FIFTY YEARS AGO IN ETC.

It may seem curious that a person whose whole professional effort is devoted to psychotherapy should be interested in problems of communication. What relationship is there between providing therapeutic help to individuals with emotional maladjustments and the concern of this conference with obstacles to communication? Actually the relationship is very close indeed. The whole task of psychotherapy is the task of dealing with a failure in communication. The emotionally maladjusted person, the "neurotic," is in difficulty first because communication within himself has broken down, and second because as a result of this his communication with others has been damaged. If this sounds somewhat strange, then let me put it in other terms. In the "neurotic" individual, parts of himself which have been termed unconscious, or repressed, or denied to awareness, become blocked off so that they no longer communicate themselves to the conscious or managing part of himself. As long as this is true, there are distortions in t he way he communicates himself to others, and so he suffers both within himself, and in his interpersonal relations. The task of psychotherapy is to help the person achieve, through a special relationship with a therapist, good communication within himself. Once this is achieved he can communicate more freely and more effectively with others. We may say then that psychotherapy is good communication, within and between men. We may also turn that statement around and it will still be true. Good communication, free communication, within or between men, is always therapeutic....

I would like to propose, as an hypothesis for consideration, that the major barrier to mutual interpersonal communication is our very natural tendency to judge, to evaluate, to approve or disapprove, the statement of the other person or the other group. Let me illustrate my meaning with some very simple examples. As you leave the meeting tonight, one of the statements you are likely to hear is, "I didn't like that man's talk." Now what do you respond? Almost invariably your reply will be either approval or disapproval of the attitude expressed. Either you respond, "I didn't either. I thought it was terrible," or else you tend to reply, "Oh, I thought it was really good." In other words, your primary reaction is to evaluate what has just been said to you, to evaluate it from your point of view, your own frame of reference.

Or take another example. Suppose I say with some feeling, "I think the Republicans are behaving in ways that show a lot of good sound sense these days," what is the response that arises in your mind as you listen? The overwhelming likelihood is that it will be evaluative. You will find yourself agreeing or disagreeing, or making some judgment about me such as "He must be a conservative," or "He seems solid in his thinking."

CARL R. ROGERS "COMMUNICATION:

ITS BLOCKING AND ITS FACILITATION"

In thinking about the many barriers to personal communication, particularly those that are due to differences of background, experience, and motivation, it seems to me extraordinary that any two persons can ever understand each other. Such reflections provoke the question of how communication is possible when people do not see and assume the same things and share the same values.

On this question there are two schools of thought. One school assumes that communication between A and B, for example, has failed when B does not accept what A has to say as being fact, true, or valid. The goal of communication is to get B to agree with A's opinions, ideas, facts, or information.

The position of the other school of thought is quite different. It assumes that communication has failed when B does not feel free to express his feelings to A because B fears they will not be accepted by A. Communication is facilitated when on the part of A or B or both there is a willingness to express and accept differences.

As these are quite divergent conceptions, let us explore them further with an example. Bill, an employee, is talking with his boss in the boss's office. The boss says, "I think, Bill, that this is the best way to do your job." Bill says, "Oh yeah?" According to the first school of thought, this reply would be a sign of poor communication. Bill does not understand the best way of doing his work. To improve communication, therefore, it is up to the boss to explain to Bill why his way is the best.

From the point of view of the second school of thought, Bill's reply is neither a sign of good or bad communication. Bill's response is indeterminate. What Bill means, the boss has an opportunity to find Out if he so desires. Let us assume that this is what he chooses to do, i.e., find out what Bill means. So this boss tries to get Bill to talk more about his job while he (the boss) listens.

For purposes of simplification, I shall call the boss representing the first school of thought "Smith" and the boss representing the second school of thought "Jones." In the presence of the so-called same stimulus, each behaves differently. Smith chooses to explain, Jones chooses to listen. In my experience Jones's response works better than Smith's. It works better because Jones is making a more proper evaluation of what is taking place between him and Bill than Smith is.

F. J. ROETHLISBERGER "BARRIERS TO COMMUNICATION BETWEEN MEN"

Broadcasting in the United States has been for many years an activity officially predicated upon the existence of "the audience." If we ask, for example, the childish-sounding but sensible question, "Why is a disc jockey?" the normal answer provided by an American broadcaster would be, "Because he gets an audience." Programs which exist in spite of the audience, or independent of it, are as rare in American radio and television as star sapphires at a dime-store jewelry counter.

