FIML and Symbolic Interaction Theory

June 26, 2014January 13, 2023 ~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Symbolic Interaction Theory, also called symbolic interactionism, provides the best large-scale framework I have found so far for explaining FIML practice.

Three basic premises of symbolic interactionism are:

“Humans act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things.”
“The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and the society.”
“These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters.”

These basic premises have been taken from the Wikipedia article linked above. I tend to agree with most of the general framework, as I understand it, of symbolic interactionism and believe that FIML practice can reasonably be understood as a method that can fit fairly comfortably within that framework.

FIML differs from symbolic interactionism in that FIML is much more a form of interpersonal psychotherapy than a sociological theory. FIML is a communication technique that focuses on meaning as it arises and is apprehended during short periods of time. FIML’s focus on very small units of interpersonal communication is what allows partners to understand how their sense of meaning intertwines with their emotional responses.

From a FIML point of view, society does not appear very well structured in many of its contexts, especially interpersonal contexts involving emotions, friendship, and intimate bonding. From this point of view, a great deal of social structure appears to be a substitute for authentic interaction between individual minds.

FIML seems also to show that a great deal of human suffering arises from the paucity of meaning that can be exchanged between individuals in most social contexts. Indeed, even in intimate contexts, most individuals, if not all of them, have great difficulty in attaining profound mutual understanding. This happens because our perceptions of our selves and others—due to how we use language and semiotics—are too crude and vague to allow for communicative complexity equal to the complexity of our minds/brains.

FIML corrects this problem by focusing on the details of interpersonal communication. Incidentally, FIML theory/practice can be falsified by having many couples do FIML practice and measuring the results. A criticism of symbolic interactionism is that it is not falsifiable. FIML differs from symbolic interactionism in that it is a practical technique that uses objective data (agreed upon by both partners) to optimize communication and improve psychological well-being.

I am pretty sure I will have more to say about symbolic interactionism in the days to come. A friend just sent me the article linked above, so I put down a few thoughts after one reading. FIML partners may find that symbolic interactionism helps with a general understanding of FIML practice.

UPDATE 01/13/22: The Wikipedia page has been updated since the excerpt above. I found this update interesting:

[Symbolic interactionism] is a framework that helps understand how society is preserved and created through repeated interactions between individuals. The interpretation process that occurs between interactions helps create and recreate meaning. It is the shared understanding and interpretations of meaning that affect the interaction between individuals. Individuals act on the premise of a shared understanding of meaning within their social context. Thus, interaction and behavior is framed through the shared meaning that objects and concepts have attached to them. From this view, people live in both natural and symbolic environments.

I agree with this and would add that the the shared understanding and interpretations of meaning that affect the interaction between individuals occurs all-importantly and very profoundly on the level of intimate interpersonal relationships. What FIML does is discover, foster, and create a much more accurate shared understanding and interpretations of meaning between FIML partners. The benefit of this is enormous since it has an extremely profound effect on individual psychology and all other shared understanding and interpretations of meaning encountered in society everywhere. ABN

Some depressing thoughts about the evolution of human intelligence

June 16, 2014June 23, 2023 ~ ABN ~ 2 Comments

Firstly, human evolution is typically not survival of the fittest, but rather survival of the average. Outliers are misunderstood, envied, feared, killed or harmed. This happens to the less intelligent as well as the more intelligent.

The reason this happens to the intelligent is humans are envious and violent and prone to misunderstanding people who are smarter than them. This leads to violence toward, obstruction of, or not helping those who seem more intelligent.

It’s hard to escape a black ghetto because you will be perceived as “acting white” and attacked for that. It’s not very different in white “rural ghettos” (or urban) where intelligence is perceived as a threat. In many societies, average people cannot or will not lend support to their more intelligent members because they know, or imagine, that such behaviors will eventually lead to them being “lorded over” by the person(s) they helped.

Just a few generations ago, Italian American communities were famous for discouraging higher education among their children because it threatened the social structure if sons, let alone daughters, attained better careers than their fathers.

I am sure there are many other subcultures within the USA and throughout the world that have similar attitudes. Siblings often envy and decline helping each other, to say the least.

In the more distant past, violent death at the hands of other humans was a very common way for people to leave this vale of tears. Today the killing is less, but I doubt the harming is all that much less. Nowadays people use rumors, lies, poison, and many sorts of hindrance to prevent intelligent people from rising above them.

