Origins
Marshall’s origins are those of the urban, Jewish working class. Born in Canton, Ohio in 1934, Marshall grew up in the worst years of the Great Depression. His father was an unskilled laborer and moved from place to place to found work. Marshall entered school ion Steubenville, Ohio in 1940 where he remained for his first three grades.
As the war economy began to pull the country out of depression, urban centers in the north offered the prospect of more lucrative employment, so the family moved to Detroit in 1943 in time for Marshall to witness the race riots which broke out in that year. Forty-five people were killed, and Marshall remembers this incident as one of the signal events of his childhood. From that point on, he consciously, almost obsessively, wondered why there is suffering in the world.
In Detroit around the summer of 1943 when I very quickly became aware of something that Jimmy Cliff summarizes in a song I love, “There is Suffering in This World.” All of a sudden, I learned about the enormous suffering going on in the world. I was about nine years old, at a very formative time in my life…..
Marshall also quickly learned that racial bigotry was only one of the ugly characteristics of life he was destined to experience.
All of a sudden, I’m in an inner-city school in Detroit. My memory of my first day in school in Detroit is as sharp as any memory. I had trouble finding the place, and got there late. I’m making a racket trying to lift up the top of the desk to put my books underneath, like we did in Ohio. But these were different desks. You slid your books in from the back. The teacher comes over and lets me know she was annoyed with me. Then comes the part that ‘s indelible in my mind. The teacher starts reading the roll. She calls my name—“Marshall Rosenberg?” I say “here,” and two kids looked around at me like their necks were on a swivel, and one said to me “are you a kike?”
This incident marked the beginning of years of coping with the anti-Semitism of others as well as his own. Marshall was taunted and ridiculed, threatened and physically attacked during his grammar school years. It was not until the family could afford to move out of the inner city that Marshall escaped the daily threat of violence.
During these years in which he longed for invisibility, his parents and relatives were at pains to enlighten him about how lucky he was. Elsewhere in the world, Jews were hunted and killed in pogroms. Here in America the future was bright. In a way, they were right. In America, you might be scorned, treated with contempt. You might be prevented from living with gentiles in the dormitories at Ivy League schools or joining their fraternities. But you could live.
But for a child who was sick with fear, who could feel the next fight building, the idea that his suffering was due to his being one of “the chosen” seemed like the mutterings of a bunch of crackpots.
I learned about suffering that day. I started to learn first-hand the painful lesson that I could be hated because of a characteristic of myself that I had no control over and not much knowledge of. My life was hell for the years we lived there. I used to wish that I could get to and from school without so much fear.
Looking back, Marshall recognizes that his own internalized anti-Semitism resulted from the strong anti-Semitism in American culture. Had his family been more economically secure—and religious—they might have belonged to a Synagogue and a community of Jews. As it was, Marshall grew up with almost no explicit knowledge of the history or traditions of Judaism or the Jewish people.
I had no feeling for our heritage or history … I had no sense of what it was to be a Jew until I got to Detroit, and then it meant to be persecuted … What I was also learning at the time, which is very valuable to the work I’m doing now, was to hate myself. I learned to be this despised minority person. I didn’t buy that I was a “chosen person.” I bought that I was an inferior creature, and that Jewishness brought to me a scar.
The intersection of social class factors and his ethnic identity could easily have spelled disaster. With no access to a coherent tradition, being a Jew for Marshal Rosenberg was to suffer being stigmatized and scapegoated. The task of managing a “spoiled identity” became his lot (Goffman, 1963). Goffman maintains that the primary objective for a stigmatized person is to disguise the particular aspect of identity which will set the processes of stigmatization and scapegoating in motion.
Because many Jewish names were distinctive and recognizable, large numbers of immigrant Jews changed their names to avoid anti-Semitism as we saw in the case of John Rossen. One of Marshall’s sharpest and most painful memories involves his name. He states that over the years of growing up, he suffered precisely because he might be exposed as a Jew.
For the next twenty years of my life, I would often lie about my name, particularly in dating situations. I would dread introductions in dating situations. I envied people with nice anglo names. I would almost always lie amongst certain of my peers about my ethnic background and my religion.
Marshall began to wish that he could disappear. He turned his internalized anti-Semitism on members of his own family. He remembers how much he hated to have his friends hear Yiddish spoken in his home and how embarrassed he was by the kisses and hugs of his mail relatives.
Marshall was living with a divided self. On the one hand, having absorbed the white-class, Christian ethos, Marshall realized that people like him were outsiders. On the other hand, he was dearly loved by his parents and members of his extended family. Fortunately he was able to remain somewhat emotionally open (although there were definite limits to how open he could be) and attached to his family. He was able to receive the only real regard and love available to him.
I was loved immensely by my family. I was the first grandchild, the first child. My family was very affectionate. I got heaps of love, and I think, had it not been for that, the effects of this self-hatred could have been much harder to deal with.
I was fortunate to be blessed to have this balance to my misery. I witnessed and was the recipient of the best in people, and that was in me, even during my violent times. I always knew that, as nasty as I was, it was really an act, and that something else was important to me, something different from what other boys would be into. I always knew that I was different from the other boys. I never fooled myself.
Becoming A Man
In significant ways, Marshall shared the interests of other boys his age. He suffered the agonies of boredom, and hated school. But at the core of himself, Marshall knew he was different from the boys he associated with. He loved sports with a passion. He also shared the inner-city subculture of street violence.
I felt then, and to a large degree now, that I was not only living in a war zone, but within a minority within it. I’ve always felt strongly the Christian-ness of this society…. Along about that time, I also learned that if I could be more vicious than anybody else, if people believed that I might hurt them worse than they had ever been hurt before, well, that was another way I could get people to leave me alone. I learned the growling, the looks, the walk. I learned that if a group of people were coming on to me not to appear scared at all, even though at that moment, my heart would be pounding, and I would just dread the fight—that in just a minute I’m going to be pounding the hell out of someone, and maybe he’s going to be hurting me. I learned that it was better if I just got real tough. So these were all the strategies that I was developing. I’m still trying to unlearn some of this.
While some men relish physical aggression, Marshall was not among them. He was forced to adapt to an environment characterized by class conflict, interracial and inter-ethnic hostility. He achieved this adaptation by developing an aggressive persona—a macho act. His story describes strategies for the management of stigma and the management of personal incongruence.
Ashamed of his background, embarrassed by his uncles’ affection, fearful of physical violence, Marshall learned to bury his genuine responses. His mother actively rewarded him for this suppressive strategy, and Marshall admired her as a tough and resourceful woman.
My mother gave me tremendous rewards over the years. I picked up a message real quick from her: “Marshall’s a real boy!” She took real pride in how many bones I broke, and in how many times I was in the hospital. I did, too. I was very proud of my war wounds. I was in the hospital a lot, although from violent sports that I was good at, probably more than fights. My father is just the opposite. My mother was the one who told me “you got to hit them first! You got to show them that you’re not going to take any more!” Everything for her was “They’re jealous! Don’t take anything from them! Hit them back!”.
Marshall’s mother reacted to the situation she and her family had landed in, and she probably recognized her and her husband’s limited ability to protect their children. To her mind—with the pogroms a recent memory received from her parents—survival required an aggressive stance. Although Marshall has since recognized the price he paid as a person for the “stone face” he perfected, at no point in his story, does he criticize either of his parents.
Clearly, he believes that they did the best they could. Later in his story re relates that his “meanness” was the only thing which got him through his first year in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in which they cut 24 out of 27 students.
