Therapeutics has been a way of life for me for the last three decades. I actually first met therapy in 1968. At that time I was 33 years old and I had never been near a therapist's office; I had been opposed to going to therapists' offices. I had received a Ph.D. where I had spent endless hours making nasty remarks about therapists' offices. I was really seriously anti-therapy. But I was also an emotional wreck. I had this really dear friend of mine, a fellow named Hank. And Hank and I would go out periodically and grab a bite to eat. And Hank would say to me, "Why the hell don't you go to therapy, man? You're out of your mind; you're crazy. You could really use some help." And I would run through my Ph.D. rhetoric on how therapy was empty and nonsensical and ridiculous and so on. And he would listen and chomp away on his pastrami sandwich. 
Well one night he convinced me. 

There were a lot of bad, depressed days in that time in my life, a lot of sadness -- this might have been a particularly bad day, I don't know, and I wasn't handling it terribly well.  So off I went to this therapist, who was his therapist, a very delightful and wonderful man who helped me enormously.  And this incredible thing happened to me. I had spent the previous ten years of my life professionally writing about the philosophy of science, ruthlessly critiquing therapy-- every bad thing you could say, nastily, about therapy, I had said at least twice. I mean I had condemned it; I can't think of the words to express how oppositional I was. And suddenly I show up in this office in Long Island and I sit down there and he starts talking to me and it's now 50 minutes 
later--that's the standard session, as you know--and I get up and walk out -- and I feel better. Fifty damn minutes of this thing which I had said was the devil incarnate and I'm feeling better. How do you deal with that kind of contradiction.? 

In a way it's not so unusual. It's like our experience with certain kinds of foods -- you spend a lifetime saying "I will never touch that food -- I don't eat green food." And then one day you eat some green food and you say, this really tastes good. 

So the therapy goes on and I'm getting better. It's wonderful; I'm getting help. I'm having en emotional experience that's profound, that's impacting on my life. And before I know it it's four years later, 1972, and not only have I gotten an enormous amount of help -- I feel better, my life has been transformed emotionally -- but with enormous support from the therapist I've been seeing, I now change my career completely.  I'm no longer doing philosophy, I've become a therapist. Worse even than that, I'm good at it! I mean that was really humiliating. I had to go get some extra sessions just to deal with the problems caused by that. I'm now actually helping other people by practicing this activity that five years earlier I thought was nonsensical. And I'm getting gratification from it, and so are other people. 

And I've been doing that for 30 years now. That's a fairly long time -- I was once 33, now I'm 63. And I have spent 30 years doing therapeutic work. I have spent 30 years helping people -- lovely people, decent people -- and I couldn't be more proud of doing this work together. I love it; I love it with a deep passion. And I guess my consuming need was to try to understand something about what I'm describing to you as this strange contradiction. All the nasty things I'd said about therapy -- maybe this is my pigheadedness -- but it never occurred to me that I was simply wrong. Even as I was getting tremendous help from getting and doing therapy, it never occurred to me that some of the attitudes and beliefs I had about what I took to be some of the mythic qualities, some of the irrational and bizarre qualities of therapy, were inaccurate. So I had to deal with the fact that this therapeutic thing is of incredible value to lots of people, and the question which kept occurring to me was, "How in the hell could this thing possibly work? What made it work?" I was personally convinced that it did work, but it didn't make sense that it should work; it didn't make sense that it should be so successful. I could not fathom why, and I became consumed with this question of how come this thing called therapy works. I had the feeling that if I found out how come it works, maybe we could in fact teach others how to do it, maybe in fact it didn't require a specialized degree, maybe as a matter of fact plain old fashioned human beings could do it with each other. Maybe we could help each other in therapeutic ways. Maybe therapy didn't have to be some high fallutin' science or some fancy medicalized procedure; maybe it was a way in which human beings could learn to relate to each other -- neighbors, friends, family -- and thereby enhance our way of living. Maybe it wasn't a quasi medical technique at all -- maybe it was a way to make a better life. Maybe there was a way that we typically relate to each other which is other than therapeutic which could be helped if we could learn to be more therapeutic with each other. I wasn't sure what that meant when I first started this investigation, but I had this sense that we could learn to live better together, that therapeutics could be a way of life. I was consumed with this, and I went out and I started to practice on my own. I learned a great deal from the people I worked with. I went to training workshops, I learned different approaches, different styles, and I started to evolve a way of doing therapy, or many different ways of doing therapy, trying to help people. 

