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REVISITING FROMM’S THE SANE SOCIETY AT
THE PRESENT TIME:
SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR MENTAL HEALTH AND MENTAL HEALTH
EDUCATION WHEN SEEN WITH A PCP EYE
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Bill
Warren
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University
of Newcastle, Australia |
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Abstract
This
paper
discusses the notion of mental
health
from the perspective of the social context in which such a notion has
to exist,
and has to be fostered or otherwise, by that key social activity in a
democracy
that is education. In particular, it considers this topic by way of
reviewing a
thoroughgoing analysis of ‘society and sanity’ presented over a half
century
ago by Erich Fromm in his The Sane
Society. The
links to and an implications for a PCP understanding of mental
health in the light of the ideas of Fromm and some later thinkers are
discussed.
Keywords: Erich Fromm, mental health, education, democracy,
PCP
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INTRODUCTION
Erich
Fromm, developing his ideas out of the initiatives of the renowned
Frankfurt
School, sought to combine the insights of two theorists whose ideas at
first
sight – and perhaps even on closer inspection – seem diametrically
opposed to one
another: that is, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Fromm’s The
Sane Society (1956/1963) was a continuation of ideas
expressed
in his two earlier works, The Fear of
Freedom (1942/1984) and Man for
Himself (1947). These last two works discussed how and why
people so easily
gave up the freedom that had been so hard won against both direct
oppression,
as exemplified in a resurgence of totalitarian ideologies in the 1920s,
and the
persistence of superstitions imposed since the conversion of the
western world
to a particular view of Christianity around 500 CE. That victory over
superstition came in that period known now as the Enlightenment, around
1700 CE
– a victory for the idea of reason,
an
idea which continues to the present day to be undermined and its fruits
continuing to require vigilant protection against forces that would
return us
to dogma, a closure of enquiry, and totalitarianism.
In The Sane Society, Fromm shifts his
focus from the individual to
consider
how a particular form of social
organisation provides a system-level escape from freedom,
highlighting the
experience through the concept of alienation.
Together, these three works focus the interaction between psychological
and
social factors of life, and they arguably have an interest to Personal
Construct
Psychology (PCP). This paper outlines Fromm’s argument with particular
reference to the third work above (1956/1963), and considers its
resonance with
an understanding of ‘mental health’ as such notion is developed within
PCP. In
turn, the idea of mental health in relation to education is considered;
this
relation is suggested to take on quite a qualitatively different
significance
than might be commonly thought, with some possibly radical challenges
for PCP
adherents.
FROMM’S
THESIS
Fromm
(1956/1963) discusses normative humanism,
which he contrasts with
sociological
relativism, in relation to the notion of mental health-illness as it might be applied to a society.
In essence, he suggests that in order to be able to speak of a ‘sane
society’
we must be able to speak of an ‘insane society’. In turn, this requires
“universal criteria for mental health which are valid for the human
race as
such, and according to which the state of health of each society can be
judged”
(p. 12). His argument is that members of our species share basic
psychic
qualities and when the employment of these in different situations and
circumstances is examined in a way which highlights variation
and difference,
our thinking about human nature ‘writ large’, is distracted. That is,
we
confuse a particular manifestation of it in a particular context, with
the universality
and commonality that is assumed by the very idea of a human
nature. Put another way, as he does in his
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
(1973), we should not mistake a particular behaviour (for example, our
patently
obvious capacity for violence) as telling us something of the species characteristics when it may be,
rather, the opposite of such a characteristic that is evidenced, and
what we
see merely the outcome of a deformation of what we ‘really are’. Thus,
for him,
violence and aggressiveness against one’s own species is learned,
not ‘natural’ or ‘innate’. This view is not, of course,
unique to Fromm and various social theorists, particularly those of the
anarchist
tradition, have argued this same point without the help of Marx or
Freud,
notably Kropotkin (1902).
Fromm’s
(1964) normative humanism assumes,
in
opposition to relativism, that “there are right and wrong, satisfactory
and
unsatisfactory solutions to the problem of human existence” (p. 14). He
reminds
us that ‘consensual validation’ is no guarantee of the truth or
validity of a
particular way of understanding the world, and that we must look rather
for the
laws inherent in human nature and the goals of the unfolding of that
human
nature. Human beings, Fromm argues, not only transform the world but
also
themselves: “[They are their] own creation, as it were” (p. 13).
