VOLUME 2. Novelty, Excitement, and Growth

Part 1. Introduction

I. The structure of growth

1: The Contact-Boundary

Experience occurs at the boundary between the organism and its environment, primarily the skin surface and the other organs of sensory and motor response. Experience is the function of this boundary, and psychologically what is real are the “whole” configurations of this functioning, some meaning being achieved, some action completed. The wholes of experience do not include “everything,” but they are definite unified structures; and psychologically everything else, including the very notions of an organism or an environment, is an abstraction or a possible construction or a potentiality occurring in this experience as a hint of some other experience. We speak of the organism contacting the environment, but it is the contact that is the simplest and first reality. You may feel this at once if, instead of merely looking at the objects before you, you also become aware of the fact that they are objects in your oval field of vision, and if you feel how this oval of vision is, so. to speak, close up against your eyes—indeed, it is the seeing of your eyes. Notice, then, how in this oval field the objects begin to have esthetic relations, of space and color-value. And so you may experience it with the sounds “out there”: their root of reality is at the boundary of contact, and at that boundary they are experienced in unified structures. And so motorically, if you are aware of throwing a ball, the distance comes close and your motor impulse has, so to speak, rushed to the surface to meet it. Now the purpose of all the practical experiments and theoretical discussions in this book is to analyze the function of contacting and to heighten awareness of reality.

We use the word “contact” — “in touch with” objects—as underlying both sensory awareness and motor behavior. Presumably there are primitive organisms in which awareness and motoric response are the same act; and in organisms of higher grade, where there is good contact, one can always show the cooperation of sense and movement (and also feeling).

2: Interaction of Organism and Environment

Now in any biological, psychological, or sociological investigation whatever, we must start from the interacting of the organism and its environment. It makes no sense to speak, for instance, of an animal that breathes without considering air and oxygen as part of its definition, or to speak of eating without mentioning food, or of seeing without light, or locomotion without gravity and supporting ground, or of speech without communicants. There is no single function of any animal that completes itself without objects and environment, whether one thinks of vegetative functions like nourishment and sexuality, or perceptual functions, or motor functions, or feeling, or reasoning. The meaning of anger involves a frustrating obstacle; the meaning of reasoning involves problems of practice. Let us call this interacting of organism and environment in any function the “organism/environment field”; and let us remember that no matter how we theorize about impulses, drives, etc., it is always to such an interacting field that we are referring, and not to an isolated animal. Where the organism is mobile in a great field and has a complicated internal structure, like an animal, it seems plausible to speak of it by itself—as, for instance, the skin and what is contained in it—but this is simply an illusion due to the fact that the motion through space and the internal detail call attention to themselves against the relative stability and simplicity of the background.

The human organism/environment is, of course, not only physical but social. So in any humane study, such as human physiology, psychology, or psychotherapy, we must speak of a field in which at least social-cultural, animal, and physical factors interact. Our approach in this book is “unitary” in the sense that we try in a detailed way to consider every problem as occurring in a social-animal-physical field. From this point of view, for instance, historical and cultural factors cannot be considered as complicating or modifying conditions of a simpler biophysical situation, but are intrinsic in the way any problem is presented to us.

3: What is the Subject-Matter of Psychology?

On reflection, the foregoing two sections must seem obvious and certainly not extraordinary. They assert (1) that experience is ultimately contact, the functioning of the boundary of the organism and its environment, and (2) that every human function is an interacting in an organism/environment field, socio-cultural, animal, and physical. But now let us attend to these two propositions in combination.

Among the biological and social sciences, all of which deal with interacting in the organism/environment field, psychology studies the operation of the contact-boundary in the organism/environment field. This is a peculiar subject-matter, and it is easy to understand why psychologists have always found it difficult to delimit their subject.⁴ When we say “boundary” we think of a “boundary between”; but the contact-boundary, where experience occurs, does not separate the organism and its environment; rather it limits the organism, contains and protects it, and at the same time it touches the environment. That is, to put it in a way that must seem odd, the contact-boundary—for example, the sensitive skin—is not so much a part of the “organism” as it is essentially the organ of a particular relation of the organism and the environment. Primarily, as we shall soon try to show, this particular relation is growth. What one is sensitive of is not the condition of the organ (which would be pain) but the interacting of the field. Contact is awareness of the field or motor response in the field. It is for this reason that contacting, the functioning of the mere boundary of the organism, can nevertheless pretend to tell reality, something more than the urge or passivity of the organism. Let us understand contacting, awareness and motor response, in the broadest sense, to include appetite and rejection, approaching and avoiding, sensing, feeling, manipulating, estimating, communicating, fighting, etc.—every kind of living relation that occurs at the boundary in the interaction of the organism and environment. All such contacting is the subject-matter of psychology. (What is called “consciousness” seems to be a special kind of awareness, a contact-function where there are difficulties and delays of adjustment.)

