VOLUME 1. Mobilizing the Self

Part 1. Orienting the Self

II. Contacting the environment

Experiment 1: Feeling the Actual

Our first move is directed at helping you to heighten your feeling of what is actual. Most people admit that at times they are only half there, that they daydream, lose track of things, or otherwise wander off from the present situation. They also comment about others: “He doesn’t stay on the spot,” or “He doesn’t keep his eye on the ball”—or, in general, “He doesn’t make good contact.”

Contact does not imply a constant state of pop-eyed alertness. This would indicate chronic apprehensiveness, which usually rests on a misapprehension of actuality. There are occasions when it is appropriate to let go, grow hazy, and bask in animal comfort. That few of us can do this fully is a curse of our times—a consequence of “unfinished business”—but the ability to do so, which for the most part we now know about only from envious watching of our household tabby, is one that we can reacquire.

Apart from such moments of occasional bliss, when we can afford to let alertness dissolve and give place to a diffuse glow of wellbeing, there are other times when sharp awareness of actuality runs counter to the organism’s best interests. While the dentist is extracting an infected tooth, only that patient who needs to pose as a hero will spurn the anesthetic. Nature herself sometimes acts as anesthetist when she makes a creature swoon with pain. The situation is far different, though, when one buys patented “pain-killers” at the drugstore. Here one attempts to trick the organism into losing its feeling of actuality—throbbing headache, agony of an abscessed tooth, fatigue from overwork, insomnia as an indicator of “unfinished business.” These are warning signals—they indicate something amiss which needs attention—and the problem is falsely solved when one merely turns off the signal.

Obviously, there is no virtue in enduring the continuation of a warning signal after it has been heeded. If one has a toothache and has made an appointment with the dentist for the earliest possible time, then the “pain-killer” comes in handy as a way of avoiding suffering that can do no good. With headaches, fatigue, insomnia, the case is not so clear. Sometimes the family doctor can despatch them as readily as the dentist repairs or pulls the ailing tooth, but often even the specialist shakes his head and says he can find nothing organically wrong—though, if up-to-date, he may hint darkly of something “psychosomatic.” Even so, he will be chary of recommending psychological treatment, for it is long, expensive and often unsuccessful. Frequently he will ease the patient out of his office with advice to “forget it” or “take some aspirin.”

That pharmacological “pain-killers” are a means of partially blacking out one’s actuality—in this case, the actuality of pain—is well- known to everyone. That comparable “pain-killers” of a behavioral sort exist and are used still more widely is less often recognized. They are not taken in pill or tablet form, and the person using them, not being aware of what he is doing, will deny that his actions have this function. Furthermore, once he has become dependent on them, it would be cruel to wrest them suddenly from him, if this were possible, just as it would be cruel to deprive an addict abruptly of his drug. But, because this is behavior which the person himself controls, whether he knows it or not, there is no way—even were it desirable, as is not the case—to strip it from him by force. On the other hand, should he wish to uncover such self-defeating behavior and to change it gradually, staying always within the limits of what he cares to tolerate, that is another matter.

As a first step in this direction we propose something that will seem fatuously simple. We state it in the few indented lines below. The indentation is our device for indicating that what is set off in this fashion we wish you to take as definite instructions. In what follows there will be many such passages. Whenever possible, try them out at once before you read further. If you read on, you may by the discussions which you encounter, cheat yourself of something you might have discovered for yourself.

Try for a few minutes to make up sentences stating what you are at this moment aware of. Begin each sentence with the words “now” or “at this moment” or “here and now.”

Now, having survived this first, brief testing of the water and found it neither too hot nor too cold, let’s talk about it a little. Then we shall ask you to do it again.

Whatever is actual is, as regards time, always in the present. Whatever happened in the past was actual then, just as whatever occurs in the future will be actual at that time, but what is actual—and thus all that you can be aware of—must be in the present. Hence the stress, if we wish to develop the feeling of actuality, on words such as “now” and “at this moment.”

Likewise, what is actual for you must be where you are. Hence the stress on words like “here.” You cannot at this moment experience any event—that is, live through it at first-hand—if it takes place beyond the range of your receptors. You may imagine it, yes, but that means picturing it to yourself, and the picturing will be here where you are.

It has been customary for psychoanalysts—for instance, in the interpretation of dreams—to speak of the present as including the recent past—say, the past twenty-four hours. But whenever we speak of the present, we shall mean the immediate, here-and-now present—the time of your present attention-span, the time that is right now!

Remembering and anticipating are actual, but when they occur, they occur in the present. What you remember will be something seen or heard or done in the past, but its recapture or review is in the present. What you anticipate will be something which, if it happens, will happen at some time in the future, but such foreseeing is the present seeing of a picture which you here and now construct and label “future.”

These considerations may seem so trite as to need no further pounding home. But examine, for instance, these remarks from an intelligent student: “I feel that we are all living too much in the present and disregard to a painful degree the memories and lessons of the past. Similarly there is too much preoccupation with the present and not nearly enough consideration of the results of our current activities and their effect upon the future.” What is missing here is a clear comprehension that the aim of this experiment is not to get us to live more exclusively for the present, blind to what the past should have taught us or foolhardy about what lies ahead and needs to be prepared for, but, rather, to get us to live in the present.

Living fully in the present includes taking note of present reminders of past lessons and thus making more adequate present responses; and it includes taking note of present harbingers of things to come and adjusting our present behavior accordingly. The healthy person, with the present as reference-point, is free to look backward or ahead as occasion warrants.

A point that could bog us down in metaphysical mires if we did not meet it and dispose of it is raised by this statement from a student: “Others may be able to remain in the now, but, unfortunately, I find it completely impossible. There can be no constant now for me. At this very moment I have just passed now.”

The wish to seize the present and pin it down—to mount it, as it were, like a butterfly in a case—is doomed to failure. Actuality forever changes. In healthy persons the feeling of actuality is steady and continuous but, like the view from a train window, the scenery is always different. We shall see later that when actuality seems fixed, permanent, unchanged and unchangeable, this is a fictional actuality which we continuously build anew because it serves some present purpose of our own to preserve the fiction.

Actuality, as you experience it, is your actuality. You cannot experience what is actuality for someone else because you cannot tune in on his private receptors. If you were able to, you would be that person. You can share an experience with someone in the sense that you and he may experience similarly some situation which you and he have in common, but what he experiences is bis and what you experience is yours. When you say to a friend in trouble, “I feel for you,” you do not mean that literally, since he is doing his own feeling and no-one else can do it for him, but simply that you, by imagining yourself in his place, construct a vivid picture of what the situation would be like—and then react to that.

Now let us go back to the experiment once more. As you again produce sentences stating what you are aware of, put a pedantic emphasis on the words “now,” “here,” and “at this moment.” While this will be merely a verbal artificiality which we do not expect you to continue for the rest of your life, it will assist you not only to realize (make real) the nowness of your experience, but also to verbalize what you are doing or about to do, thus sharpening your awareness that it is you who experience whatever it may be. Feel the meaning of the now-here as your own now-here; thus, “Now I, with my breathing body sitting here in the chair, the chair in the room, the room in the neighborhood—now in the afternoon, this particular day, in this Twentieth Century—I now-here am doing so and so.” To repeat:

Try for a few minutes to make up sentences stating what you are immediately aware of. Begin them with the words “now” or “at this moment” or “here and now.”

Next we go to a very important part of the experiment. As you perform it, what difficulties do you encounter?

This question may come as a surprise. A common remark at this point is, ‘‘Difficulties? There aren’t any difficulties. It’s pretty dull, but—no difficulties.” Then let us ask this: why did you terminate the experiment just when you did? We are not suggesting you should have continued longer, but simply asking if you are aware of what immediately preceded your stopping. Were you tired? Had you gone blank and ceased forming sentences? Or did you, perhaps, quit without being aware that you were quitting?

Let us review some difficulties reported by others. These may not be your particular stumbling-blocks. We mention them to give you some notion of the range of reactions to this experiment, to show you that nothing extraordinary is expected and also that you need not be disappointed if at this stage you do not already “feel like a different person.” If you are dissatisfied with the work so far, admit it. If you begrudge the waste of your time, then be aware of your resentment toward us for having misled you into this. One student said, “I was told this would seem fatuously simple. Well, it did—and it still does!”

When this experiment is conducted in the doctor-patient situation, the patient in many ways can go through the motions in a fashion which observes the letter but not the spirit. For instance, an obsessional case, a Mary-Mary-quite-contrary, produced sentences like these: “Now yesterday I saw my friend” and “At this moment I shall see my friend tomorrow.” This illustrates how easy it can be to win petty victories by carrying out instructions in a way that defies or nullifies their intent. To some extent most people have such a need for personal triumph over someone, and it is important to be on the lookout for this motive in doing these self-awareness experiments. While certainly you may not respond in this particular way, you may somehow feel that we are challenging you to a kind of tug-of-war, in which you must defend yourself against us. If so, you have the decisive advantage, for, so long as you feel that way, we cannot budge you. What we wish to do is to ally ourselves with you and help you to budge yourself. Should you succeed to the end in demonstrating that you can do these experiments and still remain unmoved, over whom would you have won a victory?

Let us suppose that, far from being defiant, you are, instead, a good, well-behaved type who swallows indiscriminately whatever is offered. If you are such an “introjector,” you will find later experiments on chewing difficult but useful. Your initial reaction, though, may be one of enthusiastically talking about this program to your friends but neglecting to chew your way into it with your own teeth.