However, just
as the natural world can only be transformed according to its nature,
so, too,
human beings can only modify themselves according to their nature. His
perspective is generally Marxist, perhaps more so Hegelian, and rests
on the
belief that just as certainly as we transform our environments, and
they
transform us, so equally certainly, both us and our environments are,
we might
say, not infinitely malleable.
Whilst,
amongst other things, malleable we are, there are, that is, inherent
limitations to the extent or degree of our malleability. Moreover, as
Freire
(1970b) was later to say from a different perspective, while people’s
consciousness was indeed conditioned by social circumstances, they could recognise that
it was so
conditioned.
Fromm
provides some ‘markers’ of the sanity, or otherwise, of society,
prefacing his
discussion with the acknowledgement that we, in the West at least, have
greater
material wealth than any other society in human history. Yet, and he is
writing
in 1956, we still have wars which kill millions of people, as well as
an
intense suspicion of other cultures (characterised once as a ‘cold
war’). We
have an economic system which pays farmers to not grow crops in order
to
‘stabilise the market’ in their zone of economic activity while
millions starve
in another, an economic system that is significantly dependent on the
production of weapons of war; the so-called ‘military-industrial
complex’. We
have a ninety percent (90%) literacy rate but the media in relation to
which we
exercise our literacy skills “fills the minds of men with the cheapest
trash,
lacking in any sense of reality, with sadistic phantasies which a
halfway
cultured person would be embarrassed to entertain” (p. 5). We have
reduced the
average number of working hours from a century previous, but we do not
know how
to use the free time made available to us. Or, as contemporary critics
of the
dominance of advanced technology such as Marcuse (1964) would say, our
leisure
time itself has been invaded by the mindless media offerings of the
type just
noted by Fromm. Further, Fromm cites some figures, albeit figures he
acknowledges to be ‘rough’, concerning the then increasing number of
admissions
to psychiatric hospitals. Related to his statistic here is another;
that some
eighteen percent (18%) of ‘rejects’ from conscription in the USA (for
WWII)
were for reasons of mental illness, this suggested to be saying
something about
the society that produces those draftees. He also identifies some
comparative
data that he feels provides a further estimation of the health of
society; that
is, statistics on suicide, homicide, and alcoholism.
Fromm’s
figures show the then highest rates of suicide, homicide, and
alcoholism in the
Scandinavian countries, and in the United States. His general
conclusion,
though, having noted the correlation between suicide, alcoholism, and
homicide
in these last countries, is that the most democratic, peaceful and
prosperous
countries in Europe, and the most prosperous in the world (the USA),
show the
most severe symptoms of mental disturbance as indicated by these three
behaviours.
Fromm’s
substantive thesis is that mental health is shown not
in the fact that
people generally have adjusted to a particular social order (a “folie a millions” he calls this), but by
the extent to which a particular social order corresponds or does not
correspond
to the needs of human beings. That is, not their felt needs, but their
objectively ascertained needs, and he contrasts these needs with their
opposites. Thus, he discusses relatedness versus
narcissism; transcendence-creativeness versus
destructiveness; rootedness-brotherliness versus incest; sense of
identity-individuality versus herd
conformity; reason versus
irrationality. (As an aside, it is useful to say that these constructs
are not
merely arbitrarily ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when in operation in our social
life, but
can be shown to lead to a more harmonious social life and to more
optimal
psychological functioning in individuals. It is difficult to imagine
how far blind conformity or irrationality, for example, would take us
in terms of increasing
our understanding of the world and of ourselves. Moreover, and at the
risk of
opening a much bigger debate drawn from the philosophy of science, it
is
arguable that they contribute to a progressive, rather than a
degenerating
research program (or programme;
Lakatos,
1970) in regard to our understanding of at least our psychological and
social
life.)
In essence,
Fromm describes a condition of individuals’ chararacterised by a defect
of
spontaneity and individuality the origins of which are in their
cultural circumstances,
which culture, paradoxically, “provides patterns which enable them to
live with
a defect without becoming ill” (Fromm, 191956/1963, p. 16). He suggests
that
Spinoza, in his Ethics (1677/1967),
Chapter IV, Proposition 44, best formulated the problem of “the
socially
patterned defect”, and Fromm brings Spinoza’s description up to date:
"Today we come across a person who acts and
feels like an automaton; who never experiences anything which is really
his;
who experiences himself entirely as the person he thinks he is supposed
to be;
whose artificial smile has replaced genuine laughter; whose meaningless
chatter
has replaced communicative speech; whose dull despair has taken the
place of
genuine pain." (p.
