Introduction to the Essentials of Process Oriented Psychology: A 1986 Interview with Arnold Mindell

this video which has never been published before was recorded in zurich switzerland in 1986 in the video grady gray interviews arne about his development of process-oriented psychology or process work it is possibly the earliest video recorded interview with arnie about his ideas describing this new form of psychology the viewer will sense how ernie's previous studies in science influenced his empirical approach to all forms of human experience this attitude made it possible for him to dive beneath known psychological concepts and develop fundamental ideas related to nature that is to what is actually happening he also discusses some of his philosophy and attitudes towards working with people in all states of consciousness as well as his thoughts about training in psychology and psychology's future some of the ideas and details he discusses in the video have changed somewhat over the years yet the essence has remained the same arnie himself got a little shy when he watched the video recently in 2021 because he felt he was too intense and today he would be more related to grady he's changed so much since the video was recorded in 1986 but i didn't agree i felt it was an inspired interview to me it captured arnie's vivacious spirit just in the beginning when he was researching formulating and developing the very basis of process work and just prior to his development of world work so he then encouraged me to share the video and go forward arnie especially thanks grady for this very stimulating and creative interview many thanks also to grady's wife dana mars for sending the original video files to us you can also find my written transcription of this interview on our website at the following link is i'd like to know more about your psychology process-oriented psychology how did you create it what was what are some of the origins behind uh process psychology well i noticed that uh when you say that i created it that i have a uh uh i get shy yeah um uh i feel like i was part of i'm part of uh many people who have been creating this i think that every psychology which has worked and which works for people follows process in some small way i've learned a lot from these other people what you feel would be the most important aspects of your psychology that you would communicate to the other psychologies well the obvious uh uh the obvious thing that i would like to communicate is that it's important to follow the individual that uh what i'd like to communicate is that that is the most exciting thing and that's the thing that people seem to need the most uh i'm also interested in what you uh in pinging you down on some on some terms and terminology that you use for example just even the word process um how do you how do you i mean jung talked about the individuation process and paroles talked about the awareness process how do you use the term process well the word when i say process i mean right now for example following your process and mine and i noticed that your voice is a little bit shy or hesitant and i would i need to know before we even go further to what it is that your voice is doing could you tell me that uh now i'm stopped and i'm also aware of my voice how does it sound um it sounds um let's see yeah it sounds a little low yes yeah yeah um maybe a little monotone yes yeah like how like uh like i'm conducting an interview yes yeah yeah yes yeah like you're conducting an interview yeah like i'm conducting an interview rather than a talk yeah yeah uh what would be the difference um the difference be um uh i might weave the questions that i have more into our conversation yeah that sounds good to me yeah yeah that would be following more of the process of what's happening between us yeah yeah it'll be easier for me to answer i think so you asked me that before what i meant by process yes uh for me process there's a lot of people talking about process today and uh there's very process oriented psychology there's a very specific uh use of the term process i mean when i say process i mean uh the evolution of signals that's my definition of the term process there's a lot to that because signals don't just come out of the clear blue sky they're perceived in terms of certain channels like for example i'm i'm seeing you uh you're doing things which are visual you yourself see things so those are you're seeing me you're hearing your own voice you're probably capable of feeling your body i know you are you're also able to move there are things which happen in the world around you yeah and uh various you hear things so those are various channels in which signals come the signal for your voice signal for example comes versus a monotone view uh you're conducting you hear it right and uh so the process that you have to begin with is hearing your voice and your voice making these signals then by hearing it uh certain things happen inside of you when you you have like a feedback loop starts to happen in other words you hear yourself talking and through that hearing the talk itself has changed so something that that changes the process that's been happening the process is the evolution of signals your voice changes your face changes the relationship between us changes so those are some of that's what i mean by process is that clear yes well i'm thinking also about um uh process and awareness so uh your awareness of signals is also seems to be uh very important part is the part is the feedback there's many parts to process one is just proceeding most perceiving happens unconsciously like uh i'm sitting here and uh uh in the beginning i'm hearing things in your voice and certain things in your voice and do things to me that i'm not aware of so they i got shy in the beginning i had a hard time talking to you yeah now i feel much better with you us but i didn't know that i was hearing those things so when i felt that i was shy i decided to to become conscious of what i already was perceiving unconsciously so i perceive it consciously then i brought it up to myself