Kelly Wilson, Copenhagen 8/11-2007

Kelly Wilson, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of psychology at the University at Mississippi. He is past President of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. After running a National Institutes on Drug Abuse clinical trial in Reno, he joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi in 2000 where he founded the Mississippi Center for Contextual Psychology. Kelly has devoted himself to the development and dissemination of ACT and RFT for the past 17 years, publishing 31 articles, 20 chapters, and 4 books, presenting workshops to more than 4000 individuals in 15 countries, and participating as co-investigator on a wide range of research projects in the U.S., Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. He has central interests in the application of behavioral principles to understanding topics such as purpose, meaning and values, therapeutic relationship, and present moment processes.

Charter met up with him at Hotel Kong Arthur in Copenhagen at the end of the second day of a four day ACT workshop, and talked about, amongst other things, shopping malls, love and leopard skin flannel shirts.

Charter: This is about clinical vs. cultural. That’s about all we can say right now.

Kelly Wilson: I don’t draw lines very much (laughs).

C: What is music?

KW: I’m a functional contextualist, you know. Music is the context in which I get reinforced for saying music! It depends on the social milieu. What’s that guy’s name? John Cage. A friend of mine told me about this concert he went to. John Cage comes out and sits down for like 40 minutes. My friend thought ‘This is amazing!’ I, on the other hand, would have gone and insisted that they give me my money back! (laughs) This is a context in which my friend would’ve said “music”, and I’m sure there was a group of people there who would’ve provided reinforcement for saying “music”, but I was the wrong group! (laughs) There is nothing magic about the conditions. There is a set of conditions in the presence of which you get reinforced for saying music. They’re not fixed. They vary culturally. What you listen to and say “Now, that’s music!”, your parents would probably listen to and say “That’s not music! That’s noise! We listen to real music! The Beatles!” And their parents said “That’s not music, that’s noise…” It’s a moving target. I don’t think meaning is in things, or in the world. It’s in the functional properties. It’s “meaning in use”.

C: So, someone who is producing music, what is it that they are doing?

KW: You can speculate about what people are doing. Sometimes they’re making money. Sometimes they’re trying to orient people. I heard Eric Clapton say one time that he aspired to make people cry with a single note. Eric Clapton wants to orient people. He wants to cause people to feel something, to see something that they wouldn’t ordinarily see or feel, but I don’t expect everybody is doing the same thing as he. People are doing all kinds of different things in the production of music. If you try to find the edges of it, there is stuff that you can present and you can get broad agreement that it is music. But if you follow out to the edges of like hip hop or something like that, you’d get “No, there’s no instrument left. There’s just somebody talking and there’s a certain kind of syncopation…” Is that music? Is it poetry? Is poetry music? It’s the same thing! It depends on who you ask, and it depends on the community. It’s the same problem with poetry. Poetry is what people agree is poetry.

C: Back in the twenties, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe!”… What is art?

KW: Yes, this is not a pipe! Magritte was very astute. He saw behind the veil. Words seem to stand in for things, for the world. They substitute for the world. The Zen guys would say “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon!”. Saying “This is music” is not the music and the depiction of a pipe is not a pipe…

C: Music, art, are those non-verbal categories?

KW: Once you get people languaging, they pretty much language about everything. You have to engage in really specific kinds of practices to break lose of the word machine, even for relatively short periods of time. And as soon as you get done, you say “Yeah, there it was!” and right back in you go… Not that that’s bad! ACT is not anti-language, I’m not anti-language. I don’t think behavior analysis is anti-language. I think language is marvellous. Words are wonderful. And there is a dark side…

C: What is happening in a shopping mall?

