diapo 1

REVISION OF THE NOTION OF IDENTITY

AND ITS IMPLICATIONS IN PCA CLINICAL PRACTICE Dr. Claudio Rud

Slide 1

If I had the capacity and the courage to do it, I would give this lecture with the aesthetic of poetry, because poetry always works the miracle of putting into words what cannot be said in words, and what I come to share with you today, is about that.

I have tried to replace the use of images and metaphors, which is a habitual attribute of poetry, by Power Point slides, with desire to illustrate some passagesof my lecture as if they were the images that accompany a book, andI must confess that I really had a wonderful time preparing them. I havent included schemes; I wouldnt know how to do it, because what I try to express today escapes any scheme, except for the sequence of my conference, with the intention to make it clearer.

There is another confession I must share with you, it is about a double ignorance: the first, and quite evident, is my ignorance of the English language. I am aware of the limitation of not mastering a language and the culture where it comes from, and to what extent this often makes it difficult to share in depth what one wants to convey through words. That is why, beyond the limitation the translation entails, I would like to suggest that we should do the same thing that I try to do every day in my consulting room: (and that is) to be able to accompany each other through words, beyond words

The cause of my second ignorance, consequence of the first, is that I havent read until recently, texts like those by Peter Schmidt and Dave Mearns among others. Only recently, thanks to Silvia Lombardis translation, did I have access to them and was astonished by the coincidence of some of our conceptual routes.

So, why the title of this conference, whose subtitle is The philosophy of the open?

Because throughout the years of my experience as PCA therapist, I started noticing phenomena inclinical practice that made me ask myself, reconsider, and change what I had learned in relation to the traditional concept of identity, challenging me to look for a conceptualization of what I was experiencing in my practice. In that way, re-reading once and again the work ofRogers I started finding, sometimes explicitly, others barely hinted, clear references to this experience that places to the psychotherapeutic encounter in the light of the notion of event. Authors like Deleuze, Foucault, Nietzsche, and fundamentally the philosophy of Spinoza, also generously offered me a solid support, a kind of conceptual paraglide, to throw myself into this abyss of the unknown.

They saythat the mind is like a parachute, it works better when it is open.

The route/path/road to the conference is a conceptual sequence, intimately interwoven with a thread of thought that spans the notion of LIFE, as a full expression and pure affirmation. Diapo 2The sequence that we follow here is the following; I start with a reference to the philosophy of the open, as an alternative to the usual ways of knowledge in the Western World in general, and in particular in our practice, that trims and freezes the flow of what is happening. Without denying the value of the cognitive procedures contribution to humanity, from the perspective of a particular model of science, I try to point out how infertile and even frankly negative it can be, at the time of the inter-human encounter in the psychotherapeutic practice.

This is the reason why in the sequential order that follows is the revision of the notion of identity, as a form of knowledge restricted and closed that, to a certain extent, does not acknowledge the multiplicity and simultaneity of the human soul. Thus I prefer to refer to the psychotherapy in terms of event, as expression of that relationship that founds the terms that compose it in a novel and unique way.

Deleuze offers a beautiful example when he describes to the bond between the bee and the orchid, granting this event a movable, transitory and impossible to cover identity. Something that is neither in one nor in the other, although they can interchange, and even mix themselves;but something that is between the two of them, outside the two of them, and that runs in another direction.

Understanding the inter-human encounter as event, I propose a form of knowledge, quite forgotten in these times, (that is) Intuition. I understand intuition as a revelation that arises from the in-between, from that particular and unique relationship which happens in mutual implication, and not as a distinct attribute of the therapist. A type of knowledge that requires more implying than explaining.To understand intuition as the knowledge that is happening in the therapeutic relationship necessarily implies a consideration around the policy of human relationships, and a revision of relations of power in our practice, theme that I have developed in other papers, and because of time reasons I will only make reference to in this conference.

In this side of the world we live fighting to know who is the owner of the truth, if man is the owner of the world, or the world owns man, who owns the Earth, who owns the planet, who is the master of house, who is the owner of the identity, who is the owner of our human behavior. Which is the concept of truth that owns experience, is the mind the owner of the body, is the body the owner of the mind (here we see dualism in its entire splendor)? Is the man the owner of his circumstances, or the circumstances take over the man? Is destiny in charge, is God, is science, is philosophy, etc., etc.?What is out of question, and I believe that this is the question: it is the notion of owner in itself.It seemed that this need to find an owner responds to the urgency to organize what happens according to some hierarchy, and then fight among us to establish how that order of subordination is, but what is not questioned is the very notion of the act of establishing hierarchies, that is the ownership.

