CENT Paper No.6: How to analyze autobiographical narratives

CENT PAPER NUMBER SIX:

HOW TO ANALYZE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVES IN COGNITIVE EMOTIVE NARRATIVE THERAPY

Introduction

In my first paper on CENT, I presented the case for moving beyond Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), and developing Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT).

In my second CENT paper, I presented my own autobiographical ‘Story of My Origins'. This was intended to illustrate the kinds of autobiographical stories I seek to obtain from my CENT clients, and to model how to go about writing a ‘Story of Your Origins'.

However, in my third CENT paper, I presented a complication. There is research evidence that autobiographical narratives are not reliable records of what actually happened. They seem to contain nuggets of truth, but they are not factual statements in the normal sense of that term. They are, however, taken to be accurate accounts of how the narrator experienced their world, or whatever events or objects they are describing.

There is an additional problem here. According to Bartlett (1932)[1], human memory is not so much about direct recall of memories, but rather of reconstitution of memories. Recollections are not only imperfect, but they may also be mood dependent. So depending on how the narrator feels, they may present a particular period of their life differently on different occasions.

How then is it possible for a CENT therapist to analyze a client's autobiographical story, given these constraints or limitations of autobiography? (Indeed, how is it possible for any kind of counsellor or psychotherapist, who deals in the belief system or verbal reports of their clients, to have any faith in what their clients present to them?)

Let me try to explore that question experientially, by beginning, on the fly (as it were) to analyze my own story from CENT Paper No.2.

Was I really such a saint?

In my story, I explained that I came from an impoverished rural background; I was moved to the city at the age of 18 months with my migrating parents; and went to school, at the age of four years:

"... in a different, partly middle class, urban cultural tradition. Those two cultural traditions were significantly antagonistic towards each other, and so I got to experience being a total outsider from the age of four to fourteen years, during which time I did not make a single friend. In some respects I showed up as largely autistic, though I was always in the top three in my class on annual test results for my school subjects. In the school playground I was called "Mr Know-all", or "The little professor", or the "Country bumpkin", and pushed from pillar to post; punched; stolen from; verbally abused; and even urinated upon."

I can be reasonably sure that the country/city split was a significant factor, because some of my siblings, when grown up, chose to ‘return to the country' instead of staying in the city; presumably because they felt more ‘at home' in the rural setting from which our parents had come.

However, the "little professor" and "Mr Know-all" jibes are not about my place of origin. They are about how I think and relate. It turns out I am - in terms of the Jungian (or Myers-Briggs) model - an Introverted-Intuitive-Thinking-Judging-type, which is labelled an INTJ for short. And "INTJs are the most self-confident of all the types (of which there are sixteen), having ‘self power' awareness. Found in 1 percent of the general population, the INTJs live in an introspective reality, focusing on possibilities, using thinking in the form of empirical logic, and preferring that events and people serve some positive use. ... INTJs look to the future rather than the past, and a word which captures the essence of INTJs is builder- a builder of systems and the applier of theoretical models." Keirsey and Bates, 1984, pages 180-183)[2].

So before we even look at the cross-cultural (country/city) split, we need to take note of the fact that I have a particular type of mind, which is rare in school playgrounds. As my first school was tiny, with less than 100 pupils, I was probably the only INTJ in the whole school. Most of the other types - from ENFJs to ISFPs - would have had five or more peers of the same type, and so they would have been understood and had peers to identify with. I was the odd one out, because of my temperament and character.

So here is the first challenge for CENT clients:

Complete the questionnaire from Keirsey and Bates book, and work out your character/temperament type (or submit it for analysis). Once you know your character/temperament type, answer the following questions:
1. How could my character/temperament have affected my life at the point of my origin, in my family and school, etc?
2. Does my character/temperament classification help me to understand why I behaved as I behaved?
3. Does it help me to understand why others related to me as they did?
4. What other insights can I learn from reading about character/temperament types in Keirsey and Bates' book?

