Look For What You Do Not See and Listen For What You Do Not Hear

The Role of the Essential Elements of Natural Systems
in Making a Paradigm Shift in Psychotherapy and Social Reform

By Edwin L. Young, PhD
February 6,2007

One of the essential elements of Natural Systems is how one looks at things, at the world. You see what is before you. Now look at what you do not see. You hear sound. You hear what people are saying. You listen to what you hear. Now listen to what you do not hear.

Teachers teaching art teach you to look, not at the object you are going to paint, but at its background. The ground takes primacy over the figure. A figure-ground reversal is necessary.

If you take a person’s life history, focus on what was not in the life history. In the former, you may get a sense of what explains their current problem or behavior. In the latter, you can construct what was not there but, if it had been there, could have resulted in a different life history and outcome. The next question is, how can you provide what was missing in such a way that the problem behavior is replaced with constructive, mature, non-problematic behavior?

One does not see TIME. One does not see HISTORY. Time, past and future temporality, is the ground. The immediate, the present, is the figure. One must learn to recall and project so as to set the immediate ‘figure’ over against the ground of temporality.

One does not see SPACE. If one uses the imagination and sets the immediate scene, for example a neighborhood or even a country that is impoverished over against those that are affluent, or vice versa, one can be the figure and the other the ground. Then, reverse figure and ground. Supply what is missing or abundant in first the one and then the other. Combine this with imagining their histories and futures to imagine why each has become what it is. Then imagine what if the causes and prospects were somehow reversed. Suddenly the way that things are is not an inevitable reality but rather an arbitrary twist of fate, an arbitrary twist of the vagaries of evolution. What at first appears to be reality, normality, even just, is now seen as arbitrary. Fortune is arbitrary and unfortunately, arbitrarily cruel or auspicious.

The problem behavior is the 'figure' in psychotherapy. What is missing is the ground. Psychotherapy is not designed to provide what is missing.

This is a conundrum for psychotherapy. To compensate for this deficiency, one can incorporate minor ‘fixes’. Undertaking this challenge of finding and incorporating minor ‘fixes’ means learning and adopting a new sophisticated psychotherapeutic ‘art form’.   The Natural Systems approach provides that new 'art form' with its focus on external structures, or 'structuralism'.