Clinical Social Work Journal Vol. 25, No. 3, Fall 1997

EXISTENTIALISM AND CONSTRUCTIVISM: A BI-POLAR MODEL OF SUBJECTIVITY David Klugman

ABSTRACT: The philosophical systems of existentialism and constructivism have generated distinct clinical approaches based on seemingly incompatible conceptions of subjectivity and its role in clinical work. The premise of this paper is that, taken together, existential and constructivist perspectives provide an essentially dialectical view of personal identity, suggesting that a bi-polar model of subjectivity may yield a broader therapeutic gain than either/or positions. I demonstrate this premise by illustrating the central tenets of each approach using clinical vignettes, then further elucidate each position by drawing upon its philosophical underpinnings. Finally, I present a longer clinical illustration that contains both an existential and a constructivist phase. KEY WORDS: subjectivity; constructivism; existentialism; identity.

INTRODUCTION That many clients enter treatment because something is amiss with their subjective experience is an idea with which most clinicians would agree. How one conceives of subjectivity is thus a central, guiding notion which informs all aspects of the social work process, from our first encounter with the client and her presenting problem, to the development of a preliminary treatment plan, to the targeting of goals and objectives. Philosophically, the stakes involved in the formation of such a conception are also high, because in the balance hangs our notion of the self: how we define it theoretically and how our practice reflects that definition. In this sense all treatment theories carry implicit sub-theories regarding the nature and meaning of subjectivity. Notwithstanding recent developments in brain science (Searle, 1995a; Searle, 1995b; Schore, 1994), infant research (Stern, 1985; Lachman, 1992), and motivational 297

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systems theory (Lichtenberg, 1989; Lichtenberg & Schonbar, 1992), a unified theory of subjectivity which can integrate biological, psychological and empirical research data is not yet available. Meanwhile, multiple models of subjectivity which allow clinicians to modulate between one conception and another may broaden our ability to make meaning of our client's subjective experience and the sense of self and identity that is so closely linked to that experience. In this article I explore a bi-polar model of subjectivity based on an integration of existential and constructivist approaches. Due to their differing interpretations of the meaning and value of subjective experience, existentialism and constructivism offer a contrasting view of the self. Briefly, for constructivism, the self is a construction with local characteristics, rather than an entity with universal features; a function rather than a being. For existentialism, the self is in and of itself a substance, a being, a fundamental given once we get through the obstacles that shroud our direct and unadulterated experience of it. So on the one hand it is argued that the self is a socially constructed set of contextual functions, attributions and beliefs, while on the other it is held that the self is ultimately a free and given being, an entity in its own right. Though the philosophical reconciliation of these two perspectives is beyond the scope of this paper, I present case material to suggest the clinical applicability of both viewpoints. My underlying premise is that, based on a bi-polar model of subjectivity, our client's experience of personal identity may be fruitfully conceived as a progressive, ongoing dance between existential and constructivist modes. Drawing on the work of Roberto Assagioli (Assagioli, 1965, Assagioli, 1973), whose integrated vision of the self anticipates and in many ways underlies my position in this article, I will refer to the existentialist subjective mode as the "I" in its will aspect, while for the constructivist subjective mode I reserve the phrase, "I" in its awareness aspect. Roberto Assagioli's Conception of Personal Identity A young contemporary of Freud and Jung, Roberto Assagioli was the first Italian doctor to be formally trained in psychoanalysis (Hardy, 1987). By 1910, however, he had already grown weary of the limits of the evolving Freudian system and, with some encouragement from Bleuler and Jung, he set out on a course to broaden the scope of the psychotherapeutic enterprise. Though even a short description of this enterprise is beyond my scope here, I briefly present Assagioli's view of the self which lies at the heart of his thinking. For Assagioli, the self (what he called the personal self or simply "I") functions in essentially two ways: as awareness and as will. As awareness, "I" is witness, reflec-

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tor, observer of who we have been. As will, "I" is immanent, being, the action of who we are now. By considering as fundamental to a conception of the self both the action of being and reflection, Assagioli offers an essentially dialectical view of personal identity as an evolving dance between two distinct but intimately interrelated subjective modes. Below I illustrate how existentialism and constructivism are respective embodiments of those modes, and suggest that a bi-polar model of subjectivity capable of modulating between both modes may yield a broader therapeutic gain than either/or positions. Existentialism: Subjectivity as Will In its will aspect I expresses itself as the ability to be in the here and now, immanent in experience, numinously present to this moment, open, without reflection or conscious reservation. An example of this is Susan who comes to session miserable and has done so for many weeks. She is cut off from the fullness of being, contracted and neurotically perseverating on everything and nothing, feeling stuck, getting nowhere in her life, in the; session, and feeling unable to connect with her therapist. After twenty or so minutes, Susan's therapist asks her to focus on her breathing and, as she does, to become aware of any sensations she is having. As Susan begins to slow down and ease up on herself, moving out of her head and into her body, the therapist invites her to make eye contact, while staying with her breathing and her sensation focus, not to lose connection with her therapist in the process, but to stay connected by making eye contact and yet being with herself at the same time; in her body though, and not so much with her thoughts and complaints: just breathing, sensation, connection, for a moment at a time. At first Susan feels herself tensing up and she wants to look away, but she chooses to stay with the connection, moving more and more viscerally into the experience of being present with her therapist and herself. As she does this she begins to feel differently: things loosening up in her body and her head clearing a bit, then a little bit more, starting to feel scared but alive and better and clearer. Susan's therapist can feel what is happening since she, too, is experiencing an increased sense of presence, and so after a few more moments of heightened silence, she asks Susan how she is feeling. Susan says she isn't sure exactly what to call the feeling she is experiencing, but she uses words like "light, tingly, free, open, and full" to describe it, and it is obvious to both of them now that Susan is feeling closer to the fullness of her being and to the fullness of her connection with her therapist. Eventually Susan says.Tou know, I spend a lot of time in here telling you how I felt, under the pretense that I am telling you how I feel. Now I am just feeling . .. and