This does not mean not being aware of the human construction of hierarchies, of laws that organize the civilized world. For example, the use of language, tries and often succeeds in organizing the events, at least temporarily.Already in the XVII century, Spinoza observed that man placed himself in relation to nature as an empire within another empire, thus pretending an absolute dominion over his actions, only determined by himself. Not knowing that what it does happen is shared potency, co-participation in everything that exists. Certainly I propose an alternative and open view, in a world in which we live bloody disputes to determine who the owners are, who are in possession of the absolute truth, of the Earth, money and power, and also of the Person Centered Approach. From this view then: the Earth, the truth, and essentially, life, have no owner.

Regarding the possession of material possessions, it is possible to establish this characterization of the property. But taken to the level of human relations, and in particular taken to the level of what is experienced in psychotherapy, when somebody, for example, tells us about his pain, that pain that is alien to me, I also recognize it like my own. When somebody brings pain, here between us there is pain. It is unavoidable the mutual affectation of our experiential fields. Regarding our practice as therapists, to consider that encounter, that event,without owners, where the potency of each element that constitutes the event happens, with an organization, which is pure creation, anarchical and open; allows us a different way to approach that practice without the imperative to find an owner. It is an attempt to think the human and the inter-human, in an embracing way, trying to go beyond dualisms and the anthropocentric view of the world. It is about a glance whose horizon is life, as an affirmation of what exists in all its manifestations, where man is just one of them.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE OPEN (THE WAYS OF KNOWLEDGE)In order to refer to the character of fluid and of permanent change of what happens, I have resorted to the metaphor of the sea as a reference to the infinite, the unforeseeable and in permanent movement. This metaphor is valid for life in general and for the experience of the psychotherapeutic work in particular. It is also useful to share with you what I understand as the fluid and changing characterof what we called personal identity.

Paraphrasing JeanCocteau, I would say since what happens in the world is somysterious, lets pretend to be its organizers. SLIDES 3-4Based on a certain model of knowledge we construct our daily practices. From the way we raise our children, to the way in which we conceived and practice our work as person-centered-therapists.

Theparticular vision, with which we face what happens, determines a certain way of knowing and this leads us to characterize reality in a certain way and to structure a practice.The existing model of knowledge comes packaged in the culture to which we belong, from merely supposing and affirming with no trace of doubt, that there is an internal world separated from the external world, to pretending that there are subjects separated from each other and separated from their surroundings.

On account of the order of the thought being linear, a series unit to unit, can come near but never understand a system of relationships in which everything is happening simultaneously Nature is, in the last term, a volume and at the most, a field of infinite dimensions. We needed then, another conception of the standard natural order aside from the logic, the order of the logo or the word, based on an attention unit by unit. ALAN WATS, Human Nature Man and Woman, Chapter 3.Throughout the history of psychology, in psychotherapy in particular, and of human relations in general, we have tried unsuccessfully to organize the mystery of encounter with another and others. It is my impression that this is not about revealing that radically unknown,vast, abysmal and sometimes terrible mystery, but about living it.

In the following slides I try to illustrate the appearance of human glance on the infinitude of the landscape making up another landscape, locked up by the bricks of knowledge, that progressively narrow the contemplation of what there is.

Slides -5-6-7Returning to our sea, Alan Watts tells that for him reality appears like a scribble, and culture is in charge of applying a grid on it in order to encircle and dominate it. Then we alluded to what appears to us as reality, as if it were a naval battle game A 4water, B 7.sunk.

Slide 8The human attempt to know is done through a double procedure of capture. On the one hand, the isolation, the trimming, to extract a fragment of the totality that appears as reality, that is to say, to isolate a portion of that immensity, soon to apply a second procedure, that is immobilization, giving rigid contours to that fragment. These are procedures of capture, isolation and trimming, freezing and immobilization.

In astonishment at what happens, we ask ourselves a question which seeks understanding, since we assume that an explanation is lacking. The formulation of an answer with character of truth tries an explanation and grants us the power of the answer. That person who is in possession of the truth seems to be the owner of something that is lacking, the owner of the answers to the innumerous questions that request them.

Slide 9The following procedure is to include that answer in the book of the knowledge.

Soon those cubes of reality are accumulated; they are piled up transforming them into accumulated truths that grant frozen and accumulated power and knowledge.

Slides 10-11We read in Rogers In thus floating with the complex stream of my experiencing, and in trying to understand its ever-changing complexity it should be evident that there are no fixed points.

