Practical Narrative Psychology

Melanie Anne Phillips

In the classes I teach on story structure we often point to Clarice Starling (Jody Foster) in “Silence of the Lambs” as a great example of a Success/Bad story in which the goal (save the senator’s daughter from Buffalo Bill) is achieved, but the personal angst of not being able to save that spring lamb remains, as evidenced by Lecter’s final conversation with Starling over the phone in which he asks, “Are the lambs still screaming?”

Her silence in response (plus the somber soundtrack music even though this he graduation from the academy) both indicate she is still holding on to that angst.

We usually leave it there, having served our purpose of illustrating what Success/Bad means. Sometimes we go on to say that the reason she is trying to save all these people today – the reason she got into law enforcement (besides the fact her father was a sheriff) was because she can’t let go of that one lamb she couldn’t save and keeps trying to make up for it.

But now I’m thinking that while that may be true in an objective sense, nobody would carry that weight in their heart and act out that way for those reasons alone. You’d see it, you’d understand it and move on.

Rather, I think the reason she does what she does is not to make up for that lamb but to avoid having to carry another similar sense of loss.

So every extraordinary effort – even to the extent of putting herself at risk of death – is to keep from adding one more victim to the pain or failure she already carries.

It would seem, then, counter-intuitive to put oneself in a profession where the risk of failure in the exact same subject matter area as your angst.

But consider – most of us need to pay penance when we feel we have screwed up. The risk of hurting herself emotionally even more by her choice of profession, therefore, is penance for the first lamb she lost, while the extra-human effort she puts into each case is the attempt to avoid adding another instance to the pain she already carries.

Pretty screwed up, really, but in actuality the only way a mind, a heart, can make up for failing another in a way that can’t be fixed is to try to help others in a similar way. But then the risk of failure is omnipresent, so we give up a life of our own to excel enough to avoid another failure.

It is a never ending cycle of emotional self-flagellation: trying to make up for the failure by putting oneself in the situation most likely to create a repeat, then devoting one’s life to trying to avoid the failure and thereby punishing oneself for the original failure.

That’s how we think and how we feel. Of course, the only way out of this vicious circle is to accept the original failure, call it a clean slate, and move on. But who can easily do that, and how?

I’ve been reading about the advent of the new programming language, GPT-3.  Very interesting.  But, of course, it continues down the wrong path to create an artificial true self-awareness, and merely approximates human thinking through increasing levels of finer and finer detail.

The point is, the as long as  you see everything in a system as binary, there will be no self-awareness, no matter how fine the details are.  It is only when the details blend together so that they move as a wave, rather than interact as particles, that you get the second have of the Artificial Mind which requires both binary and analog – particle and wave.

This essential relationship is at the heart of the quad – one side blend and the other is discrete.

This same relationship is seen at the core of all constructs that have achieved the perfect balance:

Mass, Energy, Space, Time

Knowledge, Thought, Ability, Desire

Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb

Strong forces, Weak forces, Electromagnetism, Gravity

Earth, Water, Wind, Fire

Each of these quads exhibits the exact same interrelationships among the four components, and each set of four will have three that seem like the others, and one that seem the odd man out.

But more important, each set of four divides into two pairs – one part at a given fractal level and a second pair at another fractal level.  Or, more accurately, one pair that creates fractals and a second pair that creates frictals.

More basically, as described at the beginning, one seeing discrete particles and one seeing homogeneous influences.  Translate as digital vs. analog.

In fact, the basic functioning circuit of self-awareness would require no more than to be comprised of one transistor and one tube.  The transistor represents the neural network and the tube represents the biochemistry.

These two aspects of the brain generate, in tandem, the mind.

The neural network sets pathways – obstacles and riverbeds – through which the information energy of the biochemistry  is channeled.  The energy of the biochemistry erodes obstacles and builds up the material of thought to divert channels, block them completely, or carve new ones in the fabric of experience.

Each system informs the other, alters the other, and each operates at a level a magnitude away from the other so that when one sees one system as made of  particles, one sees the other as functioning as a wave.

Could we look deeply enough into the wave media (the biochemistry of the brain) to see the particles (individual ions and neurotransmitters).  Surely.  But from that level of perspective the neuro network will appear as chaos.  Similarly, if we step back far enough so that the digital nature of the synapses blends together to create a wave form, the function of the biochemistry will no longer be visible and will appear to be chaos as well.  Chaos from above, or chaos from below.

But even if we move  up or down in perspective, in the end, we will find there two inter-affecting systems: one digital and one analog.  And one will channel the other, and the other will influence the one.

So, building a self-aware system will never be achieved simply with increasing detail.

However, just as the minimal circuit of self awareness  that I described earlier – a transistor and a tube, can easily be ratchetted up to a supercomputer and a quantum computer, not running in parallel, but sharing the same processing space so that every calculation of the supercomputer is influenced by the tendencies of the quantum computer, and every tendency of the quantum computer is channeled by the supercomputer.

Such a system would not only rival our own intensity of self-awareness, but might very well exceed it, which is, actually, rather disturbing.

But, for a practical example of such a system that already exists, consider the binary connections and neural network patterns of social media as the digital, and consider the direct human interactions of people in the real world as the analog.

An even happens, people report it on social media.  Social media digests it and points of view are formed regarding it.  These points of view channel human energy by organizing protests and gatherings, which grow their own energy, which is then covered in social media, and so on.

Social media channels, and the people in the streets influence.  And so, with billions of people, might not one wonder if we have not now already created a self-awareness a magnitude above our own – one that cannot see us any more than our minds can directly perceive our brains, and one that we cannot see any more than our brains can perceive our minds?

Something to think about.

The following is a rough transcription of audio notes I recorded about story structure and narrative psychology after having completed my work on Dramatica.

Though I have completed a rough edit of this material for typos, misunderstood words and grammatical inconsistencies, I am sure many errors remain.

Use this transcription more as a guide than a gospel, and refer to the original audio recordings if possible.

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It’s Monday morning, February 13, 1995. 

I had a dream last night and when I woke up I knew a lot more about the pair relationships, dynamic, companion, dependent, and component.

For a long time, we have known that men and women perceive them differently in terms of positive and negative.  Men will see each kind of relationship as having a positive one and a negative one and they are completely bipolar, so that you end up with a positive dynamic relationship and a negative dynamic relationship in a quad; each of those is represented in a diagonal. 

For example, companion relationships, dependent and component each one will appear to be positive or negative.  However in the first three pairs dynamic, companion, and dependent, from a male stand point, each one of those  relationships can very clearly be described as to which one is positive and which one is negative by nature. 

But when you get to the component relationship at the end, that one – all bets are off. That is the one that has to be the flexible one, that’s the one in their blind spot where they can’t see which one is positive and which one is negative because it changes by context. 

The component relationship is where you’re either seeing all as one group like a family or a team, or whether you are seen as an individual, and trying to determine what’s best for the individual verses what is best for the team is the component relationship.  That is why it is difficult to determine what is positive or negative, by saying it is always better to be an individual or always better to be one of the team, you really can’t look at it that way.

However, women don’t appreciate pair relationships at all like men do, women appreciate them completely differently.  For a long time, we felt that women saw the relationships; one theory that we had was that women would see the relationships, one of them the same way as men, with one being positive and one being negative.  Then they would see another one exactly the opposite of men.  Then another one they would, the other two remaining ones, they would be like the reverse of men because they would see one of them all positive and one of them all negative.

So basically, we would see one, like the dynamic pair for example, I don’t know which pair would be which cause we haven’t calculated out that far, but the dynamic pairs would be see as positive and negative to both men and women. 

Then, the companion pair relationship, what men see as positive, women would see as negative and vice versa. 

Then in the dependent pair relationships women would see that as perhaps all positive and the component pair relationship as all negative.       Well actually I think that is the way women appear to men, remember we’re dealing with four things here; how men see themselves, how men see women, how women see themselves, and how women see men. 

In terms of the relationships we’ve lined out so far, all of that is consistent male bias, where it is how men see themselves.  And when we have women appear in the model, it is always from the perspective of how men see women.  How women see women, is not at all represented in anything we do in Dramatica, as of this point.  We know it is out there and we are trying to document it but since there are all kinds of tools out there for understanding how men see men, and how men see women, but nothing has ever been devised, very little for how women see men, and hardly anything at all for how women see women. 

Those examples are just not there, the tools are just not there, so we have to construct a whole framework of understanding before we can even explore the theory.  Well, the first aspect of this framework came to me last night, after this dream I had and it occurred to me that in looking at the companion and dependent pairs, women see those as favorable relationships, when you have a favorable relationship because those are the ones that they can control, those are the ones that are stretchy, they are the ones that are sliding scale. 

In other words, rather than seeing as two pairs you see two separate areas, the positive ones and the negative ones, you see it as a single relationship, women blend that together – what men would see as a positive and negative companion , and then they –?– separately, in a separate group the positive and negative dependent relationship, so that women are constantly looking at a range and saying well it is a love hate relationship. 

Well that doesn’t mean that it’s got love in it and hate in it, it means that it cycles or oscillates between love and hate, between good and bad.  And the relationships are not judged as being positive and negative, they are being judged as favorable or unfavorable kinds of relationships and then the nature of whether they are more positive or more negative, is what you have to get a feel for. 

This causes women to get into relationship in which they are abused but not want to leave them because they see the relationship as this sliding scale that it’s much better to be in an overall negative relationship as a dependent one or overall relationship as a companion one, then it is to be dealing at all with dynamic relationships or component relationships. 

Now this is the natural tendency of women. Assertiveness training tries to bring women to the point where they can do the dynamic relationship and argue with somebody, and stand up for their rights, and go head to head against them.

This is what happens when women become masculinized in assertiveness training and the other opportunity is to leave, which is what ultimately women need to do in battered relationships, to get out and leave through the component. 

The dynamic relationship is really not the women’s way, that is really not what is going on in their heart.  A women who is constantly in a dynamic relationship with people if she works and functions and has relationships in terms of dynamic relationships, has missed the boat.  That is the exclusive male domain, is that kind of direct conflict.  It is not appropriate to one’s fulfillment, you can do it if you want, it doesn’t mean any women can’t do that, it just means that I guarantee that any women who is living her life in dynamic relationships, is a women who’s not going to be fulfilled no matter what she says.  That is a pretty bold statement, but that is what the theory predicts.  And I believe in the theory because it hasn’t let me down so far.