4: Contact and Novelty

Envisaging an animal freely roaming in a spacious and various environment, we see that the number and range of contact-functions must be vast, for fundamentally an organism lives in its environment by maintaining its difference and, more importantly, by assimilating the environment to its difference; and it is at the boundary that dangers are rejected, obstacles are overcome, and the assimilable is selected and appropriated. Now what is selected and assimilated is always novel; the organism persists by assimilating the novel, by change and growth. For instance, food, as Aristotle used to say, is what is “unlike” that can become “like”; and in the process of assimilation the organism is in turn changed. Primarily, contact is the awareness of, and behavior toward, the assimilable novelty; and the rejection of the unassimilable novelty. What is pervasive, always the same, or indifferent is not an object of contact. (Thus, in health, the organs themselves are not contacted, for they are conservative.)

5: Definition of Psychology and Abnormal Psychology

We must then conclude that all contact is creative and dynamic. It cannot be routine, stereotyped, or merely conservative because it must cope with the novel, for only the novel is nourishing. (But like the sense-organs themselves the internal non-contacting physiology of the organism is conservative.) On the other hand, contact cannot passively accept or merely adjust to the novelty, because the novelty must be assimilated. All contact is creative adjustment of the organism and environment. Aware response in the field (as both orientation and manipulation) is the agency of growth in the field. Growth is the function of the contact-boundary in the organism/environment field; it is by means of creative adjustment, change, and growth that the complicated organic unities live on in the larger unity of the field.

We may then define: psychology is the study of creative adjustments. Its theme is the ever-renewed transition between novelty and routine, resulting in assimilation and growth.

Correspondingly, abnormal psychology is the study of the interruption, inhibition, or other accidents in the course of creative adjustment. We shall, for instance, consider anxiety, the pervasive factor in neurosis, as the result of the interruption of the excitement of creative growth (with accompanying breathlessness); and we shall analyze the various neurotic “characters” as stereotyped patterns limiting the flexible process of creatively addressing the novel. Further, since the real is progressively given in contact, in the creative adjustment of organism and environment, when this is inhibited by the neurotic, his world is “out of touch” and therefore progressively hallucinatory, projected, blacked out, or otherwise unreal.

Creativity and adjustment are polar, they are mutually necessary. Spontaneity is the seizing on, and glowing and growing with, what is interesting and nourishing in the environment. (Unfortunately, the “adjustment” of much psychotherapy, the “conformity to the reality-principle,” is the swallowing of a stereotype.)

6: The Figure of Contact against the Ground of the Organism /Environment Field

Let us return to the idea we began with, that the wholes of experience are definite unified structures. Contact, the work that results in assimilation and growth, is the forming of a figure of interest against a ground or context of the organism/environment field. The figure (gestalt) in awareness is a clear, vivid perception, image, or insight; in motor behavior, it is the graceful energetic movement that has rhythm, follows through, etc. In either case, the need and energy of the organism and the likely possibilities of the environment are incorporated and unified in the figure.

The process of figure/background formation is a dynamic one in which the urgencies and resources of the field progressively lend their powers to the interest, brightness and force of the dominant figure. It is pointless, therefore, to attempt to deal with any psychological behavior out of its socio-cultural, biological, and physical context. At the same time, the figure is specifically psychological: it has specific observable properties of brightness, clarity, unity, fascination, grace, vigor, release, etc., depending on whether we are considering primarily a perceptual, feelingful, or motor context. The fact that the gestalt has specific observable psychological properties is of capital importance in psychotherapy, for it gives an autonomous criterion of the depth and reality of the experience. It is not necessary to have theories of “normal behavior” or “adjustment to reality” except in order to explore. When the figure is dull, confused, graceless, lacking in energy (a “weak gestalt”), we may be sure that there is a lack of contact, something in the environment is blocked out, some vital organic need is not being expressed; the person is not “all there,” that is, his whole field cannot lend its urgency and resources to the completion of the figure.

7: Therapy as Gestalt-Analysis

The therapy, then, consists in analyzing the internal structure of the actual experience, with whatever degree of contact it has: not so much what is being experienced, remembered, done, said, etc., as how what is being remembered is remembered, or how what is said is said, with what facial expression, what tone of voice, what syntax, what posture, what affect, what omission, what regard or disregard of the other person, etc. By working on the unity and disunity of this structure of the experience here and now, it is possible to remake the dynamic relations of the figure and ground until the contact is heightened, the awareness brightened and the behavior energized. Most important of all, the achievement of a strong gestalt is itself the cure, for the figure of contact is not a sign of, but is itself the creative integration of experience.

From the beginning of psychoanalysis, of course, a particular gestalt-property, the “Aha!” of recognition, has held a sovereign place. But it has always seemed a mystery why “mere” awareness, for instance recollection, should cure the neurosis. Note, however, that the awareness is not a thought about the problem but is itself a creative integration of the problem. We can see, too, why usually “awareness” does not help, for usually it is not an aware gestalt at all, a structured content, but mere content, verbalizing or reminiscing, and as such it does not draw on the energy of present organic need and a present environmental help.

