How and Why We Change
Process and Product
There are many ways to change. The model proposed by Darwin suggests that species change gradually over time to adapt to their environments, and for sometimes random reasons. Some political theorists, like Marx, teach that change is gradual until it isn’t, and then it becomes radical — but it’s always necessary. Paul changed from Saul after a rather explosive event which showed him the truth of the world. Nietzsche thought that everything, all the time, was changing, and nothing was solid or fixed.
So, there are a great number of ideas about change offered throughout the history of thought. Change has always been an important concept for peoples and cultures. In our culture, January represents a time of change or a time of newness — “New year, new me” and so on. Famously, people do not follow up on those early year commitments, but almost everyone still thinks it’s important to make them. Even the promise of change seems important to people, tantalizing and exciting. I recently read that people default on their New Year’s Resolutions within the month. There is something refreshing to throwing everything to the wind at the end of December and telling oneself that in just a few weeks, everything is going to change and restart for the better.
Psychotherapy offers another kind of change. Carl Rogers very astutely noted that the idea of ‘process’ is very important when considering change from a therapeutic perspective, or from the perspective of the psychotherapist. Patients want change quickly, and they want it guaranteed in the form of a ‘product’ — but therapists are willing to wait. Part of this, surely, is what is at stake for each party. For the patient, more time without change means more time in whatever kind of discomfort they’re living in. For the therapist, it could mean a more interesting case study or steadier income.
The product style of change says that there can be a state which is reached in which change is no longer needed. In other words, Nietzsche’s least favorite kind of change, and St. Paul’s chosen style.
The product style of change, many proclaim, is born from the market and all its promises (and perhaps we can dump New Year’s Resolutions inside the discount bin after Christmas shopping is over). But it can be sniffed out in history much further than the emergence of the modern market. For St. Paul, there was an end to the change, meaning that, in one sense, change was only a transitory stage or a moment, not something to relish in itself.
Sincerity has something to do with this as well, as does belief, both of which Sartre thought of as modes of bad faith. Sincerity means that one has proclaimed what one believes through and through. To do that, one must first have something solid and fixed to believe in in order to identify with it. But this betrays the essential thing about consciousness and human life: that there is no essence, nothing fixed and solid to stand upon. So, when a person is being sincere, they’re pretending that they’re not really human, but something else. Something which can be caught in a net of words and ideas, something which suspends for a moment the absolute nothingness that characterizes human reality, like an object, or a thing of any kind which doesn’t have the thing we call ‘consciousness’. Emerson, in a 1841 essay called “Circles” says that the only true sin is to limit oneself and others. (Interesting, I think, to note the religious language permeating both Sartre’s and Emerson’s critique of the soul.) In a similar way, Sartre argued that belief is always duplicitous: always involving more than one kind of thinking at a time. If someone says, “I believe in X”, they’re simultaneously distancing themselves from X. If we can name it, Sartre says, we can never be at one with it, never be reduced to it.
God and Death
I remember watching a conversation on YouTube a while back between two religious scholars. They were talking about the declining state of Christianity in the West. Without remembering the names of the people or the context, I recall one of them saying, regarding the medievals, that they didn’t properly believe in Christianity or God — it simply was their life, their reality. Or, as Coleridge puts it in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” They didn’t exactly believe in God; it was unquestioned for them. (I was trying to think of an example for us ‘moderns’, but after a minute or so I realized that as soon as I think of an example, it ceases to be an example, because then it becomes a ‘belief’. This kind of shift, I suppose, is only available to thought after it happens, retrospectively.)
This is precisely what Sartre is talking about. If we can think about whatever we believe in in any way that’s conceptual, we lose the intimate connection with the object of belief.
So maybe St. Paul’s version of change looks different from ours in some kind of necessary way. Maybe he had access to a different kind of water than we do. Or is Sartre wrong? Can there really be a ‘fixed’ product at the end of a moment of change?
To return to Carl Rogers and the idea of processual change in psychotherapy: Rogers believed that not only was a state of complete and total fixedness impossible, but the very ideal of this state causes a lot suffering for people. It’s expecting that to be human is something different from what it is — that is, a dynamic state of constant flux and change. There is even quite a bit of literature to suggest that hope for change in a patient is one of the best predictors of positive outcomes of therapy. So perhaps something we can take away from this is that half of the work is letting go of the idea of a product state of change, a state when change is no longer needed, a final outcome. Or, to take the title of Adam Phillips’ book, On Wanting to Change is just as, or more, important than the actual change itself.