Keirsey and Bates do not provide insights into all sixteen types when looking at temperament in children: (Chapter 4, pages 97-128). Instead, they group them into four groups of four types in each. In this classification, I belong in the NT group - the Intuitive Thinkers. (N is used to denote Intuitives, because the I is used for Introversion). So let us now look at what NT children are like:

"The NT baby is probably rather solemn and likely to be a puzzle to those around him if they are not also NTs. He may be precocious, talk early, and learn to read long before he goes to school". Mr Know-all / The Little Professor! "The chances of an NT having even one NT parent are rather low, since this group is represented by only 12 percent of the general population". Both my parents are dead, and they never took the Keirsey and Bates test, nor the Myers-Briggs test; but I know from relating to them that they were very different from me. I was the intellectual in my family - publicly acknowledged as "the brains of the family" - and my mother announced early on that "James is going to be a doctor". It took many years, but I got there! Because of this difference between parents and children: "The NT child often experiences the same rejection accorded to the SP (child), but for the SP this occurs when he enters schools and moves through the grades. For the NT child this begins earlier. Over and over, NTs have reported their childhood experiences" as feeling like the odd one out; until they reached college age, joined larger populations, and found people like themselves in larger populations.

I don't know if I've every found another NT type. But processing this information is very helpful for me, because it makes it clear that I was not "personally" responsible for how I acted and how I was experienced by my peers at school. It was absolutely predictable, once my character/temperament type is known, that I would not fit into school; especially such a small school. A final point on how "odd" I would seem to my peers and others is this: Physical punishment was commonplace in homes and schools when I was growing up. Most children seemed to take this "reality" in their stride. But not me:

"Physical punishment is deeply violating to the NT. Although his body, as his world, is a source of curiosity - not himin the same way the body is for other types - he reacts to physical abuse of that body with what seems to be an exaggerated response, somehow seeing this abuse as a violation of his nature. Dignity usually is important to NT children, and they are often described as ‘prideful'. Somehow, others often find this offensive and seem to take the NT's pride as a personal affront, which often presents a challenge to those around the NT to bring the NT off his high horse". Keirsey and Bates, pages 114-115.

My parents hit me often, and I never forgave them for that. Some of my teachers punished me physically and I never forgave them for that. Some of my peers physically abused me, and I never forgave them for that. (Is that true? I never forgave them? I was under the impression that I had forgiven all my tormentors for what they had ever done to me. But now I need to go back and re-examine that, and make sure I have forgiven everybody. Forgiveness is an expression of the Good Wolf). I think people did see me as prideful, and on my high horse, and many tried to tip me off; and often succeeded. (My parents often called me Little Lord Fauntleroy. I don't know how many parents did that, or if I was worse than other kids for pride and disdain of others?)

My pride was probably an expression of Bad Wolf, and my lack of forgiveness (if true) an expression of sulking/anger. I thought I was so righteous. I need to be more aware of my capacity for self delusion; and to learn from Epictetus to watch myself as if I were an enemy and lying in ambush. (Epictetus, 1991, page 41[3]).

Here is the next challenge for CENT clients:

Read the relevant section of Chapter 4 of Keirsey and Bates (1984), about temperamental/character differences in children:
1. What does this tell you about the ways in which your Story of Origins needs to be amended?
2. Does this resolve any ‘mysteries' about your childhood? If so, please describe them.
3. Are you able to reframe your childhood more positively in the light of what you know about how you probably were (in terms of character/temperament) when you were a child?

What is the "individual ego"?

Now back to my Story of Origins, as if I had not yet done some of the reflections above. I definitely recall being a passive recipient of other people's malign actions. However, can that really be the whole truth? (We now know it was not, but let us proceed with this question). While reflecting on that question recently, I had a major breakthrough. It came out of my first CENT model of mind. This model of mind begins with two simple circles, labelled as follows:

Figure 1: The most basic model of CENT - The dialectical nature of the individual/social ego. The ego is a product of relationship, and cannot exist without relationship

Whereas Freud began with himself as research subject, as a mature man, and then worked his way backwards; CENT begins from the moment of birth - while not discounting intra-uterine experience - and constructs our understanding of the baby as a dependent, social being. Somebody once said there is no such thing as ‘a baby', only ‘a mother/baby'. Babies are never found in places where there are no mothers (or mother substitutes). The vaunted ‘individual' is a fantasy: just one of many of our delusions. We are social animals to our very core.

