WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE OBJECTION CAN’T GET IN?

I read your piece carefully, Kim, and I want to respond because I think you are making some worthwhile arguments about context, language, group behaviour and the dangers of moral certainty. I also think your defence of Steven Forrest contains some of the same closed-loop thinking you are criticizing in his detractors.

A little context about me, since you have no reason to know who I am. I have been an astrologer professionally for more than thirty years and a Gestalt practitioner since 1998. I have also been an enormous admirer of Steven’s work. His books delighted me. His thinking has influenced mine. I did not come into this looking for an opportunity to knock Steven Forrest off a pedestal. Quite the contrary.

I have, however, had a couple of direct exchanges with him recently that changed my perception of him. They were tiny matters compared with this controversy, which is partly why they became interesting to me afterward.

In one, I questioned his treatment of Venus as involving rejection. From a Gestalt perspective, I distinguished orientation from rejection: when something becomes figure, and I orient toward it, everything else does not thereby become psychologically rejected. Rejection is another event, involving contact and an organized “no.” Steven disagreed. Fair enough. What troubled me was what happened next. My disagreement was progressively treated as evidence that I had not understood him. I was told the point I was making was already contained in his argument, then encouraged to reread his essay. Eventually we were apparently “going around in circles” and could agree to disagree.

I had another exchange with him about the Sabian Symbols. My own work has involved going back to Elsie Wheeler’s original images and examining what Marc Edmund Jones and, later, Dane Rudhyar did to them. Again, what struck me was not that Steven disagreed with me. I enjoy disagreement. It was how little genuine curiosity seemed to be available once I challenged an established interpretation.

Those encounters left me with a question about Steven before the present controversy ever entered my field: what happens when another person’s perception genuinely challenges his own?

That is why I don’t think the central question here is whether Steven is a racist. I don’t find that formulation particularly useful. Nor do I think saying a prohibited word magically tells us everything we need to know about a human being. On those points, you and I may have more common ground than you expect.

Where we part company is what happens after that.

You begin your essay by describing Steven’s critics as an “anti-intellectual, 100% hysterical mob.” You distinguish them from the “serious, intellectual-minded people” for whom your publication is intended. Later they become manifestations of “cultish groupthink,” people trapped at Green, and eventually people “too imprisoned in their own categories of thought to be able to reason with anyway.”

That troubles me immediately. You have created an epistemological trap. If I agree with you, I am capable of nuanced, contextual thought. If I disagree, my disagreement can itself be explained by the developmental limitations of my consciousness.

Where in that construction can I understand your argument perfectly well, understand Steven’s context perfectly well, and still disagree with you?

Because that’s where I am.

I agree completely that context matters. Steven was not calling Ricky Williams the N-word. He was describing an earlier anti-racist performance in which he had used the word while embodying a racist character. Ricky clearly understood the conversation, laughed, participated willingly and subsequently defended Steven. Those facts matter enormously. Anyone pretending otherwise is giving an incomplete account.

But then Steven did something else. After successfully referring to it as “the N-word,” he turned to Ricky, remarked that Ricky must be familiar with it from having heard it in his life, and actually said it.

That interests me.

Not because I believe certain phonemes possess supernatural evil, but because he didn’t need to do it.

Why did he?

That seems to me a much more fruitful shadow question than whether contemporary culture has become too sensitive.

You repeatedly offer Ricky’s response as important evidence. It is important evidence. Ricky wasn’t apparently hurt by it. Ricky’s experience belongs to Ricky and deserves to be taken seriously.

But surely the corollary of your argument that Black people shouldn’t be treated as a homogeneous category is that Ricky cannot settle the matter for other Black people either.

Once a private conversation becomes a public podcast, Ricky is no longer the only person in the field. Other people hear it. Their experience doesn’t trump his, but neither does his erase theirs. Treating Ricky as authoritative because he wasn’t offended risks doing exactly what you accuse Steven’s critics of doing: allowing one preferred racial perspective to stand for a heterogeneous population.

I have a similar problem with your treatment of harm. You write that there is “nothing innately harmful or hurtful in using a certain word” and that the degree of hurt somebody experiences ultimately results from their own reaction.

As a Gestalt practitioner, I can’t follow you there.

Human experience is relational. Meaning emerges in a field. Power exists in a field. History enters the field with us. If I humiliate somebody publicly, I can’t locate the entire event inside their emotional response and tell them that ultimately their hurt belongs to them. Of course adults bear responsibility for what they do with their feelings. That doesn’t absolve me of responsibility for my participation in creating the situation.

More curiously, your own argument about language has already established this. You explain very well that language isn’t neutral, that words participate in discourses and can create social realities and power relations.

And then, when you arrive at the N-word, it becomes “certain phonetic sounds.”

You can’t really have both.

If language participates in constructing social reality, then this word does too. We can argue endlessly about appropriate contexts for speaking it, but reducing it to phonetics precisely when its accumulated meaning becomes inconvenient seems to me an abandonment of your own premise.

I also think you’re arguing against a stronger claim than is necessary. You spend considerable time attacking the idea that a particular word “must never, ever be uttered” under any conceivable circumstances.

I don’t need that proposition at all.