In a gruesome but very realistic way, this all makes sense because, evolutionarily, why should an individual help a genotype that is different from their own? This is probably why so much extant human intelligence, such that it is, is devoted to deceiving other humans, outsmarting them, out-competing them, getting ahead of them. Humans do better in a capitalist system because capitalism allows them to compete by virtually any means they can get away with.

Some strongly hierarchical societies, like China, do tend to help intelligent people if they are well-connected or have already risen to the top of a hierarchy. On the way to the top, though, the internecine fighting can be as bitter as anywhere else in the world.

In times of war or perceived threat, many groups will help the smarter ones of their own, but compensate by harming other groups even more viciously that usual. You can see this behavior in some cults, cliques, and secret societies within the USA today. Sometimes they help their genotype and sometimes they help their ideological types by that sort of behavior. In a sense, groups like that are just acting like individuals on a larger stage; they are selfish and violent as a group, but not too bad to themselves.

Having spent so much time with FIML practice and its considerable social and psychological implications, I don’t feel sanguine about the statements above. Isaac Newton helped the whole human race because somehow he was both left alone and helped. Had he spent time in public houses just being himself, he probably would have been beaten, and thus returned through brain damage to the common lot. Had he not been helped, he probably would have done nothing, and certainly much less. My guess is England probably had hundreds of potential Newtons, but just that one survived to produce great science.

Archimedes was murdered by a Roman soldier. Socrates was poisoned. Newton survived. These are the few we know about. I am sure there are many thousands more who were destroyed before they ever did anything to cause us to know about them.

My guess is the Buddha meant something like the above when he described the Four Noble Truths. Notice, that his formula provides no way for societies (large groups) to escape suffering en masse, but only a way for individuals or small groups.

Large groups can become more comfortable but, it seems, always at the expensive of even larger groups that are exploited by them. Maybe computers and machines will fix this problem in the future, but there doesn’t seem to be much hope today. Multiculturalism will very likely make things even worse, except for the few groups that dominate the others. Not much different, except in scale, from a normal bad neighborhood today.

Humans are fractals of their societies

June 10, 2014December 3, 2022 ~ ABN ~ 1 Comment

words 709

The microcosm of the individual human is made of the same stuff as the macrocosm of the society to which it belongs. The two are a fractal set displaying similar patterns.

This makes sense since both individuals and their societies use the same networks of semiotics to communicate.

In many ways, societies are less complex than individuals. In the sense that a society is an assemblage of many individuals, society is more complex. But in the sense that a society is held together by a network of communicable ideas, or semiotics, society is frequently less complex than many of the individuals living within it.

For example, most societies have very simple “biographies” (their always slanted histories), while many individuals have nuanced biographies that encompass change, growth, and contradiction.

A recent study of people’s attitudes towards atrocities points to this truth by showing that “…the way people’s memories are shaped by selective discussions of atrocities depends on group-membership status.” (Source)

In-groups forget bad things they have done—or “morally disengage” from them—while clearly remembering bad things that out-groups have done. This is a major element of all group stories.

I bet you cannot name a single society that has anything even approaching a fully nuanced view of itself on almost any matter, let alone its history. Individuals often “morally disengage” from their past acts, but it is not common for them to do so to the same extent as the societies they live in.

It hardly matters if the social story is about atrocities or trivia. I have actually witnessed fairly heated arguments over who first invented pasta, the Chinese or the Italians. And another one on who first invented dumplings, Poles, Jews, or Chinese. The origin of beer is another subject that can get people going.

It makes sense that societies’ stories about themselves be as simple as they are false because they serve as lowest-common-denominator social bonds. Indeed, it probably even helps that these stories be knowingly false as the bond will then require an even deeper level of commitment.

Of course, some of the energy for falsification and simplification comes from one group’s story needing to counter another group’s story. Yes, we did that to you, but you did this to us first.

In that, societies further resemble individuals because that’s what we do as individuals, too. Only individuals who are very well disposed toward each other and who try hard ever overcome the need for false stories between them.

FIML practice provides individuals with a means to observe the smallest fractal details of their individual stories and correct them where they are wrong. FIML partners would do well to take what they have learned as individuals and apply it to the stories told by the society in which they live. You will surely find a macrocosm of yourself in the absurdities of whichever group you “identify” with.

Maybe people in the future will be better able to see how ridiculous our stories are and better able to deal with the complexities that lie beyond them. For now, maybe we can at least start getting a fuller, truer view of what is happening in and around us.