The other day I was teaching a class with some friends, and one of the 
persons suddenly lit up and said, "Now I get it! Now I know what you're 
saying. You're saying that what's so different about ourselves, about who we 
are, is that we can't get out of ourselves in order to get a good look at 
who we are. I finally got it. We're stuck inside of our own lives. So when 
we try to understand our own lives, one of the serious difficulties is that 
since we are in the midst of it, there's no place to step outside and look 
at it." And I kind of sighed and I looked at him and said, "It's exciting 
what you're saying, but to tell you the truth, so far as I can see you've 
only gotten half the story." 

Here's what I think is the other half of the story. You see, not only is it 
true of all of us that we're so much in our lives that we can't get any 
distance from it, it's true equally of the far wall of this auditorium. It 
can't get outside of being the far wall -- it is what it is and it can't get 
outside of itself to see itself. So does this card, so does this glass -- it 
just sits there and it goes through whatever it's going through and it 
doesn't have the capacity to comment on its own life.  This cup doesn't all 
of a sudden move over here and reflect on the status of its cup-ness. 
So, you see, in that half of the story there's not much of a difference 
between the far wall of the room, the cup, the microphone, myself, and so 
presumably mountains and stars, hot dogs and knockwurst and cartons of milk 
and cars -- we are all limited in that kind of way. We are what we are, to 
quote Bishop Butler from 1543, and not another thing. So then what is it 
that's unusual about us? Ah! Here's Part 2: Unlike this cup and this table 
and that wall, this species of ours, this strange and glorious and crazed 
and sometimes oppressive and hurtful and sometimes magnificent species of 
ours, we imagine that we can! So far as I can tell, that back wall never 
once imagined that it could succeed in stepping outside of itself to see the 
life that it was leading. It is content to be a back wall. But we, this 
unusual species, we think and feel and in fact have the capacity to imagine 
ourselves being other than who we are. We think that we have the capacity to 
say, "I'm not simply living my life, I have the capacity to imagine that I 
can perceive myself from a distance." We have -- and it's the madness and 
the genius of this species, it seems to me -- this extraordinary and unusual 
capacity to imagine that we can get outside of ourselves and see ourselves. 
And indeed, we invent things to enhance our thinking that we can do that. 
That video screen over there is one of them. We have pictures of ourselves, 
books and stories about ourselves, we reflect on ourselves, we create images 
of ourselves. 

The full story of human beings is that we are these animals, these objects 
of the world -- like rocks and cows and bottles of milk and stars and 
giraffes -- we are part of the whole shebang. But one unusual feature of 
ourselves -- and whether or not we can do this is another question -- is 
that we have the impression that we have the ability to imagine ourselves 
reflecting on ourselves. We do have the unusual capacity of hearing 
ourselves talk even as we're saying it. But beyond that, we have the 
capacity to imagine what it is that's going on as we're saying it. So for 
example, we interpret what people are saying. We hear these words and we 
think we can interpret what it is that we're hearing or seeing. 

Well how is this related to psychotherapy? Therapy is deeply rooted in this 
understanding of human beings as having not only the capacity to be who they 
are, but in supposing that some people can help other people by having the 
capacity of being able to interpret, understand, explain, account for, what 
it is that is really going on for the other person. Fascinating phenomenon. 
Let me introduce something else: Long before there was anything called 
postmodernism, there were people who were commenting on this interesting 
human characteristic. I want to share a quote from one of those persons. 
He's still alive, and in fact he's kind of the patriarch of modern American 
philosophy. Not surprisingly he's from Harvard University. W.V.O. Quine is 
the grandfather of American analytic philosophy, and one of the principal 
persons that he trained is a man named Donald Davidson, who in turn is now 
80 years old and is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, and 
Donald helped to train me, and so we have a direct line here of nothing of 
any importance. 

