Respectfully
Resocializing
Going Down the
Rabbit Hole
Emerging from
Post Doctoral
Clinical
Sociology Research
Currently a live
document with multiple updates every day.
Tues
day 28th March
2017
Email: tcenablers@gmail.com
About ways that work in transforming people
and society:
o Respectfully re-socialising
o Stopping conflict in all of its forms[1]
o Evolving enabling[2]
atmospheres and environments
o Evolving Vibrant Communities
o Increasing effectiveness in Therapeutic Communities
o Setting up community processes for:
o Stopping family violence
o Stopping bullying
o Stopping addictive behaviours
o Stopping racism
o Re-constituting[3]
society following man-made and natural disasters
o Enlivening schools in areas of situated poverty
o Revitalizing Grandparenting, Parenting and Childhood
o Re-locating, settling, and habilitating displaced people
o Re-socialising the Radicalized
o Evolving thriving multicultural communities
o Evolving humane caring alternatives to Criminal and
Psychiatric Incarceration
o Reviving closed Therapeutic Communities
o Having vibrant Community doing things and being the change process (rather than
government, organizational, or business services)
o Evolving our Unique Potentials in making better Realities
perhaps
it’s a source of precious gems
not
a manual
and
whether gems
depends
on you
as
the potency of these gems
is
a function of you
not
the gems
and
a function of how
you
weave
the
gems
and
imaging a special place
filled
with these gems
healing
transforming power
only
tapped by folk
relating
with them in special ways
and
using these same ways
in
relating with each other
within
contexts
framed
in special ways
something
to do with subtle loving energy
surrendering
for
evolving
potent
realities
Contents
Assuming a
Social Basis of Mental Illness.
Margaret Mead the Anthropologist
Visiting Fraser House
Constituting
Fraser House as an Institution.
The
Potency of Social Relating
The Resocializing Program
– Using Governance Therapy
The
Potential Potency of Small Moments
Identifying with Transforming
Action
Legitimising Fraser House by
Establishing the Psychiatric Research Study Group
Legitimation Supporting
Fraser House and All Involved
Legitimating Under Threat of
Reality Breakdown
Research
Questionnaires And Inventories - Neville Yeomans Collected Papers
A List Of Advisory Bodies And Positions Held By Dr
Neville Yeomans
DIAGRAMS
Diagram 1 Map of Section of Gladesville
Diagram 2 Resident Committees and the Staff Devolving their Traditional Roles to
Become Healers
Diagram 3 Recast of Diagram Two
PHOTOS
Photo 1 One of the
Fraser House Dorms
Together we make things happen
and together we’re transformed in the process
Pervasively, throughout the
world social systems of systems have evolved with a massive array of control
processes for the control of everyone with no one in control.[4] The expression ‘going
down the rabbit hole’ hints at entry
into the unknown. The red pill and its opposite, the blue pill, are popular culture
symbols representing the choice between embracing the sometimes painful truth
of reality (red pill) and the blissful ignorance of illusion (blue pill).
You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe
whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and
I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
In the Matrix[5] film the term red pill referred to a human that is aware of the true
nature of the Matrix. In Fraser House they were re-defining
the nature of the red pill – here you’ll experience living well in the Matrix
and support re-humanizing the Matrix. The Matrix is the Social System of
systems of control with no one in control.
A major means of control is
socializing. Within that a major means of control is the slowing down of
imagination so that a fundamental mural[6] about reality can be set
in concrete and therefore never noticed and rarely or never questioned. It’s
about time - this E-Book looks back (to the 1960s) to look forward to present
action towards respectfully re-socializing in the process of evolving new realities where people can thrive in evolving new thriving Again -
it’s about time.[7]
In the early 1960s
there was an example of Resocializing that Worked. In this E-Book
‘Resocializing’ refers to actions that profoundly respect the individual and
the collective.[8]
This 1960s example may be a model for our Age. This social action example was
an experimental facility called Fraser House, an
uncharacteristic psychiatry Unit exploring non-drug community processes.
This
Unit took in seriously at-risk Residents transferred from the wards at the back
of mental hospitals where these hospitals would put patients that they could not help.
Fraser
House also took in people from jails whom the authorities would not give a day
of parole. Processes that worked were replicated or adapted in later contexts
within the Unit. After operating for some months this Unit was returning these
Residents to living well in Society within twelve weeks. In the early drafts
of this E-Book it commenced as a dense account unravelling how the tightly woven
Fraser House Way worked in re-socialising
these people. This E-Book has emerged as something very different. It is now
more a dense account of how the Residents
socialized Fraser House and found
themselves in the process. Before coming to Fraser House, the Residents
tended to experience life as without meaning (meaningless), and without norms
(normlessness). They were typically isolates that did not belong. They were
misfits.
Yeomans
set out to evolve a dense process for establishing shared meaning, and shared
norms, and supportive friendships and a strong sense of belonging to something
of great value.
It
is also about how the Residents found out
things about how society at large shuts down, controls and limits[9]
people and how they began taking back
agency in acting together for a better world.
The
founding director of Fraser House was Dr Neville Yeoman (1928-2000). The Unit
was exploring the evolving of non-drug community-based re-socialising
approaches within psychiatry (and without psychiatry) in Sydney, Australia
during 1959 to 1968.
A
concerted attempt has been made to make this E-Book understandable. One of the
challenges is that Dr Neville Yeomans’ Way was very eclectic, multifaceted and
guided by the moment in context.
Neville’s way can never be adequately expressed
in words. It can never be externalised.[10]
His
Way pervasively involves engaging the flux between internal and external realities, phenomena, and
experience within and between people – inter-subjectivity.
Yeomans’
Way is encapsulated in one of more than 1,000 poems he composed.[11]
The Way
is
searching
for the way
This
is one reason why this E-Book is not a step-by-step manual where the potency is
externalised and pinned down with words. Any attempt to do that looses the Way
Some aspects mentioned may appear paradoxical - though
these aspects are
typically at
different logical levels, where the term ‘logic’ is
used in an original
meaning – namely,
the pattern whereby all
things are connected.
Where typically a book may have
many sentences to state a good idea, many of the
sentences in this E-Book have a number of good ideas stacked in one sentence,
or sentence fragment. Sometimes just two words within a sentence embody a very
potent idea. This is consistent with Dr Neville Yeomans’ Way and the Ways being
explored in this E-Book
Some
sentences may need a few readings and some reflection, as like Alice, we are
going down the rabbit hole - perhaps to find a Wonderland.
Yeomans evolved Fraser House assuming a social
basis of mental illness. This has links to the important role social cohesion
plays in preventing mind-body-spirit sickness in Australian Aboriginal culture.[12]
Regardless of conventional diagnosis, in Fraser House it was assumed that
dysfunctional Residents would have a dysfunctional inter-personal family friendship
network. This networked dysfunctionality was the focus of change. Consistent
with this, the Fraser House process was sociologically oriented. The Way was
based upon a social model of mental dis-ease and a social model of change to
ease and wellbeing.[13]
That the public at large never thought much about
social causes of dis-ease was discussed by Smelser in the BBC Series The
Century of the Self[14]
in speaking about the United States public post Second World War:
.......that they would in fact
adapt to the reality about them. They
never questioned the reality. They never questioned that it might itself be a
source of evil or something to which you could not adapt without compromise or
without suffering or without exploiting yourself in some way. So there was this
fit with the politics of the day
Yeomans
used a very holistic approach weaving together the biological aspects of the
physical body, the psycho-emotional aspects of people, and how everyone’s’
body-mind interacted with the social-life-world (the bio-psycho-social).[15] Yeomans was exploring
links between the social and the bio-psycho aspects of all. In drawing upon
sociological perspectives Yeomans included the Sociology of the Body and
Clinical Sociology – discussed later.
Yeomans
was interested in the re-constituting of the physical body moving in space[16] and how movement
interacts with the illness-wellness continuum; exploring moving beyond:
o feeling down (de-pressed)
o feeling heavy (with compressed vertebrae activating
kinaesthetic receptors through the spine increasing subjective sense of weight)
o feeling crushed,
o being on the back foot
o being off-side,
o feeing being bitter and twisted
Yeomans
was equally interested in Ways for re-constituting the body of the Fraser House Collective.
Yeomans said that he and all involved in Fraser
House worked with the notion that the Residents’ life difficulties were in the
main, from ‘cracks’ in society, not them. Yeomans took this social basis of
mental dis-ease not out of an ignorance of diagnosis. Yeomans was a government
advisor on psychiatric diagnosis as a member of the Committee of Classification
of Psychiatric Patterns of the National Health and Medical Research Council of
Australia.
Yeomans was familiar with twin sociological notions
that people are social products and at the same time people together constitute[17]
their social reality.[18]
Yeomans said[19]
that he took as a starting framework that people’s internal and external
experience,[20]
along with their interpersonal linking with family, friends, and wider society
are all inter-connected and inter-dependent.
Given this, Yeomans held to the view that
pathological aspects of society and community, and dysfunctional social
networks give rise to criminality and mental dis-ease in the individual. As
well, his view was that ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ behaviours emerge from dysfunctionality
in family and friendship networks.
This was compounded by people feeling like they did
not belong - being dis-placed from place and dislocated. Problematic behaviours
may be experienced as feeling bad or feeling mad, or feeling mad and bad.
While Yeomans recognized massively inter-connected
causal process were at work, he also recognized and emphasized this macro to
micro direction of complex interwoven causal forces and processes within the
psychosocial dimension.
Working with the above framework, Yeomans set out to
use a Keyline[21]
principle, ‘do the opposite’ to interrupt and reverse dysfunctional
psychosocial and psychobiological processes (biopsychosocial). That is, he
would design social and community forces and processes that would inevitably
lead from the micro to the macro towards Fraser House Residents reconstituting
their lives towards living well together. Yeomans told me a number of times
that the aim and outcome of Fraser House therapeutic forces and processes was
‘balancing emotional expression’ towards being a ‘balanced[22]
friendly person’ who could easily live firstly, within the Fraser House
community, and then in their new, expanded, and functional network in the wider
community.
Andy Brooker in an email wrote of:
Institutions promoting decontextualized forms of personal
responsibility - ‘often implying (through the veil of diagnosis) that the
person themselves, or their family are the cause of their problems; while
consistently failing to highlight the real cause of social harm and its[23] role in creating the
interlinking forms of oppression, at the root of their suffering.’
In
this view, dysfunctional behaviours may be seen as ‘defence patterns’, and as ‘the
best that people could do` in endeavouring to cope with and accommodate
societal pressures.
Fraser House took
people who were profound dropouts – people who were shutdown and largely disconnected from
society mentally and physically.
These were people who had had society
disconnect them from their friends, relatives, acquaintances, and society at
large by locking them up in prison cells and the back-wards in mental
hospitals. They had had ‘society’ ‘knocked’
out of them by the system. What had happened in their worlds had also happened
inside of them - people were dissociated[24] and dis-connected.
These residents had
profound shutdown in response to not fitting within the dominant system. Some
had the added overlay of addiction.[25] Fraser House was
originally called the Alcoholics and Neurotics Unit.
The aim in Fraser
House was to have these people engaging collectively in doing their own transforming of their own making
in dis-alienating and re-socialising
themselves so that they were not only able to cope, they were also able to live well with others and be resilient in the face of dominant system
pressures.
What Yeomans did do
was to constantly stack possibilities
for contexts to emerge where Residents engaged in their own transforming.
After leaving Fraser
House ex-Residents were able to live
well in Society. In many cases they became social catalysts creating social
innovation (rather than fighting the existing system or returning to being
‘dropouts’).
When
Yeomans was approached by me relating to doctoral research into Fraser House he
referred me to past staff, Residents, and Outpatients of the Unit, as well as
to Alfred Clark, the head of the Fraser House External Research team at Fraser
House.
He
and Yeomans wrote the book, Fraser House – Theory, Practice, and Evaluation of
a Therapeutic Community.[26] Alf Clark[27] went on to obtain his PhD[28] based upon his Fraser
House Research.
When
Clark left Fraser House he worked at the Tavistock Institute in the UK; then he
became Professor and Head of the La Trobe University’s very radical and
critical Sociology Department in Victoria, Australia for fourteen years.
He
was head when I completed my Social Science degree in his department – majoring
in Sociology of Knowledge.[29]
Clark
writes in his 1993 book, ‘Understanding Social Conflict’[30] that Fraser House and its outreach[31] is still the best model
for resolving social conflict around the
world that he has found.
None of these interviewees referred by Yeomans were able to shed any
light whatsoever on what actually
made Fraser House work. They could outline the timetable of activities - that
kept being altered by Residents in committee. They could confirm that Fraser
House processes did work extremely well and had good results in healing people
in an original sense of that term meaning to
make whole; to integrate. People did transform. This transforming was a
matter of degree - at times bit by bit, at other times big changes.
Interviewees confirmed that the Residents and Outpatients engaged in
mutual-help[32]
and self-help through being fully involved in re-forming their way of life together.
The interviewees could describe the many things that happened. However,
every one of them said that how all
this ‘worked’ and what made the processes work in being transformational was
‘beyond them’.
Yeomans was enriching practical
wisdom[33]
in the common person.
In a resonant way Postle[34] has introduced the term
‘the psyCommons’.
