Gendlin’s position against the “unit model” or the “content paradigm”: retroactive time in terms of G. H. Mead’s theory of time

Gendlin’s idea that living processes cannot be predicted in advance leads to another important idea: that the past is reviewed “ex post facto” from the present perspective. However, we tend to fall prey to the illusion that elements that should have been discovered later existed unchanged beforehand. This illusion was represented by his terms “unit model” or “content paradigm.”

Non-Laplacian Sequence

As discussed in my previous blog post (Tanaka, 2024, March), Gendlin argued that the way living processes proceed cannot be predicted in advance, as with determinism in classical physics. In the early ’90s, he proposed the notion of a “non-Laplacian sequence.” This notion is Gendlin’s antithesis of Laplace’s “logical implying—a single determined sequence” and “one fixed possibility-system” (Gendlin, 1991, p. 95).

The more complex pattern emerging here is a non-Laplacian sequence: The whole series cannot be predicted from one step, because each step carries forward an implied change in implying. (Gendlin, 1991, p. 95)

Retroactive Time

Since the living processes cannot be predicted in advance, this notion leads to Gendlin’s idea that the past is reviewed “ex post facto” from the present perspective. Let us return to his physics paper in the early ’80s:

The model is one of process and takes its rise from a conception of knowledge as “explication,” rather than as a copy of reality. In explication, “retroactive time” is the rule rather than an anomaly. One always asserts now what earlier phenomena “were.” (Gendlin & Lemke, 1983, pp. 71-2)

Next, his scientific philosophy paper in the late ’90s advanced this discussion on “were” or “was” as follows:

The retroactive “was” is not the linear “was.” ... The retroactive “was” does not move back; it is a carrying forward. It can generate a new, more intricate scheme of time which includes linear and retroactive time .... (Gendlin, 1997, pp. 394-5; 2018, p. 264)

G. H. Mead's theory of time

These ideas lead to the notion that “we need our model to let us think about how our present living can change the past” (Gendlin, 1997/2018, p. 64) in “Chapter IV: The Body and Time” in his later “A Process Model” (APM). Also, these ideas, in terms of previous studies of Gendlin’s philosophy, can be seen in the discussion of George Herbert Mead: “The past is an overflow of the present. It is oriented from the present.” (Mead, 1929, p. 238 [SW, 348])

The pasts that we are involved in are both irrevocable and revocable. It is idle, at least for the purposes of experience, to have recourse to a “real” past within which we are making constant discoveries; for that past must be set over against a present within which the emergent appears, and the past, which must then be looked at from the standpoint of the emergent, becomes a different past. The emergent when it appears is always found to follow from the past, but before it appears it does not, by definition, follow from the past. It is idle to insist upon universal or eternal characters by which past events may be identified irrespective of any emergent .... (Mead, 1932, p. 2)

However, Mead said that in ordinary thought, events tend to be explained on the uncritical assumption that past events were originally there, forgetting that discoveries are a posteriori. In addition, Mead said that in such an explanation, the emergent character that should appear unpredictable disappears:

The difficulty that immediately presents itself is that the emergent has no sooner appeared than we set about rationalizing it, that is, we undertake to show that it, or at least the conditions that determine its appearance, can be found in the past that lay behind it. Thus the earlier pasts out of which it emerged as something which did not involve it are taken up into a more comprehensive past that does lead up to it. (Mead, 1932, pp. 14-5)

“Unit Model” or “Content Paradigm”

This habit of “rationalizing” our thinking is the premise of the conventional paradigm introduced as the “unit model” in Gendlin’s APM.

We ... need to recognize the way time is assumed in what I call the “unit model.” At time one (t1) some set of basic elements have to be already there, so that t2 is a mere rearrangement of them. In such a system of thought nothing can ever happen. When something happens, it is an embarrassment and an anomaly. (Gendlin, 1997/2018, p. 37)

However, these critical considerations predated Gendlin’s introduction of the term “unit model” and were discussed in his psychotherapeutic writings. He explained, “One explains an event at time 2, by going back to some time 1, earlier, and finding there the same pieces. Time 2 is “explained” as a certain rearrangement of the pieces from the earlier time.” (Gendlin, 1982, p. 29)

The critical perspective that rearranging the same pieces cannot explain change can be traced back to Gendlin’s earlier paper, “A Theory of Personality Change” (Gendlin, 1964). In the “content paradigm” section of the paper, he argued as follows:

We could state only that at t1 the test tube had certain contents A, B, while at t2 the contents were C, D. Only if A, B, C, D, are not themselves the ultimate explanatory concepts can we expect to explain changes from one to another. And so it is with personality change. If our ultimate explanatory constructs are "contents;" we cannot explain the change in the nature of just these contents. (Gendlin, 1964, pp. 104-5)

In light of Mead, as described above, it will be more conspicuous that Gendlin’s problematics are consistently shared from the criticism of the “content paradigm” to the criticism of the “unit model,” although the terminology was used differently.

References

Gendlin, E.T. (1964). A theory of personality change. In P. Worchel & D. Byrne (eds.), Personality change (pp. 100-48). John Wiley & Sons.

Gendlin, E.T. (1982). Experiential psychotherapy (draft). The Focusing Insititute.

Gendlin, E. T. (1991). Thinking beyond patterns: body, language and situations. In B. den Ouden, & M. Moen (Eds.), The Presence of Feeling in Thought (pp. 21–151). Peter Lang.

Gendlin, E.T. (1997). The responsive order: a new empiricism. Man and World, 30 (3), 383-411.

Gendlin, E.T. (1997/2018). A process model. Northwestern University Press.

Gendlin, E.T. (2018). Saying what we mean (edited by E.S. Casey & D.M. Schoeller). Northwestern University Press.

Gendlin, E.T. & J. Lemke (1983). A critique of relativity and localization. Mathematical Modelling, 4, 61-72.

Mead, G.H. (1929). The nature of the past. In J. Coss (ed.) Essays in honor of John Dewey (pp. 235-42). Henry Holt.

Mead, G.H. (1932). The philosophy of the present (edited by A.E. Murphy). Open Court.

Mead, G.H. (1964/1981). Selected writings [Abbreviated as SW] (edited by A.J. Reck). University of Chicago Press.

Tanaka, H. (2024, March). Dewey’s position towards the “spectator” and Gendlin’s position towards the “idealized observer”: based on their views of old and new physics.