In CENT, we say the mother ‘colonizes the baby', using the analogy of a paternalistic (or maternalistic) ‘foreign power', marching into an ‘immature' island, and taking over. From birth onwards, for many weeks and months, nothing that the baby ‘does' is separate or apart from the colonial actions of the mother. She decides when to pick it up, when to respond to crying, when to offer the breast or bottle, when to withdraw the breast or bottle, when to change nappies, and so on. It's her call when to speak; when to be silent; when to be comforting. (And, of course, when we say ‘she decides', we mean her non-conscious mind controls all these processes; and the baby is ‘at the mercy' of her non-conscious mother-wiring). Everything about the baby's environment is beyond his/her control. The baby is a relative captive of this whole process. (Of course, over a period of months, this begins to change somewhat, and power relations become more strained! But it does not get anywhere near an ‘equal contest' until the teenage years!)

Let us now take a closer look at the development of the baby-ego.

Figure 2: The mother interacts with the baby, and the baby interprets and encodes the experience

Figure 2 is a very simple illustration of the mother ‘acting towards' the baby. The baby registers the mother's actions (though [initially] not necessarily as being ‘external'), then interprets the experience: (Is it ‘good' or ‘bad'? Pleasure or non-pleasure?). Then the baby records their interpretation of that experience in long-term memory (indicated by the X's in the dialectical overlap in Figure 2). The baby has very little previous experience to inform its interpretations, but that's life. It has to interpret without the benefit of much knowledge or experience of interpreting events/objects. Thus it is from the beginning a creator of interpretations, based on a flimsy foundation.

Over time, the baby registers thousands and even millions of such experiences, and they are all interpretations. Those interpretations are also, obviously, cumulative. An earlier experience informs the latest interpretation. And beyond that, the baby not only interprets an experience, and records it; but it also encodes its own (‘good' and ‘bad') adaptations towards, or reactions against, each interpretative experience. (Of course, later on, the father also begins to ‘act towards' the baby, and the baby interprets those actions, and records them, plus its own adaptations towards, and reactions against, the father's actions).

We now have enough of the first CENT model in place to begin to think about my statement from above:

"Those two cultural traditions - the city and the country - (in my school playground) were significantly antagonistic towards each other, and so I got to experience being a total outsider from the age of four to fourteen years, during which time I did not make a single friend."

Notice something odd here. "Those two cultural traditions" - pointing outside myself! But if we think about the model in Figures 1 and 2 above, the rural tradition must be strongly encoded inside of me. In this case it would be wrong to represent myself as a ‘third party', or an ‘innocent bystander'. Let us put labels on those two cultural traditions to enable us to talk about them more precisely.

Clashing cultures

My parents were from rural Ireland, which was closer to the Gaelic language, in which the word ‘culchie' meant something like ‘the land', ‘the soil'. For example, ‘culchie mach' meant something like ‘son of the soil' - a young countryman. But in Dublin this was used as a term of abuse. There ‘culchie' was used as an insult, to mean: stupid, ignorant, uneducated, ugly, gauche, awkward, uncool, square, and so on. I was associated with the culchie tradition, because of my accent and the way my parents dressed me (in poor quality, rough clothing). And I carried my (culchie) parents' cultural values in my ‘basic wiring'.

My peers at school came from Dublin, which had been inside the political/military boundary called the ‘Pale', where the English colonial administration was housed over hundreds of years of occupation and oppression of the native Irish people. The Dubliners were more associated with the English language, and street trading and petty commerce on the fringes of the English administration. For this reason, the country-people called the Dubliners ‘Jackeens', which had some of the following connotations: chancers, tricksters, cheapskates, petty criminals, collaborators with the occupation, common, immoral, indecent, and so on.

Both the ‘Culchie' and ‘Jackeen' labels were clearly black/white exaggerations, based on acute political antipathy and cultural prejudice.

I grew up in a household of culchies, and must have internalized lots of prejudicial statements about Dubliners, and lots of complimentary comments about country-people. My parents taught me to look down on Dubliners, as being ‘common' - that is the one label I can recall - and then sent me to a school full of Dubliners! What a set-up. I must have looked down my nose at my peers from day one. So I was not an innocent bystander. I was judging them just as negatively as they were judging me. The possibilities for peer friendship were doomed from the start. (And of course, we now know I also was an INTJ - the odd one out! Proud! Intellectual! Solemn!)

Is this a curative insight?

But what makes this a therapeutic insight? It sounds quite depressing on the face of it. A ‘doomed kid', sent into a school where he could not hope to win! But it is therapeutic.

At some level, I must have felt bad about being isolated from my peers - being out of relationships with them - being the odd one out. I must have looked around me and seen kids playing in groups, clusters and pairs. And yet there was no such place or role for me. I may have told myself something negative about that; such as: "Nobody likes me. There must be something wrong with me - even though I know that there is something wrong with them. What kind of tish gets looked down upon by tishes?" (Tish is an anagram of a socially unacceptable body product.)