The practice of hiding out, the adoption of an aggressive persona, and the suppression of emotion which Marshall describes represent his adaptation to the requirements of the male gender role in a working-class milieu. Physical competence in sports and fighting came pretty naturally to Marshall, but the suppression of his own response did not. He says that when he tried to bring out feelings at home, violent emotional responses were triggered.
He decided that it was best not to add to his parents’ pain and anxiety, and learned to swallow his feelings. He literally looked for hiding places. He found one under the porch, and when he was able to go away to camp, hid out ion the trees. Marshall mentions that, to this day, his feeling safe is associated with a low density of people and a high density of trees.
The Problem Of Suffering As A Beacon for Development
Marshall’s inner emotional response to his own and others’ humiliation and suffering was certainly one of rage, but it was mainly pain. His empathic capability is evident in his reactions to suffering. The crucial questions arose in him “why is there suffering in this world?” “Why do I suffer?”
When I said I became aware that there was suffering in the world, the experience wasn’t like feeling for other people, it was just feeling very terrible for myself that I had to live in a world like this. This was a theme for me for years. Growing up as a kid, I just couldn’t stand to see people torment other people. I’d want to scream and say, “My God, why? Don’t do that!” So it was more that kind of awareness of suffering—why do people do this—and particularly, why does it have to happen to me?
It is not just that Marshall asked “why do I suffer?” that is significant in terms of his moral development. Many of us spend our lives pondering our suffering and the injustice of it all. In the terms of S. S. Tomkins’s theory, the issue of suffering “recruited” Marshall’s ideas and feelings (ideo-affective density). This theme became a constant preoccupation.
From this time, a strong, innate desire got started in me—in a vague form to be sure—of wanting to figure out why people caused each other to suffer, and to have some control over it, something I could do in the face of it… that was a very important time of my life—an obsessive concern with people’s cruelty and what makes people cruel and feeling the pain of that myself.
This was not just an intellectual puzzle, although the way Marshall speaks of this issue is in terms of trying to get at the cause of suffering. He expresses perplexity and pain at cruelty. One way to interpret this preoccupation with the issue of cruelty relates to empathic capability. The life story contains a great deal of material to support the picture of Marshall as a highly empathic person, both in terms of the things he remembers and relates and the degree of emotion he expresses in telling the stories. His description of his reaction to seeing other people hurt or humiliated is “my God, why? Don’t do that!”
Marshall’s reaction resembles those of some of the rescuers studied by the Oliners. Asked why he had given Jews refuge, a rescuer answers
Human compassion. When someone comes and says “I escaped from the camp,” what is the alternative? One alternative is to push him out and close the door—the other is to pull him into the house and say “Sit down, relax, wash up. You will be as hungry as we are because we have only this bread” (Oliner & Oliner, 1988. P. 197).
The reaction is immediate, spontaneous, and results in immediate action. While responses like the one just cited arose in individuals whose orientation the Oliners have termed “principled” or “normocentric,” it was typical of the rescuers who were primarily moved by empathy. Empathic rescuers focused upon the internal emotional realities of the persons they rescued. The imaginative penetration of the inner world of the hunted and an appreciation of what they faced moved the empathic rescuer to act (Oliner & Oliner, 1988, pp. 188-199)
Marshall’s response to others who are hurt or victimized whether they are personal friends or strangers is indicative of an “extensive” orientation—a reaching out to others and a willingness to become involved regardless of where the involvement leads. This orientation appears to be isomorphic with the Maslovian quality of gemeinschaftsgufuhl which describes the experience of kinship with all life. It is a profound sense of affiliation, affection and sympathy for others (Maslow, 1950).*
* Eugene Victor Debs, one of Maslow’s candidates for a self-actualizer, illustrates this feeling attitude in a letter he wrote to his brother Theodore from prison. “It seems to me that my heart is the very heart and center of all the sadness and sorrow, all the pain and misery, and all the suffering and agony in the world. I don’t know why it is so. I only know that deep melancholy is so completely a part of me, and I have been so often under its chastening influence, that it has become sacred to me, and costly as it is, I should not wish it taken out of my life.” (Salvatore, 1982, p. 316)
Another quality Marshall displays which also appears on Maslow’s list, is that of problem-centeredness. The self-actualizer, according to Maslow, focuses less upon self and more upon tasks which will benefit others. It is not enough to simply perceive a problem. The problem-centered person exhibits the tenacity of the bulldog when it comes to deriving solutions to complex problems.
For years Marshall appeared to others as an aggressive, stubborn, stone-faced person. His life story lists numerous exploits, drinking bouts, violent encounters in bars, and a frightening assault upon a preppie student in his dorm in college. He was an angry young man. His anger was turned in upon himself and outward on others and the world. What accounts for the radical transformation he achieved? In addition to his empathic capability and the shaping influence of this dynamism, Marshall was able to surmount his own frustration and rage through his powerful intellect. In college he began to get inklings of the class and ethnic dimensions of his situation. He began to see the position of a person of his class and ethnic background somewhat apart from his personal experience.
The financial burden of going to the University of Michigan meant that Marshall had to work while he was a student.
I needed a job desperately. They were hard to get, but I got a job as a waiter— two meals a day for a sorority, and one meal a day as a cook’s helper in a fraternity. We were not allowed to talk to the young women in the sorority. They would tell us what food they wanted and so forth, but we’d lose these hard-to-get jobs if we were caught talking to them. I’m washing their dishes, and I can’t talk to them. They’re upstairs studying for a test we’re both going to be taking, while I’m preparing their food. What the University of Michigan meant to me was not getting into a fraternity because l was Jewish, not being able to talk to certain people because they’re wealthy, and having to wait on them, while they’re upstairs competing with me. I didn’t think of it in class terms then—I just walked around with a slow-burning rage, generalized to anybody that looked wealthy.
Known only to himself, and perhaps one or two really close friends, he was a man in a great deal of pain, suffering with righteous anger which had no outlet. His analysis of his situation was still far from systemic but he was allowing himself his own perceptions without discounting their veracity.
In addition to a kind of proto class consciousness, he had a beacon which guided his development. This beacon was his involvement with suffering as a problem. Marshall relates that he had an obsessive concern with people’s cruelty and what makes people cruel, and feeling the pain of that myself. It is not surprising to me that when I came to think about a career, I never really thought beyond something that would deal with healing.
According to Tomkins’s theory, the person who possesses a commitment script exhibits clarity about what is possible. This clarity leads to making possibilities into realities. The bad scene can be turned good. Also characteristic is the person’s ability to transform setbacks into a deepened commitment to one’s goals (Carlson, 1988, p. 111). Marshall’s life all the way through graduate school is replete with failure of empathy and understanding at home, emotional ambivalence, physical violence or the threat of it, discrimination and self- hatred. *
*There are numerous examples of this configuration in Marshall’s story. Marshall’s appreciation of the experience of his own internalized self-hatred and anti-Semitism illustrates his capacity to recruit pain and punishment to the service of his goal. He states that he could not have had a more important experience for his current work with groups and individuals. He surmounted the difficulties he experienced in graduate school, in his work with Psychological Associates in St. Louis and in his first marriage and created a more rewarding and congruent life.
From Marshall’s point of view, these were hardly things to be thankful for, but his case illustrates the saying whatever doesn’t kill out outright, only serves to make you stronger.
Exemplars of Compassion
Marshall’s empathic capability and his ability to absorb punishment were tested by the situation his family faced when he was growing up. His grandmother was dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease in the dining room. His grandfather was being cared for at home by his parents. As if this weren’t enough to contend with, Marshall’s mother’s retarded sister was brought back from an institution to live with the family.