KW: (laughs) What isn’t happening in a shopping mall! That’s very puzzling to me! All kinds of things happen in a shopping mall, aren’t they? In a shopping mall I’m being a dad, hanging out with my girls... There are probably a couple of really broad sets of categories of events that are happening in a shopping mall. Probably the predominant ones are social. It’s the agora, the marketplace where people meet up. There are other things going on, like the predominant human activities of looking good and being right. I suppose that there are lots of other things going on there too… I know what I’m doing at the mall: I’m hanging out with my daughters. They love to go to the mall, and I love to be with them, and the mall is a perfectly good place to be with them. What do you mean by that question? What puzzles you in that? I’m interested in what puzzles you in that question! I mean, you ask me these questions like there is something in there that is puzzling to you, and I’m interested, curious…

C: One thing that’s going on in a shopping mall is that people are shopping…

KW: There’s no doubt about that!

C: People are buying a lot of things.

KW: And is the question “what is the meaning of that?” What is that about?

C: Yes. And our impression is that people are buying a lot more things than they need…

KW: Absolutely! People are binding their anxiety with possessions! They’re keeping themselves safe. If you pile up stuff around you, then you’re safe from the world! If you got the right jeans, if you got the right jewellery, if you got the right car, you get to stick around, you get to be somebody…

C: So, we look at society, and then we look at this shopping mall as part of society, and we wonder what the function of this shopping mall in society is…

KW: I don’t think that’s all that it is. There’s an old tradition in behavior analysis of disrespecting religion, and it works something like this: “Religion is just social control! It’s about exerting power over people and causing them to behave in certain ways. If you don’t have a big enough club, you take the God Club and hold it over people’s heads.” Is religion about social control? What’s going on the church? It’s the same sort of question. Is it social control? Sure it is! Is it merely social control? No. To say that is just behavioral arrogance! Because you identify a function of something and then pretend that you’ve captured the world in that set of words… The same can be said of what’s going on in the mall. I think that that acquisitiveness is really about binding anxiety. If we have enough stuff, we feel sort of safe…

C: We will never die!

KW: We won’t die! I think a lot of it is about the kind of death anxiety that Becker talked about.[1]  If you want to find out what the function of something is, stop the thing. If I work with people who drink and they want to know what drinking is about, stop. If you do something and you wonder why, just stop! Whatever shows up when you stop, that’s what it’s about!

C: You mentioned religion before and it’s easy to see a connection between ACT and Buddhism, mindfulness being a major ingredient, but there is a connection to Christianity as well…

KW: Absolutely! I’ve lectured on this topic!

C: If we don’t talk about ACT on a general level, but on a more personal level, for you ACT and religion…

KW: I’m not of any religious affiliation that is recognisable in any sense, but I’m interested. If I’d had a couple of more lifetimes to live, I would try to doc in theology, because it’s just deeply, deeply fascinating to me. And I’m particularly interested in the Western tradition. Buddhism gets all the propers on all the mindfulness, and the mystical sort of business, but there are much older mystical traditions than Buddhism. Buddhism is kind of a newcomer, it’s late to the game.

C: So what is it that fascinates you when it comes to ACT and…

KW: What is interesting to me is that all the great religions have a mystical wing, and I think of it as a way – among other things – of contending with the word machine. It’s in the Buddhist tradition, and you also find it in the Christian mystical tradition, and the Jewish mystical tradition. All the great religions have it and it’s the answer to the question “How do I live in this world?” If you get the ubiquity of human suffering, which is empirically demonstrable, and the ubiquity of human problem solving – everywhere you find suffering, you find problem solving! – then guess what happens? Next time you get that problem solved, then what’s the next thing? Another problem! Problem, problem, problem on and on and on and on… What is the way to stop that chasing? Religion gives an answer to that. It provides a place where people can rest.

C: So why lecture on Christianity?