16)
Spinoza was
a philosopher who more than any other argued how the classic separation
of
‘thinking’, feeling, and ‘willing’ was mistaken, and this error is not
repeated
in PCP and was specifically rejected by Kelly (1955/1991). Rather, as
Warren (1990,
1998) attempted to show, Kelly did not accept the tripartite
distinction
between ‘reason’, ‘emotion’ and ‘volition’ and his views are highly
consistent
with Spinoza’s account of mind. Thus, in the present discussion, any
reference
to ‘reasoning’ (thinking) trumping ‘feeling’ (emotion) is a
misunderstanding;
it is always a matter of balance.
BEYOND FROMM
Fromm was
an early writer to raise the question of the
sanity of our social arrangements, shortly following a period in which
Europe,
and then most of the rest of the West had ‘gone mad’. Rereading Fromm
at this
distance from the times he was describing, one is impressed by just how
equally
apt is his analysis to our present times. This is daily evident from
even a
passing attention to the popular media, but equally in the more sober,
formal
analyses that appear in scholarly journals and monographs. We could
cite many
such analyses, most painting but more detail into the broader canvas on
which
Fromm had sketched his outline, but a few will suffice. Chomsky (1989,
2003),
for example, has been a consistent critic of the demise of real
democracy in
North America and in its exercise of its foreign policy, challenging
“the
United States to apply to its own actions the moral standards it
demands of
others” (Chomsky, 2003, p. 142). Hertz (2002) describes the
consequences of the
silent conversion of the world to a ‘global business civilisation’
which
effectively corrupts and diminishes democracy (echoing Chomsky, 1989).
Saul (2001)
stresses how only by reclaiming a balance, an ‘equilibrium’ between the
common
qualities that all peoples share, can we keep the excesses of any one
of these
qualities in check and use them as positive forces in individual and
group
life. Given that both Saul and Fromm share the humanist perspective,
Saul’s
list of qualities is similar to Fromm’s. Saul’s six qualities, which he
gives
in alphabetical order so as not to privilege any particular one, are:
Common
Sense, Ethics, Imagination, Intuition, Memory, and Reason. Thus, he
offers some
hope for a resurgence of our humanity, and he has gone on to enlarge
that hope
(Saul, 2005). In this last work his argument is that the phenomenon
that is
‘globalisation’ might have within it the seeds of its own destruction,
just as
the taken for granted non-resistant malleability of the human being
might be a
significant oversight to assume. These analyses were made before the so
called
‘global financial crisis’ and the havoc generated by that crisis need
not be
catalogued, nor the particular economic efforts to fix it revisited in
order to
strengthen the point here. That said, and given our focus here is on
mental
health, we might note James (1988, 2007) who analyses well the negative
psychological
consequences of our ‘capture’ by consumerist demands, and Wilkinson and
Pickett’s (2009) notion of a virus that leads one to adopt values and
pursue
goals that give us ‘affluenza’ – a mental condition that is tantamount
to
insanity – which refers to an addiction to a work-ethic that generates
the
resources that allow us to achieve more and more growth in our/our
social
group’s material wealth, to a point where ‘keeping up with the Joneses’
becomes
an end in itself and despite the patent waste of resources – material
and
personal – and the futility of such a life.
It can be
argued that these last writers chart particular dimensions of a more
general
phenomenon that is the growth of society governed by advanced
technology. While
the focus in that work is mainly ‘the west’, the phenomenon is no less
a
concern to ‘the east’ and, indeed, to ‘the world’, as non-western
countries
aspire to ‘western ways’ and globalisation creates ‘one world’; ‘the
east’,
however, is not directly germane here. Warren (2002) considered some
ideas that
have been developed within that field that is Philosophy of
Technology, there in regard to
PCP as an ‘applied
psychology’. The Philosophy of
Technology is a broad field encompassing various different
perspectives. Feenberg
(1991) differentiated three theories of technology: the instrumental,
the substantive, and the critical.