I doubt we can do this on a societal level any time soon because the LCD stories will always reassert, but as individuals with a good partner I believe we can. This is probably a main reason that monastic and reclusive traditions have been practiced all over the world. Groups are ignorant, violent, stifling, and crazy. Individuals simply have a better chance at going beyond their simple patterns by acting on their own.

The fractal of the individual is generated by society but it is prone to being trapped by it as well.

_______________

Edit 6/13/14: When good people do bad things. We all know that people in groups can behave badly. This article is about a study that uses a plausible fMRI method to measure some of the basic processes underlying immoral behavior. In my view, the situation is not much different when the group is a large culture, rather than a small number of participants in a laboratory experiment. Cultures not only permit bad behavior toward out-groups, but they also numb us to what our in-group is doing.

Meaning and existential networks

June 8, 2014February 18, 2015 ~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

The FIML approach to human psychology considers humans as existential networks of signals, some internal and some external.

A core concept in FIML is that cognition relies on semiotic networks. Semiotics are meaningful or communicable signals.

The purpose of FIML practice is the optimization of interpersonal communication. An important part of this process involves removing what we usually call “misinterpretations.” Some synonyms, depending on context, for misinterpretation are neurosis, emotional suffering, emotional confusion, disordered thinking, wrong views, and so on. The main point is that the sufferer of a misinterpretation is making some sort of mistake in how they perceive, cognize, or react to the world around them.

Misinterpretations are fundamentally rooted in meaning. A misinterpretation is not fundamentally emotional, but meaningful. From the mistaken meaning flows emotions, perceptions, reactions, psychological confusion.

A friend sent me a fascinating Wikipedia entry on ideasthesia. Ideasthesia

is defined as a phenomenon in which activations of concepts (inducers) evoke perception-like experiences (concurrents). The name comes from the Greek idea and aisthesis, meaning “sensing concepts” or “sensing ideas” and is introduced by Danko Nikolić. The main reason for introducing the notion of ideaesthesia was the empirical evidence indicating that the related term synesthesia (i.e. union of senses) suggests incorrect explanation of a set of phenomena traditionally covered by this heading. “Syn”+”aesthesis” denoting “co-perceiving”, implies the association of two sensory elements with little connection to the cognitive level. However, most phenomena that have inadvertently been linked to synesthesia, in fact are induced by the semantic representations i.e., the meaning, of the stimulus rather than by its sensory properties, as would be implied by the term synesthesia.

Note this line from the section above—“However, most phenomena that have inadvertently been linked to synesthesia, in fact are induced by the semantic representations i.e., the meaning, of the stimulus rather than by its sensory properties, as would be implied by the term synesthesia.”

If ideasthesia happens with simple perceptions, imagine how often it happens in our existential networks of cognition, semiotic perception, semiotic response and interpretation.

By correcting the core meanings of core misinterpretations, FIML practice corrects maladapted existential networks, thus relieving suffering while optimizing communication.

All ideologies are prone to extremes

May 28, 2014 ~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Bank of England governor: capitalism doomed if ethics vanish

Guns, white males, and false public semiotics

May 26, 2014May 26, 2014 ~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

I hope I have not been misleading in my use of the term “public semiotic,” which I probably coined.

By public semiotic, I mean a semiotic or bundle of semiotics that most people within a culture recognize. A meme is a narrowly focused public semiotic. The reason I use the term public semiotic is there are many sorts of public semiotics that are broader or vaguer than sharply focused memes.

One of them is “white males commit a disproportionate number of rampage killings,” as Michael Moore implied shortly after the Rodger rampage killing in California. A simple check of rampage statistics in the USA reveals that “white males” commit rampage killings at slightly less than or about the same as their percentage of the US population.

Another false public semiotic is that “guns cause America’s high murder rate.” Moore implied that one, too. Why do people who have a loud public voice not even bother to check with the science before speaking? Here is a short, recent study by eminent criminologists that refutes Moore’s claims about guns causing violence: Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?

The answer is no. Surely Moore can read studies like this one (and there are many of them) that refute his emotionally charged errors before pontificating yet again on this subject.

If it were only Moore who made mistakes like this, I might not have bothered to write this post. But Mayor Bloomberg himself, arch foe of gun ownership, actually makes two major mistakes in this short video: Bloomberg Doesnt Know SemiAuto from Auto.