On Becoming a Person

Carl R. RogersSlide 12I would like to propose a reflection about that form of knowledge, as if it was notthe only possible one. This is why I have subtitled this communication: Philosophy of the open, as a different way of approaching knowledge.

I think about the open as pure affirmation of all that exists,everything that is in expression state including the close, because the human action of closing, trimming and freezing is also expression of what exists. It is not then about The Open opposite to The Close, (remarkably the dictionary defines the open like that which is not closed). Open it is not an adjective here, not even a noun, it is an Action. It is an action then, not the action of a particular subject, but the way of being of life.Life names a field of concepts and practices not dominated by men, as an arranging category of the experience. The open implies here and now, everything.

Slide 13In 2006, I presented in Postdam a paper on slavery in its diverse forms. I referred specifically to the epistemological slavery since I believe the paradigm of modernity is still in force supporting the idea of unique truth.

An alternative paradigm is that of the open systems, nonlinear, self-organized and their characteristic a priori indetermination. What there is, what happens, what occurs, belongs to a continuous where objects are entangled one with the other tightly, objects that our present structure of thought tends to see as isolated.

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Me on one side, on another side the other, on another side the armchair, on another side the braking that can be heard coming from the corner. I believe that this proposal, although avoiding the human being as center of all meaning, can help the practice of psychotherapy to acquire that open character that I mention in this paper. That consists in the exercise of being, through being what happens. That is to say: the exercise of life.. Its about the attempt to try to inhabit the open, the surprise, the fatal. And thenceforth, to participate in the wonder, the grace of being, being with the world in the world.

I now want display the poetic testimony of the experience of a client:

I feel like doodle, scrawl, scribble.I am, we are being pothook.Part and whole simultaneously.And the limits become blurredI do not know what the past, another place isThe bounds of my body, of our body are not limits.Everything comes together here and now.I feel the skin, the bones, the muscles very elastic, as if they were clay!I am, we are moldable clay, alive.And I stretch, I bend, we mixed ourselves, we get entangled and we unknot and we stretch once again.Everything expands in the possibility of infinite new forms of this totality.And I feel potency; I feel that we are potency.Slide 14 THE QUESTION OF IDENTITYNow I would like to talk more specifically about the notion of identity: the reframing of this notion is not the result of speculative or conceptual appetite, it is rather the result of what I experience daily in my practice as a therapist. Also investigating what intuition is about resulted in giving a name to situations that happened in that field. To such an extent that towards the year 1989, I wrote an article which I titled the Way of Indifference, where in a still precarious way, not very polished, I tried to talk about to the experience of not rigidly establishing differences within the continuous of a session. I believe that to fluidize the categorical ways is not only an intellectual issue but also constructs a different way of perceiving and living.

Although I am conscious that this is an ambitious task and that undoubtedly I will barely be able to present it, we can reframe the notion of identity from a philosophical, psychological point of view and also from a clinic and psychotherapeutic one..

The conscience of our own identity or the personal identity has had, in the history of thought, different interpretations. Among them, those of greater historical importance are the ones that consider the self as equivalent to Descartes thinking substance, and Humes theory which considers the self as a beam of impressions, without forgetting the different present theoriesabout the conscience of the philosophers who study the human mind. This issue is extremely complex and controversial, and continues giving rise to debates in the different fields of knowledge.

I suggest that we should reconsider the notion of identity as a phenomenon of movable multiplicities, that are constituted as identity in each encounter, and that always turns out to be part of other relationships that in turn grant an identity that is circumstantial and bound to each event.

This challengeis stimulating and intimidating at the same time, in as much as it implies daring to enter a territory without a precise map that indicates with absolute clearness who is who, and that a priori guarantees what is going to happen to us in the experience. It invites us to be explorers in a virgin, undiscovered land, where not only the other but also we are unknown and also what happens in between, in that mutual implication.

My hypothesis is that each relationship sets up its terms, that is to say, we are ever changing constituent relationships, knots of a network in transformation that tie and unknot endlessly conforming a net.

Each singular individual is a knot of relationships and each relationship is a knot of singular individuals. In this way each knot is constituted as a singular and unique relationship that disappears as such in time, reentering into a new constituent relationship, and on and onad infinitum.

It is from the weave of relationships that each event gradually defines who I am,and each relationship establishes new identities. One is not identical to oneself permanently; we should admit that we are part of a greater complexity, the universe.

I am not questioning the that we can experience our own self, because that experience offers us the security, support, recognition necessary to handle everyday life, it gives us the possibility of obtaining an identity card that, strictly speaking, is a legal identification instrument, but that nothing says about identity. What I am trying to say is that, from the philosophy of the open, the identity is the illusion that we can freeze that something we identify ourselves with in the present.