But if that’s all there is to getting the life we want to get (and clearly there are more things involved in that endeavor) regarding our attitude towards change, why and how do we stay so fixed on being fixed? There is something so obviously compelling about being done with change, as if we’ve done the work of change and have reached a point of perfection where one need not change anymore, where one is done with the process of change. Sartre would say this state is only accessible to God: where the “for-itself” is harmonized with the “in-itself”. God, he says, is the only being capable of achieving a state of completion. Well, that and death. For us mortals, we can achieve completion once we’re dead.
Outside of being God or being dead, is it possible to get to a point where change doesn’t happen anymore? Erik Erikson, the psychoanalyst, made a much-needed correction to early theories of development. Instead of stopping at age 6 or 12 or around thereabouts, he believed that development continues to happen until one’s death. And although he was still committed to a kind of progression or advancement (towards what?), he was at least considering people to be things of change, or processes in Rogers’ words, as long as they live.
This is a much more hopeful way to think about things than the kind of thinking which says we are who we are, and there’s nothing to be done about it.
Who You Are: Becoming
I always found the axiom to “become who you are” fascinating because it assumes that there is a “you” somewhere inside which is always there, and just requires the “other you” to step into it, to become it. It is a phrase which evokes fate, but a fate which is within, not without. Living according to one’s fate means finding one’s purpose and true nature in the stars, in a book, or among other (typically more authoritative) people. But becoming who one is assumes that all you must do is look within, like the protagonist in Coelho’s The Alchemist. On the other hand, if we think, like Rogers and others do, that “who you are” is precisely the process of “becoming”, we get a much different picture, one of constant change.
But if one never stops changing, who or what is the one that one really is?
Carl Rogers might urge us to think that who we ‘really’ are is pure change, pure dynamism, nothing fixed or settled at all. Becoming who we are then means that, at least at first, we must give up the idea of becoming who we are.
I think it’s a very open question as to who or what gives us the idea that humans are fixed beings, and their reasons for doing so are even more obscure. One idea is that we get this from our parents (which doesn’t solve much, because they also must get it from their parents ad infinitum, unless it is only the previous two generations in a massive conspiracy experimenting with future humanity). They have certain expectations of us — very often with good intentions — such as it being important to be reliable, to be trustworthy, to be a good worker and husband and wife and partner. And all of these things need at least a modicum of stability. In less favorable circumstances, they may instill in us that the world, ourselves, and even them are unsafe and dangerous, and we will do much better if we close down shop, shut ourselves off to the horrible things outside. A castle built on rock is more defensible than one built on, or made of, sand.
Another source of the idea of fixity is from Plato and the religious and philosophical ideas he inspired. He teaches us that we have a soul which is untouched by the world of appearances and changes, and we have to guard this soul against the world. Nietzsche famously hated Plato because he taught that the world was corrupt, and that we should save ourselves from it by denying it (though, of course, the Greek version of worldly denial looked a lot more like our modern version of indulging). The world and all of its falsehoods of change and instability is only useful insofar as it points to the world beyond. If we see an very symmetrical triangle in this world or have good friends, we can extrapolate that there is a more perfect, whole, and fixed ideal of it somewhere else, not accessible to us.
Perhaps another reason for our idea of fixedness is a sociological one: it is much easier to organize society when people know who they are and what role they fulfill in society. If I am always able to change and therefore doubt myself, who is to say that my roles are any more fixed than water? And if everyone does that, when will the trash be taken out, the taxes be done, and the houses be built? Perhaps, if one really realized that they are always changing and that who they really is up to them each moment, we’d all be too busy exploring ourselves and others and the world to commit to any kind of stable work. The French philosopher Louis Althusser wrote that this kind of messaging is transmitted to us through all of the “ideological” forms of social control like churches, schools, families, and workplaces. The idea that there are things to be done, and we’re the ones to have to do them doesn’t need the hard-handed fist of a dictator. Indeed, that often backfires. But if people are encouraged and taught rather than forced, anything is easier to swallow.
So, if the idea that we’re fixed and stable has a certain lineage, can it be undone — and what kind of life might we get if we undo it? Let’s start by reversing some of the effects we just considered.
First, we’d probably have different ideas of what a good person is. Stability and fixedness wouldn’t necessarily be the only things to consider when thinking about relationships, work, and life in general. Maybe boundaries would be more negotiable and up for discussion. As Adam Phillips might put it: the forbidden and unforbidden pleasures wouldn’t look so hard and fast. Perhaps even our gender and sexuality would be more of a question to be developed rather than a thing to be assumed. Curiosity, I think, wouldn’t feel like doubt anymore, but more like an invitation. But people would certainly be late more to meetings and reservations. And there would be always a residue of our former selves, so it would be quite painful at times to be caught between the fixed self and the unstable core of being.
