. Aside from the sense of reality it offers, a particular en-counter may be of little consequence, yet we must see that the rules of conduct that oblige individuals to be able and ready to give themselves up to such moments are of transcendent importance. Men who are held by these rules are held ready for spoken interaction, and spoken interaction between many kinds of people on many kinds of occasion is necessary if society’s work is to be done.
The sense of reality that has been discussed in this paper takes its form in opposition to modes of alienation, to states like preoccupation, self-consciousness, and boredom. In turn, these modes of disengagement are to be understood by reference to the central issue of spontaneous involvement. When we have seen the way in which a spoken encounter can succeed or fail in bringing its participants to it, and have seen that unfocused interaction can be looked at in the same way, we have a lead to follow in the understanding of other kinds of commitments—the individual’s occupational career, his political involvements, his family membership—for there will be a sense in which these wider matters consist in recurrent occasions of focused and unfocused interaction. By looking at the ways in which the individual can be thrown out of step with the sociable moment, perhaps we can learn something about the way in which he can become alienated from things that take much more of his time.
* * *
1 One of its heroes is the wit who can introduce references to wider, important matters in a way that is ineffably suited to the current moment of talk. Since the witticism will never again be as telling, a sacrifice has been offered up to the conversation, and respect paid to its unique reality by an act that shows how thoroughly the actor is alive to the interaction.
2 Yet different strata in the same society can be unequally concerned that members learn to project themselves into en-counters; the tendency to keep conversations alive and lively may be a way in which some strata, not necessarily adjacent, are characteristically different from others.
3 The problem of safe supplies is further considered in my “Communication Conduct in an Island Community,” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1953, ch. XV.
4 Other-consciousness is briefly but explicitly considered in James Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development (London, 1902), pp. 213-14.
5 Charles H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1922), pp. 196, 215.
6 For example, in social intercourse among traditional Shet-landers, the pronoun “I” tends to be little used; its greater use by individuals from the mainland of Great Britain, and especially its relatively frequent use by Americans, leads the Shetlander to feel that these non-Shetlandic people are immodest and gross. Shetlandic tact, it might be added, frequently prevents non-islanders from learning that their manner causes Shetlanders to be uneasy.
7 There is in fact a small literature in “applied human relations” detailing ways in which the superordinate can imply that an interview is over, allowing the actual leave-taking to be initiated, in a face-saving way, by the other.
8 For psychoanalytic versions of this theme see Ralph Green-son (“On Boredom,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, vol. I: 7-21) and Otto Fenichel (“The Psvchology of Boredom,” no. 26 in the Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, First Series [Norton, New York, 1953]). Some interesting observations on the cult of boredom and the place of this cult in the world of an adolescent can be found in J. D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye (Little, Brown, Boston, 1951).
9 The plight of the self-conscious person is in fact so good a stimulus for calling forth spontaneous involvement on the part of those who witness it, that during conversations where there may be difficulty in capturing the involvement of those present, individuals may take turns both at committing minor infractions against propriety and at becoming embarrassed, thus ensuring involvement. Hence the paradox that if all the rules of correct social behavior are exactly followed, the interaction may be-come flaccid, stale, and flat.
10 The following is an instance of psychiatrist-patient interaction that is verbal on one side only: “. . .in the course of an analysis of a very disturbed schizophrenic with depressive features the patient hid herself within her only garment, a blanket, so that only the eyebrow showed; nothing daunted I continued the conversation from where we left off last time and noted changes in that eloquent but only visible member, which changes—a frown, scowl, surprise, a flicker of amusement, a softening of the curve—indicated the changes in her mood and thought. My surmises proved correct for when next she displayed her face and used her voice she corroborated the general trend of my guesses as to what had gone on in her mind. That session was no verbal interchange—it might even be called an eyebrow analysis—but there was an endeavour to verbalize, to conceptualize and make concrete ‘in the here and now’ what was occurring concurrently in her mind.” (John Richman, “The Role and Future of Psychotherapy with Psychiatry,” Journal of Mental Science, 96 [1950], 189)
Mental Symptoms And Public Order*
Persons who come to the attention of a psychiatrist typi-cally come to the attention of their lay associates first. What psychiatrists see as mental illness, the lay public usually first sees as offensive behavior—behavior worthy of scorn, hostility and other negative social sanctions. The objective of psychiatry all along has been to interpose a technical perspective: understanding and treatment is to replace retribution; a concern for the interests of the offender is to replace a concern for the social circle he has offended. I refrain from enlarging here on how unfortunate it has been for many offenders to have been granted this medical good fortune.