When I look back at this Gordian knot, I can allow lots of false schemas (or mental maps about who I ‘am') to dissolve; or the insight helps to cut through the knot. I no longer have to be affected by whatever decisions I made about myself during those ten years at school. Because I have done a lot of therapy on myself over the years, it is hard for me to appreciate just how liberating this insight would have been if I was going into therapy for the first or second time right now, and achieving this insight. (It is sometimes said that ‘insight is the booby prize'. But this cannot be true if the insight allows you to think thoughts you could not previously think; or to have emotions you did not previously have; or to reframe some part of your life constructively. Insight can only be a booby prize if it has no application, no use, no ‘purchasing power').

Challenge for CENT clients:

Try to identify those environmental clues in your school playground that might have caused you to judge yourself negatively.
1. What was wrong with those judgements?
2. In what ways were they invalid?
3. How can you reframe ‘yourself' (as being okay) today?

More self criticism

But that was not the end of my perceptual errors. Take a look at these two statements:

"I did not have a model of mind at that time. If I had a model of life it was this: ‘I am like a little mouse, frightened and weak. Everybody else is like a cat, with sharp claws and vicious tempers. Fortunately most of the cats are sleepwalking most of the time, or blind. All I have to do is to move slowly, quietly, make no sound, and I will not get savaged to death!'

...

"My predominant emotions were sadness and fear. (I would discover years later that my anger was repressed out of awareness, to prevent conflict in which I believed I would surely die)."

I now see those two statements as missing the point. They do include some elements of truth, and some misconceptions and misperceptions. I could write two volumes about how I analyzed those statements, but I don't want to put you to sleep. Suffice it to say that I had written the statements above a few days before I read about "the false self" in Gomez (1997)[4]. This is what Lavinia Gomez said about maternal deprivation that caught my eye:

"Winnicot describes deprivation as the loss of good experience at a stage when the baby or child is able to perceive the loss as coming from the outside - usually from the parents". At the age of eighteen months, my right hand was seriously burned by my sister (according to the family ‘story'), and my parents were not there to protect me. The pain must have been intense. At the age of four years I was admitted to hospital with appendicitis, and I spent more than a week there, all on my own; and my parents visited for one hour on the Sunday. I felt abandoned by my parents. (I have clear memories of the isolation, fear, loneliness, and sense of loss). "It is a loss that continues for longer than the child can manage, until his faith in his parents and in the world is broken. With this fracture, he is in danger of falling into a primitive agony of helplessness and inner collapse with no one to hold him together, and he tries to forestall this catastrophe by holding himself together and away from danger. He constructs a compliant self which is designed to fit in with a dangerous world, adapted to the external requirements rather than his own needs. Thus in the immediate wake of loss or disruption, a child may become unnaturally ‘good'. Through inhabiting this ‘false self', his ‘true self' is protected; the price is a break in the continuity of living and relating from genuine need, love and anger". (Page 96).

And that image fits my early life very well. Firstly, I was not ‘defeated' in school. I was already ‘broken' when I arrived in school - so the ‘culchie' thing was just ‘icing on the cake' of defeat. And the INTJ thing also probably did not play a prominent part in the original defeat. These additional ‘marks of the outsider' were just extra burdens to carry, on top of the loss of my real self, in my family.

My mother was seventeen years old when she got married. It was an ‘arranged marriage' to a thirty-four year old man. She was largely uneducated, came from a huge family of twenty-one kids, in which the father may have engaged in some child sexual abuse. There was certainly a lot of callusing of my mother, and not much sensitivity or gentleness. However, she was good with infants in arms, like many girls are with dolls. The first eighteen months of each child's life, in our family, was probably quite secure. But once each child could resist Maureen's ‘dolly management strategy', she would react punitively.

I was the second child in this family. I had an older sister, eighteen months older than me. I cannot imagine Maureen (my mother) being watchful to see that my older sister did not hurt me. Indeed, one of the family stories is how my sister, at the age of three years, when I was eighteen months old, lit a newspaper (probably at the fireplace) and handed it to me, burning my right hand very seriously, permanently damaging some of the digits of my fingers, and some tendons, and removing all the skin. I think it is reasonable to assume that my sister dominated me. That she defeated me. That I formed a "false self" to cope with this situation - and with my parents' anger and cruelty - a false self which would not respond angrily to frustrations[5], and would not ask for or expect any love, affection, attention, and so on. And it was that false self, combined with the INTJ thing, and the culchie thing, that stepped into the school playground at the age of four. What a sad, unhappy, defeated little thing that was! A little residue of a self. A little ‘survival machine'.

