Chapter 45 - Seminars: Part 6 - Neuro-Semantic Relaxation

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

At the first seminar in Chicago, during the first personal interviews he gave there, Korzybski made an interesting and, for him, pivotal discovery. He conducted the interviews in his hotel suite, which had a narrow table where he sat across from a student during a session. He heard more than one tale of woe. “The carpet after a few hours”, he said, “was wet from tears.”(10) Seeing the ‘unhappiness’ frozen on a student’s face, he often felt impelled to reach across and touch it in a gesture of comfort. He hated to see such a face “tense as hell”.(11) He wanted to relax it. And the student’s face seemed to invariably soften and relax. If the student began to ‘make a face’ again during the session, Korzybski would quietly reach across once more to relax him. It seemed to make a difference in the student’s attitude, at least during the session. Afterwards, accompanying the student to the door, he would often pat him on the back, shoulder, or arm, making a more or less instinctive gesture of connection, reassurance, and calm as they said goodbye. More than one student returning for a second interview would ask Korzybski to repeat what he had done to relax them. Korzybski began to wonder about what had happened, to consider what he had done with so little plan.

He realized he had done this kind of thing most of his life, first with horses. He wouldn’t get on a horse, even one he knew, without approaching it first and making a friendly physical contact. And having trained wild horses, he had learned how to relax a skittish one this way too. What had worked with horses had worked with people as well. At St. Elizabeths he remembered that upon finishing an interview with patients there (not the kind of consultative interview with students he had just started to do) he would sometimes give them a farewell pat which seemed to leave them in a somewhat brighter mood.

Now his students were coming back to him and asking him to purposefully repeat “his friendly grasp of their arm, or gentle shake-up of [their] distorted, worried face.”(12)  He now began to consciously experiment with what he had first done in an off-handed kind of way. His students began to do it to themselves as well and a new technique evolved, which he came to call “semantic relaxation” or “neuro-semantic relaxation”.

The label would make no sense to those who continued to restrict the term ‘semantic’ to the realm of verbal ‘meaning’. But since for Korzybski, evaluation or ‘semantic reaction’ related to non-verbal organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment responses, he came to feel that dealing with the musculature in this way had critical importance in reducing ‘emotional’ tension and thus in becoming more extensional. He came to believe the technique had its main effect not on the tension of the voluntary musculature, which we can feel, but on the involuntary, insensate musculature of the blood vessels, which affected the blood pressure. (He had some confirmation of this from the effects which the procedure seemed to have on normalizing the blood pressures of students who practiced it regularly.) A few years later, he would write in his “Introduction To The Second Edition” of Science and Sanity:

We are never aware of this particular steady kind of ‘emotional’ tension, which involves hidden fears, anxieties, uncertainties, frustrations, etc., and through nervous mechanisms of projection colour harmfully our attitudes toward the world and life in general. Such conditions result in defensiveness, which is no defense, but a wasteful, useless drain on the limited nervous capacities. (13) 

Korzybski later became fond of Dave Breger's 1944 cartoon which showed a tough-looking drill sergeant, hands on hips, yelling at a group of frightened-looking recruits: "You on the end! Wipe that opinion off your face!"

Korzybski circa 1948-1949 holding framed illustration below

Cut, pasted, framed
and kept readily at hand in Alfred Korzybski's office

Whatever its mechanism, semantic relaxation seemed to help students wipe their opinions off their faces. It became a regular part of the seminar training (usually put at the tail-end of Korzybski’s lectures). First, he would explain the origin and theory of the technique and demonstrate it with a male volunteer. Then the class would break up into small groups (men and women separated) where they would practice on themselves with the help of one of Alfred’s assistants.

Although Korzybski saw it as primarily a self-help method, it could be done by a practitioner on someone else as well. Korzybski became quite adept at applying the technique to others with quite noticeable effects. Goddard Binkley, who later studied with F.M. Alexander and became a well-known teacher of Alexander’s technique of postural education, described his experience with Korzybski:

...Stripped to my shorts and seated on a chair facing Korzybski who was also seated on a chair, he gently took fleshy parts of my body in the palm of one hand, flexed the palm with straight fingers and then, gently pulling the flesh-muscle away from the bone, shook it gently and released his hand. This procedure he followed on all the more fleshy parts and in a different way on the face and hands. ...Afterwards, when I walked down the street from the Institute to my car, I felt light, free and floating, as though I’d shed a hundred burdens. (14) 

A few of Korzybski’s students would write about the technique and develop it further, but after his death it fell into disuse, without the research Korzybski seemed to think it deserved. (15)


Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

10. Korzybski 1947, p. 289. 11. Ibid. 12. 

12. Schuchardt 1943, p. 1. 

13. Korzybski 1994 (1933), p. lx. 

14. Binkley, p. 8. 15. For more on neuro-semantic relaxation see Wendell Johnson 1938 and Wendell Johnson 1946. Also see The Technique of Semantic Relaxation by Charlotte Schuchardt [Read] (1943) and the 1941 paper by May Watrous Niles, “Use of General Semantics Techniques In Physiotherapy”, pp. 183–186 in Papers From The Second American Congress On General Semantics (1943) edited by M. Kendig.