The first regards technology as simply the expression of
humankind’s capacity to use the environment and as an activity that is
under
the control of the common ‘brakes’ on social forces that are composed
of
politics and culture. The second considers, rather, that technology has
become
an autonomous force that is ‘self-augmenting’ and essentially beyond
the
capacity of human beings – who are mere ‘cogs in its wheels’ – to
influence. The
third, drawing on the work of the Frankfurt School, is both less
sanguine that
the impacts of technology are benign, and less resigned to the
inescapable
negative outcomes. Critical theory
of
technology requires that we construe the situation as one in which the
real
struggle is about the control of technology and the democratisation
of it. Thus, there is, again, some hope, and Feenberg (1991) sees this
lying
within the possibilities technology itself makes available. This might
be seen,
for example, in the possibilities for organising and the dissemination
of
information and ideas ‘outside’ the parameters set by the dominant
hegemony.
These ideas
noted, it must be accepted that any attempt to assess the general
quality of
social life is obviously fraught with difficulties; a major one is the
operation of ideology, and of the analyst’s own particular ideology.
What one
person construes in positive terms of being financially secure and
‘comfortably
off’, another construes as one having put selfishness ahead of
principle in
that others must be poor to allow that selfishness. What one sees as a
‘terrorist’
another sees as a ‘freedom fighter’, and the so-called ‘evil ones’
perceive
those who so label them as such, to be themselves the doers of greater
evil. Nonetheless
the answers to the question of which constructions are ‘more true’ – or
are
more progressive and more conducive to co-operation and peace, love,
and
enquiry, and also, from a different perspective as previously noted,
contribute
to a progressive as differentiated
from degenerating research program
– are
not beyond human reason (‘reason’ as Spinoza conceives it to be, that
is as a
composite of thinking, feeling, willing).
Fromm,
then, is an interesting early thinker who offers some challenges for
the idea
of mental health, linking it to the realm of ‘the social’, writ large
and writ
deep. It predates and is prescient for more embracing critiques of our
contemporary social life, as given in a wide ranging literature in Philosophy
of Technology, and in more specifically focused analyses
exemplified in
such thinkers as Chomsky, Hertz, and Saul, as well as James and
Wilkinson and
Pickett, to note but a few.
MENTAL
HEALTH
In the
history of reflection on the idea of mental
health – and mental illness which,
perhaps unfortunately, becomes entangled with the idea of health – two general perspectives can be
discerned. The first
stresses how one operates cognitively, focussing such matters as the
effective
use of one’s intelligence; mental health as ‘rational autonomy’ is an
aspect of
this perspective (Edwards, 1981, 1983; Nettler, 1983). There may also
be a
belief in certain fixed moral standards and principles (the work ethic,
self-discipline, emulation of role-model members of the society), and a
view of
the overall purpose of one’s life, perhaps of life in general (likely
drawn
from the dominant religion). A healthy body, or at least a non-diseased
or
damaged brain, might also have been important in some quarters. The
second
perspective gives weight to how one approaches life and the world,
stressing
interpersonal communication and emotional sensitivity, self-confidence,
self-realisation, the ability to present oneself well, to believe in
one’s
self, and to ‘self-actualise’
Jahoda
(1958), an early important thinker in this field, provided a list of
six
characteristics that covered both approaches. These were:
self-awareness and
acceptance, growth and self-actualisation, integration, autonomy,
perception of
reality, environmental mastery. These characteristics, as well as the
more
general matter of defining and characterising the notion of mental
health/illness
were discussed and debated over the next three decades or so; for
example, Wootton
(1960) challenged the definition, Flew (1973), amongst other things,
focused
‘madness’ and ‘badness’, and Szasz (1961/1974) brought a radical
viewpoint to
the debate. Further, Peters (1964), considered the relationship between
mental
health and education, challenging with the argument that mental health
was not
an aim of education but, rather, a prerequisite for it.
Personal
Construct
Psychology takes a significantly different approach to that of stating
particular qualities or characteristics of mental health. It considers
its
equivalent of mental health, that is, ‘optimal psychological
functioning’, in
terms of the individual constantly engaged in the mental and
behavioural
activity of three ‘Cycles’, and the validation/invalidation this
entails
(Winter, 1992, Walker, 2002, Walker & Winter, 2005). These need
only to be
sketched here for present purposes and for completeness. The Creativity
Cycle involves a sequence of loosened construction followed
by progressive
tightening to a position of testing and consequent
validation/invalidation. In
persons functioning less than optimally, the cycle will not be
completed and
tightening will not occur, thus no validation/invalidation and no
opportunity
for change and growth. The person stays stuck and unable to grow in
understanding. The Experience Cycle involves a
sequence of: Anticipation
(a prediction is devised), Encounter (the individual gets thoroughly
involved
in the prediction); Encounter (where the individual is open to the
event or
situation in all of the dimensions in terms of which it can be
experienced);
Confirmation-Disconfirmation (the initial prediction is validated or is
not);
Constructive Revision in which appropriate revisions are made to the
original
prediction. Non-optimally functioning people are blocked in some way at
one or
more of the phases of the cycle. The C-P-C Cycle
involves a narrowing of
focus from a more general to a more focused attention. When we construe
circumspectly
we try to take account of all the
information presented by a situation, open to its complexity of it.
