Commentary I: A Phenomenologically Based Theory of Personality: Whither Meaningfulness?

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To be published in a forthcoming edition of the Gestalt Review Journal
Whither meaningfulness?
Commentary on Burley, A phenomenologically based theory of personality
Lynne Jacobs, 2011
Moments in time: gestalt formation process
I owe Burley a debt of gratitude for his main point, his thinking about phenomena
that occur along the time line of a gestalt formation process. When he first introduced his
nuanced ideas many years ago, he linked the gestalt formation variations to personality
styles. His thinking led me to develop course material using some of our theoretical
concepts such as gestalt formation, contacting styles, emotional saliences and polarities,
to articulate a process/phenomenological understanding of the experience of living within
the constraints of particular character (or personality) styles. While some of the material
would surely be considered dated today, portions of that course are in use today.
I made two changes (or additions) to his time line. First, I believe that all of us
encounter difficulties worthy of exploration at every point in the process. The difficulties
may be of a different sort depending on various supports and inhibitions and conditions,
but I don’t believe anyone escapes unscathed from the challenges posed at each point
of the process. Second, I think it is of great value to the patient and therapist to explore
the experience of the challenges at each point. Otherwise one might be left reducing the
patient to a pathological category. I am interested in how the gestalt process is
experienced, and what attributions of meaning might be relevant to the inhibitions at any
given point.
When clinicians observe process without exploring meaning, they run the risk of
assuming the observable inhibitions and interruptions should be changed. They also run
the risk of assuming that what they observe—which always reflects their own situated
awareness—is an observation of an objective fact. Exploration of meaning opens the
door to understanding just how those possible interruptions and inhibitions might be
protective adaptations and creative solutions in a threatening or impoverished situation
(including the threats posed in the therapeutic situation).
I also agree with the implications of Burley’s interesting point that perhaps our
best clinicians also have the most fully developed personality theories. I would add that
all of us work from private theories about personality that are only more or less closely
aligned with espoused theories of personality development and functioning. And in my
experience, the better clinicians are also those who take the time to try to articulate—
whether publicly or privately—just what is contained in their private theories. I suspect
that those of us who write are always articulating, to some degree, our here-to-fore
private theories, and trying to find a home for them in the sea of ideas that is our public
theory.
Scientism vs. science
Burley seems to be trying to accomplish three tasks in his ambitious article. His
main point is to offer some ideas about how gestalt therapy can build on its personality
theory to take into account perceived continuity of self-experience and behavior over
time and across situations. I think two other agendas weave through the article. One is
to make the case that neurophysiology explains behavioral processes that we gestalt
therapists find interesting. Another agenda, which he uses the language game of
neurophysiology to support, is to assert that individuality originates “in” the individual.

The two secondary agendas lead me to wonder if Burley is one among the many
who worry that theorizing about relationality has erased the individual, and with it,
individuality. I have problems with the arguments he makes, largely on two grounds: first,
his use of knowledge from neurophysiology results in a non-phenomenological
reductionism (reducing behavior to brain activity, for instance, when he equates “mind”
and “brain”), and second, while he says that context plays a role in how we act and
make choices, I believe he underestimates the power of context. His “person”
sometimes ends up being a decontextualized, biological creature.
Scientism is the evil twin of science. Scientism is what happens when scientific
findings are treated as an absolute truth unsullied by, and standing hierarchically above,
the intrusion of subjectivity. The truths are treated as though they universal, undeniable,
and transcend experience. Scientific truths are treated as “really real,” as opposed to
experiential truth and knowledge.
A phenomenological perspective treats all truth and knowledge as partial, fallible
and open to revision, whether scientific, or something more directly experiential. A
hermeneutic understanding of science humbles scientific “truths” by contextualizing them.
Science is understood as always situated within historical and culturally based concerns
that shape the kinds of questions that are asked (and therefor the kinds of answers that
can be found). Wittgenstein referred to domains of study as expressions of “language
games,” and warned that often, different language games are incommensurable.
I believe that the language game of science and the language game of one’s
experiential world are incommensurable, and using one to explain the other is
reductionistic.i Science can possibly help us vulnerable clinicians—who stand on shifting
sands—by validating that the stories we tell ourselves about human experience are
similar to the stories that science is telling us. But science cannot explain us to ourselves,
at least not very meaningfully, in that meaningfulness can never be fully reduced to brain
activity.
Scientism—a danger for any one of us who tries to explore the relationship of
brain activity to behavior—appears in Burley’s article in various forms, one of which is
placing brain function as foundationally causal of human behavior. Burley writes that he
might “go to a museum to see expressionist paintings because we seek a certain limbic
stimulation. (italics mine)” Now, instead of being reduced—as Freud would have it—to
satisfying drive demands, we are reduced to satisfying brain demands. Although it might
make sense to say that we as human beings need limbic stimulation, the attempt to
explain any specific meaningful engagement--such as a trip to the museum--in these
terms is paltry and insufficient.
One cannot experience a need for limbic stimulation. One can certainly
experience boredom, restlessness, eagerness, and aesthetic attraction. A
phenomenological exploration will never lead you or the patient to the experience of a
need for limbic stimulation. And in the consulting room, we are engaged in a dialogical
exploration of the experiential process.
I think vigilant attention to the slide into reductionism that happens when the
language game of science is used as if it can account for a specific meaning (attraction
to a museum experience) is an important bulwark against slipping back into the either/or
thinking that our original concept of the organism/environment field (or more rightly said,
person/environment field) aimed to redress.
My reading of Burley’s paper suggests he has at times slipped back into a
Cartesian separation of the person and the environment that becomes static and reified.
The paragraph below demonstrates a scientism that treats scientific explanation as
“really real,” and experience itself as mistaken.