Anyway, Quine is a perfectly brilliant philosopher and he said something that is relevant to therapeutics as a way of life. I want to read it to you. It's in an article called "Two Dogmas of Empiricism": As an empiricist [meaning someone who believes that what you know is based on what you can see feel and touch and so on] I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool ultimately for predicting future experience in the light of past experience [a sensible enough statement]. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries, not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For  my part, I do, qua lay physicists [as some ordinary person who understands science], believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods. And I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical and the objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. 

What an astounding statement; this is 50 years before postmodernism becomes 
a fad. "The myth of physical objects." Hey wait a second! I didn't think physical objects were myths. I mean I always thought the gods of Homer were myths. But physical objects -- they're hard, they're tough, they're cans, bottles, people, stages -- they're real. Now Quine, who is a fairly bright fellow, says that they're myths. What an amazing statement. But what I want to raise for our consideration -- as amazing as that statement is -- is, if we have Homer's gods over here, and physical objects over here, where do we place in this Quinean continuum the mental objects that preoccupy psychology? The mental objects that we take to be those things going on in our heads, which is precisely why it was the case that I was always so critical of psychology and therapy before it helped me so. Because I thought the stuff that was talked about -- the mental objects -- were at least as suspect as the physical objects that Quine is talking about and perhaps much more suspect. I was not the least bit convinced that there was anything going on in anybody's head, that there were any objects in people's heads, and when I heard psychologists talk about these desires, these drives, these things that were supposed to be going on in people's heads, I was suspect because, like Quine, I thought that these things were in fact myths. So that was my pre-therapeutic frame of reference. 

And when I went into this process, into therapy, I could not comprehend why 
I found it helpful because what was being said to me about what was helpful 
about it was that somehow or another this person that I was working with was 
able to correctly sort out and order the mental objects that had gotten 
misordered in my life, and when you put them in the right order I can go out 
into the streets and say I feel good. But I didn't think there were any of 
these mental objects at all. But I believed in therapy. I experienced myself 
getting better, and I experienced other people who I had come to work with 
getting better through going through this process. And suddenly it began to 
dawn on me that what was making a difference to me and others was in fact 
the human process that was taking place, not the reframing of these mental 
objects. It occurred to me that the entire model of what therapy has come to be identified as, this medical conception of therapy, getting into the mind and somehow reshaping it, has little or nothing to do with what makes people better at all. And so I began to reconsider what it was that was the process 
that was taking place, not in terms of some medical notion of a kind of 
mental surgery to find out what were the deeper internal mental phenomena 
and restructuring them, but in terms of what was going on between human 
beings that was leading people to give some expression to emotional life. 
What was going on in the process of therapy. 

People often use the expression, "You can't change the past." The past, it 
is claimed, has passed; it's fixed; it can't be touched. And I've spent a 
lifetime challenging that, because I don't think it's the case. People say, 
"How can you say that? The past is buried; it's gone." And I'll frequently 
use this image to try to help people to see what I'm trying to get at: 
Imagine a piece of rope. And this piece of rope has an interesting and 
curious property, namely, that the two ends of it keep growing. It's not 
like a rubber band; it's not that we stretch the ends and thereby elongate 
it, but we have just have a rope with two ends that keep growing out of it. 
Now suppose we think of what happens at any point in the process of this 
rope growing, such that at any point in time we can move our hands to change 
the shape of that rope. Well it seems to me that that is a vastly better 
image of how the past, the present, and the future works than this notion of 
taking everything that happened and putting it in a vault and burying it so 
that it can't ever be touched again. Because in point of fact we are 
continuous with our history, with our past. Let us ask the philosophical 
question, if you will, When does the past end and the present start and when 
does the future come up. And people will say, Oh that's an idle question. 
But in point of fact, it seems to me, the image that we want to use here is 
this conception of an ongoing continuous process that we can in fact do 
things about, because we can change the shape of this rope by how we 
manipulate either end of it. And so we can change the entire character of 
that process. We cannot perhaps stop it from being a rope, but we can change 
the shape of that rope indefinitely. We have that human capacity for change. 
Maybe, in fact, we have a capacity for changing our past, for changing our 
future, for changing our lives, more than we have this imagined capacity for 
understanding and interpreting our lives in new ways. Maybe the myth is the 
myth of interpretation, and the non-myth is the human capacity to 
continuously transform and change. 