i said well something in grady's voice is interesting me so i said hey great what's in your voice man yeah yeah so yeah so i'm rules i'm also shy about this too yeah yeah um i'm feeling also that i i uh i would like to know more about your background my background yes i know it's uh that i know something about you that about of street fights yeah when i was a kid and i was in lots of fights yeah i'm sorry well i'm uh yes uh street fights and uh and i'm in love when i was 17 and what's what part of my background uh psychology yeah in 1960 61 as an exchange student yes uh from the states first i was a student of physics and i was interested in theoretical physics and i was studying the statistical quantum mechanics and the theory of irreversible processes i smile when i tell you that because it's like it's still part of what i'm doing it just sounds complicated how is that how is it part of what you're doing right now in turn well uh the whole business of observing of observation and of taking close account of what people are doing the signs of scientific aspect of human behavior makes relationship much better more fun that's how it's part of it so i mean you moved from physics uh which is a hard science yeah and uh and then moved that to psychology so really what happened is i was i came over here and i started working with from france and one of the first dreams i had was that young said to me well in this dream you have to find a relationship between psychology and physics how old were you i was 21 21. so i didn't know what to do with my life you know yeah but yeah i started doing it so uh i started intro i got into analysis and i started studying psychology and physics got boring after a while you were still studying physics at the same time you were interested in psychology i was becoming a physicist and uh but i ran and i ran out of time with it it got boring and it didn't have enough to do with people and there was the ways of approaching things were too standard for me so i decided to study psychology i went to the young institute in zurich and i went through the institute and got a diploma there and started my practice uh should i keep going yeah sure uh i started my practice and then i got bored again and that sounds pretty normal i got more gradient i just couldn't sit all the time and talk yeah yeah it was dreadful for me and uh and it's right for some people but for me i just couldn't do it so i wanted to get up and do more things and i had to go on with my study some more and so that's how i got here he made a big jump yeah yeah yeah um you studied at the young institute and then uh you you went and uh had practice for a while yeah and then you got bored in the streets i got sick and i got bored had body problems and i didn't know how to deal with them and i thought to myself i have to study some more so i started studying body stuff and i studied everything that i could find and then there was also something missing there i've always had this process of of trying to search for things and what was missing for me was that everybody that i had been reading about looks at the body as if there's something wrong with it you get sick and uh and that's not right uh you know what i mean yeah well i was thinking this is like a jungian idea isn't it that young's idea was that uh you that what's happening to the person is not a bad thing it's not necessarily pathological but it's meaningful and body work the same thing was present at least in the early 1970s as far as my knowledge was concerned somebody would have a problem with their body and would be considered as a disease as a general rule instead of something trying to happen you know uh so uh what did you how did you begin this then this investigation but you you you uh made a philosophical leap then in a sense in terms of body processes to look at them as something that's meaningful that's happening yeah and then how did you begin to uh investigate that more whenever i've had a crisis in my life i've always gone back to physics oh yes okay so what did you go back to that so i went back to studying things empirically and i went and then i i took my pencil and paper and like that and i went and i started working with dying patients and i started writing down exactly the kinds of things that happened to them and they made discoveries through doing that what uh what kind of discoveries well i one of the things i came across right away was that uh i noticed that if somebody had a tumor inside of him and you amplified what was happening with that tumor you know then all of a sudden the tumor would begin to explode or do something and if you looked into the person's dreams i'd have also similar explosions i wrote all that down like a very good student of science i didn't tell anybody i was shy i couldn't tell anybody that if you go into those things in detail that uh that uh they nobody i didn't think i thought i was crazy i thought how is this possible you go inside the body and you amplify things instead of trying to get rid of them they make them a little bit worse and they start mirroring dreams it's very funny you work with somebody's body and uh take for example somebody who has a bad earache okay okay and work with his ear ache he says i have a lot of pain in my ear and you start to press over here and underneath the ear in the back and you start to amplify that and he's ooh that really hurts and you say well what's it like that hurt and he says well it just hurts me you know what's it like you continue to amplify that and then he said well you know it's it's like it's like and then after a few minutes he says it's like an incredible drum pounding and then i said it's like a drum pounding oh but this is just what i dreamt last week somebody was pounding a drum and i said and what was he pounding the drum about because i'm pounding the drum or the drum was being pounded in the dream it was announcing the beginning of a new era and i said a new era is going to begin the guy bursts out crying and he says it's true it's true and i want to do something new with my life et cetera people