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Having said that, I should turn to Berke's other mode of engagement with
Barnes. Berke continually constructed
interpretations
of the nature of Barnes's
problems and fed them back to her. He concluded, for example, that much
of her strange behavior derived from anger. This anger was related to guilt:
because of her inability to distinguish between inner and outer states, she
tended to blame herself for anything that went wrong at Kingsley Hall, often
including things which had nothing at all to do with her. Barnes also tended
to interpret any situation on models derived from her childhood: Berke con-
cluded that sometimes she was treating him as her mother, or her father, or
her brother, and so on. Barnes at first rejected much of this but eventually
came to share many, though not all, of Berke's interpretations, and this ac-
ceptance seems to have been an integral part of her recovery.
What should we make of this? The first thing to say is that there is nothing
especially cybernetic about Berke's interpretive interventions into Barnes's
life. They take us back instead to the field of representation rather than per-
formance; they belong to the other ontology, that of knowable systems. But
we can also note that the epistemological aspects of the interaction—Berke's
interpretations of Barnes's performances—were parasitic upon their perfor-
mative engagement. They did not flow from a priori understandings that de-
termined those interactions from beginning to end: “It became obvious that
it wasn't words that mattered so much as deeds.” I have also emphasized that
this performative engagement had an experimental quality; Berke had to
find
out
how to relate to Barnes, and his psychotherapeutic interpretations grew
out of that relation as reflections upon its emerging substance. And, further,
the interpretations were themselves threaded though a performative feedback
loop running between Berke and Barnes, and the value of specific interpreta-
tions depended upon their contributions to Mary's behavior: “If my acts and/
or interpretations had been sufficient, such agonies could have been averted.”
This aspect of the Barnes-Berke interaction thus again stages for us a per-
formative epistemology, in which articulated knowledge functions as
part of
performance—as arising from performance and returning to it—rather than
as an externality that structures performance from without.
A R C H WAY
When we turn to the Archway communities that succeeded Kingsley Hall, we
find a similar pattern, though at Archway the interpretive aspect of therapy
receded still further.
41
Burns (2002, 23) mentions that during his time in