Pre-emption
is when we select from the complex of possibilities we have recognised,
a
particular element that appears to be the most significant in making
sense of
the situation. Control
is when we make a
selection and prediction in terms of a construct pole to be tested in
behaviour, and validated or otherwise.
Some
related work in PCP drawing-out the last core ideas has had two general
dimensions. The first was an account of common psychological problems
that
people have, common ‘mental illnesses’. This focus includes Button
(1983, 1985)
and especially Landfield’s (1980) delineation of so called ‘psychotic’,
‘neurotic’ and ‘normal’ behaviour, as well as Leitner’s (1981, 1982)
developments of this, as well as more recent work such as that on
eating
disorders from a PCP perspective (Feixas, 2010). The second challenges
the
notions of illness and disorder themselves as they underpin the idea of
mental
illness, and especially the idea of ‘diagnosis’ such as that of the
DSM-IV (for
example, Neimeyer & Raskin, 2000).
However, as
valuable as the PCP understanding of mental health is, it has been
argued
(Warren, 1996) that mental health understood in process terms of the
person
proceeding through all of these cycles, is too ‘neutral’. Someone we
might
intuitively construe as not mentally healthy might be seen to more or
less go
through these cycles; an Adolf Hitler, for example. What seems to be
needed,
and can be well argued that PCP is underpinned by, is that social life
that is democratic; or, better,
that a more
general egalitarianism has to
prevail
in society at large. The notion of democracy stressed here is taken
from Barbu
(1956) and turns around his four cardinal psycho-social concepts of the
‘democratic mind’. That is, he is less concerned with democracy as a
system of
functional arrangements like elections, fixed-terms of office for
elected
officials, the separation of legislative, judicial, and administrative
power,
and the like, as with the mental outlook that is required by and which
flourishes in genuine democracies. In turn, the democratic mind is the
more
directly political face of a more general egalitarian
outlook, that is, one that regards
others as equals, and treats them
according to their needs. His four concepts are: critical-mindedness,
objectivity,
leisure and individuality. The first, critical-mindedness,
is a capacity to relate to the world with a minimum of emotion (but not
and
cannot be with a total absence of emotion, as in Spinoza); the
democratic mind
is characterised by a rational approach. Objectivity
describes how the critical-mind attempts to deal
with all of the data or evidence
related to a particular choice, to be
as realistic and comprehensive as possible. The third element, leisure, refers to a sense of ease, an
absence of tension and stress, a freedom from real or imagined
‘crises’, from a
need to be vigilant against real or imagined enemies; it encompasses
both a freedom from and a freedom to
(Fromm,
1942/1984). The core
feature
of this frame of mind is individuality,
which refers to the sense of difference from
others. It is an outcome of a process of individuation which is a
growing into
an awareness of one’s uniqueness, and the development of a sense of self.
Now, it is
arguable that these qualities of mind are most difficult to encourage
and
protect in contemporary society; their significance in non-western
society is
beyond present interests, but not entirely irrelevant or uninteresting.
It can
be argued that social conditions in life governed by advanced
technology
encourage the development of the ‘authoritarian personality’. When one
revisits
the extensive work that charts the structure and functioning of the authoritarian personality (Adorno et al,
1950) and the ‘closed mind’ (Rockeach, 1960), one is struck by
similarities
between this and major negative-critical themes in Philosophy
of Technology.
The loss of a sense of personal efficacy in technological society can
be
overcome by adopting any of the ready-made ideologies that protect one
from the
insecurity that may follow this loss. Being essentially ‘blind’ to the
impacts
of advanced technology – as the critics argue we are – we champion the
system
for satisfying ‘false needs’, which we do not recognise as ‘false’
(Marcuse,
1964). To fuse or merge one’s self with a higher, more embracing power
in the
face of life in which one feels essentially powerless and ineffective,
may be
most attractive. Thus
may we develop an
authoritarian outlook with its rigidity, closed-mindedness, lack of
objectivity
and so forth, in order to feel personally efficacious and to ‘belong’.
