Preface

The major effort of ten years of my career has been the analysis of this thirty-minute transaction and the publication of the method and results. In fact, publication has been the knottiest problem of our research. It is surprising and disturbing to notice how few publications in this field are available to the average reader. An outsider would not know that dozens of researchers have been doing analyses like this one for over a decade. (An unbelievably detailed analysis done in 1955 at Stanford, for example, is still awaiting publication.)

There are some familiar reasons for this situation. Nontraditional approaches to research are difficult to fund, and, with no established body of readers interested, publishers hesitate to take the risk. Also, it takes a long time to formulate new approaches in a clear and readable way. Further, the painstaking requirements of film analysis and the cultural taboos against looking closely at other persons have caused many workers to drop out and leave their work uncompleted.

But there is an obstacle to publication that is even more critical. Many events and behaviors in communication are almost entirely outside the realm of language and consciousness. There are no words for them, and these infrasystems of behavior are so complex that few readers will wade through a systematic description of their integration. Thus, intricate nonlinguistic behaviors must be transformed into the system of speech and metabehavior, and the major effort of this research and others like it has been, not the detailed observation, but the search for a way to tell what the slowmotion analysis of a film has revealed. I have needed as much help in describing the observations and promulgating the ideas as I did in learning the viewpoint and studying the film.

A number of lines of thought that have come together in current concepts and behavioral systems can be traced back for generations. For example, we can trace the basic systems concepts from Maxwell to Einstein to Lewin to Redfield and Bertalanffy, while the general notion of holism in the psychological sciences has precedence among Gestalt theorists like Kofka and Koehler, along with the clinical naturalists like Freud, Bleuler, Meyer, and many others. The history of the concept of behavioral patterns stretches from Boaz to Benedict and Mead in anthropology and from Sapir to Pike in structural linguistics.

I consider the primary architects of the current behavioral systems emphasis to be Kenneth Pike, Ray L. Birdwhistell, Gregory Bateson, Erving Goffman, and the ethologists from Lorenz to the younger non-Europeans like Klopfer and McBride. The development of methods for synthesis is indebted to the work of Pike in linguistics, Schneirla in biology, and the 1955 explication of context analysis by Bateson, Birdwhistell, Brosin, Hockett, Fromm-Reichmann, and McQuown.

A number of people have initiated and guided projects in which younger men have been able to learn and carry out research in this tradition. Henry Brosin has sustained the tradition at Western Psychiatric Institute in Pittsburgh for over a decade and O. Spurgeon English sponsored the work at Temple University in Philadelphia. In fact, English organized or sustained each of the early projects in which this particular work was developed. Brosin, Kubie, Mead, Bateson, Bacon, and others have continuously advised, taught, and supported these programs.

The prime contributor to the actual work in this volume has been Ray Birdwhistell. He taught me the method and participated daily for almost a decade in the analysis and formulation of the data. Although Birdwhistell is best known for his microanalysis of kinesic behavior, he actually has played a primary role in conceptualizing and teaching the broad ideas of systems, behavioral integration, and communication. Others also have contributed. Mr. Jacques vanVlack, the project cinematographer, supplied technical advice and equipment to improve the screening of the films, and our artist, Mr. Sherl Winter, made the drawings for this volume. Miss Libby Goldstein and Mr. Robert Armstrong worked with the transcripts and Drs. Warren Натре, Arthur Auerback, and Paul Watzlawick helped with the analysis.

A staff of associates and assistants has struggled with me to solve the problem of publication of results. Draft after draft of the manuscript was typed by Josephine Dixon, Susie Slutski, Barbara Catena, and John Vila. A number of colleagues have read manuscripts and contributed ideas and encouragement, ineluding Glen McBride, Thomas Sebeok, Charles Kaufman, Adam Kendon, Joseph Schaeffer, and Andrew Ferber. But the major task of boiling down data into concise, readable, and interesting form fell to my wife, Alice Scheflen, research assistant and editor of the original project. She repeatedly reworked the ideas, inventing key devices to make explicit operations of search and testing which previously had been largely intuitive.

Still another kind of contribution has been necessary — that of the subjects who have been willing to be filmed and studied. I appreciate the willingness of Mrs. V. , Marge, Whitaker, and Malone to be filmed. The willingness of Whitaker and Malone was a sophisticated sacrifice. They knew that their work would be judged by clinical colleagues and that their every muscle twitch would be scrutinized and written about. Both were willing to tell us anything they could about their behavior; Whitaker, especially, has supported me in this write-up even though he did not agree with all of my comments. I feel another, less obvious, kind of gratitude to these men. They have willingly allowed their clinical work to be used for a nonclinical purpose. They served as guinea pigs in a study which does not primarily deal with their contributions to psychotherapy. It is as though we asked an outstanding musician to play for us, then used his work to make an analysis of the physics of sound waves.

Finally, other filmed subjects made a necessary contribution to this research, even though the text does not describe the transactions in which they were involved. For example, we first filmed Dr. John Rosen, who not only fostered our efforts to develop film analysis by serving as a subject but also helped us raise the money for the study. At Dr. Rosen’s request, Mr. Laurence Rockefeller and Mrs. Edwin Webster put up the first funds from their own pockets. Later, O. Spurgeon English, Barnard Holland, Jules Masserman, Milton Erickson, Ross Spark, Nat Ackerman, Murry Bowan, and others permitted themselves to be filmed and studied to prove us with recorded psychotherapy sessions to compare with Session I.

The original research for this volume was done in Philadelphia in the Department of Psychiatry, Temple University Medical School, and at the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute. The research at Temple was financially supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Benjamin Rosenthal Foundation. The work at Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute was greatly aided by the administration of Drs. William Phillips and Richard Schultz and financially supported by a grant from the Commonwealth Research Foundation of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

The first printing of this book, entitled Stream and Structure in Psychotherapy (Scheflen 1965) was sold out before the publication was announced. In 1966, Dr. Thomas A. Sebeok, Professor of Linguistics and Chairman of the Research Center for the Language Sciences at Indiana University, recommended that the volume be revised for the use of the behavioral science reader. At his suggestion, I have prepared the present edition for publication by Indiana University Press. The revision was begun at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California, during 1967-68 and completed at the Bronx State Hospital and at the Jewish Family Services of New York. Work on the revised edition has been sponsored by the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Bronx State Hospital.