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Methods - Building Context: Transpersonal Reality in Existential Psychotherapy1 SCOTT BORTLE "Different participants' utterances and conversational actions are lined up, straightened out, rectified, or laid out in an orderly way. Participants can then achieve intersubjective understandings rather than separate understandings; they can interact rather than merely act" (Nofsinger, 1991, p. 112). Introduction In this paper I will focus on the way in which a number of distinct contexts are invoked during the course of the interaction between Laing and Leila. An important aspect of the work that Laing does in his demonstration can be found in his willingness to take these contexts seriously and, so to speak, step into them and grant both their reality and their relevance. The result is that the "here-and-now" of the conversation is progressively enriched: Laing and Leila come to know where each other stand in terms of these contexts. Within this enriched here-and-now, Laing is able to help Leila untie some of the knots that bind her. And I will argue that Laing is himself aware of these phenomena. When Laing returns to the podium at the end of the 3 demonstration-accompanied, dramatically, by Leila-he is asked by a member of the audience to clarify remarks he had made earlier about "transpersonal reality-stepping into something that is a shared reality between you and the person you're working with." Laing picks his words carefully: "It's with the greatest reservations that I think one can talk about transpersonal reality. It is certainly non-verbal. And it is fundamentally, essentially impossible to express in the content of words. It is possible to convey it, however, more through words, in the music of words. In the manner of words." He continued: "When one tries to explain one's awareness of that transpersonal field to people who are not aware of it--and I know that in this company there are a lot of you who are aware of it, and many of you who are not aware of it. To those of you who are aware of it, you know how difficult it is to talk about it. And to those of you who are not aware of it, I would say this. Don't be too impatient. Don't, because you don't understand it, because you're mystified, don't get angry. Something is happening, something is happening, something is happening between us in this hall at this very moment. We can't express it in words." I suggest that the "transpersonal field" Laing speaks of is the level of conversation at which context operates. Laing is saying that if one is not aware of context, one will be unable to see how therapy works. The analysis here (and in Goldman, this issue, Hwang, this issue, and Harper, this issue) corroborates this; it does indeed show that Laing "steps into" context in a manner unusual for a therapist. But there is nothing mysterious going on. Leila, in answer to a comment from the audience, says, "I think this guy would make a good therapist--he's able to read people's minds" --but Laing is not reading her mind: rather, he is unusually sensitive to important pragmatic devices and features of everyday conversation. In particular, Laing is able to respond effectively when there becomes apparent in Leila's discourse a close linkage between two central contexts: that of family, and that of Christianity. In doing so he is able to foster ontological change. Ontological Change What do we mean when we say that someone changes? It is tempting to envision a psychological self in interaction with an external world, undergoing conscious or unconscious structural changes-either through passive modification of its parts or more actively adopting new attitudes or beliefs. This cannot be our understanding, as phenomenologists, of what it means for a person to change. Martin Heidegger insists in Being and Time that the human being enjoys a particular and exceptional existence, exceptional to the point that he writes of the specifically human kind of being, calling it "Dasein," literally "being-there," or as Heidegger glosses it, "being-in-the-world." If he is correct then a dualistic basis for thinking about human change will not suffice. Heidegger's analysis is an ontological one: it aims not so much at what we know, but at what exists for us and how it exists, and how we exist. The crucial importance of Heidegger's analysis in Being and Time (Heidegger, 1927/1962), and the reason for its continued importance 75 years since its publication, is its insistence that being is contextual. Heidegger's was one of the first cultural and historical analyses of both human being and the being of entities. What something, or someone, is, he insisted, depends on the historical and cultural circumstances in which it, or they, are encountered. Heidegger was not an idealist; he was not asserting that if humans ceased to exist, material objects would vanish from existence. Rather, his point was that ) such objects would no longer have being, for being is a human issue. "To intentionality, as comportment toward beings, there always belongs an understanding of the being of those beings" (Heidegger, 1975/1982, p. 175, original emphasis). Building a Common Ground Linguists who study the pragmatics of conversation recognize that in any conversation "participants are situated within multiple contexts which are capable of rapid and dynamic change as the events they are engaged in unfold" (Goodwin & Duranti, 1992, p. 5, emphasis added). This is an insight important for understanding the phenomena I describe in this paper. I will explore the ways Laing and Leila invoke multiple contexts, and the ontological change that is consequent upon this. Laing and Leila have apparently spoken to one another only briefly before they meet at the beginning of the demonstration, and so the here-and-now of their interaction is at first sparse. They don't know what they have in common; they don't know much about each other. It is not surprising then that can we see difficulties at the start of the conversation: we find misalignment, repairs, and dispreferred responses. In the first line it is not even clear who Laing speaks to, and line 2 displays Leila's confusion, Her next utterance--"Says, he says when you when you try to torture him, he's going to get, get a parachute and bail out" (4 )--is quite bizarre, Laing attempts to align with it, with a collaborative completion ("To the nether regions") that he must immediately repair, without apparent success. It is not even clear that Laing and Leila are initially aligned, on the purpose of their meeting, on the language-game they are playing. Laing, according to the chair of the session, is to give a demonstration of some sort. Presumably this means Laing will in some way help Leila with a problem. But at one point Leila remarks to him, "I'm just trying to help you guys um get some sense into your brains" (47) (see Harper, this issue, for more on the ambiguity of the purpose of the demonstration) Page ..1 ..2 ..3 ..4 ..5 Next... Hermeneutic Research on Psychotherapy. 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