Or you may be a person who does not want to get close enough to his experience to feel it vividly. A student reported: “I gave considerable practice to the ‘now’ and ‘here’ awareness process, but concluded that these things are only actions and reactions which have become conditioned responses. It is convenient, probably necessary, that they be relegated to the level of automatic habits.” Habit, certainly, conserves time and energy, and our organized ways of dealing with things would be disrupted if we had to give close attention to every detail. When routine matters are truly routine, they are best handled in ways so standardized as to require the very minimum of attention. What makes this best, though, is that attention is thereby freed to deal with what is novel and non-routine. To make a point of maximizing automatic functioning and minimizing awareness in one’s life is to welcome death before its time. It is the goal of the cybernetics workers in reverse—instead of trying, as they do, to make robots which are more and more like men, it is an attempt to make oneself more and more a robot.

Again, you may be a person who is abashed, when you try to feel your actuality, to discover what a commonplace, lackluster actuality it is. Students have reported, “I am ashamed to say that I was not able to be aware of anything very remarkable. It was just such dull stuff as, ‘Now my nose itches’ and ‘Here and now I scratch it.'” But what impossible kind of actuality are you demanding if you require that, at any given moment when you try to feel it. it must be wondrous and exotic? If nothing more exciting is at hand to give attention to, what could be more healthy than to become aware of an itching nose and to scratch it? On the other hand, should you find your actuality chronically dull and uninteresting, what is to keep you from doing something to liven it up? What hindrances in this direction are you aware of?

We are not at the moment suggesting that, in connection with whatever you become aware of, you rush pell-mell into action. Manipulation of actuality we shall deal with later. Here we focus exclusively on the topic, “What is your actuality? Can you genuinely feel it? Can you feel that it is yours?"

Although the instructions for this experiment are as clear and simple as we can make them at this time, there is nothing we can do to keep you from reading in additional instructions of your own and then attributing them to us. For instance, a student, without being aware that these were his own instructions to himself rather than those given on the printed page, concluded that what this experiment called upon him to do was to search for something that was missing in his feeling of actuality. He stated, “I looked and looked but didn’t find anything that was missing.” His procedure is akin to making a roll-call by requesting all those not present to shout out their names. What one can do is bit by bit to extend one’s awareness by discovering and dissolving the resistances in oneself which have prevented this, but one cannot command what one is unaware of to march obediently into awareness.

Nevertheless, we know from clinical practice that there may be a gross neglect of areas of awareness which may be corrected simply by pointing it out. For instance, one patient may make sentences only about what he is aware of by means of exteroceptors, while another may report awareness of no events other than those taking place inside his skin—the beating of his heart, the pulsing of his arteries, the aches, the tensions. Are we to suppose from this that, for the first person, actuality is limited exclusively to what may be seen and heard, and that, for the second, no “external” events exist? No, but we can say that these patients differ radically in where they direct their attention and in what they exclude from attention. If they were running a newspaper, we would say that they favor some available news-sources to the exclusion of others, and our advice to them would be, “Whether you choose to print it or not, take notice of the range and kind of information that is pouring into your editorial office. Maybe you’re passing up some good bets.”

You may react to the experiment—this one or others to come—as if it were some kind of test of your potency; that is, you will do it, prove to yourself that you can do it—and leave it at that. But of course you can do it! Anybody can, to a degree. The point, though, is to achieve a result that makes it worthwhile—a genuine change in your perspective of events, the feeling that you are a continuous flow of processes. We may suspect that something less than this had been obtained by a student when he claimed, “I tried the experiment. Really, I was completely successful in that I got just the feeling that the writers wanted and which I also wanted.” Proving one’s potency in this manner is perhaps the most dangerous of all self-deceptions.

Some persons, confronted with these experiments, undertake to decide in advance how or whether they will have any effect; for instance, “1 have spent hours trying to decide how and to what extent the experiments on self-awareness would change my sensory and conscious thought-experiences. First, I wanted to know if the sought-after end-result would bring about a change that I would welcome. Second, I wanted to know if the time and effort would be worthwhile. ... At the present time I have not achieved any miraculous sense of awareness.” Words are wonderful tools in their place, but why would anyone sit for hours with a meal prepared before him trying to reach a verbal decision as to whether it would taste good and be worth the effort of eating? Or, having taken a bite or two, why expect something “miraculous”? If one waters a plant, does it instantly burst into bloom?

Perhaps, after these comments from others who have worked at the task, you are ready to try again. This time, maybe, you can notice more clearly when and if you leave the present. And if so, where do you tend to go? Some people suddenly find that it is as if they were in the past or in the future, without awareness that it is now and here that they reminisce about the past or anticipate the future. Other people, or these same people at other times, find that, while they maintain present tense, they do not stay here. It is as if they were outside themselves, observing their own experience as an onlooker rather than being the immediate experiencer.

As one student put it, “I take a man-from-Mars view of myself.” Whatever you discover in this regard, don’t try to compel yourself to change it and somehow force yourself to stay in the here-and- now. Just notice what you do in as great detail as possible.

Make up sentences about what you are immediately aware of. Begin them with “now" or “at this moment" or “here and now.”

Discussion of this experiment has been unusually prolonged because it is the first. Many of the points made will apply as well to all subsequent experiments, but will not be repeated there. Let us conclude by considering the here-now procedure in comparison to the approaches of Freud and Adler.

These two men, each expressing what was characteristic of his own personality, laid stress, respectively, on past and future. In their work with neurotics they indulged, each in his own way, the patient’s wish to dig into the past or to safeguard the future. Delving into the past serves the purpose of finding “causes"—and thus excuses—for the present situation. That the present is an outgrowth of the past no-one will deny, but it does not, for instance, solve present problems to blame one’s parents for the way they brought one up.

Suppose, as an example, that you treasure memories of how your father has frustrated you. Such memories are important for you in actuality only insofar as you now feel that what you expected from your father is still to be fulfilled or that your resentment at its non-fulfillment is still to be expressed—in short, that your relationship with your father still presents a problem to be attended to and solved. Otherwise, your brooding on the past is a mere pretense of attacking your problems and is actually a convenient refuge from them.

If, instead of carping about the past, one clings to it as “the good old times” or one’s “golden childhood,” one is again escaping present frustrations or even neglecting present enjoyments by sentimentalizing or glamorizing what is past.

Adler, contrary to Freud, encouraged his patient in a futuristic attitude. He asked him to dwell upon his life-plan or prospect, his ambition, his final goal. Such a procedure aggravates what is already the usual tendency—to try to be, however impossible, always a step ahead of actuality. People who live futuristically never catch up with the events for which they have prepared and do not reap the fruits of their sowing. They rehearse for even the most unimportant interview and then have no ability to act spontaneously when it arrives. Situations for which they have failed to prepare catch them utterly at a loss.

If your view of the future is not apprehensive but rosy, why do you so paint it? Are you consoling yourself for some present frustration with daydreams, resolutions and promissory notes? Is your hope for tomorrow a means of putting off doing something today? Now, as you know very well, the future course of events can rarely be predicted with much accuracy. Do you, perhaps, count on this real uncertainty so as to avoid involving yourself in what is certain —namely, the present—or even adopt such an attitude as a secret way to disappoint and punish yourself?

Let us emphasize strongly here that we do not wish our experiments to foster new repressions, to rouse guilt feelings, to make the personality shrink still further. On the contrary, the aim is to expand or, better, to heighten awareness of what you are doing and how you are doing it. For instance, in this experiment on actuality, what present grudge, gratitude, remorse, or excuse makes you anticipate the future? Our method is not to suppress that grudge or that ambition, but simply for you to become aware that, in terms of the way you are now structured, this is how you behave! With awareness this structure will change in line with changes in your functioning, and your escapes into past and future will diminish. Do not moralize to yourself about escapist tendencies, but simply describe them in terms of the actuality—that is, as behavior that is going on.

The relationship of past and future must be continually reexamined in the present. A useful way to begin is to describe the scene and situation you are in. Suppose, for example, you omit the reading which you ordinarily do in the subway on the way to work and instead look around and commence an internal monologue: "At this moment I am riding in the subway. Now the train is swaying. Now people are beginning to move toward the exit. Now this man is looking at me. Now I am concerned with how I impress him.” Stay aware of the two parts of the experiment: (i) to use "now" or an equivalent in every sentence, and (2) to discover your resistances to doing so—for instance, that you get bored or annoyed or, more likely, lose (“flee from”) the sense of actuality.

The theory of these two parts is this: To the extent that your feeling of actuality has been split off from your workaday personality, the effort to experience actuality will rouse anxiety (masked, perhaps, as fatigue, boredom, impatience, annoyance)—and what specifically rouses your anxiety will be the particular resistance by which you throttle and prevent full experience. We shall discuss this in more detail later. In this experiment we are concerned only with your discovering the actuality of such resistances to what, on the face of it, is a “fatuously simple” procedure.

For the most part you will not notice the transition from contacting your environment to wandering off into thoughts about past and future. You may simply have the experience of catching yourself fleeing, or waking up with a start from daydreaming, or, on the other hand, of fearing to lose yourself in “thoughts” lest you thereby miss your station.

A by-product of this experiment on the feeling of actuality—the use and meaning of the words “now” and “here”—will be to increase your sense of the concreteness of experience and to sharpen the difference between the concrete and the abstract (generalized). Both concrete immediate experience and abstract generalizing, classifying, etc., are healthy functions of the personality, but they are different modes of behaving. To confuse them means to regard actual things and persons as stereotypes, as vague and irrelevant furniture, or, on the other hand, as mere bogeymen who do not really exist. The feeling of actuality dissipates such vagueness, and to this we shall return in a later experiment.