Just the other day I had another exciting encounter on Dr. Fulani's television show [a weekly cable talk show]. I've always been interested in embryology and biology. We had this teacher from Swarthmore, Dr. Scott Gilbert, a holistic biologist. He calls himself an organicist. He was telling this fascinating story.  He was saying that recent experiments have shown that if you take some of the molecules from the embryo of the to-be salamander, in early mitotic stages when the salamander is first developing as an egg in its 2nd or 3rd or 4th reproduction -- if you take some of the material that is destined to become the brain of the salamander and place it on that part of the cell development which is destined to become epidermal tissue of the stomach of the salamander, and then watch it develop from there, it becomes epidermal tissue, even though genetically it was scheduled to become brain tissue. 

Fascinating? Only half the story! The other half of the story is if you drop that same bit of brain tissue from that early stage two hours later, not only doesn't it become epidermal tissue of the belly but what happens instead is that this salamander will develop a little bit of brain tissue right smack in the middle of its belly. And this was verified again and again. What is it that holistic biologists are telling us? They're telling us that this myth which has dominated genetic biology for the last 40-50 years now, which says that everything is encoded in the genes, everything is predetermined by genetic structure, is not the whole story. Because in point of fact a big part of the story is context. It's when and where the evolving embryo happens to hit particular features of its environment. I was just watching a piece on public broadcasting in which they're talking about the fact that they have just in the past several months discovered -- and this is appearing in medical journals -- that unlike what has been the myth for 50 years, the brain does continue to develop; new aspects of it can grow throughout the totality of life. The notion that something is so predetermined as to be fixed and unable to respond to the environment is being shown to be a myth. And the significance of that is overwhelming, and certainly calls into question the reductionistic, deterministic model which has dominated all of science, the conception that once something is set or fixed, once you know the parts that make something up, you automatically know the character of the whole. And what Quine and so many others are now recognizing, in what is an extraordinary revolution, is that the whole, the totality, is vastly bigger than the sum of its parts. It is now being  appreciated that context, environment, process, makes a profound difference. What this relates to is this strange notion of what we mean by saying that something "is." I'm the last person in the world who would like to sit up here on the stage and express too great an agreement with Bill Clinton. I have some respect for some of the things he says, and some things I have some serious reservations about, but I do want to say this: All of these people who are condemning him for raising the issue of what "is" means are making a big mistake. In fact, he is our first postmodern president; that is perhaps his greatest contribution. Clinton publicly says that "is" is not so easy a term as we'd like to think -- and he's right. What does it mean when we say something "is." Everyone wants to reply, "Well, everyone knows what 'is' means." But I don't know what "is" means. "Is" changes in meaning very dramatically from situation to situation, from context to context. The point I'm making here is that we are being forced, in this time in the history of our species -- and this is very much related to what I think I've learned about therapy as a way of life -- to reconsider the very models that we use for understanding how the world works, how the mind works, how human beings work. We are trying to break out of a straitjacket. 

Let me introduce the person who has helped me most to break out of that straitjacket. Somewhere down the road in this process of trying to understand better how therapy works, how the mind works, how human emotionality works, I "met" a guy named Lev Vygotsky. Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist. He died of tuberculosis in his early thirties in the early 1930s. A genius, a brilliant, brilliant man. Vygotsky did some extraordinary work in psychology. He was up against the entire Stalinist regime and indeed the whole of world psychology, and his work was lost for decades \and rediscovered only a relatively short time ago. Vygotsky made many brilliant observations, but let me share just one with you as it fits into what we're talking about here tonight. Vygotsky said, There is a fundamental picture of the human mind, of human emotionality, of human cognition, of human life, a fundamental picture that psychology teaches, and it is completely wrong. And that picture is the following: There are things that go on in the mind -- cognitions, thoughts, ideas, emotions, feelings, intentions, beliefs --  and somehow (so the story goes) these things are, often by language and sometimes through other means of communication, expressed to other people by the use of language. So the picture that psychology portrays is a picture of, "Well I have something going on in my mind, and now I speak some words and I somehow communicate that to someone and she has receptors which pick up on this so she now knows what's going on in my mind." It's an expressionist conception of a world in which things are taking place internally which we then, via the mediation of language and other means, convey to other people. 