KW: It doesn’t get much play. Everybody’s interested in Buddhism and pretend like they invented mysticism. I don’t think there’s anything in the Eastern tradition that you can’t find in the Western tradition, although it is not dominant in the Western tradition. Although what Westerners think about Buddhism is of course is not… You got people worshipping Buddha and it’s indistinguishable from some kind of idolatry! I had no religious background growing up. I might as well have grown up in Sweden (laughs) with all these exquisite churches that no-one goes to. My only contact with church was TV on Sunday, watching these guys asking people to write a check. And I thought that that was what religion was about, getting people to empty their accounts into to coffers of the church… But I went to Gonzaga[2] as an undergraduate. I got a scholarship to study with the Jesuits, and part of the curriculum was religious studies. That was the only part that I was really not looking forward to, but there were people in the religious studies department, liberation theology types and feminist theologians, and they started putting me on to the kind of lunatic fringe of Christian theology. I started reading guys like Sebastian Moore[3], who is an interesting guy if you ignore the psychodynamic stuff… We had this idea in ACT of the ubiquity of human suffering, and also that people kind of keep it a secret. This is from Sebastian Moore: “The rejection of our common fate makes us strangers to each other. The election of this common fate, in love, reveals us as one body.” That’s an amazing thing! From an ACT-perspective this is the rejection of our suffering. It’s our pretend game that we are all okay. We look around and we say ‘Oh my God, he looks okay, and he looks okay. She looks fine, but I’m all fucked-up!’ And of course you’re sitting over there thinking ‘He looks fine, she looks fine, and I’m all fucked-up’… “The rejection of our common fate makes us strangers to each other…” Sometimes at workshops I ask people ‘What if everyone has a secret and it’s the same secret?’ What if you found out that the thing you been trying to keep everyone from knowing, that they have exactly the same thing that they are trying to keep everybody from knowing? It’s in a different form, but it’s in the spiritual tradition. It’s the sensibilities that interest me. I have always pursued what I consider to be interesting sensibilities. I had three years of psychodynamic supervision. Once a week for three years! When I was a graduate student, on my own, I went outside of the department, and found an object relations-person who would supervise me... Why did I do that? To become a psychoanalyst? No! Because psychoanalysts have sensibilities that are interesting to me! Christian theologians have sensibilities that are interesting to me! It’s easy to dismiss what is wrong with it. Like the mall, that kind of avarice, wastefulness, the consumption to bind anxiety… It’s easy to see what’s wrong with it, but I’m not sure that that is all there is to it… Maybe there’s more going on there than just that… I’m always interested in ‘What else?’ What else is going on?

C: You mentioned religion as a flight from death…

KW: I don’t know if it is a flight from death, but it’s like a place to rest. People are just looking for a place to rest. People are just scared, and it’s hard…

C: And one of the things that we are the most scared of, which is very much in the psychoanalyst tradition, like absence or lack in the writings of Lacan, the limits of this life…

KW: Frankl talks about that, the finitude…

C: If that’s what we are running from by going to church or by going to the shopping mall, how would you like to reintroduce old age, sickness and death into peoples’ everyday lives?

KW: I danced close to death myself for a good bit of my life… People don’t have very much room for death. They don’t want to hear it. As soon as I start talking about suicide in the workshops, they don’t want to encounter that. I understand that place, death. I know it. I’m intimate with it. The culture would benefit from a willingness to be present with it, and that’s why I raise that issue in the workshops. If it is the case that half of the human beings that you know, at some point in their lives, are seriously going to consider ending themselves, and you can’t be psychologically present to that, then you have to co-conspire with them in this game where you pretend that we’re okay. That is a very tiring game. It is not a game that I want to play, and it is not a game that I want to support people in playing. How do you break up the game? I talk about it out loud. I spent the first 30 years of my life wanting to die. From the time I was adolescent ‘til I was 30 years old, I was just waiting to die. I thought I was going to die. I was sure of it. Then I thought ‘I might not die!’, and that was even worse. I was trying to die. I was trying to get out. And I talk about it. It is discomforting to some people, but to some people it’s sort of a relief. People tell me that they want to die, and I say ‘I hear you!’ I understand that. That’s no mystery to me. When you talk about such things you get permission for other people to talk about such things. Not in a confrontational way, but just to be able to have that be present, without trying to change it, or alter it, or fix it or make it go away. To introduce those kinds of things are values, to end the silence around things. Because thoughts of death do not kill people! (laughs) There’s this nonsense on the Clinical Psychology List server right now about Institutional Review Boards which review the ethics of research projects of all the universities and institutions. They don’t want people to put Beck’s Depression Inventories in sets of assessments, because what if that endorse suicide items, and you don’t get to those surveys immediately to intervene… You know, if we don’t ask… (laughs) It’s an amazing perpetuation of this silence! You can’t even ask about it! I personally think that Institutional Review Boards are just over the deep end! It’s astonishing! They would rather not know, than risk knowing and not having acted… Even in the face of the fact that there is not a single, good predictor of suicide over the short term! There are some things that predict suicide over the long term, like Para-suicide, but over the short term, nothing! Not one single bit of evidence that there is anything that will allow you to predict suicide over the short term. But they don’t even want to hear it!