Marshall understood how little time or attention his parents had left to give him, although he resented the fact that his family was not the idyllic Ozzie-and –Harriet variety. Still Marshall perceived the enormous compassion for others in the example of his parents, and particularly by his Uncle Julius. Tomkins’s notion of the bad scene turning good can be seen in what is salient for Marshall in the following passage.
My family was a model of compassion for me. It was a wonderful bitter sweet experience to feel so much pain out in the streets, and then to have such extraordinarily good stuff going on in my family. As horrible as it was to have my grandmother in her condition, everyday I say my Uncle Julius come into the house and nurse her and take care of her … I once said of him that all I had to do to get loved was to show up.
I was getting hatred from so many people, and when I would come into his presence, it would be like the Christ child had just walked in. And he would always say the same thing. He would beam and he’d say, “That’s my boy!” He was like that with everybody. He was a pharmacist at this time in his life and had a drugstore down on Woodward Avenue, which was in an all-black neighborhood. He was never robbed because he showed everybody who came into the store this strong compassion.
Rather than focusing on the pathos of his family situation, Marshall sees the powerful love being expended in service to the weak and ill and appreciates its redemptive power in his own life. Uncle Julius related to Marshall that the person who had been a model of compassion for him was the woman he cared for on the dining room table—Marshall’s grandmother, Anna Satovsky Weiner. He told Marshall some of the legendary acts of compassion she was responsible for, including caring for the man who said he was “Jesus the Lord.” Marshall’s attachment and admiration for his Uncle Julius was made clear in the interview in the depth of emotion he expressed when he related these stories. The devotion which Julius gave Marshall’s grandmother endeared him to Marshall in addition to the strength of his love for Marshall and, apparently, toward most everyone with whom he had contact. In his grandmother and Uncle Julius, Marshall had two powerful exemplars of compassion.
A Radical Intellectual Tradition
Although grammar school had been torturous, Marshall did enough work in high school to allow him to pursue a college degree. His older friend, Clayton Lafferty, was going to college to study psychology and informed Marshall about the field and about the whole process of going on to school. Neither parents had college degrees, and although they expected a brilliant future from Marshall, they were not able to help him much in making this future. Yet both Marshall and his brother excelled. His brother entered the University of Chicago at the age of 14. As children tend to perform according to expectation, undoubtedly Marshall’s parents’ high expectations exerted a strong influence on both their sons. About his story stresses the fact that Marshall possessed an independent, internal source of motivation which was his desire to come to grips with his own and others’ suffering.
Marshall’s interest in healing could have led in many directions, but circumstance led him to study psychology. He had considered forensic psychology, but the reputation of the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin convinced him to apply to the clinical program. As he mentions in the life story, his tenacity and meanness got him through an extremely stressful first year in which most of the entering students washed out of the program.
As a teenager Marshall had the makings of a potential dropout. But he also possessed an underground river of emotionality and intellectuality which surfaced in young adulthood. He chose a traditional life path—not medicine which his parents might have preferred—but still a profession.
Marshall loved the work with individuals, but disliked the quasi-medical, elitist value orientation of the theories and practices in clinical psychology. He sought out the professors, books and ideas which gave substance to his widening critique. This association with a radical social science tradition in graduate school brought him to a critical turning point. Marshall took the profoundly important lesson from sociologist Michael Hakeem that psychiatric diagnoses, without exception, are value judgments presented as scientific facts. The impact of Thomas Szasz in psychiatry, Al Elias, Erving Goffman, and Michael Hakeem in sociology, and Carl Rogers in psychology enabled Marshall to develop a powerful critique of the clinical field and to break away from the dominant paradigm of psychoanalytic treatment.
I loved practicing psychology. I just loved it. I got into psychology at just the right time. Psychology got its start right after the Second World War with testing and so forth. The state of Wisconsin didn’t have enough people in its system, and it paid me to be trained as a psychologist, and when I graduated, I owed them a year of service in a state institution. It had a wonderful training program. I worked all the way from half time to full time the entire time I was going to school. That helped me. It didn’t make school harder. I was so totally turned off with the academic part, that I don’t know that I could have sustained the effort if I hadn’t gotten a lot of good learning by actually beginning to practice psychology.
I always think the best way to learn something is to do it rather than just think or read about it. I learned to do it, because in each of the placements I went into, I just really dove into it, and I was very active and would not allow them to bind me in terms of what I could experiment with.
Marshall loved working with people. In this respect, he’d made a good decision because he had natural capabilities for empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard—the core conditions for promoting personality change.
Marshall’s innovative approach to therapy immediately sparked criticism which was then turned against him as a diagnosis of “problems with authority figures.” He experienced first-hand his dissent used as evidence of his psychopathology. But armed as he was with the understanding he had gained from Hakeem, it just made him fight harder.
Besides Hakeem, another influential rebel against psychoanalytic orthodoxy Marshall encountered at Wisconsin was Carl Rogers. Rogers had come to the University of Wisconsin from the University of Chicago in the late fifties. Marshall took part in Rogers’ research projects and interacted with him in classes. He recalls how powerfully affirming Rogers’ own pain and frustration were for him in reaction to the inhuman methods of training foisted upon the graduate students.
Other significant influences on Marshall’s later work were Bandura, Wolpe, and Ellis. These cognitive behavioral approaches appealed to Marshall’s preoccupation with getting solutions to the problem of suffering. Theories which provided descriptions of the roots of cruel behavior were useful to Marshall only in so far as they suggested some directions for change which would show up in more compassionate behavior.
Life as a Professional Psychologist
After his training was complete and he had given his year to the state of Wisconsin at Winnebago, he decided to pursue a professional practice with two partners in St. Louis, Missouri. His work involved individual, family and group therapy as well as consulting with corporations and schools. Marshall was one of the first, if not the first, psychologist to write about learning disabilities, an interest which grew out of his tendency to look for causality in systemic relations or in physical limitations as opposed to intrapsychic, unconscious conflicts.
It was during this time that he came to the realization—although this occurred very gradually over about ten years—that as open, congruent, and innovative as he could be outside the home in his work life, his marriage relationship was dishonest. He realized he had had an investment in a Father-knows-best marriage, and that it didn’t work for him. Having lived with a mother who never behaved like the wives and moms on TV, Marshall wanted that domestic, happy home. In contrast to his mother the high-stakes bowler and card shark, he married a woman who wanted a traditional marriage and family life. When Marshall started having his prison cell dream, he realized that as close as they had come to emulating TV marriage, it was not a life he could live any longer.
During this period his ideas continued to evolve in an unorthodox direction. In a field dominated by the individual treatment model based on psychoanalytic theory, he was doing group work, and marriage and family therapy before it was called “family therapy.” His basic assumption was that in oppressive situations, at least in some cases the status quo was maintained out of ignorance of alternative ways of being. As his therapeutic philosophy continued to develop, he found himself becoming increasingly critical of the ways he and his partners defined their practice. It was psychology for the affluent.
At one point, Marshall refused to allow parents to pay their children’s therapy fees. He would only accept payment if the child wanted to pay him! His thinking was that if he was providing a helpful service then the helpfulness should be apparent to the client—including the child. These innovations were immediately criticized by his partners as “the social work syndrome.” In their eyes, Marshall had a job to do which was to function as a traditional clinical psychologist and to make a substantial amount of money. They felt no particular responsibility to address the racism in their community, and began to object strongly to the projects in which Marshall began to involve himself.