So if there is any therapy to be done here, it is not to do with school and my peers. It is to do with my sister, my mother and my false self. What an amazing breakthrough in self-analysis, after more than 41 years since Charles Gray told me to "examine my relationship with my mother"!

Challenge for CENT clients:

If you reach the point of getting an insight of this type, then there are various ways to deal with it:
1. You could ask your therapist to help you to integrate the conflicted elements - in this case: mother, sister, self. To facilitate a three-chair conversation between these elements until they come to some kind of agreement among themselves that brings any subterranean conflict to an end.
2. If there is any anger from you towards your sister, or whoever it is in your life story that plays the role of the sister in my story, then you might need to look at your beliefs about that. Are any of your beliefs demanding that it should not have happened? Or describing it as totally bad that it did. Or damning your sister, or your nemesis, for what they did? If so, ask your therapist to help you to work through these beliefs using Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy.
3. You also need to now consider how this broken part of you moves forward through your personal history, and how its existence illuminates later periods of your life. This calls for more written, narrative therapy.

Further reflections

When I came to analyze CENT Paper No.2, I identified two points in the section on ‘Freedom from school':

1. My discovery of the inferiority complex; and:

2. The way I failed to enforce dues payments at the Judo Club, when members failed to pay up.

I am now better able to understand both of those points as manifestations of my false self syndrome. I was not being ‘real', operating from my guts and heart.

In the section entitled ‘Back in the soup', I identified two statements for consideration:

1. How Dr Charles Gray had determined that my problems with my peers were linked to how my parents had related to each other, and to me and my siblings; and:

2. The fact that I could not use Charles' advice, because I did not understand what a ‘relationship' was.

I now think it is not so much to do with how my parents related, as the fact that in the process I was defeated, and adopted a false self position, which remained with me for many years. (Has it now been dropped, dissolved, eliminated, and reduced? How can I check?)

Regarding point 2, it would not have made any difference, I now believe, if I had understood what a ‘relationship' was. As long as I did not feel safe operating from my ‘real self', I could not do anything about any of my relationships. I was not up for relationship, because relationship had let me down. I had an insecure attachment to my mother; and a huge distrust of my father and others.

In the section entitled ‘The worm turns', we see the beginning of the emergence of the ‘real me', in my anger at the capitalist system. The anger built up and poured out in all directions, nicely packaged as ‘politics', until the dénouement in the bookshop meeting, where I had that enlightenment experience, when the sun struck the carpet, and all the bile of the Bad Wolf drained out of my body/mind.

The next section of Paper No.2 is ‘A new life in Bangladesh'; but that, and the section that follows it, belongs in ‘My Story of Relationship'; which I will write in the near future.

(CENT identifies particular stories as key narratives to be explored: the story of your origins; the story of your relationships; the story of present problems; the story of adolescence; the story of adult developments; the story of transitions; the story of work, money and success; and so on. Many of these stories are likely to overlap; and only the client can really decide which stories s/he needs to explore).

Conclusion

The question that I posed at the start of this paper was this: How is it possible to analyze autobiographical narratives in Cognitive emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT)? At the point where I posed this question, I had little clarity of how to answer it, and so I engaged in this experiential/reflective/reflexive writing process to gain some perspective on the question. I will now attempt to answer the question, based on my experience:

Firstly, let us look at the specific problems of memory that I mentioned in the introduction:

"According to Bartlett (1932)[6], human memory is not so much about direct recall of memories, but rather of reconstitution of memories. Recollections are not only imperfect, but they may also be mood dependent. So depending on how the narrator feels, they may present a particular period of their life differently on different occasions."

This did not present a problem for me in analyzing my own narrative. However, the general point can only be dealt with by ensuring that the narrative is revisited on a number of occasions, and any difference in interpretation arising out of mood alterations, must be reconciled with each other, until a stable narrative is produced.

"How then is it possible for a CENT therapist to analyze a client's autobiographical story, given these constraints or limitations of autobiography? (Indeed, how is it possible for any kind of counsellor or psychotherapist, who deals in the belief system or verbal reports of their clients, to have any faith in what their clients present to them?)"