To over-emphasize the abstract is characteristic of so-called intellectuals. With some of them one feels that what they say derives solely from other words—the books they have read, the lectures they have attended, or the discussions they have engaged in—without much flesh-and-blood contact with the non-verbal. For such persons the attempt to become aware of their immediate experience may be disturbing at first and feel like strenuous work. We quote from a student’s report:

“I went through the first experiment for what seemed about fifteen minutes. Increasing impatience was the main reason for stopping. It was an unusual experience. The word ‘now’ is very successful in bringing about the feeling of the immediateness of being. This gave me a sense of fear, that I can describe only as breathing very deeply while a feeling n constriction in the chest. On the other hand, an instant’s experience was much richer than ever before, and I could actually see things in the environment at which I had only looked before. I was in my room, and as I went through the experiment 1 felt a drive to straighten out and put in order whatever was amiss. It was like seeing the things in it for the first time or after a long absence. The objects had an identity of their own, stood around me, but were in no way continuous with me. A tendency to go off into abstract thinking kept creeping in.

“The second time I tried the experiment I noticed the recurrence of the same sense of fear at the realization of the actuality of being alive, and also the tendency to indulge in adding modalities, qualifications, adjectives, to the objects observed rather than concentrating on the experience of the act of observing, which I found mentally tiring and disturbing.

“On a third occasion I practiced the experiment on the subway. The experience was rich and penetrating. The sense of fear was still present but to a slighter degree, perhaps because of other people around me. My ability to see seemed multiplied a hundredfold and this gave me strong pleasure. After a while it was like playing an amusing game, but one exacting much energy.”

To reacquire the full feeling of actuality is an experience of tremendous impact, moving to the core. In the clinical situation patients have cried out, “Suddenly I feel like jumping into the air!” and “I’m walking, really walking!” and “I feel so peculiar—the world is there, really there! And I have eyes, real eyes!” But there is a long road from this present experiment to such a full experience.

Experiment 2: Sensing Opposed Forces

In the previous experiment we asked what difficulties you encountered, and these we called “resistances.” Now we must try to understand who or what does the resisting. As a chic, which you may easily verify, consider what happens when instructions for the actuality experiment are put to a healthy child, lie finds in them nothing strange, artificial, or an affront to his dignity’, and, if you are his friend, he straightway obliges with a copious flow of here- and-now sentences. In fact, at a certain stage in language development, he delivers spontaneous monologues which are play-by-play accounts of his aims and actions. Compared with ours, his resistances to the actuality experiment are negligible.

It would thus appear that the resistances are not present to begin with. If we can understand how we acquired them, this should give some pointers on how to get rid of them. But in the present experiment we merely take the first step toward realizing that they—the resistances—belong to us, are ours, just as much as whatever they resist. This is difficult, for it involves discovering that we ourselves interfere with our own activity—in short, that, without being aware of it, we launch counterattacks against our own effort, interest, or excitement.

As an approach, let us consider the concept of equilibrium. At its core is the notion of a balance of forces. In the chemistry laboratory a student who has been instructed to use five grams of a certain compound determines this quantity by first putting a standard weight—a bit of metal known to weigh five grams—into one pan of his balance. In the other pan he adds the compound until both pans hang in the air, with precise balance indicated when the pointer on the scale stands at zero. Any tendency for it to move in one direction is exactly counterbalanced or canceled by the equal and opposite tendency to move in the other.

The car of an elevator hangs in its shaft in such fashion that the cables supporting it run over pulleys at the top of the shaft and down to heavy metal plates which weigh just about as much as the car. For the car to rise the motor needs to exert a force only slightly greater than that which is necessary to counterbalance the weight of the passengers or freight; conversely, for the car to descend the motor must expend a force somewhat less than the weight of the cargo. This illustrates the fact that where large forces are truly in balance it requires but little additional force, added to one side or the other, to produce large changes.

A moving body does not come to rest until it meets opposing forces sufficient to counteract its further progress. A bullet fired from a gun does not, of course, go on forever, but it comes to rest much sooner if aimed, say, into the trunk of a hardwood tree than if discharged into a bale of cotton. Likewise, as is now well known, a feather, released in a vacuum jar, falls just as heavily to the bottom as a chunk of lead.

Moving on from such simple equilibria, now consider some that require constant rebalancing. The total life-processes of an organism demand continual rebalancing, but let us for the moment limit ourselves to the single activity of riding a bicycle. For the beginner this is an impossible feat. When he wobbles too far to one side, either he fails to compensate adequately by shifting weight or steering, or, in desperation, over-compensates—and then falls off on the other side. If, despite setbacks and bruises, he persists in trying to ride, eventually he handles the continuous adjustments, originally so troublesome, almost automatically. He does not reach a static equilibrium on his bicycle. Rather, he becomes expert in correcting disequilibria before they go too far—but this, far from seeming burdensome, provides much of the fun of riding.

To attain and maintain a healthy equilibrium in his activities a person must be able—like the poised rider of a bicycle—to appreciate and act upon differences in his situation as they occur. These may be subtle or so striking that they cannot be overlooked. For anything to be noticed at all, however, it must somehow be distinguishable from its background. It must differ from it in a way, as someone has said, “that makes a difference.” If, to a pure white surface you add a patch of white, it goes unnoticed because, literally, it doesn’t make any difference. A patch of black, on the other hand, provides maximum contrast and is seen as blacker and the white whiter than would be the case if either were seen by itself.

Many phenomena could not exist if their opposites did not also exist. If day were indistinguishable from night, no such distinction would ever have been made and we would lack the corresponding words. Now, as a first step in this experiment:

Think of some pairs of opposites in which neither member could exist were it not for the real or implied existence of its opposite.

You may be dissatisfied with a number of the pairs of opposites you produced. Some, you may feel, are not genuine opposites, and others are opposites only in a very specific context. With some pairs you may have found that there were additional phenomena which fitted intermediate positions. For instance, “beginning—end” has an in-between term, “middle”; “past—future” has “present”; “desire—aversion” has "indifference.” The middle term in such pairs is especially interesting, since it often constitutes a "neutral-” or “zero-’’ or “indifference-point” along some kind of dimension or continuum. On an algebraic scale numerical values diminish one by one until zero is reached; beyond zero they increase again, but as negative values. The gear-shift on many devices has extreme positions labeled “forward” and “reverse” and an intermediate position “neutral,” in which, with the motor running, the device remains stationary or “idling.”

The pilot of a carrier-based plane must take off from a short runway. Unless he can attain speed sufficient to support him in the air by the time he reaches the end of the deck, he will simply drop off into the water. To minimize this hazard he first “revs up” his engine, while his brakes, fully applied, hold him stationary. Then, when his motor is whirling the propeller at such a rate that the plane shakes, throbs, strains at the brakes, he suddenly releases them and flashes into the air. Until this point the pilot, identifying himself with his ship, might verbalize his sense of the opposed forces by saying, “I feel the tremendous urge to fly, but also the equal and opposite tendency to hold back. If I kept this up for long, it would shake me to pieces.” And, of course, the whole maneuver would be completely senseless if there were not the clear intention, when the right moment came, to release the brakes and take off.

Note the difference between idling in “neutral,” where no force is applied forward or backward, and straining forward with the brakes set. The first is a situation, of “resting,” while the second is one of extreme conflict. In the case of the plane, the opposition is not forward—backward, but moving—not moving. A mechanical example of forward—backward conflict would be the situation where a ferry boat, coming into its slip too fast, reverses its engines to slow its forward momentum.

"Creative pre-commitment” is the situation of being at the “indifference-point” of a continuum, poised between but aware of and interested in the potential situations which extend in either direction. One feels the beckonings to action, but is not yet committed to either side.

Now, to return to the original problem, just what does all this have to do with resistances? Situations in which you encounter blocks in carrying out tasks which you have set for yourself are conflict-situations—and, furthermore, the conflict is between one part of your personality and another. Of one part you are aware, the part which sets the tasks and tries to carry them through. Of the other part, the resister, you are less or not at all aware. To the extent that you run up against resistances, they frequently seem, far from being of your own creation, to be imposed and inflicted on you from outside.

If these experiments simply sent you about your ordinary business, you would experience little conflict, for in those situations you know very well how to avoid conflict. Instead, this work is designed with the express purpose of making trouble for you. It is intended to make you aware of conflicts in your own personality. If this were the full scope of the program, you could justly charge us with malevolence. But there is this further plan: to show you how, by appropriate action, the resister can be reclaimed from unawareness and transformed into a most valuable resister. The resisting part of your personality has vitality and strength and many admirable qualities, so that, while it is a long and arduous job to achieve full reintegration of these disintegrated parts, to settle for less when it is unnecessary is to ratify the permanent loss of parts of your personality. The brighter side of the picture is that, before you have proceeded far, you are likely to feel that you have already salvaged priceless potentialities and energies.

In these theoretical remarks we have split you as a person into two warring camps. If you are incredulous about this, we strain your incredulity a bit further by asking you to accept, as your own, the conflict between these factions.