C: What could be done to lower the suicide frequency?

KW: Suicide isn’t very frequent. It’s very infrequent. It’s a very low base rate behavior. Suicidal ideation is very, very high base rate. I don’t know that I would aspire to that necessarily. It’s in the human condition to suffer! It comes as part and parcel with language that human beings have the capacity to suffer everywhere and anywhere. It is part and parcel in being a human being to suffer! No matter where you are, there’s a better ‘where you are’ than where you are… And if you’re in a good place, it might not last… Even if you’re in a good place, it’s a bad place, because it won’t last forever! No matter where you are it is possible for you to suffer, and we are the only creature on the planet that can imagine our own non-existence! We can verbally create our own non-existence! The only way to end human beings imagining their own non-existence as a way out of the suffering that they’re in, would be to turn us all into puppy dogs! It’s just part of living! If there’s anything that we could do about it, it would be to make suffering more not a problem.

C: Like suffering education in school?

KW: Suffering education (laughs). Suffering appreciation! Like music appreciation! Yes, we don’t teach people how to suffer well! We teach people how to avoid suffering, even though it’s like avoiding breathing. In fact, that’s the only way I know of how to avoid suffering, and this religious business, even then you don’t avoid suffering, you just go suffering somewhere else… (laughs) There are some people that are interested in changing cultural practices. Tony Biglan is enormously interested in this topic of ‘How do you change culture?’ Tony is a community psychologist, and he’s interested in intervening at the level of communities, not at the level of individuals.[4] How do you intervene on communities to alter some of these things? Tony is very interested in how you bring ACT principles to bear on these kinds of issues. If you talk to people who are really suicidal, there is commonly this sense of isolation in there, of this extraordinary aloneness. Like what you are experiencing cannot be understood by another human being. What if you knew that in fact lots of people really can get that? What would the effect be? As a matter of fact, those people who don’t seem to understand, who back off as soon as you start talking about wanting to die, they can see that in themselves. It rings those bells for them, and some people don’t want that. If we can teach people to suffer well, and suffer publicly… Some people suffer publicly, but it’s a form of social coercion. They are trying to work people over. ‘Oh, I suffer! Would you please come over and take care of me!’ Private suffering, what does that get you? Nothing! But if you suffer publicly, you get ‘He is such a hard worker! He is so dedicated! That is something! Wish I could do that’ There are all kinds of little social ”gimmies”, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about being willing to be present with suffering. When I was talking about that woman in that cancer project, about the woman in that room suffering and wanting to take a last walk to buy that dress for her daughter[5], does that need anything, like a happy conclusion? I’ll tell you what happened: she died and left a little girl orphan! That’s what happened. A little girl grew up, and her mother couldn’t go and buy that last Easter dress with her. Do we have to change that? No. So what’s my contribution? I talk out loud about suffering. And sometimes about suffering that has outcomes that are lovely, and sometimes outcomes that are tragic. I said ‘yes’ to all this stuff in 1985 when I decided to stay alive. I know when I decided to stay alive, when I took dying off the table.

C: What happened?

KW: Well, I couldn’t run anymore, so I either had to go or stay. I couldn’t run anymore, I was too tired. I either had to leave permanently, or stay. I couldn’t fight anymore. I made this deal that whatever was on my plate, I was going to eat that. If it is depression, okay. Whatever it is, I’m going to have that. All of it. I’m going to clean my plate, like when I was a little kid. Either that or die. And stop fighting.