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it's a completely different, and very satisfying experience for me ... I don't even have a desire to talk about it really. I just want to be with it." Susan's ability to move out of her staid, felting mode, into a present, feeling mode in which she allowed her subjectivity to take over and lead her through her own experience, is an example of the I in its will aspect. Present without reflection, without even the need or desire for reflection, engaged, here and now, in touch perhaps with more anxiety yet shaken out of the stifling un-aliveness of neurotic perseveration, I in its will aspect denotes the action of being, just as I in it awareness aspect denotes the action of reflection. Constructivism: Subjectivity as Awareness As awareness the "I" is observer, in but not entirely of its immediate context, able to step back and be witness to any given self-experience. An example of this is Michael, an adolescent who was sent to therapy by his mother for depression. It didn't take Michael and his therapist long to trace the onset of his depression to his being told by his mother about an affair his father was having. Though the affair ended, the matter was never dealt with openly and Michael held onto the secret, never telling his father that he knew about the affair or that he knew his mother knew. Meanwhile, every time Michael got into a bout with depression, his mother rushed to his side and coddled him and worried over him, while his father became intolerant and judgmental. As therapy unfolded it became clear that although Michael's depression may have emerged in response to the sad news about his parents' troubled marriage, it seemed to function now as a way for Michael to distract his mother and father from having to look at the problems in their own relationship by allowing them to focus on him. The result was that, in Michael's words, "I end up carrying the dead weight of my parents' bad marriage." Michael worked hard to face and integrate the implications of his insight, and as he did his moods began to lighten. He experienced a certain freedom in the notion that the deep, dark depression he had been under was not an essential, fixed part of his personality. Prior to this genuine 'lightening7 of mood, Michael had come to believe that he was his depression, that depression was his deepest and most true personal identity: all others were false, merely masks, bald pretensions. So he clung to depression, aggrandizing it by calling himself a "generation X-er," or condemning himself by declaring that depression was the inescapable destiny of his genetic endowment. As therapy proceeded, Michael began to doubt these convictions, and eventually was able to step back and experience his depressed mode of being as just one of several modes or 'identities' available to him. There was, for instance: the curious mode, in which Michael's passion

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for building scientific contraptions flourished; the athletic mode, in which Michael's healthy, competitive spirit was given room to play; and there was the more solitary, reflective mode, in which Michael exercised his interest in music and biography. In fact, Michael came to believe that his 'depressed identity* was not really even his, so much as it was something he and his parents had secretly co-created in order to keep the lid on his father's affair. In later sessions Michael was able to explore how unbearable it was to be asked to keep this kind of secret; so unbearable that he had constructed a second secret—his depression—to help him cope with the feelings he was having. By tracing the genesis of this second secret to its source, Michael was empowered to step back from his identity as a victim, was able to unload the secret and begin to process the real grief about his family life that lay behind his depression and the secret from which it sprang. Getting to his real feelings about what had been going on in the family liberated Michael from an old, unwanted identity. Michael's ability to step back, or "dis-identify" (Assagioli, 1965), from his depressed identity denotes the activity of which I in its awareness aspect is capable: the power of "I" to transcend or go beyond what the person was previously caught up in and with which he was utterly identified. As Assagioli (1965, p. 22) consistently emphasized, "In this principle [of dis-identification] lies the secret of our enslavement or of our liberty," for the power of "I" in its awareness aspect is no less than the ability to step back and observe what we previously believed with all our heart and mental energy, we actually were. Taken together, "I" in both its will and awareness aspects makes up what Assagioli called personal identity, or the personal self: a pure center of "consciousness and self-awareness, coupled with .. . the use of its directing will" (Assagioli, 1965/1987, p. 86). Though simple, the power of this formulation should not be under-estimated, since what it tells us is that personal identity is not something static, but a balance between different, often opposing forces; that identity is not so much achieved as it is sustained through the rigors of disidentification, the "I" not a thing one discovers but a dynamic process one engages, channels, utilizes, participates in and flows with. The Outer Form of an Inner Struggle Just as awareness and will work inside each individual to choreograph the ongoing dance we call personal identity, I would like to suggest that this effort is reflected in the field. There, it tends to gear the general practice of psychotherapy toward either a will or awareness bias: on one hand focusing on the client as experience!-, actor, someone who is now, and on the other, seeing the client as reflector, observer,