Vygotsky says this happens to be a very faulty picture, and he brings in this image of the rope which I was talking to you about earlier. It is not the case that there is something going on in here which I use language to communicate to someone.  What we have is in fact something that is continuous -- not existing in the head and then via communication becoming part of the world -- but a continuous process that is neither inside of us nor outside of us but is part of this rope. Our thoughts, our intentions, our beliefs, our emotions, our attitudes, are to be thought of best as ropes which expand on either end and which interconnect us not by virtue of our saying what it is that's going on inside (because there's nothing inside that's going on), but rather by virtue of the fact that we are all carrying on what we're doing in a joint social venture. We are all interconnected. And in fact what it means to create new things is for us to collectively, via a process of human communication, to build something because we all have access to what it is that's going on. I don't have private access to what is going on in my head any more than you have a private access to what's going in your head. We are not simply interconnected by language, by culture, by custom, we are interconnected by virtue of the life activity that we engage 
in. And what it is that makes therapy a way of life is not so much a surgical process of straightening out what's going on in this dumb head of mine, or in the confused mixed up minds of other people, but of literally coming together -- 2 people at a time or 3 people at a time or 10 people or a thousand people -- with our interconnected ropes, so to speak, and restructuring, rebuilding, how it is that we are together. 

Suddenly I read this in Vygotsky in the midst of the work that I'm doing and 
it occurs to me that it's possible to appreciate the way that therapy works 
without having to understand it in terms of some medicalized, objectified model of things going in our heads. That we are in fact able to create new things because there is an interconnectedness between us which is not easy to discover given this scientific model of physical objects, of particulars, of discrete individuals.  In fact, this individualistic, scientific separatist model, is an incorrect model in that it keeps us at a distance and then demands that we introduce strange mythological things to make comprehensible how we get back together again. It's like Humpty Dumpty. We tear ourselves apart and then what we have to do is figure out what's got to be done to get us back together. 

But what if it's the case that we were never apart? What if nobody's sick? 
What if there is no such thing as mental illness, of therapeutics in the sense of "making better?" What if there is, though, therapeutics in the sense of making otherwise, creating something new? Do we have to accept this model that something is wrong and then engage in the activity of making it better? 

Martin Seligman is the 1998 President of the very very traditional and orthodox American Psychological Association. 

Let me share a few of his words in the context, this from Lois Holzman's forthcoming book, Performing Psychology: A Postmodern Culture of the Mind. Holzman writes, "Along with steps to upgrade the public image of psychology as scientifically relevant and socially practical, the Association began in 1998 to make moves to focus psychologists in a new direction. Then-President Martin Seligman urged members to seriously consider a reorientation of research and practice 'from deficits and wounds to strengths and virtues.' According to Seligman, 'The future of the discipline' might well depend on abandoning its 50-year focus on mental illness because the mood of the country has shifted. 'We are enjoying as a nation economic prosperity. It has been at the few times like this throughout history that different countries have turned their attention 
from concerns about defense and damage to promotion of the highest qualities 
of life.'" Holzman continues, "In order to remain in sync with the consumers 
of psychology, Seligman proposes the following, 'That we reorient ourselves 
from being a victimology to being a positive social science for the 21st 
century.' He goes on. [This is after 50 years of making us all crazy.] 
'We've done an excellent job of learning how to validly assess such negative 
states as depression, fear, anomie, aggression and hopelessness. Now we can 
call upon the same methods to measure and understand how to build personal 
human strengths and civic virtues.'" 