As Marshall said in his life story, the period in which he began to break away from his partners was more painful in certain respects than the divorce, which he finally sought from his wife. He was leaving mainstream, middle-class society which, he had worked all his life to join. He had made it. Now, in essence, he was going to throw it all away. Strangely enough, it was easy.
Marshall is the only one of the participants in this study who achieved the degree of middle-class security and respectability which he enjoyed in St. Louis. None of the other participants reported rides in limousines, fancy hotel accommodations, gourmet meals, or expense accounts provided by rich clients. I am highlighting the economic heights to which Marshall had risen in order to underscore the significance of his willingness to leave middle-class status and economic security behind.
The following passage was not included in the life story, but I include this story because it captures the change in Marshall’s status and his attitude about the change. This incident occurred after Marshall had given up his therapy practice in St. Louis.
So I drive a cab. It gave me plenty of time to think over my plight. Obviously I’m not making enough money to survive so what do I want to do about it? One day while I was driving a cab, I had one of the weirdest experiences of my life. I picked up a woman. Do you recall a woman comedienne by the name of Billie Burk? She was a comedienne back in the 1920’s or 30’s, and I remember as a child that she was in just about every movie that required a comedienne. She was a busybody, a flitty, bird-like character. But she was very funny, and played many character roles.
Well, during this day that I was driving a cab, I pick up a woman who has this kind of quality. I pick her up at a very rich section of Clayton, Missouri, and she wanted to go shopping at Straubs, which is a store that only the affluent can afford to shop in for their groceries. So as I pulled up in front she said, “now wait for me,” and I said, “well, you know we keep the meter going.” And she said, “oh, turn it off. I’ll make it worth your while.” So I turn off the meter figuring that she will make it worth my while, and I’m leaning up against my cab, waiting for this rich lady to shop, thinking how my life has come to this. And I looked up, and I swear there was divine something going on at that moment. There right in front of me, right across the street from Straus in big block letters was “PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATES.” My ex-partners had finally done what they had always wanted to do—acquire their own building in the highest rent district of the whole St. Louis area. There it was—a whole building! And I see out in back that they have 3 or 4 vans that they obviously use to get big executives at the airport and whisk them to their training rooms and so forth.
So here I’m waiting for this rich lady, driving a cab. She comes out after 20 minutes or so. I get back in, but I don’t bother to turn on the meter again because she had said she was going to make it worth my while, and we go back to her house. She says, “now what was the fare?” And I told her, and then she said, “here’s what I promised.” In addition to the fare she gave me a quarter…. You’ve got to understand she’s just like a Billie Burk woman, I mean it was funny. It was Divine, something really going on that day, that this funny woman would come and give me a quarter for waiting 20 minutes and turning off the meter and cost me about $4 for the length of time that she was in there. So those were very emotional times when I was driving this cab (Rosenberg interview).
The remarkable thing about Marshall is his ability to enjoy experiences like this. From the core of himself, he knew that if he wanted to remain psychologically and spiritually alive, he had to make the change. So he took the steps. He drove cabs, started doing all kinds of things in order to do the work which began to emerge for him as his true work.
This is the period in which he met Al Chappelle, Paul Donohue, Mary Ann Gleason, and Vicki Legion. These people were involved in social change; they worked in the black community of St. Louis, the Catholic left, and the women’s movement. Marshall found that he had something to say about nonviolent communication. He also found that he had a lot to learn. To his credit, he eagerly moved toward people who criticized his racism and sexism. He gives them unceasing praise in the life story. In fact, it is typical of Marshall to use almost awestricken descriptions of people he meets and admires. The most recent of whom is Annie Muller, a spiritual leader on the West Coast who, with her husband, Martin, founded a spiritual community.
As Marshall moved more and more into community and civil rights work, he came to see and appreciate his own gift. My understanding of the gift is that it is an aspect of Marshall’s person—a way of being which is quite powerful and helpful for individuals who experience him. But to Marshall, it was not just a personality trait but a life conversion which was taking place.
It was a call. I was called by these people out in the streets, and it was a joyous call. That call has been the best thing in my life. To this moment, I’m not too sure where it will lead, and at times I doubt it whether it was ever there. But it doesn’t usually take long before something happens to bring me back to it. The thing that leads me to trust it, and to kind of relax about it, is that the people it attracts to me are great crap detectors. So I don’t have to worry about it. The biggest danger of having this gift is that I will misuse it. That would be a sacrilege I could not bear. With people around who help me enjoy it, and keep me from getting into destructive patterns, I don’t have to worry about ruining it with my neurotic and Jewish scrupulosity—have I deserved it? What do I have to do to earn this? What if I misuse it?
There’s a problem with this that I haven’t resolved by any means. It’s complex. It’s a sense that I don’t have anything to do with the gift. It’s easier for me to play a self-deprecating role in relationship to it, than to look at the responsibility of it, the joyous responsibility of its being mine, not something I’m merely passing along.
I worry that I’ll not exercise the gift fully out of some limitation in my development that keeps me from accepting the gift—a feeling that I’m not worthy of it or something. A big part of me is just totally astonished that I have this ability, and that I am in this position where these wonderful people do so much for me and support me.
In order to grasp more fully the issues Marshall is dealing with in terms of his gift, it is necessary to review the evolution of the model he has been working with for many years.
The Practice of Nonviolent Communication
Several accounts of the model have been published or privately produced and informally distributed. The first effort entitled “A Manual for ‘Responsible’ Thinking and Communicating” was published in 1974. This was followed by “From Now On” published in 1976 which is a revision of the previous manual. In 1983 New Society publishers produced “A Model for Nonviolent Communication.” Most recently in 1986 or 1987 (no date is given), the fantasy narrative “Duck Tales and Jackal Taming Hints” was published by the Center for Nonviolent Communication with the text by Cecily as told to Marshall Rosenberg with illustrations by Jerrold Carton.
The first three versions educate the reader to the distinction between observation and interpretation or evaluation. Statements such as “Doug procrastinates” or “Jim is ugly” are given as observations and have a factual quality. In fact, they are evaluative statements issuing from the speaker’s frame of reference which is obscured by the declarative form of the assertion. Take an assertion like “borderlines are very manipulative and often manifest primitive defenses like splitting.” Marshall excels in deconstructing communications like these.
The generalization being made implicitly suggests that all “borderlines” can be so described. The statement uses a psychiatric label to refer to an individual which reduces her to a diagnosis. The declarative statement as a whole, and the specific use of the adjective “manipulative” cloaks the negative evaluation in the rhetoric of the factual. The term “splitting” does not refer to a specific, observable phenomenon. It is an interpretation of diverse phenomena—an inferential construct which is not explicitly identified as such.
When people communicate in this manner, they preempt debate about how phenomena should be designated according to what criteria. The failure to discriminate between observable behavior and psychological constructs, as Szasz has pointed out for several decades, is not accidental in the field of psychiatry. The purpose for this practice is the creation of “illnesses” which can only be treated by psychiatrists. Marshall hooked up with this intellectual tradition in college and learned his lessons well from Michael Hakeem.
By calling attention to the routine habits of expression people employ, Marshall draws our attention to what we actually say to allow us to assess whether we are communicating what we wish to communicate. He is concerned to diminish the unwitting evaluative characteristics of much verbalization and to encourage the “owning” of messages which are deliberately evaluative. By teaching the differences between observation and evaluation Marshall is trying to enhance empathic, nonviolent interactions.