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someone who has been. This dichotomy is probably nowhere more salient than in the discrepancy between Existentialist and Constructivist traditions. In an effort to illuminate my position, I will briefly consider the basic, philosophical tenets of each tradition as they manifest themselves in the field of psychotherapy. EXISTENTIALISM AND CONSTRUCTIVISM Existentialism Existentialism takes as its focus the primacy of "I" as being, or in the terms I have been using, the "I" in its will aspect. From Kierkegaard on, a bold emphasis on the individual's first person, subjective experience can be heard ringing loudly and profoundly throughout the existentialist landscape. In the case of Kierkegaard himself, this cry for immediacy was a reaction against three things: the elaborate systematizing of German Philosophy (Braaten, 1967; Wilson, 1957), the "soft and vapid religion of his day" (May, 1958, p. 25), and the "increasing objectivication of the person" by both scientific and economic theory (ibid.). As Kierkegaard writes in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard, 1944): ". . .it was in my view the misfortune of the age to have too much knowledge, to have forgotten to exist, and what inwardness is." (p. 235). Or, as he begins Part Two of the same volume, ". . . the subjective problem is not something about an objective issue, but is the subjectivity itself" (p. 115). Jumping ahead nearly a century and a half, we can hear this philosophical emphasis on subjectivity echoed in the words of the American existential psychotherapist, James Bugental: We need to ... recognize the subjective for what it truly is: the central fact of human life. By acknowledging it, we can begin to explore it and to learn how to live out its potentials more fully and effectively. Until we do so, our psychologies and our psychotherapies are going to remain partial and limited in their application to living humans (Bugental, 1992, p. 156).

In a book that acted for many as a needed bridge between existentialism as a philosophy and existentialism as a psychotherapy, Hollo May is unequivocal: "The fundamental contribution of existential therapy is to understand man as being"(May, 1958, p. 37). May and his European cohorts took up the banner of existentialism in protest against the psychoanalytic tendency to see patients "in forms tailored to our own preconceptions" (p. 8), after long clinical experience with analytic tools had convinced them that "the unconscious ideas of the patient are more often than not the conscious theories of the therapist" (p. 5). Similarly,

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in America, Rogers embraced existentialism against the objective trends of behavior modification and reinforcement theory, claiming in opposition to the reigning psychological cliches of the day that "the way to do is to be. The way to understand is from within." (May, 1969, p. 87). Psychologist Gordon Allport (Allport, 1955) found in existentialism a method that "deepens the concepts that define the human condition [and] in so doing ... prepares the way ... for & psychology of mankind" (May, 1969, p. 94). And Abraham Maslow (Maslow, 1971; Maslow, 1964; Maslow, 1968) believed that existential psychotherapy, unlike Freud's psychoanalysis, honored the "aspirations .. . realizable hopes [and] Godlike qualities" of the person (May, 1969, p. 53): "Freud supplied to us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half (Maslow, 1968, p. 5). Perhaps even more fundamentally, existentialism was a reaction against seeing the patient as a theoretically containable entity due to the existentialist's conviction that no theory is bright and powerful and beautiful enough to do justice to the living person sitting on the other side of the consulting room. So there is a movement away from the person as an objectively knowable subject in an objectively knowable reality, toward the realization of the person as a "consciousness [being] who participates in the construction of [his or her own] reality" (Yalom, 1980, p. 23), and who is therefore only knowable through a kind if inter-subjectivity. Often referred to philosophically as the ontological position (May, 1958, pp. 12 & 18; Tillich, 1952, p. 25; Yalom, 1980, p. 31), though perhaps better conceived as a kind of radical subjectivity, what is stressed here is the clinician's grasp of the client's first-person subjective experience, and the ways in which that experience can be "treated" so as to enhance the client's ability to access the fullness of being. It is in this sense that Rollo May defines neurosis "in terms of what destroys man's capacity to fulfill his own being" (May, 1958, p. 35). Though space does not permit a full investigation of what this "treatment" looks like given the myriad of existential approaches, it is important to point out, as Yalom has done in detail (Yalom, 1980, pp. 16-21), the difference in flavor between the existentialism of Europe and that of America. Briefly, European existentialsim centers on the ultimate concerns (Death, Meaninglessness, Isolation and Freedom), on the inherent limits dictated by the reality of those concerns, and on the subsequent need to face and take into oneself "the anxiety and uncertainty of non-being" (p. 19). American existentialism, on the other hand, "[b]athed in a Zeitgeist of expansiveness" (ibid.), tends to shrug off the intensity of what Maslow called the European proclivity for "high I.Q. whimpering on a cosmic scale" (May, 1969, p. 57), focusing more on the individual's potential for actualization, peak experience, self-realization and higher stages of development.

