16. The Idea behind the Contact Rebus

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The Chinese logo of Motivational Work illustrates the similarity between a Chinese sign and a defense. They are both puzzles. When using the contact rebus, it is essential to have this insight. It is a guide and enables an understanding of the resistance.

View on Defense and Resistance

The contact rebus serves as a guide on handling the defense and enables an understanding of the client’s resistance, creating a positive attitude towards the client. In essence, it is a new concept in psychology.

The latter is, from an emotional perspective, crucial in Motivational Work. The client’s defensiveness is the most challenging thing for the motivational worker to manage. His unreceptiveness and emotional distance convey a powerful negative confirmation of the motivational worker’s efforts. Therefore, it is critical to consider how the defense and resistance of the latter view, as it is also his primary working material (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory. page 94 – 159).

The Contact Rebus

The fundamental tenet of the theory that will now be expounded upon is that contact rebus is the prime purpose of all forms of defense, and resistance is an indirect means of making contact. Henceforth, such an indirect communication strategy will be termed a “contact rebus,” a puzzle comprising pictures, words, and letters that can be decoded into a particular word or phrase.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines rebus thus:

[French Rébus – Latin rebus, plural of res thing, in the phrase de rebus quæ geruntur ‘concerning things that are taking place, a title given by the guild of lawyers’ clerks of Picardy to satirical pieces containing riddles in picture form.] An enigmatical representation of a name, word, or phrase by figures, pictures, arrangement of letters, etc., suggests the syllables it is made up of.

A Chinese Example

A rebus is a puzzle with a concealed message. Let us take Chinese characters as an example. Research has shown that these characters were originally concrete pictograms that have undergone a process of stylization. The pictogram is a rebus, and its subsequent stylization is a further transmutation. For instance, the symbol for the verb cross was originally a picture of a man with his legs crossed – itself a pictogrammatic puzzle, the meaning of which is not immediately apparent, although easily guessed. The character looks like this:

chinese sign 111

chinese sign 222

The transformation of the original pictogram makes the “puzzle” harder to solve. The puzzle has increased in complexity, rendering the meaning of its hidden message almost impenetrable to the uninitiated. It has also been compounded by the character’s taking on a more figurative sense of contact, exchange, or communication. This character has since been stylized to appear thus:

The picture puzzles can be further compounded by juxtaposing two independent characters to form a third, which now has two layers of coding, namely the stylization and the combination. An example is a character for good/love, a fusion of the characters for woman and child.

By borrowing a character for another word with a different meaning but the same pronunciation, Chinese can add a third degree of transformation; a derivative sign to specify the meaning of a “homonymic” character attaches a fourth. The change can also involve appending a pronunciation signifier to distinguish between possible meanings.

The Contact Rebus Enables an Understanding

As complex rebuses that incrementally transform the original message, Chinese characters are analogous to the structures of defense and resistance. Concealed within them and heavily transmuted is an indirect attempt to make contact. Just like a rebus, defense embodies a puzzle that, if solved, can reveal the client’s outstretched hand and open a channel to reach him.

The theory of the contact rebus helps the motivational worker understand the client’s dissociation and destructiveness, fires his commitment stamina, and lets him see different opportunities in the motivational situation. It is also a general and versatile theory that is not restricted to use with the latently motivated but also with manifestly motivated persons. One central component of the approach deals with how people form mutual relationships.

The Contact Rebus as a Guide

At the same time, it is also a critical guide to dealing with the latently motivated client’s apparently formidable defenses. When laying siege to these sturdy walls, the motivational worker is confronted with aspects of human behavior in a concentrated, maximized form. Therefore, his approach can also be applied in other contexts with more motivated clients since everyone fundamentally has the same functional behavior.

The theory affects how he feels when dealing face-to-face with his client. An essential part of how the motivational worker responds emotionally and deals with the client’s defense is his attitude towards his client’s dismissive behavior, determining his optimism towards his client.

In contrast, the meaning of the client’s defense is the crucial shaper of the motivational worker’s attitude, which protects him against burnout and increases his commitment stamina accordingly. His view of his client’s defense also sets the framework for his chosen methodology.

Examples of contact rebuses

So far, the description of the contact rebus has been general. To fully comprehend the concept’s functions as a guide and enable understanding, you can go to several blogs that give concrete examples of contact rebuses and how to meet them.

You have the manifestly motivated person’s individual contact rebuses, for example, in love affairs,

the latently motivated client’s destructive behavior,

you have the group contact rebus,

the couple contact rebus,

the family contact rebus,

and the organizational contact rebus

Contact Me: per@revstedt.com

30 Comments

  22. […] The contact rebus theory is not only useful therapeutically; it is a universally applicable concept of human behavior that lends itself to other contexts of human interaction (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 349 – 388). To illustrate the general theory of the contact rebus, we can start by describing how manifestly motivated people build relationships with one another. An obvious candidate for such a relational scenario is that between lovers, the active mechanisms behind the process of bonding are clear for all to see. In this blog, we will describe how bonding occurs through withdrawal. […]

  23. […] The contact rebus theory is not only useful therapeutically; it is a universally applicable concept of human behavior that lends itself to other contexts of human interaction (Motivational Work, part 1: Values and Theory, page 349 – 388).To illustrate the general theory of the contact rebus, we can start by describing how manifestly motivated people build relationships with one another. An obvious candidate for such a relational scenario is that between lovers, the active mechanisms behind the process of bonding are clear for all to see. In this blog, we will focus on lovers bonding via compliance. […]

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