An entity which -- officially and verbally at least -- determines so much of the activity of a sizeable industry must, in the course of time, acquire a special set of characteristics. The characteristics of "the audience," we shall suggest, are more than reminiscent of a tribal deity. "The audience" is a creature of inhuman simplicity, of violent preferences, of vast boredoms. It is willing to be appeased by spectacle, and loves the symbols of violence, sorrow and sex; yet is prudish and ready to take offense if these symbols are not suitably indirect. It is willing to be coerced by ritual, whether spoken, chanted or sung, and will pour a golden flood of wealth upon the worshipper who discovers the coercive word. It exalts its favorites far beyond their apparent merits, but its favor is an unchancy thing; those who enjoy the bounty of the god are usually thought to be persons who have found a proper "formula" to titillate it, and have had the tenacity and the nerve to stick to the formula with iron determina tion.

MARTIN MALONEY "THE UNKNOWN GOD:

NOTES ON THE DEMONOLOGY OF AMERICAN BROADCASTING

There are many reasons why it is difficult to give a capsule answer to the question, "What is general semantics?" What Highet said of William James gives just one:

He found it impossible to make a long, sustained, orderly, authoritative speech and to unfold, stage by stage, argument by argument, proof by irresistible proof, a philosophical theory. He felt that any such speech would stiffen and cripple the essential flexibility of thought, and that any such theory must misrepresent the infinite complexities and novelties and inconsistencies of reality.

Nevertheless, I have found it convenient to approach the subject in three ways.

(1.) As a description of a methodology of statement analysis and performance, as a set of things to do if one wished any or all of the following:

(a.) The recognition and achievement of the varying degrees of specificity, precision, and accuracy in assertion;

(b.) The distinction between the bewildering variety of statements which take the declarative mode since any one may be mistaken for another: verifiable and non-verifiable, factual and inferential, lie, fiction, fantasy, error, those which do and do not involve variable terms, those which label or define and those which describe, etc.

c. The recognition of the forms of oversimplification which tend to accompany talking (1) in terms of causal rather than functional relationships, (2) in additive terms about non-additive relationships, (3) in terms of symmetrical relationships to the neglect of the asymmetrical, (4) in terms which split and separate what is to be found whole or inter-related, (5) in subject-predicate forms which obliterate relational factors.

2. As a description of a person's orientation, the general and specific tendencies, perspectives, attitudes a person may take in his adjustment to situations and people and in his definition of himself. These become types of reaction found in all degrees, variations, and combinations. If they are phrased in oppositional terms, it is for brevity only. Here the concern is with how much and under what circumstances a person reveals the following:

a. Does he ever go beyond his present premises and knowledge to face facts and theories which are different?

b. Is he disposed to listen to others to discover what "they have in mind" instead of arrogantly assuming that he knows without the investigation?

c. Does he respond in trigger-fashion without analysis of Situations, or does he exhibit the control which accompanies delay-of-reaction?

d. Does he expect to find things and people alike, unchanging, or are his expectancies attuned to the possibilities of difference and process? Is his thinking in terms of fixed types, kinds, categories, or does he take account of graded variations?

e. In his moments of painful "emotion," anger, hatred, fear, shame, indignation, or envy is he aware of the object of his feeling? Does he respond to the object in its setting or is he responding to some associated label or verbal definition of the situation? Do his feelings of being afraid, hurt, insulted (which may be justified in any one situation) freeze into chronic resentments and fears as if the stimulus continued, or does he seek to fix the feelings in space-time, thus forcing re-examination and attack on the chronicity?

f. When faced with the necessity of making decisions, is he willing to experiment and act in terms of what is known, or does he take refuge in postponing action until "all the data are in"?

g. When faced with problems requiring solution does he tend to think by verbalization, projecting ready-made linguistic schemes onto the facts under consideration, or does he think by visualization, directing his attention to pictures and situations without words, thus involving the structural aspects unrestricted by the verbally-defined categories?

3. As a set of premises, assumptions and claims, based on data available in 1933 which must be modified if new data are found:

a. That it is possible to create a general theory of sanity and human evaluation based on physico-mathematical methods which is not only internally consistent but usable and teachable;

b. That only the human class of life by virtue of its capacity to use symbols can begin where others leave off, and that upon this physical fact of interdependence can be established a rationale for a system of ethics, human relations, and feelings of social responsibility;

c. That any point of view about the behavior of human beings must start by considering them organisms-as-a-whole-in-an-environment, and that any analysis which implies a splitting must end in blind-alley over-generalizations;

d. That meanings of words or things are not merely matters of verbal definition, but are inseparably connected with "intellectual" and "emotional" states and colored by past experiences; that what something means is a composite of, at least, the cultural-psychological-logical-neurological-physiological-factors all interrelated;

e. Though a language may be used for many purposes, persuasion, poetry, polemics, etc., whenever it is used, it functions as a form of representation, a map which stands for territory inside and/or outside the person;

f. That the linguistic forms used by a people are involved in the formation of their attitudes; that a man who uses a structurally correct language will be moved to evaluations which are more appropriate than if he uses one which is structurally distorting;

g. That the creative achievements of man throughout history is evidence of human potentialities; that though we may live in a time of war and anxiety there is reason for despair only if men do not recognize the part their evaluation-talking processes play in the preservation of defeatist and destructive dogmas.