 

C: Fighting what?

KW: Life. Fighting suffering. I quit. I just gave it up because I was too tired. I was thirty years old and exhausted, near dead. A couple of years later, I saw this drafted chapter from Neil Jacobsen’s book about this therapy called ‘Comprehensive Distancing’. I started reading it and thought ‘This is familiar!’ And I told my wife, ‘Honey, I think we’re going to have to go to Reno!’ (laughs) I thought I might learn to be a comprehensive distancing therapist. It kind of turned out different… (laughs)

C: You already answered the question ‘What is the psychotherapists place in our culture?’; you’ve been very explicit on that... So, what is love?

KW: What is love… See the problem is I’m a behavior analyst. Meaning is to found in the determiners, not the properties of a response. It’s Skinner’s 1945 paper, so if you want to know what love is, read it. Love is the conditions under which I say “that is love” and I get reinforced for that. (laughs) What are those conditions? Specifying those conditions is the deal. People get reinforced for saying love under lots of different kinds of conditions. Lots of them are very interesting to me, they are the once under which I say it.

C: Which are the once under which you say it?

KW: …under which I say it, and where other people around me say it and I say “yeah baby”…

C: Which are those?

KW:  Which are those? I don’t think it’s anything particularly profound. It’s just openness without conditions. It is hard for me to think about these things in any abstract sense because they are not abstractions for me. I can think about my wife for example. We’ve been married for 28 years this month. It was rough for the first 5 or 6 years and right about that same time, 1985, there was a lot of things going on in my world. I had this kind of relationship with my wife: “Well, if this goes like this I’ll hang around. But if it goes like that, then I won’t hang around…” So I would watch to see how it was going to go, to decide whether I was going to stay or not. These conditions were always there. Then I started to notice this thing about my wife (starts to cry), that she’s really afraid that she does not deserve to be around. And I thought, “If you don’t think you measure up and then you’re married to someone who is measuring you every day… How terrible that would be!”. It’s bad enough being measured, but being measured by someone that really matters to you… It was -86 or something like that. We’d been together for about seven years. I remember spending a lot of time thinking that “What if I could be one safe place for her to be, where she did not have to be measured just for a minute…”  And I remember thinking “A ground that she could grow on, or a safe harbor, a place where she could not be measured”. And I thought about that, and that would be love, and the conditions under which I would say, yes, that’s love. What I was doing prior to that is not. It just wasn’t. It was commerce (laughs) “If you do this, then I do that”… That would be love, for me, and I am never good at it. I fall of constantly, but we do have this thing where we always come back to the table, however fucked up it gets. We are not like some people who are married, and they just get along great all the time. My wife and I yell at each other and (laughs) and we always come back to the table, so far, 28 years, come back to the table, come back to the table, come back to the table… Just like a breathing meditation, the same thing. You just notice when you are being a big asshole, and you see if you can just gently let go of that and come back. Just like that. How many times? One more time than you go away. Just like that. I think that’s love. Being willing to come back no matter what.

C: Thank you.

KW: It’s all in the particulars... (laughs) Sorry if I was touchy about the mall question. It’s just that I get so much joy there with my kids. (laughter) I do. I love shopping with my daughters, it’s so much fun. They like it too…

C: Don’t you badmouth my shopping mall…

KW: That’s right! It’s my little temple with my daughters. No, it’s nice. Emma is particularly patient with the shopping thing. She will go with me and try things on, come up to me and say “try this and try that”, it’s nice.