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Also significant, though unexplorable given the aim of this essay, are the profound differences between the Christian existentialists, for example Kierkegaard, Jaspers (Jaspers, 1955) and Tillich (1952), and the atheists like Camus, Sartre, and the existential psychoanalytic tradition (Sartre, 1947; Sartre, 1956, 1994; Sartre, 1957). Again briefly, for the atheistic group, the non-existence of God makes "everything permissible . . . and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to" (p. 22). Put philosophically, "existence precedes essence" at all levels and so there is no reconciliation possible between the finite and the infinite. For the Christian existentialist, however, as Tillich (speaking of Kierkegaard in Braaten, 1967) reminds us, "reconciliation might be possible ... in the inner divine life ... of essence [it's just that] . . . the system of essences is not the reality in which we are living. We are living in the realm of existence, and in the realm of existence reconciliation has not yet happened [hence] . . . there is no escape from the sickness unto death" (pp. 462, 463 & 464). Despite these differences, however, and especially with respect to the practice of psychotherapy, it is accurate to say that existentialism is a method characterized by a bold emphasis on the first-person, subjective mental and emotional state, on experience over reflection, existence before essence, on inwardness and being in the moment. Naturally, awareness plays a crucial role in the existentialist's system, but by virtue of its granting privilege to the immanence of first-person subjectivity, to the primacy of the self as being, existentialism is necessarily biased in favor of what I am calling the "I" in its will aspect. For Assagioli, the emphasis on inwardness and presence constitutes a "fundamental similarity* (Assagioli, 1965, p. 4) between his conception of the self as will and the existential tradition generally, a central tenet of which involves "experiencing one's self, and from the center of oneself [one's Being] directing one's life" (ibid., p. 113). Constructivism If existentialism is will biased by virtue of its emphasis on being, then constructivism (and narrative therapies) carries an awareness bias by virtue of its focus on the many different 'selves' that emerge in the process of being. In its simplest form, constructivism asserts that reality does not exist in any ultimate, empirical way, but is rather a construction of the person who is viewing or experiencing reality at any given moment. Applied to the client's sense of self or personal identity, the usefulness of such a theory is apparent: constructivism empowers client and clinician to abjure certain worldviews or "self-stories" in favor of other ones which work better by providing more cohesion to the sense of self (Weingarten,

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1995, Mishara, 1995, Lock, 1995). Thus "clients move from being influenced by problem-dominated stories [about who they are] to more preferred stories" (Zimmerman, 1994, p. 233), by means of viewing the culture, the peer group, the family, the school, etc., as "interpretive communities" (Fish, 1991, p. 7) which provide possible, but not definitive ways of seeing and experiencing reality and the self (Pare, 1995). An early task of the therapist is therefore to identify what story is dominant in the client's life and how its inaccuracies or cultural biases are constraining the client's self-image, functioning, etc. In terms of the word itself, it is perhaps harder to trace constructivism back to one author whose use of the term embodies the essence of its attendant philosophy, the way we can, for instance, with Kierkegaard and existentialism. However, because it bears so much in common with skepticism, one could say that the origins of constructivism stretch back as early as the Greek Sophists, since for the Sophists the "systematic doubting of human beliefs" was a way of "freeing up thought to take new and unexplored paths" (Tarnas, 1991, 30). Indeed, constructivism is nothing if not a systematic doubting of beliefs, and especially of beliefs about the nature of the self. For instance, what therapist has not challenged a client's conviction regarding a certain self-perception (eg. "I'm a loser") by holding, in whatever form, the possibility of an alternative perception? This is the essence of constructivism as it relates to the therapeutic situation: whereas the existentialist might ask, "What does it feel like to be a loser right now, and where does that feeling take you if you surrender to it in this moment?"; the constructivist inquires, "What else are you?" in an effort to search for something that does not fit the (problem dominated) sense of self with which the client is identified. Jumping ahead a couple of millennia, Ernst Von Glasersfeld (Glasersfeld, 1984) cites Giambatista Vico as being the "first true constructivist," claiming that for constructivists like Vico, "all communication and all understanding are a matter of interpretive construction on the part of the experiencing subject" (p. 19) (italics mine). More recently, constructivism has been linked to post-structuralism, deconstruction, and the linguistic revolution of the twentieth century, the hallmark of which has been "the recognition that reality is not something expressed or reflected in language; it is essentially produced by it." (Solas, 1995, p. 151). Turning from philosophy to psychology in our own century, one would of course want to consider the work of writers like George Kelly (Kelly, 1963), whose social construct theory is clearly rooted in the constructivist tradition. Kelly says, "To the living creature ... the universe is real, but it is not inexorable unless he chooses to construe it that way" (p. 8) (italics mine). Also, writers in the cognitive-behaviorist tradition such as Albert Ellis (Ellis, 1971, 1988) and Aaron Beck (Beck, 1980,

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1988) would need to be included. Psychologists like Ellis, for example, concentrate on how the person 'constructs' herself through thinking since, according to Ellis, it is often the case that muddled thinking and irrational beliefs, more than any 'real' situation, are what constitute a person's sense of self and world and the problems they experience between the two (Ellis, 1992, pp. 79-92; Ivey, 1987, p. 307). From a therapeutic standpoint, the most significant idea to emerge from constructivism is the idea that the self is a narrative, or multiplicity of narratives. In its simplest form what this means is that a person's identity ("I," self) does not exist in any ultimate, empirical way, but is rather a story, with the structure of a story; part of which is invented by the individual, and a greater part of which is invented by, and will therefore of necessity reflect, the many familial and cultural influences that have gone into the 'telling' of that story (Flaskas, 1993). Evident in the thinking of writers like Bruner (Bruner, 1990) Eicoeur (Lock, 1995), Schafer (1992) and others, the idea of the self as a narrative construct is perhaps most popularly represented by the work of David Epston and Michael White (O'Hanlon, 1994): We believe that persons generally ascribe meaning to their lives by plotting their experience into stories, and that these stories shape their lives and relationships. We also contend that most conversations, including those conversations with the 'self, are shaped by at least the rudimentary requirements of a story [so that the idea of the] . . . narrative is not constrained to literary texts (Epston & White, 1990, p. 79).