The psyCommons is a name for the universe
of rapport – of relationship between people – through which we navigate daily
life. It describes the beliefs, the preconceptions, and especially the learning
from experience that we all bring to bear on our own particular corner of the
human condition. To name these commonsense capacities ‘the psyCommons’ is to
honour the multitudinous occasions of insight, affect, and defect that we bring
to daily life: in parenting and growing up, caring for the disabled and
demented, persisting with the love that brings flourishing and success,
supporting neighbours visited by calamity, joining friends and family in
celebrations of life thresholds. As my colleague Andy Rogers described
it, the psyCommons is a rich resource of ‘ordinary wisdom’ and also, more
controversially, ‘shared power’. The air we breathe, the radio spectrum, the
oceans and the land we occupy – all these are commons, or ‘common pool
resources’; they belong to us and we belong to them. The psyCommons is one of
these commons. And, in parallel with the history of the enclosures of common
land in the UK and elsewhere, the psyCommons too has enclosures. In that
insidious way that politics can be invisibly present in daily life, the
psy-professions – psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, psycho-therapy and
counselling – have enclosed the
psyCommons.
Yeomans Way at Fraser
House could be characterised in part by the notion of exploring all manner of
ways for enriching the psyCommons within
all attendees.
As pointed out by
Bob Dick:[35]
The harming
consequences of the dynamics of the larger system would have been also affecting
the Fraser House Psychiatrists and Psychologists (including
Yeomans). Their behaviour was also a consequence of system dynamics.
To quote the Biography on Yeomans
work life:
In the early days of Fraser House,
permissiveness within the staff-Resident relation was embodied[36]
in the slogan, ‘We are all patients here together’.
The self-help and mutual-help focus was supported by the slogan:
We are all co-therapists.[37]
However, recall that boundaries
were maintained between staff and Resident in that any staff needing
psychosocial support would either receive this within an all-staff support
group, or if the situation warranted it, the staff member would enter Fraser
House as a voluntary patient[38]
The following three paragraphs are repeated text (without
the footnotes – though you may want to refer back to these) from earlier in
this segment.
In writing and rewriting this E-Book I read through
these three paragraphs many times. Then it suddenly dawned on me that these
three paragraphs are the very heart and soul of Neville Yeomans’ Way. In many
respects they sum up the whole E-Book. Perhaps you, like me may get more significance
out of the repeat reading with interspersed comments.
Note that it reports Yeoman saying the following is
his starting frame work.
Yeomans said that he took as a starting framework that:
a) people’s:
a. internal, and
b. external experience,
b) along with their
interpersonal linking with family, friends,
c) and wider society
d)
are all inter-connected and inter-dependent.
Time and again we will be
referring to the following)
a)
the inter-play between
a. internal, and
b. external
b) the experience of all involved (again the mingling of the internal and
external aspects of experiencing)
c) Residents interpersonally:
a. inter-linking, and
b. inter-relating
d) with family and friends
(and learning about and experiencing belongingness and locatedness; and
expanding and enriching their sense of identity)
e) Re-connecting all involved
f) in new ways to society (new ways that are
functional and tapping the unique potentials)
Note this influencing is going
from micro – to macro; linking the individual to the group and the group to
society. Each of the above points are being done simultaneously; they are also:
a.
Inter-connected, and
b. Inter-dependent.
Given this, Yeomans held to the view that:
a)
pathological aspects of:
a.
society, and
b.
community, and
c.
dysfunctional social networks
give rise to criminality and mental dis-ease in the
individual.
Note the framing (dis-ease). Yeomans does not use dominant
system metaphors - ‘hygiene’, ‘health’ or ‘illness’ in referring to phenomena
of mind (mental)
As well, his view was
a) that ‘mad’ and ‘bad’
behaviours emerge from dysfunctionality in family and friendship networks.
This was
compounded by:
b) people feeling like they
did not belong - being dis-placed from place and dis-located.
Problematic behaviours may be experienced as:
c)
feeling bad or
d)
feeling mad, or
e)
feeling mad and bad.
While Yeomans recognized:
a)
massively inter-connected causal process were at work,
(going
from the macro to the micro – society to individual)
he also:
a)
recognized. and
b)
emphasized:
this macro to micro direction of complex interwoven
causal forces and processes within the psychosocial dimension.
Yeomans is referring to socialising, and particularly
in context, problematic aspects of, and consequences of societal socialising.
Working with
the above framework,
That is, the starting
with the framework that:
a) people’s internal and external experience,
b) along with their
interpersonal linking with family, friends,
c) and wider society
are all inter-connected, inter-related and inter-dependent
– a complex multi-variable system.
Dynamic transformational engaging with this inter-connecting,
inter-relating and inter-depending entails sensing everything as a complex
multivariable system. There is absolutely no way that this complex system can
be understood from an analysis of the parts. So many crucial aspects only emerge at the certain levels and kinds of
integrated complexity. For an example in nature - the property of sweetness
associated with glucose only emerges when carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen are
combined in a very particular way in very specific proportions (C6H12O6). You can analyse carbon,
hydrogen and oxygen separately and you will never find sweetness. Yeomans
Transformational Framework involved honing in on evolving inter-connecting,
inter-relating and inter-depending relational networking.
The living world with Fraser House was a Network of
Intersubjective Relating within Relational Networks involving networked
thinking. This concept is embraced by the German expression vernetztes denken
which translates as joined-up-thinking.[39]
Yeomans was a pioneer in linking ecology and social
ecology in using a living systems approach in engaging with people on the
margins. Living systems that are adaptive
and thriving well, while being provoked and challenged by the surrounding
ecosystem are usually in far from equilibrium states.[40] In complexity terms, every aspect of Fraser House was
structured by Yeomans and others to maintain the Unit in a far from equilibrium
state. When situations within Fraser House became stuck, Neville would
intentionally perturb it, and then use the evoked heightened emotional
contagion as emotional corrective experience. It follows that there multiple
ways to engender transforming in complex systems.
Yeomans set out to:
a.
use a Keyline principle (do the opposite)’
b. to interrupt, and
c. reverse
d.
dysfunctional
i. psychosocial, and
ii. psychobiological processes (biopsychosocial).
Yeomans is interrupting
society’s sustained socialising and reversing it by re-socialising all involved
in a micro-life-world of their own
making – where their way of life together
is wholesome and promotes ease (rather than dis-ease) and wellness in all of
its forms.
That is, he would design:[41]
e.
social, and
f.
communal
i. forces[42],
and
ii. processes
g.
that would inevitably[43]
lead from the micro to the macro
towards
Fraser House Residents reconstituting their lives towards living well together.
Yeomans told
me a number of times:
b) that the aim and outcome of
Fraser House therapeutic forces[44]
and processes was ‘balancing[45]
emotional expression’
c) towards being a ‘balanced
friendly person’
d) who could easily live
firstly, within the Fraser House community, and
e) then in their new,
expanded, and functional network
f) in the wider community.
There are a lot of ideas stacked in these three repeated
paragraphs. They came directly from my recording of Neville Yeomans telling me
stories about his days in Fraser House. And it was stories that I was hearing.
My retelling makes the words have overtones of explaining and
describing. Neville used the narrative form. I had written Yeomans words down
in the 1990s and added them to this E-Book without the denseness and import sinking
in. They were not some ‘introductory snippets’. They actually are succinct
dense statements encapsulating Yeomans Way.[46]
Margaret Mead the anthropologist visited Fraser House in the
early 1960s. Mead was the co-founder of the World Federation of Mental health
and the third president of that organisation during the years 1956-57. In August 1999, Yeomans was recorded as saying that
during that Fraser House visit, Mead stated that Fraser House was the only
therapeutic community she had visited that was totally a therapeutic community in every sense. Fraser House
anthropologist-psychologist Margaret Cockett confirmed what Dr Yeomans had said
about Mead’s comments.
By this term ‘total’ I sense Mead was referring to the
pervasively complex inter-connected, inter-related denseness of the
interweaving of every aspect of the
Unit’s densely inter-connected and
inter-related ways towards Resocializing and return-ing
Residents to living well in community. All
of my Fraser House informants also spoke of this dense holistic inter-related
‘total’ nature of Fraser House.
Maxwell
Jones the pioneer of therapeutic communities in the UK said of Fraser House:
......given
such a carefully worked-out structure, evolution is an inevitable consequence.[47]
Perhaps
Maxwell Jones (like Margaret Mead) could sense Resocializing (outlined in this
current E-Book) as being implicit in Clark and Yeomans’ book if one had
capacity to read between the lines and sense all of the rich implications of
Fraser House Ways, especially the inevitability of evolving.
The Fraser House roles for professional staff
did not involve using their academic training – rather, the evolving and using
of a very different set of competences. For context, Yeomans profoundly respected the
psyCommons in everything he did. While the psy-professions generally had
totally enclosed the psyCommons of these potential
residents of the Fraser House (coming as they were from psychiatric hospitals
and prisons), Yeomans enclosed residents within Fraser House Commons and
regularly brought residents’ family friend network into the Fraser House
enclosure. Then via Governance Therapy and the Resocializing Program (see
later), Yeomans had all of the professional
staff stepping out of their
psy-profession roles (read experts ‘doing things to or for people’) to become
supporting the enriching of the psyCommons – as ‘healers’, (the term meaning
‘to make whole again’ – and enablers[48]
(a term meaning to support others to be able) – hence, supporting Residents and
Outpatients to do everything for themselves – mutual-help) in the context of
what Postle termed a 'universe of rapport' within relating between people.
Yeomans
wove together and adapted understandings from working with his father in
evolving Keyline, a process within sustainable agriculture. Neville Yeomans,
his brother Alan and their father P.A. Yeomans discovered ways to make nature
thrive.[49]
Neville
extended this work in exploring how to have human nature thrive. Neville used
bio-mimicry in setting up embedded contexts – the context within the context –
to multiple levels – and imbrications.[50] Within Fraser House,
Yeomans was continually setting up meta-contexts[51] and co-locating[52] people and things; as
well as combining[53]
people, things, and contexts[54] – the context for the
emergence of significant contexts.
Another
thing Yeomans was doing is perhaps summed up by the term ‘stacking’. He would
literally pile things on top of each other in a stack. He would stack each day
full of transforming possibilities[55] – something recognised by
Margaret Mead with her use of the term ‘total’.
Another
significant adaptation was engaging with indigenous understandings of the
geo-emotional and the links between land topography and social topography.[56]
Yeomans
said[57], that any psychiatrist
entering Fraser House would experience ‘their maximal career dis-empowerment’
as nothing in their academic training or their professional experience or
career to date would have prepared them for their new role of sustaining healing contexts; where all
involved - including all staff - were Resocializing
themselves by finding themselves
(their selves). As Maxwell Jones
observed, within Fraser House, evolution was an inevitable consequence – and this applied to the staff as well.
What’s
more, they would be working in an environment where Residents and Outpatients
who had already being involved in Fraser House living everyday and every night
for many weeks were far more experienced in Fraser House transforming ways than
these psy-professionals.
Residents
in writing one of the Fraser House Staff Handbooks[58] wrote:
So
you have decided to join Fraser House. Good career move!
The
Residents recognised firsthand the potency of this potential new area within
the psy-professions of having the role of being enablers of self-help and mutual-help within the psyCommons using uncharacteristic
community as the transforming medium (therapeutic community).
Yeomans said[59] that when staff returned to work everyone wanted to get the
latest news and catch up on everything that had been happening. So engaging was
the work that staff had to be sent home at the end of their shift; they did not
want to leave.
When I commenced this research
into Fraser House I assumed that some traditional
change process was being used. I would ask questions like, ‘what type of
therapy did you use’? Gestalt? Cognitive? Behavioural? The typical reply was:
It was not like that.
I
cannot pinpoint the time when I realized that in Fraser House ‘community’ of a peculiar and
uncharacteristic kind was the therapy and that ‘therapeutic community’ was the change process, not a just a name.
I
sense it came from conversations with a friend and colleague of mine, Dr Andrew
Cramb.
All
of the Resident Community Governance (refer later) and other ‘work’ by
Residents were change process. Everything was change process. Processes were eclectically spontaneous and not driven by
compliance with steps or theory.
Mead
recognised that with her use of the word 'Total'. ‘Community
being the change process’ was mentioned in the archives. However, I had just
not sensed it.
Once I had this understanding about socio-therapy and
community-therapy and that Neville viewed Fraser House as a complex
self-organising living system, it became clear that all that Neville had said
about his father’s interest in living systems was central and not peripheral.
One
of Yeomans’ mantras was:
Nothing
happens unless the locals[60] want it to happen.
There
is a dense subtlety to this mantra:
o The Residents
(the locals) had the say as to what, when, where, and how. This had the
processes always changing, largely by
input from Residents and Outpatients. Residents and Outpatients would play a
part in writing up the latest Staff Handbook, which was a catch-up depicting
what had already being put into
place.
o The collective was evolving their own Way of
life together, and it was the collective
that was Resocializing. Yeomans was never
engaged in Resocializing the Collective. It was never service delivery [61]
o Residents and
Outpatients were the one’s involved in helping themselves in self-help and
mutual-help
o They are the
ones doing the doing
o They are
collectively engaged, again, if they want to
o The foregoing
sets up the context for outsiders – staff - (working with some or more, or all
of the locals) in supporting locals to be able, or more able
o It presupposes
that any in the enabler role gain and sustain rapport
o For Yeomans, all
of the enabler language is in the passive voice. Everything is soft – never
imposing or directing – never ‘telling them what to do’ – rather, suggesting
possibilities – suggesting experiences
Yeomans did:
o
Set
up Fraser House as a purpose built infrastructure
o
Select
the staff
o
Set
up the intake process and the balanced intake of kinds of Residents
o
Set
up Big Group and Small Group Framework
o
Set
up the Governance Committee process that Residents and their family friend
network attended
o
Set
up tight constraints within Big and Small Groups
This replicates in a peculiar way that life
happens within constraints. Residents had come from psychiatric hospitals and
prisons that were filled with pervasive constraints.