do that because they have dreams and then they have things that start to mirror dreams like an automatic connection the same thing happens in different channels he's having something proprioceptive you go ahead and you amplify that and then suddenly oh well this reminds me of the visualization i've had where people have visualizations at that exactly that moment so you utilize some of the principles from from information theory and physics about signals yes and talk about uh the different channels that information comes in and uh and work with what's uh in front of you and uh somehow that connects with uh dream or unconscious processes the connection is a process itself people have insights automatically you needn't help them there are several principles behind this kind of work one of them is the thing that i learned from young it's a teleological concept the final philosophical idea that you were you start you believe in what's happening and you believe in the unconscious and you try to follow it and and you discover in time that it's meaningful that's one concept right then there's another concept the idea of information information theory and process the process concept and then you go ahead and work with that and you follow the signals and watch how process changes channels change for example this guy is first having a proprioception feeling something in his ear and then it changes and he's got he's seeing something suddenly same information is being uh visualized that was being felt before channels change when you get to the edge in in in what you can experience for example that pain got so much that he could hardly experience anymore he could have perhaps experienced it more but he felt he couldn't uh so then the uh your process has a sort of a wisdom about it and it makes it switch like that and says well this this isn't going to be useful going any further like that you're not going to get any more information this is as much information i'm going to give you now it hurts a lot and it feels like a drum the next step is then to see the drum and i think some of those channel changes happen to make the person whole to be just perceive things in one channel as to be a one-sided person i need to see and learn how to feel things and be able to represent and express things in many ways i'm thinking about so somehow that you said there's a wisdom about the process behind and uh it's like there's a master uh or uh some kind of a uh master awareness behind this that somehow is uh um yeah i'm not sure if you've got any ideas about this itself it's i don't know really what's behind it all i think of the ijing that uh i think of the ai ching and the iching it says that uh it says that uh you can represent the changes but the spirit behind them is unfathomable but yeah but how yes so what's really behind the whole thing is uh also be i don't know uh uh yes but it seems like uh um uh we're interested i mean you're interested in what this is about i mean it's like i'm a worshiper a worshiper yes i believe in it i've seen it work so much so i follow it i'm like a queen following the king and i know that it seems to be right because people grow and they become alive when you follow it but what is really behind it i it's uh you also i'm i'm thinking about the terms that you use in process um psychology talk about primary and secondary process and i'm wondering if that's uh similar to uh jung's concepts of conscious and unconscious and also i'm wondering about um uh is the secondary process this mat this uh uh thread of the dow behind or is that uh um can you yeah well one thing is that yeah that's a good question uh um i use terms called primary and secondary processes and the reason i do that is because when i started working with psychotic people or working with people who were in deep body conditions altered states of consciousness i could no longer differentiate what is conscious and what is unconscious and yet there's differentiations and structures one of the most mysterious thing is that everything that people do with structure that's highly structured even psychotic episodes are very highly structured so the concept of conscious and unconscious wasn't useful in those altered states so i thought to myself what is useful here and i watched exactly what the people do in altered states what they do in altered states is they identify themselves with certain processes and still with other people like they say now i'm feeling and simultaneously say oh that noise out there disturbed me so i realized oh they don't identify themselves with the noise it's coming in from the outside but primarily they're identifying themselves with this feeling so so primarily the primary process for me is what you identify yourself with it's different than consciousness though consciousness for me is a very special term i don't want to get so theoretical that will bore people but i'll tell you quickly okay okay consciousness means for me the awareness of the primary process and the awareness of secondary processes yes it doesn't mean uh just being in the primary process so so these primary and secondary process terms these are term process terms that you can carry you can use them all the time in fact i have not yet come across an aspect of human behavior where they don't they're not useful so so far i had to make these new terms i hate making new terms but i had to do that yeah yeah you also mentioned uh the word edge and uh that seems to be an important aspect of the work too now you see i'm so interested in working with altered states not just discussing about them but actually working and dealing with and following people in all sorts of states enjoy that working with people in altered body states and psychotic people and working with people in comatose conditions a lot of variety a lot of different different things working with little tiny kids working with babies who don't talk it you can work with them but if you you can work intuitively or you can work intuitively and use process concepts helps to structure what's happening here you you're gathering information