This may at times present some confusion because the organism may be
stimulated by the environment so that it would appear that the gestalt is
environmentally based. For example, as you are reading this paragraph, and you
stop to listen closely, you will notice that there is a background of noise that you
had not been aware of a moment before. The reason and mechanism for noticing
or not happens to be organismically based in that the inferior colliculi, part of the
midbrain that is constantly filtering auditory information for familiarity. If a sound
that is unfamiliar or signals danger such as rustling outside your window is heard,
then the mind directs attention to that sound. In other words, it is not the
environment that decides what is to be attended to; rather it is the organism
based upon its experience that determines what is figural and creates the gestalt.
(italics mine)
It is worth taking some time to unpack this paragraph. I italicized two sections
that are relevant to my argument. Burley seems to be saying that something that
appears environmentally based, is not to be understood this way. And yet, appearances
are foundational to a phenomenological approach to the awareness process. And my
pragmatist bones rebel against saying the attribution of distraction to my environment is
specious. His explanation is not pragmatically useful. My experience of being distracted
is “actionable.” I can do something about it (close the window, play music, or simply take
a few breaths and re-focus on what matters to me). And in fact, without meaning to,
Burley seems to agree, however awkwardly, that experience is what matters. He points
out that the significant factor is the prior and current experience that shapes the gestalt.
Experience occurs in a messy, non-linear mix-up of momentarily designated distinction
within a field (distinctions between perceived self and perceived environment). So, while
it may make sense to say that the sedimented learning of which Merleau-Ponty writes
shapes and is shaped by all nature of processes, including brain activity, all of this brain
activity has been developing within, and becomes stimulated by, various environments.
Attributing brain activity as causal or originator of action (in the sense that it can explain
a museum visit or filtering sound) is a very narrow, scientistic lens that adds nothing to
our work of tracking the awareness process or guiding responsive action.ii
Brain science as useable story
Despite my strong aversion to the valorization of science (whose findings tend to
supersede their own previous “truths” on a regular basis!), as somehow more “really
real” than phenomenological exploration, I do think that science has a place in our
integrative theorizing, but must be used with greater caution. Two uses come to mind.
The first is that scientific research often validates our current theory, which provides
reassurance to us that our ideas have relevance in our larger culture. Second, I have
found that sometimes, when I explain to patients, current ideas about the
neurophysiology of PTSD, they feel less ashamed of their hyperarousal and other
symptoms.
The power of context: the social science story
Burley also proposes that an integrative understanding of a person’s traits,
coupled with an analysis of the process of gestalt formation, coupled with an analysis of
the situation might one day provide predictive power to our theory. The discipline of
psychology—both Burley and I are trained as psychologists in the USA—has been
bedeviled by a wish to be able to predict behavior since its founding as a “science.”
There is hubris in this project. It is firmly rooted in a belief in a relatively decontextualized
personology. Yet if we engage in a phenomenological exploration of the “traits” and

behaviors that seem to reflect highly developed individualization, we find that these
qualities—such as a sense of independence, agency, freedom, choice—are highly
contingent. That is, they emerge from contexts in which our environment functions as
supportive of our individuality. As paradoxical as it may be, our individuality is an
emergent property of our surround.
By the same token, social science research and historical research (of, for
instance, holocaust survivors), puts the lie to the belief that personality variables can
predict our behavior in extreme situations For instance, Zimbardo, an American social
psychologist, designed and ran the Stanford Prison Experiment. He recruited graduate
students and randomly assigned them to be either prisoners or guards for a two-week
experiment on prison life. Zimbardo wanted to study whether personality factors or
situational factors were the stronger influence on human behaviour. He found that
situational factors were by far stronger than personality factors. The more extreme and
totalistic the situation, the less personality factors seemed to come into play. His
sophisticated personality research provided no reliable clues as to who among the
volunteers would be a cruel or sympathetic guard, or who would be a rebellious or
compliant prisoner. What the social science narrative has given me, as a clinician, is a
story that keeps me humble, and like the brain science story, a way to help patients
come to terms with their shame over prior and current “bad acts.”
Returning to phenomenology
At one point, Burley makes a summative statement that I endorse:
Taking these clarifying definitions into account we can now state Gestalt Theory's
core statement in more simple language: the needs and interests of the individual
in his or her context (ecosystem), will determine what is central to the person's
awareness and will guide that person's cognitive/affective and physical behavior
to resolution of that need or interest so that the need/interest driven figure ceases
to be central in the person's awareness.
The exploration of the needs and interests of the person-in-context can be
explored in the phenomenologically-based dialogue of therapeutic conversation. In his
description above, he is pointing to exploring experience, not brains. I whole-heartedly
agree.
i Reductionism is apparent when experience is explained as “nothing but” something
else, such as brain activity, or when one aspect (brain activity) of a complex human
situation is consider the originator, or first cause of behavior and experience.
ii While I am focused here largely on the dangers of scientism as that perspective
becomes popular across many schools of therapy, I also am concerned about how often
there are other elisions that reflect slipping back into Cartesian reified bifurcations. At
another point in the paper Burley actually refers to “non-phenomenal” aspects of the field.
He also says that sometimes what might be required is the ability to act “within oneself
or within the field itself.” These two references point again to the dangers losing sight of
a phenomenological approach to understanding. In this case, “field and “environment”
have become conflated, where it is forgotten that the field is comprised of both the

person and the environment as perceived by the person (phenomenal), and it is
forgotten that acting “within oneself” is acting within the field.