Relational Frame Theory
= Relational frame theory (RFT) is a novel explanation of cognition and language. [1]
Definition
Erik Haines:
"Relational Frame Theory attempts to explain how human beings learn to relate events symbolically and how those learned relations transform what things do to us. Words, memories, identities, imagined futures, social categories, and evaluations acquire behavioral functions that no longer depend upon direct experience alone. A person can become frightened by something that has never happened, organize a life around avoiding a judgment no one has actually made, or respond to a word as though it were the thing the word names."
(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/the-language-parasite-and-the-symbolic)
Discussion
Seeing the Symbolic Trap
Erik Haines:
"Relational Frame Theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis are, in important respects, approaching the same human phenomenon: we become organized by symbolic relations that operate prior to conscious reflection and can come to govern perception, identity, emotion, memory, and action.
Lacan’s account is structural. Human subjectivity is constituted through language rather than merely expressed through it. The subject enters a Symbolic Order of names, laws, kinship structures, prohibitions, social meanings, and signifiers that existed before any particular individual appeared. There is no fully formed self standing outside this order and subsequently learning to use language as an instrument. The speaking subject emerges through symbolic mediation and remains divided by it.
This is one reason psychoanalysis can be so illuminating. It directs attention toward repetitions and identifications that ordinary introspection misses. Freud’s unconscious already challenged the ego’s confidence that it knows why it does what it does. Lacan relocates that problem within language itself. Žižek then extends it into ideology, showing how political and cultural formations can organize desire precisely where subjects imagine themselves to be acting freely.
There is an old joke about a man who goes into psychoanalysis because he wets the bed. Years later, a friend asks whether the analysis worked. “I still wet the bed,” he replies, “but now I know why.”
The joke is unfair to psychoanalysis, but it captures the problem I am trying to name. Insight and behavioral change are not the same thing. A person can understand a symptom, give an increasingly sophisticated account of the fantasy or repetition underlying it, and remain caught in much the same pattern. Knowing why one does something does not necessarily make another response available when the conditions that produce the behavior return.
That limitation becomes especially visible in the Lacanian and Žižekian traditions because their great strength is interpretation. They can make forms of capture visible that would otherwise remain difficult to see: how desire becomes organized around lack, how identification attaches us to particular images of ourselves, how ideology operates through enjoyment rather than simply through false belief. But the very sophistication of the interpretive machinery can become part of the difficulty. One interpretation leads to another; contradiction generates another dialectical turn; the discovery that we are caught within language produces still more language about the character of our capture.
At its best, this can deepen self-understanding and expose ideological structures that a narrower psychology might overlook. At its worst, the person becomes increasingly fluent in explaining why change is difficult without becoming substantially better able to change.
RFT reaches much of the same territory from a radically different intellectual lineage. It does not begin with the divided subject or the Symbolic Order but with learned relational behavior. Human beings acquire the capacity to respond to relations among events — same as, different from, better than, before, after, mine, yours, here, there — in ways that become increasingly independent of the physical properties of the events themselves. Once these relational networks develop, the functions of one event can be transformed through its relation to another.
The word worthless can alter behavior even though worthlessness is not a physical property one could discover in the body. A memory of humiliation can change what a future social encounter means. A political category can alter whom we trust before another person has spoken. A diagnostic label can reorganize how previous experiences are remembered and how future possibilities are imagined.
There is a genuine convergence here. Both traditions reject the picture of an autonomous rational individual transparently deciding what things mean and then acting accordingly. Both recognize that human beings become entangled in networks of symbolic relation that acquire force outside conscious intention.
The difference becomes much more significant when we ask what happens next.
Psychoanalysis asks us to understand the structure of the trap more deeply. RFT asks what the trap is doing to behavior. ACT then asks whether that behavioral relationship can be changed.
That movement from interpretation toward function and action is where the distinction becomes practical."
(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/the-language-parasite-and-the-symbolic)
More Information
Bibliography
- Hayes, S.C., Barnes-Holmes, D., & Roche, B. (Eds.) (2001). Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition. New York: Plenum Publishers.
- Steven C. Hayes, Kirk D. Strosahl, and Kelly G. Wilson, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed., 2012)
- Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters (2019)