in some way i'm wondering how you structure that information that you've gathered well i notice what a person identifies himself with that's the first thing what's closer to his identity that's primary what's further from his identity that's secondary what channels does the person use with awareness like for example you maybe you sound to me to be a visualizer but you just heard me say you sound to me all right so i'm using my hearing right now mainly with you that's occupied yes so certain channels are occupied and other channels are not occupied you identify yourself with that channel at this particular moment are there particular patterns for people i mean do they they tend to use it sounds like this is the uh yes there are there are there are we don't i don't have a personality uh theory like other psychologies which say personalities are structured this way or that way that's possible but uh it changes a great deal for example i happen to be in these days a proprioceptive person that's the channel i use the most i'm feeling all the time what's happening inside my body and i hear i'm listening very closely and uh but that can change in within two or three minutes so i tend to use that mainly that channel but uh it's not an absolute structure now i'm not a personality theory yeah um but i've also heard you talk about longer term patterns for people in other words i i've heard you um ask clients for childhood dreams for example and uh that would indicate that you're looking for some kind of pattern or process that happens over a long period of time that's true yeah so could you talk more about uh more about that and maybe they're very short-term processes those are things like we're experiencing with one another in the communication process right now right and then we're both also partially patterned by uh our childhood dreams or myths you would say that they're myths and uh a childhood dreams pattern a whole lifetime so for example somebody with a tiger in her childhood dream uh who goes like this when you ask her what's it like to be a tiger then uh this is a person frequently who has all sorts of eczema problems later on where body problems are patterned also excellence yes scratching because she needs to integrate that tiger into her life and her whole life is a constant battle with integrating that tiger for example we made this motion with uh the one that has uh eczema yeah and the tiger been related to the tiger yeah somehow that this connection is even more specific for a particular we could say young might talk about dream figures or particular symbols that would relate to particular body processes yeah is that uh yeah it's an archetypal body processes are patterned they're archetypal just like whole lifestyles are yeah tiger freaking depending upon what one says about a tiger like like has to do with scratching and using fingers more being more direct uh there are many different archetypal patterns in the body yeah i'm a typical asthmatic has a dream about walls being coming in on her or him and so uh the myth of the tiger in the background is like um um also somehow a um i'm thinking about the causality and teleological uh aspects of the symbol yeah and uh wondering uh uh which comes first does she get eczema because she dreamt of that uh is that a causal connection no because she could have gotten many other things too in other words if she has a uh she can also have um i'm thinking of somebody who i work with who has a tiger in her childhood dream so if it was causal then you could say people with tigers in their childhood dreams afterwards have eczema later on that's not the case she has a throat cancer and i asked her about what her throat cancer is like this is a woman who came to me uh some months ago and she put a throat cancer and i said what's your throat cancer like she didn't know i said well tell me what it's like and says well strange she said this to me sounds like a tiger so i said well let's let's play tigers together she went to me and i just ra to you and she came back and forth many times and she was like roaring about different things in her life i asked her what she dreamed in her childhood dream this is a woman who dreamed about a tiger yeah i'm just thinking this tigers is in her in a different shape that's right different channels body part too yes um i'd like to ask you some questions about uh how you begin psychotherapy or or process analysis do you have any particular goals in mind when you when somebody comes to you or or particular things oh yes oh yes i have lots of goals you know but people rarely follow them your goals yeah that's the trouble now i notice i would like to do things and this was already an astounding thing years ago i would want to talk to people about their dreams and some people want to talk about their dreams and other people doesn't want to do it and that was a big problem for me yeah yeah this is a this i think is a very uh i haven't opened my eyes and ears most people don't have the goals that i do like one of my major goals is following people's process and and i like it when people become more aware i just have a weakness in that area i'm in love with consciousness it's my myth but not everybody shares it like i work with uh somebody who just committed suicide tried to commit suicide and she just jumped in the water and she comes out and she says she said you know all i want to do is die she doesn't have the same goals as i do she wants to die and i'm interested in her coming to awareness so i have to change one of us has to change i'm calling her psychotic but if i don't change she's got like a really serious depression if i don't change i don't have a feedback loop i might go also in another world so i decided to start changing myself to and trying to adapt what i'm doing to follow the other person's process so most of my goals really have to tell you the truth most of the goals really are following the other person's process and sometimes i'm not able to do it then it's then i can't do it what happened uh yeah i'm interested in that uh what what happens when you can't