My narrative is true to my feelings about my childhood; true to the fragments of memory available to me; and true to elements of shared family history. It is also true to available theories of child development - including the idea of the ‘false self' which was developed from child care and child analysis experience by the Object Relations school in the UK. That seems to be as good as it gets in human studies. This can never have the ‘replicability' and ‘measurability' of inquiries in the science of physics. (Rickman, 2009[7]).

Secondly: A CENT therapist, in analyzing a narrative by a client:

1. Would be looking for indications of one or more of the four irrational beliefs from REBT (Ellis, 1978; Ellis and Dryden, 1999[8]): demandingness; awfulizing; low frustration tolerance; and/or condemning and damning the self, other people and/or the world; and/or:

2. Would be looking for evidence of occupying an unhealthy place on the OK-corral (Stewart and Joines, 1987[9]); e.g. ‘I'm not OK - You are OK'; and/or:

3. Would be looking for evidence of excessive use of Critical/Controlling Parent ego state; or Adapted/Rebellious Child ego state (Stewart and Joines, 1987); and/or:

4. Would be looking for disruptions in the relationship between the child and mother; and/or child and father (Gomez, 1997); and/or:

5. Would be looking for evidence of cross cultural conflict: e.g. racism; classism; sexism; regional antipathies; rural/urban splits (Nelson-Jones, 2001, Chapter 16[10]); and/or:

6. Would be looking for insights into how the client's character/temperament type (INTJ, etc) fitted in with his/her parents' and peers' character/temperament types. And/or how the client's temperament type predisposed them towards certain kinds of difficulties (Keirsey and Bates, 1984); and/or:

7. Would be looking of evidence of the development of a false self; or of other defence mechanisms (Gomez, 1997; Freud, 1986[11]); and/or:

8. Would be looking for evidence of the Bad Wolf driving the client in unhelpful, anti-social directions. (Vitale, 2006; Zimbardo, 2007; Gray, 2003[12]).

He or she would also want to challenge the client with the kinds of exercises shown above in this text. The challenge would be to think on paper; to think long and hard; to be open to having to admit things that are painful to admit. The truth will set us free (if we can find out what it is!)

The therapist does not have any absolutely true or certain answers. But s/he can ask useful questions, introduce useful models and concepts, present helpful processes, and get the client to go back over their narrative, to expand it, refine it, look deeper, look longer, be more creative, be more scientific or forensic.

That is the beginning of the answer to my question, which will be explored further in a later paper.

Dr Jim Byrne

Email: jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com

15^th September 2009

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To reference this paper in a publication, please use the following citation:

Byrne, J. (2009f) How to analyze autobiographical narratives in Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT). CENT Paper No.6. Hebden Bridge: The Institute for CENT Studies. Available online: http://www.abc-coounselling.com/id173.html.

[1] Bartlett, F.C. (1932) Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[2]Keirsey, D. and Bates, M. (1984) Please Understand Me: Character and temperament types. Gnosology Books.

[3] Epictetus (1991) The Enchiridion. New York: Prometheus Books.

[4] Gomez, L. (1997) An Introduction to Object Relations. London: Free Association Books.

[5] My older sister told me, when we were grown up: "You would never defend yourself!" I sensed that the subscript was: "If you had defended yourself, I could not have been as cruel towards you as I was!" So it was my fault!

[6] Bartlett, F.C. (1932) Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[7]Rickman, P. (2009) ‘Is psychology science?' Philosophy Now, Issue 74, July/August.

[8] Ellis, A. (1978) Executive Leadership: a rational approach. New York: Institute for Rational Living; and: Ellis, A. and Dryden, W. (1999) The Practice of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. London: Free Association Books.

[9]Stewart, I. and Joines, V. (1987) TA today: a new introduction to Transactional Analysis. Nottingham: Lifespace Publishing.

[10] Nelson-Jones, R. (2001) Theory and Practice of Counselling and Therapy. Third edition. London: Continuum.

[11] Freud, S. (1986) Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis. Vol.15. London: Penguin Books.

[12]Vitale, J. (2006) Life's Missing Instruction Manual: the guidebook you should have been given at birth. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons Inc. And:

Zimbardo, P. (2007) The Lucifer Effect: how good people turn evil. London: Rider. And:

Gray, J. (2003) Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals. London: Granta Books.

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