That is the reason why the perspective of the event, as the way to consider the therapeutic encounter, necessarily implies reviewing the notion of identity, since as I just said it is a phenomenon that becomes new every time.

Slides 15-16-17-18-19-20-21-22I would like to invite you to consider two objections to the habitual way of understanding the identity:

One refers to the identity as belonging to an individual subject, (the cutting, the isolation I mentioned before) The other one refers to the identity as a fixed and unique organization (immobilization), that is to say, it does not allow for the multiplicity that simultaneously is happening in each of us.

To understand this reflection, it is necessary to see how with the same model of knowledge I made reference to at the beginning, the notion of identity also isolates and freezes, and is a cutting of the multiplicity of what happens.

That form of knowledge is based on a double principle as we have already seen, that of differentiation and that of identity as if they were the same cognitive operation.

The differentiation is the recognition, putting the differences in full view of everybody which enables us to identify the different. But this does not allow usto allocate a fixed identity.

A simple example would be: that I can distinguish in a multitude a well-known face and identify it like Juan, my schoolmate, but this does not entitle me to confer Juan a fixed identity. Surely he is not the same Juan I met so long ago, as I am not the same, either. Slides 23-24 From the philosophy of the immanence there is no Juan separated from my look, it is from a relation thatthe terms Juan and I are founded.

From the point of view of psychology, the principle of identity is, to a great extent, considered as constituing the essence of the man. The self, of course, is born in relationship, but we assume that it has an individual essence to be unfolded throughout time. Individualism has gradually taken the axis of the consideration of men in modernity. As a man of science, I have learned along my years in the Faculty of Medicine that it is necessary to separate in order to know. This way also includes knowledge aboutman, considering him an individual, separated from the universe, and also having a mind, separated from his body. Of course our learning was influenced since the 17th century with the appearance of the Cartesian cgito, and even before with the platonic illusion of pure ideas.

In our practice we often observe that when somebody comes to amedicalor psychological consultation, he doesso not only looking for a specialist, but also he himself seems to be a specialist in some pain, some suffering or some inner disorder, removing its complexity, its unsoundable multiplicity, its experiencial wealth, and offering himself as an object of study. I understand that this position of specialists is sustained in a kind of cartography, that is to say, in a procedure that tends to predefine the land we are going to accede to.Gaining access to a territory from a map also implies certain risks, for example: arriving only at the places that we assume are described by the map, as the ones one is going to get to, therefore there is nothing new to be known, we are left just with verifying that the territory repeats the map. Those who are willing to run that risk give up the possibility of discovering themselves in the unique, undiscovered here and now of each encounter.

Our view as Rogerian therapists tries to approach this territory free of maps, which implies running other very different risks, for example: to lose ourselves in that territory, to be confused, to arrive nowhere. In fact, there is nowhere to arrive, if we become aware that we are in the place where we are.To notice that, strictly speaking, we are part of that territory that we are supposed to investigate,implies deeper and/committed attitude on the part of therapist, that makes himself available to an encounter that is unique for its character of unrepeatable, even with the same client, because neither of them is the same in each encounter. Heraclito, already said that nobody bathes in the same river twice.

It is a way that does not explain what happens, but gets involved in what happens/ If we dare see identity just as a practice that confers identification, we would be aware of the inevitable fluid character of what happens, and it happens that there are people, things, scents, and resonances. That is the atmosphere where what THERE IS appears, nothing more, nothing less, and if Juan appears, there is Juan, if pain appears, there is pain, if a memory appears, there is memory. We happen withJuan in that multiplicity of events.

I believe we can all admit the occurrence of the manifold, simultaneous and contradictory desires that shake in our lives.

Often at night, looking at the front of an apartment building, light coming out of its windows, I am captivated by the diversity of scenes that occur simultaneously. From a family eating, a couple fighting, a young person speaking on the telephone, a light that is turned off, a light that is turned on. This could be a metaphor of what is /bubbling inside each human being, of the simultaneity and complexity that we experience, both in a prospective client and in ourselves as therapists.

We can imagine the enormous complexity that settles in a therapeutic relationship, and the infinite possible interbreeding.Slides 25-25-26-27-28Based on this metaphor, I will try to illustrate the way part of the mythology of our time is like, how absurd it is to try to encapsulate everything that /happens in an encounter, in a frozen bubblecalled the other. Slides 29An interesting contribution from the so called exact sciences comes from fractal geometry that proposes a disarrangement of reality as we knew it, or as it was presented by science and Euclidian geometry. Then what we called reality can be considered from Euclidian geometry, and also from fractal geometry. That is to say, from a point of view of rigid and regular forms,or from a point of view closest to the scale of the event: irregular, mysterious, complex, far from being ordered, tidy and controlled.