Now in terms of the component relationships that is the place that women have sort of a major blind spot; the option that you can step out of it, the option that you can stop being a family, the option that you can stop being in a relationship with a guy.  We use it all the time, we do it all the time because we are not looking there, we step on people in those areas, we form little cliques and little groups, we reject men who feel like they aren’t part of our circle, we do it all the time with the flick of the finger because we never even aware we’re doing it. 

It’s not that we are intentionally locking into that, it’s just that, that intrinsically is not an area that we consider.  We step on the flowers as we pass by without realizing that they are under feet, in that area. 

Now the interesting thing about that is because we see two kinds of relationships as being favorable or attractive relationships; and two as being repulsive relationships, not in an “ooh grody” sense but in a “no we are pushed away from those” even if we find ourselves drifting towards them on our own, we’re pushed away from them which are the dynamic and the component. 

Those are areas we don’t wish to tamper in, that are not comfortable for us.  Completely unlike men, who basically have the range of all three of them but they don’t look into the component generally at all.  For women, women have the range of two of them as being favorable, the dynamic as being unfavorable and the component being a shared area of not looking, which is also unfavorable.  So men don’t think in terms are what are favorable and unfavorable relationships, they look at each relationship as having the opportunity as being unfavorable or unfavorable depending upon whether it is positive or negative.  Women never look at the positive or negative nature of a relationship they look at the kind of relationship and try to gravitate towards those that are more favorable, which are the companion and the dependent. 

Now in looking at that, you will notice that the relationship that guys have with women and the relationship that women have with guys  are quite different, because we are using different standards of measurement.  And where as a guy may say, ” Oh, well she depends on me, I am the bread winner, therefore I am in a positive relationship because I have someone dependent upon me.” 

For a man to be dependent upon someone else is not a comfortable thing.  For there to be a unity of opposites, that is a dependent relationship where men realize the value of working together – Brain and brawn, for example – a partnership, learn that they will watch each other’s back, and together they can accomplish something and so in that nature there is a mutual need that is going on.  

But in a dependent relationship for women, women are not looking at it as a mutual need, women are looking at it as providing something that is of assistance and in return they get something that they desire.  It is more of a transactional relationship, which essentially is the difference in the way men and women view prostitution, is that women see it as a transaction and men see it as this is something that someone will do to fulfill their needs for money. 

It’s different  – the concept of fulfilling one’s needs for money as supposed to as the concept of it being a transaction because then a transaction is two people involved  in something in which two people provide something the other wants.

In a need kind of situation is where I, you are fulfilling what I want for a price.  The aspect of what the price does for the other person is really not considered, it’s just a requirement rather then a balanced trade off.

That is why it is usually a win / lose situation when dealing with men, is women try to go for the win-win in negotiations. 

Beyond this you end up with the companion relationships being quite different for men and women as well.  Men are looking at it as saying, what are the cost of having this relationship verses the benefits that I get, the positive things verses the negative things and women are just saying, oh we’re close to each other. 

That is what leads to the grouping mentality, is just to be close to the action, just to be close to somebody, just to be near it.  Is quite different than looking at as being part of the family or just being an independent unit. 

Men might have trouble blending those two things in the companion and the component.  If they were to look at women, when they see women they say oh they are trying to be part of the group. 

No, they are not trying to be part of the group, they are trying to be close to the center, so that there is more fall out, more positive fall out.  And this is what also leads women, when they are dealing with companion pair relationships, to look at things in terms of the warmth of an atmosphere.  To look at things in terms of being around friends who do interesting things, that’s a very positive attractive kind of relationship for women and even being around friends who do negative things because then in effect you are participating without being a participant.  You are not dealing with the companion relationship, yes this is how you are yourself, you’re part of the group, you’re responsible for things, from the female perspective.  Instead, you can say I can be there and enjoy all this negative, evil, terrible stuff that is going on without really being the one who is doing it, just because I happen to be in an area where I can pick up that signal and resonate with it. 

Well, that’s quite different then it is for men, men are dealing with it more in terms of logistics.  But this again is an interesting situation.  I said that women were looking at relationships as being favorable kinds of relationships whether or not they were positive or negative overall.  Women of course are going to be looking at the relationship as being favorable, they are going to take a momentary value and say it’s favorable and right now it is also positive.  But then if it is negative, they’ll say it is a favorable relationship but it’s negative and they will feel that just have to get through things until they get better again, sensing intuitively the cyclic nature of relationships. 

What they do not see in their blind spot, is that these relationships may be overall to the point that the bad far out weighs the good, and yet women are always looking at there being an up swing, that it is always going to be better because the relationship itself is favorable, so how can it ever turn out to be negative? 

Well, favorable and negative are two different things.  A favorable relationship just means, the kind in which you are comfortable with the relationship nature, but it doesn’t mean that the relationship itself, this particular relationship, is a positive one of that kind. 

This is an important thing for both men and women to remember is, just because there is a relationship that is positive for men, does not mean that it is a favorable relationship, that is where they get into trouble. And for women, just because the relationship is favorable doesn’t necessarily mean it is positive, this is where women get into trouble.  Interesting thing about that, is that the same kind of thing that’s going on in terms of looking at the relationships as being favorable because men don’t consider the favorable, and women don’t consider the positive or negative. 

Look again at how men or women pick out cars and things.  It’s funny that men are always complaining that women are the one’s who go off and do things frivolously, and yet then they have women coming out and picking out cars because they’ve got the right number of doors for the family and good trunk space.  And guys are out there picking out cars because they’re fast and sleek and all kinds of things that aren’t, what’s the word, practical. 

Women are more practical, but how can men be more analytical and logistic and women be more practical?  Because the relationship of practicality to logic, is the same as the relationship of favorable to positive and negative.

When men are dealing with being logical, logical has nothing to do with practicality.  See practicality is looking at things holistically, it’s saying what will cover most of the needs for all of the different things that are going on, it’s very non-linear.  Whereas men are dealing with logistics, they’re dealing with, if this is a particular need this is what I need to get there, these are the steps I have to take, these are the resources I’m going to have to have.  But that is a linear approach, a straight line approach and for men it is appropriate. 

For women the practical approach is more appropriate, to say how can I cover as many bases as possible so that the overall situation is as positive as possible or as favorable as possible.  And men will be looking, plotting the path way that they have between where they are and what they need for their goal, trying to come up with a path way that is as positive as possible.  So a positive path way would be the most efficient path way, whereas a favorable situation would be the one that creates the least problems, fulfills the most needs even if they are not tied into a specific purpose even if they have no relationship to what’s going on, immediately in the for front. 

This is why men and women in business get into arguments all the time, is because of that nature that men are looking for, here is what we are trying to accomplish and here is the fastest way to go to it and once we’ve set ourselves a goal than we are saying that this takes priority over everything else.  In other words, not only does this take priority but everything else is shut out of the picture. 

Once you define the scope of your goal and –?– you can define a goal as being a pleasant environment or a pleasant working environment but once you’ve defined a goal, anything that falls outside the scope of that goal id no longer considered. 

Men throw themselves, then into creating the most efficient path to get to that goal and arrive at it.  That kind of approach is very satisfying to them, but it’s not very fulfilling to women. 

Women are not concerned with just having one particular thing you’ve achieved going through life in a linear pattern, one foot in front of another, one step after another, that is not what has fulfillment and meaning for women, but it does for men.  But when you have women in life, looking towards what will make them happy, they want to create a holistic environment, where everything within the range of their perception is balanced as positively as possible or as favorable as possible.  And so, women are constantly fine tuning things, moving furniture, trying on new clothes, joining new social organizations, watching new programs on television, exploring these areas.  Whereas men will usually find a new direction they like to go, one particular hobby, one particular approach, one particular activity and they will go with it a long time, until it stops doing it’s job for them and then they will select something else. 

Women are usually apt to bounce around a lot of different things and balance them off.  When they become single-minded that’s when they find that they are not being as fulfilled as they would like to be, because all the other things they are not considering are slowly detuning through the effects of chaos. 

Of course, they might not detune, in which case we end up with women being very fortunate because they are lucky, they’re simply lucky.  They go off and follow a single-minded purpose and everything else around their life just gets in order by itself, that’s great.  That’s like having a house you don’t have to dust, but the point is, when most of us focus on one thing and leave the infrastructure to itself it begins to crumble around us. 

In the end, if we had any kind of order in our life, that order will react with chaos to form an equilibrium between –?– and –?–, and we’ll end up with something that is neither good or bad, neither favorable or unfavorable rather neutral.  So then we have to put all our eggs in one basket and fallow this linear path that means nothing as women in terms of fulfillment and when we are all said and done we accomplish our goal, and we’re left with what neutrality.  It’s as if we got no reward because we’ve worked all our lives and gotten back to zero, of course for some people getting back to zero can be an improvement. 

Anyway all these things not withstanding we are able to look briefly at the difference between those relationships.   We talked about heterosexuals looking at homosexual relationships.  Relationships that are of a homosexual nature are different for men and women. The relationship between lesbians is different then the relationship between gays. 

It’s going to be a very hard thing for men to try and understand because men are going to be looking at the relationships in terms of maybe being in a companion relationship with somebody, or maybe in a dependent relationship with somebody and if it’s a positive one or a negative one. 

But women are going to be gravitating towards a certain kind of relationship and in fact, when women get into relationships with men or with women as being straight women or gay women, lesbians, than the relationship shifts between the dependent and companion.  It’s the type of favorable relationship that is the difference, in that kind of sexuality. 

It’s very, very interesting, you have women who are just good friends, have no sexual interest in other women between them, they give themselves hugs, they hold each other tight and have feelings for each other, and those feelings are feelings of proximity, feelings of being close to someone else, that’s the companion relationship that is doing that.  The companion relationship has a closeness, and there’s really when you have a lesbian relationship that is based on love, it’s a companion relationship.  It’s where the women have become so close to each other that they share everything, that is a positive lesbian relationship, if you would look at it completely positive. 

But if you have a lesbian relationship that is a dependent relationship, that is negative lesbian relationship, where each one is dealing from the female perspective in terms of their needs.  And because they are dealing in terms of their needs, then you end up with each other not being able to trust each other one, constantly checking your security, constantly being insecure, constantly wondering what the other person is up to, where you are trying to divide up territory, where you are trying to separate yourselves one from the other, and so that would be a negative lesbian relationship. 

