‘In human society, at all its levels, persons confirm one another in a practical way, to some extent or other, in their personal qualities and capacities, and a society may be termed human in the measure to which its members confirm one another.
The basis of man's life with man is twofold, and it is one – the wish of every man to be confirmed as what he is, even as what he can become, by men; and the innate capacity in man to confirm his fellow-men in this way. That this capacity lies so immeasurably fallow constitutes the real weakness and questionableness of the human race: actual humanity exists only where this capacity unfolds. On the other hand, of course, an empty claim for confirmation, without devotion for being and becoming, again and again mars the truth of the life between man and man.
Men need, and it is granted to them, to confirm one another in their individual being by means of genuine meetings: but beyond this they need, and it is granted to them, to see the truth, which the soul gains by its struggle, light up to the others, the brothers, in a different way, and even so be confirmed.’
MARTIN BUBER (l957a)
Total confirmation of one man by another is an ideal possibility seldom realized. For practical purposes, as Buber states, confirmation is always ‘to some extent or other’. Any human interaction implies some measure of confirmation, at any rate of the physical bodies of the participants, even when one person is shooting another. The slightest sign of recognition from another at least confirms one's presence in his world. ‘No more fiendish punishment could be devised,’ William James once wrote, ‘even were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof.’
Thus, we can think of confirmation as partial and varying in manner, as well as global and absolute. One can think of actions and interaction sequences as more or less, and in different ways, confirmatory or disconfirmatory. Confirmation can vary in intensity and extensity, quality and quantity. By reacting ‘lukewarmly’, imperviously, tangentially, and so on, one fails to endorse some aspects of the other, while endorsing other aspects.
Modes of confirmation or disconfirmation vary. Confirmation could be through a responsive smile (visual), a handshake (tactile), an expression of sympathy (auditory). A confirmatory response is relevant to the evocative action, it accords recognition to the evocatory act, and accepts its significance for the evoker, if not for the respondent. A confirmatory reaction is a direct response, it is ‘to the point’, or ‘on the same wave-length’ as the initiatory or evocatory action. A partially confirmatory response need not be in agreement, or gratifying, or satisfying. Rejection can be confirmatory if it is direct, not tangential, and recognizes the evoking action and grants it significance and validity.
There are different levels of confirmation or disconfirmation. An action may be confirmed at one level and disconfirmed at another. Some forms of ‘rejection’ imply limited recognition – the perception of and responsiveness to what is rejected. An action ‘rejected’ is perceived and this perception shows that it is accepted as a fact. Direct ‘rejection’ is not tangential; it is not mocking or in other ways invalidating. It need neither depreciate nor exaggerate the original action. It is not synonymous with indifference or imperviousness.
Some areas of a person's being may cry out for confirmation more than others. Some forms of disconfirmation may be more destructive of self-development than others. One may call these schizogenic. The ontogenesis of confirmation and disconfirmation has barely begun to be explored. Responsiveness adequate to the infant will be inappropriate to an older child or an adult. There may be periods in one's life when one has experienced more confirmation or disconfirmation than at other periods. The qualities and capacities confirmed or disconfirmed by mother or father, brothers, sisters, friends, may differ widely. An aspect of oneself negated by one person may be endorsed by another. A part or aspect of oneself which is ‘false’, or which one regards as false, may be confirmed actively and persistently by one or both parents, or even by all the significant others at the same time. At different periods of life, the practical or felt need for, and modes of, confirmation or disconfirmation vary, both as to the aspects of the person's being in question and as to the modes of confirming or disconfirming particular aspects.
Many families have now been studied (not only those in which one person has come to be regarded as psychotic) where there is little genuine confirmation of the parents by each other and of the child by each parent, separately or together, but this may not be obvious, though it can be studied objectively. One finds interactions marked by pseudo-confirmation, by acts which masquerade as confirming but are counterfeit.1 Pretences at confirmation go through the appearances of confirmation. The absence of genuine confirmation, or pseudo-confirmation, may take the form of confirming a fiction the child is taken to be, without the actual child receiving recognition. The characteristic family pattern that has emerged from the studies of the families of schizophrenics does not so much involve a child who is subject to outright neglect or even to obvious trauma, but a child who has been subjected to subtle but persistent disconfirmation, usually unwittingly. For many years lack of genuine confirmation takes the form of actively confirming a false self, so that the person whose false self is confirmed and real self disconfirmed is placed in a false position. Someone in a false position feels guilt, shame, or anxiety at not being false. Confirmation of a false self goes on without anyone in the family being aware that this is the state of affairs. The schizogenic potential of the situation seems to reside largely in the fact that it is not recognized by anyone; or if the mother or father or some other member or friend of the family is aware of this state of affairs, it is not brought into the open and no effort is made to intervene – if such intervention were only to state the truth of the matter.