In Fraser House, Yeomans set up a mini life
world[62]
with extremely tight socially ecological
enabling constraints[63]
that set up extremely attractive rich contexts for them to engage the mantra:
Nothing happens unless the locals
want it to happen.
Here we together evolve our reality, and as we
do this we may find ourselves finding our self, and enriching our self.[64]
Yeomans described his role as relational
mediator[65] between those involved
and life’s possibilities.[66]
Yeomans was involved in highly effective
sustained promotional activity. This is discussed later under, ‘Legitimating
Fraser House’. Yeomans typically had a waiting list of people wanting to attend
and or be residents at Fraser House.
Often, ex-Residents would be negotiating
re-entry for a further stay. And this context where people wanted to be
involved also applied to Yeomans’ outreach work where he was setting up micro
therapeutic community houses in Mackay, Townsville, and Cairns; he had no
difficulty obtaining residents.
In Fraser House the ‘locals’ were the Residents
and Outpatients. Yeomans applied the same mantra (Nothing happens unless the locals want it to
happen) during Fraser House Outreach up the East Coast of Australia, across the
Top End, and in his SE Asia Oceania work. The mantra embodies self-help and
mutual-help.
Upon
leaving Fraser House they were leaving the peculiar Fraser House Constraints;
no longer the daily round of activities. However, they now had internalized
Fraser House within them as re-socialized selves.
They
had an extensive repertoire of life competences; they had a new relating with
what things mean (meaning making) – and increasing wellbeing in their life with
others.[67]
They
could recognise themes[68]
and be aware of changing contexts,[69]
and new frames[70], reframes[71]
and new definitions of the situation[72]
relating to their relating to the
reality of everyday life.
This
world is rather crazy, not me!
Another
key component not yet mentioned was that Fraser House Residents in large part
went home on the weekends throughout their stay. This was a weekly reality
check on how they were transforming.
If
any had strife – call on your network of friends and acquaintances over the
weekend, or bring it up in a group on Monday.
Those
interviewed for the PhD said that they could not make any sense what-so-ever of
what actually made Fraser House
‘work’ in having people transform. While the people interviewed were still
working (or participating as Residents or Outpatients) in Fraser House in the
1960s, they had accepted Fraser House worked just like they accepted as a fact
that the sky is blue.
Yeomans himself stated that finding out how Fraser House worked was my research challenge; Yeomans knew how
it worked though he was not going to do my PhD for him (or for me).
Neville never described Fraser House to me or attempted to explain it in
any way. We discussed the limits of explaining and describing many times. In
summary:
‘Explain’ means to make (an idea or situation) clear to
someone by describing it in more detail or revealing relevant facts (facts are
slippery and depend on human interest).
The Romans realised that explaining
involved an abstracting process – the leaving out of the richness of the
original.
The word explain is derived from ex- a word-forming
element; in English meaning usually ‘out of, from’ - from the Latin ex ‘out
of, from within; from which time, since; according to; in regard to’. Explain
is also derived from plain - ‘flat,
smooth’: from the Latin planus ‘flat, even, level’. In combination ex-planus literally meaning ‘out of the plain’ (out of the
two-dimensional); that is, reducing the multi-dimensional to two dimensions.
Yeomans was very wary of explanations (and the inadequacy of ‘describing’).
In place of explaining and describing Neville told stories and told me
to ask my interviewees to tell their stories. He told me to visit Fraser House
building and personally sense the place. He also teed up many contexts of
similar form and therein created contexts for me to experience things of great
potency.
The PhD has been completed[73] and revised and extended
as a biography[74]
on Dr Neville Yeomans’ life work. This Resocializing E-Book has been written as
a stand-alone piece, although reading the Yeomans biography and other
references may enrich understanding.
An associated text, ‘Coming to One’s Senses – By the Way’[75] provides scope to
complement understanding.
This current E-Book also draws upon:
o Berger and Luckmann’s, ‘Social Construction of Reality - A Treatise in the Sociology of
Knowledge’ (1976),[76] and
o Pelz’s, ‘The
Scope of Understanding in Sociology - Towards a More Radical Reorientation in
the Social and Humanistic Sciences’, and
o Clinical Sociology[77]
to explore some of the essence of Fraser House
Re-socializing Ways.
Setting
out in words how Fraser House worked is a near impossible task. You had to be
there. You had to experience it. In fundamental ways words are inadequate.
Words are used sequentially. Sentences are also sequential. Fraser House was
fundamentally a profoundly dense, interlinked, integrated, holistic process. So
much was happening below awareness. So much was happening simultaneously. There
was constant Flux and Flow. There was continually stacked framing, reframing,
functional boundary ambiguity and co-locating of multiple realities.[78] Sometimes the
participants were all together. Sometimes they split up and were in anywhere
from two to eighteen rooms, or scattered throughout the facility.
All
were engaged in this splitting up and re-joining – what Yeomans’ termed
cleavered unity.[79]
What
was happening in different places also had multiple implications for others
involved. So much was laden with multiple implications.
Masses
of significant and potent things were constantly happening
day and night, day in and day out, with multiple things happening at the same
time in the same place every moment – in a word ‘dense’ and in another ‘total’.
In Fraser House, often what was potent was the most simplest of things.[80] And these significant and
potent things were indelibly linked to place – such as the Big Group room.
Yeomans was hyper-aware of the significance of place and Ways to add to and
enrich the significance of place. He stacked significant happenings inside the Big
Groom room. With ‘place’ looming so large Yeomans was well
aware of what has been termed the method of loci (loci being Latin for
"places") – this is a method of memory
enhancing which uses the phenomenon of knowing linked to place and the
associated spatial memory and visualizing linked to the use of familiar
information about place and one's spatial environment to quickly and
efficiently recall information and re-access psycho-emotional resource states.
Happenings within the Big Group room were readily recalled and along with this
recall; the accessing of psycho-emotional resource states accompanying the recalled
experience. Attendees would re-access these resource states whenever they
re-entered the Big Group room.
The
challenge in this E-Book is to have the reader reading the sequential material and progressively receiving information that
has the quality of being ‘stacked’, while shifting beyond ‘stack’ to receiving
the feel and sense of this non-linear dynamic – to sensing the whole-of-it[81] and beginning to get it –
whatever it is. Not your average
academic or non-academic read.
All
involved in the uniqueness of Fraser House as a social system had embodied
experience leading to embodied knowing (typically without the knowing making
much sense) and also to actual transforming (and hardly noticing the difference
– so they did not sabotage their change work) and to moving back to living more
easily in wider society.
Yeomans[82]
suggested that a starting point for PhD research on Fraser House was reading all
of his father’s writings about agriculture.[83]
Yeomans then said that he had extended
the work that he had done alongside his father towards having nature thriving
by adapting ways from nature[84]
to fostering human nature to thrive. At the time this suggestion made little
sense to me. My own preconceptions about what Neville and his father were doing
was massively limiting both my inquiry and my perception and it was many months
later that I did follow Neville’s very sensible suggestion. Without a sense of
the profound linking between nature and human nature and how Yeomans was using
bio-mimicry to evolve his processes one would never plumb the depth of his Way.
Recall that those interviewed for the PhD said that Fraser House was
incomprehensible – to repeat, they had accepted Fraser House worked just like
they accepted as a self-evident fact that
the sky is blue; Fraser House was just there, like the AMP Society[85] - as part of the ‘nature
of things’. The term ‘reify’ applies. ‘Reification’ is the treating of human
phenomena as if they are natural or ‘god-given’ and not human-made and socially
constituted. Fraser House phenomena were legitimated by their very existence as
‘something in the world’. In this context, both the AMP Society[86] and Fraser House were
reified. This process tends to hide the fact that because these institutions
are made by humans they can also be re-made by humans; they are not fixed in
stone. While this incomprehension was going on among my interviewees back in
the 1960s (and still continuing when I interviewed them in 1998 and 1999),
everyone involved with the Unit during the Fraser House years was continually
immersed in the very processes that constituted Fraser House, namely collectively re-constituting their shared
social reality, while simultaneously, all
were individually and collectively being re-constituted by this same social
reality.
While
looking at reification at the institutional level, the same process can happen
to both roles and identity of self and others.
Reification concretises such that the person becomes the role and nothing more.
The distance between the person and the role shrinks. This same reifying process
had contributed to Fraser House Residents’ way of being prior to, and during their incarceration in mental hospital
or prison – they were those types of people. At that time this typing of these people was accepted as
fact by ‘Authorities’:
A
person diagnosed as thing – she’s a neurotic (she IS a neurotic).
She
is here to be contained (in multiple senses) and looked after – not transformed
beyond assigned typing; to be ‘warehoused’ indefinitely and not to be returned
to society.
Similarly,
these ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ had totally identified
with this socially assigned typing
(typification). In self referential description, some were mad types; some were bad types; and some were both mad and bad types. In Fraser
House they began changing the type of people that they were, and sensed they
were.
Herbert
Mead wrote:
A
self can arise only where there is a social
process within which the self has had its initiation. It arises within that
process.
Many
of the Residents when they arrived at Fraser House were ‘no-bodies from
no-where’. Fraser House evolved a very special social process where the
Residents’ selves could have initiation and arise.
Fraser
House was collapsing old dysfunctional reifications at both role and identity level. Self was
being enriched so that Residents began realising their capacity to take on new
types of roles and maintain distance between their various roles and their core self. They became types in the
process of transforming type; being involved in Self realising.
Here
is more of Herbert Mead’s comments on the self:
A
self can arise only where there is a
social process within which the self has had its initiation. It arises
within that process. For that process, the communication
and participation to which I have
referred is essential. That is the way in which selves have arisen. There the
self arises. And there he turns back upon himself, directs himself as he does
others.
He
takes over those experiences which belong to his own organism. He identifies with himself.
What
constitutes the particular structure of his experience is that what we call his
‘thought’. It is the conversation which goes on within the self. This is what
constitutes mind (my italics).[87]
Outside
of notions of type assigned by others, Residents and Outpatients began refining
and fine-tuning their selves in becoming a fine[88] self[89]
All
involved were learning how to be self-made people and collectively-made people
of high worth through high quality mutual-help and self-help while tapping into and evolving their unique potentials
(refer, ‘Realising Human Potentials’).[90]
At
the same time they were taking on the understanding that:
Here
in this Unit, this is what does
happen for all involved, and that
this changework is our primary role,
and that we only have twelve weeks to do all of this, with all the support we
will need, so we can get on with it now.
Fraser
House existed as both an objective
and subjective reality. People could objectively see and hear it in action.
They could also experience it internally
as a subjective experience.[91]
What
made Fraser House work will be explored in terms of externalization, objectivation, and internalization.
Fraser
House way was exploring processes for the ongoing modification of subjective reality.
Residents
and Outpatients were continually having experiences within powerful contexts
that were altering their internal psycho-emotional and physical states of being
in everyday life.
Little
known and apparently not discussed was the fact that they were also
transforming the way they moved their bodies – the way they sat, the way they
stood, and the way they walked.[92]
While
starting as an idea in Yeomans head, Fraser House became an objective reality; an entity existing in
the externally real world. It became, by various processes, there present to
visit and see on Cox Road in North Ryde on Sydney’s North Shore as an
objectively present complex.
People who
participated at Fraser House were constantly engaged in continual exchange between inner and
outer experience.[93]
They were internalising their experience of
the Unit. These processes of externalization,
objectivation and internalization
were not sequential; rather they were all occurring simultaneously as Fraser House evolved. Everyone involved was also
simultaneously externalizing their internal experience of being in Fraser
House while internalising their
experience as an objective reality. Internalising was evidenced by objectively observing Objective
behaviours and deep immersion in intersubjective relating, while flitting
between inner and outer focus is an inherent aspect of the human condition. To use a metaphor, living in Fraser
House was like living in a fishbowl surrounded on all sides by participant
observers who showed sustained interest in you.
All involved
were ongoingly mutually identifying
with each other in a two-fold sense – firstly, as ‘people involved with Fraser
House’; secondly, in this they were also identifying their own identity in the
process of their transforming. In identifying with Fraser House they were
reforming (re-forming) their own identity. They not only shared this
experience, they participated in the experience of each other’s being.
Together they continually
re-constituted these phenomena – the objective reality of Fraser House. They
became significant in each other’s lives. They became significant others.
Many significant
others became guides and mentors into this strange new reality.
These mentors
were one significant representation
of the Fraser House plausibility
structure in the various roles they played; this process was one way
whereby this new reality was mediated to the new arrival.
The
Fraser House process was clearly not insight-based. Knowing theory was not
required. The processes and the experiences and the meanings and understandings
derived from deep immersion in the lived-life experience of Fraser House were
all pre-theoretical.
To
repeat, when interviewed in the 1990s, no staff, Resident or Outpatient had any
idea whatsoever about what made Fraser House Work. This was also admitted by
Professor Alf Clark who was the head of the Fraser House External Research
team. Clark co-authored with Yeomans the book on Fraser House.[94] That book detailed the
Theory, Practice, and Process of Fraser House. However that book gave no
indication whatsoever as to what would have made such Theory, Practice, or
Process work. Professor Clark went on to be head the Sociology Department in La
Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia for fourteen years.
Perhaps
Clark was looking at Fraser House through the framing filters of psychiatry and
psychology such that he never sensed the potency of the sociological framing or the (here we evolve our own way of life
together; our own culture) anthropological framing within Fraser House. Or
perhaps he too was always being swept up in the dynamic experience of Fraser
House.
Some
dynamic was going on that limited his understanding. One big one - people tend
to not notice socialisation in everyday life and yet it is pervasively present.
Recall
that Residents at Fraser House had had socialisation ‘knocked’ out of them.
Fraser House Way was Resocializing them.