Marshall assumes (accurately in my opinion) that self-regard is something that most people wish to preserve. It may appear as a need to “save face”. It may involve a private reckoning of one’s code of personal honor with one’s performance. The point is that critical statements almost always injure an individual’s self-regard. Within the context of a loving relation or when such feedback has been requested, this rule may not apply. But in my experience, many people are criticized and evaluated so constantly that they become habituated to the injury to self they sustain and lose awareness of the toxic effects of this treatment. Growing up with derogatory labels applied to him, witnessing the violence of the conflict between his parents, Marshall experienced these effects. He suffered the consequences in terms of the damage to his self-esteem. He became less real and open as a defense against the assaults upon his evolving self.
In the earlier versions of the model, Marshall typically frames the task of nonviolent communication in terms of the communicator’s self-interest, although he is careful to ground the appeal in his own personal experience.
It’s been my experience that when I express how I feel about what I’m observing, others usually care about my feelings and are motivated to cooperate with me. Conversely if I diagnose or judge others they often become resistant and antagonistic (Rosenberg, 1983, p. 11)
This passage captures the pragmatic feel of a lot of Marshall’s writing. The model is presented mainly as a way to get what you want for reasons you won’t be sorry for—which is one of Marshall’s maxims. Rather than communicating non-judgmentally because it is ethically higher, Marshall encourages non-evaluative messages because they work better at getting a desired result. Extrapolating from his writing and the life story interviews, Marshall appears to think that if people are given the necessary skills to communicate nonviolently, they will mostly prefer the fruits of that process to the fear and escalating negativity which usually attend human conflict.
Marshall’s position on human nature appears profoundly optimistic. Marshall stands in a liberal tradition along with other humanistic psychologists like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, both of whom understand human nature to be socially constructive given adequate environmental conditions. Destructive behavior, within this tradition, is understood as a response to reality as perceived by the individual and as the best she or he could do under those circumstances as perceived. There is no end to the debate over human nature. The question—are human beings basically good or evil—is one which it would behoove us to quit asking. My point here (rather than join the debate) is to illuminate the implicit assumption in Marshall’s work. Skeptics may object that using observations instead of interpretation, expressing personal feelings and wants will never work in highly polarized situations of racial or religious conflict. Marshall might respond “how can you know unless you try it?” He is certainly correct that the interactions between the vast majority of the parties to conflicts—either interpersonally or internationally—tend to press their agenda in a medium of threats and hostility instead of that of personal vulnerability and disclosure.
Marshall’s teachings are framed very much in terms of his own personal experience instead of explicitly moral categories because he wants to avoid falling into contradiction by suggesting that there is a “right”, “good”, or “moral” way to communicate. The introduction of these words seems almost inevitably to lead to processes Marshall is trying to avoid—judgment of others’ ways of communicating or harsh judgment of oneself. One of Marshall’s main themes is that of self-appreciation and self-acceptance. He doesn’t want his model to turn into a set of rules or commandments. The lock-step mentality of rules is part of the problem. Marshall illustrates the problem in this vignette from Duck Tales and Jackal Taming Hints.
When I was four years old, I used to love feeding the ducks that visited the pond near our house. I was thrilled to be able to bring them pleasure and excitement. Somewhere along the way, however, I started to should myself and label the ducks. For example, I’d tell myself things like, ‘I should feed the ducks; they’ve come to expect it.’ And I’d get angry with the ducks, telling myself, ‘They are too dependent! They are developing a welfare mentality. Soon after I began telling myself these thoughts, I lost the joy I had been feeling while feeding the ducks. I even started to have Jackal-like thought of killing and eating them. What’s worse, I even started to label and should myself and others at home, at work, and everywhere else until I totally lost touch with how good it can feel to give to others. Ever since, I have been dreaming of regaining the joy I once felt feeding ducks. I’m sure if that joy returned I would also regain the joy I used to feel giving to people. (Rosenberg, circa 1986, p. 10)
Marshall clearly believes that self-acceptance is a prerequisite to compassionate treatment of others. When individuals communicate “responsibly,” without interpretation or critical judgments, and by making their wants and desires known, Marshall expects that greater satisfaction, harmony, and self-regard will be the outcome.
Early in life as he attempted to fathom the mystery of suffering, Marshall reports that a strong desire awaked in him to do everything in his power to alleviate it. Psychology, as we have seen, “…seemed to meet this need I had to deal with suffering…to learn why people are nasty to one another”. He sounds the same note later in his narrative recalling how angry and depressed he was during his college years largely due to the anti-Semitism at University of Michigan and the alienation common to many young adults.
I was very much alone and very depressed, and very unhappy. I thought that nobody was as morose and as depressed and as miserable as I was. I was drinking very heavily and doing crazy things. I’d find myself in places that I didn’t know how I got to. The only thing that sustained me through that was how deeply I wanted to learn stuff to help me deal with the suffering of people.
The significant point about this passage is that his response to his own suffering was to hold more tightly than ever to his life’s mission.
Although Marshall mentions human suffering many times in his narrative, his life work is not primarily focused upon problems of material deprivation—lack of food, health care, housing, and jobs. Marshall focuses upon what he sees as the core cause of suffering. In A Model for Nonviolent Communication, Marshall identifies the internalization of the values of an oppressive culture, as reflected in language, as the root cause of inequality and the unfair distribution of social and economic resources. His persistent concern is to go to the root of the violence in social and personal relationships. Prevailing ideology influences habits. These habits of thinking and communicating condition us to accept unequal power relationships as natural and given. He draws on Wendell Johnson’s description of the language problem.
Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem (Rosenberg, 1983, p. 4),
The humiliation or deliberate injury to someone’s self-respect and pride ignites Marshall’s outrage at the same time that it motivates him to ameliorate the violence attendant upon verbal attack. In his narrative, Marshall refers to his powerful negative reaction to cruelty.
I could stand getting hurt, but I couldn’t stand people laughing at me, or making fun of me. One of the worst moments I had was being surrounded by kids laughing at me, enjoying my suffering. I couldn’t let myself cry—that would have been a total loss—and whatever fear I might have had about fighting just evaporated, and my adrenaline took over. I probably could have avoided a fight but I initiated it out of the sheer pain of being tormented.
I didn’t realize how deep my response to humiliation was, and how much pain was still left because of it, until much later in my life, a gentleman in a group I was doing said something that for a split second I took as humiliating. I had him up against the wall, and was almost ready to hit him before I got control of myself. And as recently as the Memorial Day before last, I almost did serious injury to a gentleman I saw humiliating my friend Gilbert, a black man from San Francisco. All this gentleman did to set me off was to indicate sarcastically that Gil hadn’t properly used one of the skills I was teaching. I knew the kind of pain Gil had gone through as a black person, and I saw the pain in his eyes. Well, I say this for myself, I saw the signs coming on, and I took a deep breath and told myself that Gil doesn’t need help. Gil tried again, and this guy repeated himself. I just got up and said “I’m not going to take anymore of this shit” and I should have just kept going. Dottie Sandburg saw me starting to leave and she said, “Marshall, stay, don’t leave,” and I started throwing stuff around. If I hadn’t done that, I would have taken it out on the guy. I was just beside myself to see somebody ridiculed. (cries) It was the theme of people’s cruelty based on prejudice. The feelings are still there, left over from being a victim of that.