C: The idea of experiential avoidance has been quite revolutionary; and you want to see all sorts of phenomena in society in those terms. Of course, then you realize that there could be something else as well. But the first thought is, there is only experiential avoidance…

KW: And an important thing in therapy and any place else: you’re not going to find it in the form. It is what Skinner meant when he said “Meaning is to be found in the determiners not the properties of a response”. So, it’s not the form of the behavior, it’s the function of the behavior! (laughter)  It isn’t “Me going to the mall, picking a pair of jeans out, giving them money there”… That’s not the meaning of that. The meaning is to be found in the reinforcers that maintain that behavior. And what are the reinforcers for me? Time hanging out with my girls! And there is another reinforcer in there: I dress like a kid and it amuses my students. I have many crazy clothes.  I don’t pack very many of them when I travel, but at home I am known for flamboyant dressing. I have a shirt with leopard skin panels in the front. I might go into class and, in the middle of my learning lecture, I pop up a slide that’s got a picture of this leopard skin shirt, and a picture of this other shirt with flames on it and I let the students choose. “I can’t decide, which one of these do you think I should get?” And then I buy that shirt and wear it in class. It’s fun for them and its very fun for me. I tell them I buy all my clothes at lecturewear.com (laughs) So what does it mean? It means different things for different people, but these social reinforcers are the predominant reinforcers for me. I’m probably warding off old age by dressing like an adolescent too (laughs), but so it goes...

KW: We were curious whether you were going to fall into the reductionist trap when we asked those questions. The trap of saying: these things are a way of avoiding aversives, or it is some type of short term satisfaction…

KW: And have I?

C: You passed the test! (laughter) But it’s an answer you could give to all these things…

KW: I could, and I absolutely don’t doubt that they don’t function in that way, at times. But behavior is mostly complexly determined.

C: Our impression is that you are staying within this theory and still explaining things in a lot of different ways. (laughter)

KW: I think human behavior is just the most interesting thing. It’s amazing, it’s remarkable. If you think about that story I told about that woman, the HIV positive one.[6] She is still alive, not physically, but she is changing lives. I sat in that room with her and she wanted her life to be about something, and it is. How could she even imagine that she could change lives half way around the world? And she has. R told me that she was talking to T[7], and T was telling her that story, that I had told him, and she said, while he was telling it he had tears in his eyes. She really had an impact, didn’t she? She had that kind of impact on me that had that kind of impact on T that had that kind of impact on R. Just like that. Marvelous…

C: And at the same time an example of the bright side of the linguistic force maybe?

KW: Absolutely. Boy, I am no enemy of language, I love language! It’s marvelous… It is life-sucking and kills you, but it is not merely that (laughs). It’s also beautiful and extraordinary! These stories, oh goodness… Got to love a good story. There is a book by Ernie Kurtz called “The Spirituality of Imperfection”[8]. Isn’t that a gorgeous title? I love that title! It’s a marvelous book. It’s a slim little book filled with stories. One of the stories is a favorite of mine, and I can’t remember the name. I have so many favorite stories. (laughs) It comes out of the Judea tradition and it’s about this rabbi. Whenever his people are in trouble he goes to this secret place in the forest and builds this fire. He says this special prayer and his people are delivered from whatever kind of bad thing is going on. And a generation down, there is this Rabbi. His people are in trouble, he says I don’t know this special place in the forest but I can build the fire, I can say the prayer and it’s enough. His people are delivered. Another generation further, the guy says “I don’t know the special place in the forest and I can’t build the fire but I can say the prayer.” And it’s enough, his people are delivered. Another generation further, the guy is sitting in his chair and says “I don’t know the place in the forest, I don’t know how to make the fire and I don’t know the prayer, but I know the story (laughter) and it’s enough. The end of it is “Perhaps God created people because he loves a good story”… (big laughter) Stories can orient people. It turns them, tips them, and lets them see something. Like that woman, when I am doing that piece of work.[9] She is suffering in there. I ask her “Look at that little girl, and imagine you could give her some gift…” And that’s just words. “What if you could give her a huge gift, what would you give her? What if you could give her just a tiny little gift, what would you give her?” I just help her move around in those words. I help her move around in that space, and what she finds in there is room to live, a place where she can get a breath, a little rest… Steve[10] gave a talk, years ago, about language, called something like “Choked by its own hand”, where you use the effects of language to underline the effects of language. It’s kind of funny… So what is your plan for your journal? Maybe I could be a coconspirator, I love conspiracies. I love revolutions. Revolutions are good.