This
Way extended to the whole-of-it;[95] the bio, the psycho, and
the emotional aspects. The Way was supporting them all to evolve their own way
of living well with themselves and each other – their way of life. They were
evolving their own culture, in ways supporting enculture.[96]
Yeomans,
in pioneering therapeutic community in Australia was engaging all involved in
evolving a very uncharacteristic community with processes that led to the
emergence of densely interconnecting, inter-relating, inter-depending,
inter-woven aspects conducive to transforming. Fraser Houses, as therapeutic
community, had community (of this
unique kind) as the therapy (wellness change process).
What
was happening was experienced and internalised as subjective bio-psycho-social
embodied experience.[97]
One
resource that came out of the PhD is the Method Section[98] especially aspects
relating to connoisseurship and contemplation in qualitative method that
informed this current E-Book. Another is the paper, ‘The Art of Seeing -
Interpreting from Multiple Perspectives’.[99] Another resource for
making sense of this E-Book is the Natural Living Processes Lexicon – Obtaining
Results with Others.[100] Another more general
resource is Realising Human Potential.[101]
It
is suspected that Dr Yeomans did know at the level outlined in this E-Book, though
passed on nothing to the others involved; and didn’t pass on such knowledge to
me. No knowledge of theory was needed or
required to make the Fraser House Social System work. Yeomans’ experience
was that Fraser House worked because of what was experienced by everyone involved, staff included.
Thinking,
especially thinking about experience interrupts experiencing experience.
Thinking disconnects people from feeling.[102]
The
Fraser House processes had everyone immersed in being aware and emotionally responding
to the moment-to-moment unfolding action, not distracted by being inside of
themselves up in their front brain mulling over theory, or using theory to
sabotage their own and others’ change work, or theorising other people to
everyone’s utter distraction - thinking
driving one to distraction.[103]
Things
happened extremely fast in Fraser House, and all involved stayed present in the
moment. It was reported that the rich energy even had catatonics coming back to respond to what was happening.[104]
In
Fraser House, exploring re-socialising through
social relating was an aspect of the approach. Like that last sentence, the
passive voice form was typically used by Yeomans when he was speaking. He said
that the passive voice softened things as it was less imposing.
Typically,
people arrived at Fraser House with a dysfunctional family-friend network of
five or less. Prospective Residents were required to sign on ten times as an
Outpatient and attend Big Group[105] with members of their typically
dysfunctional family and friend
network also signed on as Outpatients - and all stay for Small Groups.[106] After these attendances
prospective residents may be accepted to become a Resident as long as their
family friend network members committed to continue regularly attending as
Outpatients throughout the Resident’s stay at the Unit.
Because
of lots of integrated processes Residents
left after being in Fraser House for twelve weeks typically with between 50 and
70 people in a now functional family-friend network. These network members also
had a common experience of Fraser House Big and Small Groups.
After
Residents had been in Fraser House for a time, the people who were now in
Residents’ expanding family friend networks were people they were now in close
regular contact with, with varying degrees of emotional closeness and emotional
dependency in the process of transforming to emotional independency. After
leaving Fraser House, Residents could and would attend Fraser House Big and
Small Groups on a regular basis as Outpatient friends of those still in Fraser
House. Additionally, Fraser House Residents could be accepted for up to three
further stays at Fraser House. These processes extended and maintained their
connecting with Fraser House.
Another
key aspect of Fraser House Way was throughput. Fraser House had a continual and
dynamic streaming of people coming into and leaving with those in the process
of preparing to leave with highly evolve Ways passing these on to new arrivals.
People identified
each other and in so doing identified
themselves – as in, enriched their own identity
and sensing of their own self
identity.
For
all involved, Fraser House was there as a ‘self evident compelling reality’. It
was an enclave (closed society) bracketing off the outer world. While before,
overpowering life-at-large was the paramount
reality, upon entering Fraser House, the extraordinary richness of the
Unit’s processes becomes the new paramount
reality. Like the rise and fall of the curtain marks the beginning and end
of the play reality, after Fraser House had been going for a few months any new
arrival would quickly sense that this Fraser House reality was a very different
one to anything they had every experienced before, especially after learning
they had being assessed by a very competent assessment team who were now to be
their fellow Residents.[107] And then finding out these
very assessors had arrived at Fraser
House not long ago with a diagnosis that could be translated as ‘mad’ and/or
‘bad’ [108]
Then
going into the intensity of the first Big Group. All these unusual things were
markers[109]
for this new and extraordinary reality.
Fraser
House was structured by Yeomans as an INMA
- an Inter-people Normative[110]
Model Area. In this context, ‘Area’ has the connotation of place and space –
firstly, a ‘Locality’ – meaning connecting to place, and secondly, a ‘Cultural Locality’ meaning a place where people become connected
together connected to place – in this case, Fraser House.[111] The term ‘enabling
environment’ also applies to Fraser House; where a physical and emotional
(geo-emotional) environment is evolved and sustained where every single aspect
supports all involved to be more able in tapping into and using their unique
potentials.
Exploring
values and norms was a core focus. Yeomans carried out extensive values
research comparing values held by Fraser House Residents and Outpatients with
over 2,000 respondents in Melbourne and Sydney, the largest research study of
its type in Australia at the time.[112]
Yeomans
did not publically use this INMA term in the sixties, though he had the idea of
an INMA and used the idea of ‘model areas’ in his work in normalising culture.[113]
This
may be the place to introduce Neville Yeomans bio-mimicry of the work he did
with his father in evolving sustainable agriculture.
On
their farms the Yeomans supported nature’s naturally occurring self-organizing
processes;[114]
in particular through tapping the freely available potential energy in complex
systems.
Yeomans
used to engage the free energy rather than struggling to fix the stuck energy.[115]
As
an example, Yeomans’ outreach work that he commenced in 1971 in the Atherton
Tablelands in Far North Queensland continues to this day as a self-organizing
social system after his death in 2000.[116]
All
involved in Fraser House would meet, engage and relate with each other in an enabling
environment[117] bracketed off
from mainstream.
They
would explore as differing types –
initially, types deemed to be deviant by authorities within the mainstream
system, and radically affected by the pressures of the mainstream life.
Residents
would arrive at Fraser House typically with one of two particular types of
sympathetic-parasympathetic tuning:[118]
Either:
A.
Under-aroused,
under-active, over-controlled, and
over-anxious
or
B.
Over-aroused,
over-active, under-controlled, under-anxious, talkative, and noisy
Within
these two particular types there was a whole typology of sub-types of actors.
Types of behaviour quickly became a function of context.
Dr
Yeomans was a member of the Committee of Classification of Psychiatric Patterns
of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. In such a
role he well understood psychiatric diagnostic typing though did not use
diagnosis within Fraser House.[119] Notes in Resident
Progress Records would not distance Residents by using impersonal
categorising/descriptors (she IS a psychotic).
In Fraser House, Resident file notes contained
comprehensive life histories, gathered by the Admitting/Assessing Group and the
Progress Group and as an integral aspect of Psycho-Social Research within the
Unit. File-notes were extremely relational - personal, inter-personal,
biographical and containing notes relating to changes in the living experience
of social relating as a type-of-person-transforming-type. Example: ‘Name of
first primary school teacher’ - useful for age regressing to re-access
psycho-emotional resource states.
In telling their own story they are hearing themselves speaking
and recalling past experiences and identifying with these memories, and in this
identifying they are also enriching their own identity (identifying themselves)
and seeing and feeling their lives emerging as having greater meaning and
purpose especially that of supporting and helping themselves as they are supporting
and helping others.
Yeomans
took in new Residents on an intake balanced in many respects:
o Ensuring that there was a balanced spread of people
with the differing mainstream diagnostic categories[120]
o Gender balance
o Half under-aroused and half over-aroused
o Half under-controlled and half over-controlled
o Half under-anxious and half over-anxious
Within
Fraser House everyone apprehended each
other within a typificatory continuum as a type-in-the-process-of-changing-type.
Two
of Type A[121]
were placed in same sex dorm with two of Type B so there was a natural pressure
to move towards a more normal centre; the more aroused becoming less aroused
and vice versa, with similar shifts in the other aspects.
Photo 1 One of the Fraser House Dorms
Typically,
new arrivals found Fraser House to be a massive improvement compared to where
they had been.
They
had the choice of returning to where they had been, or going along with the
norms of this new place. The report from those involved was that Residents
participated and engaged in all of the processes. Every aspect of day-to-day
life in the Unit was somehow ‘massive’ and ‘compelling’.
Some
many of the aspects of the way Fraser House was composed[122] was attractive – it
attracted people. Many people wanted to attend as visitors.
Residents
at first apprehended others and increasingly comprehended others as different,
though specific types within a
dynamic reciprocated typificatory schema.
Simultaneously, types would be
socially re-constituted in typical (typified) ways in the Fraser House typificatory schema.
The
layout of Fraser House (refer diagram below) meant that Residents were
constantly meeting fellow Residents and relating. There was one long corridor
and enclosed pathway running through the Unit. Chilmaid, a Fraser House psychiatric
nurse during the 1960s was one of my interviewees for the PhD. He stated that
during the day when no one was in the upstairs dorms, on a walk from one end of
the Unit to the other when people were outside of activities and generally
milling around before or after dining you would meet or see everyone in the
Unit.
Typically, Residents were continually being present in
social relating. If people were deep inside, others would attract their
attention. This continual passing of each other and engaging in activities set
up continuous verbal and non-verbal reciprocity within expressive acts.[123] A lot of this ‘expressive
language involved what may be called ‘speech acts’,[124] where the
speech is more than an utterance; the speech is an act with transformative consequences.
An example of a speech act
from another context is the words of the marriage celebrant, ‘I now pronounce
you husband and wife together’.
Relating
Well was ‘continually been held up’ as ‘this is what we do here. We all stay
attending to social relating.’
Residents
in face-to-face contact were simultaneously available to each other. The
‘other’ was in many ways ‘more real
to me than I am.’
To
reiterate, this enhanced typical
apprehending of each other was in a two-fold sense.
Within
the concentrated reality of everyday
Fraser House life there was a continuum
of typifications where, in moving through Fraser House everyone would apprehended; then after a time they
would begin comprehending each other
as a type-in-the-process-of-changing-type.
Diagram 1 Map
of Section of Gladesville
Macquarie Hospital
Showing Fraser House as a Set of Six Buildings ringed by roads on the near
right with a Long Pathway from One End to the Other
By
being involved in activities in the Unit, the Residents and Outpatients
participated in the objective reality
of the Fraser House social life world, or to use Benita Luckmann’s term, a
‘small life world’[125]. Residents gained
experience, confidence, and competence in taking on the various roles within
Fraser House. By internalising these roles, they (the roles) become subjectively real to participants.
Residents had the objective experience
of participating. They could take on the idea:
I
am the person doing these roles at Fraser House, and others are confirming I am
doing them well.
After
a time, doing these various
roles became natural, automatic, habitual, hardly noticed, and rarely or never
questioned.
All
of this helped constitute the objective
reality of life in Fraser House, and with this, the reciprocal typifying
comes to have the quality of objectivity.
While
initially, objectivity may be tenuous, the density of the interconnected tasks,
roles, and social actions ‘thickened’ and ‘firmed up’ objectivity.
Now
we’re going to have Big Group......
soon
becomes:
This
is what we do around here.
This
life together starts to be defined (determined with precision) by a widening
sphere of taken-for-granted socially
ecological normative habitualized routines; this in turn sets up the
possibilities for division of labour
and the adopting of tasks and roles requiring and demanding Residents
and Outpatients use a higher level of
attending to what is going on in their respective roles. One attendee of
Yeomans groups stated in writing about Yeomans processes:
They
were good for different people in different ways. It intensifies communication,
that’s what it does. It focuses you. You get down to the specifics of social
and cultural communication rather than just, ‘how’s the weather’?[126]
Residents
and Outpatients who have become competent in a specific task and associated
roles were given the role of mentoring new people to take on these tasks and
roles on the principle:
Here
all tasks and roles are passed to those who cannot
do them so they can learn to do them well with support.
These
roles and role-specific tasks help constitute particular types of relevant being[127]
and action within the continuing role-specific
social action situations. Roles are types
of action by types of actors in such contexts. Further, Fraser House roles
represented themselves. For instance, helping represents the role of ‘helper’.
These
reciprocal typifications were being constantly re-negotiated as people were
transforming in the face-to-face ever-changing located situations where they
were negotiating meaning[128] (Big Group, Small Group,
Governance Committees, etc).
Having
transitory processes that were
being constantly modified by Resident and Outpatient driven community action
was an essential element of the reality of everyday life in Fraser House.
Fraser House as institution itself
typifies individual actors and their actions. All involved begin ‘taking
on’ the Fraser House Way. The institution posits (puts forward as fact) that actions of
type X will be carried out by Residents of type Y. ‘Once you have been here for
a while you will be on the governance
committees and doing social research etc.’
The
helping Resident is not acting on his own, but as helper. Residents were identifying
with these roles, and internalizing
this identifying in enriching and
expanding their own self identity.
Additionally,
the helper role is one part of a dense woven tapestry of roles making up the
conduct of Fraser House Residents – for instance roles such as: assessor,
audience, crowd, mediator, negotiator (especially supporting self and others in
negotiating meaning) role model, facilitator, innovator, researcher, carer,
catalyst, paraphraser, and exemplar.
In
Fraser House there was the continual exploring, trying on, negotiating,
navigating, and experiencing of roles and role-specific behaviours. In any of
these roles the Resident acts as a significant representative of Fraser House.
