What follows from this sense of flexible placement and relational structure in viewing human communication? Suppose we saw the culture of psychotherapy through this lens? If "free association" is important to the activity of therapy, does it matter whether that task is done by patient or therapist? If dreams are the "royal road to the unconscious," can the therapist sometimes blaze the trail? Therapists may think of balancing or sharing emotional attribution among individuals, as they do in work with families, or even of shifting the attributed origin and ownership of troubles, as is done when narrative therapists "externalize the problem." Erickson-influenced therapists will recall his delightful habit of shifting the seats of family members to influence change in feeling by change in place.

To investigate this set of ideas as they occur in practice in a "systemic" therapeutic culture and to examine the communicative relationships whose rules form that culture, we ought to be participant-observers, not analysts from some Olympian point of intellectual leverage. We can follow the advice of the anthropologist, Clifford Geertz (1995), that, "what is needed, or anyway, must serve, is tableaus, anecdotes, parables, tales; mini-narratives with the narrator in them."

You know, ordinarily, what is what about yourself and the other person. When confused you suddenly become concerned about who you are and the other person seems to be fading.

Erickson (cited in Havens, 1996, p. 33)

Consider the problematic attribution of locus which I mentioned earlier and consider an antidote to such troubled communication: BJ sat in my office, alert and intense at our first meeting. His huge, pale frame filled the large chair as he had completely filled the door frame. Prison time and mental hospital time: violent encounters. He had learned to wait. Feeling "dissociated, unreaI," he came for help. I asked him a question about his life. BJ glanced at the wall behind me. "I could take that wall apart with my bare hands. I've done that." "I like that wall," I said. "I've liked that wall for many years."
For the rest of our conversation I spoke only about myself, my thoughts, my feelings and my dreams. He spoke, more sparingly, of his thoughts and experiences. After the third conversation in this manner, BJ said, "You've done something all the armies of lithium pushers and padded cells didn't do. They always told me what I was like, and I shut them out. You talked about you: your thoughts and feelings. I feel like myself."

The next time we spoke, I told BJ a dream of mine: I am driving a wonderful old red sports car on a cliffside road. The road diverges and I knowingly choose to drive the way that careens down to the beach and strands me in the sand, rather than continuing on the highway along the cliff top. BJ listened to the dream, then said, "I dreamed a park is being built in the wasteland of Beirut. I feel this session really flowed." In the next three conversations, BJ said, "Things are developing at a pace that makes a lot of sense to me. I'm happier. ... I want to take care of myself. ... Everybody wants to act better."

This simple notion of pitching in to do or demonstrate what is necessary to the activity of therapy, without fussiness about who is responsible to do it, obviates any need to discuss or interpret what is not being done and why it is not being accomplished. A fancy way of saying this might be that "the attribution of locus of experience is arbitrary in systems of two or more persons." A therapist comfortable with this outlook will appreciate Chloe Madanes' (1990) many therapeutic inventions, as when she encourages minor children to care for their troubled parents or shifts relational tasks to those family members best suited to carry them out.

Flexibility of attribution can help reorient the meaning of feelings without their having to change in form or intensity. It can also help develop meanings which were obscure and help them flower in the person’s life. A professional musician, first chair in a symphony orchestra, came to therapy with negative feelings and thoughts about her musical performance and performance troubles with a “shaky bow.” Asked to describe the feelings of playing the violin, she said, “Feelings of love in my heart.” Asked to describe the negative, fearful feelings, she said, “Feelings in my throat and the pit of my stomach.” Asked to show how she feels when she practices, she said, “I relax my feelings into the bow,” and demonstrated a beautiful bowing motion. Asked, “Why have these problems come along now?” she said, “I feel that I can be considered a world class violinist.” And, when asked her place in the world, she said, with her “pit-on-the-stomach feeling,” “When you come to #15 on the list of violinists in the world, you come to see me.”

Instead of asking about her ideas about the origin of her “shakiness” or about her “fear of success,” I asked about her relationship with the conductor. I was told that he was arrogant and controlling and uncertain at beating the time. I said, “He is shaky.” She said, “Yes!” She described her attempts to help him keep the music under control from her place among the strings. I asked her if she would be willing to lead him to a better sense of the beat and a more collaborative sense of making music. Her reply was forceful and direct, “I want people to know I can play!”