Freudian psychiatry introduced an important twist in this medical line. In little classics of analysis, Freudians have shown that particular delicts, now called symptoms, can be interpreted or read as part of the offender’s system of communication and defense, in particular a reversion to infantile modes of conduct. The final triumph of this psy-chological, technical perspective is the implication that socially improper behavior can be psychologically normal (as when a man shows strength enough to terminate an unhealthy marital relationship), and a socially proper behavior can be truly sick (as illustrated by the obsessive concerns and sexual withdrawal of some research chemists). In brief, for the psychiatrist, a flagrant presenting symptom is merely a license to start digging.
One effect of this enlightened approach that the sociolo-gist might bewail has been that interest in the improprieties themselves, paradoxically, has been blunted. (After all, a symptom is only a symptom, even if it does mark the place where you start digging. If, through whatever excising, you manage to lop off one symptom, and do nothing about the dynamics, another symptom is likely to pop up; it can have a quite different face and yet wear the same leer.)
In moving so quickly from the social delict to the mental symptom, psychiatrists have tended to fail to be much better than laymen in their assessment of the impropriety of a given act—defensible in the case of extremely deviant acts but not in the case of the many milder misbehaviors. This is inescapable, since we just do not have a technical mapping of the various approved behavior patterns in our society, and what little information we have is not imparted in medical school training. Psychiatrists have failed to provide us with a systematic framework for identifying and describing the type of debet represented by psychotic behavior. At present there is a rather special and hardening language in psychiatry, involving terms such as “flattened affect,” “posturing,” “manneristic movement,” “out of contact/’ and others, which solves the problem of having to write up clinical notes in a hurry but which provides the practitioner with a handful of thumbs. The moralistic language in the social sciences built around the incredible notion that persons should be in good, clear, direct or open communication with one another is, if anything, worse—as if communication were a pill one ought to swallow because it was good for the tummy.
A seco
nd effect of the enlightened psychiatric approach which the sociologist might bewail is that a very special and limited version of communication has resulted from it. Psychiatrists, because of their leaning toward an office practice and a preoccupation (at least until recently) with neurotics as opposed to psychotics, have tended to meet with their patients in two-person rooms. Even worse, they have tended to labor under the telephone-booth bias that what the patient was engaged in was somehow a type of talking, of information imparting, the problem being that the line was busy, the connection defective, the party at the other end shy, cagey, afraid to talk or insistent that a code be used. Strong patience and a good ear were apparently required in the business. Hypnosis and the “truth” drugs were also useful in clearing the lines. Lately, with the introduction of cortically embedded electrodes, we have progressed, along with Bell Telephone, to a type of direct dialing. Few professions, may I add, have so well been able to institutionalize, to sell on the social market, their own fantasies of what they were engaged in doing.
In any case, there has been a general blindness to the following fact: very often the misconduct of the patient is a public fact, in that anyone in the same room with him would feel he was behaving improperly, and, if not quite anyone, then at least anyone in the same conversation. True, the patient may misconduct himself merely because persons present are taken as substitutes for the really significant figures. But whatever the deeper target of the misconduct, and however successful the psychiatrist is in making sure that he and his patient are alone in the office, the misconduct is a public thing, potentially accessible and potentially a concern to any and all who might happen to enter the presence of the patient. And when we move from the psychiatrist’s professional precincts, this fact becomes more obvious. Psychosis is something that can manifest itself to anyone in the patient’s work place, in his neighborhood, in his household, and must be seen, initially at least, as an infraction of the social order that obtains in these places. The other side of the study of symptoms is the study of public order, the study of behavior in public and semipublic places. If you would learn about one side of this matter, you ought perhaps to study the other too. I am suggesting, then, that symptomatic behavior might well be seen, in the first instance, not as a tortured form of two-person communication, but as a form of social misconduct, in the sense that Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt recognize this term.
I want for a moment to turn the psychiatric clock back and outline a slightly different approach to symptomatology and communication. Starting with the social debet of a prepatient, I propose we examine the general rule of conduct of which the offensive behavior is an infraction, then try to fill out the set of rules of which the one that gets us started is but one member and at the same time try to get a glimpse of the social circle or group that sustains the rules and is offended by the infraction of any one of them. Once that work is done, we can return to the individual offender to examine again the meaning for him of his offensive behavior. When we have made this analysis we should be in a position to understand the embarrassing fact that an individual who appears to be thoroughly crazy one day may, the next, through the magic of “spontaneous remission,” come to be, in conduct, “sane” again. We should also be able to find terms that aptly and elegantly describe standard symptoms. And, as Harold Gar-finkel has suggested, we should be in a position (not desirable in itself, but desirable as a test of theory) to program insanity, that is, reduce to a minimum the instructions you would have to give an experimental subject in order to enable him beautifully to act crazy, from within as it were.
Although social scientists have been classifying psychotic behavior as a type of improper conduct, a type of deviancy, for many years now, they, like their medical colleagues, have not carried the matter very far.