Later
Yeomans extended his use of roles in Resocializing to setting up what he termed
hypothetical realplay.[129] Participants become
involved in taking on roles (and role specific behaviours) in potent
hypothetical contexts that are very real in their consequences for transforming
with others.
Fraser
House Residents, Outpatients, and all staff were together continually
re-constituting the communal and social reality of their life together in
community. That process was folding back to be individually, socially, and
communally reconstituting firstly, everyone’s being (being-in-the-world) with their own outer and inner states of
conscious and non-conscious experience of their phenomenal experience of their being in the world
with others, and secondly, reconstituting their being-in-the world with others in the
Fraser House extended transitional community, and in this, together constituting their Fraser House social
life world.
The
increasing set of Fraser House roles evolved from the same processes that constituted Fraser House as an institution -
through the internalising of socially
ecological[130] habitualized routines that had been objectified
as routines that could be observed objectively on a daily basis.
As the functional in context was always highlighted, the continual pressure was
towards quality acts – embraced by the Greek term phronesis meaning wise practical acts. These routines also embraced
and constituted tasks and roles that represented and re-presented the Fraser
House institutional order. All conduct by all involved in Fraser House was being
constituted[131]
by these social processes. The roles of Fraser House had a similar constituting
power as every other aspect of Fraser House. This is a reflection of the total nature of the interweaving of
processes within this Unit that Margaret Mead described as total.
While
in one sense Fraser House was a set of buildings on the grounds of Macquarie
Psychiatric Hospital, the human face of this
institution manifested itself[132]
and was represented and re-presented in interacting performed roles. This
was one way Fraser House manifested itself in
human exchange and experience.
Fraser House as institution
soon had its immediate past as history
and the Unit’s transforming processes were being informed by this history that
lived on as repeated stories passed on within Fraser House gatherings and
networked exchange outside of Fraser House. These stories were relived and shared in storytelling when ex-residents and
outpatients got together both inside and outside of Fraser House.
These glimpses of shared experience were framed in story
form and were living on as biography and recallable memory among those involved.
Yeomans in his young life lived with his family among
remote area aboriginal people[133] living traditional
lives and he experienced firsthand the potency of repetition of narrative for
social cohesion and community wellbeing. Narrative therapy was an integral
aspect of Fraser House Way and was a core aspect of Fraser house Research.
While all involved co-constituted Fraser House as
Institution, the institutional framework[134] set limits and
constraints on people that were of their own
making. These limits and constraints set up a framing of contexts (Big Group,
Small Group, Governance Committees and the like) for establishing new patterns
in habitualized conduct leading to transforming in many ways.
Fraser House as Institution was operating at the level
of valued inclination, so people began doing what they were inclined to do. At
the same time, every single aspect of Fraser House was up for constant review.
Within the richness of
Fraser House experience people ‘went with the flow’. There was little sense of
the presence of ‘control’. Anything and
everything could be and was changed in the spirit of inquiry relating to how to
live extremely well together. Everything
was towards open flexible ‘let's try it out’ tentative, not preoccupation with
control.
In Fraser House anything approaching notions of ‘social control’ was under collective control.
There were massive influences towards
transforming. Rather than ‘control’, Fraser House processes enriched
influencers.
In Fraser House Yeomans
applied the latest understandings of complex multivariable systems of motion.[135] For example, looking
at Fraser House through the concept ‘motion’, there may be one or two points in the ‘phase portrait’[136] that
'attracts' the system energy, as in the rest point of a simple swinging
pendulum. From these studies of motion, more complex multivariable systems may
have their movements restricted to what are called 'strange attractors', having
three or more variables. Fraser House as a multivariable system in motion,
continued to have something approaching 'strange attractors' as an essential
aspect adding/ influencing form(s).
A person or group, or aspect would be metaphorically
a 'strange attractor'.[137] For
example, ‘nodal’ people[138] may
influence the complex shape of self-organizing systems by a few strategic
interventions.
This
was a multi-causal process with Yeomans establishing the context for
possibilities.
To
borrow from studies in Chaotic Systems, Neville Yeomans was setting up ‘phase
plains[139]’
and possibilities for the emergence of ‘strange attractors’ influencing
‘multivariable systems’.[140]
Strange Attractors Influencing Multivariable Systems
Fraser House processes continually accessed free
energy[141]
in the system and linked free energy to ‘strange attractors’. An example is the
two residents talking and then one of them linking with the female acquaintance
mentioned in this E-Book.
Gouldner (1970, pp. 222) writes of the
potency of one nodal person:
The
embodied and socialized individual is both the most
empirically obvious human system, and the most complex and
highly integrated of all human systems; as a system, he is far more
integrated than any known ‘social system’. In his embodiment, the biological,
psychological, social, and cultural all conjoin.
And
a single creative individual, open to the needs of other and the opportunities
of his time, can be a nucleus of spreading hope and accomplishment.
Fraser House processes continually supported people learning about
evolving their own personal agency through their embodied experience of their
biologically flexible responding to:
o
their own moving, sensing, feeling, and
o
verbalising in relational social engaging with others
o
in evolving together the Fraser
House culture - as in ‘living well together’
o
with all of this of their own making.
This took place within a culture of continual improvement in tapping
people’s unique potentials[142]
without anyone particularly
noticing any of this.
Professor
Paul Wilson,[143]
psychologist-criminologist writes of this learning how to ‘live well with
others’ in describing his experience of living in Dr Neville Yeomans’
therapeutic community in Mackay, Queensland.
Wilson
was having psycho-emotional difficulties in his life at the time and used his
stay in this therapeutic community house to sort out his life.
Wilson
writes:
Neville
Yeomans created a community free of doctrinaire principles. The Mackay setting
successfully created a sense of belonging. Most people who have experienced
deep personal distress have lacked, in my opinion, any sense of residing in a
group or clan. They, like I, have lived their lives constructing walls around
themselves, to protect themselves from other people. In the process, they have
lacked the knowledge and experience of living in a community.
There
was nothing magical in the process of achieving this sense of belongingness.
Our
day-to-day activities were almost mundane. I would wake up in the morning and
help whoever was up to get breakfast ready. Then as people came in to the
kitchen, we would talk about all sorts of things people talk about over
breakfasts.
Marion
would ask one of us to collect some groceries, or to cut the lawn, or help with
the laundry.
Most
importantly, there were always people around you who you felt cared for you as
a human being. This interconnectedness of person with person was the thread
that bound the community together and gave us a sense of ‘family’ - a unit that
many of us had ignored or not had before.
Wilson
is here highlighting the potency of everyday conversation in maintaining our
subjective reality while living in a world that, in large part, we silently
take for granted.
Given
that Fraser House Residents had been locked out of everyday life in criminal
and psychiatric incarceration (some for many years), an essential feature of
Fraser House processes was reconnecting Residents with the micro aspects of
life (making a bed, paying for a bus ride, keeping things tidy around one’s bed
and the like) with these things adding to Residents’ recipe type knowledge within the Fraser House common social stock of knowledge, with this increasing their
confidence, readiness and pragmatic competence in carrying out routine
performances in everyday life. This was preparing these people to return to
living confidently, competently, easily, and well in society.
Over
the first weeks and months of Fraser House the Residents and Outpatients were key
contributors alongside staff in evolving differing types of habitualized
activities by types of actors. And the reciprocal typification of habitualized
routines instituted Fraser House into a unique institutional form that was itself constituted by all within the
collectivity engaged in mutual help. This soon becomes the now familiar background of shared habitualized
activity that sequentially opens up
differing foregrounds for
anticipating and experiencing social exchange and innovating, with all of this
sitting inside laced with emotion as recent memory. There was some subsequent
deliberating and reflecting. Often everything was a puzzling confusion that
left them alone with their changing self that was not noticing it’s changing,
and hence not sabotaging its change work.
The
nature of the routines ensured that all of the typified habitualized activities
in Fraser House were available and shared in common, even with people who had
been isolates. For example, in a file note in Yeomans’ Archives[144] called ‘colindivism’ he
describes the interactive nature of collective and individual behaviour in
Fraser House. In talking of colindivism, Yeomans spoke about Fraser House as a
place where some people acted as individuals. These people did their own thing,
though linked in with the various micro-networks in the Unit. This linking of
individuals acting as individuals Yeomans called an 'indivity'. Linking of
micro-networks was called a 'collectivity'.
A
linking of an indivity and a collectivity in cooperative activity Yeomans
called a 'colindivity’ - a social form where individuals following their
individual action and interests work well with groups of people who are
following their collective passion and way, and each aspect of this web of
micro-networks and individuals was doing their own thing in a loose
self-organising kind of way. Again these processes soon were accepted as ‘this
is the way we do it here’.
Within
this Fraser House structural framing of
social process in action there was the continual focus on people increasing the quality of their
social relating with themselves
and others thus constituting a social structural overlay of Fraser
House that was, following Berger and Luckmann,[145] ongoingly constituted by the ‘sum total of the typifications among
those involved and of the recurrent
patterns of interaction established by means of them.
Everyday
reality in Fraser House was filled with objectifications
that were framed[146] as, and then in a sense
proclaimed or symbolised as collective
human intention to transform to wellness; every aspect of the Fraser House daily round were such
objectification, e.g. Big Group and Small Group, and all of the other
activities.
Each
Resident, Outpatient, and staff member was constantly interacting with each
other as transforming type engaging
in differing roles in repeated situations
that are typical in this place Fraser
House – for example, Residents being
involved and socially interactive in situations during:
o
Big Group[147]
o
Small Groups[148]
o
Governance Committees[149]
o
At the break between
Groups[150]
- where refreshments were available from the Fraser House kiosk[151] that was Resident-owned,
run, and controlled – an aspect of work as therapy[152]
o
During Psycho-Social
Research[153]
o
Sustained engaging on
the Suicide Watch ‘Specialling’ Duty[154]
o
Six experienced Fraser
House Residents in the Domiciliary Care Group (using the Resident-owned red
Combi Van purchased by Fraser House Residents from the surplus gained from
running their kiosk) visiting Ex-residents to provide Care and Support (before
the Domiciliary Care Group members had become ex-residents themselves) and then
sharing outcomes with the other members of the Domiciliary Care Group following
return to Fraser House[155]
o
Telephone responding
on the 24 Hour Fraser House
Resident-based On-call Community Crisis and Suicide Prevention phone line; and
going on crisis calls with 4-5 other Residents using the Resident-owned Combi
Van [156]
o
Initial and Ongoing
Assessment of Fellow Residents by Experienced Residents[157]
Note
that each of the above involves opportunities to acquire a range of competences
including:
o
concentrating
o
staying present while
sustaining an external focus
o
attending & relating
o
assessing others
regarding the presence of dysfunctional
patterns
o
pattern interrupt[158] of dysfunctional
behaviours
o
spotting role specific
functional in context behaviours
o
supporting others to
be more able
Between
Big Group and Small Groups was a 30 minute break. The Staff would be together
for a review of Big Group.[159] This started with a
report by the[160]
two official observers, and comment by all staff members present, including the
Big Group Leader. Points assessed were:
o Mood, and changes in Mood[161]
o Use of Theme[162]
o Value and Interaction
o The Big Group Leader’s Role[163]
o
Transformational
Processes used, including metaprocesses (that is, processes being used to guide
use of process[164]
From
these reviews came much of the insight[165] and knowledge needed.
The aim was to always look at the community in the ‘BIG’ – as a whole; and this
was certainly no easy matter.[166]
Residents
and Outpatients were allocated to Small Groups by sociological category. This
resulted in continual ‘churning’ of the mix, with everyone meeting and engaging
closely with everyone over time.[167] Both the sociological
category and the composition of small groups varied daily. All the Small Groups
at any one time were based on the same category.
The
social categories were:
(i)
age
(ii)
married/single status
(iii)
locality (a major
contributor to expanding Friendship Networks)
(iv)
kinship
(v)
social order (manual,
clerical, or semi-professional/professional) and
(vi)
age and sex.
Friday’s
Small Groups were made up according to both age and sex for both staff and
Residents. This was the one exception to the non-segregation policy. Often
inter-generational issues, including sexual abuse issues, were the focus of
these Friday groups.
Big
and Small Groups occurred twice a day on Mondays to Fridays. As there were six
categories, anyone always visiting on the same day of any of the first four
days of the week would experience being split up using differing categories[168] – another aspect
increasing the churn towards relating with differing people.
While
in these Small Groups, the different people that they were mixing with and engaging
closely with all had the prior experience of closely attending to each other in
the continually changing Big Group contexts. One of the Fraser House Handbooks
had Notes for Psychiatric Nurses on the Role in Small Groups.[169] This set of Notes was
written by Residents.
Yeomans
set up eight family Units within Fraser House at times with three generations
for transforming inter-generational issues. These people within families
exploring inter-generational issue acted as functional examples for others as they
changed.[170]
These family Units had eight cots for young children..[171] There was evidence that
other residents with histories of family violence, addictions and mental strife
stemming from intergenerational onset could spot the dysfunctional behaviours
in these families in the family units, and find parallels between these
dysfunctional families (in the process of change) and their own transforming
patterns. Yeomans also set up Child-Parent Play Groups as an integral aspect of
these Family Units.[172] Dr Terry O’Neill who
mentored me in Student Counselling at La Trobe University pioneered these Child
Parent Play Groups at Fraser House. Warwick Bruen, one of my PhD interviewees
continued these Play Groups after Terry came down to Melbourne.
Fraser
House had its own structuring that
was generating order within the daily round of life in the unit that varied from
time to time by the Residents and Outpatients mutually helping of each other as
one example of the externalizing of
the internal subjective experience[173] of all involved as the
Fraser House objective reality.