Second, I wonder, along with Nietzsche, what ideas about life we would have if Plato never happened. If there was never a philosophy or worldview which believed the present, material world was nothing more than a mere distortion of some truer, more real world, my guess would be that we value the present world more. We wouldn’t have any idea that there is anything other than what we’ve got here before us. The change that we so clearly observe in everything around us (from melting candles to evolving personalities) would be taken as it is, and not as a progression to something or a degradation away from something, but simply life as it is: constant movement and change. Perhaps philosophy in general would look a little different as well, maybe something more like sketches of ideas, or aphorisms, or even a poem about an idea, instead of a systematic approach. People like Rudolf Carnap and other so-called positivists thought the role of philosophy is to deliver fixed, invariable meanings of words and ideas. But this is hard to square away when, in life, we rarely find that things lend themselves to this kind of thinking. Change has a stubborn tendency to resist stubbornness. This would, obviously, put science in a strange position, being the philosophy of predictability.
And then what if our cultural institutions never taught that we had to find our role within society and stick to it, or change it only with some narrow guardrails? From a bird’s eye view, society in general would look different. Adam Smith would never have written that the factory is efficient because every pin-maker has a different and minute role in the final product of the pin. I also wonder if advertising would be different. If, instead of a phone company celebrating the next addition, they would say, “Ah, well here’s another one. You can get it if you’d like, but your life will likely be no different than with the previous model.” In other words, if the very idea of ‘product’ will be let go of, and we might instead be less inclined to believe that whatever we buy will not afford us any more of the X factor thing we are looking for (happiness, sexiness, better relationships, more adventure, and so on). We would know that each thing is only another iteration, not some final stopgap in our ephemeral desire. It’s also interesting to think about what school and work might look like. Maybe we would be encouraged to do whatever we find interesting in that moment or era of our life instead of following the fixed track of English at 9:00 AM, Mathematics at 10:00 AM, Gym at 11:00 AM, and so on until 3:00 or 4:00 PM, Monday to Friday, January to May and then September to December. I would also think people would generally work less, and maybe they would work differently.
It’s interesting to imagine such changes to society at large, but we will never know what it might look like if everything were different. At the very least, it is inciteful to realize just how much of life and our ideas about life are informed by the idea of fixity and thingness. And how these ideas conflict with ideas of change. It is the process or product debate baked into our personal and social lives.
The Illusion of Change
When people go to the office of a psychotherapist, they expect a certain kind of change. There is hope that something will be different (and better) if one talks with this person and listens to what they have to say because, after all, they’re professional.
What kind of change a person expects from a therapist is always an open question, but one that is sometimes anxiety-producing to sustain for very long. Therapy is becoming more accessible, and so insurance companies are more likely to cover the services. And for those therapists who decide to accept this form of compensation, they have to do certain things to justify their services.
For instance, before the third session, the therapist is expected to provide a diagnosis and 6-month treatment plan with expected outcomes. But how, one could ask, could a therapist predict the change that will happen in six months?
There are many advantages to implementing scientific research into the discourse and practice of psychotherapy. It holds practitioners a little bit more accountable to each other and their patients. It bridges gaps in communication — which is usually a benefit no matter the outcome. It creates very interesting conversations about the role of knowledge and authority in both therapy and science. But one disadvantage, among others, is that it forces the psychotherapist to act as if change is predictable, and as if the individual encounter between this psychotherapist and this patient is scientific in the way that a research project is. As if this middle-aged Hispanic American patient with a mood disorder will respond positively to 3 months of cognitive therapy followed by two family sessions and then followed by two and a half months of humanistic therapy. But that would require both the therapist and the patient to decide from the first interaction what kind of person the patient is, and what kind of person they want to be.
This is on top of the very natural and very welcomed wish of the patient (and often the therapist) to want things to go a certain way from the outset. There is both a demand at the institutional level and the personal one, the microcosm of the consulting room. The anxiety produced says, “Be careful not to be surprised!” On the other hand, to be able to surprise oneself is a mark of mental health, according to Donald W. Winnicott, so it is rather striking that it is often what we try to avoid the most — even in psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy is a place that is built to welcome surprise into the room, and all the incumbent difficulties. Children learn very early to be wary of surprise. Surprise means unpredictability, and it is the exact opposite that children need from their caregivers. Consistent and devoted caregiving are really the only two requirements for raising a healthy child.
