From filled roles to empty roles to process

Perhaps in more traditional times the roles were not empty. The change might be due to industrialization. (Marx termed it " alienation”- people’s lives do not express them anymore when people make products that will belong to others, when " work" is not expressive of life but only of money, when large parts of each day are taken up with producing what is then taken away and " alienated" from the producer. In Marx's conception of human nature, work and making were natural expressions and manifestations of living, and the alienation unnatural. )

The literate individual of today has a great deal more capacity than can be exercised within the roles. Long ago the roles were a precious way of keeping, for the mass of people, the inventions only a few were capable of. To keep civilization, discoveries had to be routined so the mass of people could do them. Greater sensitivities than most people had would be enshrined in such roles. The roles were better than what people could have managed, had they innovated. Barbarism and breakdown were always just one backslide away. Today it's the other way around, people’s abilities and sensitivities are far greater than what their roles structure them to do. Instead of enabling us to be human, as perhaps they once did, we feel roles as limitations on our humanity.

Our society has arrived at this development in very many ways. Old forms have been broken over and over again, a puzzling " zero point" has been reached, of nothingness, absurdity. Finally, a process is being discovered, in which there is neither straight-jacket form nor nothing, but a process in which there is not one controlling form, but rather an alternation. This development might be described as first a breaking of forms and roles, then a zero point where everything seems absurd, and then thirdly a process in which again all forms become usable, but not as before, not as the form of the living, and not singly as just one form. Rather as a process, a sequence, in which many forms are used and are only one side of an alternation, with the person's felt creativity being the other side.

Before I discuss institutions and the more specific institutional roles they involve, I want to say something about this sensing-form-sensing alternation in general. It applies to a lot of places, including the relation between logic and feeling. You can think of this basic idea as the process of forming (instead of just forms), or patterning (instead of just patterns), or role-structuring (instead of just role structure). Add, however, that such forming requires not mere inventing of patterns, but the felt sentience of human experiencing in its detail, between every form and the next ensuing one.

This is very different than going from one pattern to the next via logical thinking. It's also very different from staying in one form, or from having no form at all.

For instance, in art, in the last seventy years, there was first a movement to break old forms. Cubism and other types of painting, twelve tone scale in music - there was a breaking out of old forms. Then it got to be difficult to find any forms that hadn’t already been broken down. A painter would have to come up with something form-breaking somehow (and still make a good painting, too). It got so painters threw paint at the canvas, and Cage played a tape recording of random traffic noises in the concert hall. Similarly, drama broke old forms, for instance the distinction between the actors and the audience (Gide), and went from this to no forms at all, just the absurd (Ionescu). A nothing point is reached. It seems then, just as with person and role in our discussion, that without some patterning there isn’t anything. It seems that form is all there is after all. Similarly, in religion there was first liberal reform and a breaking of old forms, and then nothing. When the forms break there is then a stage of zero.

Currently we are moving from forms and then nothing, to a process that employs many forms again, but in a new way - in a way that is experientially continuous rather than being continuous because of a form. Our music still has radically new sounds, but now they aren’t just one strange noise after another, but sounds that follow in a continuity you can feel. Our poetry is again lyrical, and has left behind the days when only experts could read it. The poetry uses images from wildly different places in one poem, but it follows - you feel how it follows, it doesn’t follow because it makes thought sense. An old-fashioned lyrical poem would be about a walk in the woods and everything in it would be imagery that fit the walk in the woods. Today what each image is about doesn’t necessarily go with what the one before it was about, but the poem makes a continuous feeling process, and is not absurd. Frank Lloyd Wright, rather than staying with boxes and steel frameworks that all look like graph paper, one form, and also rather than building wildly as in Las Vegas, devises a new form for each building depending on its function (as in the Guggenheim building).

And people today do the same with religion. The forms, patterns, words, concepts, can come from very different and opposing religious systems, but it isn't any longer the forms themselves that matter, it is how they carry further the feeling process of the people who are in them. The way they carry that further makes it possible to combine forms that would contradict as forms and systems. It is as if, long ago, as Jung says, these forms encapsulated the real live collective process, and now we are liberating these forms to carrying that process forward again, rather than encapsulating it.

Psychology, too, must go this way - must leave off asserting this or that system of theoretical forms and concepts to people, and instead offer all the various forms it has to people’s live sensing into themselves and carrying themselves forward with any of this vocabulary or some other. Psychology cannot be used to say what is in a person, it is only a welter of generalities, words and patterns that can be used, but only if used so that a person's direct sense always goes beyond them and corrects them and details them. Your hang-up isn't to be found in Freud's books, though you may fit into one category or another, along with six or eight million other people. From Freudian orthodoxy, psychology went to a large number of disagreeing theories and from that to pure emotionalism. But just emoting and screaming till you're tired doesn't do it either. There is a process, this way: your hang-up, now, can be found by you only if you can stand to let yourself gently down into your feel of your living, so that what then won’t relax and sticks out can be found by you directly. A process of psychotherapy from that can only be one in which, step-by-step. what you say or think moves what you feel directly. Keep only those concepts which help that open and come apart, and which further the complexity and richness of your ongoing living.

Therefore, in our group and in this book, we don't subscribe to any of the various definitions of what is crazy and what isn't, or what is good and what isn't, which can be found in psychology. A certain process can be defined, and is good, and only that process can tell one whether a given content is good or not, for this person, at this time.

Of course, if society is changing, psychology cannot adjust people to society as it is, to some one form. Rather, people can free themselves as much as possible to carrying forward their living and sensing, which is beyond the roles and forms and words and structures society offers. This doesn't mean that they do without words or forms, zero, nothing, or aren't in society, but that they move beyond any given form to further form via their sensing beyond a given form.

Today's literate developed population in an industrial society consists of more and more people who can do just that, whose sensing exceeds extant social patterns. This brings us to the discussion of social institutions and their needed new kind of pattern.