In Item Five above, I said that “we are actors in a play that the manager directs”. What did I mean by that? Well I was basically quoting Epictetus, who says as much in his pamphlet, the Enchiridion. But what does he say, exactly? He says:
“Remember that thou art an actor in a play of such a kind as the teacher (author) may choose; if (a) short (play), of a short one; if (a) long (play), of a long one; if s/he wishes you to act the part of a poor (wo)man, see that you act the part naturally; if the part of a lame (wo)man, of a magistrate, of a private person, (do the same). For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you; but to select the part, belongs to another”. Page 20, The Enchiridion, by Epictetus; New York: Prometheus Books.
Now this is the Stoic view of the world, and many aspects of that view are preserved in existential philosophy, and some aspects of it are preserved in REBT. But not this one. REBT sees humans as having choice, of choosing what to think and feel. So it is important to deal with that point.
You are an actor in a play in the existential sense that you are “thrown” into the world at some point in time/space, which significantly impacts your life possibilities. That is why Woody Allen says: “If you want to be successful, then choose your parents very carefully!”
You are an actor in a play in the biological sense that you have a set of genetic potentials which set the limits of your development. You cannot fly. You cannot be fearless. You cannot be impervious to the pain of thrown stones or flailing sticks. And all of these things shape the parameters of your life’s possibilities.
And you are an actor in a play in the social sense that you are thrown into a particular family (or, if you are even less fortunate, an institution) in which you do not set the agenda, nor even define the words or values that form your cultural environment.
But in this final sense, you are not an actor in the normal sense, of being given a script that you have to learn. You have your own innate urges, biologically wired into you. Soon after your birth, you begin to internalize your social environment, in terms of sights and sounds, and later symbols and language, rules and regulations, interpretations, superstitions, and on and on. Internally then, there is the “social script” of your family/society, and your innate wiring for particular urges, attitudes and values. And these come into conflict quite early on. It is the dialectical interplay between the innate urges – the “good wolf” and the “bad wolf” (in your ‘id’) – and your internalized social environment – your “superego” – that the space, or internal stage, emerges within which you get to construct your own “virtual self”, or “ego”. This ego also makes up a set of stories, or mini-scripts about the various social situations it knows about, and uses these narratives to guide it through those social situations. In this sense you are an actor in a play, some of the scripts of which are set by you society absolutely, and some of which are negotiated internally between your society and your original “self”; but all of this happens unconsciously, and your conscious “self”, or ego is NOT consulted about all of this; or at least, not very often. In this sense, your conscious “self”, or ego is an actor in a play that was scripted by a “blind child” (you) and a “stupid culture” (yours). This, then is a more dialectical kind of play than that envisioned by Epictetus, but a play nevertheless; and no less difficult for the fact that an unconscious part of you had a hand in writing some of the mini-scripts!
At the level of your ego, three basic ego states emerge, normally: the Parent, the Child and (later) the Adult. When you are in Parent ego state, you are thinking, feeling and acting like a real parent, or parent substitute (e.g. teacher, etc) that you once knew. When you are in Child ego state, you are thinking, feeling and behaving like you once did as a child, in actual space-time. And when you are in Adult ego state, you are engaging in the coolest cognitions you are capable of as a human; weighing up the odds; calculating the risks; collecting the relevant data; and in general behaving as much like a ‘human computer’ as a human is capable of behaving.
However, even when you are in Adult ego state, you are still affected by emotions, attitudes, and urges. When you engage in thinking, as far as I can tell, the best you can do is to ask yourself questions, and seek the answers. But while you are consciously seeking the answers, your ‘adaptive unconscious’ – using its tacit knowledge – is already working out answers for you, that link you back to your past knowledge and experience. So when the answer arrives, it largely comes from inside of you, rather than from a dispassionate scanning of your “environment”. And it largely comes from the past, and is compatible with your ‘scripts’, or life narratives.
