Double Vision

[...] relationship is always a product of double description.

It is correct [...] to begin to think of the two parties to the interaction as two eyes, each giving a monocular view of what goes on and, together, giving a binocular view in depth.

This double view is the relationship.

Relationship is not internal to the single person. It is nonsense to talk about 'dependency' or 'aggresiveness' or 'pride', and so on. All such words have their roots in what happens between persons, not in some something-or-other inside a person.

Only if you hold on tight to the primacy and priority of relationship can you avoid dormitive explanations. The opium does not contain a dormitive principle, and the man does not contain an aggressive instinct.

[I came to understand] that I will get nowhere by explaining prideful behaviour, for example, by referring to an individual's 'pride'. Nor can you explain aggression by referring to instinctive (or even learned) 'aggressiveness'.

Such an explanation, which shifts attention from the interpersonal field to a factitious inner tendency, principle, instinct, or whatnot, is, I suggest, very great nonsense which only hides the real questions.

If you want to talk about, say, 'pride', you must talk about two persons or two groups and what happens between them. 

The same is true of 'dependency', 'courage', 'passive-aggressive behaviour', 'fatalism', and the like. All characterlogical adjectives are to be reduced or expanded to derive their definitions from patterns of interchange, i.e., from combinations of double description.

[Gregory Bateson]
Mind and Nature, p. 146-7

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Small Part/Large System
Addiction: the Long and Short of it
"Laziness" (and other fictions)

The Right Match

Carbon symbolizes the marriage-idea in Nature. Its one equator is the bond of its unity. It is no longer a pair - and that is what marriage in Nature means, and what it should mean in man's mating practices.

Divided pairs have opposed attributes. The negatives of pairs are metallic acids - the positives are metallic alkalis. All are conductive, for conductivity is a search for balance.

[...] An example of unbalanced mating in Nature is that of the marriage of sodium and iodine or sodium and bromine. Each of these marriages has stability but there is a residue of unbalance in each of them which is evidenced in distorted cube crystals.

Each of them would likewise continue as harmonious marriages unless chlorine appeared, in which case Nature would immediately annul the marriage in favor of chlorine.

[Walter Russell]
A New Concept of the Universe, p113-14

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When healthy persons come together, they each contribute a whole world, because each brings a whole person.

[D.W. Winnicott]
Home Is Where We Start From ('The Meaning of the Word 'Democracy''), p. (unknown)

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Problems arise in interpersonal relationships when people are out of balance [...] The old saying opposites attract is actually true in many cases.

I'm sure many of us can think of examples of relationships in which one person is very rational and non-emotional, and the other person is very emotional and seemingly irrational. What happens in this situation is people see in each other what they don't have in themselves, and by getting together they kind of complete each other's circles.

These people can interact in the physical and spiritual realms but when [the rational person] wants to be rational there is conflict because the [irrational person] has to operate outside of their circle. And the opposite is also true.

[...] The reason there is conflict is because they are constantly trying to pull each other outside of their comfort zones. Oftentimes these people will remain together, because even though there is a lot of conflict, each person provides for the other the aspects of life that are not developed within themselves.

In an ideal situation, both people will develop their wheels fully before trying to start a relationship or a marriage. In this way they can interact equally on all four levels and provide each other balance through harmony rather than through conflict.

[Don Warne]
The Medicine Wheel

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No two men but, being left alone with each other, enter into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that determines which two shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other; will never suspect the latent powers of each.

We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation, - no more.

A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour.

Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson]
'Friendship', Self-Reliance and other essays, pg 46-7

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[On how a sane relationship might work]

Well, first you would not be preoccupied by whether it was working or not. You would be preoccupied by whether or not you enjoy or crave each other's company. So, it would not be working the way a business works. That would be exactly the wrong model.

It may be in time that we come to see friendship as our best picture of a working relationship. 

It may be, too, that we need accept that sexual relationships are inevitably unpredictable. One would not then measure the success of a relationship by how long it lasted.

Whether a relationship works for 20 years or for 20 days is not the question. The question is, is my life better with this person? And better, in this instance, does not mean more glamorous or richer or more alluring, there is more to it than that.

[Adam Phillips]
Observer Interview

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Sometimes I think we’re out of time with each other, just by a little but enough to feel it.

We’re like the wheels on one of those jackpot machines, spinning and spinning but never matching.

Sometimes we do. Three red cherries. Those are the good moments.


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Related posts:-
The Colour Wheel 
One to One 
The Devil is in the Details (and God is in the Generalities)
A Good Mix
Maintaing the Balance 

The Space Between

Children's play was not only the child's more or less disguised representation of a craving for the object, but the child's finding and becoming a self.

The transitional space in which the child plays, or the adult talks, is, in Winnicott's view, 'an intermediate area of experiencing to which inner reality and external life both contribute', and it exists as 'a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet inter-related'.

Transitional space breaks down when either inner or outer reality begins to dominate the scene, just as a conversation stops if one of the participants takes over.

At the very beginning, when the infant begins to be able to acknowledge that his monologue is, in fact, a dialogue, he needs this 'intermediate state between [his] inability and growing ability to recognize and accept reality', what Winnicott now refers to in the terms of his own developmental theory as 'the substance of illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion'.

This is a long way from Freud's view of culture as the sublimation of instinctual life, or the wishful compensation for the frustrations imposed by reality.  

In the Freudian scheme, culture signifies instinctual renunciation; for Winnicott it was the only medium for self-realization.

What Winnicott rather misleadingly calls 'shared reality' is constituted by the sharing of illusions. Shared reality is the area of overlap between those individual preoccupations that Winnicott calls illusions, not because they are false but because they combine the desired with the actual in tolerable ways.

'If we wish,' he writes, 'we may collect together and form a group on the basis of the similarity of our illusory experiences. This is the natural root of grouping among human beings.'

[Adam Phillips]
Winnicott, p.119

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Create or consume?
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Alone with my Self