An
example of the routine Monday to Friday rollout:
o Rise, shower, dress, making one’s bed
and attend to the ward neatness
o Breakfast (including social exchange
before, during, and after)
o Big Group (1 hour) – intense interaction
as participant, focal person, audience and/or crowd
o Refreshment Break (30 min) (Snacks and
Drinks from Resident-run kiosk -
co-mingling with Outpatients[174]
o Small Groups (1 hour) intense
interaction as focal person, participant, audience
o Lunch and free time
o Governance Committee Work
o Resident Involvement in Research[175]
o Other groups and activities including
work as therapy[176]
o Recreation – one end of Fraser House was
the recreation centre, the other was the dining room[177]
o Evening Meal
o Big Group (1 hour)
o Refreshment Break (from Resident-run
cafe) – co-mingling with Outpatients
o Small Groups (1 hour)
o Recreation
o Learning how to do the gentle social
banter while getting ready for bed, before and after lights out.[178]
All
of the above became habitualized and shared.
It’s
what we all do in this place. All of this is how this place works, and what we
do, and when we do it.
Below
is some aspects of life within a Therapeutic Community[179] evolved by Yeomans that
he modelled on Fraser House:
o
A community free of
doctrinaire principles
o
A setting successfully
creating a sense of belonging
o Participants having a strong sense of
residing in a group or clan
o Having the knowledge and experience of
living in a community
o Sensing belongingness
o Outside of the groups, committees, and
research many aspects of day-to-day life were almost mundane
o Waking up in the morning and then as
people came in to the dining room talking about all sorts of things people talk
about over breakfasts
o Always people around you who you felt
cared for you as a human being
o Having interconnectedness of person with
person as the thread binding the community together and giving a sense of ‘family’
- a unit that many involved had ignored or not had before
The
transformative experiences were available to everyone involved, even the
cleaners. Each of my interviewees stated that the cleaners were a most
insightful group as they were actually the closest staff to the Residents. The
cleaners[180]
were seeing everything that was going on and hearing all of the small talk.
Each
of my interviewees stated that the most experienced people in this new area of
using community (albeit of a very special kind) as the therapy were the
Residents towards the end of their three months stay.
This
was because Residents lived totally immersed in the Fraser House process all
day every day.
The
cleaners came next in experience of community therapy as they worked close to
the Residents everyday (more so than the professional staff) and they also
attended the Big and Small Groups.
The
professional staff were all new to this form of therapy including Yeomans
himself. They were pioneering this treatment form in Australia. Nothing in the
professional staff training had prepared them for community therapy.
In many ways their Professional training may well have been
a hindrance in Fraser House as they would have had a continual and massive
overlay of 'what does my professional preparation 'say' to do in this context?.’
This would have been continually intruding into their
consciousness as they were doing internal scans of an ever present ‘if this
then that' template for relevant theory driven 'what to do now' that was not
helpful or particularly relevant in engaging 'authentically' in surrendering[181] and staying fully present in the here and now with others
- in being real rather than being 'professional' - and having internal
dialogues about their experience that would continually be getting in the way
and interrupting their experiencing
of their experience.
Constant
and sustained interrupt[182] of dysfunction was a core process at
Fraser House – ‘there’s no madness or badness here’. For examples from life of
using sudden and unexpected interrupt[183] for transforming behaviour, refer Coming to One’s Senses – By the Way.[184]
In the 1960s all Mental Hospital patients were expected to exhibit madness. All
prisoners were expected to be bad. In
stark contrast, within Fraser House, everyone - staff, Residents and visiting
Outpatients alike lived with the continually repeated injunction – ‘No madness or badness in Fraser House’.
There was sustained interrupting[185] of any and every
micro and macro incidence of madness and badness.[186]
Feldenkrais
writes on the potency of
interrupting and dis-integrating habits in changing
emotional and kinaesthetic states (in simple terms ‘how we feel’) temporarily
or potentially, permanently:
A
fundamental change (read as ‘interrupt’) in the motor basis within any single
integration pattern will break up the cohesion[187] of the whole and thereby leave thought and
feeling without anchorage in the patterns of their established routines.
If
we can succeed in some one in bringing about a change in the motor cortex, and
through this a change in the coordination of or in the patterns themselves, the
basis of awareness in each elementary
integration[188] will disintegrate (1972, p.39).[189]
What
they were exploring in Fraser House were ways that worked in breaking up
dysfunctional habitual patterns. Feldenkrais pointed out that potentially, the
easiest entry point for total system transforming of part and whole is through transforming moving. A subtle aspect of
Yeomans way was closely observing how a person stood and moved and sat.[190].
He
was very interested in the sociology of the body[191] and the link between motion and emotion. [192]
Germaine
to sociology of the body is that Gouldner[193]
quote mentioned:
The embodied and socialized individual is
both the most empirically obvious human system, and the
most complex and highly integrated of all human systems; as a system, he is
far more integrated than any known ‘social system’. In his embodiment, the biological,
psychological, social, and cultural all conjoin.
And a single creative individual, open to
the needs of other and the opportunities of his time, can be a nucleus of
spreading hope and accomplishment.
Yeomans pioneered Resident committees in the mental health context
within Australia. Yeomans set up a process whereby Residents and their
family-friendship networks, as Outpatients, were massively involved in meetings
and committee work. Residents and Outpatients effectively became responsible
for the total administration of Fraser House.
Appendix 13 in the Biography on Yeomans life lists the Roles and
membership within the various committees.[194]
Members of Residents’ family friendship networks were required to sign
on as Fraser House Outpatients and to attend Big and Small Groups. As well,
they would be expected to offer themselves for election to serve on committees
and to begin to recognise when they were ready for this role. Others would
accept or reject them to stand for election, and vote for them during
elections, depending on how they were progressing in Big and Small Groups and
in the other Fraser House activities. If they needed to devote more time to
personal transforming they would not be selected for committee work in the
current round.
They would be encouraged to keep on with their change-work and
encouraged to aim for election to committee work in the near distant future and
to begin imagining themselves in these roles (future pacing[195] themself as mental
rehearsal for a new way of being and being in the world).
Fraser House Residents and Outpatients progressively took on
responsibility for their own democratic self-government and governance. This is
fully consistent with Yeomans’ exploring of epochal
transition[196] – how to create
global change to better ways of living in wider society. Yeomans referred to
Resident-based rule-making as creating ‘a community
system of law’.[197] Law evolved out of
evolving Fraser House lore.
As the Fraser House activities evolved there were more and more
structured activities that Residents and Out-patients could be involved in. For
example, the Fraser House vehicle for evolving democratic self-governance[198] initially was a
committee that decided the ground-rules for ward life called appropriately the
Ward Committee. Then other Committees were added till there were ten committees
in the Governance Process that mirrored the roles of every section of Fraser
House’s administration.[199]
Residents and Outpatients were elected to go on these committees by the
staff, Residents, and Outpatients. [200]On every Fraser House
committee, each committee member had one vote. Residents and Outpatients
outnumbered staff on all committees. This meant that Residents and Outpatients
could always out-vote staff by collaborating and cooperating.
Everyone
in these different Committees was also automatically a member of the
Parliamentary Committee. All committees reported to the Parliamentary
Committee. Then a few experienced Residents and Outpatients were elected onto
the Pilot Committee that was like the Privy Council in the Westminster system.[201] The Parliamentary
Committee would refer things to the Pilot Committee. This often happened.
Yeomans set the committee ground rules such that he always had a power of veto.
Dissenting people who felt strongly enough about a decision could take it
before Yeomans and the decision would be held over till he attended the
particular committee where people would present their views.
Yeomans said[202] that he rarely
overturned a decision made by Residents and Outpatients where staff dissented,
as by Yeomans’ reckoning after due consideration, the Residents generally held
the better stance.
In Yeomans’ paper, ‘Sociotherapeutic Attitudes to Institutions’ and
consistent with creating ‘cultural locality’ he wrote:
Patient committees formalize the social
structure of the Residents’ sub-community change’.[203]
Yeomans being ‘dictator’ satisfied the Health Department’s requirements
for top-down control.
However, Yeomans said[204] that he was a
‘benevolent dictator’ and the Residents and Outpatients effectively ran the
place – and by all accounts, they ran it effectively. This was confirmed by my
interviewees.
The
structures and process of the committees were being continually fine-tuned.
Chapters Eight and Nine of Clark and Yeomans’ book[205]
contain a detailed description of the Resident/Outpatient committees at one
point in time.
Diagrams
Two and Three below adapt the top-down traditional organization chart in Clark
and Yeomans’ book.[206]
Yeomans had suggested Diagram Two back in December 1993 and reaffirmed it in
Sept 1998; it shows ‘Resident - Outpatient controlled’ committees, and the
staff devolving their traditional roles to become healers[207]
- meaning to make whole; to
integrate.
Yeomans[208]
said that his book with Clark had not made the comprehensive devolving of
normal duties by staff clear enough to readers.
The respective roles that were devolved to the
committees were (in alphabetical order):
o administrator
o charge nurse
o nurse
o psychiatrist
o occupational
therapist, and
o social worker
These are depicted by the darker boxes.
The various committees that took on aspects of
the foregoing roles are shown in the lighter boxes.
All of the governance committees shown in
Diagrams Two and Three below were isomorphic with mainstream administrative
cleaving of Fraser House’s Administration team that mirrored the rest of
Macquarie Psychiatric Hospital (even following the Federal Government’s
Parliamentary Review Committee - the Fraser House Pilot Committee, and using
the term ‘Parliamentary Committee’).
The Diagrams also indicate the staff standing
down from their professional (do things to and for others as expert) roles and
the taking on of the Enabler Role - as in supporting the psyCommons among
others engaging in mutual-help.
Given the emphasis on socialising within Fraser House the role of the
Social Worker became very significant
and like all the other professional staff, the social workers role was
transformed to being an enabler of self help and mutual help in social relating
and networking among all involved as well as supporting three committees in the
Governance Process:
o
Out-patients and Friends Committee
o
Rehabilitating Committee, and
o
the Follow-up Committee which worked closely with the
Resident-based Domiciliary Care Group.
Diagram 2
Resident Committees and the Staff Devolving their Traditional Roles to Become
Healers
Diagram 3 Recast
of Diagram Two
Every aspect of this committee structure and process was co-evolved by
the Residents and their family and friends signed in as Outpatients. They
helped constitute it, and then they were being re-constituted through their
involvement.
Yeomans
spoke of three levels of governance at Fraser House – local, regional, and
global. Each Resident with their family-friendship network was engaged in their
own local self-governance. The Committee for Locality Based Transport – the
Outpatients, Relatives and Friends Committee was engaged in ‘regional’
self-governance. The Parliamentary-Pilot committees, in association with the
other sub-committees of the Parliamentary Committee were engaged in ‘global’
self-governance of the Fraser House ‘global commons’. This is a micro-model of
the ‘Local Regional Global Self-Governance’ model that Neville detailed in his
‘On Global Reform’ paper.[209]
Thursday
morning Big Group was ‘administrative only’.
During
a 1998 interview/conversation with Neville, he stated that any attempt to bring
up an administrative matter in a therapy group was deemed to be ‘flight’ and
was interrupted with compassionate ruthlessness. Any attempt to bring up a
therapy matter during an administrative group was deemed to be ‘obstruction’
and deferred.
This
set up the context with the theme ‘discovering how to change, organize and
administer’ their individual and collective reality and evolving competence in
the associated administrative tasks and roles; and then identifying with all of
this.
During
Administrative Big Group administrative matters were discussed and Resident and
Outpatient Committee elections were held under the auspices of the
Parliamentary Committee. During this Thursday morning Big Group, reports were
received by the Parliamentary Committee from all of the other committees. This
meant that everyone at Fraser House for Thursday Morning Big Group not part of
the Parliamentary Group (Residents, Outpatients, Staff, and Visitors) became Audience for the Parliamentary Group.
This necessitated Committee Members acquiring report writing and report
delivery competences and the capacity to respond to matters raised by the
Parliamentary Committee.
Residents and Outpatients were involved
in this reporting process. Outpatients came to the Unit to participate in the
committee structure.
The presence of this large Audience for
the Parliamentary Group added ‘performance pressure’ on Group Members as well
as other audience effects. It also meant that everyone knew what was happening
in the various Committees.
The Thursday Administration Group’s sorting out aspects of how
Fraser House as a social system was organized was a major contributor to
socialising both Committees members and all the onlookers (other staff,
Residents, Outpatients and visitors. They were literally all together constituting their reality - their
culture
- their way of life together.
This is similar to the UK experience of re-socializing and
reconnecting the returning prisoners of war with society following the end of the Second World War.
Perhaps it may be timely to reiterate that the people
who had been previous assigned to the category of the mad or the bad were the
ones involved in all of this Fraser House meticulous discussion, reporting, and
decision making. They were involved with administering this large facility with
over 20,000 Outpatient visits a year.
‘Signification’
means, the representation or conveying of meaning. A special case of objectification
in Fraser House was signification.
Many aspects of Fraser House life were marked[210]
in many ways as significant by the
use of signs with an explicit imbedded intention to operate
as a carrier of subjective meanings.
Back
to the minutia of the Unit - a special case of signs was the display throughout
Fraser House of actual signs up on
walls showing slogans such as:
o Bring it up in the Group[211]
o The Wisdom is in the Group
o In Fraser House we get on with our changework
o We are all Co-therapists
o No mad or bad behaviour to take place in Fraser House
o No one is sick all through
o You can only stay three months so get on with your
changework
o Here everyone has an equal voice
Staff
had their own slogans; examples:
o Know what to leave undone in an emergency
o Frequent rounds are a necessity
o Combine the weak with the strong
These
signs as physical objects were placed up on walls with objective messages of subjective intention.[212]
The messages on these signs were capable of:
o being ‘detached’
from time and place, and
o
mediated through
the mediating presence of bodyminds
o
internalised
as internal mantras that could be recalled by self and others
o
influencing
inclination and pre-disposition
o
being used in evolving
guiding principles
o
being recalled objectively and available later, and
o
being used extensively
in social relating – e.g. as in the two residents talking about Jane mentioned
in this E-Book
On
one occasion a sign was put up especially for one catatonic woman who a cleaner
discovered was a talented artist.
