Processing the Self

Abstract

Processing the Self The Self in Process. Guidano, V. F, New York: Guilford, 1991 (237 pp.). Big things come in small packages, and Ouidano's recent volume, entitled Self in Process, does little to disabuse this old adage of its truth value. Packed into a pithy 200 pages, Guidano succeeds in fashioning an incisive and original approach to a developmentally respectful form of constructivist psychotherapy. In fact, this mite-sized volume compares favorably with more weighty tomes along dimensions of sheer substance and originality, and surely surpasses them in term of signal-to-noise ratio. Notwithstanding its size, the volume is by no means what might be characterized as a "quick read"; indeed the reader is likely to encounter formidable obstacles to assimilating its material in a single sitting. Broadly divided into two sections, The Self in Process first tackles thorny theoretical issues before contending with the psychotherapeutic principles that anchor the volume's last half. On first blush it may appear as if this division is designed to apportion material of interest to the scholar and practitioner, respectively. But this appearance is beguiling. In fact, one of the most valuable features of the volume (and one of its central tenets, to boot) is its blurring of the boundaries between theory and practice and its compelling development of the essential interrelationship among them. Far from the simple truism that each informs the other, Guidano advances the position that each essentially is the other, that is, that the distinction that we customarily forge between theory and practice is, in large part, what Alfred Korzybski (1933) dubbed an "esstentialist transgression"; it represents a distinction forged along theoretical lines without any corresponding ontological warrant. The jumping off point for Guidano is that all observation is self-referential. Any perception, therefore, signals aspects of the perceiver as well as his or her object of perception. ReminiscentofWeimer's (1977) motor theory of mind, Guidano argues that "the order and regularity with which we habitually deal with things, as well as with ourselves, are not external and objectively given, but are rather a product of our continuous interaction with ourselves and the world" (p. 4). A distinction is forged between moment-to-moment experience (a priori first-order) and experiences as subsequently reordered into symbolic (e.g., linguistic) representations of this experience (a posteriori second-order experience). These two types of processes correspond to embedded experience, on the one hand, and explanation on the other. The centrality of this difference between experience and explanation to Guidano's work is increasingly clear throughout the volume as his major forms of intervention draw force and form from precisely this distinction (see below). A critical aspect of this approach is its endorsement of what might be called developmental teleology, for lack of a better term. Fundamentally respectful of, and committed to, developmental analysis, the orientation regards the past as shaping and framing an individual's emotional tonalities, without necessarily constraining or determining his or her personality or attendant life choices. As Guidano notes, "a 'depressive' personal meaning simply brings forth a possible world in which the experience of loss is the generative dimension for discovering cognitive and emotional domains, without defining whether, in unfolding such a dimension, the subject will become, for example, an original writer with an intense and full emotional life or whether he or she will become a drunk, of varying degrees of desperation, who will spend his or her days in solitude" (p. 197). Reminiscent of George Kelly's (1955) concept of constructive alternativism, Guidano views the individual's way of being as providing a grounding or perspective from which a wide variety of possible selves may be formed. This grounding simultaneously enables and disables particular perspectives, and its revision requires the respect and patience one would assume would be required to undergo significant developmental transformation. …