You see when women are dealing with other women, in a straight sense, they are dealing with companion relationships and when they are dealing with men they are dealing with a dependent relationship, they are not companions with men.  But because companion and dependent are both favorable relationships, women can empathize with either men or women, because men will fall into the dependent category in all of relationships and women will fall into the companion relationship in all relationships that are of a favorable nature. 

But see if you flip, where you put men and women, and you start putting men into a companion relationship, that is a very negative relationship for women.  And so if you have a heterosexual relationship that falls into the companion relationship area that is not really very favorable for women to put it that way.  You see the interesting thing about it is that these relationships for women, depend on whether it’s men or women in terms of what is favorable and what is not favorable.  And it turns out that the favorable relationships, the most favored relationship for men is the dependent pairs for a women, and the most favorable relationship with a women is a companion pair.  And that is why you end up with having a relationship between women either as friends or intimately as a lesbian relationship.  Or with men, the concept of having a male friend it just doesn’t quite work out well, there has to be a dependency in there some where, in order for it to be a favorable relationship. 

Now a lot of women have men as friends and the men come to them and ask for advice, they talk to them about this and that, that is the relationship that women have with their male children is a dependent one and the dependency turns around. 

And that’s the problem that a lot of mothers have is, their children grow up, is that it starts out with the man being dependent upon the women so there is a love hate relationship between the child and the mother when they are younger.  And at that point though the mother is there, is always providing positive if she is a good mother, and therefore the young man grows to love his mother, because even though he doesn’t want to be dependent from the get go his reliance on her is not violated, is never violated, or is seldom violated and therefore he comes to trust her. 

But when it turns around the other way, then here is a dependent relationship that he has with her, and in having that relationship with her then, now she is dependent upon him.  And in being dependent upon him, she just becomes a drain, and he has this terrible conflict psychologically with in himself because, he loves her because when he was dependent upon her, she never violated that. 

He now feels an obligation to her because she is dependent upon him, but she is not providing anything to him anymore, she is merely a drain.  That is the kind of relationship with a man that he would sever immediately, but  he can’t sever it with his mother because of an obligation and love turns to obligation. 

The best thing a mother could do is set up her own little nest egg, so that when she is older, she is in the position where she can take care of herself.  But she doesn’t want to move into a position where she seems completely independent because the component relationship will bite her son on the ears, and when that happens he will feel that she no longer needs him at all and if she no longer needs him, then he has no function or purpose with her because he certainly doesn’t want to have to need her, which is the only other kind of relationship he can have with her. 

So generally the dependent relationship is the one where men will always place women, and men will always strive for the companion relationship with men, but dependent and companion are the types of things that (end of side A)

            OK, I only have a few minutes here, I was losing track of what I was saying at the end of  that because I got interrupted by running cats through the living room, it disturbed my train of thought.  It is time I have to get ready for work anyway, it’s nine o’clock, I’ve got to get in and get some stuff done.  But anyway just to put a –?– on that thought, clearly the relationships that men and women have with their same sex or the other sex, in a intimate and non-intimate sense can be catalogue in a way, as long as we change the meaning of the terms we are looking at.  So we have to look at terms of practicality verses logic, because logic has no meaning, linear logic has no meaning to women, practicality does. 

Linear logic is something that, yes we can do but if we do it, it brings us no fulfillment, which is very important to us, although it would bring us satisfaction but satisfaction is not important to us, but that is important to men.  So the differences between how we break down, what relationships are attractive or not, well men don’t even use the concept of what relationships are attractive they look at all relationships at which are positive and which are negative within each kind of relati0onship and categorize them according to which kind. 

Women basically categorize them according to kind for determining what is favorable relationship, regardless of whether it is positive or negative.  This kind of differential is going to lead, what does lead to all that confusion between the sexes because we are not looking at the same things at all, from the same perspective. 

When we look at our inner selves, when we try to find out what is really going on inside the first thing we do, is we perceive relationships differently and then we measure them differently on top of it.  Meaning that what we are looking at, and where we are looking from, both of those things are at odds. 

This is the area in which the paradox exists, this is the area in which men and women are one-hundred and eighty degrees opposed, even though in the process of creating these evaluations of relationships, they are really only ninety degrees out of phase at any given point.  But since they’re ninety degrees out of phase on how they look at relationship, and ninety degrees out of phase in how they measure relationships or where they are looking from, it comes to an entire one-hundred and eighty degrees out of phase in terms of relationships in general. 

It’s a combination of the two ninety degrees movements out of phase and they don’t cancel out, that’s the thing of it they don’t cancel out.  It always works around the clock in the direction to go one-hundred and eighty degrees out of phase.  If they could cancel out, that would be a wonderful thing and we can find in real life these kinds of relationships and they cancel out through training, but if you train yourself to get to the point where you undo or adopt the opposite –?– for half the equation, wither how you look at the relationships, the way you evaluate relationships, the way you see them being, or the way you evaluate them, if you move one of those one-hundred and eighty degrees out of phase, then you could cancel out the way men are looking at it and be more in tune with them, which is what happens to a lot of business women but you’re never going to find fulfillment because you’re putting yourself out of phase with yourself. 

So the real key is to be true to yourself, and find something that accommodates both.  Much as you would look at a photon of light and say it has a particle and a wave nature, so it doesn’t matter whether you look at it as a particle or a wave, you might not be able to do some things when you look at it as a wave that you could do when you look at it as particle and vice versa.  But if you only have need for looking at it, or desire for looking at it as a wave than that is fine for you.  But if somebody else wants to look at is at a particle they can do that and it works fine for them.  So it doesn’t matter that it has a duel nature, if you’re using only half of that nature, then it only appears to have on nature to you.  And as long as you’re dealing with the same object, it’s equally useful to both parties.

Same thing for men and women in relationships, whether they are same sex or opposite sex.  Is that you have to come up with something that is both positive for men and favorable for women.  In other words, if you had a relationship with a man, you would want  to look for a dependent relationship, where he would look at it and say, is it a positive or negative dependent relationship?   And if he sees the relationship as a positive dependent relationship, than in that case he is able to get more with you than he would get without you, but not in the sense of just saying it adds a little bit.  Saying that he has to supply you with his resources, and in supplying you with his resources then because of what you contribute, he ends up getting more than if he had used those resources for himself alone.  So that is where you end up with, with buying flowers and candy, after all tomorrow is Valentines Day.  That is the concept behind it, is by putting in something that is of X amount of value to him, he gets something much more in value even if it is intangible.  He should recognize that there is much more of value coming for the amount spent, it’s got to be a situation where he is feeling that his needs are being fulfilled, that he is coming out a winner. 

I had a teacher once in economics.  She talked about the concept of economic profit.  One of the most intelligent ladies I’ve ever met in my life.   She had been all over the world, she written a number of books, she was incredible.  And she taught about economic profit, she said if you go to a, she used this example because she was trained in the male mystique, she said if you go to a football game, it’s a hot summer day, you’re thirsty, you’d gladly pay a dollar for a lemonade.  So a vender comes by and sells it to you for fifty cents, you’ve made fifty cents economic profit because that is the money you didn’t spend that you would have in order to get that satisfaction.  That’s how you come out a head of the game. 

She said if you have five dollars?  How do you spend your five dollars?  Do you buy five used paperback books, or buy one new paperback book?  Do you go to a movie with it?  Do you rent a videotape?   What do you do?  When you have five dollars, how you spend it should be determined on bases of economic profit.  Meaning, do you get how the difference between how much pleasure it gives you and how much you’re willing to spend for it?  Meaning, it’s not always this is the thing that will bring me the most pleasure at the moment, but sometimes it’s saying that this is the thing that will bring me the most pleasure for the buck.  Because it may turn out that with five dollars you’re able to get something that would normally cost a huge amount but is only five dollars and  that huge amount that it would cost that you would be willing to pay if you had the money, is something that you don’t have to pay now because it’s on sale. 

This is where the whole sale mentality comes from, especially with women, is that when something is marked down in terms of saying well it’s normal price is X and it’s now selling for this.  Well even if it is something that will not bring you as much pleasure, as spending the money on something else immediately, you want to get this because it is a fleeting opportunity to make that kind of economic profit. 

That is when you’re diluting yourself and misusing it because you’re doing something that you didn’t have a preestablished need for now, but you anticipate a need for later or something that actually doesn’t give you the greatest amount of pleasure because it is something that gives you the greatest amount of economic profit.  So those two concepts of what will make me happiest and what will make me feel like I have the biggest bargain, are two different concepts.

Men want the biggest bargain all the time, in terms of relationships.  Women want the biggest bargain all the time, in terms of material things.  Men want the things that make them happiest immediately, in material things.  Women want the things that make them happiest immediately, in relationships, so in the end there seems to be an opposite in there. 

But the whole nature in all of this is the different ways we look at relationships.  So if we come up with a dependent relationship between men and women, and we have it as a positive dependent relationship, then that is the one in which both the man and the women will be satisfied with the relationship and fulfilled, because the women will find that she can rely on the man and he will take care of her needs and the man will look at that relationship and say that in it the women is supplying something that is of great value to him, greater than the value of the money that he is spending, the emotional money that he is spending on her.

And therefore he comes out with a tremendous whopping profit out of the deal just by being in an association with her, in a relationship with her.  Whereas if you are looking for, as a women, a lesbian relationship, you’re going to want to get into a companion relationship because in a companion, you will both be looking at that as a favorable relationship.  And if you can make it a positive companion relationship, then two of you could make that work. 

But if you put yourself into a dependent relationship, then that is not going to work as a true lesbian relationship.  Now if you put yourself into a dependent relationship that is positive, well then you end up in a relationship that is essentially a male-female relationship between two women, which is not going to be fulfilling, it may be satisfying but it won’t be fulfilling. 

So women who put themselves into relationships as lesbians that have a dependent relationship, have one of the parties depending upon the other one to fill their needs.  And when that one fills their needs, the one who is doing the need feeling has to perceive the relationship as being one that brings them more out of life, then they would have had by using those resources else where, that is what makes it worth will.  If that is not happening, then it appears negative to one side, and positive to the other side. 

I’ll close in a moment here by saying, this has led into the concept of positive and negative, not by looking at the relationship between of two people, but by looking at  how each one sees the relationship  because relationships can be seen as positive or negative from either side. 