The Mayor is wrong about how semi-automatics work and he is wrong about the meme that legally owning a gun makes it “statistically 22 times more likely” that a family member or friend will be shot with that gun. Read the study above for a complete refutation of that falsehood.

How can two of the most prominent anti-gun spokespeople (don’t get me started on Dianne Feinstein) persist in making such elementary mistakes in their oft repeated comments? Is it any wonder the public does not trust them and hardly listens anymore?

False public semiotics are usually deliberately employed emotional statements that sound convincing because they are frequently repeated.

Fortunately, the American public is better informed than Moore or Bloomberg on guns. But there are so many issues it is hard to keep up. Notice how often emotional public semiotics are at the forefront of the side that is lying, whether it be to start a war in Iraq, reduce internet freedom, permit violations of the Fourth Amendement, and so on.

Imaginary communication

May 25, 2014 ~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Normal socially-defined communication—business, school, professional, etc.—operates within known limits and terminologies. Skill is largely defined as understanding how to use the system without exceeding its limits, how to play the game.

Many other forms of communication must be imagined. That is, I have to imagine what you mean and you have to imagine what I mean. This is so because the rules of communication are not well-defined.

In many cases of this type I will imagine that you are normal to the extent that I am able to imagine what normal is. And I will imagine that you imagine me to be normal. As I imagine you I will probably assume that your sense of what is normal is more or less the same as mine. This is probably what the central part of the bell curve of imagined communication looks like. People in this group are capable of imagining and cleaving to normal communication standards. If you reciprocate, we will probably get along fine.

If my imagination is better than normal, I will be able to imagine more than the normal person or given to imagining more. If this is the case, I will tend to want to find a way to communicate more than the norm to you. If you reciprocate, we might do well communicating. If you don’t, I might appear eccentric to you or distracted.

If my imagination is worse than normal, I will have trouble imagining or understanding normal communication. I won’t have a good sense of the cartoons we are required to make of each other and will probably appear awkward or scatterbrained to most people. If you reciprocate, we might do well communicating and find comfort in each other.

Normal communication, even when imagined, is based on something like cartoons. I see myself as a cartoon acting in relation to the cartoon I imagine for you. If my cartoon fits you well enough that you like it and if your cartoon of me fits well enough that I like it, we have a good chance of becoming friends.

A great deal of normal imagined communication is cartoon-like, and being normal, will take the bulk of its cartoons from mass media—movies, TV, radio, and, to a lesser extent today, books and other art forms.

People still read and learn from books and art, but normal communication has come to rely heavily on the powerful cartoons of mass media.

The big problem with our systems of imagined communication is they are highly idiosyncratic, messy, and ambiguous. We have to spend a lot of time fixing problems and explaining what we really mean.

It’s good to have idiosyncratic communication, but we have to find ways to understand each other on those terms.

Networks of words, semiotics, and psychological morphemes

May 21, 2014November 22, 2018 ~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

On this site we have claimed many times that words and semiotics are held together in networks. We have further hypothesized that “psychological morphemes” are also held together in networks.

A “psychological morpheme” is the smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.

Of course word networks, semiotic networks, and emotional, psychological, and cognitive networks all intertwine with each other.

FIML practice is designed to help partners untangle unwanted emotions from these intertwined networks. FIML practice focuses on psychological morphemes because they are small and thus rather easily understood and rather easily extirpated from real-time contexts (when partners are interacting in real life in real-time).

The hard part about FIML practice is it is done in real life in real-time. But the easy or very effective part about FIML is that once partners learn to do it, results come quickly because the practice is happening in real life in real-time. It is not just a theory when you do it in that way. It is an experience that changes how you communicate and how you understand yourself and others.

In FIML practice partners are mindful of their emotional reactions and learn that when one occurs, it is important to query their partner about it. They are mindful of psychological morphemes and as soon as one appears, but before the morpheme calls up a large network leading to a strong reaction, they query their partner about it.

This practice leads, we have claimed, to a fairly smooth and effortless extirpation of unwanted psychological responses. This happens, we believe, because the data provided by the partner that “caused” the reaction shows the partner who made the FIML query that the psychological morpheme in question arose due to a misinterpretation. Seeing this repeatedly for the same sort of neurotic reaction causes that reaction and the psychological network that comprises it to become extinguished.

A fascinating study from the University of Kansas by Michael Vitevitch shows that removing a key word from a linguistic network will cause that network to fracture and even be destroyed. An article about the study and a link to the study can be found here: Keywords hold vocabulary together in memory.