It would be hard to find a clearer example of a powerful affect-laden scene which continues to preoccupy Marshall as an adult. In terms of Tomkins’s theory of the development of a commitment script, the individual constructs the painful, “bad” scene drawn from early experience—a kind of event schema—and proceeds to construe new experiences not as a continual reply of this bad scene but rather in terms of anti-analogs and variants which allow a bad scene to be overcome or “repaired”. Marshall’s model of nonviolent communication, viewed from this vantage point, is a creative system of ideas and practices which is aimed at eliminating the injury of humiliation by others through the acceptance of personal vulnerability and a willingness to live that vulnerability with honest y and transparency. ***
*** Tomkins’s theory holds that commitment scripts are constellated when a “rewarding socialization of affect (occurs) in childhood,” and if the child has “…models who exemplify commitment to ‘improving’ some less than ideal conditions” (Carlson, 1988, pp. 110-111). Illustrative of this theoretical proposition is the statement: “I got the message from very early on that I was brilliant, and that great things would come to me. There was not much doubt in anybody’s mind that I would be the greatest thing that ever came along. It really was my family’s attitude toward me. My family gave me a tremendous amount of that kind of feeling” The reader may also recall Marshall’s accounts of his Uncle Julius as his model for compassion who held Anna Satovsky Weiner—Marshall’s maternal grandmother—as his model of compassion. Both of Tomkins’ criteria appear to have been satisfied abundantly in Marshall’s early life in his family.
His continual rumination about the reasons for human violence and hatred produced a model which was simple to understand, simple to teach and quite hard to implement in daily life. Yet with practice the person who uses the model will see dramatic changes in his or her personal interactions which compensate for the effort expended in changing habitual methods of communicating. The emphasis is placed upon harmonious, peaceful and mutually enhancing relationships. But as problem-centered and practical as Marshall is, he wanted to be absolutely sure that the model could be conveyed to empower those most needful of the benefits the model bestows.
Until recently Marshall and others working to share what they had learned have avoided the terminology of either religion or sensitivity training. It seems apparent that they are striving—to use Renny Golden’s words—“to make love efficacious” with the understanding that nonviolent communication makes love possible.
Marshall emphasized the importance of successfully reaching those with the least personal awareness and the most oppressor consciousness.
So what Marshall Rosenberg has done, given his thuggish mentality, is to try to figure out how you could teach a thug to connect with this wondrous energy.
You have to be very concrete with a thug. You can’t use words like spirituality. You have to say, ‘Thug, identify observable behavior. Identify feeling. Identify reason for feeling. Identify wants. Put that out. Make sure other person connects with it. And thug, you’ll know a miracle start to happen after a bit. You’ll notice a transformation, even though you’re too thugish to understand that whole thing. You’ll see as you do it, that some wonderful things will start to happen.’ You see the thug has come up with some ways to teach himself how to make these wondrous connections. And lo and behold, if a thug can do it, anybody in the world can.
Marshall’s reference to “this wondrous energy” is indicative of a significant change in how he thinks about the process of nonviolent communication and in how he imparts it. He maintains that he has always recognized that the model is not just technique. More fundamentally, it is a moral philosophy which grows out of a spiritual experience of universal, compassionate energy.
I’ve always known that the model is my attempt to live my religion. I have always known it had the spiritual base, but I’ve never used the word “spiritual” probably until about a year ago. I would have said that it really is my religion. But I never said that out loud to very many people because when a lot of people hear the word “religion,” they want to do a Joan Rivers routine. And the only word that I know that is equally bad in its negative impact on people is spirituality. So it is not an improvement. It’s just a change. But it is a very important level to me. I wouldn’t be fooling with the model just to teach the communication skills. That might be nice, but it is only because I have experienced the communication skills help me connect with a wonderful power—something big, something more vast than just communication itself. I have always felt that and known that.
Marshall’s most recent effort, “Duck Tales and Jackal Taming Hints”, drops the explicit concepts contained in his earlier work. Perhaps he feels he can afford a more poetic and magical version of the model because he has already explicated the conceptual base and the forms of its implementation. At this point in the evolution of the model, Marshall is very direct about the larger context in which the ideas and practices are situated. When I queried Marshall about the “skills”, he replied this way.
Let me try to give a quick answer to your question, which is the best answer I’ve come up with. The first time I skied was on a hill with a rope tow. It was one of the most miserable days of my life. I’d grab on too quickly and fall. People behind me would whine and complain, and I’d get mortified. By the end of the day, I finally got the hang of it, but my muscles were so sore, I dreaded doing it again. Somebody told me about this simple little metal thing you attach to the rope. It cost about a dollar. The skills are like that little metal thing. Not knowing the thing existed, I suffered. Once I discovered it, going up the hill was a breeze. Just as the clamp uses the power of the rope to tow you to the top of a hill, which opens up all kinds of possibilities, the skills are a way of tapping into this wonderful, warm, great source of power. When I tap into it, miracles happen with people—that’s not too strong a word. So what are the skills? They are this little device, simple device.
That’s it. I have no better way of describing it than that. My agnosticism dissipates when I experience that, especially the inevitability of it. There’s something so awesomely beautiful in that it makes doubts flee away. I know God through that. The power is always there, and it can be tuned into at any time.
Another metaphor Marshall uses in describing the nature and purpose of the model is that of a dance.
The model was designed to keep us in a dance with other people. A dance in which the whole purpose is to let what happens between us, happen according to a rhythm of compassion. Where the only energies that are going on between us are ones in which we nurture one another and are nurtured by each other, and that if we catch ourselves getting out of that dance, the model is our way of helping us get back in. To engage in that dance with people is what the model is all about.
I am wanting people to get away from thinking of the model as communication skills, because there are ways that the model can be of great value to us in being in that dance that do not involve saying anything.
There’s a dance which possibly goes on in the universe between people, and it can never be done with just one person. It takes energy to be there. And it takes people to know how to connect with it. (812)
In addition to his growing openness concerning the mystical dimension of the model, Marshall describes another recent change in how he understands and communicates what the model is about. Moving away from terms like “conflict resolution” and “getting power”, Marshall talks about affirmation, beauty, celebration, nurturance, and compassion which, for him, are woman-identified qualities and values. He says that the model is undergoing a process of “feminization”. Recalling Carol Gilligan’s work on women’s moral development, he may be drawing on a significant difference between genders in terms of moral decision-making.
While emotional openness has always been explicitly valued as an indispensable part of the model, the even riskier stance now being advocated involves actively nurturing and caring for others. This development in Marshall’s thinking and practice describes more nearly the ideal of the bodhisattva and the life of compassion from Buddhist tradition. From the context of Judaic tradition, it is reminiscent of tzedaka; from that of Christianity, a life of mercy and charity. In Marshall’s case, the life of service and care was part of a family tradition. The examples in the life story include “Jesus the Lord,” the tailor who was fired, and the many others cared for by Marshall’s grandmother, mother, and uncle.
His mentors and critics in the areas of sexism and racism, Al Chappelle and Vicki Legion long ago recognized the emancipatory potential of the model due to its positive impact on self-esteem. Beyond the realm of personal growth, however, it offered a powerful method of dealing with the often bitter conflict which afflicted groups trying to create social change. Without sacrificing his goals of social change at the grass roots level—the empowerment of individuals and groups—Marshall now places his practice more within the context of a spiritual and feminist consciousness. The emphasis changes from “doing” to “being”. How you put things is important; so is the attitude and intention behind what is being put.
How well he has succeeded in his own personal transformation from street thug to bodhisattva only Marshall can judge. But it appears that this is his aim. The model, and the life work which it expresses, can be seen also as a brilliant piece of autopsychotherapy. As a vision, a practice, a discipline, the model rivals other religious systems for increasing awareness and compassionate behavior.