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Chapter 45 - Seminars: Part 5 - The Alka-Selzer Case

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

  

With his students, Korzybski was willing to do what he thought it took to get results. He would later recount an interview at one of his early seminars with an anxious and withdrawn college teacher in her late twenties who hallucinated a skeleton. She told Korzybski that a teenaged boy had molested her when she was three. Her mother had told her about it when she was in her teens. The little girl had been left alone with the boy for only a few minutes. The mother returned before he had time to do any physical damage. Sitting at his desk across from the young woman, Korzybski guessed her skeleton hallucination had something to do with her early childhood experience. He kept various items on the desk and happened to see the long glass cylinder of an Alka-Seltzer bottle in his field of vision: 

....It occurred to me, which is quite natural, that she felt a ‘bone’ between her legs, bone. No harm done, except fear. You understand that the fear was there all right, a little child having a bone between her legs, and it occurred to me that eventually that hallucination of a skeleton, bone, may have originated from that, to her, fearful experience... 

I explained to her that the male organ is more or less like an Alka-Seltzer bottle, and I had it on my desk. I explained to her that this is possibly the combination of the memory of a bone between her little legs, then I showed her the Alka-Seltzer bottle and made her handle the Alka-Seltzer bottle.  

...It is beyond description, the terror, the horror, when she had to handle the Alka-Seltzer bottle. This was confirming, so to say, my guess, that it may be the origin of the skeleton, the bone between her leg. The terror and horror she exhibited handling the Alka-Seltzer bottle. It means, I hit the nail on the head. I made her overcome that horror or fear. She had to, through skirts and everything, it means between her legs use the Alka-Seltzer bottle, poke herself with it—still worse trouble, horror, terror; my god, I have seen such terror only on the battlefields.  

Well, I used to have some fruit [on my desk], I had a banana—yes, we have no bananas—well, I had a banana...I explained to her that the male organ is more or less like the Alka-Seltzer bottle. Then I explained the male organ is not as stiff as the bottle and then I picked up the banana and explained to her that a banana in this direction may feel like a bone, but this way it is flexible and what not. I made her actually handle the banana. Still worse horror. I didn’t have any pity, I wanted her to overcome the hallucination of that skeleton which ruined her life, because she was ruined in the head here. She put still more horror, suffering, handling the banana. Of course I was explaining to her the whole situation, the origin of her hallucinations, to make her conscious of it, why the hallucinations happened.  

Then I took her to the college museum where there was an actual skeleton. It happened to be a male skeleton. She was a small thing, frightened to death; she cuddled to me, I put my arm around her and she had to play, get acquainted—I called the skeleton her ‘boyfriend’. And I had to protect her and make her get acquainted with the skeleton. And because she was protected, like a little child she began to poke her fingers in the eyes of the skeleton, handle, handle. I simply wanted to eliminate the hallucination of that skeleton; so she had to inspect the skeleton. I explained to her, among others, that the skeleton has no Alka-Seltzer bottle there; that muscles, nerves hurt, the bones don’t hurt. And I took her little hand; she had a very little hand. My hand is very strong; I hurt her, deliberately—you know how you can hurt squeezing the hand too hard. I deliberately hurt her. She didn’t wince even; paid no attention to it. I ask her to shake hands with her boyfriend the skeleton; see whether the skeleton can hurt her. I was hurting her deliberately. She shook the hands and inspected the hand of the skeleton; naturally the skeleton didn’t hurt her.  

That’s all there is to it; she had to inspect and get acquainted with the skeleton. I called him deliberately her ‘boyfriend’, and she was left with orders to go daily to the college museum to shake hands with her ‘boyfriend’, which she did for months. Do you know, the hallucination disappeared. On my part it was, if you wish, extensional guessing. It was nothing but guessing, but it did work. It took her about six months visiting daily her ‘boyfriend’, shaking hands with him, the skeleton. Do you realize that after six months of daily performance not with me; I explained of course that she has to do it alone—the hallucination disappeared. A medical man may know what it means if we can eliminate hallucinations. Hallucinations are extremely serious; it means a person who has hallucinations is very seriously ill. Well after six months hallucinations disappeared.  

She was in a way a beautiful young woman, but shy, afraid of life, retired, afraid of men, I don’t know what kind of a mess she had. I have seen her later; she became a beautiful young woman. She was an ugly duckling at first; then she became very popular with the college fellows, then she became more and more popular with the college fellows, she changed physically from an ugly duckling to a beautiful young woman and hallucinations disappeared. It was only one meeting remember, and the performance of what I described apparently did the trick. Oh, by now she is married woman with babies and so on; but even when I was having my seminar she already was changing and becoming more interested in life, not skeletons. She was losing the fear of men, she became more and more attractive, even in the three weeks I carried on the seminar...She had to perform, perform. If she would have never been forced to become acquainted with a skeleton, she would not have overcome the hallucination. (9)

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

9. Korzybski 1949, pp. 358–361.

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Chapter 45 - Seminars: Part 4 - Laboratory Work

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

The group format of the seminar allowed Korzybski to introduce his work to more than one person at a time. It also allowed students, often 40 or 50 per class, to observe and interact with and so to learn from each other. But the intellectual, i.e. verbal, understanding of general semantics that could be gained from seminar lectures was not enough. Individual students typically needed individualized help to apply the extensional method to their personal lives—what Korzybski referred to as the “laboratory work”. (5)

From his first seminar in Chicago, Korzybski offered this “laboratory work”—in personal interviews—to all of his seminar students. He came to see the personal interview as a necessary part of his teaching. As the process for the interviews evolved, a student would provide a written history of him/herself and whatever he/she wanted to work on. Reading this statement let Korzybski begin to visualize the person’s life situation, which included how the person talked about things. Then in one or more sessions, Korzybski would work to help the student extensionalize his problems and himself.

