Now, many psychotherapists believe that this homology necessarily leads to a
disturbed pattern of life, and they hold to a view of rationality as precisely
the absence of pregiven patterning in life. (Another theory, also common, is
that the homology is inevitable and only causes disturbance when the original
patterns were disturbed.) Vygotsky, on the other hand, sees the homology
as a medium of historical memory and a mechanism for the reproduction of
cultural skills and knowledge. Who's right? Is it possible to release the
pathological internalized relationships without losing the functional ones?
Where to draw the line?
Here's what has really set me thinking about this lately. In another part of
my life I've been learning something called "shadow work". Its practitioners
would cringe at the idea that they're practicing psychotherapy, and with good
justification, but still within limits that's one way to look at it. It has
*nothing* to do with Freudian therapeutic practice; it might be considered a
highly evolved (and rather more responsible) form of Gestalt therapy. Here's
the gist. Let's get twenty people in a room, two faciliators and a bunch
of students. They form a circle. One student volunteers to go into the
middle to work. A facilitator says, "what would you like to have happen?".
A typical answer might be, "I want to stop hitting people". Then they start
"triangling". The facilitator identifies a "role" that is evidently part of
this person's "script" around that issue, and then recruits another student
to play that role. They give that student some lines designed to provoke the
urge to hit, and the hitter starts feeling it. Then the facilitators get the
hitter to step out of that role, picking another student to be the person who
acts out the role of feeling an urge to hit. That student gets some lines.
They keep doing this, pulling the hitter out of whatever feeling comes up,
until he's able to get an objective view of the situation. The result is the
whole intramental drama of the issue being played out in the room. Then they
regress the whole script, asking "where have you seen this situation before?".
This is invariably a *very* heavy experience for everyone involved. Having
now reestablished the full emotional force of the homology between intramental
and interpersonal life, it becomes possible to work through it on a symbolic
level, though acting out the symbols usually involves long stretches of loud,
physically strenuous activity. As you can imagine, facilitating this kind of
work safely is an advanced skill.
>From a Vygotskian viewpoint, one striking aspect of this method is the
many ways in which it presupposes the homology between the intramental
and interpersonal planes. And not just a homology, but an actual real-time
correspondence, as if they are analytically inseparable, a unified phenomenon.
Another striking aspect of the method is the use of highly evolved mediational
means to *reverse* the process of internalization -- or, more precisely, to
set the process of internalization back into motion where it has gotten stuck,
so that one internalizes (and thus proceeds to reproduce) new relational
patterns. This might sound flippant, but I wonder if similar methods could be
used to help people unlearn bad math teaching.
Phil Agre
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 1996 08:08:04 -0500 (CDT)
From: James Wertsch <jwertsch who-is-at artsci.wustl.edu>
For [Vygotsky], the point was that the _same_ mental functions appear
on the intermental and intramental planes. Furthermore, the fact that
mediational means, or cultural tools inherently shape processes on both
planes means that the connection between individual and social processes
is even closer. From this perspective, the important point is to view
neural, mediational, social, economic, and other such processes as
_moments_ in human action rather than stand-alone entities.