Ah yeah probably, I only know ICF from the description in this post. So when I said ICF, I basically meant “the technique described here”.
ICF is build the opposite way:
assume layered agency (which is basically “put different layers of organization into the focus of intentional stance”)
ask: what sort of phenomenology would this lead to? how to interact with it?
I see, that’s a definite difference then. I read the article’s claim that ICF tries to “generalise from a class of therapy schools and introspection techniques working with parts of the mind” as meaning that the model takes existing therapy schools as its starting point to derive its assumptions from them and their empirical observations, as opposed to deriving things from layered agency in a more first-principles manner.
I think it would be also fair to say that experienced IFS practitioners doing the real thing unlearn part of what’s in the books. And sometimes end up in similar place to e.g. experienced IDC practitioners who also end up not doing the protocol described in LW posts. From this perspective, it makes sense to have a label for the core of the approaches which works, distinct from IFS label.
I guess that makes sense—but then is ICF sufficiently general for that either? E.g. if we’re talking about IFS ideas that one might want to unlearn, I think that sometimes it’s useful to abandon the assumption of the parts being discrete units, and at least this article made it sound like ICF would still assume that. But maybe I’d need to know more about the general framework to know what assumptions it makes, in order to have this discussion.
Ah yeah probably, I only know ICF from the description in this post. So when I said ICF, I basically meant “the technique described here”.
I see, that’s a definite difference then. I read the article’s claim that ICF tries to “generalise from a class of therapy schools and introspection techniques working with parts of the mind” as meaning that the model takes existing therapy schools as its starting point to derive its assumptions from them and their empirical observations, as opposed to deriving things from layered agency in a more first-principles manner.
I guess that makes sense—but then is ICF sufficiently general for that either? E.g. if we’re talking about IFS ideas that one might want to unlearn, I think that sometimes it’s useful to abandon the assumption of the parts being discrete units, and at least this article made it sound like ICF would still assume that. But maybe I’d need to know more about the general framework to know what assumptions it makes, in order to have this discussion.