Slide 30

THE INTUITION Slide 31 (just sea)

From the conception of the philosophy of the open that I have been developing,together with reading and deepening in the work of Baruch Spinoza, I have found his definition of intuition asthe most complete, sublime form of knowledge. Spinoza defines as the putting in act of the third sort of knowledge intuitive science.

Intuition is a way of knowing in which we are open to see what happens from the point of view of eternity. That is to say, to see each singular person from the perspective of the universe, rather than to understand the universe from the perspective of men. It is a wish to understand the ice-cube from the vast perspective of the sea, rather than to try to understand the sea from the perspective of the ice-cube.

The intuition, settles on the level of the event. It is a direct and present relationship of knowledge. It is an immediate knowledge, in which deductive reasoning does not mediate. We could also characterize it as awareness, and notice that that is the experience of being part. There is noseparation between what happens and me;it is the way of knowledge of unity.

I believe that we can account for the phenomenon of therapeutic encounter, as a territory in which the event is that unity wherethere are no more hierarchies than that of diversity of intensities that become present within the complete and eternal encounter.

In the therapeutic process, as I understand it, we can say thatin each encounter everything is happening, so that in the following everything happens again, without this implying a necessary or forced connection neither with the previous encounter nor with the following one. Because from this perspective they have neither past norfuture, as data foreign or alien to the event. Each look is always new, something changes, something is added; a new look is always a manifestation of the transformation that is permanently happening. That is why what is obvious lacks meaning, everything becomes new, and there is norepetition, no representation, and no necessary condition for something to become obvious. Half-joking it would be something like repudiating memory, or praising forgetfulness.

In the Seventh International Conference in Postdam (Germany), in July 2006, Peter F. Schmid made an excellent presentation about the danger of understanding the new as the old plus the different, and the other like Me plus the differences. Back in Winter 2002, If one is to resign to knowing, it is because knowledge in the traditional sense limits and freezes. It is about not knowing in the traditional sense. Not to know means the innocence of becoming.If we are to not know in the open, intuition is the instrument par excellence, a channel without intention, pretension, but with desire, proposal and invitation.

Here it is interesting to observe that in that immediate knowledge, the temporal-space categories are different, since intuition displays a non fragmented reality, opened to its multiplicity.

It is my opinion that intuition is not an attribute of an individual subject, but rather a revelationIntuition is to place oneself in disposition to resonate; it is to be part of that resonant event that is the cosmos. In order to do this, we only need to be present without pre-tending, that is to say, without tending in anticipation,simply and rigorously to feel part of what there is.

It is to be attentive to the multiple variations of experiences, of affection, of the self that we are being, not to try to modify them, but simply to make them manifest, visible and to allow its richness and its maxim expression.

SLIDE 32With the slide I am going to show you next I want to illustrate, in my view, what the psychotherapeutic work from the perspective of the event would consist in. The event understood as that what happens in the in-between from which resonances and intuition arise as a shared production and creation. I also want to warn you that although we are differentiated, we are not separated. From this glance a different power relationship takes place, the therapist doesnt have to provide an answer, a must imposed by the medical logic that supposes that we must cure those who consult us. Our task is to accompany those who come to us, with the rigor that implies to be present in that event with all our power and actively contemplating; without mandates other foreign to the constitution of that peculiar and unique encounter. With the certainty that it is there where our effectiveness as therapists lies.It is more about giving ourselves permission to be present,than to make an effortto do something. As I say in my book Between Metaphors and Chaos, it isto go from a passive intervention, (as a musical score that is already written), to an active contemplation, (that participates in the art of improvisation). It is to be as a way doing, more than to do as a way of being.

SLIDE 33-34

I am not suggesting the dissolution of the ego, since this would be one more means of the ego , that demands itself to dissolve itself. I am proposing, at least during the development of the theraphy encounter, to defrost our attitude. To be there, attentively, knowing that our view is just one possible cutting of the multiple possible cuttings there are. Now you will ask yourselves what is new in this proposal in our practice. Only to contemplate actively each therapeutic encounter, open to the plenitude of that encounter. It is something subtle, almost imperceptible, like breathing, but the difference between breathing and not doing it is the difference between life and death. So that to end my presentation, I suggest only one thing:

Lets be with life, that is to say, lets breathe.

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