Vitevitch’s study involves only words and his analysis was done only with computers because, as he says, ““Fracturing the network [in real people] could actually disrupt language processing. Even though we could remove keywords from research participants’ memories through psycholinguistic tasks, we dared not because of concern that there would be long-term or even widespread effects.”

FIML is not about removing key words from linguistic networks. But it is about dismantling or removing psychological or semiotic networks that cause suffering.

Psychological or semiotic networks are networks rich in emotional meaning. When those networks harbor unwanted, inappropriate, or mistaken interpretations (and thus mistaken or unwanted emotions), they can cause serious neurotic reactions, or what we usually call simply “mistaken interpretations.”

We believe that these mistaken interpretations and the emotions associated with them can be efficiently extirpated by revealing to their holder the “key” psychological morphemes that set them off.

My guess is the psychology of a semiotic network hinges on repeated reactions to key psychological morphemes and that this process is analogous to the key words described in Vitevitch’s study.

Vitevitch did not remove key words from actual people because it would be unethical to do so. But it is not unethical for consenting adults to help each other find and remove key psychological morphemes that are harmfully associated with the linguistic, semiotic, cognitive, and psychological networks that make up the individual.

Is “low trust” in government a good sign?

April 30, 2014 ~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

If the government is not trustworthy, I believe it is.

A recent poll of 18-29 year-olds found historically low levels of trust in the US government and its main institutions—the presidency, the military, Congress, the Supreme Court, and the federal government as a whole.

The poll and an article about it can be found here: Harvard Poll Shows Millennials Have ‘Historically Low’ Levels Of Trust In Government.

I suppose many readers will have more trust in the poll due to the word “Harvard” in the title. For me, even those days are gone. The following is a long article, but it is worth reading in full: The Myth of American Meritocracy: How corrupt are Ivy League admissions? The answer to that question is quite corrupt.

It is better to recognize a problem than to have it and not recognize it. So, I take low trust in government among young people to be a good sign in the midst of bad times. We do have bad government and you really cannot trust anything they say or do.

I am sure the problem results from a mix of the fracturing of society due to multicultural policies, the inevitable ossification of institutions, the inevitable growth of oligarchic practices in all large institutions, the almost inevitable takeover of the US economy by financial institutions, government captured by corporate and special interests, population growth, and so on.

I am not hopeful of anything positive happening soon, but with such large numbers of realists among the young, maybe.

The prevalence of mistakes about people and mice

April 29, 2014April 29, 2014 ~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

A statistical analysis on death-row prisoners indicates that roughly 4% were/are not guilty of their crimes or would be “exonerated” if there were more time to investigate their cases.

The study can be found here: Rate of false conviction of criminal defendants who are sentenced to death.

An article about the study can be found here: Death-penalty analysis reveals extent of wrongful convictions.

Besides contemplating the horror of being executed for a crime you did not commit, consider also how flawed we humans are about our judgements.

I do think that we can assume that in most cases, people engaged in the court system—prosecutors, judges, juries—are being as reasonable and fair as they know how. But even still, and even with all those people looking at the evidence, wrongful convictions happen with alarming frequency.

Here is another study that shows how prone to error we humans are: Lab mice fear men but not women, and that’s a big problem for science.

That headline may not sound like much, but it has been a huge mistake to do studies on mice without taking into account that they react very differently to male and female researchers.

Now that is many decades of expensive scientific research that has been compromised. My understanding of the problem is that the gender-difference issue is only one of many very serious problems with mice studies. Some of the others involve the lighting of the mouse environments, failing to account for their diurnal cycles, failure to account for how they are treated, what they can smell, and so on.

How much good research has been lost because it could not be replicated due to one or more of those mistakes?

So, if courts of law can err significantly in their most serious criminal cases and if bio-medical research can include numerous serious errors (many of which have been know about for many years), how can we possibly claim to know what other people are thinking or even what they really mean when they speak even very simple sentences?

The answer is in most cases we cannot be sure at all about what anyone really means in almost all cases. If you do FIML, you will be able to know with vastly greater accuracy what your FIML partner is saying, but if you don’t do FIML you cannot even be sure of the person(s) closest to you.

Yes, the world functions, sort of, and things get done, somewhat. But we function and get things done by basing our thoughts and behaviors on standard intuitions and stereotypes (of situations as well as people).

