Alpha and Omega, or, Does actualisation encompass death?
This piece was sent to me by my good friend and colleague Professor Keith Tudor in response to the post I wrote last week on Death as a therapeutic act.
It asks whether death should be considered alongside maintaining, enhancing, and reproducing itself as a hitherto missing fourth part of an organism’s actualisation.
Here is the text of Keith’s paper.*
Person-centred psychologists and therapists tend to refer, as Rogers did, to “the actualising tendency”. Defining and referring to this concept as a noun, however, objectifies and reifies the concept, which I and Worrall think is better expressed in a verbal form, for example, the organism tends to actualise (see Tudor & Worrall, 2006; Tudor, 2008). This has the advantage of acknowledging the concept as a process: an inherent, directional process which represents both a biological and social reality as well as a unitary theory of motivation. Moreover, stating this as a proposition, i.e., “that the human organism tends to actualise”, is consistent with the propositional logic that Rogers adopted, and with the non dogmatic approach to the construction and testing of theory that, generally, is promoted by the person-centred approach.
In this short paper I examine another aspect or aspects of this unitary process theory of motivation which has been evoked by re-reading Rogers’ (1963) paper on “The actualizing tendency in relation to ‘motives’ and to consciousness”. In it, Rogers refers to the organism as maintaining, enhancing and reproducing itself. He also refers to his own earlier work (published in 1959) in which he had written about the actualising tendency as involving “development towards the differentiation of organs and functions, expansion and enhancement through reproduction” (p. 196). These papers thus represent three qualities of this tendency (or the fact that the organism tends to actualise), that is: i) maintaining; ii) developing, expanding, and enhancing; and iii) reproducing.
Much of the literature on the actualising tendency, both within and beyond person-centred psychology, has concentrated on the first two qualities (and especially the second), and hardly, if at all, on the third quality or feature of reproducing. This may, in part, be due to the fact that, after 1963, Rogers did not refer to this aspect of the life of the organism. The term “reproducing” perhaps had – and still has – too much of a genetic, biological and, possibly, heterosexual association to be current or viewed as inclusive. Yet it deserves, I think, reconsideration for two reasons:
It is, or may be viewed as a sign of a tendency or trend (Angyal, 1941) that goes beyond individual and individualistic goals, and expresses a sense of belonging and wanting to add to humanity [and/or, indeed, the world, the environment, earth, and so on)].
It may be understood as referring to a broader sense of “reproduction”, akin to Erikson’s (1968) concept of generativity, in other words, the re-production of the organism through creativity as well as procreativity, in the form, for example, of art, buildings – and, of course, articles and books! Interestingly, the psychosocial crisis Erikson refers to at this stage or phase of life is “generativity vs. stagnation” – although, from a person-centred perspective, as the organism is always in motion, it is never stagnant. As Patterson (1964/2000) put it: “There’s no such thing as a lack of or absence of motivation. To be alive is to be motivated, to be unmotivated is to be dead. Thus we cannot say that a client is unmotivated.” (p. 16)
Reflecting on these three qualities and, partly, as a result of teaching this aspect of person-centred theory now over some 35 years, I have begun to wonder whether the process of actualising includes death. Is death a fourth aspect of actualising, or is the death of the organism an interruption to and, as it were, the “death” of actualisation? Freud (1924) acknowledged that: “Even at birth ... the whole organism is destined to die.” (p. 270) Whether we think about this as destined or not, what we think about these questions has profound moral, ethical and clinical implications. If we think about death as an aspect of actualising, then we can support clients to die and even, possibly, to suicide. If we think that death is anti-actualisation, we will encourage people, as the poet Dylan Thomas (1952/2003) did, to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
When I presented these ideas at a workshop, one participant wondered about the other end of the life cycle, i.e., whether the organism has a tendency – or tends – to emerge (D. Dumitru, personal communication, 4th March 2009). Whilst I think it is interesting to speculate as to whether the potential organism has a tendency to emerge into life, I tend to think of this as encompassed by the quality of developing, expanding, and enhancing. This is consistent with Stern’s (1985) concept of the emergent self, an emergence which continues throughout life.
Alpha and omega refer to the beginning and the end of things. The proposition that the organism tends to actualise challenges such fixed points in favour of a concept of the human organism in continual process in relation to its environment.
References
Dylan, T. (2003). Do not go gentle into that good night. In The collected works of Dylan Thomas 1934–1953 (p. ??). Phoenix. (Original work published 1952)
Erickson, E. (1968). Identity, youth, and crisis. W. W. Norton.
Freud, S. (1924). The passing of the Oedipus complex. In The Standard Edition of the complete psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 19 (pp. 3-66). Hogarth Press.
Tudor, K. (2008). Verbal being: From being human to human being. In B. Levitt (Ed.), Reflections on human potential: Bridging the person-centered approach and positive psychology (pp. 68-83). PCCS Books.
Tudor, K., & Worrall, M. (2006). Person-centred therapy: A clinical philosophy. Routledge.
*The original article this text was drawn from was originally published in February 2010 in German in Person: Internationale Zeitschrift für Personzentrierte und Experezielle Psychotherapie und Beratung [The International Journal for Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy and Counselling], and was published in English in 2021 in: Tudor, K. (2021). Alpha and omega, or, does actualisation encompass death. In 20/20 vision, 2020 (pp. 33–35). [E-book] Tuwhera Open Access Books. https://ojs.aut.ac.nz/tuwhera-open-monographs/catalog/book/6.
For more of Keith’s recent work includes publications, see: Effective and respectful interaction with Māori; Person-centred psychotherapy; professional papers on research and practice, including contributions to the discipline of psychotherapy, and note-taking and note-keeping in psychotherapy; and four open-access books: Psyche and Academia, 20/20 Vision, 2020, The Book of Evan, and Pluralism in Psychotherapy.