Doubt is what is at our core
Albert Camus
To access the intimacy of a decision, the explanatory interview must remove barriers
1 – Obstacle to the functioning of consciousness in action
One of the obstacles to accessing the memory of what has been done lies in the movement of consciousness. Henri Bergson states in Spiritual Energy (1911): “What happens when one of our actions is no longer spontaneous but automatic? Consciousness withdraws.”
Awareness is the tool for immediate coping at the moment. This consciousness has an attentional capacity that focuses on the perceptual table, that is, on the objects with which I interact. Consciousness is limited, we are limited by cognitive load. Consciousness then has an automation mechanism to increase the number of interacting objects unless it needs to make them conscious. An “economy of consciousness” therefore makes it possible to make activities that no longer require attention involuntary and unconscious. This phenomenon is well known when driving. There is no need to go through all the driving gestures, they start spontaneously. The reflex is a testimony to this process.
Attention acts as a filter and remains limited to new elements that require special treatment. A “highlight in the landscape” triggers a reaction. The brain develops a tendency to reduce cognitive load. Automation makes the processing of experiences invisible. A situation in which I have integrated myself without attention and without mobilizing consciousness is made implicit. Consequently, the explanation is easier for a learner who is new to a task than for an expert who has made many of his routines implicit.
Stanislas Dehaene (2014) states: “At every moment our brain is saturated with countless sensory stimuli. However, our consciousness only gives us access to a very small part of it.”
The explicit interview is a guided introspection to examine what is invisible. Action is knowledge that is unknown. An expert does not know what he is an expert at.
For Piaget, intelligence is the ability to adapt. By examining adaptation, we examine action. “Action alone represents an initial autonomous knowledge and is of remarkable effectiveness even when it does not know itself.” Piaget distinguishes the affective unconscious, to which access is required through psychoanalytic treatment, and the cognitive unconscious, which is through explanation remains accessible.
It is very difficult to search your unconscious. “Just because I know how to do it doesn’t mean I know how to do it.”
To describe the action, you must first access it
2- The cultural obstacle
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant invokes access to experience. Reflexivity is a cultural characteristic that favors the practice of explication. Our culture does not train us in reflexivity and access to lived experience. Religious culture and Christian belief are in a sense a work on one’s own experience, but from a moral point of view.
Access to self-knowledge is also available to the Buddhist world, which focuses on inwardness, particularly through meditation. The expertise of reflexivity is present in religion, but not necessarily action-oriented. In movement there is a close connection between body and consciousness. Francisco Varela wrote “The Physical Inscription of the Mind” in 1993, it is a text that integrates the idea of action, knowledge is made by the body and not just the brain.
In the West, our language is turned towards the world of objects, language objectifies according to the vision of Descartes, who offers us the destiny to “make oneself the master and owner of nature”. According to the “cogito ergo sum,” scientific culture turns us outward. Therefore, it is difficult to enter subjectivity, we have few words and few forms to express our interiority.
On the other hand, Michel Bitbol (2014) questions consciousness and its cultural origins. For him, “a culture is defined, among other things, by the range of behaviors it accepts and the experiences it welcomes.” These inclusions and exclusions are deposited like sediment in the structure of language.” What if our culture would distract us from the intimate to occupy the world with noise? Introspection is little valued in school culture, especially in France, and the expertise involved is difficult to predict. Accessing the invisibilities of consciousness proves to be difficult.
3- Methodological obstacles
Methodological hurdles still exist. For example, it is better not to question the action during its execution so as not to distort it. To explain this, the action is then questioned.
From then on we are asked to question the memory, so it is a reconstruction. The act of remembering is an act of changing experiences. This raises a question of loyalty. Elizabeth Loftus (1979) discusses the weaknesses of memory in her work Eyewitness testimony. With every reconstruction of memory there is a modification, because a fusion takes place through the integration of fragments of the moment in which the memory is mobilized. There may be no onboard storage.
When recomposing memory, the individual integrates the circumstances of the moment in which he or she narrates the recalled situation. Loftus shows how fragile witness testimony is in court proceedings. She notes that “in real life, as in experiences, people can believe things that never happened.” For example, it is possible to create false memories. Loftus reads a text about Bug’s Bunny before asking individuals what experiences they had during their day at a Disney park where Bug’s Bunny is conspicuously absent. Visitors claim to have seen Bugs Bunny. Further experiments are carried out with fake family photos during a hot air balloon ride. Some respondents recognized the scene, even though it was tailor-made. This confirms the saying. “I remember, so I’m wrong.”
These experiences distinguish episodic memory, as opposed to semantic memory, which contains all of its knowledge and proves to be fragile, and procedural memory (Tulving, 2002). The whole game of explanation is sorting between the reassembled memory and the memory of the action.
4- Barrier to consent
No explicit work without consent. Making the invisible visible requires a state of relaxation and self-confidence on the part of the interviewee. Consent means being present here and now with the interviewer conducting the disclosure interview.
To remove obstacles
These obstacles require one to commit oneself contractually, to establish a specific moment, and to place the subject in an evocation (a specific position of memory). As he opens up about his experience, ask him relevant questions
The attitude of the interviewer
In his questioning, the interviewer must strive to distinguish between “general truth”, habits, figurative gestures, gaze here and now, neutral, external or distant, I-You-You marking, available flow rhythm, condensed statement, which characterize alternatives the generality (in general, it depends on whether…) and “certain moments”, incarnation/performative gesture, facial gesture, emotional dimension, silence and gaze that breaks away to seek an answer (sign of evocation, Signs of reflexivity), “I” or “we” marking when the action is collective, slowed flow rate, expanding statement, in this moment…
In order to successfully distinguish truths and moments, he uses chronological questions; in the present to refer to more incarnation, visualization. The past tense refers to a distance from the utterance. The aim of the survey is to determine the sequence of steps. The present “presents” the relationship, the presence in the situation increases. The explanatory interview focuses on specific, unique and unique moments. Access to the concrete requires questions of clarification
One precaution is to avoid intruding on intimacy that is marked by emotions, no remembering the emotions, no questioning the feelings, just welcoming the sensations. Instead of rephrasing, the interviewer will prefer pure and simple repetition without changing the vocabulary. The interviewer repeats words and does not reformulate them because this causes the speaker to lose his “indexing”, ie his temporal markings on the sequence of actions.
The educational questions are structured along the lines of “What do you do?” It’s about slowing down, taking your time, and then doing a chronological summary at the end of the interview or even other things you can say.
Find “a specific moment that happened well only once in the person’s life,” or “a single temporal location,” as Pierre Vermersch calls it, rather than a general moment. The general public is a global, more diffuse moment.
This article comes from an explanatory training led by Frédérique Borde Oftex. Mastering this practice requires a lot of time and expert-led training.
Image: Unsplash
Sources
Jacques Theureau’s self-confrontation with video visualization
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Meditation at the Crossroads and Psychology Antoine Lutz and Mathieu Ricard
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Loftus, E. F. (1996). Witness testimony. Harvard University Press.
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Maela Paul “Support for a certain professional attitude” L’harmattan 2004 “Rubriques”, Contraste, 2006/1 (No. 24), pp. 307-325. https://www.cairn.info/revue-contraste-2006-1-page-307.htm
Stanislas Dehaene The Code of Conscience 2014
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Bouchut, F., Cuisiniez, F., Cauden, I. & Tronchet, J. (2020). Tool 51. The explanatory interview. In: F. Bouchut, F. Cuisiniez, I. Cauden and J. Tronchet (directors), The Trainers’ Toolbox (pp. 142-143). Paris: Dunod.
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