As the change from a technique to a way of being takes place, so must the medium (Marshall) become the message. Marshall has grappled for many years with his own charisma. He recognized the power of his impact on others early in his career at a conference with psychologists and psychiatrists in Peoria. From this experience and others like it—the loaves and fishes incident—Marshall construed what was happening as a “joyous call”. By relating to his charisma as a “gift”, he is not a repository of characteristics but has a relationship with the source of the gift.
It’s one of the hardest things for me to even think or talk about. I would hate to use a language that makes me sound like a religious zealot. I’m too sickened by the Jimmy Swaggarts of our day to want to sound like that for one second. I don’t have a vocabulary for describing the profound nature of this spiritual awakening and powerful religious experience of feeling chosen as a conveyor of something very important.
Rather than recognizing his gift as an integrated aspect of his self-concept, it appears rather that Marshall was surprised and shocked at his effect on people.
I started to see that the power that I managed to tune into is, I think, the power that Christ and Buber talked about. I was spending a tremendous amount of time reading anything I could to find things that could be valuable to people, and enable me to get it across to them in a short period of time. I started to realize that I was on to something, and that I had a real gift for tuning into some very important stuff, and making it available to people.
It evolved, but there was a concentrated period when it was starting to hit me and really affect me psychologically, and the moment when it seemed to reach its peak, one of the strangest moments of my career and life, was in a weekend group that I was conducting. It was like a peak experience of my being conscious of having a gift to pass on to other people and the power of what it was doing to them in this group. We were all aware that we were going through something very powerful, and nobody wanted to move and yet we were all hungry. We were sitting there in this weird, blissed-out state, as they would say in Southern California, when Vivian, my wife, came to the door. She was worried that I hadn’t come home for lunch, and she brought some food. The lunch was what we needed. It was just a little, but we all felt very filled. And then one of the people in the group, a priest, brought it to my attention that we had been brought sardines and bagels-—the fishes and the loaves to feed that multitude. All of a sudden, I became aware that I had been chosen to receive some gift of an awesome nature.
Marshall is acutely aware of the dangers accompanying the perception of oneself as gifted, charismatic, and powerful. He takes comfort in the friends and colleagues who surround him and who, as he puts it, excel at crap detection. He relies on others to keep him balanced and clear about his strengths and limitations. He also scrutinizes himself. Reflective of his commitment to sharing power and to striving for equality in relationships, Marshall invites others to share their honest reactions and feelings about him and what he does. Marshall struggles with this problem, calling it variously his “Jewish scrupulosity” or “neuroticism”, depending on whether he’s in touch with his ethnic background or his training in clinical psychology. He also is aware that excessive preoccupation with one’s power and influence can become a defensive operation to protect one from genuine self-confrontation and accountability.
Unlike the other three subjects in this study, Marshall’s power is the kind of personal power which emerges in direct encounter with others who are personally vulnerable. While his effort is to help individuals tap their own resources and the wondrous energies of compassion, people can easily idealize Marshall. With his laid-back, urban cowboy style of dressing, his unfunky guitar and songs, he is charming. But when he gets into the profundity of the model, he is powerfully magnetic. As his influence increases with the size of his following, the challenge of remembering who he is—warts and wings alike—will increase.
Mystics and Militants
In the concluding section of Marshall’s life story, he discusses the tension he encounters within the various sectors of the progressive movement at this time. One tendency is represented in the New Age wing of the movement. At the other extreme are the activists who focus exclusively on civil disobedience, the liberation of American political prisoners, and even the effort to prepare for armed struggle. There is, of course, a large group of moderate, single-issue progressives in the United States who hold down the middle of this political and spiritual continuum. Many members in each of the camps appreciate the complexity of achieving inner peace, building peaceful relationships among one’s friends and movement allies, as well as the enormous challenge of changing unjust relations within a global context.
Marshall’s contribution consists in his understanding of the indispensability of militance and spirituality and of his creation of an approach which humanizes the way people struggle for justice. Marshall has learned much from the great apostles of nonviolence, Gandhi and King. The philosophy of nonviolence is not his creation, yet he gives us something new in his model by breaking out the specific elements of communication and showing alternative forms of expression which more nearly mirror nonviolent relations.
His experience is characterized as much by the supraliminal and transcendent as by the practical and political. His aspiration to heal suffering has been realized in the development of a powerful “presence” which people experience as profoundly empowering and enlivening.
In terms of tradition, perhaps the most significant in his story is the family tradition—as symbol and vessel of love and nurturance and as the source of individual exemplars of compassion. Whether or not an explicit religious tradition influenced his grandmother, uncle, and parents is not clear.
Second in importance was his opportunity to appropriate certain strands of the radical tradition in social science. This gave him a needed conceptual framework and the beginnings of a systemic analysis of power relations within the society as a whole.
Finally, the movement of the 1960s also had a great impact by virtue of its zeitgeist and through individual activists like Al Chappelle, Vicki Legion, Mary Ann Gleason, Paul Donohue and many others. Marshall met up with these people at a critical point when he was turning away from an upper middle-class, professional life toward the life of commitment and service. The historical period of the 1960s was particularly conducive to making the change. With gratitude, Marshall heeded that joyous call.
CONCLUSION
In the previous chapters, I wanted to present the participants’ life stories in sufficient detail to enable the reader to appreciate the uniqueness of each person, and of each life story. I think the contribution represented by this thesis consists largely in the complexity and wealth of particulars which distinguish the participants from each other and from members of a larger population whose lives are primarily characterized by commitment. My intentions have been more description than analysis. I tried to avoid holding my subjects up against the many theoretical templates in the areas of personality theory and human development, although I am aware of many points of coincidence between my participants and the theories. Straying from the strongly idiographic character of the life stories and discussions into the nomothetic real, I want to make a few tentative generalizations in my concluding remarks.
Although a systematic analysis required to assess the levels of development of my subjects was not done here, I speculate that all of the participants in this study are functioning at Level III of Dabrowski’s and Piechowski’s theory of emotional development and possibly at Level IV which is the level of Maslow’s self-actualizers. I see Heather Booth in terms of Adam Curle’s typology primarily as a militant with high awareness identity. John Rossen is harder to evaluate in terms of this theory. Marshall Rosenberg and Renny Golden appear to conform to Curle’s description of “Configuration 4”. Curle’s description is given here.
They will be very much in command of themselves. They will not seek popularity or be dependent on the good opinion of others… Their actions and speech will be governed by their values. These values will be objective, unselfish, and altruistic, of the sort Maslow (1965) calls B-values. Such people will have a clear perception of human and social problems. While deeply committed to the service of humanity, they will be in a sense detached….The overriding impression, perhaps, will be that they are whole and autonomous beings…two other attributes: a non-violent approach to the elimination of social wrongs and injustices…and deeply held moral beliefs, amounting at times to spiritual or even, in a more formal sense, religious convictions (Curle, 1972, p. 85).
Curle’s configuration 4 individual avoids the extremes of both militancy and mysticism, somehow combining positive aspects of each way of being.
From the vantage point of Dabrowski’s theory of multilevel development, Maslow’s theory of self-actualizing persons, or Curle’s typology, and perhaps Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, the four individuals in this study might look exceptional if they were systematically assessed. I suspect they would.