Here we shall look at some acts of confirmation or disconfirmation, without prejudgements as to whether or to what extent they are schizogenic.
There may be a failure to recognize a person as agent. The attribution of agency to human beings is one way we distinguish people from things set in motion by agents external to themselves. In some childhoods this quality of being human, whereby one can come to feel that one is an agent in one's own right, is not confirmed by the original significant others. It is illuminating to match observations on the way a child is treated by his parents with the ‘delusions’ the psychotic child or adult expresses.
Julie said she was a ‘tolled bell’ (told belle), that she was ‘tailored bread’ (bred). When it was possible to observe the interaction between her mother and her, one could see that her mother could not or did not confirm agency on Julie's part. Her mother could not respond to spontaneity and intended with her only if she, mother, could initiate the interaction. Her mother visited the hospital daily. One saw Julie daily sitting passively while her mother combed her hair, put ribbons and hairpins in it, powdered her face, applied lipstick to her lips and mascara to her eyes, so that the final appearance resembled nothing so much as that of a beautiful, lifesize, lifeless doll which her mother ‘told‘ (tolled). Julie seemed to have been her mother's ‘transitional object’, to use Winnicott's term. One might say: ‘What could her mother do but this, if her daughter was catatonic?’ It is significant and remarkable that it was this passive listless ‘thing’ which her mother regarded as normal. She reacted to spontaneity on Julie's part with anxiety and attributions of badness or madness. To be good was to do what she was told (Laing, i960, pp. 196–224).
1. During direct observation of the relationship between a six-month-old child and its mother, the occasions in which smiling occurred were noted. It was observed, first of all, that infant and mother smiled at each other not infrequently. It was then further observed that the mother, during the periods of observation, never once responded with a smile to the infant's initial smile at her. She, however, evoked smiling in the infant by smiling herself, by tickling and playing with the infant. When she was the evoker of the infant's smiles, she in turn smiled back, but she responded with a flat, dull look if the infant took the initiative (cf. Brodey, 1959).
2. A little boy of five runs to his mother holding a big fat worm in his hand, and says, ‘Mummy, look what a big fat worm I have got.’ She says, ‘You are filthy – away and clean yourself immediately.’ The mother's response to the boy is an example of what Ruesch (1958) has called a tangential response.
Ruesch writes:
‘The criteria which characterize the tangential responses can be summarized as follows:
The reply inadequately fits the initial statement.
The reply has a frustrating effect.
The reply is not geared to the intention behind the original statement as it is perceivable through word, action, and context of the situation. The reply emphasizes an aspect of the statement which is incidental’ (Ruesch, op. cit., pp. 37–48).
In terms of the boy's feeling, the mother's response is at a tangent, as it were. She does not say, ‘Oh yes, what a lovely worm.’ She does not say, ‘What a filthy worm – you mustn't touch worms like that; throw it away.’ She does not express pleasure or horror, approval or disapproval of the worm, but she responds by focusing on something which he has not considered and which has no immediate importance to him, namely whether he is clean or dirty. She may be saying either, ‘I am not interested in looking at your worm unless you are clean’, or, ‘Whether or not you have a worm is of no importance to me – all that matters to me is whether you are clean or dirty, and I only like you when you are clean.’ In developmental terms, the mother can be seen as ignoring the genital level in the boy symbolized by the big fat worm, and as recognizing only the anal issue of clean or dirty.
In this tangential response there is a failure to endorse what the boy is doing from his point of view, namely, showing his mummy a worm. ‘Boy with worm’ is an identity that might facilitate a later identity of ‘man with penis’. Persistent absence of a confirmatory response to boy-with-worm may lead the boy to make some detours before he can arrive at being a man with a penis. He might decide to collect worms. He might feel that he can collect worms only if he keeps himself very clean. He might feel that he can collect worms as long as his mother knows nothing about it. He might feel that the most important thing was to be clean and have his mother's approval, and that collecting worms did not matter. He might develop a phobia for worms. At all events, one imagines that, although his mother has not openly disapproved of his having a worm, her indifference to it is likely to generate at least some transitory confusion, anxiety, and guilt in him, and that if this particular response epitomizes the exchanges between him and his mother at this stage in his development, then it is going to be that much more difficult for him to have an unself-conscious, guilt-and-anxiety-free, non-defiant, real sense of the many aspects of being ‘boy-with-worm’ and ‘man-with-penis’.