How are you to go about acquiring a sense of the opposed factors in your make-up? Well, along the lines just mentioned, would we not have to infer that the wishes and inclinations of this resister, of whom you are so little aware, must be the opposite of the ones you feel that you bring to the task? And would it not follow, then, that you might get some notion of how things look to the resister if you tried to imagine the direct opposite of whatever you, as the aware person, believe to be the case? If this seems worth a trial, do the following:

Consider some everyday life-situations, objects or activities as if they were precisely the opposite of what you customarily take them to be. Imagine yourself in a situation the reverse of your own, where you have inclinations and wishes exactly contrary to your usual ones. Observe objects, images and thoughts as if their function or meaning were the antithesis of what you habitually take them to be. Furthermore, confronting them thus, hold in abeyance your standard evaluations of good or bad, desirable or repugnant, sensible or silly, possible or impossible. Be satisfied to stand between them—or, rather, above them—at the zero-point, interested in both sides of the opposition but not siding with either.

A benefit which comes from developing your ability to see things in reverse—to be uncommittedly interested in the opposites—is the power to make your own evaluations. Psychoanalysis has brought about many reversals. What used to be considered good—for instance, sexual inhibition—is now judged to be bad; what used to be rejected is now accepted. When patients came to Freud with concealments, he urged them to reveal. When he noticed that dreams were new synthetic unities, he set about to analyze them into separate elements. But, if all this is to be evaluated as good, by what criterion is it to be so evaluated?

How is the patient to know that his analyst’s evaluation of sexual inhibition is better than his own? If the analyst uses knowledge and authority to impose his evaluation—meanwhile disparaging the patient’s opposite evaluation as resistance, negative transference, or irrational conscience—he may, by convincing the patient that he is wrong, foist on him a new compulsive morality in the opposite direction. But if, instead of this, the patient can come to feel within his own personality the actual clash of opposite evaluations without being swept off his feet or compelled, then, instead of being a person who feels himself as always being judged, he will begin to feel (as will be clearer later on) what actually is the case—that, ultimately, he himself is the person who does the judging.

Perform the reversal experiment in a playful spirit. Never mind what amusing or tragic aspects the reversed situation may assume. As Socrates pointed out, the comic and tragic are not far apart, and the same event from different points of view may be comic or tragic. The mischance of a child or adolescent is comic to an adult —for instance, “he looks so cute when he cries” or “he’s suffering from puppy love.” And adult woes are comic to the gods. Change places, for once.

Reverse such details as the “p” to “q” in a line of type, or turn the “p” upside down to “b”. Reverse other letters which change meaning when rearranged. Notice what happens if you spell words backward, for instance, “lap” and “pal.” Inability to notice such reversals is an important part of the reading difficulties and mirror-writing of some children.

Imagine the motions around you as if they occurred the other way around, as in a reverse-motion moving-picture film, where a diver sails gracefully from the springboard into the water and then with equal case flics back up from the water to the springboard.

Reverse junctions. Under what circumstances might a chair be used to cat from and a table as something on which to sit? Instead of looking through a telescope at the moon, make the man in the moon look at you. Take the white ceiling and blue walls of your room and imagine them the other way around. Turn the pictures upside down. Allow submarines and fishes to fly through the air. Let loose the schizophrenic possibilities of your imagination—for most of them are no more strange than the bitterly held conviction that persons, and society as a whole, act in an obviously sensible way.

Freud made a significant observation when he said that if we find people standing on their heads, we have to turn them upside down to put them back on their feet. Take, for instance, the extremely common way in which the “need to be loved” is mistaken for “loving.” The neurotic claims to be full of love and kindness, but then it turns out that what he does for the beloved stems mainly from fear of rejection. Similarly, we often meet our “dear friends” with feelings of disgust and hostility. You may have noticed (in others) that all over-compensations are reversals of the original tendency. Compulsive modesty covers greed and cockiness hides inner shakiness.

Consider what the situation would be if you hadn’t got out of bed this morning. What would happen in a certain situation if, for once, you said “no” instead of “yes”? What if you were four inches taller? Or twenty pounds leaner? What if you were a man instead of a woman or vice versa?

Every credit is a debit, a transfer from somewhere. Nature does her bookkeeping by double-entry. Every addition is somewhere a subtraction. The food we wrest from the soil impoverishes the soil, and by disregarding this obvious reversal man has made barren areas and dustbowls. So, think of something you have acquired and consider where it has been lost somewhere else. What if you had failed to get it? And, with regard to something you didn’t obtain, what would now be the situation if you had?

Reactions to this experiment fall roughly into two classes. For a majority it is a release from the “straitjacket” of the actuality experiment and a chance “to use the imagination.” For others it is a “foolish messing around with what all the time you know isn’t so,” or an uncalled for interruption of the tried and true policy of “letting sleeping dogs lie.” For instance:

“. . . . In any event, I had too many years when my opinions were dispassionately formless; all I can say is that I felt like a lost soul. With accumulation of experience I began to have my own opinions formed on empiricism and for the first time began to feel some sense of direction. In other words, I became ‘hidebound.’ All right! But that’s better than feeling like an amoeba. It seems more important to consider the accuracy of decisions an individual makes, rather than demand a chronic state of analysis. What is accurate? Evidently, what is considered eminently sensible by the society, a consensus of opinion. Has society any monopoly on truth? Probably not, but you cannot depart publicly too radically from the consensus. After all, despite the lack of funds and the over-crowded conditions of state hospitals, there is only so much bizarre behavior you can get away with before you find yourself committed.”

Can we venture a guess at the premise which must underlie such statements? At the very least, they imply that one had better toe the mark of conventional behavior pretty carefully, on pain of being shut away in a psychiatric hospital. To be sure, bizarre behavior can lead to commitment—and thought is a form of behavior. But is it reasonable to view what you have been asked to do in this experiment as bringing you dangerously close to the brink? Or may we say that here is a man who feels obliged to summon up pretty frightful bogeymen to keep himself walking a chalk-line?

Some persons make difficulties for themselves by demanding that they be able to find something that is, in literal detail, the exact opposite of something else. For example:

“I am typing. What is its opposite? Now I’m balked. What is the opposite of typing? Not typing. But that is just negation and doesn’t leave anything. So I try various situations as opposites to typing, but none fits. Is canoeing the opposite of typing? Is conducting an orchestra its opposite? True, they’re not typing, but they’re also not its opposite.”

Now, for any highly differentiated activity or structure there is no reason at all to suppose that by looking around one can find another activity or structure which would be for it a perfect match in reverse. But, to stick with typing, consider what you do. You put words on paper. What is the opposite? You take them off— that is, you erase. Or, again, what are you typing? Perhaps a letter accepting a job. What is its opposite? A letter of resignation. Or, to shift the context again, the opposite of typing is to get someone else to do your typing. That the validity of opposites depends upon appropriate context is a point to which we shall return shortly.

For some it is the height of absurdity to suppose that altering the position or sequence of letters in a line of type should pose a problem for anyone, but consider the following:

“When reversing such details as “p” to “q”, etc., I found that disturbing, too. It was the same reaction I get when seeing a person opening a can or a package of cigarettes upside down. For me things have to be precisely as they ought to be—that is, the correct way. When I get in bed at night I can’t go to sleep if I know that a drawer is open or the door to the closet is not shut. It’s something that’s wrong, something that should not be.”

Another student had still greater trouble with the letter-reversals:

“When I turned letters around I became nervous. My heart began to beat faster and my eyes began to water. Since I was just looking at words on a page and trying to imagine how they would look twisted around, I thought maybe somehow I was straining my eyes to do it. So I tried writing them down in reverse and then looking at them—but after that my eyes watered so much I couldn't even look at them! That’s crazy! What are you doing to us with these experiments?”

“Creative pre-commitment” can be misconstrued to be a state of chronic indecisiveness, rather than the phase of orienting to diverse possibilities and actualities, or even, after trying out one unsuccessful plan of action, of returning to the zero-point to reorient with respect to other possibilities. A student said, “The attitude of seeing both sides ultimately results in an aloofness from reality.” Perhaps he is referring to the trick of pitting one argument against another as an excuse for not taking action and, if so, we would agree with him that this involves “aloofness from reality”; but we would say that it is the need to be aloof which gives rise to and supports this stratagem rather than the other way around.

In trying to reverse one of his important life-situations a student reports as follows:

“The real situation is this: my sweetheart is coming home soon, after being over in Europe for nearly nine months, and when she does we’re going to get married. I have the just-can't-wait feeling about it all.

“Now if I try to imagine having opposite ‘wishes and inclinations’ I come up with something like this: I don’t want her to come home; I don’t love her; I’d rather run around with lots of new girls for another few years. Now that I’ve written this, I see there’s a little truth in the last thing I said.

“That leads me to criticize what you said about the numbers that algebraically approach zero and then increase again, only this time negative in value. This is a pretty complicated way to say something unimportant. Furthermore, it’s wrong, because the truth about a situation is spread pretty well over the whole continuum. One side is not all positive, or all negative, and therefore what you said is misleading. . . . Then again, perhaps only to me.”

We can use the above excerpt to illustrate several points. The first paragraph states this young man’s official position with respect to his coming marriage—namely, he was completely sold on it. Then, in the very process of typing statements expressing the opposite situation, he recognized that he also possessed some contradictory feelings where previously he had suspected none. With little reading between the lines it may be inferred that he then became angry with us for having led him to this unwelcome insight, for he at once attacked some of our statements. Finally, having expressed his aggression appropriately—that is, directly to the very ones who roused it in him—the air was cleared and he could in the end acknowledge that perhaps his objections were highly personal.