Throughout his life, Korzybski had worked as a translator. The interviews seemed much like a job of translation: how to translate his student’s personal problems from intension (verbal definitions in which they had gotten ‘stuck’) to extension (‘facts’). Sometimes another form of representation could help someone change his/her approach to a situation. For example, to someone who had a rough time with “Papa” and “Mama”, Korzybski might suggest referring to them instead in the third person, as “Mr. and Mrs. Jones”, or, when addressing them directly, to do so by first name, e.g., “Richard and Darlene”—with the parent’s permission, of course. So ‘simple’ a change could often make a significant difference in a habitually sticky relationship between an adult child and his or her parents.

Intensional Smith1
Watercolor and Ink drawing for Korzybski by A.B. Stewart, 1940 

Extensional Smith2
Watercolor and Ink drawing for Korzybski by A.B. Stewart, 1940 

'A Chairy Tale' of Intensional Smith1 Versus Extensional Smith2

Using the extensional devices provided a major way to translate a problem situation—to newly represent it—in extensional terms. Korzybski would tell seminar classes about former students he had helped in this way (leaving out identifying information). There was, for example, the case of “the boy out the window”. One of Korzybski’s early, seminar students had related that, as a five-year-old boy, he had been picked up by his nanny—who supposedly loved him—when she couldn’t get him to stop crying. She held him out of the fifth-floor window and told him she would drop him if he didn’t stop. He stopped. This single occurrence appeared to have shaped his whole life into adulthood. He had troubles with anxiety, with trusting people, with women, etc. In the interview sessions, Korzybski worked with him on dating and indexing. “It took me a long time to make him date his experience. Date the experience, yet what happened twenty-three, [twenty-]four years ago, is not what happened today.”(6) The man had to ‘sweat’—practicing for about two years—but eventually he no longer suffered from the anxiety that had plagued him most of his life. He was not “the boy out the window” anymore. 

Students needed to do more than make a superficial change of words; ‘words’ in isolation were not enough. The associated neuro-semantic (evaluational) reactions were not verbal. To challenge the unspoken assumptions behind problems, new assumptions, new behavior, feelings and experience had to arise as well. Korzybski might do something as simple as getting a student to actually pinch his finger. Saying “I am pinching my finger” was not the same as pinching his finger. A student had to pinch his finger to experience this. Students had to remind themselves of the un-speakable level often. He wanted them to handle the structural differential, to keep it in sight, and to point to it and use it to make sense of a situation or problem. He wanted them to use their hands to make kinesthetic gestures for the devices whenever possible. If the hands weren’t available for doing single quotes, you could use your toes. As Korzybski roughly formulated it, these methods bridged the predominantly verbal ‘cortical’ region of the brain with the ‘thalamic’—the pre-verbal, lower-order-of-abstraction, ‘sensory’-‘emotional’ region where people lived, suffered, and could experience deep change. He had tested everything on himself.

To demonstrate a point to a student, he might ask her to play with a simple toy like the spinner sparkler one could buy at Woolworths. (Korzybski would end up with a collection of these in his desk drawer.) Held in the hand, you made the toy’s little wheel spin by pumping a spring-loaded slider at the base. The wheel might make sparks but the main point for Korzybski was that by cutting or replacing the wheel to make a fan-shape, you could spin it and see ‘a disk where there is no disk’. Campbell had used one of these with a priest who heard voices. The priest was taken with the realization that he could perceive something that ‘wasn’t there’—that just as his nervous system had constructed the ‘disk’, it had constructed the voices as well. He played with the device quite often. His auditory hallucinations eventually stopped. 

"The world is not an illusion."
Korzybski explains more about abstracting and 'the disk where there is no disk'.
Produced by Steve Stockdale

Korzybski’s job, as he saw it, required ‘holding up a mirror’ to his students so they could honestly look at themselves and their reactions. Such self-reflexiveness could apply in the most literal sense. For example, if he saw a deadness in the facial expression of a student, he might ask him or her to practice actually holding up a mirror to look at themselves.

Personal interviews for students were included in the tuition fee. Initially, even after the founding of the Institute of General Semantics, Korzybski tried to see everyone that he could and scheduled the interviews concurrently with his course of lectures. Eventually as the exhausting—for him—character of the interviews became more apparent, he had them scheduled to begin only after he had completed the lectures. He stressed the optional nature of the interviews as well. He found those claiming to be satisfied with their lives might be less likely to come or, if they did, less likely to seriously use it to apply general semantics to personal issues. More’s the pity. Korzybski didn’t consider it likely that anyone—even a well-trained mathematician or mathematical physicist—could master a general extensional approach to life unless he had first worked to apply it to himself. If a student felt he didn’t have any significant personal problems to work on, one couldn’t justifiably conclude he didn’t have any.

Korzybski would later estimate that about “Ten percent of every class got nothing out of it. Some became my enemies for life.” As Kendig phrased it, “When you touch the fundamental verbalisms around which an individual has organized his life pattern, it may be too disturbing for him to face.”

