April 28, 2015

April 28, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

I had a wonderful long sleep and I feel rested and relaxed. Yesterday, I helped planting beets at Baba’s vegetable farm and felt appreciated. I went to bed early. This added to sound sleep, which I don’t have often these days. In my dream, I was a young man and there was this beautiful nameless girl, who I liked me and let me kiss her. We laughed and had fun and when I woke up, I remembered I was once in love with that girl and got into an embarrassing situation because of it. 

She lived in a building where I sometimes hung out. Her mother had put an empty milk bottle outside the door and underneath it was some money to pay the milkman for a new bottle of milk. I knew I would get caught if I took that money, but I stole it anyway. The door opened as I ran down the stairs and her mother called my name. She demanded I give her back the money. There was no escape. She would have gone to my parent’s house if I wouldn’t have given it back. I walked back up the stairs and gave the money to her and caught a glimpse of her pretty daughter, who was laughing at me. While her mother was admonishing me and telling me she was going to talk with my parents, I felt ashamed, but her daughter was smiling at me. After the news had reached my parents and I had been punished by my father, I was made to go back there and apologize. The girl was again smiling at me from behind her mother.

I was reminded of this girl in this dream. I had never thought of her again  until last night. Although I knew that I liked that girl, I never asked her or contacted her and avoided going to that dreadful place of humiliation. When I had stolen the milk money, it never occurred to me it had something to do with that girl. I remember clearly I was going to get caught, but I felt I had to do it. In the dream, we were reunited and we tenderly embraced and kissed each other. It took me a long time to figure out something forbidden and shameful had joined with attraction. The girl saw and knew my emotion. After that my relationship with women was shaped by their ability to see, acknowledge and reinforce my feelings. 

In my dream, I asked the girl if I should brush my teeth before kissing her? She laughed and asked me why? I said, because I want to have a fresh breath when I kiss you. I had had some coffee and felt it made me smell bad. We didn’t have sex. We did what young people do before they have sex: we hugged and caressed each other and we looked into each other’s eyes. When I woke up this morning, I felt a sense of satisfaction and relief, as if something had come back which had been missing a long time. 

My sexuality is not, as it once was, something forbidden or to be ashamed off. To the contrary, it is light-hearted and innocent. The transition from being a boy to becoming a man was full of feelings of guilt and rejection. I often did exactly what I was not supposed to do and got caught red-handed. Often I acted in negative ways, because I felt it was expected from me to act that way. I confirmed all the beliefs about me. Luckily, I no longer feel trapped by these powerful expectations of others.  

What follows now is the last part of my response to the paper “What is Defined in Operational Definitions? The Case of Operant Psychology” by Emilio Ribes (2003). Smith (1992), who examined the influence of Beacon on Skinner, is quoted as ‘saying’ “human knowledge and human power meet in one.” He spoke of “the declaration of a different kind of knowing, in which the power of producing effects is not simply the by-product of knowledge, but rather the criterion of its soundness.” 

Those who experimented with Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) acknowledged that the continuation of the conversation in which there is no aversive stimulation is very different from the Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) we mostly engage in. When individuals feel supported to listen to themselves while they speak, they find themselves capable of thinking and speaking simultaneously and are able to recognize that they are what they think, that thinking is a behavior which creates their person- hood. Consciousness, which is an effect of one behavior on another behavior within one person, is expressed during SVB. 

In the section “The analysis of private events” Ribes reiterates Skinner’s insistence on the inclusion of private events in the experimental analysis of behavior. He writes “Assuming that private events could be discriminated like any other physical event, Skinner “spelled out the conditions required by a verbal community to identify (discriminate) them to teach a subject to discriminate private physical events in terms of a verbal self-report (tact).” However, there is a great difference between a verbal community which teaches us empathy versus one that tells us not to cry and to suck it up.

If our family or community is one in which toughness and insensitivity is praised, this is bound to give rise to more instances of NVB. Only to the extent that we receive love, care, bonding and sensitivity, will we be taught to tact that kind of behavior and have more instances of SVB. In other words, in environments in which NVB dominates, people are not as likely to identify what they feel, because they are only taught to tact how to be insensitive; for them tacting insensitivity means being sensitive.

“The core of argumentation of Skinner focused upon two issues, the truth value of observation based on public agreement and the ontological status of private events.” SVB and NVB relate to these two important issues, but public agreement about these two can only be obtained due to SVB. The distinction or rather the rift between radical behaviorism and methodological behaviorism was and could never be resolved, because of NVB. This distinction, which, as Malcolm (1971) has stated, is “questionable”, has weakened and continues to undermine the importance of the science of human behavior. 

“Analysis of private events passes through the analysis of how the verbal community identifies their occurrence and reinforces the individual for properly reporting his or her private events in the form of a discriminated verbal operant (the self-descriptive tact).” What happened to the behaviorist community is no different from what happens to any other verbal community. Those who are conditioned by and therefore more involved in NVB only have limited, at best, inaccurate descriptions of their private events. Unable to remediate the consequences of their inaccurate descriptions, they inevitably learn to avoid self-descriptive tacts altogether and are of course reinforced for that. 

Like Stevens and Skinner, I agree that we must study “private events scientifically” that is “the terms denoting them should be identified through public concrete operations.” Although SVB and NVB can only be identified when we have SVB, they are publicly observable phenomena, which co-occur iwith entirely different private events. Certainly, “private events are not causes of behavior”, but those who keep eliciting NVB will always tell you otherwise. It is important we recognize the enormous role of NVB in psychopathology. As long as we keep writing about ontological assertions versus epistemological assertions and have NVB instead of SVB, we keep beating around the bush.

It is only because we are conditioned by and used to NVB and because we don’t know how to create and maintain environments in which we will reliably increase our SVB, that we accept as a given that “the verification of the utterance “I am excited” is different for the person experiencing excitement and for the one observing that person.” I claim that this difference is absent in SVB and only occurs as a consequence of NVB. To the extent that our private events and concurrent private speech are not reciprocated by others, a wedge is driven between private speech and public speech. Another angle to look at this is that during SVB we are conscious about the same behavior. 

We may not be familiar with it, but this doesn’t mean we can’t talk from a third-person perspective in a first-person manner. To believe otherwise, is to assume that conscious communication is impossible. When speakers listen to themselves while they speak, they are conscious of their sound, which is produced and listened to in the here and now. In SVB a sense of well-being is shared and continued by all the communicators.