C: The idea is, because of the reductionist lure, because it’s so easy to draw a line between clinical and cultural… “Whatever happens out there, we don’t care, we do panic disorders, we do depressions…”. What about literature, drama, music? The psychodynamic tradition is abundant with ideas, with interpretations. Most of it is really strange stuff, but they do it, they really do it. It’s almost as important as what they are doing in the therapy session.

KW: Well, in fact psychoanalysis probably has a stronger foot hold in literature than they do in psychology in the contemporary world.

C: They say it’s an art form…

KW: And I think that’s right. They have not been terribly interested in science for the most part.

C: And so it was a bit like “I am allowed to talk about clinical symptoms, or clinical disorders or whatever phenomena, but I am not really allowed to talk about culture…” That’s the sense we get.

KW: Well, of course behavior analysis has never been like that. Certain aspects of learning theory are reductionist, but behavior analysis has never held a reductionist position, not out of that Skinnerian tradition. Now, out of the Hullean tradition, which is much more dominant on the continent and in the UK... Hull was a much bigger fish than Skinner. He just didn’t last as long (laughs). Read Skinner! He was all over the place: psychotherapy, religion, government, poetry… He was expansive in his intellectual curiosities and the behavior analytical tradition is rich, rich in that. Like Willard Day. If you want to read a really truly interesting behavior analyst, inspiring in this sort of creativity, you just got to read Willard Day. Sam Leigland, my graduate mentor, a guy who could turn his body into a question mark, he compiled a set of Willard’s canonical works in a little edited book that Context Press publishes.[11] It's got “Behaviorism and the Reconciliation with Phenomenology”… I can’t remember exactly, “Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism and the Latter Works of Ludwig Wittgenstein”… Willard Day. This guy was a wild man. He took a sabbatical and went to read philosophy with Ryle in England. He was a lay minister in the Episcopal Church and a radical behaviorist of the first order, and a concert quality pianist, spoke Japanese fluently, the guy was…

C: Like a Renaissance man.

KW: Yeah, but he is really a nut though. I mean, he is really a wiggy, a crazy, crazy guy. He wrote articles. One article that I loved was called something like “A Behaviorist Reflects on the Surviving Works of Justin Martyr”. (laughs) If the topic doesn’t apply everywhere, then what’s the point? Willard used to run these seminars, these radical behaviorist retreats in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, in the same place where we used to run the ACT experiential workshops. He would bring somebody in like Stanley Messer. He is one of the nouveau psychodynamic psychotherapy school, of this hermeneutic mould. Willard got Messer to come to this summer camp, to a room full of radical behaviorists, and to have this conversation over the course of two and a half days, to just talk about stuff. (laughs)

C: What happened?

KW: Intellectually, it was a blast. It was wonderful! I am sure when he came, he thought it was weird, but he came and he did it. Willard liked to expose people in depth to the writings of B. F. Skinner, and to put them next to other stuff and then just see what happened. Actually, we just put a new room on the house, and it’s really a lovely room. My wife and I designed it on the fly. It’s got these high seventeen foot pine ceilings and acid stained concrete floors. I have got all my guitars hanging on the wall. I run seminars at my house every year with a small number of graduate students. This will be the new seminar room. We drink dangerously strong coffee, and my chair lets me have a seminar on whatever I been thinking about lately. My chairman is really brave. Because I pull the cart in the department he lets me do whatever the hell I want in the seminar. We usually have seven or eight students. One year we did the odd edges of existential and behavioral psychology. We read Walden Two, Carl Rogers, Victor Frankl, this crazy mix of existential and humanistic psychology, and classic stuff in behavior analysis, making sense of spirituality. We just talked, drank dangerously strong coffee and talked. So the new room will be the seminar room, and we have decided it should be a named room, so it will be the Willard Farnsworth Day Room or, for short, the Day Room. (laughs) We are going to get a picture and then we are going to have a room naming ceremony. Pretty soon we will have a lab party and have everybody over and I will talk a little about Willard. We will name the room and thereafter it will be the Day Room…

C: And he will continue to live.