Some ‘got it’ quickly and as easily fell back into old habits of thinking-feeling. They use the words but not the method. ‘They “refused” to work at themselves, he said. Some learned general semantics ‘intellectually’ (i.e., verbally, ‘cortically’) knew all the principles and terminology and techniques, but simply could not apply them, change their evaluations, their living reactions. Some ‘got it’ very slowly, over the years. It apparently had no effect on their lives, their work, and then—something happened. (7)

As to how slowly this ‘something’ might happen, Kendig quoted a letter that research psychiatrist Charles J. Katz wrote to Korzybski in April 1950 (not having heard yet of his death on March 1 of that year):

Dear Count Alfred : 

I think I owe you a little apology, a vote of thanks, and an explanation. As you recall it was in the summer of 1939 that I first became aware of General Semantics. At that time your and my good friend Dr. ___ [deceased] . . . took me with him to your Seminar. I could ‘get’ the cortical aspect [verbal] but for some reason the thalamic portion [change in living, feeling] seemed to elude me. However in this last month something apparently has happened. I begin now for the first time to ‘feel’ that general semantics has something I need and which can help. What the explanation is I do not know—all I can give you is the answer my small son (thirty-four months) gives me—when I ask him why he does this or that, he simply says, ‘Well I did it’... just to let you know that sometimes it takes a little while for things to sink in, I remain, 

Semantically yours (8)

From the time he began teaching until the end of his life, the personal interviews with students took a tremendous toll on Korzybski’s time and energy. They took up not only the hours of interview time—often with a large portion of a seminar’s participants—but the hours of personal follow-up as well. He encouraged his students to write to him in detail to let him know how they were doing. He, in turn, would respond to these letters with his detailed analysis, advice, and encouragement. (Korzybski’s large correspondence with students, their letters to him, as well as their autobiographical statements, were destroyed or returned to the students soon after his death. A small number of letters were retained in the Institute files with students’ permission, their names cut out from the letters.) After the founding of the Institute of General Semantics, a number of the Institute trustees tried to convince Korzybski to stop providing interviews. Korzybski refused. Although he readily admitted their taxing nature, he felt compelled to provide a laboratory wherein he could help his students learn to apply what he taught—the main point, after all.


Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

5. Korzybski 1947, p. 327. 

6. Korzybski 1947, p. 405. 

7. Kendig 1950, p. xxxii-xxxiii. 

8. Charles J. Katz, M.D. to AK, 4/4/1950. IGS Archives, quoted in Kendig 1950, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv.

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Chapter 45 - Seminars: Part 3 - Extensionalize

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

From the start, Korzybski considered what he was doing as training. He aimed at “extensionalization”, i.e., getting his students to ‘think’ in terms of ‘facts’ about themselves and their problems. He had used the term, “extensionalization”—the name of a process or an act—once in his 1934 “Outline”, and he used it again in 1935. Indeed, by the end of that year, he had turned it into a verb—“to extensionalize”.

In November, after his last seminar of the year , he stayed in the Midwest to conduct further business in Chicago with Campbell and Congden, and to prepare two papers for presentation at the 97th annual, end-of-year meeting of the AAAS in St. Louis, where Kendig was also presenting. (3) 

The first paper, which he gave at the Psychology Section meeting on December 31, had the potentially tongue-tying title of “Neuro-Semantic and Neuro-Linguistic Mechanisms of Extensionalization: General Semantics as a Natural Experimental Science”. The paper, as its title suggests, focused especially on neurological and psychiatric aspects of Korzybski’s developing work. His paper seems to have impressed not only some of his professional listeners (it was published the following July in the American Journal of Psychiatry), but also a newspaper reporter attending. The next day’s St. Louis Globe Democrat included the following report of Korzybski’s talk at the end of a general article on the conference:

“Science of Man.”  

The possibility of establishing a “science of man” was discussed yesterday before a subsection on psychology by Count Alfred Korzybski of Brooklyn, N.Y. 

[The article quoted almost exactly from the last paragraph of Korzybski’s paper.] “The white race has come to a real impasse, the actual conditions of life are shaped by extensional science while our inner orientations and language remain intensional,” he stated. “Increasing maladjustment must follow, as it actually does. Either we return to primitive states and abolish extensional science and then perhaps survive, or we bring about our orientations to conform with the actualities of our lives, in other words extensionalize them.” (4)

Korzybski gave his second paper, originally titled “Extensionalization in Mathematics, Mathematical Physics, and General Education: General Semantics” two days later on January 2, 1936 to the AAAS Mathematics Section. It surely qualifies as one of his most succinct presentations of his work—general semantics stripped down to its roots in mathematical method. Whatever the response of the mathematicians to the paper, the notion of “extensionalization” had certainly captured Korzybski’s attention. Over the next few years, he wrote two more papers with that main title and different subtitles for AAAS mathematical venues, although other than abstracts they never appeared in AAAS publications. (Korzybski later changed the ‘subtitle’ of this first “Extensionalization in Mathematics,...” paper from “General Semantics” to “Paper I – The Extensional Method” and eventually published it himself along with the others in the series.)

The two St. Louis papers had importance beyond their general emphasis on extensionalization. In Science and Sanity, Korzybski had used Indexes, Dates, Quotes, Hyphens, and Etc., but he had not summarized them sharply as part of a single mechanism. Although the 1934 “Outline”, referred in general terms to “linguistic extensional devices” it said nothing specific about them. For the first time, in the St. Louis papers, Korzybski used “extensional devices” as the common summary term for Indexes, etc., which he then listed and discussed. In retrospect, it may seem obvious to us to do this. But to create a common term for them, Korzybski had to take himself to another, higher level of abstraction in order to clearly enough see the similarities of the different devices. The common term made them more usable and teachable. And the extensional devices served as essential tools for the work of extensionalizing his seminar students, the ultimate purpose of his teaching.


Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

3. AK to Jacques Cattell, 11/26/1935. AKDA 35.238. 

4. “Phases of Research in Different Fields Occupy Scientists. New Developments Are Discussed at Joint Meetings”. St. Louis Globe Democrat, 1/1/1936. AKDA 42.72.