8: Destroying as Part of Figure/Background Formation

The process of creative adjustment to new material and circumstances always involves a phase of aggression and destruction, for it is by approaching, laying hold of, and altering old structures that the unlike is made like. When a new configuration comes into being, both the old achieved habit of the contacting organism and the previous state of what is approached and contacted are destroyed in the interest of the new contact. Such destruction of the status quo may arouse fear, interruption, and anxiety, the greater in proportion as one is neurotically inflexible; but the process is accompanied by the security of the new invention experimentally coming into being. Here as everywhere the only solution of a human problem is experimental invention. The anxiety is “tolerated” nor by Spartan fortitude—though courage is a beautiful and indispensable virtue—but because the disturbing energy flows into the new figure.

Without renewed aggression and destruction every achieved satisfaction soon becomes a matter of the past and is unfelt. What is ordinarily called “security” is clinging to the unfelt, declining the risk of the unknown involved in any absorbing satisfaction, and with a corresponding desensitizing and motor inhibition. It is a dread of aggression, destroying, and loss that results, of course, in unaware aggression and destroying, turned both inward and outward. A better meaning of “security” would be the confidence of a firm support, which comes from previous experience having been assimilated and growth achieved, without unfinished situations; but in such a case, all attention tends to flow from the ground of what one is into the figure of what one is becoming. The secure state is -without interest, it is unnoticed; and the secure person never knows it but always feels that he is risking it and will be adequate.

9: Excitement is Evidence of Reality

Contact, figure/background formation, is a mounting excitement, feelingful and concernful; and conversely, what is not concernful, present to one, is not psychologically real. The different genera of feeling—e.g., pleasure or the various emotions—indicate altering organic involvement in the real situation, and this involvement is part of the real situation. There is no indifferent, neutral reality. The modern epidemic scientific conviction that most or even all of reality is neutral is a sign of the inhibition of spontaneous pleasure, playfulness, anger, indignation, and fear (an inhibition caused by such social and sexual conditioning as create the academic personality).

Emotions are unifications, or unifying tendencies, of certain physiological tensions with favorable or unfavorable environmental situations, and as such they give ultimate indispensable (though not adequate) knowledge of the objects appropriate to needs, just as esthetic feeling gives us ultimate (adequate) knowledge of our sensibilities and their objects. In general, concern and the excitement of figure/background forming are immediate evidence of the organism/environment field. A moment’s reflection will show that this must be, for how otherwise would animals have motivations and strive according to their motivations, and yet be successful, for success comes by hitting the reality.

10: Contact is “Finding and Making” the Coming Solution

Concern is felt for a present problem, and the excitement mounts toward the coming but as yet unknown solution. The assimilating of novelty occurs in the present moment as it passes into the future. Its result is never merely a rearrangement of the unfinished situations of the organism but a configuration containing new material from the environment, and therefore different from what could be remembered (or guessed at), just as the work of an artist becomes unpredictably new to him as he handles the material medium.

So in psychotherapy we look for the urgency of unfinished situations in the present situation, and by present experimentation with new attitudes and new materials from the experience of the actual day to day, we aim at a better integration. The patient does not remember himself, merely reshuffling the cards, but “finds and makes” himself. (The importance of new conditions in the present was perfectly understood by Freud when he spoke of the inevitable transference of the childhood fixation to the person of the analyst; but the therapeutic meaning of it is not that it is the same old story, but precisely that it is now differently worked through as a present adventure: the analyst is not the same kind of parent. And nothing is more clear, unfortunately, than that certain tensions and blocks cannot be freed unless there is a real environmental change offering new possibilities. If the institutions and mores were altered, many a recalcitrant symptom would vanish very suddenly.)

11: The Self and its Identifications

Let us call the “self” the system of contacts at any moment. As such, the self is flexibly various, for it varies with the dominant organic needs and the pressing environmental stimuli; it is the system of responses; it diminishes in sleep when there is less need to respond. The self is the contact-boundary at work; its activity is forming figures and grounds.

We must contrast this conception of the self with the otiose “consciousness” of orthodox psychoanalysis which has as its function merely to look on and report to the analyst and cooperate by not interfering. And accordingly the revisionist para-Freudian schools, for instance, the Reichians or the Washington School tend to reduce the self altogether into the system of the organism or the interpersonal society: strictly speaking they are not psychologies at all, but biologies, sociologies, etc. But the self is precisely the integrator; it is the synthetic unity, as Kant said. It is the artist of life. It is only a small factor in the total organism/environment interaction, but it plays the crucial role of finding and making the meanings that we grow by.

The description of psychological health and disease is a simple one. It is a matter of the identifications and alienations of the self: If a man identifies with his forming self, does not inhibit his own creative excitement and reaching toward the coming solution; and conversely, if he alienates what is not organically his own and therefore cannot be vitally interesting, but rather disrupts the figure/background, then he is psychologically healthy, for he is exercising his best power and will do the best he can in the difficult circumstances of the world. But on the contrary, if he alienates himself and because of false identifications tries to conquer his own spontaneity, then he creates his life dull, confused, and painful. The system of identifications and alienations we shall call the “ego.”

From this point of view, our method of therapy is as follows: to train the ego, the various identifications and alienations, by experiments of deliberate awareness of one’s various functions, until the sense is spontaneously revived that “it is I who am thinking, perceiving, feeling, and doing this.” At this point the patient can take over on his own.