Another man, a prospective father, by the reversal-experiment foresaw that the little “credit” who was on the way would also entail some debits:

“My wife and I are planning a family, and I look forward with great eagerness to the prospect of having a child. To picture a situation where I could not stand such a prospect, I dwelt upon—and was surprised at how readily they occurred to me!—the loss of freedom, disturbances in the middle of the night, medical expense, and all the other possible disadvantages. I genuinely realized the truth of the statement, ‘There are no credits without debits.’”

Some reversals have a nightmarish quality. A zoology student reported, “I am not dissecting the fetal pig. Now it is dissecting me!” If you will notice your dreams, you will discover that you can make sense of a great many by treating them as reversal experiments spontaneously performed. In dreams, the resister gets a chance to express himself more openly, but he does it in a language which you, the awake personality, find largely incomprehensible.

Daydreams, too, are spontaneous reversal experiments, and their meaning is usually much more obvious. What we fantasy ordinarily is the reverse of a present frustration. If broke, we fantasy winning the sweepstakes. If jilted, we wallow in fantasied revenge. If we fee! like a nobody, our daydreams put the world at our feet. There is nothing baneful in daydreams provided they do not crowd out “real life” efforts. If given to daydreaming, you can learn from their content what the areas are in which you feel yourself frustrated— that is, you can learn more clearly the direction of your needs.

If, for instance, you daydream about being in love with a famous film star, this may indicate, not that you need the film star, bur that you would find it rewarding to cultivate your acquaintance with that attractive person who lives down the street. If you daydream about becoming a famous author, you probably have latent talents in this direction worth developing. When you follow up in a practical way the suggestions of daydreams, the outcome, while less grandiose than the fantasy, will be much more adequate in ministering to your genuine needs.

A student reversed some situations in which she had become angry at people. She reports, “Some of them made me laugh out loud. There was relief, as if now I was through with them.”

Some persons report disturbance when they attempt to imagine hating someone they love. Others cannot conceive of such a possibility. One man, who tried to imagine hating his wife and could not, commented, “Perhaps this is a form of ‘shrinking from completing the experiment’—but, after all, it’s still less than a year since I was married!”

There are several reversals which, are especially likely to produce blocking and going blank. One is the attempt to imagine oneself as being of the opposite sex. Another, which might be a good one for you to try, is to attempt to reverse roles with your parents. A student, who tried out reversals in company with her mother, states that things went swimmingly, each of them suggesting situations for the other to reverse, until the mother suggested reversal of the mother-daughter relation. “At this point,” the student said, “my imagination dried up completely.”

Some persons imagine situations so vividly that they can feel the beginnings of what would be the appropriate overt behavior:

“I worked as a waitress last summer. For this experiment I thought of myself as a waitress who sat down at a table while a customer waited on me. Even though realizing the irreality, I could feel the muscles of my legs become tense in the effort to inhibit the impulse to get up and correct the situation.”

Now let us look a little more closely at what you do when you treat two situations as contrasting opposites. Whether aware of it or not, you put them in some context which includes both. So, having acquired the knack of reversing, try to sharpen the exactness of the oppositions by thinking up the precise context. For instance, “fresh” has an antithesis “rotten” in the context of eggs, but “modest” in the context of character, and “seasoned” in the context of lumber or of college slang (“frosh”). Producing the precise context will give you improved orientation. You will begin to notice without effort important connections where previously you had to search for them. Most important, the contrasts themselves will begin to appear as functional relations between the opposites—that is, they will begin to generate their own explanations. For instance, mirror-images may be understood as reversed from left to right because of the nature of the reflection, whereas camera-images are reversed both from left to right and also from top to bottom by the action of the lens.

Notice how the quality of a situation—happy or tragic, attractive or repellent—depends on the context. If to think of the loss of something you have makes you sad, try to think of someone—for example, an enemy—whom it would make glad. Once again take note of the main purpose of the experiment—to discover the circumstances or the persons that make it difficult for you, even in fantasy, to make reversals. Where do you find that you set in motion resistances to your own free activity? Do you love your parents? Then imagine in what circumstances you would hate them. Does your friend bully you? Then imagine bullying him. Can you do it? Watch for the point where anxiety, fear, or disgust comes to the foreground and makes you shrink from carrying through the experiment.

For the most part, our “obvious” preferences and “natural” ways of looking at things are mere hand-me-downs. They become routine and “right” because we hold back from even imagining the opposite. Where people lack imagination it is always because they are afraid even to play with the possibility of something different from the matter-of-fact to which they cling for dear life. The ability to achieve and maintain an interested impartiality between imagined opposites, however absurd one side may seem, is essential for any new creative solution of problems.

Perhaps we can make sure that this point is clear by taking a look at the behavior of political parties in a democracy with respect to some national issue. Since each party-position is espoused by a large portion of the population, it is most improbable that complete wisdom on the matter rests with either side. Neither of the “solution*;” offered is likely to be a creative solution in which nothing valuable is lost. Yet each party is so immersed in its vote-getting and other obligations that it cannot be interestedly impartial, cannot think of the opposition in its precise context, cannot change the context. Almost surely this means that there are ambitions and vested interests that are not allowed to come into the foreground of awareness.

Experiment 3: Attending and Concentrating

The preceding two experiments were opposites. In trying to heighten your feeling of actuality you narrowed down interest to your now-here, while, on the other hand, any success in getting the sense that there are in your personality forces opposed to each other depended on widening your perspective beyond your accustomed interpretations and evaluations of things. But the aim of both was the same: namely, to help you become aware of resistances (blanknesses, counter-emotions, and other behavioral difficulties) encountered in trying seriously to carry out the experiments.

If these resistances have been severe enough to make you feel somewhat helpless and inadequate to the tasks, there is no need to be despondent. When you blocked or went blank, you may have complained, “It’s because I can’t concentrate,” and with this we would agree, but not in the conventional sense. Inability to concentrate comes from years of carefully learning to hold parts of your personality at bay as if otherwise they would ferociously eat you up. Then, when these parts are needed for something you try to do, you cannot beckon them back by the mere crooking of a finger. It does no good for people to insist that you “pull yourself together." It does not make it any more feasible even if it is a psychoanalyst who says, “Just relax, don’t censor, and remember the details of your childhood.” Except very superficially, these things cannot be done by deliberate decision!

What can be done is what you have started to do in these experiments—that is, to become aware of your efforts and reactions and to acquire toward them an attitude of “creative precommitment.”

First, let us distinguish between what is habitually called concentration and what is genuinely healthy, organic concentration. In our society concentration is regarded as a deliberate, strenuous, compulsive effort—something you make yourself do. This is to be expected where people are forever neurotically commanding, conquering and compelling themselves. On the other hand, healthy, organic concentration usually is not called concentration at all, but, on those comparatively rare occasions when it does occur, is named attraction, interest, fascination or absorption.

Watch children at their games and you will see that they are concentrating on what they are doing to such a degree that it is difficult to draw their attention away. You will notice also that they are excited about what they are doing. These two factors—attention to the object or activity and the excitement of satisfying need, interest or desire through what one is attentive to—are the substance of healthy concentration.

In deliberate concentration we “pay” attention where we feel we “ought to,” at the same time withholding attention from other needs or interests. In spontaneous concentration what we are attentive to attracts to itself and includes the full range of our present interests. When we “have to” undertake a particular task, we are fortunate if deliberate concentration can turn into spontaneous concentration and draw freely on more and more of our powers until the task is finished.

Where the personality is divided with respect to a given situation, so that the part which attempts the task is confronted with a sabotaging resister, one’s full power cannot flow freely to the object of attention, for parr of it is already fixed on something else—perhaps precisely on interfering with and preventing the completion of the “chosen” task. Such interference the deliberately concentrating person will experience as “distraction,” and he then has to use a portion of his deliberately available energy to reduce to a minimum the disruptive influence of the distraction. Carefully note what happens here in terms of his total energy as an organism. His total energy is suffering a three-way division: part goes to the task, part goes to energizing the resister, and part goes into fighting the resister. Also note that what, to the deliberately concentrating person, constitute “detractions,” to the resisting part are attractions elsewhere—toward something other than the task or toward fighting rather than accomplishing the task. As more and more of one’s total energy gets committed to the battle over the “attractive distracter,” and less and less of it remains available for proceeding along the deliberately chosen line, one experiences mounting irritability and temper until one either abandons the task as a bad job or explodes.

In other words, when one forces oneself to attend to what does not of itself draw one’s interest, excitement accumulates, not toward this “chosen” object of attention, but in the struggle over the “distraction” which might really fire one’s interest. (When this mounting excitement finally explodes as anger, one often turns it against some innocent bystander, as if he were the distracter.) Meantime, as more and more of the excitement of attentiveness becomes committed to suppressing the disturber, what one is deliberately concentrating on is correspondingly more and more drained of interest. In short, it is boring.

Boredom occurs, then, when attention is deliberately paid to something lacking interest. The situation that could become interesting is effectively blocked. The result is fatigue and, eventually, trance. Suddenly attention switches from the boring situation to daydreaming.

The sign of spontaneous attention and concentration is the progressive forming of a figure/ground, whether the situation be one of sensing something, making a plan, imagining, remembering, or practical activity. If both attention and excitement are present and working together, the object of attention becomes more and more a unified, bright, sharp figure against a more and more empty, unnoticed, uninteresting ground. This form of unified figure against an empty ground has been called a “good gestalt.’’