That makes for a very muddled psychology where inaccuracy contributes to suffering and semiotic “instincts” rule. When the Buddha spoke about everyone being deluded, I think he meant mainly something like this. We are sloppy, stupid, ignorant, emotional, foolish creatures and most of us are so far gone we cannot even recognize that.

So we condemn innocents to death and waste important resources doing shitty science when pretty much everyone in that business knows the results will stink as much as the mice cages.

Please, learn FIML and do it with your SO. You will remain a foolish human, but your evidence will be better and your cognition and emotions will be closer to whatever “truth” is.

Standoff in Nevada resolved nonviolently

April 13, 2014April 15, 2014 ~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

This short clip is a great lesson in semiotics. Readers can make of it what they want. So many American elements are there—land rights, grazing rights, gun rights, civil rights, individual freedom, heavy-handed federal agents, and peaceful resolution following courageous citizen action.

My understanding is the situation is far more complex than Bundy simply not paying grazing fees, but I am not an expert so please make up your own mind (after doing some research).

The discussion at 1:24 is priceless.

As a Buddhist, I am not at all ashamed to say I support full Second Amendment rights and, for me, this video shows an important reason why.

Second Amendment rights are “fundamental rights” that “…exist philosophically and legally at the individual level and are not dependent upon the existence of government.” (Source)

Notice that by having and exercising their fundamental rights to protest and carry weapons, the people in the video resolved a potentially dangerous conflict nonviolently.

__________________

Update (4/15/14): Below are a few more pieces of recent news on the Bundy ranch issue. I am not completely sure of the veracity of these videos, but am providing them for readers who are interested. As mentioned above, this issue is replete with American semiotics. It even has cows, horses, cowboys, and a quintessential American plot-line—big bad guys messing with little people’s land.

To be clear, I support the BLM managing public lands for long-term environmental and wild animal protection, and even support more of it, but that should never be a cover for political corruption and cronyism, which may very well be what is happening at Bundy’s. Politics and semiotics are complex, almost always.

Exclusive: Sources Inside The BLM and Las Vegas Metro Say Feds Are Planning A Raid On Bundy Home

Bundy Ranch – What You’re Not Being Told

Sen. Reid on Cattle Battle: “It’s not over”

My personality problem

April 5, 2014November 1, 2014 ~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

I may be guilty of rhetorical excess in my mini-battle against the term personality, but overall I believe I have a significant point worth discussing.

A good deal of my professional training is in translation. This makes me sensitive to how word-choice can be misleading.

In non-specialist situations, the word personality can be useful and doesn’t bother me at all.

Joe and Suzy have such different personalities, but they get along so well. My twins look alike but have very different personalities. Sammy’s personality hasn’t changed in thirty years.

These sorts of casual uses are often informative, economical, and well-suited to context. I might make similar statements myself.

The term personality bothers when it is reified, when it becomes a thing far more than it deserves. A basic example of this problem might be the term personality disorder.

Here is a link to a chart that shows how the definition of personality disorder has changed through the years in the USA: Personality disorder diagnoses in each edition of American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Manual. Notice how often it changes.

Personality disorder is defined as “enduring maladaptive patterns of behavior, cognition and inner experience, exhibited across many contexts and deviating markedly from those accepted by the individual’s culture.”

And yet there is nothing “enduring” about what the term defines or the professional culture of psychologists defining it.

And the definition itself is hugely slippery, especially when it comes to the notion of the “individual’s culture.” In the USA, does that mean “American culture,” one’s “subculture(s),” the “individual’s perception of their ‘culture’,” “others’ perceptions of the individual’s perceptions,” or what?

The term personality itself is actually very nicely defined in one place on Wikipedia as, “…personality theorists present their own definitions of the word based on their theoretical positions.”

In another Wikipedia article we find that personality “defined psychologically, is the set of enduring behavioral and mental traits that distinguish human beings.”

The term is vague in itself and based on “cultural” standards that are highly ambiguous and that change all the time. What can possibly be “enduring” about that except opaqueness?

In 1952, the DSM categorized homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disorder.” Today most in the USA think you are a bigot if you oppose gay marriage.

Not only are “authoritative” uses of the term personality and personality disorder ambiguous and protean, they are also profoundly misleading.

Unless an individual has a strong and realistic sense of how their mind works and how complex feelings and behaviors interact with mental processes, they will be susceptible to reifying their “personality,” to believing in it as if it were a real thing or their “role” in life.

Worse, they may cultivate this thing, this role, and turn it into a fetishized semiotic.

