Introducing Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Anthony Ryle

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      This is defined as the gap between what a child is able to do alone and what he or she could learn to do with the provision of appropriate help from a more competent other, who may be parent, teacher, or peer. The good teacher will aim to work in the ZPD, not assuming that current performance is a measure of capacity, by providing what Bruner (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) described as a “scaffolding” in the form of support and the provision and development of the appropriate conceptual tools which are then “handed over” to the pupil. Importantly, this also implies a “prospective” view of development (and of therapy). The aim is to explore where one can get to rather than interpret where one came from, as in some forms of psychoanalysis. This stance has some commonality with the “synthetic” and prospective therapeutic position stressed in analytical (Jungian) psychology (Samuels, 1985). It is clear that individual therapists should aim to work within the ZPD, but the same is true of the opportunities for learning through peers as provided in groups.

Developmental Studies of Role Acquisition

      The key importance of RRs in CAT theory was first fully presented in Ryle (1985). However, it was derived from early work with the dyad grid and from clinical experience and was discussed prior to the evolution of CAT as such (Ryle, 1975). This involved in particular a restatement of ideas put forward by Ogden (1983). From a quite different background (see also Boyes, Guidano, & Pool, 1997; Cox & Lightfoot, 1997), the basic importance of RRs in early development are described by Oliviera (1997, p. 116) in her summing‐up of a detailed and sensitive Vygotskian study of interactions between children in day care aged between 1 and 6. She writes: “From birth, the child is involved in social matrices in which meanings are constructed in each baby–caregiver dyad. Then, in the dynamic process of coordination of the roles that the partners assume in the here‐and‐now situation, a confrontation of needs, goals and senses is created. While playing roles … the individual has to follow, not necessarily in a conscious manner, a way of acting that involves complex abilities, dealing with postures, gestures and emerging representation… Children become able to master several role relationships … while interacting with others with their own and maybe opposite intentions. The as‐if atmosphere created in symbolic play and in other situations … allows them to examine and modify some rules and images mediating their interactions.”

      Oliviera's study traced the development of forms of collaboration from the 1‐year‐old's use of expressive gestures and reciprocal imitation through the creation by 2‐to‐4 year‐olds of “a collage of fragments of experiences” integrated by a range of signs or “starters,” including the use of language to take turns and reverse roles. Between 4 and 6 this “memory in action” is increasingly replaced by speech and by rule‐governed playing as the process of alternate imitation and reciprocation continues.

      Oliviera's paper serves as a reminder of the extent to which other children are involved in the acquisition of RRs, but it is important to recognize the particular power of parents who may impose rather than negotiate their RR patterns and who have the power to define the agenda. The parents' personal restrictions and distortions may create idiosyncratic and confusing patterns and they may be unable to supply mediating concepts with which to make sense of some aspects of reality. This last point can be underlined by paraphrasing Vygotsky as follows: “what the child does not do or say with the adult today she will not do or say on her own tomorrow.”

      Further evidence for the powerful way in which observed and experienced role enactments are internalized and re‐enacted by children comes from a fascinating projective test known as the “the teddy bears’ picnic” developed by Mueller (1996). In this test, young children are asked to describe what would happen next during a story about a picnic, using teddy bears and props such as a cart and picnic basket. The range of responses to imaginary situations, such as the cart getting a puncture, is remarkable. In the case of “daddy” teddy bear, for example, the child may describe a calm, reassuring, and problem‐solving response or, at the other extreme, an angry and abusive outburst directed toward “mummy.” These results correlate well with the quality of the family background and with a child's psychopathology, much of which might have been undetected by conventional clinical interviewing. Many other projective tests can be interpreted similarly in terms of RR enactments.

Bakhtinian Contributions

      Although Vygotsky and Bakhtin were contemporaries and worked in overlapping fields they did not collaborate and their perspectives were different in important ways. Leiman (1992, 1997, 2002) introduced the ideas of both into CAT thinking and has drawn on the latter to propose a “dialogic” model of the self (Leiman, 1997) that bears some similarities to those proposed by, for example, Hermans (see Hermans & Di Maggio, 2004) or from a clinical perspective by Seikkula (see Seikkula et al., 2006). Further contributions to the dialogic dimension of CAT have been made since then by a number of writers as noted above. A further, illuminating discussion of the implications of the differences between Vygotsky and Bakhtin is offered by Cheyne and Tarulli (1999) which, although at first reading is apparently rather esoteric, in our view merits consideration. They note that Vygotsky was primarily concerned with the ways in which the skills and knowledge of the culture were acquired by the child. A narrow interpretation of his theory of the social formation of mind would define the parent or teacher as an agent or interpreter of the wider culture, aiming to transmit what the culture values and knows to the receptive child. For Bakhtin, on the other hand, the emphasis is different; for him, open‐ended dialog is seen as the essential and most valued basis of human consciousness: “To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 293). Dialog is a fundamental human activity; every utterance will be directed to an addressee who may be “an immediate participant‐interlocuter in an everyday dialogue, a differentiated collective of specialists … a more or less differentiated public, ethnic group, contemporaries, likeminded people, opponents and enemies, a subordinate, someone who is lower, higher” (Bakhtin, 1986 p. 95).

      To this model of dialog, Bakhtin adds a highly significant idea, that of the third voice or “super‐addressee.” In the address of the first (e.g., parent, teacher, therapist) voice to the second (child, pupil, patient) voice there is this implicit third voice, representing the wider culture or some part of it. The third voice (super‐addressee) legitimizes the first one who is in effect its conduit to the second voice. What is transmitted might be the current paradigm of a branch of science, the membership rules of a club, the articles of faith in a religion, the definition of gender roles, and so on. The social formation of mind, in this view, can be seen as a distillation of the whole range of human history and culture, while being inevitably focused and filtered by the particular time, place, and family into which the child is born.

The discussion by Cheyne and Tarulli on the forms of dialog employed as scaffolding sets the comments made above on the effect of different styles of parenting in a wider context. Drawing on Bakhtin's ideas, they propose a spectrum of scaffolding styles from the authoritative “Magistral” dialog typical of religious training in the Middle Ages through the “Socratic” questioning dialog to the “Menippean” upturnings and carnival. The voice of Menippean dialog is described (Cheyne & Tarulli, 1999) as a mocking and cynical questioning after the Menippean satire which Bakhtin considered and associated closely with the notion of carnival. The “Magistral” voice provides a restrictive scaffolding which imposes compliance on the pupil or initiate. In the “Socratic” form of dialog, the scaffolding is less rigid; the first voice (parent, teacher, etc.) will question the second (child, pupil) but may in turn be questioned. Through this, the child, pupil, or patient not only receives a broader and more complex introduction to the conceptual tools of the culture but may actively enter СКАЧАТЬ