“In the Beginning, there was the word, and the word was God….” and so the world was created for the Judeo-Christian peoples through the power of Naming. Just so, older, non-western civilizations have the awareness that to Name something is a way of gaining control over it.
To Name something is to create boundaries and limitations for it; to distinguish it from what it is and what it is not. This process of naming is a central part of our work as Psychotherapists. Just as wizards, magicians, and priests have always had a special magical language that most people do not speak, so too do we have the DSM-III and the Metaphoric language of therapy to use in Naming the amorphous disorder, the confusion and the pain the patient suffers. The problem is Named, and therefore limited, predictable, and controlled. In watching Frank Farrelly work I am most impressed by his ability to Name, and his ability to Clown.
“Clowning” is a dangerous word for me to use here, since Westerners have lost the sense of the Sacred always associated with Clowning. For that reason, I too, will rely upon the Power of Naming, and instead use the term “Chiffoneti,” from my own Tiwa language of the Taos Pueblo Indians. For the vast majority of Native American cultures, the Chiffoneti is a fascinating blend of priest, healer, and trickster, words I also associate with Frank Farrelly. Different tribes will use different names for the Chiffoneti, but they would all recognize him at once… and the Chiffoneti of the world are almost always male… perhaps women can never quite succeed at being as ridiculous as a male.
In some tribes, the Chiffoneti would be the one responsible for introducing any new laws considered for adoption into the community. This was because someone who had created the new law would of course be biased in its favor. But the Chiffoneti would introduce it by making fun of it… pointing out its flaws and inadequacies. For a law to survive the treatment of a Chiffoneti it would have to be an excellent law.
Few outsiders are aware of the healing power of the Chiffoneti since they are too distracted by his work with play, making the new familiar and the familiar new. But we know the Chiffoneti is sometimes himself someone who was once an ordinary person the other Chiffoneti healed, and so he joins them to heal others, having conquered the old illness, named it, and therefore gained Power over it. We respect the Chiffoneti with a feeling of mild fear mixed in with that respect, for the Chiffoneti are predictable in their unpredictability.
For the Chiffoneti at Taos Pueblo also has a role of Police Officer of his function as Trickster one who keeps order during festivals while simultaneously violating order himself. To be a master of something one must understand its polarities… one must know order to recognize chaos and know chaos to recognize order. The Chiffoneti makes us laugh at the serious things of life we would never have the nerve to laugh at publically. . . . . the important people, the Sacred, and ourselves. In so doing the Chiffoneti plays with limits, juggles different levels of reality as though they were balls to allow irony to become visible.
A few years ago, I was home for our Feast Day, a time in September when the Chiffoneti come out among the people. One of my cousins was a Chiffoneti and joined his brothers in their work. On this day, a great pole nearly three stories high is placed in the plaza of our village and a dead sheep and bundles of food are placed at its very top. The Chiffoneti spend a great deal of comic time searching for this nourishment that symbolizes what will feed our people during the year. When they finally discover what is obvious (an interesting metaphor, nicht wahr?), they shoot tiny arrows made of straw from bows the size of sparrows, arrows that rise a few feet in the air and then fall back to the earth. Using something artificial won’t work in nourishing the community… one must use oneself. And so the Chiffoneti must climb the pole to feed the people.
In the past, my cousin, young and strong, would be the first one to succeed in reaching the top and delivering the gifts to the community. But he had been in a motorcycle accident and carried a metal rod in his thigh. He could not get more than halfway up the pole. Disappointed he returned to the ground and studied the pole very carefully from all angles. It was mid-afternoon, and the shadow of the pole was exactly the same length as the pole itself. For a long time he looked at the pole and then the shadow. Finally, he lowered himself to the ground…and began to climb the shadow!
For many patients we see they have spent too much of their time climbing the shadow and never the pole. Milton H. Erickson (a spiritual relative of Frank, and another Chiffoneti) suggested that it is the patient’s inability to deal with the problem directly that creates the neurosis. And the remarkable complications the patients develops to deal with the problem indirectly form the symptoms that eventually bring the patient to us. For us to deal directly with the problem in an authoritative manner brings out all the defenses the patient uses in his or her daily life to avoid the problem, and this is what many have misnamed “resistance”. But the one thing that cannot be resisted is humor, for as Gregory Bateson (yet another member of the Chiffoneti clan) pointed out, humor is a way of saying no without saying no, a double-level communication where one may resist one level or the other but one can’t refuse the message of both (if one begins to get angrier, go into denial the Chiffoneti smiles, and says, “it’s just a joke after all… can’t you take a joke?”). Frank uses the humor of the Chiffoneti as a brilliant spotlight that shines on the problem… and it’s hard for shadows to survive a well-placed spotlight.
The Chiffoneti comes with his two hands outstretched … with two levels of meaning. One hand carries the gift of fear…an emotional arousal (one of the cross-cultural of all healing processes) that we are on the verge of being fooled, about to discover something new that may be quite frightening. But in the other hand is the gift of laughter…the message one does not really need to be afraid, because “it’s just a joke,” anyway. Just so, the Chiffoneti can let us explore the edges of our limitations we would never come near ourselves. The spotlight turns on and exposes the fact the black border we thought had existed was never a border at all, but simply darkness. While we might be afraid the Chiffoneti laughs and reminds us it’s just a joke, and one will never really be afraid of a joke.
And so Frank Farrelly comes with fear and laughter. Like Milton H. Erickson, he has learned the effectiveness of the “Yes Set” …if he can get you to say “yes” to a series of his statements the next “yes” is automatic. And this is how Frank maneuvers his patients into agreeing to outrageous things. They keep advancing on the stepping stones he lays out for them only to discover the last one is a thinly covered hole they fall through to a new understanding. Like the Chiffoneti, Frank dares to make the most basically held beliefs of the patient seem so funny and so ridiculous the patient is actually embarrassed to go on believing them. But if a belief can survive Frank’s efforts then like the law of the Chiffoneti it must be an excellent one, and deserves to be accepted.
Frank Farrelly will never be totally accepted in the United States…he violates too many cultural norms. Most Americans think medicine has to taste bad to be effective, hardly the mindset that can see the laughter of the Chiffoneti as a healing process. Americans also need to see therapy as a type of control since the ultimate goal of contemporary psychotherapy is to permit the patient to become a “productive” member of society… the patient is sent to us because he or she is “out of control”. Even a Chiffoneti can barely control another Chiffoneti (or would want to do so). And most of all, Americans want predictability and “standards” (another way of saying “control”), where every french fry in every McDonald’s looks and tastes exactly the same, whether the restaurant is in New York, Zürich, or Frankfurt.
But every Chiffoneti knows you can’t tell exactly the same joke over and over again…people will stop laughing. One can “standardize” Client-Centered Therapy or Behavior Modification, but it’s hard to imagine a “standard” provocative therapy.
The Chiffoneti are therefore very dangerous people because their laughter is the one weapon no bureaucracy, no dictator, no illness can defend against, and that is why the Chiffoneti of the American Indian peoples were locked away on reservations by the American federal government. But the Chiffoneti just keep laughing, and teaching the laughter to others.
Sometimes the Chiffoneti plays at being psychotherapist. Keep an eye on Frank Farrelly. And keep laughing.
Asamuyah.
Prof. Dr. Terry Tafoya
June 28, 1988
–Foreword to the book Frank Farrelly, Playing the Devil’s Advocate, (Des Teufels Advokat spielen), Rössler Verlag, Konstanz Germany, 1989.