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Chapter 45 - Seminars: Part 2 - Seminars

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Not working with the seriously disturbed, but teaching the everyday un-sane would become the central focus of his work. The seminar format would give him the chance to do what he couldn’t do in one or even several lectures—not just to get people’s attention and interest, but to begin to train them towards consciousness of abstracting. Many interested people had not read Science and Sanity, and of those who did, many seemed to miss the meat of it. In his seminars, which could extend over a number of days and even weeks, he would have time to cover his system ‘deductively’—i.e., showing the systemic interconnections between the formulations—while also providing lots of examples along the way, with the ultimate goal of helping as many students as possible by “rubbing in” what he felt they needed in order to deal better with their life difficulties. He was not there just to expound theory. He wanted results.

After the first two seminars in Chicago, he returned briefly to Brooklyn and then left for an intensive schedule of teaching he had lined up for the remainder of 1935:

* July 29 to August 20 – a seminar in Berkeley at Cora Williams Junior College;  

* August 27 to October 13 – two seminars in Los Angeles organized by Vocha (Bertha) Fiske, a former teacher for Cora Williams, presently working in the California Department of Education who had attended Korzybski’s March lectures in Berkeley; and  

* October 16 to November 22 – a seminar for teachers at Barstow School.

During this time, he established the basic structure for the many subsequent seminars he would give. Eventually, he found he could cover what he wanted to cover in about 40 hours of lecture. And over the next 15 years, he would continue to develop both the content and presentation of his seminars (which, of course, were not entirely unrelated.)

Regarding content, throughout his subsequent teaching career Korzybski would find new examples and stories, and new demonstrations to illustrate his points. He would also continue to develop his formulations, which—as a visualizer—he liked to diagram. Over the years he would thus develop a collection of blackboard notes consisting, in large part, of such diagrams, which he used in each seminar to represent the significant formulations he wanted students to remember and use. For him the diagrams had great significance since he wanted to encourage what he called ‘eye-mindedness’ in his students.

Korzybski (late 1940s) seated behind his lecture podium
holding a rotating fan: 'a disk where there is no disk'.

Regarding his presentation, in the beginning period of his seminar-giving he would start with the basic formulations, what he called “the baby stuff”. In time, as he expected students to have read his work, or various popularizations of it, he found it more effective to move this material towards the end of the seminar. By providing more preliminary background to show the complexities involved, this order might reduce people’s tendency to dismiss ‘the baby stuff’.

In his seminars, Korzybski became known for his “footnotes”—digressions wherein he expanded on a topic, provided an example, or made a connection with something else he considered important. This led to his “peculiar style of lecturing”. Kendig, who attended many of his seminars, would describe it as,

...a non-linear method of developing his exposition of non-aristotelian orientations by going round and round in widening circles, turning back to some example given at the beginning to illustrate a mechanism of his later lectures. He used shocking examples from his study in mental hospitals, from psychiatry, from his own experience with deeply maladjusted people, criminals, etc., to (as he called it) ‘get under the skins’ of the class, to ‘shake them up’. He used examples from daily life, from the history of science, from mathematics. At times he was elegant, crisp, suave—at others, humorous, discursive. Often his face, his hands, conveyed as much as his words and diagrams. One educator said he was ‘the most powerful and effective teacher’ he knew, ‘a master of pedagogy’. Another said he was ‘the worst, should study pedagogy’. People were seldom neutral about him, what he did, or how he did it. The more he shook their complacency, irritated them by ‘rubbing in’ the method, the more they learned. He insisted that anyone who wished to, could enroll for a seminar. ‘Because a general method of evaluation,’ he said, ‘has to work with anybody in any human activity or it’s no good.’ Professors, doctors, psychiatrists, artists, researchers, young college students, businessmen, social workers, laborers, etc., all sat in the same classes. This may all sound chaotic; it was effective. (1)

Korzybski acknowledged that the quality of his lectures could vary and sometimes suffer, especially if he felt preoccupied with something pressing or if he hadn’t sufficiently planned. Until the end of his life, he sought to improve the quality of his presentations. For this purpose, he came to have an assistant sitting close by him and taking notes, who could give him a ‘flap’ during the lecture to remind him of where he had left off if he got lost in his order of presentation after an extended footnote. The assistant’s notes also helped him to review what he had covered in the course of the day’s talk. In a day-long teaching session, say for six hours with a break for lunch, he would do a mid-day ‘course correction’ looking over the assistant’s notes, checking off the diagrams he had discussed, deciding whether to move on to another topic or to spiral around again for another turn on a subject he felt needed more elaboration. An end-of-day recap with the assistant helped him review the day’s performance.

As Kendig said, some people liked his teaching style and some didn’t. One who did, Goddard Binkley—at the time a 23-year-old pre-med student—took several seminars in Chicago with Korzybski in 1942 and 1943. For him, “General Semantics had a distinctly purifying, immensely stimulating, and thoroughly therapeutic effect on my feelings, thoughts and general attitude towards life and the world.” He described his impression of Korzybski lecturing:

I looked and listened with rapt attention as Korzybski talked and gesticulated, absorbed in his every expression, gesture and movement. He constantly illustrated his concepts with diagrams and symbols and sometimes, little mechanical devices, like a small electric fan or a match box. His talk was punctuated with small quick movements of his hands and fingers, pointing for emphasis, making quotation marks in the air, and, most characteristic of all, indicating an “et cetera, et cetera,” with a quick ripple-like motion of his hand. He was a short heavy-set man with a large, totally bald head. He wore rimless glasses with thick lenses. He spoke deliberately with a deep Polish accent. He conveyed great understanding, warmth, and love for—but sometimes an irritable impatience with—his fellow human beings. (2)

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

1. Kendig 1950, “A Memoir: Alfred Korzybski & His Work” in Manhood of Humanity, Second Edition, pp. xxx–xxxi. 

2. Binkley, pp. 6-7.

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Chapter 45 - Seminars: Part 1 - Introduction