Relationships can be seen as favorable or unfavorable from either side, and depending on whether you are dealing with relationships between women or relationships between men is going to create a very complex algorithm of finding out if they are seen as favorable from one side and negative from one side, favorable from one side and unfavorable from the other side, unfavorable from one side and positive or negative from the other side, or unfavorable from one side and favorable from the other side, so all of these combinations create the wealth and variety of relationships. 

Keep in mind that many of us, most of us have relationships that don’t just focus on one particular kind. That, in other words, when we get closer to people, we are not just operating at one level of relationship, we are actually beginning to stretch into other areas.  So we begin in one of them, perhaps dynamic are arguing and fighting all the time, and maybe that turns into companionship and then dependency and then into a component where you become the same thing.

The journey that we take through these dynamics is one in which we expand our context of relationships and so very often, we’ll find that certain aspects of our relationships are positive and certain aspects are negative, or certain are favorable and unfavorable depending upon the area that we are talking about.  Which is ultimately why men might have a workshop out in the garage and women would have the kitchen as their domain.  It’s a place in which they can turn the tables on other kinds of relationship issues that are less favorable or more negative to be able to define the scope in which contexts carrying a given beyond this instead of just talking about all these four different kinds of relationships that can be rated differently and create the complexity between men and women, women and women, and men and men.  T

Then you end up with the notion that each one of those relationships can be functional or dysfunctional in a different context.  So that when you are talking about relationships outside the house, verses relationships inside of the house, verses relationships when you’re dealing with economic matters, verses relationships that you’re dealing with when planning for vacation, verses relationships in raising the kids; each thing that is identified by the parties in the relationship as a context that is separate can create a completely different kind of pair relationship that is involved in that area and it can also change it’s favorable and unfavorable, and positive-negative nature. 

Then, of course, you run into the relationships where each one is defining context differently, and that is where most disagreements come from.  That’s when you are dealing with apples and oranges, where it is context itself that you see things as different, what is included what is not included in this part of the relationship, in this scope of our discussion here. 

So you add all that together and end up with the different ways men and women see relationships, in terms of being favorable primarily and then seeing what is positive and negative, and seeing that as spot judgments for women.  Or in terms of seeing the relationship as being positive or negative  one across the board, and then seeing what’s favorable or not, out of the most favorable relationships which is a more flexible thing for men.  And then determining whether it’s a relationship between a man and a women, and then determining whether both are seeing the relationship in the same light.  So that one is seeing favorable, the other is seeing positive, for example, or one is seeing unfavorable and the other is seeing negative.  Or if they don’t match up exactly and you end up with one seeing it one way and the other seeing it another, even from their different points of view, then you deal with the terms of context as to what context these relationships are taking place in?  What scope that you have them in?  If they are already –?– on the scope, and seeing how all those views of the relationship change it? 

Then you look at in terms of having different views of the context, so that is how things change.  And finally you end up with the most complex issue of all, which is, how context changes over time, so that nature of the relationships changes over time.  What is seen as favorable and unfavorable, will change for men.  What is seen as positive and negative, will change for women, over time.  The context in which we place things, will change overtime, sometimes in a repeating way were it comes full circle, sometimes in a non-repeating way where it goes off on a tangent.  That’s how relationships sometimes grow together, and sometimes grow apart.  Anyway all of this is material that can easily be put into algorithms.  I think most of them have been described here and from those algorithms, we can create an entire new dynamic engine, that can be used for Alter-Ego and also for Dramatica. 

The terms that we put on these dynamics, once we understand the mechanism of how they all go together are going to be the terms like:  greed, and love, and lust, and hate, and happiness, and sadness; and all of these things are the terms that are going to be hung on this particular model.  But I think, in looking at this dynamic model that’s building with all of these pieces to it, this flexible, fluid dynamic model which deals with things in a frictal sense, that is the other side of Dramatica.  It is the emotional side of story telling, it is the heart side or the heart of Alter-Ego.

The structural elements currently in Dramatica would be perfect for business oriented decisions because that is what you would be looking at, is the logistics and it is a logistics based system.  But in terms of dynamic model, it is not going to be based on logistics, or in terms of practicality women would also look at that structure in terms of practicality. 

But in terms of this dynamic model that we are creating right now, it would be seen as what is favorable, what is emotional aside of the argument to see what is positive or a negative emotional context.  And also what is favorable, as opposed to, I guess favorable and satisfying.  Fulfilling and satisfying is what you get over here on this side, and on the other side of the structural model, you get practical and logistic. 

So in any event, I guess it is about time for me to go take my shower because I’m going to be late for work.  But it is important to have documented this and this tape particularly is going to be the heart of future development in a practical sense.

[Please note that this transcription is not completely accurate to my original recording. I have done only a quick proof-reading to find obvious errors, separate the material into paragraphs, and correct and grammatical problems. Beyond this, you’re on your own.}

Saturday morning, February 11, 1995

I just woke up with a thought for dealing with the wave forms and the variables of the Dramatica dynamic structural relationship.  When we are picking domain, concern, range, and problem we have looked at this as being the equivalent of taking a wave form and saying, one of those choices fills in a value to the variable that determines a wave forms amplitude, another one it’s frequency, another one it’s phasing from left to right, and another one it’s overall vertical positioning,

The entire wave form is elevated or lowered, so that instead of being peak to peak from plus one volt to minus one volt, for example, it might be the same size wave but be peak to peak, plus two volts to zero or plus three to plus one.  In other words, there is a two volt range peak to peak, but you can put that at any height lower or above.

That was the only way that we’ve been looking at it in the past, looking at it structurally as just choosing concern, domain, range, and problem, which one we chose assigned a value to each of those variables and positioned the dynamic wave form on the model. 

Now in thinking of it in terms of dynamics, as with most of theses things, two of them will be the same from a dynamic stand point.  But there will be a quad of variables that are filled in, of which, the other two are variables that are completely different ions. 

That is what makes the dynamic and structural terms appear to intersect, is that they share two items out of a quad and each have two separate.  That is also what makes them appear to come together at a ninety degree angle, so that they can intersect on two points of a square, on two corners of a square.  And the other two corners, as it were, would form two planes that intersected at a ninety degree angle.

Then we look at the dynamics, the things that we do share is, I guess you could put this together in any combination of ways, you got to share at least two and this is what begins to create the dynamic model, is how many combinations you can create that share two.

Because the structural model is always going to be the four that we mentioned, and the dynamic model now will build itself by all of the permutations .  An example would be, the dynamic model might share that there is a particular amplitude to the wave and there is a particular frequency to the wave.  But then it might have a frequency modulation on amplitude modulation which could be a cyclic repeating thing, where you have a wave on top of a wave.  So that you can actually watch over time an amplitude change but in a repeating sense, so that it gets higher and lower, higher and lower, as an amplitude.  In other words, it becomes then kind of like an adjective, or a I guess an adverb in that  case it would modify the flow of the wave form.

Another way to look at it would be to, rather than just say there is amplitude and frequency modulation along with an amplitude and a frequency, would be to say that there is an amplitude and a frequency and then there is an increase or decrease in linear fashion of the amplitude or the frequency.  So that you can watch it changing without being repeating, moving it in a completely different direction.

Another way to look at it would be in terms of the wave itself becoming more and less distinct.  In other words almost like putting it out of focus, into focus, and out of focus and into focus or having the force disburse itself and then re-congeal itself so that over the body of the wave you look more at it like a three dimensional scatter chart, that basically shows the wave becoming less dense and more dense, more focused and more diffused.  So that overall, its power caused by its amplitude and frequency would remain the same and yet its impact or influence the scope of how much area it touches would actually become a factor.  So then instead of just looking at the wave as being descriptive of some function which is a very linear, structural way of looking at things, we would be looking at it as actually a wave traveling through medium and when it travels through the medium,

if it is only a single point traveling through, then it is not having a certain dispersal.  If you look at a wave as traveling through a medium as in gravity, everything will be affected to some degree just because of the influence say of the weak forces that hold the molecules of one to another in terms of affinity.  So that you move through the medium, things farther away will have less of an influence from a wave traveling through it, things closer to the wave will be more influenced, and if you look at that kind of impact, it forms the notion of a wave that is more or less diffused as it is traveling through a medium. 

And in doing so, it gives you a clear idea of the effect on biochemistry of the patterns that happen in biochemistry in terms of the brain.  The interference patterns that we create, or that actually create our self awareness, are a combination between the linear patterns that you can see moving through the neurology, where it is there or it is , and you can detect wave forms in brain waves, by something being there or being not. 

But when you are looking at the brain waves that are actually biochemical waves, then you are going to be looking at the ones that are more or less diffused and are having their frequency more or less constant.  That kind of an impact then creates an unusual interference pattern because instead of putting two waves together  to create an  interference pattern that are both linear,  you are putting a diffuse wave in conjunction with a focused linear wave, and when the two come together all bets are off. 

That is what creates the meaning of chaos because it is virtually impossible to predict both what the momentum will be and also what the new position will be because the wave form can have a number of factual levels.  In fact, there are an infinite number of factual levels from which to appreciate this new interference pattern and each fractal  dimension.  As you appreciate it, would be a different place at which you could perceive a wave. if you could see a wave, you’ve got a fractal  dimension.  There are areas in-between where you can perceive no wave and so the context in which waves can be perceived in the interference pattern between the diffuse and linear wave.  Those areas in-between are chaos and those areas where we perceive the waves are order.

Again this is at the heart of unified field theory in these kinds of appreciations, depending on the level in which you perceive them, fractal  levels can go on infinitely. 

Changes in those patterns are what always is going on fractally because whenever you see a pattern that remains constant, while it remains constant that can be fractal  and described by nonlinear equations.  Whenever  you see a pattern that is undulating or changing you can perceive that there is something at work, either above or below it, that is altering it.

(end of side A of tape)

Continuing… This is at the heart of unified field theory concept because it deals with the relationships between orders and chaos, and it says that whatever you perceive in the relationship between the diffuse pattern of waves, the biochemistry, and the focused linear pattern of waves in the brain, in the neurology, that the relationship between the two creates an interference pattern.  If the interference pattern is constant, you perceive that as order and the less constant it is the less orderly that things appear. 