KW: He will live. In my lab we love ceremony. My generation threw out ceremony, because it was hollow ceremony. Except what we did not get was that it did not have to be hollow. It could be anything you wanted it to be. Now I am busily inventing ceremony. (laughs) For example the students who graduate from my lab, they get the Behavioralis Junkus degree. It’s an actual degree, with rights and privileges. There is a ceremony, I wear usually a Hawaiian shirt, my doctoral robes. We dress the children up and they carry the sacred documents in. (laughs) I teach the secret behavioral hand shake in the Day Room. I could show you but I would have to kill you. There’s only a small number of people in the world who know it…

C: It would be worth it probably…

KW: We like that. What ceremonies can be is places where you pause and take a look at where you’ve been or what you’ve done together.

C: We never answered the question. Somebody started talking…

KW: Yeah. (laughs) Answer the question!

C: Just give us a chance here!

KW: (Big laugh)

C: What we are trying to do is some sort of try out. We are starting a web site, trying to raise these questions. We are coming from a place where death has hardly been mentioned during five years, so we have a lot of work to do…

KW: Yeah.

C: And religion has not really been mentioned at all.

KW: No, no we have got our hands off that stuff!

C: Environmental issues have not been mentioned. Consumerism has not been mentioned.

KW: These are central organizing features of the culture. We are not even going to talk about it! They don’t want to deal with it…

C: We are psychologists. We talk about information processing…

KW: I don’t even know what information is. I have never been able to get a straight answer on that. (laughter) Information is apparently just anything.

C: Anything that moves…

KW: Probably in your brain, I don’t know…

C: Basically, we miss the discussion so we are trying to start it.

KW: That’s nice. That’s good.

C: The clinical society in Sweden seems to be focused on clinical issues almost all the time. And this could aggravate some people. There is a list in Sweden. One person expressed an opinion and was asked “Do you have data for that opinion…?” They were not allowed to have an opinion without having empirical data…

KW: Some of these things may translate into empirical agendas. That’s what Tony Biglan is interested in. How do we change cultures? Tony’s got a book that’s through Context also, something like “Changing Cultural Practices”. Context Press does not have that many books. It’s not hard to find it. I think the worst thing about community psychology is that it’s mostly people talking about how much we have got to do. “Aint it awful that we don’t do community psychology, OK, job done.” But Tony has done all kinds of crazy interventions like, “How do you get people to quit selling cigarettes to kids?” They would send kids into stores to see if they could buy cigarettes. If the guy would not sell them cigarettes, they would take the guy’s picture and put an ad in the paper and say “Go shop from these people. They don’t sell cigarettes to kids. They are good people”. How can you tinker with these cultural contingencies in ways that impact? Tony got one of these MacAurther Genius awards. They give you a year in Palo Alto to sit in a room with some other brainiacs and think about stuff. It’s a pretty good deal if you can get it. (laughs) Tony is a guy who has had enormous success as a psychologist. Tony doesn’t have to do anything. He told me one time “This is what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. I’m going to see if I can improve all the lives of all the children in Oregon.”

C: Wow!

KW: That’s kind of cool! We could use some more of that! And he’s interested in the science of that. How do you intervene at the level of the community?

C: Maybe he’s the next person for us to talk to. That’s one of the ideas, to always have one person, one face, and let them speak without being interrupted.

KW: And I tell you, Tony, more than anybody I know, in this ACT community, is someone who is wholly invested in exactly these issues, like advertising and marketing. Tony testified before congress to smash the tobacco companies’ efforts to market cigarettes to children, that Joe the Camel stuff. He has been in Washington DC to witness about this manipulation of cultural contingencies intentionally to make it so that smoking cigarettes was “cool”. I don’t know anything about community psychology. Tony is a community psychologist for real. He’s thought about it. He’s written extensively about it. He’s your man.

C: He is someone we should contact. Perhaps read some…

KW: Yeah, do a little reading. Get a sense of what he’s doing.

C: I think we have to go now.

KW: Yeah…

 

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