But the gestalt-psychologists themselves have not, on the whole, been sufficiently interested in the meaning of the ground. The ground is everything that is progressively eliminated from attention in the experienced situation. In the figure/ground what is included in figure and what in ground does not remain static, but changes in the course of a dynamic development.

Consider such a simple experience as observing some visual shape— for instance, a square on a blackboard. When the square becomes sharp and clear, the “everything-eliminated” comes to include the blackboard, the room, one’s own body, any sensations other than this particular seeing and any interest other than this momentary interest in the square. For the gestalt to be unified and bright—a so-called “strong gestalt”—all this varied background must become progressively empty and unattractive. The brightness and clarity of the figure is the energy of the excitement-of-seeing-the-square which is freely being drawn from the emptying background.

A crude analogy might be to think of one’s diffuse attentiveness at the start of the figure/ground process as similar to light transmitted through a pane of glass and shining on a relatively large area. No part of the area is more brightly lighted than the rest. Then, if it were possible for the pane of glass gradually to form itself into a lens, the area as a whole would darken while the spot on which the lens was focused would gradually brighten. No more energy in terms of light units would be required, but the rays would more and more converge from the periphery into the bright spot and intensify the energy there. Where this analogy obviously falls short of the figure/ground situation is that we have hypothesized nothing which would select the particular spot for the lens to focus on or the sharpness of its focus. In the organism/environment situation it is, of course, the relevance of environmental objects to the organism’s needs which determines the figure/ground process. In this connection, our example of a square on a blackboard is trivial unless we think up some extraordinary circumstances. We use it only to indicate that the figure/ground process is not reserved for what is unusual or dramatic.

What we have said above about the formation of a gestalt we suggest that you verify and practice as follows:

For a brief period pay attention to some visual object—for example, a chair. As you look at it, notice how it clarifies itself by dimming out the space and objects around it. Then turn to some other nearby visual object and observe how this, in turn, begins to have quite a different background. Likewise, attend to some sound that is occurring and notice how other sounds form a background. Finally, attend to some body-feeling, such as a twinge or itch, and observe how here, too, the rest of your body-feeling recedes into the background.

The dynamic, free-flowing relation between figure and ground can be interrupted, obviously, in either of two ways: (a) the figure can become too fixedly attended to so that new interest is not allowed to enter into it from the ground (this is what occurs in compulsively deliberate attentiveness); or (b) the background can contain points of powerful attraction which cannot be emptied of interest, in which circumstance they actually distract or must be suppressed. Let us experiment with each case in turn:

(a) Stare fixedly at any shape, trying to grasp precisely this shape by itself and nothing else. You will observe that soon it becomes unclear and you want to let your attention wander. On the other hand, if you let your gaze play around the shape, always returning to it in the varying backgrounds, the shape will be unified in these successive differentiations, will become clearer, and will be seen better.

Just as when stared at, an object is unclear when it has gained attention by brute excitation of a receptor; for example, the continued howling of a siren. It is not the physical violence that causes “fatigue” but the essential lack of interest—one’s inability to draw something more into the figure from the ground. If a composer wishes to maintain a fortissimo—perhaps far louder than the siren— he keeps attention by varying the timbres and the harmony. Similarly, in spontaneously studying a picture or piece of sculpture, we let our eyes drift across it or we move around it. If we do not permit free change and play of observation, awareness is dulled. Thus, in deliberate concentration which does not tend to become spontaneous, there is fatigue, flight, and, to make up for it, staring.

During the war a number of fliers complained to us of intense headaches during night landings. This was due to staring. When taught to allow small eye-movements by looking here and there about the landing strip—that is, when they stopped staring—they found they no longer had headaches and their vision was sharpened. When staring is persisted in up to the point of complete disappearance of the figure/ground, the result may be blotting out of awareness altogether; that is, hypnotic trance.

(b) The opposite difficulty in freely forming a figure/ground is the inability to empty the ground, with the result that the figure falls short of becoming unified. The extreme of this would be the experience of chaos. To experience your environment as chaos is not easy, because, for practical living, you must always find differentiated unities (gestalts). Possibly you have this feeling of chaos, though, in experiencing some works of modern art which do not, in terms of your past training, provide points of attention. You then flee from the chaotic feeling because you find it painful or ludicrous. The experiments below should help you to confront such experiences with a more free-floating attentiveness and acceptance, so that the meaning of the art-work can develop itself and not be rejected only because you steadfastly cling to previous notions:

Select an impatience-situation; for example, when you are waiting for someone or waiting for a bus. Let yourself freely see and hear the figures and grounds in the environment as instructed in the experiments above—that is, shift about from one to another. You will notice that the amount of excitement involved in the still-continuing impatience-situation (for instance, your mounting anxiety at the lateness of the hour) will diminish the amount of interest you can invest in attention to other matters. Persisting, nevertheless, in noting what is about you (but without forcing an artificial concentration on any one thing), let yourself begin to feel the chaotic meaninglessness of the environment. As always, notice your resistances, blanking out, daydreaming.

The environment as such is not, of course, meaningless. If you have by now acquired a good sense of actuality, you will be able to say, “Here and now there are people and things to be observed. Waiting for the bus is now part of the background. I am now impatient.” Then, since nothing is to be gained from the impatience itself—it will not make the person or the bus arrive—you may as well make use of the time and achieve a creative pre-commitment in the actual situation.

Often, under the most favorable of life-situations, there are occasions where the ground contains strong attractions of which we may or may nor he aware, but where we must, nevertheless, deliberately concentrate on some task. In this case, the mistake is to have too rigid an attitude toward the duty and to suppress too sternly the distracters—for then the foreground will become less and less clear and attractive. If we are more lenient with ourselves, we are more likely to work up an efficient interest in the task. For instance, a student who had tremendous difficulty in cramming (a kind of “learning” which by definition excludes interest) managed the job by interrupting himself from time to rime and deliberately allowing a few minutes of daydreaming.

Let us now, in the context of the theory of psychotherapy, consider the two obstacles to spontaneous concentration—the too- fixed figure and the too-charged ground. In therapy the aim is to shift the “inner conflict” that between impulse and the counterattacking resistance, into an open, aware conflict. Suppose that, as therapist, we concentrate and ask the patient to concentrate on his resistances. These are stubborn and combative, and the attempt to keep them under surveillance will have to be forced and a kind of starring. But such forced concentration—peering at and staring at what does not want to be seen—is itself disintegrative and compulsive. It teaches the patient, for instance, to be “morbidly introspective.”

Instead of admonishing the patient to concentrate on resistances, suppose we follow the older Freudian method of free floating attention, free-association, and the like. This is spontaneous and unforced, and it reveals the hidden impulses (the charged background) in complexes, etc. But such “free” techniques lead to a flight of ideas; they avoid what are precisely the critical points— the conflicts with the resistances—and the technique of free-association becomes a training in free-dissociation. The therapist is led a merry chase. The thoughts and symbols produced all seem relevant to the hidden problem, but they deceptively go round and round and in every direction.

What is necessary is for the therapist to find some definite context, and then, keeping always to this, to allow a freer play between figure and ground—avoiding staring at the resistances, yet not allowing the patient to wander everywhere. In orthodox psychoanalysis such a definite context is regarded as given in the “transference,” the erotic attachment to and hatred for the therapist, for this is an observable and more or less controllable life-situation. In our method we use, instead, the experimental situation of the therapeutic session as the context. On what is a more general and a better basis, you may use as context your actuality— your present-day situation, its needs and aims. The more complete the felt-contact between you and your environment, and the more honestly you feel and express to yourself your feelings of desire, loathing, coldness, boredom, disgust, with the persons and things you come in touch with, the more you will have a relevant context in which the “inner conflict” will emerge during the experiments.

The following will facilitate your felt-contact with the environment:

Let your attention shift from one object to another, noticing figure and background in the object—and in your emotions. Verbalize the emotions each time, as, “I like this" or “I dislike this.” Also, differentiate the object into its parts: “It is this in it I like, but that I dislike.” And, finally, when this much comes naturally to you, differentiate your emotions, thus: “For this I feel disgust” or “For this I feel hatred,” etc.

The resistances you are likely to encounter in yourself during this experiment are embarrassment, self-consciousness, the feeling of being too harsh, presumptuous, nasty, or perhaps the wish to be paid attention rather than give attention. If, with respect to the persons you are in contact with, these resistances should become too strong to tolerate and tempt you to abandon the experiment, restrict yourself for a time to animals and inanimate objects.

In reporting on the first parts of this experiment most persons express relief that "here at last is something tangible." With respect, however, to differentiating figure and ground in their emotions, the results vary. Many insist that they “get no emotional effects at all,” and a few claim that “it would take a lot more than this to get me emotional.” On the other hand, some make statements such as this:

“As for differentiating emotions, I don’t think I’m quite ready to do this. When I think of a person and try to say that I hate him, I feel too guilty. This happens even with inanimate objects. When I tried to acknowledge that I hate a certain modern painting, I felt I was being unfair—not giving it a chance. I also felt bad because it was done by my friend’s father.”

Some had difficulty because for them anything that goes by the name of emotion must attain Wagnerian intensity. As we shall later try to show in the experiment which singles out emotions for special attention, there is continuity in the emotional life, although admittedly there are great fluctuations in its forcefulness.

One student used an ingenious approach which you might find worth trying:

“I found it very difficult to verbalize likes, dislikes, and emotional effects in general to inert objects. I got a feeling of doubt that any object could engender this sort of experience. Some objects seemed to be just utterly neutral in their affecting properties.