follow i tell somebody somebody has like i deal with murderers also from social services uh with really wild people guy says i just like to kill what's wrong with you don't you ever happen to kill i said yeah you know i don't like my neighbor i like to give him a punch but i want to kill him this guy says i want to kill and i say well we're sharing different opinions and have different belief systems and i'm not going to follow that with you and then we get into a relationship process it's no longer just his but it's he and me together and he says to me but you have to follow me you have to agree with everything that i said i said i won't he said i'm gonna kill you i said no we haven't like it problems yes and what happens well i'm still here thank god yes yes and but the goals aren't matching and we have to have a fight the guy had to learn how to fight verbally i told him if he starts to get off his chair that i'm leaving the room the fastest route possible so he has to do it all verbally it's a relationship process started to do that and uh um let me finish that i just didn't i didn't finish the story he started to uh relate to me verbally and then started telling me all sorts of things he had to like verbalize his anger that was like important for him he likes me now so you brought in your own your own process about what uh uh where your limits were in terms of the of his process yes and uh seeing that that um could you talk about that how that comes up sometimes i mean it seems to be uh sometimes i don't like working yes i don't i hate helping people uh i mean that's not quite true i really do but sometimes you know when you come and work as a psychotherapist in the morning he just don't want to help somebody i don't want to be helpful today i'm too tired or i'm my mind is another point then uh that's also important to bring in you bring that in to the i'm having trouble being with you this morning and uh that starts a relationship process going first as well don't you like me and then i feel sudden like i'm there the the other person i might feel involved with the other person yeah somebody were to come and look for example and uh at your therapy uh or or process analysis that uh they might see a lot of different things uh going on you mentioned body work you mentioned dream work yes uh you're talking about relationship work yes uh how do you know when to do particular interventions in your work many different things can happen but only one thing remains the same and that it's following as exactly as possible what's going on that i constantly do but on the outside it looks very different and i watch the signals of the person to see somebody starts to go i say well how what's going on with you today the person goes like this or today we were working with somebody and she said she wanted to work on smoking i said what is smoking she said smoking is and i took that as a sign your body gave me an answer and so uh using body signals i could follow those body signals and work on her body and then i knew to do that somebody else is telling me a dream and while they're telling the dreams i dreamed the other night about a tiger the tiger in contrast to the following report the other night i dreamt about a tiger so the second dream report the motion is the important thing and the first the word the word association someone working with that dream i'd say from the first one well would you repeat that word what's the first word you associated the word hider whereas in the second case i would say go ahead with those motions can you tell me a little bit about your practice uh it has many aspects to it yeah i see people sometimes just once sometimes only for 15 minutes uh that's unusual but i if i'm rushed for time i'll see people for 15 minutes about something i also see them only once then then i see other people for an hour an hour and a half and i see some people for a couple of years or students i'll work with individually over a longer period of time but i also see people who come to seminars therapy should be as close to real life as possible tell me more about that but what you're doing in your practice should be or one of my goals is that what's happening in practice should be as close to the way i really am as a person as a whole so in my ordinary everyday life i happen to frequently be late to things so this is part of me and i work with that with myself and when i'm with other people i work with it too yeah i was thinking about what uh how young might uh um how what he might think of how you work and and the process model that you've uh that you've uh what you might think yes process model yes yeah the important thing is the living unconscious that's important and anyone who is able to get deep down into this unconscious and to bring it up and to make it accessible and available and useful to other people that's the right track everything else is avoiding the point the the thing that jung meant by now i'm integrating part of him now the thing that jung meant by the unconscious uh is things that we're talking about both primary and secondary processes and uh they're because they're both unconscious and uh jung felt that and i feel too i feel also that unprocessed unconscious information is dangerous stuff information is very rarely dangerous very so rarely that i want that the early analysts were terrified of the unconscious they said they were very careful about uh uh about bringing up information they thought that would be very dangerous and now there's lots more techniques available as process work it's full of of methods and and available techniques to bring this material up and to make it constructive and i think if you were to ask him about that he would say that's definitely right when i started when i made the discovery that double signals in other words that things that i'm doing that are incongruent like this if i was doing that the double signals also relate to dreams i dreamed myself and i discovered that right yes the double signals uh related dreams i dreamed myself that you'll got out of the grave and started clapping so i think