Under the Sign of Irony: The Use of Paradox in Psychotherapy
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David Jaymes is Associate Professor of French at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. A specialist in seventeenth-century French literature, he has written numerous articles on Pascal.
Acknowledgment
This study was written as part of the work done in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar directed by Professor Marcel Gutwirth of Haveford College in 1978. I wish to thank Professor Gutwirth, my fellow participants, and the Endowment for their assistance and support.
Notes
1. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 206-12.
2. For the conception of irony I present in these pages, I am especially indebted to René Schaerer, "Le Mécanisme de l'ironie dans ses rapports avec la dialectique," Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 48 (1941): 181-209, and Vladimir Jankélévitch, L'Ironie, 2d ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1964).
3. D. C. Muecke, Irony (London: Methuen, 1970), 66-67. For the history of the concept of irony, I have relied heavily on this work. See also the same author's The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969).
4. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates, trans. Lee M. Capel (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 274. For Pascal, see Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), and Jean Mesnard's chapter on irony in Les Pensées de Pascal (Paris: Société d'Édition d'Enseignement Supérieur, 1976).
5. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), 78, quoted in Josiah Thompson, "The Master of Irony," in Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Josiah Thompson (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), 148.
6. In describing the theory, I have relied mainly on Jay Haley, Strategies of Psychotherapy (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1963), and Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (see note 1, above). For a recent description of the Bateson-Haley theory and the family-therapy movement, see Janet Malcolm, "The One-Way Mirror," New Yorker, 15 May 1978, 39-114.
7. Bateson, 201-27.
8. Ibid., 202-6.
9. Haley, 18.
10. Ibid., 189.
11. Concerning the therapeutic paradox, another related area of exploration might be what Walter O'Connell calls Adler's use of the "therapeutic trap." See Walter E. O'Connell, "Freudian Humour: The Eupsychia of Everyday Life," in Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications, ed. A. I. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (London: Wiley, 1976), 323.
12. Haley, 55.
13. Ibid., 65-85.
14. Ibid., 186-87.
15. Bateson, 179-80.