If the
suggestion is accepted that PCP requires and assumes a democratic
and/or an
egalitarian outlook, there would seem to be some problems for PCP to
address in
the society described by Fromm a half century ago, and more recently by
the
thinkers previously noted. It would seem to leave PCP in the precarious
position of being irrelevant at best, complicit in supporting the
status quo,
at worst. The last is in fact what it once might have been praised for not doing; that is, it escaped the
criticisms of Psychology levelled by Radical Psychology (Brown, 1973)
that the
discipline of Psychology had become essentially a servant of oppressive
social
and political forces identifiable at the time. Thus, if those forces
prevail,
and possibly in a more dangerous form and without significant
opposition, then
the situation is worse than it might have been back then.
Yet, that
PCP can be a liberating psychology is well established. As Bannister
and
Fransella (1971) note, its aim “is liberation through understanding “
(p. 201).
Raskin and Epting (1993) argue that the empowering of the client in PCP
process
oriented diagnosis and therapy allow clients to reclaim responsibility
over
their lives. Further, as suggested previously (Warren, 2002), the idea
of praxis as elaborated by Paulo
Freire
(1970a, 1970b, 1972), is highly significant for understanding PCP as an
'applied psychology', and as a liberating one. Praxis
refers to the capacity to reflect on one’s actions, to grow
a ‘theory’ out of one’s practical, daily life. Also derived from
Freire’s
discussions is the notion of conscientisation,
that critical awareness which arises when we reflect on what we do and
recognise the impact of the social conditioning to which we have been
subjected; that is, we can recognise its impacts on
our lives. Conscientisation is an
overcoming of
'false consciousness', an awareness of the real nature of the situation
confronting us; we see things ‘as they are’ and not how particular
interests
would insist we see them (‘things’ and ’as they are’, obviously, not in
the
epistemological sense but as ‘states of affairs’ in the world). This is
always
a critical awareness of things;
‘critical’ as in the Oxford English Dictionary’s “involving or
exercising
careful judgment or observation”, in contrast to being unquestioning
and taking
things ‘on trust’ from authority figures or opinion makers.
The passing
reference Kelly (1963/1979) makes to the concept of ‘learning’, taken
by Warren
(2002) as interesting because of the resonance with Freire’s ideas, is
also
interesting for some observations under our next subheading. That is, that as far as
Kelly was concerned,
what he was describing as psychotherapy
could equally as well be called learning as
long as that term is understood as that activity which helps us get on
with
life (1963/1979: 64). The idea of psychotherapy as akin to teaching –
that is,
teaching in the progressive mode as championed by Dewey, wherein the
teacher is
a guide and mentor, not a controller or ‘the’ authority on all things –
captures, too, the equality of regard
between both parties that is in play. Thus, too, would PCP not fall to
criticisms of the type discussed by Lasch (1979), for example, where
the growth
of counselling and therapy is seen as undermining our everyday
resilience and
coping strategies in the face of a class of ‘experts’ telling us how to
live
and relate to others.
MENTAL
HEALTH AND EDUCATION
In an
earlier reflection (Warren, 2003) some conceptual moves around the
ideas of
‘mental health education’, ‘education for mental health’, and
‘education and
mental health’ were engaged. What was intended was to offer some
conceptual
clarifications along the following lines. First, mental health
education was
taken as referring to the relatively uncomplicated efforts to inform
the public
about the common psychological and psychiatric problems and to
encourage a
non-discriminatory treatment of those suffering from those problems.
Education
for mental health was taken to concern the direct relationship, if
there was
one, between what happens in the activity of education and the
achievement of
that state of mind/behaviour we would accept as ‘mentally healthy’ in
its
traditional conceptualisation. As noted above, one position stated in
the early
days of interest in mental health argued that mental health was a
pre-requisite
for education, not an aim of education (Peters, 1964). Peters argued
that
Jahoda’s (1958) criteria for what constituted mental health, could all
be
subsumed under a notion of ‘rationality’; mental health was about
acting
rationally and this was a pre-requisite for
education, not an outcome of
it.