In fact, the relationship is that fractal  is where it is constant and where it is not constant that is were you end up in the domain of frictal.  [Frictal is a term we coined to describe the temporal pattern created by the interaction of order and chaos, being a contraction of friction and fraction, as opposed to fractal – the spatial pattern created by the interaction of order and chaos l being a contraction of fracture and fraction].

Frictals tell you that there is another force at work, either a greater or larger fractal   magnitude of were you are looking that is having an influence but an uneven influence because it is another wave passing through the system. 

When waves pass through the system, that can not be linear because a linear wave passing through the system will cause constancy which would contribute to the order of view that we have. But when we have a larger or smaller magnitude wave of diffuse nature passing through the system, then is influence is not going to be constant and that is going to be a frictal force that we appreciate. 

The result of the frictal and fractal working together is relativistic verses the non-linear appreciations that is what ultimately creates alternating layers of order and chaos, with order being what we perceive the constancy and chaos where we perceive the inconstancy because unpredictable, because we are not monitoring above or below at those levels of magnitude and therefore have no way of knowing  what the next move will be.

The value of this way of looking at the theory is that it takes concepts such as synchronicity and relativity, which seem to have a relationship outside of  linearity and approaches them and arrives at them completely through understanding of linear processes just by adding the extra concept of diffusion. 

And that is the same concept that you would look at in terms of saying “does something exist or does something not exist,” well it’s more of a question of how firmly does it exist.

Now that’s something you look at in reality, you say how firmly does this tape exist?  Well the tape will exist absolutely, I mean there is no question in our minds but that is only if you look at it spatially.  You can say right now here is the table and it exists, and only if you look at it at this level you are appreciating it.

            But just as in chaos theory,  they say the coast of England is infinitely long because if you try to measure it as you get with smaller and smaller instruments of measure you begin to go around boulders and then you begin to go around grains of sand.  By the time you measured you’ve added one circumference after another a portion of it as you go around all of these irregularities in the coast, and the length of the coast begins to become larger at an exponential rate, you would end up with an infinite coast to England. 

Well similarly when you look at table and you say well is the tablecloth  part of the table?  Well no it’s not, OK.  Now on this particular table I’m looking at there is some adhesive tape that I put a rip on as part of the surface, well is that part of the table?  Well no it’s not.  Now the fact that there is a rip, there is a few molecules missing of that table, does that make it less of a table?  No, because we will define it then by it’s function, it holds things.  all right one of the legs is weak on this particular table, and if I touch the wrong way it falls over and things spill, does that make it not a table?  Well it makes it not a table at the moment it is spilling, well when exactly is that moment when it is spilling? 

And then you start to get into the temporal sense, you see, you know at what exact moment of time did it cease to be a table and you run into all kinds of problems like that logistically, unless you are looking at things in terms of their frictal nature. 

When you look at things in terms of frictal nature there never is any absolute existence or non-existence everything is in a constant state of flux.  It is just that some things have long term flux and some things have a short term flux, as a result of this things appear more or less constant to us within the level at which we appreciate them.  But when we look at larger and smaller magnitudes we cans see that things are actually always in a constant state of change. 

That leads back to the concept that is essential to the unified field theory, that when dealing with things that appear to have synchronicity they only have an apparent synchronicity because of the fact that the influences that we are watching are beyond the scope that we can perceive.  And there are moments when the diffusion is undulating and at two points at the undulation of the diffusion there are two focal points in this undulation. 

Our concept of life, as an observer, does not allow us to have two focal points, when we look at something we see it from only one focal point or so we think.  We look at the world and say this is where we are, this is where everything else is in reference to us that is the subjective view.  And in so doing we then look at everything as being converging on us at one particular point.

But if we have two focal points where we say this is what it looks like to me and also this is what it looks like to me, it happens all the time but out minds are constructed so as not to appreciate it. 

When you are working out two views where you say, well I want to go here, but I don’t really want to go there. Or when you are saying, well it makes sense logistically that it would be a good career move to go there, but I really don’t like that particular meeting or those particular people and I don’t want to go. 

You have a logical point of view and you have an emotional point of view and you are actually sensing the parallax between the two.  If there is a wide ranging difference it causes more deliberation, if there is a small difference then it causes less deliberation.  If one is stronger than the other than it causes less deliberation, if they are both as equally balanced as possible if cause the most deliberation. 

When you reach the point were you get absolute deliberation, you do not move, you do not act, you form an endless loop because nothing is changing.  It’s constant and yet even though it is constant the two are completely balanced in magnitude and in differential. 

Each makes the same amount of sense, each has the strongest feeling attached to it, so you end up trapped in a loop.  This is one reason why there is a bias built into the mind of being a temporal or spatial minds to prevent people from going into brain lock all the time, which is a bad survival trait.  It’s another reason that things would evolve in this way, is any entity that was of two minds would quickly cease to live long enough to  procreate. 

In any event, it is the observer looking  through two eyes that creates a parallax that gives us all of our depth perception.  And as a result of that two focal points are what is happening in synchronicity is that things exist spatially in two areas and in-between they do not exist as firmly.  So we move from focus to diffusion and when they become diffuse enough we cannot see the smoke in the room until it reaches a certain point were we can perceive it as a haze, if it gets beyond a haze we can see it as a fog. 

Eventually you solidify a fog enough and you’ve got an ice cube, something solid, something tangible.  You go out into space and it is not absolutely vacant, it’s not a complete vacuum, but what concept does vacuum have anymore when you have to go one light year between the particles. 

If you are in-between the particles, is there a vacuum in-between the particles?  Well you really can’t say there is because from a spatial sense, as long as there is any content in something it is not an absolute vacuum and yet if you are in-between those two particles there is an absolute vacuum. 

Well you have to look at it in two ways, there is a vacuum in terms of the fact that you are not feel any physical effects from the two particles.  So you can say that their molecular energy is not being imparted to you, they’re kinetic energy and therefore you are in an absolute vacuum. 

Yet at the same time each will have a gravitational field and that will effect your gravity, so through an indirect means the kinetic energy of your molecules is being altered by the changing positions relative to one another of these two particles that you stand in-between with a light year on either side. 

That is how the brain works, is that some functions of the brain, the ones that happen in the neurology are occurring when particles collide with one another when they actually impart kinetic energy through direct contact, (quote end quote) ” direct contact”. 

In fact when you then look at the chemistry of the brain, it is kinetic energy being in parted through gravitational means.  This kind of relationship between the two is the nature of all these interference patterns, that what we hold to be reality is a combination between both.

Now when you have items that are getting closer together, what happens to the gravity?  Well naturally the gravity between them seems to be stronger when they are closer, as if which is the strangest part of it, as if gravity was egocentric.  As if gravity was something that determined it’s influence by perceiving it’s place in the universe, rather then just having a place in the universe. 

You look at a particle and from the particle’s point of view, if there was such a thing, gravity would seem to be linear, it’s gravity would seem to be linear, the gravity it has.  It would look outside itself, and say “well the sum total of the force I have one foot away from me, is equal to the summed total of the force that I  have two feet away from me, which is equal to the summed total of the force that I have four feet away from me and so on.” 

So that you end up looking at these increasing as the square of the distance and the force, of course, is cubed.  But as you begin to look at this you realize that, just as the entire universe shrinks all around you from a point of view, the farther away it gets, your influence appears to shrink also, and that is what makes it appear to be a constant. 

That is the real key, is that the two seem to me coinciding.  So that when you look at some force that is in the distance, the farther away it is, the force gets smaller from your point of view, that you are exerting, and at the same time the universe itself shrinks.

Trees become smaller in the distance, stars are little tiny things, and when this happens it appears that your force is shrinking at the same rate away from you, as things are shrinking at the same rate away from you.  Therefore, your power appears to be consistent throughout the universe from an internal stand point and certainly that is the point of view a particle would have exerting gravity in the universe. 

However when you look at another particle, when you look at a second force generator in the universe, then at that point it seems as if when it gets closer to you it’s force gets stronger. 

In a sense, you can turn around and see you’re occupying more of it’s field of vision and therefore the particle exerts more force upon you.  But as the particles come together, the gravity increases and as that gravity increases from one perspective, remember we are dealing with subjective and objective here, as the gravity increases from one perspective then it suddenly becomes the stronger of the two forces and the kinetic energy becomes the weaker. 

Now that is a very interesting thing, which one is more important?  How long does it take for gravity to change it’s position relative to the kinetic energy?  If you have two particles that are traveling near the speed of light and they collide, then what is actually going on? 

You have to look at combined momentum to understand this, consider that light travels at the speed of light, light travels at the speed of light.  Now we look at the speed of light as a limit that we cannot get by, that we can approach but never achieve.  And yet light travels at the speed of light.  So something is not only approaching, something it is at the speed of light.  Light cannot travel at anything but the speed of light, it’s trapped in that limit line. 

Now what if you take two flashlights and shine them at each another, and the two photons are coming at each other at a combined momentum of twice the speed of light.  What occurs then?  Because from either standpoint each particle could not see the other coming faster because it cannot perceive anything beyond the speed of light. 

And so if the particle is coming towards it there is no way it could affect it in a direct physical sense, so that it would have energy imparted that would transmit to it before the other photon arrived because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. 

Now if you have these two photons coming towards each other, you can look at their combined speed and you can say that they are actually converging at faster than the speed of light, at twice the speed of light, in fact.  Well that is at an objective of standpoint. From a subjective stand point you cannot see anything traveling faster than the speed of light  because it couldn’t  get to you any faster and therefore you could not see it coming and that is the nature of the chaos in a temporal sense. 

Chaos, in a temporal sense, is something that is coming at you faster than you can perceive it, faster than the size of mind, faster than the speed of mind. 

When something comes faster than the size of mind, faster than the speed of mind, it is a chaotic event but it is actually something that is quite ordered.  It’s just that the overall combined speed between what is coming to you and you coming to it, creates something that is unappreciable from a subjective perspective. 

But if you look at it from an objective perspective quite clearly there are things that one can perceive that are happening at faster than the speed of light or faster than the speed of thought or larger than the size of mind or bigger than the universe, there are levels beyond that are going to have this kind of impact. 

And it all has to do with that fractal and frictal nature of combining the linear wave patterns with the diffused wave patterns and creating an interference pattern that either has a constancy or has inconstancy, were it is constant we look at it in our time sense and our space sense or in our gravity sense, in our physical connective sense.

