Wading through epistemology.

The two books I'm exploring for this section of my investigation into how Eros is handled during therapy, fit nicely together.

The books I'm reading are: The story of Mrs Keech - How Prophecy Fails, and David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity.

The question I'm thinking about right now is, what makes a good theory? The first part of answering how do we know is to create a good theory. Clearly a compelling explanation isn't always going to be a good theory!

Mrs Keech might have had theories about her experience of channeling messages from beyond. Hopefully I will get to read them! Meanwhile what happened is, Mrs Keech received compelling communications from extraterrestrial beings who told her of cataclysmic events due to occur on a very specific date.

When on that very specific date the earth failed to crack open and the ocean failed to drown America, and when a significant number of flying saucers failed to appear. The prophecy was, in Mrs Keech's mind, not disproved.

So, there is a problem of disconfirmation here. The psychological discomfort that such disconfirmation usually creates requires remedies; new beliefs and behaviours coherent with the original narrative. The believers chose to believe that something unknown and possibly unknowable had changed the timing of the cataclysm. And that nothing about the original scenario had been altered. 

Cognitive dissonance, the friction between conflicting realities causes psychological pain. And that pain is reduced when people are able to do something to preserve their beliefs - how Mrs Keech and her followers did this will be joyfully described in the rest of the book, When Prophecy Fails!

Meanwhile David Deutsch privileges explanation above testability. The sea did not rush in, the space brothers stayed away, but there was never an explanation for the specific date or why belief was necessary. So there was never a way to really understand what was happening.

Mrs Keech was a person who spoke with authority.

A deeper investigation of what was actually occurring would need the believers to reject authority. We can't agree that something is true simply because a person speaks with passion and conviction. Therefore our ability to criticise is vital. 

Ok, well the bit that's really tickling my brain is where David goes on to say that something is 'real' when it figures in our best explanation. 

The word, Real, in this usage indicates a quantity of relevance? It appears to me that 'real' for David is a property of reality. Something exists because reality is existent. What a thing does is contextual, and if I've read it right, in David's view a real thing has the ability to construct. So the property of realness is constructed through a thing's ability to create change with and through other things.

This makes ideas real, very real actually.

Real, as a description when applied to something, for the purposes of creating knowledge, is dependant on its relevance and significance to the explanation.

So, as I understand it, a good explanation describes each potential transformation of a specific event through the action of constructs. And each transformation can be elegantly described by the explanation, and new information simplifies and refines the original explanation.

This is fascinating, ok, so Mrs Keech took her experience at face value, her passion transmitted urgency and danger to others. They changed their behaviour ( sold their property, gave up their jobs). I can see parallels with Dionysus (as a verb) - Dion meaning god, the sus bit, meaning to be inhabited by the god, to be possessed by the energy of an idea, a situation, an event. And this is part of being human, enthusiasm - a word almost stripped of power, has a similar meaning. Compelling.. compulsion, an effect of divinity. If we don't attribute it to divinity? We see authenticity, truth, justice, mania, insanity, the compelling explanation isn't a good explanation - but it might be a wonderfully transformational moment ..oh dear.

In therapy I work with face value meanings and energy. Because I work with meanings, not truth if we define truth as an accurate appraisal of what happened. And therapy is often seen as a way to help people face the truth of their reality. To let go of painful narratives and understanding, to start again with a clearer picture. My role isn't that. I don't agree that the negative narrative is the problem. Disempowerment is. Finding ways to alter that negative reality, to use one's power to construct a better version from whatever version you prefer. Now we're talking! But no one will be demonised, no need to cut or avoid.. unless there is real danger.

So why was my victim statement so necessary?

Epistemic injustice requires epistemic justice. From a third person perspective I was honour bound to bring to his awareness the consequences of his inability to work with Eros.

Because, back to myself now, without the cooperation of the therapist to help me to understand what had happened I felt trapped by his version of events. 

We are constructed within our relationships, and his effect on my psychological state had been harmful. Without dialogue there would never be anyway to refute or criticise the theories that caused harm. He will do it again.

The victim statement was a no holds barred description of my experience. Writing it, and especially sending it was necessary. I had to demonstrate to myself that he hadn't succeeded in silencing me.

Stepping out of Rogerian theory where the felt sense points to a real organismic self, and into Gendlin's view that contact with the felt sense enables the self to alter and reconstruct. It was destructive to me as a hurt and fragile client to be with a therapist who framed my feelings for him, and my attempt to talk about it, as out of order.

Disorder.

And I  only experienced a tiny taste of this pathologising process.

This isn't something I should be quiet about.