One issue is that although it is easy enough to call psy-chotic behavior social deviancy, it is even easier to see that there are many types of social deviancy that are not instances of psychotic behavior—even though brave psychiatrists and psychologists have tried to get at the sick roots of everything from crime to political disloyalty. Common criminals, we say, offend the property order; traitors the political order; incestuous couples the kinship order; homosexuals the sex-role order; drug addicts perhaps the moral order; and so forth. We must ask, then: what type of social order is specifically related to psychotic behavior?
Psychotic behavior, as suggested, runs counter to what might be thought of as public order, especially one part of public order, the order governing persons by virtue of their being in one another’s immediate physical presence. Much psychotic behavior is, in the first instance, a failure to abide by rules established for the conduct of face-to-face interaction—rules established, that is, or at least enforced, by some evaluating, judging, or policing group. Psychotic behavior is, in many instances, what might be called a situational impropriety.
Given that many psychotic symptoms are instances of situational impropriety, we must ask whether all situational improprieties are instances of psychotic symptoms. If this were the case, we would have a sociologically grounded way of differentiating psychotics from other people. But, obviously, there are many situational improprieties apparently unconnected with mental disorder. There is the unmannerly conduct of the culturally alien, the arrogant, the eccentric, the insolent, the vicious, the celebrant, the intoxicated, the aged and the youthful.
Granting this, we must ask whether those situational im-proprieties that we call symptomatic have anything in common that is at the same time exclusive to them. In the literature there has been some effort to suggest such attributes. It is suggested that a psychotic situational impropriety is an act that one cannot easily empathize with, leading one to feel that the actor is unpredictable and untrustworthy, that he is not in the same world as one is in, that one cannot put oneself in his place.
Tempting as this approach is, I do not believe it is sound. The sharp distinction between symptomatic and non-symptomatic situational improprieties is certainly part of our folk conceptual apparatus for looking at people; the trouble is that it does not seem to have any fixed relation to the actual behavior to which it is applied. There is no consensus, except in the extreme cases, as to which of the two slots to put a behavior into. Agreement typically comes after the fact, after the label “mental illness” has been applied, or (in the other case) after its applicability has been fully discounted. Therefore, I feel that a sociological analysis of psychotic symptomatology must inevitably be a little unsatisfactory, including a range of conduct perceived to be normal as well as the range of conduct perceived to be psychotic.
Let us now begin to take a social look at symptoms. First, just what is a situational impropriety? We can twist this question around by asking: what kinds of events-proper or improper—can uniquely occur in face-to-face situations? Some possibilities are 1) physical and sexual assault, and less dramatic interferences with free body movements. Let us sidestep these possibilities for a moment, although obviously fear of the possible occurrence of these events plays an important role in our attitude to the mentally ill. 2) face-to-face communication: verbal, involving the sending and receiving of messages and nonverbal, involving the exuding and gleaning of information about the informer. Now what is it that is distinctively situational or face-to-face about verbal and non-verbal communication between persons who are present to one another: 1) reliance on the naked or unassisted sense and 2) reliance on embodied messages, ones that can be transmitted only because the body of the transmitter is present. As students of communication have suggested, these two factors, taken together, imply that: 1) there will be a simultaneous symmetry of roles (sender will be receiver, exuder will be a gleaner); 2) the communication will be very rich in qualifiers; 3) there will be considerable feedback opportunity.
Useful as this analysis of the communication characteris-tics of face-to-face interaction might be, it still derives from the assumption that face-to-face interaction and communication are more or
less the same thing and that an impropriety in situational conduct is somehow a pathology in communication. However, this is a very treacherous assumption, and (as already suggested) its consonance with a middle-class intellectualistic professional orientation makes it even more treacherous. I want to argue that when spoken communication occurs, the speaking occurs, or is expected to occur, only when those present to one another have come together into a special type of ritually well-marked association, a special type of huddling you can begin to think about as a conversational circle. When an impropriety such as manneristic gesturing occurs, this becomes noteworthy and hence noted not because something is being communicated, but because the rules regarding how one is to demean oneself when in the presence of others are broken. Verbal and non-verbal communication is something that is funneled through something else. This something else is the approved patterns of manner and association or co-participation in terms of which individuals are obliged to regulate their comings together. To act in a psychotic manner is, very often, to associate wrongly with others in one’s immediate presence; this communicates something, but the infraction in the first instance is not that of communication but of the rules for co-mingling.
It is these rules and the resulting units of association, the resulting sanctioned modes of coming together and staying apart, which presumably provide a naturalistic framework within which so-called psychotic symptoms can be systematically located and described. What, then, are the rules of proper behavior while in the presence of others? What are the units of association, of comings together, which these rules make possible and which provide the framework in which all face-to-face events occur, including face-to-face communication?
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