We put the two together and were we see constancy, we describe it as order; were we see inconstancy, we describe it as chaos.  If you step back into an objective perspective out of the point of view, the single point of view concept, then you can clearly see that there is a wave form even in that, and that the wave form undulates between order and chaos, with order and chaos being one-hundred and eighty degrees out of phase. 

So the strong and the weak forces of the universe are connected in this concept, strong and weak forces of the mind, the observers connected to the observation and again, once the math is worked out, these essential concepts describe the unified field theory, which can be seen as both open and closed as a system, both as being infinite and as being infinitesimal. 

It’s all a matter of perspective, and science, as it is built now, cannot allow for a unified field theory because the one thing that must not change in an observation are the conditions under which the observation was made.  In other words, you cannot perceive the beginning of an experiment any differently than you perceive the end of an experiment or you have changed your standard of measurement, which is not allowed and that invalidates the experiment. 

That is why in trigonometry, you can only have functions that can be plotted horizontally, but if you try to plot a vertical inverse function it’s limited to one cycle because anything beyond that would require changing your perspective to perceive it. 

Everyone knows the waves doesn’t stop in that direction and waves can go in both, but we just can’t allow ourselves to look at them because it violates the standard of not changing ones perspective, cause there is only that one cycles worth of overlap between the function and the inverse function that we can perceive from the same perspective. 

That is the nature that has come out to be 3.14 on and on, as opposed to being an even three.  A truly objective perspective will see it in fact as four.  So in order to appreciate a unified field theory it requires that the perspective change, it requires that the observer be considered, it requires that you shift were you are looking at things from in order to see all the things that you can look at. 

So that is the crucial aspect of it, as long as you only adopt only a single fixed perspective or a single standard of measurement, you can only see part of the universe, you will see as much as you can see at one time. 

If you allow yourself to shift your perspective, then you are changing your perspective and between those two perspectives you will be able to see all of the universe.  But the one thing that you won’t see by doing that is to realize that you can’t be in two perspective simultaneously and therefore you have to take time to get from one perspective to the other perspective, going from one to the other. 

The nature of what you are observing changes under your feet and therefore you  will not see all of the universe shifting perspective, you will only see the largest amount of perspective you can see, keeping space as a constant, changing your perspective over time. 

So when you say let’s freeze time, that is the male perspective and that is what goes into traditional science.  When you’re saying lets freeze space, that is the perspective intrinsic to women and that is also why women are not statistically doing as well in science or math, is not because they don’t have the capacity to perceive as much of the universe as the men do.  But because the standards of measurement in the science community is established on male perspectives in which time is frozen and space is looked at in terms of the arrangement of things. 

If we were to create alternate tools for women to use, which could allow for multiple points of view to get a more holistic sense of looking around an issue rather than looking at an issue, then women would excel equally to men in terms of science and math.  But it would be a different language of science and math and in fact that language would be as inaccurate to men, as men’s language of science and math is not meaningful to women.

In talking to my son just a moment ago, he was bringing to my attention one thing I said,  “What about when you have a black hole?  And you have light that is going into a black hole and it reaches the event horizon and light actually freezes because it has slowed down towards the observer.  Well, of course, discounting what we just said about the observer and the fact that the light slows down according to the observer, meaning that light never actually slows down, that light actually continues right on into the black hole at the speed of light because it defines zone speed from a subjective stand point, suppose for a moment that we did assume that light did stop from the scientific perspective and was  no longer preceding towards the black hole.  Of course that is when it would vanish because if light stops it will give off no light, it can’t decrease itself, it will freeze it’s momentum but that is only the momentum that is going directly into the black hole.  In fact, from the stand point of the unified field theory such as this one we are describing here, is that when you approach the black hole, light will be slowing down it’s forward momentum so it will be increasing in it’s sideways momentum.  Well rather in a momentum of being diffuse more or less diffuse, because what is sideways in space? 

Well it is something becoming more or less diffuse so that angular momentum that goes of to the side that is going to increase and is going to become a wave form that’s kind of a polarity type thing, so that the wave of light that is going toward the black hole slows down and begins to come to the point where it becomes absolutely frozen. 

In relationship to that, the light is going to become more or less diffuse as it undulates from side to side, going from a focused point in it’s angular momentum to a maximum point in it’s angular momentum. 

Well what actually happens is as you reach a point coming towards the black hole when light actually would theoretically freeze and have no more forward momentum, that what’s happening is the wave form that is described as sideways undulation from side to side has become more stiff, more vertical, the peeks would become higher, the frequencies would become greater.  And you end up with a point at which the wave form is violated because if the light actually comes to a point where it stops going forward, then the side ways momentum has to be maximum and that means that it has to be maximum there is no time to turn the curve on a wave form and if you were to plot what was happening as a function you would see it would violate all functional rules because it would become plotted along the horizontal axis a series of vertical lines.

In other words, light would, say, travel from the center point to the right as far as it goes and then once it travels from the center point to the right it would immediately be traveling back to the left and there would be no point at which it was at rest, there would be no slowing down it would simply travel to the right and immediately turn tail and travel to the left. 

This odd phenomenon is what happens outside of black holes that makes them appear to just appear because all of the energy that has been seen coming back towards us is not going off in the side ways direction. 

Sideways again, looking at it as a linear event, would perceive it at a series of vertical lines, and these vertical lines along the horizontal axis would be spaced equally so that they would represent a complete cycle.  And each one would be the path way that light would take go from the farthest left point to the farthest right point, and then immediately it would be going from the farthest right to the farthest left. 

The problem is that it takes it’s time to go from one side to the other, which is represented by lengths of the vertical line along the horizontal axis but once it has taken that time to go from one place to the other, then it immediately is going the other direction and time that it has taken has passed, which is represented  by the horizontal gap between the vertical lines. 

This would normally describe a wave form, how do we get the vertical lines?  We get the vertical lines because it is simultaneously all along it’s full diffusion range from left to right, as it were, I mean from on the vertical lines from the top to the bottom from side to side in it’s movement and it simultaneously exists and then it ceases to exist for the interval period as time passes and then it exists again. 

So in a sense that would be plotting it so that you could see that it was, it existed in sideways time, I guess is the best way to describe it.  Where time has become space, space has become time, the two of them have inverted, they’ve exchanged positions and so it exists within a moment of time, … how to describe?     

Let me walk through the model one more time and see if I can find a way to describe what’s going on in the model.  The light approaches the black hole, it’s reaching the point where it freezes, as it reaches the point where it freezes, the momentum that it has so that it can continue to travel at the speed of light goes side ways to the black hole, because there is absolutely no force preventing it from moving in that direction, you might think of it as an orbit, if you would.  So if the light going forward towards the black hole is slowing down, the light going side ways that polarity is going to in a sense orbit the black hole. 

Now because it orbits the black hole, the only place we are going to be able to perceive the light as an observer, is when it comes around in it’s orbit back to the point that is directly between us and the black hole.  So we are only going to see it for that infinitely small moment, that tiny moment at which it exactly lines up between us and what we are observing.  When that happens all of it’s other momentum has gone side ways but the nature of the light has changed, because if we are plotting the forward momentum of the light is such that it no longer exists, light has stopped it’s forward momentum.  If this is the case then light itself is only visible to us because it will appear to have forward momentum when it crosses that point, it’s own point in it’s orbit of going around this black hole. 

If you plot that from the perspective of light’s forward momentum then it would appear as if light had it’s speed that it had before of the speed of light, but only for a moment. 

This would create a vertical line that would be represented over the amplitude of the speed which would be the light and this vertical line would be placed on the horizontal axis with time going off along the horizontal axis toward the right as we continue our graph. 

As things go along the horizontal axis towards the right, light is actually making another side ways revolution orbit around the black hole finally comes back to the point in front of us and instantly we see that it has an instant immediate momentary speed of the speed of light.  And we plot that by it’s amplitude speed along the vertical axis, as a vertical line equal to the speed of light and that is evenly spaced to the right of the original observations. 

These observations would continue so that each time that we saw the light, we would see it for a brief moment, kind of like a pulse type thing, we would see it for a brief moment where it would show up at full intensity and then it would be shut off instantly. 

In other words there is no undulation in it,  it’s not that we could perceive at all any wave form in it because in fact the light we are looking at is not truly anymore forward moving light but sideways moving light. 

It has gone from something heading directly on, to something heading in an orbit, why would it do that?  One would hypothetically look at a particle of light, at a photon of light going towards the black hole that would be hitting dead center, directly from the position of the observer.  And if it did go directly from the position of the observer into the black hole then at that point we could say that  (end of tape)

Okay, we are continuing now on Saturday morning, February 11, 1995, and we’re talking about if there was a situation with a black hole where the observer was actually able to see the light moving directly from them, directly into the black hole, dead on. 

Then as they perceive this, one would assume that it would just appear to blink out and we  could say that if light could go directly into the black hole, dead center, then light would not go into an orbit because there is nothing to pull it in any given direction into an orbit, no regularity. 

So there would be a theoretical point at which light could hit dead on, perfectly perpendicular to the force of  the gravity of the black hole, in all measurable directions and it would not go into to orbit because there would be nothing to make it go one way or another. 

Well in fact as we know the Coriolis effect on Earth, there is always some kind of chaotic event that will choose one thing over another.  There is a tendency to go one particular way but if you reach the equator, it is still going to go down the drain in one direction or another, but which direction it goes is going to be a  chaotic event because the Coriolis effect will be an equal pull. 

But you never see the water just sit there and not go around the drain and it never just goes down straight, that doesn’t happen, that just doesn’t happen, no time does that ever occur.  The reason for that is, the observer, if you are looking at light the only way that the observer could see the light going dead on away from them, would be if the observer were in line with the light itself so they were watching it dead on, go away from them, into the black hole. 

And if they are watching it dead on then they are not going to see anything because if the light hits them in an absolutely straight perspective completely straight, then at that point you are not going to see any light at all, so that observation could not occur. 

That is the interesting thing about the universe, is that you can come up with all these hypothetical situations in which the paradox would exist, but the nature of the universe is such a way that as members of it, as citizens of the universe, we are constructed in such a way that we can not observe the paradox and so we believe the paradox doesn’t exist because we cannot see it, or we believe it exists even though we can’t see it. 

It makes little difference because we’re never going to be able to directly observe it and if we can’t directly observe it or even directly observe it’s impact, because of that we have no way of having it effect us or us effect it in an observable fashion.