He
saw her drawing a beautiful horse during a lucid moment. The sign in front of
where she sat during the day had ‘Mural Space’ written on it in large letters.
Beside her chair were pots of water-based paint and a jar of large brushes, a
jar of water and a rag to wipe washed brushes. Soon this ‘catatonic’ was more
‘artist’ as she became busy creating murals throughout the unit![213]
Both
the slogans ‘the survival of the fitting’ and ‘get on with your own change
work’ guided participants involved in acknowledging reciprocal typification[214]
in interlocking habitualized action of differing types.[215] This links to Marx’s[216] proposition ‘Man’s
consciousness is determined by his social Being’. Notice how individual
transforming is linked into the communal transforming with this simultaneously
supporting all individuals.
Residents
and Outpatients were constantly reminded by staff, as well as other Residents
and Outpatients of the slogan ‘In Fraser
House we get on with our changework’. These and other simple slogans were
used and publically displayed to reinforce this principle as a guide to
action.
In
Clark and Yeomans’ book Fraser House, ‘The Theory, Practice, and Evaluation of
a Therapeutic Community’[217] there is a Resident’s
personal diary where he records a significant trivial conversation between
himself and another male Resident that helps him. In the weeks before this
conversation these two had their sense of ‘attending
closely to their ongoing engaging’ ramped up by their experience of the
intense Fraser House milieu.
What
is said may on first hearing seem fairly simple. The diarist writes of another Resident
telling him words to the affect:
If
you’re having strife, bring it up in the
group; were all co-therapists.[218]
Have
you talked to Jane about it?[219]
No
I have not.
Why
don’t you? She’s been leaning on you for so long now, why not turn the tables
for a change and let her help you?
I
haven’t thought of it, but it sounds logical enough.[220]
The
first speaker is drawing upon his Fraser House knowledge of how the relevances were distributed throughout
Fraser House both within the Unit’s stock
of knowledge and within the specific
stock of knowledge in particular
Residents and Outpatients – which ones had relevant
psychosocial and emotional resources that may be a resource within the current context – in this case, Jane was
probably a very good resource. This is resonant with Postle’s writing of the
psyCommons.
Let’s
explore this for a moment. Many of the relevance structures in Fraser House
were generally shared particularly in the one hour Big Group followed by 30
minutes of social mixing (and letting go some of the emotional charge generated
by Big Group) between Residents and Outpatients (where a lot of the extending
of friendship networks occurred). The thirty minute refreshment break was
followed by one hour Small Group. This pattern was repeated twice a day Monday
to Friday. This particular pattern of activity supported the objective issue with respect to
embracing the integrating of the separate relevances in Fraser House. The
Parliamentary Committee formed the same integrating function within the ten
committees within Governance Therapy.
With
the facilitating patterns and processes evolved by Yeomans, other Big Group
Facilitators began drawing the attention of everyone in Big Group to the role specific functional[221]
bits of everybody who became the focus of Big Group attention from moment
to moment.
This
contributed to a filtering for excellence
in social relating by having the audience focused on the functional and not
attending to dysfunctional and being readily able to distinguish between the
two.[222] Another competence was
recognising their own dysfunctional
behaviours in the behaviour of other.
Goodness,
that’s the very thing I’ve been doing all the time!
In
recognising themselves in other’s behaviours, then adding the role specific
functional behaviours to their own repertoire, this minimised the passing on of
dysfunction into the common stock of
knowledge, so that it became the
repository of ‘what works’.
Establishing
many activities and specific associated roles[223] that were shared by some
of the Residents entailed that there was a social
distribution of knowledge that could be separated into general relevance knowledge and role-specific
relevance knowledge.
Other
Residents ended up having a shared understanding as to who were the ‘go to’
people in the Resident Outpatient collective in terms of specific kinds of
understanding, competence, fit, or support, e.g. Jane.
This
is why the Resident could easily find the idea of asking Jane. Jane was both a
potential resource, and already part of
the other Resident’s Network.
The
common stock of knowledge in Fraser
House had a social base and was a
resource in social change. The
wisdom[224]
within this evolving common stock of knowledge is resonant with Postle’s
concept, ‘psyCommons’.
The
two Residents engaged in discussion knew that this fellow’s friend Jane was a
possible resource.
In
saying the few words -
If
you’re having strife, bring it up in the
group; were all co-therapists.[225]
Have
you talked to Jane about it?
No
I have not.
Why
don’t you? She’s been leaning on you for so long now, why not turn the tables
for a change and let her help you?
Ideas
and suggestions tumble as it were out of the Resident in spontaneous flow. He
does not have to think. Ideas just flow as this Resident hears himself as he
speaks.
His
own subjective meanings are being
made continuously and objectively
available[226] to himself and
hence even more meaningful.[227]
The
Resident’s own language has an inherent
quality of reciprocity that distinguishes it from any other sign system. As
these two Residents spoke with each other there was a continuous synchronised
reciprocal access to both of their subjectivities in intersubjective[228] exchange made
objectively available and subjectively heard making everything more real
including themselves – their respective selves.
Notice
that the speaker is:
o hearing himself engaging in the roles of helper and
enabler
o identifying with these roles
o recognising and
acknowledging the other as a helper
in need of help within a community
identified as co-therapist helpers.
The
speaker is also entering into another significant Fraser House role – that of
the facilitator mediator[229]
between this Resident and Jane. In this process he is increasing his
identifying with his emerging self
identity that embraces himself as a helper of himself and others.
This
rich theme of ‘helping’ is conducive to his own integrating and becoming more
readily available as a response to anyone asking ‘who are you?’ Married
together in this brief exchange between these Residents were two differing
modes of language – firstly,
statements of being (having strife;
you have difficulty) and secondly,
statements of action (helping your
friend; ask her for support).
The
above has been a glimpse of the potential
potency of small moments in Fraser House, where the re-constituting of
these two Residents by themselves with each other, while setting up connecting
to Jane and the wider collective was profoundly social in nature. Each of the
three show evidence of internalizing Fraser House Way.
Jane
did become involved in the helping role aiding her potential transforming, with
the three of them raising this in Big Group, and in the process hearing
themselves speaking about their helping and becoming role models and examples
for others.
At the end of this Resident’s diary it is clear by what
he writes that he has transformed.
Equally, the way he writes makes clear that he does not know he has transformed. He writes that he is ready to
leave and that he has been assessed by his peers in the Assessment Team as
being ready to leave Fraser House and return to the wider world. Nowhere in his
diary does he give any indication
that he has any insight[230] whatsoever about the process whereby change to
wellbeing and functional living is occurring in his life, or that such change
is even occurring. Change is largely occurring below awareness similar to
primary socialization. He has taken on new functional habitual responses. At the same time he was not engaging in any
intellectual sabotage of his change-work – behaviours like faultfinding,
judging, blaming, and condemning. Clark and Yeomans had not commented on the
above features of the young man’s diary.[231] This is an example of self-help through mutual-help.
While these exchanges seem trivial, Neville and the other interviewees said
that time and again the Fraser House experience was that trivial exchange could
be potent.[232]
Warwick
Bruen, a psychologist who facilitated Fraser House Big Group many times stated
in 1998 that attending Big Group was challenging in the extreme, though at the
same time extremely rewarding.[233] In this dysfunctional
tangle there continually emerged themes[234] that held everyone’s
interest – that everyone resonated with – that is, themes ‘conducive to
coherence’.[235]
Yeomans spoke of Fraser House processes generating strong affective (emotional)
states wherein all involved may experience ‘emotionally corrective experience’
of their own making. This may happen when experiencing
something first-hand that challenges a previously held distorting and/or false
belief.
Big
Group explored themes that emerged from Day Sheets that were posted on the wall
prior to each Big Group. Staff, Residents and Outpatients would make entries
upon these Day Sheets that were read out at the commencement of each Big Group.
Themes for Big Group were selected from those on the Day Sheet by the Big Group
attendees-as-community based upon significance.[236] These themes had the
property of being conducive to, or supporting coherence in the Group because
they spanned multiple spheres of reality relevant
to those present in Big Group. These
themes may lift people above where they currently are and engage forms of
linguistic modes and relating whereby transcendence
may naturally follow.[237] This language may be termed symbolic language where what is spoken
is laden with significance.[238]
Yeomans noted that the commencing of a theme influenced the social topography
in the room – sensing metaphorically ‘who took the high ground’, who tended to
be ‘front and centre’, and who ‘hid in the cracks and crevices’. He also
noticed that a change of theme resulted in instant change in social topography.
All were mentored in noticing these shifts.[239]
Once under way in Big Group, Yeomans as facilitator (and model for
others preparing to lead Big Group) would select out of the flow of
conversation the bits that were ‘role
specific functional in context’.[240]
Everyone present was therefore hearing
the sum total of the ‘good bits’ being drawn to their attention (amongst a lot
of dysfunctional behaviour), and these ‘good bits’ would be continually
reflected back to the group and internalised and added to the common social stock of knowledge in
Fraser House.[241] The 'best bits’ would be added to 'social stock of wisdom' within
the Fraser House social life world.
Typically,
little attention is paid to differing realities. Let’s consider a few. We have the rise and
fall of the curtain marking the beginning and end of the play reality. We have
the traditional formats at the beginning and end of movies. We’re familiar with
the dream reality. In the newspaper cartoon, the cartoon frame marks the
enclosure of the cartoon reality. We do not find the cartoon character snoopy
wandering around on the stock exchange report. In all of these realities, the
paramount reality is everyday life. Within Fraser House, the high frequency of
conversation enhanced its reality-generating
function. Everyone was continually being involved in adding to, enriching, and
drawing upon the Unit’s common social stock of knowledge. The collective participating
in this process facilitated the locating
and co-locating[242] of individuals in the
Fraser House society (for example, Jane) and the relating with them in fitting
ways contributing to the survival of the fitting. Residents and Outpatients
were evolving their common social stock of knowledge comprising an extensive
range of relevances relating to living well through relating well with
understanding of the relevance structures of others.
Yeomans
was familiar with Elton Mayo’s[243] Hawthorne experiments during
1927-32 into the effect of changing working conditions on productivity amongst
assembly workers. Mayo found that productivity increased each time progressive
improvements were made to working conditions.
Then
Mayo did a strategic thing – he progressively took away the changes in working
conditions and productivity increased even more. He then took away some of the
benefits that the workers had had originally and still productivity increased.
Mayo
concluded that the change component was not so much the various ‘treatments’ of
the research - rather that it was that the researchers were acknowledging the
workers’ dignity and worth, and showing an interest in them. Change was linked
to the emotional experience of being research subjects. Similarly to Mayo’s
work, Fraser House Residents and staff were the focus of continual research by
Fraser House researchers and the outside research team headed up by Alfred
Clark. Residents were being continually asked to reflect on themselves, other Residents, other staff, Big Groups,
Small Groups and on every aspect of Fraser House as well as aspects of wider
society.
Residents
became involved in both qualitative and quantitative research data gathering as
well as in analysing the data and discussing the results and implications of
the research. Yeomans had the Residents
themselves learning about then participating in all aspects of research process
– including:
o Selection and Formulation of Research Issues
o Research Design
o Exploratory and Descriptive Studies
o Designing Questionnaires
o Data Collecting
o Questionnaires and Interviewing
o Quantitative and Qualitative Methods
o Analysing and Interpreting
o Writing Research Reports
o Applying Research Findings
o Relating the Findings to other Knowledge
Fraser
House Resident and Outpatient involvement in Researching themselves, Fraser
House and the wider world embraced the full gamut of the Research endeavour
including:
o Residents and Outpatients introducing
other Residents and Outpatients to the social research process
o providing their peers experiences for
evolving competences to do all of the aspects of quantitative and qualitative
social research (learning by doing)
o evolving themes to explore
o evolving the research design
o evolving questionnaires and other
research resources
o pretesting resources
o validating resources
o establishing reliability within these
resources
o evolving competence in interviewing
including depth interviewing
o carrying out interviews or other data
gathering research
o doing data analysis
o drawing conclusions
o writing up the research
o preparing papers for possible publishing[244]
o merging the findings with other findings
from Fraser House research
o involving innovative ways to use the
findings within Fraser House processes
Yeomans was using all of this research as
therapy (beyond the Hawthorne Effect
– not only showing and interest in those being research {the residents and
Outpatients}, also actually involving them in the research as co-researchers).
Through
all of this research, Residents learned about the difference between quantitative and qualitative research[245] as well as about the
notions and guides to behaviour ‘trustworthiness’, ‘validity’, ‘reliability-testing’,[246] and ‘triangulation’, and
how these are very useful notions as part of living in a modern community,
especially one with extensive pathology.
In
engaging Residents and Outpatients in this Research, Yeomans was enriching the
psyCommons. He was not training Residents and Outpatients to enter the psy-professions. One Resident
(ex-prisoner) did go on to be a personal assistant to a criminologist.
Residents
were supported in sensing what may be valuable aspects to research within
Fraser House contexts and society at large. For example, Yeomans[247] carried out extensive
values research based on the concepts of Florence Kluckhohn.[248]
In
Kluckhohn’s[249] paper,
‘Dominant and Variant Value Orientations’ (1953, p. 342-357) she identifies
five basic human issues common to all peoples at all times and all places. From
these emerge value orientations that Kluckhohn identified that speak to the
assumptions that we make about ourselves and our relating to each other and the
world, which in turn, guide our actions.
a.
