Since consciousness is limited, respect that and don't go "Good, I'm going to do all those things that happened in this workshop." You can't. What you can do is for the first five minutes of every third interview every day begin by saying "Look, before we begin today there are a couple of things I need to know about your general cognitive functioning. Would you tell me which color is at the top of a stoplight?" Ask questions that access representational systems, and tune yourself for five minutes to that person's responses so that you will know what's happening later in the session under stress. Every Thursday you can try matching predicates with the first client that comes in, and mismatching with the second. That is a way of systematically discovering what the outcome of your behavior is. If you don't organize it that way, it will stay random. If you organize it and feel free to limit yourself to specific patterns and notice the outcome, and then change to new patterns, you will build up an incredible repertoire of responses at the unconscious level. This is the only way that we know of to learn to become more flexible systematically. There are probably other ways. This just happens to be the only one we know about now.

Man: It sounds to me as if you are telling us to experiment with our clients. I think I have a professional obligation to—

I disagree. I think you have an obligation to experiment with every client to make yourself more skilled, because in the long run you are going to be able to help more people more expediently. If, under the guise of professionalism, you don't try to expand your skills and experiment, basically I think you are missing the point and professionalism becomes just one way to limit yourself. Think about "professionalism." If professionalism is a name for a set of things that you can't do, then you are restricting your behavior.

In cybernetics there's a law called the Law of Requisite Variety. It says that in any system of human beings or machines, the element in that system with the widest range of variability will be the controlling element. And if you restrict your behavior, you lose on requisite variety.

The prime examples of that are mental hospitals. I don't know about your mental hospitals here, but in California we've got some real whackos in ours, and we have a lot of patients, too. It's easy to distinguish the staff, because the staff has a professional ethic. They have a group hallucination and this group hallucination is more dangerous to them than to anyone else, because they believe that they must restrict their behavior in certain ways. Those ways make them act consistently, and the patients don't have to play by those rules. The widest range of flexibility is going to allow you to elicit responses and control the situation. Who's going to be able to elicit the most responses—the psychiatrist who is acting "normal" or the patient who is acting weird? I'd like to give you my favorite example.

We're walking down a corridor in Napa State Mental Hospital in California with a group of resident psychiatrists. We approach a large day room and we are talking in normal tones. As we reach the door and open it and walk in, all of the psychiatrists begin to whisper. So of course we began to whisper too. Then finally we looked at each other and said "Why are we whispering?" And one of the psychiatrists turned to us and whispered "Oh, there's a catatonic in the room. We don't want to disturb him." Now when a catatonic can have requisite variety over a professional, then I join the catatonics.

When you go to California, most therapists have a different professional ethic. For example, in order to be a good communicator, you must dress like a farm worker. That's the first rule. The second rule is that you must hug everyone too hard. Those people are always laughing at the psychiatrists because they have to wear ties! To me, their behavior is just as restricted and one-dimensional and limited. The trouble with many professional ethical codes, whether they are humanistic, analytic or anything else, is that they limit your behavior. And whenever you accept any "I won't do it," there are people you are not going to be able to work with. We went into that same ward at Napa and I walked over and stomped on the catatonic's foot as hard as I could and got an immediate response. He came right out of "catatonia," jumped up, and said "Don't do that!"

Frank Farrelly, who wrote Provocative Therapy, is a really exquisite example of requisite variety. He is willing to do anything to get contact and rapport. Once he was doing a demonstration with a woman who had been catatonic for three or four years. He sits down and looks at her and warns her fairly: "I'm going to get you." She just sits there catatonically, of course. It's a hospital, and she's wearing a hospital gown. He reaches over and he pulls a hair out of her leg just above the ankle. And there's no response, right? So he moves up an inch and a half, and pulls out another hair. No response. He moves up another inch and a half, and pulls out another hair. "Get your hands off me!" Most people would not consider that "professional." But the interesting thing about some things that are not professional is that they work! Frank says that he's never yet had to go above the knee.

I gave a lecture at an analytic institute in Texas once. Before we began, for three hours, they read research to me demonstrating basically that crazy people couldn't be helped. And at the end I said "I'm beginning to get a picture here. Let me find out if I'm right. Is what you are trying to tell me that you don't believe that therapy, the way it's done presently, works?" And they said "No, what we're trying to tell you is that we don't believe that any form of therapy could overwork for schizophrenics." And I said "Good. You guys are really in the right profession; we should all be psychiatrists and believe that you can't help people." And they said "Well, let's talk about psychotics. People who live in psychotic realities and blah blah blah," and all this stuff about relapses. I said "Well, what kinds of things do you do with these people?" So they told me about their research and the kind of therapy they had done. They never did anything that elicited a response from these people.

Frank Farrelly had a young woman in a mental hospital who believed that she was Jesus' lover. You must admit that is a slightly unusual belief. People would come in and she would go "I'm Jesus' lover." And of course they would go "Unnhhh!" and say "Well, you're not. This is only a delusion you're having ... isn't it?" If you go into mental hospitals, most mental patients are very good at acting weird and eliciting responses from people. Frank trained a young social worker to behave consistently in a certain way and sent her in. The patient went "Well, I'm Jesus' lover," and the social worker looked back and said wryly "I know, he talks about you." Forty-five minutes later the patient is going "Look, I don't want to hear any more of this Jesus stuff!"

There's a man named John Rosen whom some of you have heard of. Rosen has two things he does consistently, and he does them very powerfully and gets a lot of good results. One of the things Rosen does really well, as described by Schefflin,is that he joins the schizophrenic's reality so well that he ruins it. That's the same thing that Frank taught his social worker to do.

The psychiatrists in Texas had never tried anything like that before. And when I suggested it to them, they all made faces because it was outside of their professional ethic. They had been trained in a belief system that said "Limit your behavior. Don't join your client's world; insist that they come to yours." It's much harder for somebody who's crazy to come to a professional model of the world, than it is for a professional communicator to go to theirs. At least it's less apt to happen.