Eleanor Maccoby (cited in Tavris, 1998) showed some years ago that the gender composition of a group rather than personality traits accounted for gender differences in children. The behavior we attribute to gender is “an emergent property of relationships and groups.” For example, “female intuition,” was found to be the intuition of subordinate social partners, to depend on place and position rather than on trait:

Both sexes are equally intuitive when they have to read a superior’s mood, non-verbal signals or intentions - and equally thick-headed, when they are the bosses, about their subordinates’ feelings. ( p.126)

McIntosh (1988) in an account of her investigation of her own “white privileges” draws the cord which connects social experience with states of feeling:

In this potpourri of examples, some privileges make me feel at home in the world. Others allow me to escape penalties or dangers which others suffer. Through some, I escape fear, anxiety or a sense of not being welcome or not being real. Some keep me from having to hide, to be in disguise, to feel sick or crazy...Most keep me from having to be angry. (pp. 10-11)

Emotions themselves are sometimes held to be the grail which we seek when searching for our “real selves,” or for the means to authentic communication. The place and timing of emotional experience can be shifted to allow varieties of authentic experience to replace internal conflict between relational emotions.
My friend Shirley had a yearly Christmas breakfast where all her friends would gather. She always enjoyed the cooking and conversation and looked forward to it every year. One November she said to me that she was sure she would be depressed on Christmas. Her husband was depressed, her own job was in jeopardy and several close friends were seriously ill. But, she said, she didn’t want to feel depressed and have to cancel her party, so she had decided to “put the depressed feelings aside until the New Year.” Shirley’s party was delightful as always that year and when I saw her again in January I asked how things had gone. “Oh, I had a lovely Christmas, I so enjoyed the breakfast party. But New Year’s Day I woke up with the worst depression I’ve ever had and it lasted all day. Then, it was gone.”

A counselor I helped prepare for the licensing exams used hypnotic imagination to corral her nervousness. Taking the written exam she sat in front and imagined me, her therapist and some friends at the table before her. When the question was difficult or odd, she reminded herself of them, saying to herself, “That’s a stupid question. Just go on to the next one.” At the break, she did cartwheels on the lawn. She was at ease until after the exam when she found herself very anxious about her answers and talking obsessively with others. She passed both the written and oral exams.

The therapist may also participate in change along with the patient. I offered to stop fiddling with my beard and moustache, "a really difficult thing for me, to stop fussing with myself," if my patient, Margie, would stop "threatening herself" by pulling out her hair. Between mid-October and the end of December she pulled only a single hair from her head, after months of pulling hundreds and producing bleeding and scabbing. Margie told her best friend, "I didn't feel like I wanted to do it anymore." "How did you stop?" asked her friend. "We made a deal," said Margie. Sometimes it is notoriously difficult to "make a deal" through negotiation in psychotherapy. Still, as Freud (1935) said in his Autobiographical Study, "Anyone who wanted to make a living from the treatment of nervous patients must clearly be able to do something to help them" (p.27).

People called “borderline” are like the illegal immigrants once derisively called "wetbacks". They appear in one's emotional experience like intruders and are repelled forcefully only to show up the very next session, heralded by armies of telephone messages. What can be done to effectively cooperate with a patient who claims that the therapist has certain malign motives and emotions? The attribution is made to explain or justify strong feelings in the patient, but without them claiming these feelings as their own. They may say to the therapist, "You're trying to influence me!" and then storm angrily from the office, slamming the door. In a case I supervised, the therapist responded to this with a letter, "to express my thoughts about our last meeting." She said, "When you notice the inevitable accomplishments and improvements you will make yourself without undue influence from others, write them on a postcard to me, so I and my work with others can be influenced and affected by your example." The patient resumed their meetings saying, "I'm honored," and giving the therapist a book, “How to Argue and Win Every Time.”

Suppose that a therapist were to speak aloud the putative emotions of the patient as though they were the therapist's own? They might say to the person, "I am trying to influence you! I am trying so very hard. But I feel frustrated and angry. When I can't influence you I feel helpless and empty and really scared."