Soon a very pure piece of white marble came into his studio and from it he sculpted a beautiful woman—a figure which embodied all that he considered beautiful.
Pygmalion was so smitten with his own creation that he prayed to Aphrodite to help him find a woman that would match his sculpture's beauty.
Aphrodite, however, realized that only the statue itself would answer for Pygmalion, and so she breathed in to it the life that Pygmalion so fervently sought.
Pygmalion called her Galatea and married her, his own creation.
Pygmalion is certainly not alone in his possession of standards and beliefs
about what is or is not beautiful. Regardless of how they come in to being, we all have personal beliefs about what constitutes beauty,intelligence, appropriate behavior, useful goals, and so on.
None of us means, says, does or goes after just ANYTHING. There are always certain possibilities in the world which an individual will in some way delete from his or her experience (even the person who believes that"being open to everything" is important is deleting the possibility of being open only to certain things or being open to nothing).
It is, of course, the differences in what we each hold as personal standards or beliefs that make each of us somehow unique.There is another way in which we are all like Pygmalion. Sometimes intentionally, often unconsciously, we imbue the world around us with our own ideas about the way the world is, or should be. Any time you communicate with another person what you communicate will be an expression, a manifestation, of the beliefs that constitute your personal model of the world.
And if, like Pygmalion, you are artful in your use of the communicational tools and skills you have at hand you might recreate in your conversational partner a belief or standard that matches your own.
This happens when your trend-conscious friend announces the new chic and you proceed to clean out your closet, or when a therapist convinces you that a good cry will cure you and you proceed to let the tears flow.
In our experience, most psychotherapists are like Pygmalion in that they have, as individuals, learned certain ways of understanding the world of behavior and experience, and then, if they are artful, imbue their clients with those same understandings. For instance, Transactional Analysts teach their clients to think of their experiences as manifestations of parent, adult, or child states. There are certainly other possibilities for partitioning experience and behavior; what about infant, teenager, and senescent ego states, or hypo-reactive,reactive, and hyper-reactive states?
A rational emotive therapist will teach you to organize and examine your beliefs against certain criteria of logic and rationality. These are examples of "institutionalized" sets of beliefs, values and perceptual distinctions.
Similarly, but at the level of the individual, we have witnessed over and over again the phenomenon that a therapist who has discovered in his own experience happiness from always telling others what he wants, will then explicity or implicity attempt to install that same belief and accompanying behaviors in his clients.
A therapist who, in his/her personal life, finds release from nagging problems through meditation will typically, when presented with a client who is nagged by problems, suggest the clienttry meditation.
It is, of course, the function of a therapist to assist his or her client in altering or gaining a new belief, standard, or behavior.The purpose of these examples, however, is to highlight our observation that very often the kind of changes that a particular therapist will pursue with clients are those that are consistent with the therapist's model of the world (professional training and personal experiences) rather than being a function of, and in relation to, the client's model of the world.
The point is that our private and professional beliefs/-standards/rules do not encompass what is possible, but instead LIMIT what is possible. And so, like Pygmalion, therapists can unintentionally produce clones of themselves through their clients.
This is not in itself bad or wrong, but for its efficacy it is dependent upon the presuppositions that what is effective for one person can be effective for another,that problem situations that share a common name and experiential description are structurally isomorphic, and that the suggested solution is both acceptable to the individual and capable of being duplicated.
David Gordon "Therapeutic Patterns of Milton H.
Erickson"