he would be very happy to get the living reality the the the dreaming world bringing that into this world that's important uh that's the idea of the of the uh the devil or the dreaming the dreaming body and the brain body yes yes bringing unconscious information up things that are far away from awareness and not just talking about them as if their dreams that happened last night but realizing them as a living reality and bringing that to the foreground that's more important than anything else all the theory and the structures and stuff like that if it is useful in doing that then it's right but that that is important otherwise people they like have they're like dead dead they're they're they're here and they're doing one thing and the whole living reality of their spirit is in another place so that's important how do you bring this out this seems to be well to begin with it's really like being a really good observer looking really exactly itself and noticing this is happening this is happening and helping the person become aware of it every good therapist since the beginning of time has been able to has touched that point and that's like a central point in psychology i think that's the point we all need to study much more about how do you know which signals are probably are the most important to uh don't i don't i i notice certain signals and i mention them and i watch the ones that the people pick up i don't know i see your thumbs moving for example and i see your pink shirt and i see i'm sitting here and talking with a certain kind of a voice and i would mention all the things that i notice some of them you'll pick up and some you won't the ones that you pick up i would work with those are like the moving lines in the iching's hexagram that's where change happens the things that are like in the middle of evolving right now but i don't know ahead of time how do you know what particular signals what particular signals mean for example i don't know what signals mean i never know i see something happening and it's the unknown so i go after that piece of unknown and i try to find out how to get that unknown to express itself and then it tells me i have no idea what body signals mean how would you go into that unknown for example you said uh well let's say as we saw today while we're working one woman is going like this yes right she's discussing something with another woman having a sort of a conflict and she's going like this i don't know what that means but i know that her elbow is out in the foreground and her wrist is in the background and i think to myself that's something that i'd like to amplify or work with so i could either push this out or hold this back so i did one or the other i did this she then said it later i hate it when that people can find me meaning that she's been confiding herself so this signal means that she's feeling confined and that she's fighting against her own confinement so it's a process worker then is it seems to be very important to go into exploring what particular signals mean that's right and not necessarily interpreting from a particular theoretical framework or you can try an interpretation as long as you're not excited by it as long as you're not excited about that's right if you're not attached to your interpretation it could also be useful i could say you mean this means that you're interested in talking about the weather that's a bad interpretation then she's going to say are you out of your stupid mind it means and i know i made a mistake with the interpretation but the kind of interpretation is uh meant to provoke or bring out the real meaning but uh where you can take guesses but if you tell people that you think you know what what they're doing means that's a dangerous business if they're not strong enough they'll believe you to begin with at least and you'd rather interrupt what's happening so it's uh more of a program that you're saying that you're placing on the i say to this woman now this means i think that this means that you are an aggressive person uh who is shy about expressing her your aggression then what i've done in doing that is i've interrupted her process by being smart yes i'm very intelligent and i wrecked what's happening with her then i encourage her by being so smart to start to talk to me about what's happening and she says this does mean that that's absolutely right that could be useful at one point to like talk about a signal but it's really the case uh so you're working with the signals is um yes working with the signals is important and not just interpreting them because the difference is if i just interpret that signal then the signal remains inside of her somewhere that's a way of getting sick yes if you have a signal that's trying to evolve and you don't let it evolve then it's evolving somehow there's no such thing as repressing the unconscious it doesn't exist you can't be press signals you put your arms out like that that tension goes up here or it goes down into her chest or goes into her heart then you have people who have like chronic tensions up here in their neck so that's why in process work the concept of evolving those signals is so important i'm interested in in uh your conscious conception of uh disease or disease is information that has something itself like rumpelstiltskin falling into the ground at the end he doesn't die he stays in the earth in the body take an example for example of uh a woman who has a cramp down here okay yes she's got cramping down here we saw also an example of that today and uh she said so she's got information down here of some sort right during her work her hands come like this and when it was a double as a double signal this is somebody who has to stand like this quite a lot so we worked on that double since what does that signal mean and through working with it came out and well i'm pretty tough remember so lots of uh straightforward shooting and just being direct and communicative right that comes out but this whole area with her right also here this area is cramped and uh so she has an edge or she has like a shyness or a