But in terms of what their lives have to tell us about commitment, a slightly different view emerges. Rather than seeing committed lives as extraordinary or as evidence of superhuman qualities and powers, perhaps what we see here are particularly clear examples of realized lives. On this view, the norm is that of a committed life and outside the norm, a life of alienation and stagnation. Perhaps commitment is the end product of free emotional, intellectual, and moral development. The content of the commitment may be defined and limited by the individual’s gifts, interests and circumstances, but a committed life is a “normal” life. This viewpoint is most profoundly elaborated in the work of Kurt Goldstein, a German neurologist whose work with brain-injured persons led him to conclude that only under conditions of illness and disease do we see the organism primarily devoted to self-preservation. Under normal conditions, healthy organisms actively seek more and greater opportunities for self-actualization (Goldstein, 1963, p. 196).
Moral exemplars are undoubtedly extraordinary individuals measured against any number of standards. My point is that modest lives may be equally as “committed”, although they do not achieve historic renown. The commitment to a developmentally disabled child, commitment to the cultural life of a small town, the commitment of a disabled person to self-care or rehabilitation are unsung achievements but are still important to the collective well-being in a society.
My effort in the study then was less oriented to highlighting the exemplary natures of my participants and more oriented toward seeing their lives as they understood them. I tried to apprehend the historical and present social contexts in which their lives were being lived. I accepted pretty much at face value that my participants were moral exemplars according to the criteria set out by Damon and Colby (1985).
All were articulate and vocal about the moral ideas and principles which provided vision for their work. Whether secular or religious, they attempted to live these ideals in their daily lives. They are leaders and visionaries. They had all placed themselves in life-threatening situations. In different but related ways, they are dedicated to the interests of persons who stand outside the white, middle-class. Some might object that they are all radicals of the left, and that that doesn’t count as “moral”, but merely as “political”.
Of course, political and moral life are not the same; but in some cases, in some persons, Eugene Victor Debs, Eleanor Roosevelt, Gandhi, King—they overlap so that politics becomes the arena for the expression of a moral vision.
With the assumption that my participants’ lives were committed lives, referenced by their concrete achievements (see appendix B) and that they were, roughly speaking, in the moral exemplar, self-actualizer category, I tried to get to know them in the interviews, and later in writing and reflecting upon what they had said. Evaluating their descriptions of the evolution of their concerns, I found that the S.S.Tomkins’s theory of commitment scripts tallied with the subjects’ descriptions in several ways. With the exception of John Rossen, the other three subjects report instances of intense empathic identification with the suffering of others or injustice toward others. All four participants received exceptional love and care from parents or members of the extended family.
Tomkins mentions that both an endowment of physical energy and extroverted personality typified the committed abolitionists he studied. Here again all four of my subjects demonstrate psychomotor over-excitability. Heather refers to her ability to function for long periods of time in a state of fatigue without collapsing or getting ill. Marshall loves many sports and physical activities. Renny mentions her hyperkinetic childhood and her athletic ability. John Rossen was a wrestler and a soldier. Tomkins considered these physical and personality characteristics important for direct action or confrontation which public and moral commitments sometimes require.
Two other factors Tomkins identifies are “exposure to exemplary individuals” and “parental modeling of concern with public service”. This is a theme which emerged in each of the participants’ stories. Heather’s parents stressed the importance of being a “solid citizen”, and caring about what happened in the world. Renny’s family and her mother in particular, modeled service and charity to others. John’s relationship with his grandmother and Marshall’s with his Uncle Julius are given strong emphasis in both their life stories as extremely significant figures in their emotional development.
These exemplars of compassion in the lives of my participants emerged, in the course of my research, as a distinctive finding which accords with Tomkins’s work and with that of the Oliners’ study of rescuers in the holocaust. It is not really a surprising convergence of evidence. Mantells’s study of the childhood influences and disciplinary practices of young men who became Green Berets and those who resisted the Vietnam War found distinctive differences between the two groups. The parents of Green Berets were more authoritarian, more physically abusive with their children, and less expressive of positive feeling (Mantell, 1974). Rescuers during the holocaust reported child rearing experiences typified by tolerance, verbal explanation instead of physical reprimand, and modeling of an ethic of universality toward people regardless of religion or race, or nationality. Keniston’s and Flack’s research on the backgrounds of young radicals found much the same tradition of affection and tolerance.
Abelson’s observations that deep convictions seem to crystallize in highly emotional moments accords with Tomkins’s theory of script formation which is dependent upon key scenes “recruiting” the feelings and ideas of the person. All of my participants reported memories of intensely charged experiences which were life-changing or life-deepening. The significance of emotion was stressed also in Mergendoller’s study of war resisters. Moral reasoning seemed to run parallel to emotional factors rather than function independently as the origin of action. Rorty makes the point this way:
…The only thing which can let a human being combine altruism and joy, the only thing that makes either heroic action or splendid speech possible, is some very specific chain of associations with some highly idiosyncratic memories (Rorty, 1989, p. 153).
The arenas in which commitment appears are probably dependent upon the person’s propensities and talents in combination with circumstances which foster active engagement. When those circumstances are difficult and challenging, commitment appears to deepen, as Kiesler’s experimental work predicts.
The participants in this study absorbed a great deal of punishment—punishment which tended to intensify as their resistance became more deliberate. Renny’s treatment in the convent, Marshall’s experience of anti-Semitism in school and in graduate school, John’s experience as a Communist organizer, Heather’s as a volunteer in Mississippi are instances of their willingness to stand up for others or for a principle in situations which are life threatening. What is interesting about this is their consistent reports that “this is what had to be done”. Acts of courage appear natural and necessary to committed individuals.
Also interesting is their ability to laugh at failure. Heather observes that as the movements of the 1960s were falling apart, she founded the Midwest Academy. Renny left formal religious life in order to find a genuinely redemptive faith. Kurt Golstein observed years ago:
The creative person who ventures into many situations which expose him to shocks will find himself even more often in anxiety situations than the average person…The capacity of bearing anxiety is the manifestation of genuine courage, where ultimately one is not concerned with the things of the world but with the threatening of existence. Courage, in its final analysis, is nothing but an affirmative answer to the shock of existence, which must be borne for the actualization of one’s own nature. This form of overcoming anxiety requires the ability to view a single experience within a larger context. That is, to assume the ‘attitude towards the possible’, to have freedom of decision regarding different alternatives (Goldstein, 1963, p. 306)
As Kiesler pointed out, it is easier to explain why individuals fail to act consistently with their beliefs than it is to explain why they succeed in doing so. Goldstein suggests that the actualization of one’s nature gives us the answer. Blasi, in somewhat different terms, agrees that “responsibility” and “integrity” link personal identity with action. The persons in this study seem to be able to endure the committing effects of their actions which bind them to more commitment in the future. The odd thing is that they don’t appear to chafe against these bindings—rather they find meaning and freedom in a committed life.
In addition to the personal qualities, physical energy, and emotional development which play important roles in developing life commitment, both received traditions—secular, religious, familial and communal and historical events create a vocabulary of identity and occasions for its expression.
All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and retrospectively, the story of our lives. I shall call these words a person’s ‘final vocabulary’ (Rorty, 1989, p 73)
Traditions—religious, political, civic, and intellectual—give us words which carry the echoes of the final vocabularies of our forbears. In the committed lives presented here, I think it is possible to identify the words which carry meaning for the participants in this study, and which will constitute the torch these individuals will pass to future generations. The word “story” is an important one. Stories tell us who we are and who we wish we might become. Renny Golden, Heather Booth, Marshall Rosenberg, John Rossen: their stories of commitment are versions of the story of the narrow gate. They tell us that it is a gate which leads to life.