Congruent with the cognitive-behaviorist tradition in that they believe "the meaning that [people] . . . attribute to events [rather than the events themselves] determines their behavior" (p. 5), Epston and White pay a great deal of attention to the power and influence of context, which in my view allows them to take the cognitive-behaviorist position one step further by asserting that, not only do we respond to ascribed meanings (as opposed to events or reality itself), but that all ascribed meanings are "determined and restrained by the receiving context [and] . . . by the network of premises and presuppositions that constitute our maps of [self and] the world" (ibid., p. 2). Uncovering these premises and presuppositions is thus central to the task of figuring out not only what a person's dominant story is, but why it is what it is. Also important is the notion that the self is not just one story, but a collection of potential stories, many of which actively (if unconsciously) have impact upon the a person's overall sense of self. For Assagioli, this therapeutic focus on the 'selves', stories or "subpersonalities" (Assagioli, 1965; Rowan, 1990; Sliker, 1992) that fill the individual, denotes the activity of "I" in its awareness aspect:

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Of course it should be explained that [this multiplicity of 'selves' is] ... normal, because each one of us has different selves—according to the relationship we have with other people, surroundings, groups, etc., and it is well for us not to [exclusively] identify ourselves [our "I") with any of these "selves," and to recognize that... although it seems paradoxical . . . the less we are identified with a particular role the better we play it (Assagioli, 1965, p. 74-5).

It is worth stressing that the ease we often associate with the idea of "playing a role" is not usually the feeling that clients bring into therapy, but rather the stress and anguish indicative of "complete immersion in each sub-personality tor self-story], with [varying] degrees of awareness" (p. 75). That is precisely what makes the "I" in its awareness aspect such a valuable tool in the therapeutic process: first in becoming aware of the existence of self-stories and our identification with them, and then, as awareness increases, learning to disidentify from them. Contrasting Constructivism and Existentialism Another and perhaps more profound way of getting at the philosophical power behind the basic premise of constructivism is to say that nothing simply is, but rather all things are mediated or constructed or mitigated by contexts within contexts, ad infinitum. Stated this way, what constructivism challenges is our belief that we can know the world (and thus our self too) in an unmediated way that transcends our contextual embeddedness. In fact, Ernst von Glasersfeld (Glasersfeld, 1979, p. 17) cites this challenge as the reason behind the historical resistance against the theory of constructivism, namely that it "intends to undermine too large a part of the traditional view of the world." By asserting that our common sense is not merely given but utterly conditioned and thus always indirect, constructivism says that "our basic present experiences are taken up and re-worked ... so that the final display in consciousness is an inseparable mixture of experience and mental-cultural molding." (Wilber, 1995, p. 600). Opponents of constructivism claim that, taken to its logical extreme, this kind of thinking is profoundly selfcontradictory, eg: "I have this unshakable foundation belief that foundations are impossible" (ibid.). In other words, "To say that all experience is mediated is to stand in a space that is not itself mediated" (ibid., p. 601). Nonetheless, from a pragmatic point of view as regards psychotherapy, the general appeal of constructivism lies in its conviction that "the operations by means of which we assemble our experiential world can be explored, and that an awareness of this operating... can help us do it differently and, perhaps, better" (Glasersfeld, 1984, p. 18) (italics mine). But the existentialist objects: Being is unmediated! And so it is in

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pure being that we discover true subjectivity and the direct experience of self. Not so, says the constructivist, for your 'being* too is a construct, as is the groundlessness of non-being and the inevitable "sickness unto death" from which your 'courage to be' emerges; they are not ultimate truths, but ascribed meanings and interpretations derived from presuppositions and crisscrossing networks of inter-contextuality. The existentialist retorts that the constructivist is merely playing word games in an effort to avoid the ultimate concerns that attend authentic being in the world. But the constructivist remands that the existentialist's focus on subjectivity and inwardness is isolationist and naive. And so the argument goes on, the old battle between awareness and will playing itself out in the endgame of psychological theory. The obvious solution is to grant appropriate weight to both positions, as I imagine most clinicians in actual practice intuitively do. My point has been that a bi-polar model of subjectivity—which offers a view of identity as a progressive, ongoing dance between existential (will) and constructivist (awareness) modes—allows us to integrate at the clinical level, the theories, techniques and opinions we often find opposing one another as either/or positions in the theoretical field (eg. identity as construct vs. person as being). CASE EXAMPLE The Existential Phase Cameron enters therapy presenting his "lack of potency" in the world and his feeling cut off from his "life force and power" as the leading issues. He feels depressed about his career and about the fact that things are not turning out the way he had hoped and believed that they would. He feels at the end of his rope, near despair. He has been to several therapists before me. He left his last therapist when she suggested anti-depressant medication as a partial remedy. Early on in our work, Cameron is feeling particularly stuck in a session and I am feeling stuck with him. We sit in it together for a while, talking about things, going over his frustrations, when suddenly I intervene by inviting him to close his eyes and picture himself on his deathbed. Cameron looks at me curiously for a moment, but then complies, lying back on the couch and, I can see, descending into the image. As his absorption in the image deepens, I invite Cameron to begin talking to himself about his life from the deathbed, which he does, reporting some of the conversation to me and keeping some of it between himself and the deathbed figure. But then, "I can't continue," he declares. "Why not?" I inquire. "Because it's not me on the deathbed," he explains. "Who is it?" I ask. "I don't know," he returns, irritated—"but the person on the deathbed has had a full life, things have turned out fairly well for him and there's a sense of completion and satisfaction about the way things have gone." I encourage Cameron to stay with the image, even though it isn't him on the deathbed. Again he complies, beginning to converse with the figure internally but then, after a few moments, he stops—silence, a short burst of sobs, and then a flowing of tears.