resistance against expressing uh uh herself in a direct way she would prefer to be more adapted uh like everybody else so that information then doesn't get a chance to express itself it doesn't evolve and it goes somatic so to speak into the earth and express itself in there i've worked with her also at an earlier date about the cream she has in her colon turns out to be something like this so i'm i'm interested in uh the medical model and how they might uh also deal with this particular area for example in this particular case let's say it begins to harden and turn into some kind of a mass or something or a tumor yes and then uh [Music] rather than so they would do something else well this is a good example because this is a person who has just been into gynecologists and her gynecologist said that uh that she felt some hardening up there thought it could be cancerous and went into further examinations and turned it out it wasn't the case had it been cancerous the medical model would then try to remove that right away that could also be very useful but it still doesn't process the information that's down there the chances of the that information going becoming less tractable are then greater less tractable meaning that the information becomes even more distant from awareness a medical model has uh needs also to be treated with importance it's at a certain point it can be important to take something out i would like to ask another general question about your uh therapy and i'm wondering what you feel like are the most important uh tools or techniques for in process work none of them none of them no but the philosophy okay because uh the philosophical point of view that somebody has determines everything it creates techniques it creates the relationship with people and it also completely determines what you're able to observe and uh so with the paradigm that one is working with is more important than anything else so yes i'm interested in what the paradigm is so the paradigm that i'm aware of at least the paradigm and process work that i'm aware of is that what's happening is probably meaningful and that experience shows that through bringing that information out uh the person is wholer they're more complete and they're more together and their body symptoms have a tendency to disappear at least in the moment that they're able to bring information out so that's a paradigm right okay in contrast to other kinds of paradigms so that paradigm produces uh methods and it uses methods that already exist in contrast to other paradigms which say that for example that you should understand everything it's important to understand what's happened that's also a paradigm if you work with that paradigm and it produces tools which help you to understand in contrast to producing tools that help you understand and evolve things so that's what i think is the most important thing in process work it's the philosophical yes assumptions you use a lot of concepts from jungian background and your background in physics i'm also interested in what other psychologies you have used uh particular tools from uh i've learned a great deal from meditation and and the most important thing to me however is uh uh the concept of awareness and the belief in what's happening and also the idea that the individual is is right that's so simple um even though they may have some beliefs that they're not quite right or somebody else's society might have some beliefs that they're not everybody believes that they're stupid that's very right nobody thinks that the feelings that they're having are important everybody comes in originally considering that what they perceive is not right nobody believes what they see they don't believe what they're hearing inside themselves they don't believe what they're feeling and nobody no one believes in their spontaneous movements and nobody believes in the fact that they trip across relationship problems so the result is that having a personal process is today brady it's like incredibly rare it's unbelievable people are always asking you to tell them what to do with themselves they're like it's very foreign still in this day and age that people in spite of all the talk about freedom that people believe in what's happening inside of themselves it's incredible it's just incredible um [Music] um that seems to be a uh a big problem in the world today so i'm wondering um um what you feel the role of psychology would be in the rest of the century and uh beyond what do you see the role of psychology being i don't know when this particular point i'm going to say is going to be meaningful but one of the roles that psychology has to manage is to put the person back inside himself to make every human being believe in what you're seeing right now and what you're right now hearing and what you're right now feeling the movements you're making the relationship problems you have and the things that happen in the world around you that if psychology is going to work it's going to have to turn people back to their inner teachers inside then they're ready to come out again and that is a role that it needs to do what do you think is the most important thing in the education of a process-oriented psychologist the most important thing is to be aware of your assumptions that's what i really think not the learning of techniques but to be aware of the assumptions that you have within your feelings about people that's what i think is important in training and uh then to have a very broad training and to have personal analysis to learn how you behave in relationships to have video work about how you deal with people to work yourself and have supervision in what's happening the most important um thing you seem to be saying is about is the sense of meaning and uh and following uh what's what's right there in front of you and um it seems very simple and um uh and we do this i think it's the most ancient idea that exists yeah follow the tao the problem is in the past that we haven't known how the philosophy is right but there's the relationship between philosophy and science yes following