“Then, getting no results, I finally began assigning emotions arbitrarily to each object. After I did this I started to feel these emotions as genuine and I almost forgot that the assignment of them had been arbitrary. It sort of scared me to see how easily I could fool myself into believing that I was having emotions."

What do you consider more likely here—that the emotions which felt genuine were only faked or that the original assignment of emotions was not so arbitrary after all?

The following illustrates a common phenomenon—the surprise at discovering that one's emotions are what they are rather than what one supposed them to be:

“The emotional differentiation was performed in a crowded subway car, and I uncovered considerable aggression toward the other passengers. Instead of feeling ashamed or abashed about this, I confess I rather enjoyed it and actually felt the desire to tell them what I thought of them. Later, in a less annoying environment, I reviewed it—and then I experienced the blocks (shame, desire to dilute these feelings, etc.) which I would have expected to have in the original situation but didn’t.”

From still another comes a statement worthy of consideration as showing the common tendency to condemn emotion in one’s usual behavior and to take pride in being emotionally unmoved:

“The ‘intolerable’ resistance I was supposed to encounter in my felt-contact with the environment simply did not occur. Only once did anything of the sort emerge. Once, trying the experiment while talking in a group, I became aware of the wish to be paid attention rather than to give attention. But all that resulted was a smile, and I quickly forgot it.”

Where one recognizes unfriendly emotion in oneself, there is a strong urge to assign it to something which one may quickly “’discount and forget,” as in the following:

“I was sitting near my father-in-law. I began to notice the figure and background and then to verbalize (to myself) the emotions. ‘I like him . . .’ but, as I said it, I felt some sort of anxiety arise which could be expressed in these words, ‘I dislike something in this figure.’ It seemed to be a vague fear. At this point I terminated the experiment and only after later re-examination considered it definitely to be a fear reaction. Upon further pondering of this point and taking into consideration that my relationship with my father-in-law had been always on the best of terms, I looked a little further for his reaction and its reason. One (perhaps ‘the’) reason is that my wife and her sister I have often heard tales of their father.. strictness when they were younger. This may have built up a prearranged reaction, although based on nothing concrete.”

If this father antagonized both his daughters when they were growing up, is it not probable that he is still a person who might be disliked directly rather than by hearsay?

The following is an example of what happens when one tries to divide one’s attention among several persons who are competing for it:

“When I permitted the ‘chaos of divided attention,’ I felt angry and frustrated. My husband insists that I listen to him when he is holding forth on some theory, even at times when the children are concocting some situation which, if consummated, will be serious. I am torn between self-pride—the wish to answer him intelligently— and wanting to protect the children. This conflict quickly becomes intolerable, and is then resolved by shifting my full attention to the children.”

Sometimes we fail to notice and express our emotion because it might give someone too much pleasure. Can you detect this in the following final excerpt:

“Today I concentrated on a friend’s Cadillac, which he has owned and been tremendously proud of for over a year, and which I’ve frequently ridden in. I had always been a trifle scornful of his great pride of ownership. For the first time I really noticed the beautiful lines and curves of its construction, and its magnificent functional capabilities. I received an esthetic emotion that I never would have expected a car would arouse. My pleasure from this was exceeded by my friend’s when I made a sincere and spontaneous comment on the car’s beauty. A small incident, perhaps, but I found it indicative of the new areas of experience that true awareness can open for me.”

Experiment 4: Differentiating and Unifying

When spontaneous attention is directed to an object, so that it brightens as figure and the background darkens, the object simultaneously becomes more unified but also more detailed. While more and more details are noticed and analyzed one by one, at the same time they become more organized in their relations to each other. In contrast, forced attention gives a skimpy figure and divided attention gives chaos.

The object of spontaneous concentration seems increasingly concrete and just itself. Correspondingly, it grows more “meaningful” in the sense that it becomes more and more the carrier of functions and importances that are matters of excited concern to the organism. For a classic example, consider (if you are in love) the person with whom you are in love.

Spontaneous concentration is contact with the environment. The actual situation is organized in a way that is detailed, structured, vivid, concernful.

In the following experiment, while maintaining here-and-now actuality as your context, you are to let your attention freely play about an object. The continuously shifting figures and grounds will sharpen your appreciation of the difference between staring and looking, between dulling trance and alive participation.

For an illustration, let us consider such an ordinary object as a pencil. (You will later go through the same procedure with objects of your own spontaneous selection.) Notice first that the pencil is this unique thing. There are other pencils, to be sure, but not this very one. Say its name, “pencil,” and realize vividly that the thing is not the word. The pencil as thing is non-verbal.

Next, notice as many as you can of the qualities and properties that inhere in and constitute this thing—the cylinder of black graphite, the reddish wood, the weight, hardness, smoothness; the way it is sharpened, the yellow it is painted; the fact that its wood forms a hexagonal prism; the trade-mark, the rubber eraser and the metal which crimps it to the wood.

Next, review its functions and possible roles in the environment —for writing, for pointing out a passage, for wetting with one’s tongue or biting on, for sale as a piece of merchandise. Also, think of its more “accidental’ roles—to bum if the house bums, to dig into a child’s eye if he runs with it and falls; also, its more far-fetched and fantastic uses—to send to someone as a Christmas present or to feed hungry' termites.

As you abstract from this unique thing, this pencil, its many qualities and functions, note how in detail they go together or cohere as a structure—for example, the wood firmly holds and protects the graphite and is gripped by the writing hand.

Now try this out on something of your own choosing.

In principle this is the experiment that the philosopher Descartes carried out on an object formed by a piece of wax melted from a candle. Since this was malleable between his fingers, the shape was more “accidental” than that of our pencil. He concluded that certain properties of the thing—for instance, its mass and spatial extension—were absolutely permanent in it. These he called “primary.” Other properties, such as the color, he deemed “secondary.” We are not presently concerned with metaphysics, and the soundness of his conclusions is therefore not in question. What we are interested in is to realize, by freely attending to them, the various levels of abstraction—the “thisness” of the thing, this shade of yellow as distinguished from all other yellow paint in the world, the more obvious and “intended” functions, the more accidental, far-fetched and fantastic uses—and to make as many as possible of these came together and cohere in the present experience. Thus, if consideration of an object should lead to a fantasy, keep the fantasy always returning to and connected with the present experienced object.

Although the unique thing is non-verbal, as we stated above, nevertheless, its importance and concern for you are given in properties and functions that you can verbalize—that are “abstractions” from unique things and, as words, cover many cases besides the present unique thing. You might write with many other things besides this pencil; the merchant who sold it makes a profit as well on many other kinds of merchandise. This pencil, because its properties, qualities, importance, are shared by so many other objects, is not an object which can give rise to limitlessly rich, spontaneous concentration or fascination. On the other hand, a beloved person or a great painting seem unique both in their “thisness” and in their properties and functions. With them one gets into “closer contact,” and it is less easy to abstract.

Suppose you try the experiment with a painting you like. Notice the lines and the drawing apart from the objects painted and the colors; for example, trace the outlines of the main figures and observe the pattern they form. Examine the pattern formed by the empty spaces between the outlines of the main objects. See the pattern produced by each color in turn—abstract the patch of blue, of yellow, of red. If the picture gives an illusion of three- dimensionality, follow the receding planes—the pattern of the foreground, of the middle-ground, of the background. Trace out the pattern of lights and shadows. Note the way that material is indicated by the texture of the brushstrokes. Last of all, look at the story or scene portrayed, for this is where most people begin to look at a painting and become fixed.

If you do as suggested and have liked the painting to start with, you will find that it suddenly begins to swim toward you with a new beauty and fascination. All kinds of new relations among the parts suddenly seem “inevitable” or “just right.” You will begin to partake of some of the constructive joy of the artist. Now you will be aware of the painting with spontaneous concentration—the details and their unity will be evident without painfully taking them apart and putting them together. This single, immediate grasp of the differentiated unity means that you are in contact with the painting.

Try the same experiment with a piece of music. If not musically trained and if you regard yourself as “unmusical,” notice first how difficult it is for you to keep in contact with the music at all; the sounds soon degenerate into chaos and you into trance. In this case (what is best is to play a record over again and again) abstract first the appearances of a single instrument. Then pay attention to the rhythm only; the timbre only. Detect what seems to be the melody and what the accompaniment. Often you will find that there are other “inner” melodies that you had nor expected. Abstract the harmony as you feel it; that is, notice when the harmony seems unresolved. seems to call for something more to come after it, and when, on the contrary, it seems to resolve and “close.” Provided you do this seriously, suddenly all music will come alive for you.

As your next experiment:

Pay attention to someone’s voice. How does it sound? Monotonous5 Varying? High pitched? Strident? Melodious? Too soft in volume5 Careless in articulation and hard to understand? Too loud? Flowing or faltering? Forced? Easy? Now ask yourself two questions: first, what is your own emotional reaction to the particular qualities of that voice? Are you, for instance, irritated at the too-soft tone, frozen by the loudness? Second, what is the emotional background in the other person that produces the particular qualities in his voice? Is he whining, oily, sexy, angry? It often happens that, quite unaware of what he is doing, and often in contradiction to what he is saying, this other person is trying to produce in you, with his voice quality, precisely the reaction that he does produce! His words may be of a calm, take-it-or-leave-it kind, but his voice cajoling. Or the words may be wooing words, but the voice angry and freezing.

Can you now try to pay attention to the sound of your own voice? This is very difficult, as shown by the fact that our voices heard for the first time on records seem quite alien to us. But be aware of the difficulties you encounter in the attempt.

The Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius, recommends an experiment similar to ours with the pencil. In his words:

“Make a particular description and delineation, as it were, of every object that presents itself to thy mind, that thou mayest wholly and thoroughly contemplate it, in its proper nature, bare and naked; wholly and severally: divided into its several parts and quarters; and then by thyself in thy mind, call both it and those parts of which it doth consist, and in which it shall be resolved, by their proper names and appellations. For there is nothing so effectual to get true magnanimity [what we would call “largeness of personality”] as to be able truly and methodically to examine and consider all things, and so to penetrate into their natures.” (Meditations, HI, 11).

Notice that the process we have been describing, by which one arrives at differentiated unity, is one of taking things apart and putting them back together—a kind of aggressive destructiveness and reconstructiveness! It is the destructive aspect which scares away people who have been taught to regard anything that goes by this or any kindred name as unwarranted, cruel, brutal, wrong. They must not interfere with things, but must let them stand unquestioned and unexamined. Those who follow such a concept imply that such investigation as was necessary to establish an evaluation that is to be correct for all time has presumably already been made by other and wiser persons, and to look into matters afresh from the standpoint of one’s personal experiencing of them is presumptuous and worthy of condemnation.

What is neglected in this petrified attitude is the fact, quite obvious in minor matters, that for any kind of creative reconstruction to occur there must first to some degree be a de-structuring of what already exists. The present parts of a given object, activity or situation must be recombined in a fashion more adequate to the requirements of the here-and-now actuality. This does not necessarily involve a devaluation of any of the present parts, but rather a re-evaluation of how they need to go together. Apart from detailed analysis and taking apart (destruction), there can be no close contact, excited discovering, and true love for any object (which, as we use the term, always includes persons).

When we spoke earlier of abstracting detail after detail from a painting, this was the preliminary destruction of the painting prerequisite for heightened appreciation. Destruction and reconstruction refer here, not to literal reduction to fragments of the physical object, but to our own behavior with respect to the object.

Close friendship is possible only if certain barriers can be destroyed so that the persons can “come to an understanding.” Such coming to an understanding requires that the other person be explored in a fashion somewhat similar to your study of the painting, so that his parts become reconstituted in relation to one’s own background needs, and these, precisely in contact with the other person, now become foreground and figure. To put this in terms to which we shall return later, there can be no assimilation without prior destruction (dc-structuring); otherwise, the experience is swallowed whole (introjected), never becomes our own—and does not nourish us.

Now, just as you did for seeing and hearing, but in a more sketchy way, try the experiment of detailed abstraction with your “closer” senses of touch, smell, taste and the proprioception of your own muscular actions. With these closer senses you will find that emotional factors very quickly become involved and that you soon resist or flee from the experiment. Upon discovering this, do not force yourself to continue, but proceed with the next experiment.

By way of approach to a full awakening of your closer senses, suppose you do an experiment on your eating. We shall at this point suggest no changes other than that you concentrate on your food. (Asa rare exception, you may do this already.)

Take stock of your eating habits. Where do you tend to concentrate while eating—on your food? On a book? On the conversation (perhaps talking and forgetting to eat)? Do you taste your first bite only or do you keep in contact with the taste through the whole course? Do you chew thoroughly? Do you tear the food off? Do you bite through it? What are your likes and dislikes? Do you force yourself to cat what partly disgusts you (perhaps because you have been told it is good for you)? Do you adventure with new foods? Does the presence of particular persons influence your appetite?

Notice the relation between the taste of your food and the “taste-” of the world. If your food tastes like straw, the world probably seems equally dull. If you relish your food, then the world, also, very likely seems interesting. Do nor in the course of this inventory of your eating habits attempt to rectify any of them other than to eliminate such severe distractions as reading. It is only man who ever comes to regard eating as a necessary evil or an emergency refueling. After all, it is a very important biological and (although we are not emphasizing this aspect here) social function. One certainly would not be tempted to read during the important biological and social function of sexual intercourse. Earing, sexuality—and, as we shall see later, breathing —are decisive in the operation of the organism and are worth attending to.

Against concentration on eating you are most likely to mobilize the resistances of impatience and disgust. With both of these we shall deal later in connection with “introjections.” Just now try to achieve what seems so simple and is, nonetheless, so difficult—awareness of the fact that you are eating when you are eating.

This experiment on differentiated unity, which concludes a series of four devoted to improving your contact with the environment, is the first one to which the reaction of nearly all persons is, at least to some extent and in some areas, positive. Comments range from the claim that what is involved here is nothing more than a systematic approach to what the person has already been doing all his life to statements such as: “After all these years of going to concerts and taking music lessons, for the first time I hear music!”

Fairly frequently criticism is made of our use of the word “destruction” in a favorable or approving sense. For instance: “‘Destruction’ has a wanton and anti-social connotation. Why don’t you find some word which means ‘taking apart for the purpose of putting together again in a better way’? I can readily see that to reconstruct necessitates a prior ‘destruction,’ as you call it, of what is to be reconstructed, but why use such an offensive name for it?”

No alternative word has thus far been proposed. What has been offered several times is a long sequence of words which practically duplicates the dictionary’s definition of “destruction.” What could be done, of course, is to coin a new term which would mean precisely what we intend, but then there would arise the louder hue and cry about “scientific gobbledy-gook” and the irritated query: “Why don’t you speak English?”

All this could be and is said just as cogently about such a word as “aggression.” This, to the editorial writer, means “unprovoked attack.” But, while this specialized meaning dominates current usage of “aggression” in everyday life, its broader meaning, as intended by the clinician, for example, includes everything that an organism does to initiate contact with its environment.

We believe that if new words were made up for what clinicians intend by “destruction" and “aggression,” these, too, would eventually acquire the same offensive connotations, because, in our early training for full membership in the tribe, we are taught to condemn in others and ourselves not only “wanton destruction” and “unprovoked aggression,” but also forms of destructiveness and aggressiveness which are necessary to the health of the organism. Were this not the ease, our social scene could change more rapidly and convincingly in the direction of “the good life.”

All in all, is it not perhaps advisable to retain strong, efficient words like “aggression” and “destruction,” and meanwhile perform some “aggressive destruction” on the barriers which tend to restrict them to the specialized meaning of something obviously and unquestionably to be condemned?

Our emphasis on the importance of the eating function meets with indignant rejection from almost everyone except a few who take themselves to be the “rare exception” who already concentrate on their food. A number of persons inform us that they wouldn’t even consider wasting meal-time on just eating. Others point to the bad food and unpleasant surroundings of the typical city worker’s luncheon and demand: “Would you have me concentrate on that?” Granted that atrocious eating conditions do exist, would they continue to be tolerated were there not such a general devaluation of the eating function? For those who insist that reading “goes naturally” with eating but who also assure us solemnly that reading would be impossible during sexual intercourse, we can only cite the case of the man who delayed ejaculation praecox by imagining during intercourse that he was reading the evening newspaper.

We cite the following from a student who took the eating experiments seriously:

“My lunches for years have been mere excuses for business discussions. I found that what I had previously boasted about—my catholic taste in food and the fact that ‘I could eat anything’—was actually based on a nearly complete unawareness of what I was eating.

I would read while eating, and bolt my food at a rate to be described only as alarming.

“Almost immediately upon applying the ‘here-now’ test to my eating, I experienced heightened pleasure in my food. Although I spent several years in California, I am convinced that I never really tasted orange-juice until yesterday morning. I still have a long way to go—you can’t change the habits of many years in a few days—and I frequently forget to remain aware.

“I ask myself if these bad habits are not responsible for the digestive difficulties (ulcers, diarrhea, acid stomach) from which I’ve suffered in the past few years. In the last few days, since beginning to go to work on this eating business seriously, I’ve had none of the typical stomach disturbances I’ve grown to expect. It’s still too soon, of course, to know whether this is or isn’t something ephemeral.”

We conclude this beginning group of experiments with summary statements made by several students:

“I’m interested in the way the experiments tend to blend in with each other. I don’t know if this is their ultimate purpose, but the ‘here-now’, ‘reversal’, ‘figure/ground’ and ‘differentiated unity’ experiments all seem to come to me at once or in various combinations. I seemed to be operating all of them simultaneously tonight while watching several dance sequences on a television show. I felt that never had I seen a performance so clearly, and at the same time been able to observe so sharply the center of interest without being disturbed by non-essentials in the ground.”

“Feeling of actuality, sense of opposed forces, concentration and differentiated unity are so interdependent that if, in contact with my environment, I have one of these, then I have the others too.”

“As I continue with these experiments there seems to be a greater and greater integration of all of them. Each contributes more and more to the opening motif—to attain a feeling of actuality. This last one in particular has continued this trend, but 1 by no means intend to say that anything revolutionary has been revealed to me with the concept of differentiated unity. The most novel effect has come when destruction and reconstruction of personalities is attempted—but I find it difficult to distinguish this destruction and reconstruction from the previous three experiments, for everything is merging, boundaries dissolving.

“Nevertheless, I find a strong tendency not to indulge in the ‘self- awareness’ technique, beneficial as it may be. To get full benefits from the approach I think I shall have to practice it first in theory— and subvocally—before I dare to do much of it right out loud in the company of others. Some of it already is beginning to be ‘second nature’—for instance, my growing tendency to think in terms of ‘here and now’ no longer surprises me or seems like something special It’s getting to be part of me.”