Assignment: Metaphor Of Inhaling/Exhaling

Assignment: Metaphor Of Inhaling/Exhaling
Assignment: Metaphor Of Inhaling/Exhaling
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Chapters 5 and 6 in Bridges Not Walls utilize the metaphor of inhaling and exhaling to explore interpersonal communication. Applying material from the various essays, explore the 2 concepts and explain how they further our understanding of interpersonal communication from the beginning chapters. What role does listening play in the inhaling or exhaling process?
· THINKING ALLOWED with Jeffrey Mishlove
· JEFFREY MISHLOVE Hello and welcome. I’m Jeffrey Mishlove, and our topic today is existential psychotherapy. With me is Dr. Rollo May, psychotherapist, existential philosopher and psychologist, recipient of the “Distinguished Career in Psychology” Award by the American Psychological Association, a found sponsor of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and author of many classic books, including “Love and Will”,”Freedom and Destiny”, “The Courage to Create”, “Psychology and the Human Dilemma”. Welcome, Rollo.
· 28:30DR. ROLLO MAY Thank you.
· 28:35JEFFREY MISHLOVE It’s a pleasure to be with you. You know, it’s interesting, the, the parallel that there may be between the television interview, this one on one situation and the therapy situation, especially, I think, as seen from the existential perspective of, uh, direct encounter between two people. You don’t, in, in, in therapy, so much see yourself as a doctor/patient type of relationship that many other therapists will view.
The metaphor of inhaling and exhaling describes the receptive and expressive parts of communication (Stewart, 2012, p.163). Inhaling determines how we take information in during interactions. Also, inhaling is characterized by two active, interpretive processes which are perception and listening (Stewart, 2012, p.163). Stewart (2012) notes that perception is a social and cognitive process where people assign meaning to sensory cues (p.163). Perception includes three subprocesses which are selection, organization, and inference. Selection is how an individual chooses to pay attention to sensory cues (Stewart, 2012, p.164). Organization refers tohow an individual applies structure and stability to sensory cues he/she selects (Stewart, 2012, p.166). Stewart (2012) suggests inference is where an individual goes beyond sensory cues to make his/her own interpretations and establish meaning in the sensory cues (p.166). Perception is an interpretive process therefore it is impossible to perceive without the aforementioned subprocesses.