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Tired as he felt, Korzybski took little time for rest. He had more lectures scheduled almost immediately. On April 20 he gave his second lecture at the Galois Institute of Mathematics, run by Hugh Gray Lieber and Lillian R. Lieber of the Math Department of Long Island University in Brooklyn. Alfred and Mira had met the Liebers early in 1934 when they invited Alfred to speak soon after the opening of the Lieber’s institute. They had founded it as a vehicle to make mathematics more enticing to high school and university students as well as the general public. For many years, the Leibers organized frequent lectures there and published a series of books on mathematics, logic, and physics written by Lillian in ‘free verse’ form and illustrated by Hugh’s playful drawings. Their work, influenced by Keyser, who often lectured at the institute, developed a wide and devoted audience drawn to their humanistic approach to science and mathematics. Their writings, which continued into the early 1960s, included The Einstein Theory of Relativity (1936), The Education of T.C. MITS (The Celebrated Man In The Street): What Modern Mathematics Means To You (1942), Infinity (1953) and Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics (1961). The Liebers remained lifelong friends and supporters of Korzybski. 

 

Lillian & Hugh Lieber

A few days after the Galois lecture, Korzybski gave another talk at the Columbia University Sociology Department. Then in early May, he lectured at the Wistar Institute of Biological Research in Philadelphia, where he had a chance to meet his friend George Coghill in person (Coghill, in poor health, would leave Wistar at the end of the year). Korzybski would give more lectures that year and throughout the rest of his career. However, he was about to begin a new phase in the presentation of his work—training seminars.

Alfred’s old friend and student, psychiatrist Douglas Gordon Campbell, had called him from Chicago and invited him to give concurrent seminars there starting May 20—two weeks at Northwestern University and four weeks at the International House of the University of Chicago. Alfred accepted. Campbell had been at the University of Chicago since 1931 and had become not only Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry there but also the head of psychiatry at the University Student Health Service and an attending physician at the Cook County Psychopathic Hospital. Both he and his colleague at the Health Service, Charles B. Congdon, had read Science and Sanity and had begun to use general semantics with their clinic and private patients. They were eager to see what Korzybski could do. 

When Alfred arrived for the Chicago seminar he found that the two psychiatrists had packed the audience with their patients, not only the mildly neurotic but also a number of seriously disturbed ones, some brought directly from hospital confinement. The results of the Chicago seminars astonished not only the two psychiatrists but Alfred as well. Even with some of the most deadened and disturbed individuals there, he seemed to be able to get through and bring some life, although that hardly represented a cure. Campbell and Congden became enthusiastic boosters of his work.

Over the next few years, Korzybski would work quite a bit with seriously disturbed people. He gave a number of his subsequent seminars to groups of patients in mental hospitals selected to participate by their psychiatrists. Since he considered his work educational and preventive and was not a psychiatrist himself, he preferred teaching the psychiatrists and working himself with the unconfined and so-called normal un-sane. Still, given the continuum of sanity, there was going to be an overlap and when he first began teaching he did not always succeed in maintaining the clear boundaries he would insist upon later. From 1938 on, he did his best to screen out seriously disturbed students and would allow those under psychiatric care to attend Institute of General Semantics seminars only if they had permission from their psychiatrists.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

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Chapter 44 - On The Road: Part 7 - The First American Congress for General Semantics

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

On February 16, Korzybski gave a presentation at a regional conference of the Progressive Education Association in Kansas City. Several days later, having finished his lectures at Barstow School, he left for Lawrence, Kansas, about 40 miles to the west, where he gave a presentation at the University of Kansas on “Language and Mental Hygiene”. From there he took a train to Seattle and thence 100 miles southeast to Ellensburg, arriving on February 28, a day before the start of the First American Congress for General Semantics. This gave him a little bit of time to meet Joseph Trainor and the other organizers, check out the environs of the Washington State Normal School, and have a look at the papers being presented—a number of them to be read by Trainor or others, since many of the authors were not attending in person. 

Korzybski, happy to at least have had his expenses paid, had minimum expectations about the Congress. Once there however, he felt pleasantly surprised at the place, the people, and the program. As he jokingly recalled years later, 

I expected an old barn and 2 [and] 1/2 members, the half being myself. That’s all I expected. Now I found a beautiful little college. Very well organized. A beautiful hall. Lecture hall, and something like 150 people, and they had a very nice program then.(24)

Trainor and Potts presented their papers on their classroom research. Selden Smyser, talked on “Subverbal, Verbal and Superverbal Logics”. Also present, Professor E. O. Sisson of Reed College spoke on “Basic Technique of Language”. Papers, read by others, included ones by W. Burridge, M.D. (Dean of the Medical Faculty and Professor of Physiology at King George’s Medical College in Lucknow, India); Cassius Keyser (an excerpt from his Scripta Mathematica review of Science and Sanity); geneticist Harry H. Laughlin; John Lynn (case reports on his two alcoholic patients); Roderick Macdonald (a Harvard biologist and friend of the Korzybskis who had just become director of the Philadelphia Zoo); William Malisoff (editor of the Philosophy of Science journal); social worker Sydney Maslon; businessman Charles Owen; Oliver Reiser; W. E. Ritter; University of California Education Professor C. E. Rugh; A. Ranger Tyler; penology researcher Miriam Van Waters; University of Kansas psychologist Raymond H. Wheeler; and Cora Williams. Korzybski gave three addresses pulled from his “Outline”—one to an audience of students and faculty on “The Significance of General Semantics” at the start of the Conference on Friday morning, March 1; one that evening to an audience of physicians on “The Relation of General Semantics to Medicine”; and the last, on “Education and General Semantics”, the following afternoon to an audience that included the Yakima Valley Schoolmasters Club. The variety of general-semantics applications and research presented at the Congress, and the interest engendered there—so soon after the appearance of Science and Sanity—seemed to him quite remarkable. (See Papers From The First American Congress For General Semantics )