 If you are looking for the mind of God that is probably the place to find it. 

So anyway, that one instance where it would hit dead on is something could imagine but something that we could never observe and we can also never observe it’s impact or influence upon us.  And so,  there is no way we could even measure it through circumstantial factors, anything short of that direct hit is going to lead to some kind of an orbit. 

And that orbit, because light will maintain it’s speed, is once it’s forward momentum freezes, then it’s angular momentum will be maximum but the observer will only be able to note when it exactly crosses their path.  That there is a momentary flash of light visible at exactly one-hundred eighty-six thousand – whatever the speed is depending on the medium it’s moving through – that it will show up just for that instant at it’s full force without any fading in or fading out, it will be there one moment and not be there the next and that is the nature of it’s journey turning the forward momentum into orbital or angular momentum.

My version of a TED talk about the Dramatica theory of narrative structure I co-created with Chris Huntley

One of my Dramatica narrative theory classes I gave a few years ago. This particular class explores the “Quad” – a graphic manifestation of the logic equations that drive our model of narrative psychology making it easier to visualize.

These are rough notes recorded on micro-cassette pertaining to the online psychological aspects of the continuing development of the Dramatica theory of story structure and the Mental Relativity theory of the narrative mind.

It’s Monday, February 6, 1995 at about nine-thirty in the morning.

Just a thought on relationships for alter ego [the self-improvement software program we were developing at the time], in terms of blind spots.

Men clearly see something they posses or don’t posses and so they are able to see that quite clearly in terms of relationships as to whether somebody is their girl or their woman that they, their wife it is all a possessive type thing.

Whereas women are looking at how a relationship is changing, meaning that women, in general, don’t have a tendency of being as possessive of their mate, as they are of looking at the strength of the relationship.

But the blind spots that each has is that, men will not see relationships changing. They will assume that once they have possession of something they own it, they will assume once they have a relationship that is what the relationship is and it will stay there. They can not see that maybe feelings evolve over time, maybe the other party involved in the relationship is no longer the person that they thought they had, maybe the relationship is no longer what they had. Which is why a marriage can go far a rye before a husband ever realizes it has.

But a women is aware that a relationship is going awry right at the beginning. But her blind spot is that, though they no longer have possession of someone’s heart, they are not even going to think about that. They are going to think about a matter of degree like you don’t love me like you used to or we don’t talk anymore, that is sort of the blind spot.

Men think that they just don’t love you anymore but they are still yours but women are not going to look at that, they are just going to watch the relationship go up and down. And men are going to look at a relationship and they are going to be saying things like what are you doing spending all this time with him because they are going to assume that there is a fixed relationship based on possession.

So it’s one of those things that kind of does a double reverse, see you start having the area that you are good at which is possession. But as a result for men, is a result of that, they are not going to aware of a relationship changing and because they can’t see a relationship changing, suddenly they may find that they no longer have possession and not see it coming. So it comes back to –?– them right were they see it most clearly, they just don’t see it coming because they don’t see process that leads to it.

And for women, women are generally looking at someone who they feel is caring for them, that loving them by looking at the way relationship is going and then they do not have a blind spot in that area. But they do have a blind spot in the fact that somebody may no longer be in their possession. In other words, maybe someone else comes into the picture that is of more interest or has a better situation surrounding them and the women no longer possess the man and all she senses is that the relationship is –?–. Then it comes back to haunt her later, it slaps her in the face that the relationship has now gone into a declining spiral and will eventually reach no relationship at all because of the fact that she has lost possession of the man.

A lot of folklore and old wives tales as it where, talk about how to get a man and keep a man. “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” Well indeed that is saying basically that if you supply the needs that a man has, whether in bed or on the table that supposedly that will provide so much that it’s going to require quite a holistic alternative in order to go away from the sure thing that is working really well. But if you let any of this lag, the moment you let it lag the man is going to start not wanting what he has.

There is a line in a Beatle song that says and I think I quoted it in here earlier, that says “I’m no fool ’cause I won’t take what I don’t want”. Well the same thing is true with men, they won’t keep what they don’t want. The whole idea is to shun yourself of things that are no good and to grab on to things that are. This leads into the whole discussion of looking at start and stop in our story engine, that start and stop is –?– yourself of something or adding something. That is not really appropriate to women when you’re looking at start and stop.

Talking about story now, there’s these four areas that you are going to find a quad in each one of these dynamics. And for Dramatica now, this should be put in the Dramatica file. I really think that the dynamic model that we want to create, the alternative emotional model that we want to create that deals with the heart instead of the head is going to not deal with dynamics in terms of these binary choices of good or bad, of start or stop, or change or sted-fast, but deal with a quad of four.

Now I thought of this at three in the morning and I don’t know if I can remember this part of it anymore. I may have to re-work it, so this may be a little rocky. If we deal with four things, on say, start and stop now you have a guy in change or steadfast is going to determine for main character say, boy this is rocky….

For main character you are dealing with change and steadfast that aside, you look at is the audience waiting for something to start, is the audience waiting for something to stop?

Now it may be that the main character is trying to bring something about or it may be that the main character is going to begin something in themselves. It may be that the main character is trying to bring something to a conclusion or it may be that the main character has to conclude something. Sometimes you have to give up your grief and sometimes you have to wait for what is causing your grief to go away, as it were.

So in fact there are these four aspects of these start- stop question that exists independently of change and steadfast, however change and steadfast have an influence upon them. Just like the rest of our appreciations, just like the side of the structural model.

Now, what you end up with when you go to change and steadfast, what is the quad based out of change and steadfast? Well certainly one is that the character is makes the decision to change and the other that the character makes the decision to remain steadfast. The two other one’s that we just recently discovered are in the non-leap of faith stories, in which the character is changed or the character remains the same without really making a choice, without being aware of it. It is a passive and active nature, so that you have passive and active are the functional delineation of the two dynamic pairs in a changed, steadfast quad.

But when you deal with a start-stop quad, it’s internal and external that are the two perimeters that grow out of the start-stop quad. So now the task I have for everyone in the department, if we haven’t done it by the time this is transcribed already, is to go through and take all of the eight dynamic questions and try to work exactly what the quad of options are in those dynamic questions. And then having worked out the quad of options, then figure out the binary driver of each one, and then figure out the quad of the binary driver.

So in that manner we could say change and steadfast, whether it is active or passive creates a quad of four item, and then that is determined by the active passive. Now if you have active and passive, then what would be the quad built out of active and passive and so one.

And eventually as we create this we will begin to see that we come up with the lower level of the dynamic structure, as it were. We come up with the element level of it because when we move up a level in this sense, we’re really moving side ways. We aren’t saying that above this dynamic structure is another set of four exactly, we’re saying that next to it are four other things that have an influence on it.

And then once we mapped out all of these, of which there should be again sixty-four different items and four different arrangements and what we’ve come up with all of these quads of things, in that kind of progression, then we will need to move up to the variation level. I think this is were we’re going to start seeing things at the variation level, that have to do with greed and lust and love and hate and all of that that’s going on.

And then we move up to the Type level, which I have no idea what it is and perhaps up at the highest level it may turn out that the four things we have, that are the dynamic classes as it were, would be I, you, we, and they, we’ll have to wait and see about that one. Anyway that is enough for today, I’ve go to get on to work.

After our Dramatica story structure software was released in 1994 based on our theory on the psychology of narrative, I continued our work by beginning to move into social narrative theory.

At the inception, the ideas came hot and heavy, raw, undeveloped, incomplete, but filled with little stunning insights that started to crack open the black hole of our understanding, as a species, of what drove our own social interactions, and how those dynamics actually worked.

As these little epiphanies emerged, I recorded each new understanding on a micro-cassette recorder so that they might not be lost and could be revisited later for ongoing development.

Here, then, is the transcription of one of these tapes:

Narrative Psychology Theory Notes

Melanie Anne Phillips

It’s 11:30 am on Friday, February 3rd 1995.

First a quote – A living culture should have values, not impose values.

Now a thought on getting back into the unified field concepts which will have great practical application in dealing with the emotional issues of stories and of psychology. 

As an exercise try to match the four kinds of relationships, dynamic, companions, dependent, and component, in a one to one correspondence with the four points of view I, you, we, and they. 

In fact, mass and energy seem to be the external components of our universe, and space and time are internal creations, and that seems true for both men and women. 

As a result, men and women will see dynamic relationships as “you,” and will see component relationships as “they,” so the “you” and the” they” perspectives would be consistent for male and female. 

However, because men have their space-sense, they give preference to an external view of things or looking outward and time sense is a view of looking inward.

When it comes to the other two the companion and dependent pairs, those will be reversed between of men and women as to how they place the perspective of which one is “I” and which one is “we.” 

Now for men, “we” is put in the companion pairs because the companion pairs, buddy type stuff, male bonding, a guy thing, that is where they see “we.”  And they see “I,” as independent and they look as to who they have to depend on, they gear their perspective of who I am by how independent I am verses how dependent I am. 

Whereas for women it is exactly the reverse, women will look at the I perspective in terms of companion pairs.  Who am I friends with?  I define myself by who I am around, that’s where groupies come from. 

Whereas the dependent pair relationship is where they look to as “we.” By being in dependent relationships, women have a sense that they have to rely on each other and because of that there is a certain security or a joining that comes together causing us to be “we” and that could be “we” plural – remember not just “we” meaning you and I, but it could be all of you plural, whenever you feel part of a group for women that would be the dependent relationship.

So this again it is a preference that we would see in those two pair relationships not just between men and women but also of course impacted by the other levels of the mind since this is a pre-conscious leaning of the subconscious.  Memory and conscious would also have impact as to whether it would be in line the way it was described for men and women or it would be actually the reverse in many individuals.

So in general, however: statistically this holds true because society tends to be, as a male society,  built in a male image, and as such it tends to bi-polarize the male and female aspects.

It will see what the preconscious basis is and then exert pressures to force each side of the equation to either a neutral corner, pretty much straight up and down, their minds lined up in that one level.  That is what women’s intuition has been – the attempt to say “no” to that male-minded hierarchy for women.  That’s one place we are, yes, but we also have a whole range.

Whereas men find that threatening because it blurs the distinction between the roles, but naturally this would be the case because in terms of empathy and sympathy men are going to find a huge difference between the way of problem solving spatially or holistically because it is either external or internal. 