Of greater
interest here is the connection between education ‘writ large’ and
mental
health. This requires both a brief digression as well as a return to
the large
scale critiques of contemporary life already sketched. The digression
is to
highlight again Brumbaugh’s (1973) discussion which identified two main
perspectives in the history of educational thought. One, which he
called
‘education as simple technology’, was exemplified in the Sophists of
ancient
Greece. The Sophists saw education as a process in which knowledge was
imparted
to the ‘empty vessel’, and particular skills instilled. That knowledge
was to
be uncritically received, the recipient of that skills-training to
believe that
those skills were important to the progress of civilisation, not merely
for the
service of a particular social-productive system. The second
perspective was
the approach that Socrates argued, that is ‘education as
understanding’, education
as an activity of critical enquiry. Such activity was reflective and
reflexive,
in that it enquired into every aspect of phenomena confronting one,
including
one’s own motives for enquiry. It had as its ‘aim’ the growth of
understanding
of the personal, social, and material world that confronted one;
though,
education did not have an aim in the customary sense, but was its own
aim or
end, of intrinsic rather than instrumental value. Of course, we have
what we
know of Socrates by way of Plato’s writing and perhaps Plato ‘shaped’
Socrates’
position to align with his own in his later work. That being as it may,
Brumbaugh’s
discussion is based on the traditional, scholarly understanding of the
ideas of
Socrates as captured in the earlier Dialogues, where Socrates is
clearly a
democrat and individualist, but in any case, Brumbaugh is referring to
the well
accepted Socratic ideal of
disinterested inquiry.
Brumbaugh
also discusses how the view or reality underpinning each perspective –
their
fundamental metaphysic – was different. Education as simple technology
was
underpinned by a ‘metaphysic of limitation’ which emphasised sameness
and
conformity of particular things to a ‘type’. Education as understanding
rested
on a ‘metaphysic of plenitude’, which emphasised difference between
things,
even things of the same type, and the acceptance of complexity and a
world of
plurality and interaction. Further, it recognised that any particular
thing
had, potentially, an aesthetic dimension, that
spoke to a deeper level
of understanding of and within human beings.
Both
subsequent
and earlier thinkers to Brumbaugh have emphasised that genuine
education in the
Socratic mode involves and requires a rich cultural-historical
grounding, not
mere training. Of equal stress is the significant
relationship between
education and the operation of democracy, and between an acceptance of
a
plurality of views and egalitarianism. The later German concept of Bildung was suggested as a most apt
concept to convey what is in focus here, despite difficulty in
translation of
the term. The word signifies a process of intellectual and cultural
formation,
a process in which the individual is initiated into classical knowledge
and
humanist themes in the history of ideas. In a thinker for whom this was
critical to social cohesion and freedom from alienation, that is,
G.W.F. Hegel,
the primary purpose of education was to impress on one the importance
of
focusing not exclusively on ourselves as individuals, but the
significance of
developing an understanding of the complexity of our life and the
context in
which it was lived. For him, of course, that understanding reveals an
underlying commonality in life, in peoples, and in Life. In turn, the
hermeneutic turn in phenomenology was to draw our attention to the
significance
of the ‘text’ of human history contained in humankind’s written
records,
architecture, statues and art work, artefacts, technologies, music and
song and
dance, literature and poetry, and so on, all of which when ‘read’ or
meaning
gleaned from them, enhance and enlarge our individual and species
understanding
(Schleiermacher, 1977; Gadamer, 1960/1975).
Education,
then, real education that liberates a person from superstition and
ignorance,
and from an uncritical acceptance of what is merely ‘consensually
validated’, is one aspect of that democratic social organisation and
that
egalitarian outlook that is a necessary concomitant of optimal
psychological
functioning. Real education, Socratic education, provides an essential
grounding for individuals and groups to maximally understand their
lives, life,
and Life.
The other
aspect of the discussion under this sub-heading, however, is the voices
of the
critics in relation to education, certainly education in the West, and
since
the Second World War. We could cite again the critics like Chomsky,
Hertz or
Saul, or many others like them. However, a quotation from an early
critic who
was already suspicious of technology in education, Hardison (1972), is
most
apt: “[T]he short-term signs point toward vocationalism,
accountability, and
the rise of gadgetry in public education. [in which case] we are moving
in the
wrong direction … in terms of our responsibilities” to children and to
the
future (p. 109). A general ‘dumbing down’ of education and society
emerges in
various analyses, validating the long-standing libertarian critique
that
political interests and parties of any political persuasion do not want
a
genuinely educated populace. Fromm
(1956/1963) captures the fascination for intelligence and its shallower
corollaries
in the popularity of the media Quiz Show and memory training exercises
for
registering ‘facts’ about the world – which corollaries Brumbaugh
(1973)
associated with Sophistic education – in his distinction between reason (“man’s capacity for grasping the
world through thought”) and intelligence (“man’s ability to manipulate
the
world with the help of thought”). The former is how we arrive at the
truth, the
latter an instrument for manipulating the world; “the former is
essentially
human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man” (p.