Korzybski felt especially delighted to have Burridge’s contribution at the Congress, having encountered Burridge’s four books Excitability: A Cardiac Study, A New Physiology of Sensation, A New Physiological Psychology, and Alcohol and Anaesthesia, in the latter part of 1934. Since then he had been enthusiastically recommending them to ‘one and all’ as important for the electro-colloidal outlook which they presented and which he considered essential for a more process-oriented understanding of medicine and nervous system functioning. Korzybski continued to recommend the books in subsequent years. Burridge also had an invited paper at the 1941 General Semantics Congress. Korzybski’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, after 1935 the colloidal point of view (until then a quite lively focus of bio-medical research) suffered a severe decline in fashion from which it has not recovered.

The Congress received quite extensive press coverage—and not only from the Normal School’s Campus Crier and the Ellensburg Evening Record. In the first few days of March 1935, one could find stories on the Congress with headlines such as the following in local newspapers—nationwide and coast-to-coast: “Most People ‘Unsane,’ Polish Scientist Says”, “Average Man Beset by Fears, Semantic Congress Hears” (New York Herald-Tribune, March 2); “HAS AID TO HAPPINESS Polish Scientist Introduces New Light on Semantics. Alfred Korzybski Says Man Can Be Immunized Against Vicious Propaganda” (St. Joseph, Mo. News-Press, March 2); “SEMANTICS HELD ‘WAY TO GENIUS’ Polish Scientist Avers Present Tutoring “Manufactures Morons”—Lives by Inference” (Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review, March 3). 

Robert McConnell (President of Washington State Normal School) on AK's right and Joseph Trainor on his left at the First American Congress for General Semantics,
March 1935 

After the Congress, Korzybski seemed to be flying high. From Ellensburg he returned to Seattle where he had two days of lectures and meetings at the University of Washington, organized by Dean Uhl of the School of Education. An article on his visit in the University of Washington Daily included the following, “Almost 60 years old, the Count, mathematical philosopher, author, lecturer and World War veteran,...explained that he had slept just nine hours during the last 10 days, but that he was used to hard work.”

The “Strolling Around the Town” section in the following week’s March 11 Seattle Times contained this snippet:

Aside from the astonishing subject matter of addresses by Count Alfred Korzybski, Polish mathematical philosopher, who was in Seattle last week, two things are notable in his speaking. One is the count’s fine grasp of blunt Anglo-Saxon terms, his fine sense for injecting them as punctuation. The second is his constant and energetic smoking, for which he uses—or abuses—an amber cigarette holder. 

Two friends spent a hectic two hours before one of Count Korzybski’s addresses, in escorting him on a frantic trip to a pipe hospital. The cigarette holder suffered a breakdown, and until an expert overhauled it, the count’s lecture itself was in jeopardy. 

The evening Count Korzybski left for San Francisco, the amber holder disappeared. The count was philosophical about it, naturally enough, but friends were happy to hear the next day that the holder had been found in the count’s suite at the Hotel Edmond Meany and had been rushed on its way to its owner. (25)

It took Korzybski another month to get home. From Berkeley, where he gave five lectures at the Williams Institute, he traveled to Los Angeles to spend a few days there and in Pasadena, where he met in person his friend R.B. Haseldon, curator of manuscripts at the Huntington Library, with whom he had been corresponding for several years. Haseldon, who had developed a considerable interest in Korzybski’s work, seemed full of fun. He had invented a cocktail which he called “The Korzybski” with the following formula, as reported third-hand later on in a newspaper snippet:

“...You take a large cocktail shaker and place therein: 3 parts gin, 2 parts applejack, 3 parts dry vermouth, 1 part sweet vermouth. Stand this in the refrigerator for one hour, then drink and note results. Better still, have someone note the results for you. You soon reach the nonverbal level, where one can point, but cannot utter.”(26) 

In addition to seeing friends in Southern California, Korzybski had wanted to get a paid lecture or two, but only managed an informal talk at Haseldon’s home, before returning east. After a stop in Kansas City, he went on to lecture in Chicago and at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, and finally at Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan (where his friend Joseph Brewer had recently become President) before getting back to Brooklyn by the second week of April. Mira had literally counted the days until his return. He felt very tired but considered the trip a great success.(27)

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 
24. Korzybski 1947, p. 284.

25. “Strolling Around the Town”. 3/11/1935, Seattle Times. AKDA 2.784. 

26. “Punk and Incense”. Trenton N.J. Advertiser, 3/27/1938. AKDA 2.833. 

27. AK to P. Graven, 4/13/1935. AKDA 30.58.

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Chapter 44 - On The Road: Part 6 - An Educational Experiment

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Korzybski left Barstow at the end of February. He did not have great expectations for Kendig’s chances of making any significant change at the school. He considered the atmosphere in Kansas City too hidebound and parochial to keep her from ‘breaking her head’. But over the next few years he would stay in close contact and do what he could to help her.