Furthermore, since the issues in terms of which his mother perceives him are clean-dirty, good-bad, and her equations are clean=good, dirty = bad, he will at some point have to decide whether these are the decisive issues and the necessary equations for him. If he is dirty, he may get to the point that, although his mother told him he was bad, he does not feel bad; and, conversely, that if he is clean he is not necessarily good: that he might well be good yet dirty, or bad yet clean. Or even no longer live by puzzling out the matrix of good-dirty-bad-clean. He may come to identify himself through these issues and equations, to become a good-clean or a bad-dirty boy and man, and ignore as tangential to his real concerns all those aspects of his life which do not fit these categories.
3. I began a session with a schizophrenic woman of twenty-five, who sat down in a chair some distance away from me while I sat half facing her in another chair. After about ten minutes during which she had not moved or spoken, my mind began to drift away on preoccupations of my own. In the midst of these, I heard her say in a very small voice, ‘Oh please don't go so far away from me’.
Psychotherapy with real card-carrying schizophrenics is a separate subject, but the following are a few remarks on the issue of confirmation or disconfirmation in psychotherapy.
When she made this remark I could have responded in many ways. A comment some psychotherapists might make is, ‘You feel I am away from you’. By this, one would neither confirm nor disconfirm the validity of her ‘feeling’ that I was no longer ‘with’ her, but would confirm the fact that she experienced me as away. The endorsement of the ‘feeling’ is noncommittal about the validity of the feeling, namely, whether or not I was actually going away from her. One could ‘interpret’ why she should be frightened at me not staying ‘with’ her, e.g. a need to have me ‘with’ her as a defence against her own anger if I am not. One might construe her plea as an expression of her need to fill her emptiness by my presence, or to treat me as a ‘transitional object’, and so on.
In my view the most important thing for me to do at that moment was to confirm the fact that she had correctly registered my actual withdrawal of my ‘presence’. There are many patients who are very sensitive to desertion, but are not sure of the reliability, much less validity, of their own sensitivity. They do not trust other people, and they cannot trust their own mistrust either. Jill is tormented, for instance, by not knowing whether she just ‘feels’ that Jack is preoccupied and uninterested, while Jack is pretending to be intensely attentive; or whether she can ‘trust’ her feelings to register the real state of the relationship. One of the most important questions, therefore, is whether such mistrust of her ‘feelings’ and the testimony of others arises from persistent inconsistencies within an original nexus – between the evidence of empathic attributions about others, her experience of herself, the testimony of others about their feelings, and the constructions they place on her experience of, and intentions towards, them, etc. – so that she has never been able to arrive at any trust in herself in any respect.
The only thing, therefore, I could say to my patient was, ‘I am sorry.’
4. A nurse was engaged to look after a somewhat catatonic, hebephrenic schizophrenic patient. Shortly after they had met, the nurse gave the patient a cup of tea. This chronically psychotic patient, on taking the tea, said, ‘This is the first time in my life that anyone has ever given me a cup of tea.’ Subsequent experience with this patient tended to substantiate the simple truth of this statement.1
It is not so easy for one person to give another a cup of tea. If a lady gives me a cup of tea, she might be showing off her tea-pot, or her tea-set; she might be trying to put me in a good mood in order to get something out of me; she may be trying to get me to like her; she may be wanting me as an ally for her own purposes against others. She might pour tea from a teapot into a cup and shove out her hand with cup and saucer in it, whereupon I am expected to grab them within the two seconds before they will become a dead weight. The action could be a mechanical one in which there is no recognition of me in it. A cup of tea could be handed me without me being given a cup of tea.
In our tea ceremonial, it is the simplest and most difficult thing in the world for one person, genuinely being his or her self, to give, in fact and not just in appearance, another person, realized in his or her own being by the giver, a cup of tea, really, and not in appearance. This patient is saying that many cups of tea have passed from other hands to hers in the course of her life, but this notwithstanding, she has never in her life had a cup of tea really given her.
Some people are more sensitive than others to not being recognized as human beings. If someone is very sensitive in this respect, they stand a good chance of being diagnosed as schizophrenic. Freud said of hysterics, as Fromm-Reichmann was later to say of schizophrenics, that they needed both to give and receive more love than most people. One could put this the other way round. If you need to give and receive too much ‘love’,1 you will be a high risk for the diagnosis of schizophrenia. This diagnosis attributes to you the incapacity, by and large, to give or receive ‘love’ in an adult manner. When you smile at such a thought, this may confirm the diagnosis since you are suffering from ‘inappropriate affect’.
1 Cf. Wynne et al. (1958).
1 This anecdote was told me by Dr Charles Rycroft.
1 Whatever ‘love’ is.