One of the mistakes that rationalists makes is to declare that humans are “thinking beings”. Well we are, up to a certain point. But we also seem to be, even more importantly, automata! Freud promoted our understanding of the unconscious nature of human drives, motives and decisions. The “cognitive turn” may have vainly thought that they had buried the “unconscious”, or non-conscious functioning of the human organism. But actually they had only obscured it for a while. If you want to have a real eye-opening experience, read ‘Blink’, by Malcolm Gladwell! The ‘adaptive unconscious is alive and well’ and running the “civil war” at the Albert Ellis Institute!
APPLICATION
So, when Albert Ellis called for help – he was being an actor in a play that the manager directs. He does not control the culture in which he was operating. He does not control the perceptions of his former colleagues. He does not even wholly control the attitudes he adopts towards their behaviours (except in so far as he has worked for more than 50 years to teach himself to think as rationally as he can; and in particular, to think ‘compensatorily’ in relation to uncontrollable adversities).. He is an actor, driven by scripts and narratives that operate mainly from unconscious levels. The same is true of the behaviours of most of his former colleagues. They are driven by their past behaviours; their past scripts and narratives. By the way they have wired themselves up.
But wiring yourself up is not a one-off activity. It can be a life-long struggle to keep improving our performance in the world. Or we can go to sleep, and operate on automatic.
So how was I responding to Al’s call for help? Was I in Critical Parent ego state? I think not. I had spent the period from 1984 to 1992 working very hard at putting my Adult ego state in the executive position in my personality; eliminating Critical Parent and Rebellious Child completely. And feeding Nurturing Parent and Free Child Ego states through my Adult. So I do not think I was in Parent.
However, I was committed to Al’s side, which I have argued above was not the whole story. The whole story fragmented around the time of the board meetings of July-September 2005; and two mini-stories, or partial-narratives emerged. Both sides were convinced that they had the truth; and I accepted Al’s view that he had the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But that was not my main error. My main error was that I did not know how to be partial without being libellous! I was incompetent in that respect.
But now I no longer want to be partial. I want to get beyond the fragmented stories, and to push beyond that point to something more constructive. And I think there will also be some mileage in a later post I plan to do, which will deal with Osho’s concept of “mine-ness”. What was the role of “mine-ness” in driving my behaviour in the period October 2005 and September 2006?
And why stop at September 2006, when the campaign went on until April/May 2007? Because it was in September 2006 that I spotted that it would take an independent public enquiry to determine exactly what had happened inside the Albert Ellis Institute to produce the present split, and the present excluded state of Albert Ellis. When two factions exist in an organization, the “facts” of the case cannot be arrived at by consulting one side. An independent enquiry, with access to all the documents, and all the potential witnesses, is the only way to get close to the “truth” – if such a thing as “truth” is possible for humans.
But even though I spotted the need for an independent public enquiry, I still continued to campaign in the same “factional way” that I had before. Sometimes we can have two lots of unintegrated information available to us, in long-term memory, but they do not trigger each other into consciousness when they are each in mind.
The alternative to a public enquiry is, of course, mediation. Mediation could be a way to heal the wounds at the Albert Ellis Institute, and to stop the damage that is daily happening to Albert Ellis, the Albert Ellis Institute, and to the reputation of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy.
PS: CHOICE
Back to choice in REBT. It seems to me that people can only be said to have a choice when they “wake up” (become conscious); notice an available “cross-roads”; and “choose” one of them. But we cannot know that what seems like a conscious choice will always and only be that. Often it may be driven from an unconscious “choice”. And an “unconscious choice” cannot be called a choice made by the “conscious individual”.
Furthermore, sometimes an individual will make a conscious choice, say to give up smoking cigarettes. But does it happen? Very often not. Why? Because their “non-conscious, habitual functioning” (their ‘passions’) chooses (non-consciously!) to continue smoking! So it is not a good idea to talk about human choice glibly, as if it was a non-problematical concept.
That’s how it all seems to me. Those are my perceptions. Those are my views, stories, narratives. What are yours? If you want to comment on this page, then please go here: Reader's Comments.
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