The famous Myers-Briggs personality test was originally created to “help women entering the workforce for the first time during WWII choose jobs they were most comfortable and
effective doing.” (Source)

There has been little progress or change in the field of personality testing since. They are most often used by employers to find ideal employees, most of whom (I would hope) are smart enough to figure out what the employer wants and answer accordingly.

Personality tests and metrics—as well as the simple cultural belief that an “enduring” personality exists in any of us—serve mainly to reify an impoverished way of understanding human life.

I can accept some traits as being more “enduring” than not within individuals, but even these will be highly dependent on context and what we mean by “culture.”

Shyness is generally prized in Japan and considered a mark of honesty, while in the USA it may be classified as a “personality disorder” and medicated. Strength means different things to nuns and generals. Ruthlessness was considered a fundamental virtue among Bolshevik “secret police,” who also praised terrorism. Terrorism is a crime in Russia today.

I am good with casual uses of the word personality, but often cringe when it is used as a serious analytical term. It is much better to see yourself as a complex matrix of cognition, perception, feeling, semiotics, language, and imperfect memory in a changing world than as a role-playing personality in a stable culture.

In an employment setting or a small subculture it can help to project a consistent “self,” but my advice is don’t take that too seriously. It will hinder more than help you.

If you are having mental or emotional problems, it is true that they may be roughly describable or classifiable in general terms, but I can all but guarantee you that you will only fix them when you see they are specific and very particular distortions or mistakes within the unique complexity of your own idiosyncratic life. Comparing yourself to generalities like personality will most likely only obscure the real problem and often make it worse.

Muddled intentions, specific intentions

March 30, 2014November 25, 2025 ~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

One important thing FIML practice has showed me is that people very often—more often than they realize—attribute specific, clear intentionality to the speech of others when that speech actually originated out of a muddled state and was not clear or specific at all to the speaker.

I think we do this because as speakers we have better knowledge of the rich ambiguity that is our mind, while as listeners we know, for the most part, only what the speaker has said, or rather what we think we heard them say.

In many other posts we have discussed hearing words incorrectly and the consequences that can follow from that. In this post, let’s confine ourselves to a listener’s attributing a more specific intentionality to the speaker than the speaker intended.

A crude example might be a drunk at a bar mumbling to himself. Another drunk walks by with his girl on his arm. Hearing the mumbling, he asks, “Did you say that to her?” In saying that, he is attributing intentionality where there was none.

Sometimes, the drunk at the bar will explain that he was just mumbling. And sometimes he will own the intentionality being attributed to him.

In that case, he might say, “Yes, I did. What are you going to do about it?”

Misconstrued intentionality surely leads to many fights.

But those of us who don’t get drunk in bars like that never do anything similar, right?

Not so. We do it all the time. We frequently hear the speech of others as having more specific intent than they meant.

Whenever we listen, we do so with the network of semiotics and language that subsumes our perceptions. Thus, whatever we hear will tend to confirm or be contextualized by that part of our subjective network that is most active at the time or that seems to apply best to what we are hearing.

Our use of that network for understanding the speech of others is hurried, quick, and often wrong. Our listening makes sense to us, but is almost never in full accord with what the speaker said, especially as so much speech initiates in vague or muddled states of mind. Speech is often groping while listening often is less so.

For example, if someone expresses a political view that we have recently been thinking about and that irritates us, our listening will very likely attribute a more specific or pointed intentionality to the speaker than is justified.

If we agree with what the speaker said under the circumstances described above, much the same thing will happen though our attribution of specific intentionality will be favorable rather than unfavorable.

These examples are the polite forms of the barroom brawl versus barroom camaraderie.

Notice also, the tendency we humans have to frame these sorts of errors as dichotomies. Either you are insulting my girl or we are all best friends.

Furthermore, notice that we also have a strong tendency to own the more specific intentionality being attributed to us by the listener. In the bar, you might decline the fight, but in another location you might lock horns with someone who attributed a specific intention to your muddled or idle expression of a vague political “view.”

Next time you think you heard a specific intent in the words of a friend, ask them if that was indeed their intent. Be careful when asking because if they are not experienced FIML practitioners, they may agree to own an intention they never had or that was far more muddled than it had seemed to you (or them in the moment of speaking).

My guess is a great deal of what we say is sloppier or more muddled than even we ourselves realize. This is simply how we are and how we really use language. You can’t make speech perfect.