Now that's a surprise. He [Seligman] says let's use the same methods that we used to construct a whole view of people as having something wrong with them, of being sick, of being crazed, depressed, hopeless, let's use these same tools 
except we'll somehow magically shift them around to focus more on positive 
things. What he's saying--foolishly it seems to me--is that we can make this 
shift; that psychology can once again be in sync with the times and we can 
use the exact same tools we used to use to tell people how come they were 
crazy, depressed, hopeless, anxious. Tools don't work that way, you see. 
Tools have to be made to suit the particular function that you want to use a 
tool for. So while I am sympathetic to the notion that we should get beyond 
victimology, that we should stop relating to people as sick,  I think we have to do this in a positive way by creating a whole new understanding, a whole new methodology. We have to fundamentally transform psychology, transform therapy, to a way of life, a positive way in which human beings can help each other to grow and develop. 

Let us suppose that someone in this room tonight discovered a good tasting 
drink and put it in a bottle. What does it do? You take a slug of it and it 
makes you nicer. It would never sell! The stuff that we spend billions and 
billions of dollars on is the stuff to fix up what's wrong with us. But what 
if it's the case that we can create an approach to human life that succeeded 
in bringing out what was most positive? What if that could be done? 
Well, I believe that therapy does it. The people who do the best therapy -- 
I think the thing that those people are doing for the most part --and I know 
this must sound utterly simplistic -- is helping further evolve what is most 
positive and most nice about us as human beings. I think that we reshape 
community, reshape our lives, in this process of therapy, that it has 
nothing to do with any kind of internal mental surgery, but instead it has 
to do with helping people to be more giving, to grow, to learn, to be more 
responsive to environments, to learn how to interrelate and to recreate our 
humanness. 

Shortly after I became a therapist 30 years ago I worked in a so-called drug 
rehabilitation center. It was right at the time that the Rockefeller drug 
program was coming into existence. I worked at a rehab center in Queens 
called Queensboro. And what we were working with at that time was a model 
known as therapeutic community. I was very sympathetic to that model; in 
this case it was inner city prisoners who had copped a plea and decided to 
be part of a rehab program. That model was operative in many centers 
throughout the city. It was, in my opinion, working well. Then suddenly from 
up in Albany came down the word that therapeutic community was out and 
methadone was in. Give 'em methadone, give 'em the drug. A lot of people 
think, mistakenly I believe, that therapeutic community failed. I for one do 
not believe that; I think that the methadone program, the Rockefeller 
program, was political to the core, and that therapeutic community, which is 
in some sense what I have been working to create with so many other people 
for that past 30 years, works for all people. That creating community -- in 
which people learn how to push and pull and reshape those interconnecting 
ropes that make up emotional life and cognitive life -- can make us better. 
That's what therapeutics can be about; that's how we can help our young 
people; that's how we can bring development and change to our communities. 
But not if we insist that what we're doing when we go into our communities 
to work with our young people is to "make them better," as if they were 
sick, as if all these mythical conceptions, like addiction, were sicknesses, 
and what we have to do is somehow cure them of those sicknesses. We must, it 
seems to me, go beyond that paradigm, that picture, because there is the 
extraordinary potential for helping humans to grow and develop off of what 
is most positive, most virtuous, most giving, about who we are. 

Does this mean I am so naive as to not recognize that number one, there are 
painful genetic problems, physiological problems and other problems? Of 
course I do. Should we use all that is available to us, including drugs, to 
help these people? Yes, of course we should. Does this mean I do not 
understand that people do bad things?. Yes, I know that people do bad 
things.  We all do bad things. The issue is not that there are no things 
that are wrong with us, or that we can do no bad things, it's rather that 
there could be ways of helping us grow that build off of what is profoundly 
right with us. And I don't think that's an abstract vision; I think that's a 
difficult, do-able task.  To me, therapeutics as way of life is a name that 
can be given to that task, as opposed to therapeutics being a way of trying 
to cure victims, victims who have been identified by a psychology which 
insists it has to have victims in order to make money. That's roughly 
speaking by what I mean by therapeutics as a way of life.