the tao is a wonderful idea you could everybody every good psychologist today says they're trying to follow process or follow the unconscious or something like that but then they have to find out what process if they haven't defined it exactly then they don't then they're just following what they the programs they have in their head yeah i think there's there seems to be an intense desire with psychologists themselves to somehow unify um how do you think that might be done what do you think could could happen to have that well the psychology is in a pre-scientific phase i think i don't think it has to become a science but it has characteristics of a free science thousands of things happening hundreds of psychologies people and the psychologist the worst thing is psychologists hate to talk to one another they don't learn enough from one another and so that means to me that the first step in the process is to that there need to be they need to be more fragmented that fragmentation is important that there's all sorts of very powerful individual therapies being developed in specific channels so the dream workers are doing lots of work in the dream world and the body workers are finding very specific techniques out on how to move the body about and the dancers are beginning to find the new methods about working and dance but at a certain point uh all of these channels begin to overlap and i think the next step in psychology is going to be not just wanting to come together but finding a neutral language and a neutral uh paradigm that is neither psychic nor physical or movement oriented or dream oriented it's neither uh personal nor family oriented some sort of process concept is going to happen as a unifying concept in psychology something that has a process orientation and that i think also is related to information theory is going to be very useful that's what i see happening something similar to what that you've developed yes well i think that uh i must be one person uh making an attempt to unify psychologies and other places there's other people who are trying to develop powerful things too as well yes uh it seems so difficult to try and bring these together and i i'm thinking about learning as a process therapist and bringing somehow making this mishmash of particular paradigms and making some sense out of it it must have been confusing for you in the beginning when you brought different things together well i read all the different things and i got confused and just didn't i put him aside and then i decided to start with the individual and follow that person exactly and then i found that if you follow an individual exactly that that individual process brings the different psychologies together in any one given process you might do family work or body work or dream work you know no i'm uh i'm wondering um if there are any questions that you might uh ask yourself right now if you were in over here and uh that you'd like to know from yourself i would ask me uh how do you help people have a beginner's mind how do you help people to become aware of all the beliefs that they have yeah and how do you help them to become aware of the things that are already programming their awareness and how do you get them to really open up to the reality of the person the reality of people how do you do that i would ask how do you do it and uh and i would say i would introduce that question by saying already you look all around the world and you look at human relationships and you see people have certain programs in their heads about how they're behaving how they should behave and how the other one should be higher how can you sh make them aware of that and help them to begin to open up that for me is like a central question that's what i would ask myself if i was sitting there yes so let me pretend i just asked you that question does an answer come for you hmm that's a hard question wow that's tough i notice i don't have an immediate answer so uh that means something to me not having an immediate answer means that the question is important that i want to ask everybody that question and they should ask themselves the question and i want to tell them my experiences with it but i don't have an answer to it what are your experiences my experiences with that question are that the people who are most open are the ones so it doesn't have to do with age it has to do with a certain youthfulness and uh and an openness and willingness to to find out more about life and uh a lot of people aren't they have studied something and especially therapists strange to say they've already studied what they've studied and they stop studying they have diplomitis they've got their diploma and their studying has stopped and so they also don't encourage the researchfulness in their clients they also don't bring that into what they're doing they don't say let's see and find out what is happening today so i can only state the state of the uh i can only talk about the state of the situation right now but i can't i can i can't i don't have a recipe for it i'm feeling uh like um i would like your response about the film and uh your feelings and thoughts about doing this well i was uncomfortable with filming in the beginning and then i uh the whole business of filming i didn't know i i was uncomfortable with it and now i don't care any longer and uh like this i i my response to filming will be more complete when i see the effects that it has and how many uh irritations it causes and uh and whether people have also an open mind looking in from the outside that you're concerned about how many of my shadows will be disagreeing with me and uh what the stirs up then i'll know what my response of the film is thank you very much you

Channel: Arnold Mindell

Views: 1,219

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Process Work, Process oriented Psychology, channels, process structure, edges, secondary process, primary process, conscious, unconscious, Jungian psychology, future of psychology

Id: 29xZDZHgYxw

Length: 61min 56sec (3716 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021