On the other hand, perhaps it is only the condition of the environment that needs to be consistent, which allows the child to experiment, hypothesize, change, and be surprised. If the caregiver is stable and consistent, as in John Bowlby’s work, then the child feels comfortable going out to explore the world and its own body. For change to happen, then, there needs to be an illusion of an unchanging base. Perhaps this is why people can surprise themselves in therapy, and why change is possible. The therapist is there, week after week, year after year, listening attentively and caring consistently about the patient. If he changes, he tries not to show it. But we know, both patients and therapists, that there really is something going on behind the scenes, that therapists get divorces, have children, struggle to pay rent, decide to change their hairstyle, and so on.
Hope without Promise
So, if change can’t be realistically expected from the outset (despite the demands of people and institutions), when can we be expected to know something about it? And the answer, “We will never know, let’s just talk and find out” is romantic — and there is indeed some truth to it — but for the person who is in the throws of addiction, depression, divorce, or other acute mental pain who is paying usually a good sum of money for the therapy, this answer is pithy and is unhopeful to them.
I believe that it is part of the therapist’s role to provide hope to people. Not in a eschatological way by promising or guaranteeing a certain kind of outcome, but in a more general way that evokes the positive change that usually occurs. And although the therapist’s very presence and consistency are a testament to that hopefulness, I think it should sometimes be articulated explicitly.
Hope for a positive change doesn’t give a direction for the change beyond allowing the patient to feel slightly better about their choice consulting a clinician rather than, say, holding it all in or making irreversible decisions to deal with the pain. It doesn’t forbid being surprised, in Winnicott’s terms, and it doesn’t fold the for-itself into the in-itself, in Sartre’s terms. Psychotherapy can be a practice of life, not of death, if it provides hope without promises.
But before being a practice of life, it is first an experiment in living, to borrow a phrase from Adam Phillips. It is the experiment of: If you say things without trying too hard to come of a certain way to another person, and that person tries to show you all the ways in which you’re stopping yourself from doing so, what might your life feel like? I am, of course, talking about psychoanalysis more than about cognitive or other kinds of therapies which encourage a certain kind of speaking.
Following the experiment model, though, it’s quite easy to see how one could surprise oneself. And this seems to me to be an essential step in change from the point of view of process. In fact, this seems to be an important lesson in the very act of process: I try to do this thing, something intervenes, I accept it openly as my own, and I keep along. In the opening to the beloved The Hobbit, Tolkien says of Bilbo Baggins:
“The Bagginses had lived in the neighborhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected.”
Without romanticizing psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general to the degree of high fantasy, it is curious to see the overlap between Tolkien’s description of Bilbo and observing how the rest of The Hobbit unfolds, and a particular case in psychotherapy. Bilbo needed to be brought out of his otherwise comfortable hole in the ground to do unexpected things. It is a risk to do such a thing. In Bilbo’s case, he is risking his life (and being late for dinner, a constant worry for him); in the case of entering a treatment of psychotherapy, one is risking familiar pain in the hopes of getting an unfamiliar, but better, pain.
Again, what this unfamiliar pain looks like cannot be promised from the get-go, from the consultation or the first few meetings (contra insurance companies). And I think most patients understand that too. I think that even in those cases where the patient explicitly demands outcomes, they too feel that this is a premature wish. This may have to do with the descending of the medical authority that therapists have made since Freud’s time. It may also have to do with people’s naturally playful inclination, as when a child asks its parents properly absurd and impossible questions and then doesn’t pay attention when the parent gives a response, thoughtful or not.
The Ultimate Fact
In the essay “Circles”, Emerson spends a great deal of time describing the coming and going of horizons of possibility for humans and culture, using a circle as a metaphor. The circle constantly expands, shifts, and encapsulates the old circle. “Every ultimate fact,” he tells us, “is only the first of a new series.” This remarkable line is everything we need to know about what Carl Rogers, Sartre, Nietzsche, and many others have thought about change through the perspective of a process. There is no ultimate fact, no final circle which keeps everything within it. It’s the human spirit, Emerson says, which is always pushing beyond such an encircling.
“Permanence is a word of degrees” — when we settle into something (a new role, an identity, a ‘cure’) we mistake it for permanence, and we’re afraid to lose it, or that changing will make us have to forsake this newfound permanence.
And who knows: Emerson and the others haven’t seen the end of time — no one has stepped outside of the ultimate circle of ‘being human’, so perhaps there is a true endpoint, an ultimate fact. But when we ask for change, in psychotherapy or love or with a new resolution, it might be easier to give up the idea of becoming who we are if the emphasis is on the “who we are” and not the verb “to become”.
We can view change in a number of different ways. We can think of change like St. Paul, a radical conversion into something new a final; or we can view it as a process, a question which is open and never ultimately settled. They each have their comforts and discomforts. The wager, at least at first, of psychotherapy is that if we suspend our investment in the first kind of change, a different and perhaps more enlivening kind of change will take place.