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"What is it?" I ask, softly. "Things can be different for me too," he says. "It's up to me." "Is that what the image is telling you?" 1 ask, fearing that a judgmental introject has taken over. "Yes," he says. "Does it feel like a judgment?" I ask. "No," he replies, still with sadness but no longer crying. Then what are the tears are about... do you know?" "I'm not sure, but it's not only sad," he explains. There's something liberating about this feeling too... like I'm a prisoner stepping out of my cell for the first time in years." Cameron begins to cry again, but less intensely. He takes a deep breath and sighs, opens his eyes and looks at me from out of the image he has been travelling in his mind. He smiles a rich smile, weighted with wisdom and sadness and a fullness I have not yet seen him display. "I'm feeling a little scared right now," he tells me, "but it's okay because I don't feel stuck anymore—and that's really what's scary!" He laughs, surprised by his own words. "What do you mean?" I ask him. "It's scary to step out from behind this slackness—but I prefer it, don't get me wrong ... I feel alive now, like I can do the things I need to do in order to change my life ... I don't even know what those things are, but I feel like 111 be able to do them when I do know, and I haven't felt like that in a long time." Cameron pauses for a moment, savoring the feeling of power coming of his revelation. "You know it's strange," he says, "but I feel like I'm in a familiar place. I mean I'm scared but I can handle it. I'm uncertain, but that's okay." An existential interpretation of Cameron's experience in this session might be that the idea of Death, which I invoked by the image of the "deathbed figure," acted as a catalyst to help Cameron dissolve the crust of un-aliveness that surrounded his feeling life, the crust that was, existentially speaking, a result of his denial of death. As Yalom (1980, p. 32-33) has written, "A denial of death at any level is a denial of one's basic nature and begets an increasingly pervasive restriction of awareness and experience [but]... the idea of death saves us, rather than sentence us to existences of terror or bleak pessimism, it acts as a catalyst to plunge us into more authentic life modes." In other words, the idea of death, represented by the deathbed figure, jolted Cameron out of his slumber and into the experience of being. Constructivist Phase Cameron, a white, 34 year old male from a fairly upper middle-class family, is the youngest of three brothers. Right out of high school, George and Quinn, Cameron's two older brothers, joined Cameron's father in the garment district in New York City, instead of going to college. Now, in their mid-forties, they are enjoying superior financial success. Cameron, on the other hand, opted out of the garment district path, attended a well known liberal arts college, and is currently struggling in a business that he's good at but does not much care for anymore: computer graphics and multimedia presentations. Cameron was a computer whiz kid on the inside of the industry since the mid-seventies. In 1982, at age twenty-five, he opened his own computer and graphics studio and found himself on the cutting edge of technology and industry demand. He was one of a few people who knew as much he did about cutting edge computer work and who could apply his artistic and business savvy in genuinely creative ways. Now, almost a dozen years later, Cameron is not so unique, the contours of his industry have dramatically altered, and his struggle with that has produced a profound and crippling financial and emotional crisis. During our first session together Cameron told me: "I've lost interest in work and I can't really explain it. It just doesn't turn me on to do what I'm doing