IRVING J. LEE "GENERAL SEMANTICS 1952"

Anybody can ask questions. If he can give his voice an upward inflection and if he knows words like how and why he can ask questions to an extent limited only by his own and other people's endurance. Some individuals in fact do. But their questions are not always paid off with information useful to them. For if you want to ask fruitful questions you first have to define clearly what it is you want to know.

A young child asks random questions. He is prompted by a consuming urge to know. But the information he wants is so all-embracing and his experience so limited that he is incapable of refining his questions or of making any precise statements of what he wants to know. He finds that his why's and whatsit's bring responses of some kind but those responses do not satisfy him because he is seeking information that he is unable to express in his question. Therefore all he can do is whale away at random with more why's. Frequently when he uses that word he is not inquiring about cause-effect at all; he is saying, "Tell me more. I don't understand this thing and I don't understand what you are saying about it."

At the more complicated level of adult life we are frequently as vague about what we want to know as the child is at his level. And when we are vague, our questioning, like his, must be more or less at random, with random results. For in such cases if we do stumble upon significant information, we fail to recognize it as an answer because we have not precisely formulated our question.

If we want precise answers we must ask precise questions. This applies not only to the questions which we put to others, but in particular to the ones which we put to ourselves. For usually we question others or seek information through other means from the world about us only in order to answer larger questions which we have put to ourselves. It is these in particular that must be formulated most precisely, else the questions that stem from them to the world about us are apt to be, like those of the child, a random, crude sort of quizzing all around Robin Hood's barn.

Before a scientist embarks on a research project or conducts an experiment he first states the problem in clear and precise language. It is the formulation of this clearly stated question that constitutes the creative phase of a scientist's work. The problem is well on its way to solution as soon as this has been done. For the question, when so formulated, suggests the direction in which the research is to be conducted and the specific conditions under which the experiment is to be made that will yield the facts wanted.

As Wendell Johnson says, "Any scientific worker of experience knows that by far the most important step toward the solution of a laboratory problem lies in stating the problem in such a way as to suggest a fruitful attack on it."

HELEN M. SOMMERS "GENERAL SEMANTICS AND CREDIT EVALUATION, PART 2 WHAT IS THE QUESTION?

Attention is called to the title, which is "how to talk with people," not to them or at them. Dr. Lee's new book is a simple, clear explanation, completely devoid of technical jargon, of some of the major implications of general semantics as applied to the problem of making conferences, small group meetings, and committee work more fruitful and rewarding.

The deftness of Lee's use of general semantics concepts is certain to appeal to many readers of ETC who have asked for a practical layman's manual. Because the author restricts himself to the specific task of guiding small committees in the accomplishment of their functions, he gives the reader an extremely sharp and explicit picture of the results which can be expected from general semantics in action.

For the writing of this book, Lee attended over 200 committee meetings, notebook in hand, to find out when meetings were fruitful and when they ended in wasted time and frustrated hopes. Out of these experiences he has evolved a number of ingenious suggestions as to how a chairman or leader can guide discussion into extensional channels and head off tendencies toward name-calling and partisanship. It is obvious from Lee's formulations that it is not sufficient that a chairman know general semantics; it is necessary that he have ways of implementing his knowledge through procedural habits--habits of reflecting the feelings of the participants, of pointing to areas where knowledge is imperfect, of keeping the earlier portion of a meeting devoted to the description of a problem before proceeding to the discussion of solutions, and of anticipating the blockages in communication that can occur when, for example, people begin to apply labels and to react to the labels they have themselves applied.

Such basic concepts as time-binding; two-valuedness; individual differences in evaluation; additivity vs. nonaclditivity; orientation toward similarities vs. orientation toward differences; the distinctions between reports, inferences, and judgments--all these and more are discussed and applied without the use of these terms. The trained student of general semantics will recognize the concepts and be delighted with the ingenuity of their explanation and application; at the same time he will receive (as I did) an object lesson in the kind of expository tact which many of us lack in talking about general semantics. The reader who is unacquainted with general semantics will simply find Lee's suggestions interesting and inviting. He will want to try them at the very next meeting he goes to. At the same time he will not be scared off by the uneasy feeling, which the use of general semantics terminology might have aroused, that he has to master an entire body of semantic theory before being ready to try the ideas for himself.

The modest claims of the book, as indicated in both title and subtitle, and the quiet tone of its presentation are likely, I am afraid, to obscure its importance. How to Talk With People is a valuable instrument for the improvement of human relations, not only in the contexts of committee and conference work of which Lee writes, but in larger contexts of human interaction as well.

REVIEW BY S. I. HAYAKAWA OF How TO TALK WITH PEOPLE:

A GUIDE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF COMMUNICATION IN COMMITTEES

BY IRVING J. LEE. NEW YORK: HARPER