation, an aspect of being under threat in some way.
For reasons which no doubt lie partly in biology and the evolution of animal
behaviour feeling threatened is often linked with tensing of muscles, and other
physiological changes of which we (and others) may be more or less aware. But
there is nothing here that is essentially private. It may often be easier for me to
know whether I am anxious than for you to know, but in some situations it can be
the other way round. There are situations where say I am not at all anxious, but
you can see very well that I am. Whether t or you are better placed to tell
whether I am anxious is a context-dependent empirical question, not a
philosophical one.
Much the same applies to examples such as that where Evelyn identifies her
feeling as a feeling of ‘I shouldn’t come out’. By giving attention to one’s body
one can certainly become aware of a body-sense that later may be articulated as,
for example, ‘I shouldn’t come out’ [9]. Such a body-sense is less clear and
distinct than the body-sense of anxiety. But the felt uneasiness of that body-
sense is not essentially more private than the bodily feelings of anxiety. Further,
the articulation of the body-sense which relates to ‘I shouldn’t come out’ is no
more essentially private than the articulation of the other body-sense which
relates to anxiety. The only significant difference between the two cases is that in
the case of anxiety the feeling is being identified as falling under a familiar
concept (that of ‘anxiety’) whereas in Evelyn’s case the feeling has no ready-
made label, and so has to be articulated in a more idiosyncratic way.
Another kind of example that may seem to present difficulties is this. Suppose
Mary is trying to get hold of an obscure feeling which she has. She turns her
attention inward and experiences a ‘flat and hurt’ sort of feeling in the centre of
her body. No words quite seem to fit, but then suddenly she says “The feeling is
I can’t put it into words, but an image comes to me of an empty box. That’s
how it feels”. Now according to my account it should be intelligible to raise the
question of whether that is how it feels. Mary is saying that her life is an empty
box, but according to my account, there should be the possibility that she is
mistaken about this. Yet there seems something absurd about this suggestion. If
she says her life is an empty box, who are we to question her way of putting it?
My reply to this is that the problem we may feel here has nothing to do with
issues of private experience. It is, rather, a problem about metaphorical
language. Where we use metaphors the appropriate kind of assessment of what
has been said is in terms of whether the metaphor is apt or not, rather than
whether it is correct. The aptness of a metaphor seems depend on whether the
use of a phrase or image (for example ‘empty box’) in a new kind of context (for
example, that of Evelyn’s life) draws out, or draws our attention to, a new aspect
of that context [10]. The image of the empty box throws certain aspects of Mary’s
life into a new light We could look at this with Mary, and go on to explore with
her, what is in the metaphor, what this new way of seeing herself amounts to. For
example, certain characteristics of empty boxes (such as that they were once full
but no longer are so, that they are put aside, that they are far less important than
what they contained) may well articulate her feelings about certain aspects of her
life, such as her divorce, and her having lost touch with her children.
What is left of the notion of the ‘inner screen’ here? Perhaps only this: that when
Mary began to attend to the feeling with which she started, she actually did direct
her attention inwards towards an obscure body-sense, which is her body-sense of
her life, her situation. But the appropriate emphasis on ‘her’ in that sentence
should not lead us into talk of ‘essentially private goings-on’, any more than we
should be so led by a remark that Mary is now attending to her make-up, or her
overdraft.
There are many other kinds of example of people looking at their feelings, which
may initially tempt us to think in terms of a private inner screen, but I think that
wherever we look at the examples in detail we will see that the inner screen
picture is both unnecessary and misleading. What we are really doing when we
look at our feelings is attending to our bodily felt awareness of how certain
aspects of our life are going, and in reflecting in this way we need the help of
others to give alternative perspectives, to confirm our own impressions, to
articulate what we obscurely feel. We can’t do it entirely by ourselves.
I think that what I have said in this paper could be seen almost entirely as ‘footnotes to Wittgenstein’. But I think they are worthwhile footnotes, because if there is anywhere a case to be made for the private inner world of Cartesian philosophy, then psychotherapy is the place to look. Conversely, if even the inner world of psychotherapy provides no support for the notion of essentially private mental states, then it is hard to believe that there is anywhere that the notion can survive.
[1] An earlier version of this paper was read at the University of East Anglia
Philosophy Society on 29 October 1998.
[2] Client-centred psychotherapy originated in the work of Cart Rogers, e.g.
ROGERS, C. (1961,) Client-centred Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications
and Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; ROGERS, C. (1961); On Becoming a
Person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Contemporary variants, apart from the
widespread ‘person-centred approach’ (see e.g. MEARNS, D. & THORNE, B.
(1988) Person-Centred Counselling in Action. London: Sage: THORNE, B. &
LAMBERS, E. (1998) Person-Centred Therapy: A European Perspective.
London: Sage) include ‘experiential psychotherapy’ (e.g. MAHRER, A. (1997)
The Complete Guide to Experiential Psychotherapy. New York: Wiley, and the
‘focusing’ approach of Eugene Gendlin. e.g. GENDLIN, E. (1996) Focusing-
oriented Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press.
[3] I say ‘roughly correct’ because talking about ‘congruence’ between
experience and its conceptualisation suggests a picture of how language works
which can be very misleading. The issues here are not central to my main
discussion so, with some trepidation, I will leave them aside.
{4] GENDLIN, E. (1997) Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, p. 239
[5] GENDLIN, E. (1981) Focusing. New York: Bantam.
[6] AUSTIN, J. (1970) Other minds. In Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 76-116.
[7] WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell,
section 242.
[8] Wittgenstein op. cit, section 66.
[9] For a detailed explanation and justification of this assertion see Gendlin op.
cit. (1981,1996,1997).
[10] See the discussion on metaphor in Gendlin op. cit. (1997) pp. 113-117.
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