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anymore, and I can't find any reason for that. I'm just not turned on by the struggle. My wife thinks I'm lazy," he added, "and I'm beginning to agree with her. Maybe it's that simple: I'm just lazy. I sure feel lazy," he said. Upon hearing this initial description, I felt that my first task was to help Cameron reframe the way he was viewing the problem. I did this by telling him I didn't believe in laziness, that to me laziness was a symptom and not a cause or final condition— a crust beneath which there was energy and life and vitality. "How about instead of calling it laziness," I suggested, "we just say that you're temporarily cut off from your motivation?" Skeptical, Cameron reluctantly went along with me. Refraining, like any technique, can be vacuous or meaningful. In Cameron's case it felt particularly meaningful to me because as long as Cameron saw his problem in terms of laziness, he was caught in a web of cultural judgments and expectations that would not allow him to drop below the surface of his defense, dissolve the crust around his feeling life and enter the vitality of what was really going on. That he agreed to move with me to the idea of "lost motivation" from the idea of laziness" was a first step in his challenging the cultural interpretation of (or story about) his behavior. By the third session I felt I was learning a good bit about Cameron, and at the beginning of our fourth session I asked him if we could go over some of the more salient details together. I suggested that we construct a short list, from which we could add or delete in future sessions as we saw fit. This is the list we came up with: • For Cameron, success means financial success with recognition in the community to that effect. • Cameron has a lovely wife and a child he adores, but does not spend as much time with them as he would like. • Cameron was an art major in college. He loves to paint and play music, but gave up those activities long ago because they were not a part of his success picture. • Cameron's dysphoria regarding his work in the computer graphics industry began more than three years ago, but he has long since given up entertaining options. Over the next few sessions, Cameron and I explored the assumptions and expectations that this list represented, as well as the life-story embedded within those expectations. Originally programmed by his family, and ongoingly sustained by peer groups, media, the worldspace of his daily, business interactions, and his own internal conversations, Cameron's basic story was seductive if not unusual: a tale in which Cameron rises to the top of his profession and as a result wins both respect from others and himself, is able to compete financially with his brothers and his father and ultimately win not only their validation and approval, but praise and respect from the community at large. Ironically, as Cameron actualized more and more of the many dimensions of this story he became less happy and began to lose touch with his power, drive and passion for living. The problem, he discovered, was that the life-story he had been trying to live up to was not his life-story; and so, in an effort to elaborate the implications of this insight, he started to investigate what was missing from its characters and plot. During this investigation, Cameron re-visited the many different ways in which his parents, friends, and culture had shaped his experience of meaning and, in many important ways, failed to encourage his aspirations and desires, in favor of their own. Eventually, Cameron arrived at the tragic realization that the story he'd

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been trying to live up to for years was actually an attempt to compensate for these failures—the failures of others and of the culture—by attaching himself to a success picture he believed would win everybody over and get him the attention and support and love that he missed and for which he still wished. Ironically, his commitment to this project caused him to discount many of the people, places, and activities that were capable of providing him with the very excitement, love, support, and attention he desired. For example, Cameron spent a great deal of time perseverating on his sense of being trapped in a career that he hated but could not get out of, while declining to acknowledge and explore in a feeling way how fulfilled he was by his wife and daughter, who were willing to support him in whatever career path he chose. Another example was the emptiness Cameron felt whenever he thought about having abandoned his artistic endeavors, because even though painting and music were not activities he chose to make a living at, they were nonetheless activities he valued and enjoyed. According to his old program, however, it was wrong and weak and wimpy to give yourself over to the things that you loved—unless of course they fit in well with the other parts of the success picture. Cameron worked hard in therapy, learning to track the various ways in which trying to live up to the demands of his success picture had caused him to feel alienated from himself, others, and from the 'other selves' within him. He ended up rejecting many aspects of the old success narrative, in favor of a lifestory that was rooted in the deep feelings and values that he chose to live by, aware now that his potential to do this previously had been marginalized by the social contexts and pressures under which he was raised and in which he still lived. Sum/wary Cameron entered therapy depleted and discouraged, laboring under a powerful, narrowly conceived self-story or narrative that thwarted his primal nature and blocked him from unfolding certain of his most vital qualities. Cameron's strong identification with this narrative prevented his awareness of it as a narrative (he was it), and of anything beyond the worldview embodied by it. Appealing to the "I" in its will aspect by engaging the idea of Death, I attempted to awaken Cameron from his trance. It worked, and as a result Cameron began to contact, build and engage other "stories" he had either given up or did not even know existed. Beginning with the deathbed figure (who in later dreams and images returned as a source of wisdom and courage), Cameron's awareness of these potential 'selves' or stories liberated his will in a way that freed him up to vigorously examine, and later deconstruct, the social and cultural forces, as well as the hidden family dynamics, that had gone into building the dominant, status quo self-story with which he had been identified for so long. Naturally, a great deal of our later work consisted of a deeper and in some ways more difficult healing around the woundedness and grief created by these many years of obstruction and deprivation to Cameron's primal nature—but that is another essay. Conclusion My aim in this paper has been to demonstrate how a bi-polar model of subjectivity may yield a broader therapeutic gain with regard to patients who are struggling with issues related to personal identity. I have