There are obvious contexts in which difficult words are quoted, studied, documented and discussed. My question is narrower: was Steven’s particular use of it here wise, necessary or revealing?

Those questions remain even after every bit of context has been restored.

And context actually makes another part of the conversation more troubling to me, rather than less.

Steven talks about possibly being descended from Nathan Bedford Forrest. He acknowledges that much about Forrest is indefensible, but then moves immediately to “in his defence” and offers an account of the early KKK as originally intended to protect Southern widows, becoming racialized afterward partly for what he describes as “realistic reasons.”

In a conversation about shadow, I find that extraordinary.

An ancestral story involving one of the ugliest chapters in American racial history enters the room, and the spontaneous movement is partly toward defending and contextualizing the ancestor.

That’s where I want to get curious.

What loyalty might be operating there? What inherited story? What does Steven need Nathan Bedford Forrest to have been? What happens inside Steven when that possible ancestral connection is confronted?

Those aren’t accusations. Those are shadow-work questions.

And that brings me to what I find most fascinating about the entire affair.

Earlier in the same conversation, Steven gives some excellent descriptions of shadow work. He says that someone who lives deeply with us may know more about our shadow than we do. He talks about replaying an argument afterward, watching the film of our own behaviour and asking, “Where did that come from?” He stresses humility and admits that sometimes we simply don’t know whether we’re encountering our shadow or another person’s objection to our behaviour. He tells astrologers that if they aren’t doing their own personal work, they can become dangerous counsellors.

I agree with him.

But then surely the uproar itself becomes material.

People are reflecting something back to Steven that he doesn’t recognize in himself.

What an extraordinary opportunity for shadow work.

Instead, his subsequent apology begins by distinguishing “The Accusation” from “The Reality.” He asks us to “consider the context.” He attributes his mistake partly to “present sensitivities and norms.” He explains what he intended.

Those explanations may all contain truth.

But where is: What are these people seeing in me that I cannot see?

That is the question I keep waiting for.

And, Kim, there is a place in your essay where I think you inadvertently provide a wonderful opportunity to ask the same question of yourself.

You tell us about your own experience of being ostracized and “cancelled” by progressive people, how traumatic it was, how you performed the required apologies and promised to educate yourself, and how the experience affected you for a year. Then you say, with admirable candour, “This is why I feel so strongly about this whole affair.”

I believe you.

But I draw a different conclusion from that disclosure.

If I were sitting with you as a Gestalt practitioner, that’s precisely where my ears would prick up.

What happens when you look at Steven and see a man being ostracized by a progressive community? How much of Steven are you seeing, and how much of your own experience suddenly becomes figure?

That doesn’t invalidate your argument. It doesn’t mean you’re projecting and therefore wrong. We all bring ourselves into perception. But surely an integral approach should make your personal identification with Steven something to investigate, rather than additional evidence that your interpretation is correct.

You say you are certain Steven is the person who has “primarily been wronged.”

I don’t know how your preceding disclosure can make you more certain.

It makes me want to become less certain.

And that is where your final section loses me most completely. People distancing themselves from Steven are told they’re showing no integrity, no spine, no morality. They’re caving. They’re undermining free speech. They’re making shadow work impossible. They’re helping Donald Trump. Finally, they’re told to “get out of the cult” and reclaim their sanity and dignity.

That doesn’t sound very integral to me.

It sounds remarkably binary.

There are certainly people behaving badly toward Steven. There will be opportunists, pile-ons, people who haven’t listened to the original conversation, people enjoying the righteousness of the crowd and people making extravagant claims unsupported by the evidence. Human beings do all of that.

But there are also people who have heard the conversation, understood the context, admired Steven’s work and nevertheless found something disturbing in it.

I’m one of them.

And my concern grew after reading the full transcript, not before.

My own small encounters with Steven are part of why. When I challenged something he had written about Venus, I watched a disagreement gradually become evidence that I hadn’t sufficiently understood him. When I continued trying to distinguish my position from his, I was encouraged to reread the article. Eventually we were “going around in circles.”

Now I see a much larger controversy in which people are telling Steven that they see something he doesn’t see, and once again the response is substantially: you aren’t understanding the context.

That doesn’t prove anything terrible about Steven Forrest.

But for a man whose work explicitly teaches that other people can sometimes see our shadow better than we can, I think it’s worth noticing.

And there’s another possibility here that your developmental framework doesn’t seem to leave much room for: somebody can disagree with Steven without wanting him destroyed.

I don’t want him banished from astrology. I don’t want his books burned. I don’t want people forbidden to study his work. I don’t think one ugly or foolish utterance nullifies decades of intelligent thought. I don’t need Steven Forrest transformed into a villain in order to take seriously the people who were disturbed by him.

I would actually prefer something much more demanding of him.

I’d like him to become curious.

I’d like the man who tells other people to replay the film to replay the film.

I’d like him to resist explaining himself long enough to discover whether there is information in the response he’s receiving.

And I would ask the same thing of his defenders.

Because to me, shadow work isn’t made impossible when somebody tells us we’ve hurt or disturbed them. That’s where it gets interesting.

The difficulty is staying in contact long enough to find out whether they can show us something about ourselves that we would much rather explain away.