Sometimes, a theory fails to gain the attention it deserves because
it is too simple, too clear, too practical. Snygg and Combs'
theory
is a good example. Although it has had a quiet impact on a number
of humanists, it didn't have the "pizzazz" other theories
did.
Although they say very similar things, Carl Rogers' theory sounds more
radical, George Kelly's more scientific, and European phenomenology
more
philosophical. But Snygg and Combs' theory is well worth a look.

The phenomenal field

First, "all behavior, without exception, is completely determined by
and pertinent to the phenomenal field of the behaving
organism."
The phenomenal field is our subjective reality, the world we are aware
of, including physical objects and people, and our behaviors,
thoughts,
images, fantasies, feelings, and ideas like justice, freedom, equality,
and so on. Snygg and Combs emphasize, above all else, that it is
this phenomenal field that is the true subject-matter for psychology.

And so, if we wish to understand and predict people's behavior, we
need
to get at their phenomenal field. Since we can't observe it
directly,
we need to infer it from the things we can observe. We can record
behavior, give various tests, talk to the person, and so on -- Snygg
and
Combs are open to a variety of methods. If we have a variety
of observers as well, we will eventually come to understand the
person's
phenomenal field.

And then you are set to understand and predict the person's
behavior,
since, as the quote above says, all their behavior will follow as a
reasonable,
meaningful, purposeful response to the person's phenomenal field.

One motive

Which brings us to Snygg and Combs' understanding of
motivation:
"The basic need of everyone is to preserve and enhance the phenomenal
self, and the characteristics of all parts of the field are
governed
by this need." The phenomenal self is the person's own view of
him-
or herself. This view is developed over a lifetime, and is based
on the person's physical characteristics (as he or she sees them),
cultural
upbringing (as he or she experiences it), and other, more personal,
experiences.

Note that it is the phenomenal self we try to maintain
and
enhance. This is more than mere physical survival or the
satisfaction
of basic needs. The body and its needs are a likely part of the
self,
but not an inevitable one. A teenager who attempts suicide, a
soldier
seeking martyrdom, or a prisoner on a hunger strike are not serving
their
bodies well. But they are maintaining, perhaps even
enhancing,
their own images of who they are. Their physical existences no
longer
hold the same meanings to them as they might to us.

And note that we are talking not only about maintaining, but
about
enhancing the self. We don't just want to be what we are. We often want to
be more. Snygg
and
Combs' basic motivational principle contains within it Alfred Adler's
ideas
about compensation of inferiority and striving for superiority, Abraham
Maslow's self-actualization, and all sorts of related concepts.

We become "more," according to Snygg and Combs, by means of differentiation,
a process that involves pulling a figure out of a background.
Learning
is not a matter of connecting a stimulus and a response or one stimulus
with another or even one response with another. Learning is a
matter
of improving the quality of one's phenomenal field by extracting some
detail
from the confusion, because that detail is important, is meaningful, to
the person.

This is, of course, the same thing as George Kelly's idea of
constructs:
As a child, the color of someone's skin may be irrelevant; later,
others
show the child that color is important. Color comes out of the
background;
black is differentiated from white; the contrast is learned.
Why?
Not, in this case, because the child has been shown a connection
between color and the quality of someone's character, but because a
child
cannot afford to ignore the differentiations his or her
"significant
others" make.

The example shows how nicely the theory applies to both
developmental
and social psychological issues. As children and as adults, alone
or in the presence of others, we maintain and enhance our sense of who
we are by refining and re-refining the differentiations we make.

Applied psychology

Snygg and Combs address clinical concerns by adding the concept of threat.
Threat is "the awareness of menace to the phenomenal self".
Ideally,
the threat is met with appropriate actions and new differentiations
that
enhance the person's ability to deal with similar threats in the
future.

If the person doesn't have the organization to deal with the threat
in this way, he or she may resort to stop-gap, sand-bag measures that,
while they may remove the threat for the moment, don't actually serve
the
self in the long-run. Defenses, neurotic and psychotic symptoms,
and even criminal behavior is explained in this way.

Therapy, then, becomes a matter of freeing clients from the dead-end
perceptions and behaviors and cognitions and emotions they have set up
to protect themselves from threat. "Therapy is the provision of a
facilitating situation wherein the normal drive of the organism for
maintenance
or enhancement of organization is freed to operate." And,
consistent
with Snygg and Combs' flexible and pragmatic approach, this can be done
by active intervention by a therapist or by enabling the client to
discover
his or her own differentiations, depending on the individual's needs.

Snygg and Combs also pay a lot of attention to education, and meaning
is their favorite term here. Learning occurs when the
differentiations
involved have direct relevance to the individual's needs, that is, when
learning is meaningful to
that individual.

As long as teachers insist on forcing material that, from the
students'
perspective, has no relevance to them or their lives, education will be
a arduous process. It is curious that a boy who can't remember
the
times tables can remember baseball statistics back to the stone age, or
a girl who can't write a coherent paragraph can tell
stories
that would make Chaucer proud. If calculus or Shakespeare or any
number of subjects we feel children should learn seem to be so
difficult
for them, it is not because the children are dumb. It is because
they don't see any reason for learning them. Teachers must get to
know their students, because the motivation to learn is "inside" them,
in their phenomenal fields and phenomenal selves.

Readings

To learn more about their theory, I suggest you read Snygg and
Combs'
Individual
Behavior. Ten years later, Combs released a new
edition,
called Individual Behavior: A Perceptual Approach to
Behavior, which replaced "phenomenological" with
"perceptual,"
presumably in an effort to make the approach more acceptable to a
predominantly
behaviorist audience. Combs, with Donald Avila and William
Purkey,
also wrote Helping Relationships, which
applies
the theory to education, social work, therapy, and so on.