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argued that Assagioli's integrated vision of the self, as a center of awareness and will, leads us to a conception of personal identity as an ongoing dialectic between alternating subjective modes. Illustrating my belief that such an integrated vision may be more useful than the either/or positions represented by existentialism and constructivism respectively, I have argued that a bi-polar model of subjective experience is relevant and applicable to clinical social work by offering a flexible conception of the self that may include both existential and construetivist modes. REFERENCES Allport, G. W. (1955). Becoming: Basic considerations for a psychology of personality. New Haven: Yale University Press. Assagioli, R. (1965). Psychosynthesis. New York: Viking Press. Assagioli, R. (1973). The act of will. New York: Penguin Books. Beck, A., Shaw, B., & Emery, G. (1980). Cognitive therapy of depression. New York: Guilford. Beck, A. (1988). Love is never enough. New York: Harper & Row. Braaten, C. (Ed.). (1967). A history of Christian thought. New York: Simon & Schuster. Brown, M. (1983). The unfolding self. Los Angeles: Psychosynthesis Press. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bugental. (1992). The betrayal of the human: Psychotherapy's mission to reclaim our lost identity. In J. Zeig (Ed.), The evolution of psychotherapy, The Second Conference (pp. 155-167). New York: Brunner/Mazel. Ellis, A. (1971). Growth through reason: Verbatim cases in rational-emotive therapy. Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books. Ellis, A. (1988). Rational emotive therapy with alcoholics and substance abusers. Elmsford, New York: Pergamon Press. Ellis, A. (1992). The revised ABCs of rational-emotive therapy (RET). In J. Zeig (Ed.), The evolution of psychotherapy, The second conference (pp. 79-92). New York: Brunner/ Maazel. Ferrucci, P. (1982). What we may be. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher. Firman, J. (1991). / and self: Revisioning psychosynthesis. Palo Alto: Psychosynthesis Palo Alto. Fish, S. (1991). A firing line debate: Freedom of thought is in danger on American campuses. September (111): pp. 1-40. Flaskas, C., & Humphreys, C. (1993). Theorizing about power: Intersecting the ideas of Foucault with the 'problem' of power in family therapy. Family Process, 32, 35-47. Glasersfeld, E. v. (1984). An introduction to radical constructivism. In P. Waltzlawick (Ed.), The invented reality (pp. 17-40). New York: W.W. Norton. Hardy, J. (1987). A psychology with soul. New York: Touteledge & Kegan Paul, Inc. Ivey, Allen., Ivey, Mary Bradford & Simek-Downing, Lynn. (1987). Counseling and psychotherapy. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Jaspers, K. (1955). Reason and existem (William Earle, Trans.). New York: The Noonday Press. Kelly, G. (1963). A theory of personality: The psychology of personal constructs. New York: Norton. Kierkegaard, S. (1944). Concluding unscientific postscript (David F. Swenson, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lachman, F., & Beebe, B. (1992). Reformulations of early developmental and transference: Implications for psychic structure formation. In J. Barren, Eagle, M & Wblitzky, D. (Ed.), Interface of psychoanalysis and psychology (pp. 133-153). Washington, DC: The American Psychological Association.

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Lichtenberg, J. (1989). Psychoanalysis and motivation. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Lichtenberg, J., & Schonbar, R. (1992). Motivation in psychology and psychoanalysis. In J. Barren, Ealge, Morris., Wolitzky, David (Ed.), Interface of psychoanalysis and psychology . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Lock, J. (1995). Acting out and the narrative function: Reconsidering Peter BIos's concept of the second individuation process. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 49(4), 548557. Masiow, A. (1971). The further reaches of human nature. New York: Viking. Maslow, A. (1964). Religion, values and peak experiences. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Maslow, A. (1968). Toward a psychology of being. Princeton: Van Nostrand. May, Rollo. (Ed.). (1969). Existential psychology. New York: Random House. May, Rollo, Angel, Ernest & EHenbergcr, Henri. (Eds.). (1958). Existence: A new dimension in psychiatry and psychology. New York: Basic Books. Mishara, A., Ph.D. (1995). Narrative and psychotherapy: The phenomenology of healing. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 49(2), 180-195. Pare, D. (1995). Of families and other cultures: The shifting paradigm of family therapy. Family Process, 34, 1-19. Rowan, J. (1990). Subpersonalities: The people inside us. New York: Routeledge. Russell, D. (1981). Psychosynthesis in western psychology. Psyckosynthesis Digest, 1(1), 39-53. Sartre, J.-P. (1947). Existentialism (Bernard Frechtman, Trans.). New York: Philosophical Library. Sartre, J.-P. (1956, 1994). Being and nothingness (Hazel Barnes, Trans.). New York: Philosophical Library. Sartre, J.-P. (1957). Existentialism and human emotions. New York: Philosophical Library. Schafer, R. (1992). Retelling a life. New York: BasicBooks. Searle, J. (1995a). The mystery of consciousness. The New York Review of Books, XLIK19), 60-66. Searle, J. (1995b). The mystery of consciousness: Part II. The New York Review of Books, XLII(18), 54-61. Schore, A. (1994). Affect regulation and the origin of the self. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates. Solas, J. (1995). Deconstruction and clinical social work. Clinical Social Work Journal, 23(2), 151-158. Sliker, G. (1992). Multiple mind. Boston: Shambhala Publications. Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant. New York: Basic Books. Stettbacher, K. (1991). Making sense of suffering. New York: Dutton. Tarnas, R. (1991). The passion of the western mind. New York: Harmony. Tillich, P. (1952), The courage to be. New Haven: Yale University Press. Weingarten, Kathy, & Cobb, Sara. (1995). Timing disclosure sessions: Adding a narrative perspective to clinical work with adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Family Process, 34, 257-269. White, Michael, & Epston, David. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Wilber, K. (1995). Sex, ecology, spirituality. Boston: Shambhala. Wilson, C. (1957). Religion and the rebel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Yalom, I. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.

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