Whereas external and internal has no big difference for women.  It is the idea of whether it is temporal or spatial thinking and that is why from this particular perspective women would want to have a full range across the tendencies, whereas men would try to in society have things bipolarized so that the lines become more distinct because they are based on sex.  Which is an external appreciation, which is where they have to have their binaries. 

Women have their binaries too, again, but their binaries is going to be in terms of time and space.  And that would be the division in which women would like to see things separated.  Not by gender, not by sex, but by the linear people verses the holistic people.  And in fact, that is how women would divide their groups naturally when left alone. 

If you have a group of women only, without the influence of men, they will clearly divide into the temporal and the spatial thinkers.  Whereas if you have a group of men and women together, they will divide things between men and women because men control the outside infrastructure. 

When men and women are together, women will not be able to divide into groups that have the male and female temporal thinkers on one side, and the male and female spatial thinkers on the other.  They don’t get a chance to bipolarize because they are not allowed to group together men and women on the bases of anything until it is first separated into men and women.  And then women are only allowed that opportunity to separate their own group of women into the spatial and temporal thinkers. 

This is how you will see the pairings that go on and groupings that go on at a party or at a convention wherever there are a number of people working together.  Unless there is something in the structure that forces men and women to be together, other than that you will find that the men will go over to one side and the women will go over to the other side, and then the women will sub-divide into two groups but the men will not.  And so you end up with three perspectives because the male external one currently is taking precedence in the social organization.

However if the constraints or the requirements of the social interaction demand that men and women be grouped together without a dividing line between the two of them, as uncomfortable as this is for most men, you will find that the larger group will sub-divide itself into two categories of the spatial thinkers and temporal thinkers.

The complex interactions of the social levels caused by this are nothing more than frictal echoes of repeating frictal patterns of things going on in the individual mind. And so the same technology that can be used to describe what’s happening in the internal mind, the same theoretical algorithms can be applied to social relationships — all you  have to do is just upgrade the scope of what you are applying it to and the algorithms will work equally well for complex social interactions.

*******

Okay, here’s another note, this is a quick one for organization of the [Dramatica] department..  We have so much written already on so many topics, we really have to start putting this  together in all kinds of publications. 

As I speak right now, we are only a week, ten days away from having to complete the Dramatica manual which is occupying all our time.  But just by way of setting a direction for myself, I suppose recording it here and putting it into hard copy later as we transcribe this. 

We are generating interesting useful perspectives on all of this all the time. Occasionally, a new concept such as matching up the dynamic pair relationships or the pair relationships with the points of view will come up that haven’t been thought of before but often they are just new ways of saying the same thing being developed.

Now that doesn’t mean that any way is better than any other way that all depends on the audience that we are trying to reach with our understanding of what we found.  We will need many ways to present it and so we can’t just write the book on Mental Relativity or the book on personal problem solving.  We have to write any number of books on those things so that we can have material out there that will speak to various groups that have their own particular biases in which the imagery that we use, the encoding that we’re using is such that it will be attractive or speak clearly to a wide variety of groups because again it is the symbols that we’re using, the encoding, that is going to prevent our message from getting through or make is accessible.

So the multiplicity of effort in that area is not unwarranted, the main thing is we have to set up a system at the office, a normal process where by constantly we are regenerating or generating new works, new modes of expression simply using the text that has already been written recombined in different ways. 

It is not so much an easy program because right now we have so much text that unless someone wanted to be an expert in what’s going on they would not find time, in an entire lifetime, to read everything that we’ve already written about all aspects of this theory. 

That’s why it’s our job as a department to devote full-time ourselves to going through that material and constantly gleaning and culling what we can from it and reassembling it in new packages that make it available to wider segment of the population for the temporal and the spatial thinkers.

A Dramatica follower recently sent an email with a bit of theory he had developed regarding the problem and solution elements in narrative structure.

Here is his original note, followed by my response:

Dear Melanie, 

Thank you for always taking time to answer my questions. 

I’ve noticed that every dramatica element has a positive and negative charge to it.

For example:

Projection — [Element] — dyn.pr. Speculation< >Projection — an extension of probability into
the future — Projection is a means of anticipating events and situations by extending the line
of how things have been happening into the future.

Positive/Solution – Restoring a balance: A character that represents Projection has a good grasp of what he might look for in things to come.

Negative/Problem – Causing an imbalanceHowever, this character will give great weight to past experience so abrupt changes in direction might be ignored until it is too late. — syn. anticipation, how things will be, most likely, probable

In the article,https://narrativefirst.com/articles/how-to-use-dramatica-the-right-way-part-two

Jim Hull writes: An effective Author defines how the story point is a problem.

I think a more accurate statement would be that An effective Author defines how the story point is an inequity.

An inequity is an imbalance between two or more things.

In an inequity we have a positive and negative. A solution and problem.

An even more accurate statement would be that An effective Author defines how the story point is a problem and a solution.

I feel it is a more holistic way of story encoding.

Story encoding should look more like this I’d suggest:

Pursuit

**How is pursuit a solution or a positive thing? What outcomes does pursuit as a solution lead to? **

or

How is pursuit a restorer of balance or how is pursuit trying to rebalance issues?

How is pursuit a problem or a negative thing? What outcomes does pursuit as a problem lead to?

or

How is pursuit a cause of imbalance in the story?
I feel like the order of these can be interchanged in terms of how you express them.

I dare to say that the more holistic approach to story encoding is to illustrate a story point as
both a problem and a solution.

Chris Huntley actually mentions something to that effect.

Elements: Apply both the presence and ‘lack of’ to same story point / question?

Late to the discussion here, but the simple answer to your question is YES, it can be too much AND/OR too little, as well as positive and/or negative, and an attribute OF something/someone and/or attributed TO something/someone.

Like it was mentioned above, the expression of those varieties will be different, but they can all fall under the same ‘umbrella’ of a single story point.

For example, Obtaining describes both gain and/or loss. Memory describes both remembering and/or forgetting, as well as trying to forget and/or trying to remember, or being remembered and/or being forgotten, etc.

How does same dramatica element trying to restore a balance – rebalance – How is same dramatica element a restorer of balance?

How is the same dramatica element a cause of imbalance – or how is same dramatica element an imbalance?

I feel like Encoding works better when you think in terms of positive and negative as opposed to problem and solution though one can still think that way – maybe apply different words in terms of reflecting an imbalance, problem or solution, right thing, or wrong

Encoding the problem of test as an inequity

Test as a positive thing.

Matthew wants to test and see if there’s reciprocity in his relationship with Cindy so these days when he tries to call her and she doesn’t receive his call, he waits for her to call back until it’s something urgent. He’s realized that if he’s to build a strong, intimate and enjoyable relationship with her, they will both have to strike a balance for each other.

And this is a good thing because Cindy’s workmate with whom she shares an office is envious of her relationship with Matthew.

“I admire the fact that you can call on Matthew to actually help you out with your paperwork and he actually shows up when he comes over. My husband does nothing at home. He doesn’t even help me when I ask him to help me comfort my one year old baby when he cries your a lucky lady.”

Test as a negative thing

Their relationship gets tested and Cindy does take the test well.

Matthew is from a wealthy background while Cindy is from a poor family. One day, Matt invites Cindy for a party. She feels out of place but Matthew makes her feel at home. A girl at the party who also likes Matt calls Matt’s mother and says negative things about Cindy.

Matt’s mother has a talk with him the next day and tells him that someone told her that he’s dating a social climber and that he should be very careful around her.

Matt gives Cindy a call and tells her about what her mother said.

Cindy breaks down and begins sobbing.

Both the negative and positive aspects will read something like this: 

Encoding the problem of test as an inequity reflecting both a positive and negative aspect:

Matthew wants to test and see if there’s reciprocity in his relationship with Cindy so these days when he tries to call her and she doesn’t receive his call, he waits for her to call back until it’s something urgent. He’s realized that if he’s to build a strong, intimate and enjoyable relationship with her, they will both have to strike a balance for each other.

And this is a good thing because Cindy’s workmate with whom she shares an office is envious of her relationship with Matthew.

“I admire the fact that you can call on Matthew to actually help you out with your paperwork and he actually shows up when he comes over. My husband does nothing at home. He doesn’t even help me when I ask him to help me comfort my one year old baby when he cries your a lucky lady.”

Matthew is from a wealthy background while Cindy is from a poor family. One day, Matt invites Cindy for a party. She feels out of place but Matthew makes her feel at home. A girl at the party who also likes Matt calls Matt’s mother and says negative things about Cindy.

Matt’s mother has a talk with him the next day and tells him that someone told her that he’s dating a social climber and that he should be very careful around her.

Matt gives Cindy a call and tells her about what her mother said.

Cindy breaks down and begins sobbing.

Thank you.  

My Response:

Hi, Samuel

Alas, I’m in the middle of beta testing the new version of StoryWeaver and won’t have time to respond in detail.

But, I skimmed your note and just want to offer a few quick notions to get you pointed in the right direction.

First of all, your approach is quite inventive and I like that you are seeking to create a practical algorithm to convert problem/inequity into motivation/drive.

This can be done, but it doesn’t work quite as you have it.

First, in the usage you quote – Negative just means the existence of that element causes a problem in a given story.  Positive means it is what’s needed for a solution.

But the inequity is not between the positive and negative aspect of an element, but between whatever element is the problem and its dynamic opposite, which is the solution, such as logic and feeling.

Inequities exist between elements not between positive and negative aspects of elements.

So…  “An effective author explains how an imbalance (inequity) between two elements leads to one becoming a problem and the other becoming a solution.”  Kinda like splitting an atom actually…

Alas, I have little time left to respond, but let me say this:

What splits the atom, what drives the problem and solution elements apart from each other, what breaks the natural balance or bond between them is justification.  The four stages of justification create greater and greater tension (potential) as each stage moves to the next (sort of like turning a key on a wind-up toy) until it reaches a point where the spring breaks (nuclear fission).  The two elements are separated from each other, one becoming a problem, the other a solution, but now as free ions rather than a bonded pair.  The other product of this narrative fission is energy, which is, in fact, the motivation, drive you were looking for.  Only by applying energy from the outside (the influence character) will the pressure become so great (leading to heat manifest as conflict) that the separated elements can be joined once more in balance (fussion) to become again a bonded pair.  End of story.

Hope this helps.

Melanie

Storymind

May the Muse be with you!