The intersubjective community. The character of the community in this example may be inferred from the foregoing. The community is a special instance of the I-you dyad in which the inclusion of the patient implies a significant exclusion. The exclusion is significant because of its function in therapy. Although the encounter is that of a sick man supplicating a healer, a special status is conferred upon the patient by virtue of the technique itself. I may be sick and I may have come to a doctor for help, the patient is saying, but this is no ordinary therapy in which all I have to do is hold still while the doctor works on me; this is analysis. And a good bit of the exchange between therapist and patient consists of the patient’s acceptance of the therapist’s invitation to come see it all from where he sits, as a tolerant pipe-fondling Thalesian, to share in the analyst’s understanding of symptoms, social behavior, culture — an understanding obtained by an elite technique to which to a degree the patient can, by reason of his own gifts, also aspire. Although he may have failed and so needs help, he enjoys a privileged status vis-à-vis the people out there in the street. They don’t know what we know. They don’t even know about themselves what we know about them. Thus the we-community of scientists — I, the therapist, and you, the patient but also now the surrogate scientist — can become a useful therapeutic instrument by means of which the patient’s low self-esteem is offset by Thalesian insights into himself and the society he lives in.
The interpersonal process is a multilevel one. Some estimation of its immense complexity is made possible by realizing that there occurs at one level the interaction between organisms which the behaviorist speaks of. Conversation is still a space-time journey of energy exchanges between organisms in all its molecular complexity. But this interaction is overlaid by the molar structure of symbolic behavior. Symbolic behavior is in turn as many-tissued as there are participants in the language event and as there are media of communication. The world and the being-in-the-world of the therapist collide with the world and the being-in-the-world of the patient. The possibilities of communication failure are unlimited. Yet it is not sufficient to say that one man says something and another man hears and understands or misunderstands, agrees or disagrees, rejoices or is saddened. It is also necessary to ask and try to answer such questions as: In what mode does the listener receive the assertion of the speaker? In what mode does he affirm it? In what way does his own mode of being-in-the-world color and specify everything he hears?
Perhaps what needs most to be emphasized is the intimate relation between the phenomenological structure of intersubjectivity and being-in-the-world, on the one hand, and the empirical event of symbolic behavior, on the other. The existential modes of human living do not take place in an epistemological seventh heaven wholly removed from the world of organisms and things. Rather do they follow upon and, in fact, can be derived only from this very intercourse: one man encountering another man, speaking a word, and through it and between them discovering the world and himself.
* See, for example, David McK. Rioch: “The theory [Sullivan’s theory of interpersonal relations] is very effective in dealing with the behavior of organisms, as it provides a comprehensive framework for dealing with the interaction of multiple factors, including the observer.”
† See, for example, Joseph Jaffe: “The measurement of human interaction has recently been approached through a variety of techniques, ranging from interpretive content analyses to objective recording of temporal patterns in behavioral interaction.”
‡ “Social psychology, considered as a branch of psychology, is the study of individual responses as conditioned by stimuli arising from social or collective situations; considered as a branch of sociology or as collective psychology, it is the study of collective responses or of the behavior of groups and other collectivities.” (L. L. Bernard, “Social Psychology.”)
* See Chapter 12.
* A symbol, according to Charles Morris, is a sign produced by its interpreter which acts as a substitute for some other sign with which it is synonymous. Thus hunger cramps might take the place of the buzzer announcing the food and become a symbol for the dog.
* See Chapter 11.
† See also Alfred Tarski. Other writers interpret semantics not merely as a formal science but as a quasi-ethical science in which users of words are scolded for not using them at the proper level of abstraction. See, for example, Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity.
‡ General linguistics is, of course, an empirical science, but, except for acoustics, only at the comparative level. In phonetics, phonemics, morphophonemics, syntax, and lexicography, the linguist describes the structure of the languages of the earth as they are found to occur. What one fails to find in the literature, however, is an empirical study of the language event in itself as a generic event. It is much as if biologists were interested in describing the various kinds of mitotic division among different species, but were not interested in studying the process of mitosis.
* I have in mind Paul Weiss’s exasperation with behavioral scientists’ perennial recourse to such terms as levels of organization. “We are struck with a lack of a practical, realistic, analytic approach that will go beyond the mere statement of the fact that we have hierarchical nature, that it does consist of a system of Chinese boxes one inside the other, that they are integrated, interrelated, coordinated and all these other terms.”