Kendig hired two new staff members. The new English teacher Sarah Michie, with a PhD in English philology and linguistics, began to implement a year-long program for the eighth grade that Kendig had wanted to get started. Dona Worral Brown—who had a Masters degree in English language and linguistics—became Kendig’s administrative assistant. As described in an article she later wrote for The Modern Language Journal, Dr. Michie’s work at Barstow did not appear especially korzybskian.(16) She left after a year to take a university post. Mrs. Brown, who had become much interested in general semantics, took over her position at Barstow.

Kendig wanted to reform the teaching at all grade levels. As she said in a 1940 talk on “New Approaches to Education”, given before a group of Vasser alumnae:

At Barstow I was convinced of the harm done by the ‘old’ verbalistic education, and equally convinced of the actually maladjustive tendencies of the ‘new’ progressive education, centered on the student’s own experience without supplying him with a system and method of evaluating his own experience in the light of the socio-cultural-scientific race experience. In applying General Semantics in our developmentally organized program, I found a satisfactory blending of the best features of the ‘old’ discipline and the ‘new’ experiential progressive education.” (17) 

Initially she and Mrs. Brown worked on remedial programs for individual students and in teacher training. All teachers were asked to study Science and Sanity and Korzybski returned to Barstow in mid-October of 1935 to give a five-week-long seminar to the faculty (three evening lectures per week plus private conferences with each teacher). Mrs. Brown, who had been studying general semantics with Kendig, considered this a benefit. But many of the other teachers didn’t respond very well, as she described many years later:

Korzybski had come to give a “short” seminar and stayed and stayed. The situation was certainly ‘caviar to the general’ of Kansas City. The good people were already suffering from the shock of the new. The faculty was in rebellion. They didn’t want to ‘waste time’ on Korzybski’s lectures and on reading Science and Sanity. Furthermore, the parents were baffled by the cachet of Marjorie Mercer Kendig. She was a beautiful and intelligent woman, but one who didn’t fit into their image of a schoolmarm. (18)

Kendig (behind desk) at The Barstow School 

At the end of 1935 at an AAAS meeting in St. Louis also attended by Korzybski, Kendig presented a paper to a joint psychology and education session describing her overall approach and initial efforts at Barstow. The paper, entitled “Language Re-Orientation of High School Curriculum and Scientific Control of Neuro-Linguistic Mechanisms for Better Mental Health and Scholastic Achievement”, also described further plans for the yearlong program for the eighth grade, which she wanted to become the school’s basic high school and college preparatory course. After replacing Dr. Michie in 1936, Mrs. Brown began implementing this more korzybskian program. (She reported on some of her procedures and results in a paper presented at the 1941 Second American Congress on General Semantics.) (19) She also began an elective course for juniors and seniors, and College Board training classes—all based on general semantics.

Case reports and class records of all students from the eighth grade and above were kept and updated frequently. Students also took semi-annual standardized tests given through the Educational Records Bureau, which the school had joined when Kendig became head. Barstow students could thus be compared “with 1,500 other individuals at the same grade level, and [the] class performance with performances in 145 other private schools.” When they began testing in 1934, Barstow placed as “the lowest school in the lowest quartile.” Within four years, the school score had climbed to “the bottom of the top percentile”. (20) Test results included remarkable increases in many students’ I.Q. scores, which led Kendig to later write and publish a paper questioning the fixedness of I.Q. (21) 

Despite her observed and measurable success with students, by the fall of 1937 Kendig’s time at Barstow had come to an end. As Dona Brown reported:

...The board of trustees decided that there must be a change at the top. The school was losing money and was not the kind of harmonious place in which learning and the arts could flourish. Kendig was kept on as educational advisor in absentia for one year. The new principal, I think, tried to make our program work. (Kendig, at least, gave her the benefit of the doubt.) But eventually it was the end of the line for me and the entire faculty. She tried the next year with an entirely new set of teachers, but she failed miserably [with carrying on Kendig’s program]...The whole experiment was over and the issue closed.  

Many years later, after Korzybski had died, Kendig asked me if I thought our program at the school had taken off. My answer was “yes” and “no.” We simply did not have the resources and the financial support that such a program needed to make it fly. Or perhaps we tried to do too much in too short a time. (22) 

In a short 1983 biography written after Kendig’s death, Charlotte Schuchardt Read summarized Kendig’s experiment at Barstow School thusly: “It was an ambitious, brave attempt, unequalled before or since then. In later years other teachers have dreamed of such a possibility, but no one else has so far attempted such a far-reaching re-orientation of an entire school.”(23)

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 
16. “A New General Language Curriculum for the Eighth Grade”, The Modern Language Journal, Vol. XXII, No. 5 (February, 1938): pp. 343–346. AKDA 2.894–895. 

17. Kendig. “New Approach To Education Outlined Before Vassar Alumnae”, Press Release, April 1940. AKDA, IGS Scrapbook 1.188–189; Kendig’s March 1937 address to the Barstow School community, “This Living Barstow (reprinted in General Semantics Bulletin 50) provides a good overview of Kendig’s educational vision for the school. 

18. Dona Brown 1983, p. 36.

19. Dona W. Brown 1943. “The Use of General Semantics in Teaching the Language Skills in the Eighth Grade”, in M. Kendig, ed., Papers from the Second American Congress on General Semantics, pp. 524–527. 

20. Kendig, “General Semantics 1961: Historical Perspectives, Trends and Criticisms”, Unpublished paper. IGS Archives. 

21. Kendig, “On The Nature And Constancy of The I.Q”. Educational Method, Vol. XIX, January, 1940, No. 4. IGS Archives. 

22. Dona Brown 1983, pp. 36–37. 

23. Charlotte Schuchardt Read, “Marjorie Mercer Kendig Gates: A Biographical Sketch”. General Semantics Bulletin 53, 1983. p. 51.

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