What are the innate predispositions of man? (basic human nature
b.
What is the relation of man to nature?
c.
What is the significant time dimension?
d.
What is the valued personality type?
e.
What is the dominant modality of the relationship of man to other men?
The following questions
based on the above were asked in Neville’s values research:
a)
The nature of the universe In the range ‘is basically good or makes
sense’ through to ‘is basically bad or pointless’
b)
Human nature In the range ‘good or sensible’ through to ‘bad or
senseless’
c)
Can mankind change itself or be changed? Yes, Perhaps or No
d)
Man-nature - what matters
Activity – Who do you take notice of
e)
Direction – Self, Others, What fits
Degree – Unimportant, moderate importance, important
f)
Time important Future, present, past
g)
Verticality place Above, level, below
h)
Horizontality place Centre, between edges, out one edge
Yeomans
in this values research was encouraging all involved to explore basic
human issues common to all peoples – exploring the very essence of their being
– and their being in the world with others.
Fraser
House values research was followed up by questionnaires being completed by over
2,000 people in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane - the three largest cities in
Australia. Neville[250] had placed a Survey
called, ‘The Survey of the Youth of Victoria’ in his Collected Papers Archive.
This survey (using Neville’s values questions as one part of the survey) was
conducted by the Good Neighbour Council and the Commonwealth Department of
Immigration Survey Section, Canberra during 1967. There were 1,035 informants
and 1,017 used in final analysis.[251]
During
1963-1966, research by nurses in Fraser House was supervised by Yeomans.
Neville gave preliminary training to nurses in research methods [252] and also trained the
social worker in research methods. At one time Neville arranged a Fraser House
Research workshop with twenty five associated projects.[253]
As
an example, Fraser House Residents were involved in rating Resident
participation and improvement.[254] In answering, Residents
were not only being encouraged to notice healing micro-experiences (experience
of little bits of behaviour that may contribute to healing), they were
receiving the strong positive emotional experience of forming and expressing
opinions during social relating and experiencing that their opinions were
valued, and that what they thought and felt about things mattered and was
valued as being of value.
Having
come from conflicted family environments where contradictory communication[255] was the norm, doing
reality testing and checking the practical usefulness, validity and relevance
of their observations was valuable. Residents and Outpatients would start
discussing a very diverse range of topics and in the processes evolve their
capacities in forming, expressing, and evaluating opinion and making insightful
and useful observations about human interaction.
There
were also multiple simultaneous Social Action projects to be involved in
supported by academically qualified social researchers among the staff.[256]
The
Internal Research group also had liaison with Alf Clark and other members of
the Outside Research team, as well as with the Psychiatric Research Study Group
that met on the Fraser House Grounds (see later).
Residents
could also be involved in the Domiciliary Care Work and the Crisis Callout
work. Research extended to these two activities as well.
A
massive amount of biographical data was accumulated on every Resident.[257]
An
indication of the way Residents and Outpatients were being extended in their
attitudes, outlook, and identity were research topics such as:
Landscape Planning
Attitudes Questionnaire
Attitudes towards
Overseas Trade
Given
all of these opportunities to engage in research and other activities, anyone
using role specific activity to hide from doing their own change work would very quickly have this pointed out and they
would be supported by their peers to cut back their workload on research,
committee work, and other activity.
From
the Biography:[258]
Residents
were encouraged to have balance between committee work and self-healing. There
was also an element of self-healing in being immersed in the socialising and
sorting out how to live and work well with others within the committee work.
Isolates were learning to re-socialize and form relationships with other
Residents and Outpatients.
The
Committee work required acquiring and using a wide range of personal and
interpersonal communicating skills.
Participants
were encouraged to recognize and respect their own needs and those of others.
This is a reason why the committee work was called the ‘Resocializing Program’.
Any
person ‘hiding’ from their own change-work by being too busy in committee work
soon had other Residents pointing this out to them.
If
Residents put themselves forward for elections too earlier in their stay,
Residents and staff alike would be suspicious of them being on a power trip or
avoiding personal change work and would challenge them about this, or raise the
issue in Big or Small Groups.
The
same thing would apply to a person seeking to serve on many committees.
In closing this segment on Identifying with Transforming
Action perhaps it’s timely to revisit a prior paragraph.
All involved in Fraser House were ongoingly mutually identifying with each other in a
two-fold sense – firstly, as ‘people involved with Fraser House’; secondly, in
this they were also identifying their own identity in the process of their
transforming. In identifying with Fraser House they were reforming (re-forming)
their own identity.
They not only shared this experience, they
participated in the experience of each other’s being.
Objectivising[259] occurred during Fraser House happenings that were
experienced as externalised objective
phenomena [260] happening in the here
and now – the outcomes of human exchange and activity. Fraser House as
institution was objectivated by human
activity.
This
shift has Fraser House becoming real
in a massive way. Once Fraser House started to accept Residents and Outpatients
who were not there at the founding of
the Unit, and did not have that experience as a part of their biography, these
next and later generation Residents were inducted into the history, and
folklore of the Unit. They received the Fraser House ‘way’ as an existing objectivity that was introduced
as ‘this is how this place works’.
Every
aspect had the pre-existing character of objectivity.
New Residents met older Residents who were apprehended as already having a biography
saturated in potent Fraser House
experiences located within the objective
history of the Unit.
I witnessed the upstairs dorm incident.[261]
Then there was the cobalt blue scrotum incident – the effect
was huge! [262]
The
next generation received the body of
Fraser House knowledge, structure, processes, and practices transmitted as objective truth (e.g., here we have Big
Group twice a day Monday to Friday) in the course of their socialisation and internalising this as a significant
aspect of their new subjective reality. For later generations, the Fraser House
way was massively already there upon
arrival – legitimated by its very existence as a fact – a massive facticity - a
given;
unalterable, and self-evident. It is objectively
there, whether the newcomer likes it or not.[263]
Fraser Houses’ objectivity was
in no way diminished by the newcomer’s bewilderment about what they were
finding out about the Unit’s purposes and ways. Confusion and bewilderment
increases the objectivity of Fraser
House as an object in their Social
Life world.
Fraser
House? That’s the innovative psychiatric unit on the grounds of that
psychiatric hospital in Cox Road in North Ryde on the North Shore.
There
is little newcomers could do about Fraser House. For these newcomers, life at large
was typically seen as unfathomable. However, Fraser House ways, while initially
daunting, quickly established regularity and habitual ways of fitting that soon
made its own sense as they were sensing
it.
The
human expressivity of others in Fraser House in the continuing everyday
here-and-now was confronting all involved as objectively observed aspects constituting
human activity; where every aspect of the milieu heightened everyone’s awareness of attending to and noticing the
process and metaprocess (a process relating to processes) of what was going on. Any time anything
significant happened, and often minutia was
significant, a crowd would speedily gather bringing both the wisdom in the
group to resolve what was happening, and to internalise the learning from
subjects’ relating objectively in the real.[264] This heightened objectification of human expressivity. The expressivity of
Self and Others was a constantly attended massive facticity. In this there also
was the ever present hyper-aware internalizing
of the external objective reality. The internalising through the senses was
ongoingly re-constituting both the experienced phenomena of being, along with being
itself. Following Heidegger, people were attending to mood, understanding,
and the ongoing discourse – both idle chatter and words of great pith and
moment.[265]
In
this concentrated totalising milieu, their relational
languaging was constantly accumulating - adding to the repository of vast
quantities of socially shared universes of meaning, ways and experience
relating to relating well with themselves and each other. This was all woven
together and integrated; and in this
process, fine-tuning their most important instrument,
which was their own perceptive self which they were preserving in time and passing
on their remembering and re-membering[266] to
themselves and to following generations passing through Fraser House and then
moving on into networked networks in wider society.
In
all of this richness, everyone in the Fraser House collective were
simultaneously and collectively constituting an on-going Fraser House objective reality that they were
simultaneous and separately internalising
in constantly re-constituting both their respective inner realities and who they were.[267] These objectivations function as essentially sustained indices of the subjective processes of those bringing them into being so they remain
individually and collectively available in memory for future reflection, apprehension,
comprehension, and contemplation, as well as functionally habitualizing - all
beyond the face-to-face context where they were first directly apprehended.
Participants
could use shorthand like, ‘The day Neville left for the UK’,[268] or ‘The stabbing the
wall in the Upstairs Dorm incident’,[269] and an immensely rich
amount of information about transforming was immediately available. These
shorthand references to Neville leaving for the UK, or the Upstairs Dorm, are
instances of how language was transcending
the here and now and bridging different
zones within the paramount Fraser House Reality while also integrating them
all into a meaningful whole.
Hence
later, when Residents were outside of Fraser House engaging in their family
friend network, through language and recall, the entire world of Fraser House
could be actualised at any moment with all of their massive reconstituting
experiences of Fraser House accessed, understood, and reinforced in a flash.
The
simultaneous interacting processes involved all in Fraser House in constituting
(to form something or some person new
- to transform) their collective realities, and being reconstituted in the
process:
o The Fraser House social-life-world was socially
constituted
o Fraser House interacting was internalised during
socialising
o
Internalised socialising was externally experienced as an
objective reality
o
All involved in Fraser
House were social constituted
o The Fraser House social-life-world was socially
constituted[270]
Experiencing
Fraser House was realising in the
twofold sense of this word:
o Realising as in apprehending and knowing about the
objectivated reality, and
o
Realising as in
‘making real’ in ongoingly together co-constituting this reality
The above daily unfolding of collective realities
occurred not as some externalised, detached, abstract, theoretical process. Rather
it occurred as an inherent aspect of communal vibrant lived-life experience
where everybody’s’ outward expression was formed and informed by inner
experience.[271]
Was Yeomans composing[272] Fraser House? The term ‘composing’ is derived from the idea of putting together and placing. Yeomans was indeed putting
people together and placing them in various combinations in a place. Then he
placed them in differing contexts within places at the Unit – like in the Big
Group room, and the Small Group rooms, and milling around outside the canteen
after Big Group, and in the Unit’s dining room, and in the recreation room. And
he set up processes whereby people whose normal place of domicile was in specific
localities would regularly be meeting others from the same locality. Composing
was one of the pervasive aspects of Fraser House.
Music Composers use the three beat to compose the waltz with the
emphasis on the first beat (one two
three one two three…). Recall the
three Residents engaging together with one Resident being the accented first
beat that set the pace of the three engaging together.
Along with ‘composing’ is the notion of arranging. Yeomans was constantly arranging links and compositional connectives between
separate episodes and separate parts, along with separate and or conjoined
elements within episodes.
Within Fraser House, one process in compositional
linkages was identifying the functional
in context and repeated examples of variation in the functional in context,
and functional patterns being repeated.
Melodic arrangement in music is pleasing to the ear and soul. So were
aspects of Fraser House composing. Thematic content permeated the whole
experience at regular intervals – again like melodic arrangements – rhythmical
patterns. Repetition of the Big Group, Small Group, Committee Group, and
Research Group supported the sensing of Unity in the Composition that was
Fraser House.
In all of this there is also modulating in the composing – varying
pitch, pace and power; both varying and repeated distance and accent, and
emphasis - with everyone learning how to become exquisite unto the moment. All
of these aspects added to the unity of the whole – along with correlating of
familiar aspects of the parts.
At times in Fraser House, the compositional structure
depended upon and emerged from the moment to moment content – for example, from
the presence of threat, or danger, or high expressed emotion, or conflict or
unity in conflict – where two contending factors (makers) were engaging with
emergent progressive elements and struggles with reacting all taking place
surrounded by audience and crowd with Big Group leader Neville, or someone
modelling Neville, drawing attention to functional in context.
Note that Yeomans composed the dormitory sharing with seemingly
odd juxtapositions of pairs of opposites – two under-controlled over-active,
and two over-controlled, under-active Residents.
This set up a structure of reducing struggle of opposites
linked by the unity of co-constituting (we’re all in this together) towards a
more normal centre (with under increasing, and over reducing)[273] with all of this is taking place within the compositional
framing of the symphony of life living and loving well together.
While Yeomans did compose in the sense of setting up Fraser House as a place where people could be together, once underway everything
was improvisation. Fraser House composing had very much the free form and
variation on themes of jazz music and jazz singing. Everyone in this
metaphorical jazz band was contributing to the attunement that entailed
continual variation.
This is reminiscent of my experiencing of the late night off-stage singing
of Sweet Georgia Brown in the Casino after the show with every repeat of the
lyrics being different. As a relevant whimsical metaphorical diversion, below note
the composing with considerable
whimsy of A. A. Milne writing in a joyful bouncy rhythm of unity of friendship and difference
in the unfolding lives of four friends. Perhaps you can fine parallels in this
poem with the themes of this E-Book.
Four
Friends
Ernest was an elephant, a great big fellow, Leonard was a lion with a
six foot tail, George was a goat, and his beard was yellow, And James was a very
small snail. Leonard had a stall, and a great big strong one, Earnest had a manger, and
its walls were thick, George found a pen, but I think it was the wrong one, And James sat down on a
brick Earnest started trumpeting and raised such a rumpus, Leonard started roaring
and trying to kick, James went on a journey with the goat’s new compass And he reached the end
of his brick. |
Earnest started trumpeting, and cracked his manger, Leonard started roaring,
and shivered his stall, James gave a huffle of a snail in danger And nobody heard him at all. Ernest was an elephant and very well intentioned, Leonard was a lion with a
brave new tail, George was a goat, as I think I have mentioned, but James was only a
snail. |