64).
Because the
notion of mental health in PCP rests on an assumption of social life
being
democratic, and best characterised psycho-socially in terms of a
democratic, or
wider egalitarian outlook, and requiring genuine education, it stands
in a
unique position when these things are not in evidence. Unlike
Psychoanalysis or
Radical Behaviourism, perhaps also Cognitive Psychology, a genuine
acceptance
of PCP would seem to place a particular burden on that acceptance. That
is, to
be ‘active’ in the interests of democracy and democratic and
egalitarian ways
of being. Of course, to some extent the individual must ‘fit’ into the
social
milieu in which he or she finds him or herself, and mental health will
always
have a component of ‘acquiescence’ to what is or appears to be the case
at the
individual level; social cohesion and thereby survival requires this.
However,
that critical scrutiny of ‘the given’ championed by thinkers like Fromm
and
Marcuse – which scrutiny is the life-blood of the field that is social
and
political philosophy – has an analogy in the individual search for
meaning that
is not merely imposed by others.
SUMMARY
AND CONCLUSION
The
inter-linked observations of the foregoing discussion can be succinctly
restated as follows. As suggested elsewhere (Warren, 1996, 1998), PCP
assumes
an underlying social arrangement that is democratic.
Moreover, this arrangement is best understood not in terms of external
and
procedural arrangements such as personal sovereignty, elections, and
the like,
but in terms of psychological characteristics. These characteristics
are well
catalogued by Barbu (1956) in terms of what he calls the four cardinal
psycho-social concepts of democracy. Human beings can function
optimally when
the social conditions (to a significant degree also, the material
conditions)
are such as to allow, support, encourage, even require
for their own
optimal functioning, that individuals so function. The underpinning of
democratic social organisation is an educated population. Real
education, as
contrast with ‘training’ is well-captured as an activity in the notion
of critical
enquiry, and in its ‘content’ in the notion of Bildung.
Critical enquiry is about ‘reason’ (problem solving) not
intelligence (puzzle-solving), and
Bildung, as difficult as it is to capture in its essential
meaning, refers
to an initiation into and an immersion in the history and culture of
human
civilisation. The idea of mental health, or optimal psychological
functioning
in PCP, arguably assumes not only a democratic social organisation, but
also
‘real education’. However, there is widespread concern about the
general
‘dumbing down’ of populations in a world in which economic rationalism,
corporatism, globalisation, fundamentalism, corruption of the notion of
democracy, and the like, dominate our social life and our construing.
In order
to advance optimal psychological functioning, PCP would appear to
require that
type of outlook championed by Freire in his idea of conscientisation.
That is,
PCP as a ‘liberation psychology’ – as it can
reasonably lay claim to be.
But, what chance of this is there in the face of the globalisation of
fundamentalist ideas of market economy, economic rationalism, and the
like, and
the closing of the mind in other forms of fundamentalist ideology, of
whatever type?
If, then,
(1)
mental health in PCP rests on a notion of democracy as here understood
– or,
indeed, even in functional terms of genuine choice and a real ability
to be
heard and to influence decisions without protest or violence against
one – on
an egalitarian outlook, and a functioning democracy, which (2) both
require
genuine education, and (3) real democracy is disappearing along with
its
psychological correlates, and (4) genuine education is no longer
conspicuous,
then (5) where do we find ourselves in relation to PCP and mental
health? Is one
answer that PCP adherents should be or should become social activists
if they
really wish to promote mental health in individuals or societies?
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
A version of this
paper was read at the European Conference on Personal Construct
Psychology,
Kristianstad University, Sweden, 2006. I thank participants for their
comments
and questions at that reading. |
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ABOUT
THE
AUTHOR |
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Bill Warren
holds an appointment as a Conjoint Associate Professor in the
University of Newcastle, Australia having retired from full-time
academic work teaching Philosophy, in 2006. A member of the Colleges of
Clinical and Forensic Psychology of the Australian Psychological
Society
he continues the private clinical practice in which he has been engaged
for some twenty-five years.
Email: William.Warren@newcastle.edu.au |
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REFERENCE
Warren,
B. (2012). Revisiting Fromm’s The
Sane Society at the present time: Some implications for
mental health and
mental health education when seen with a PCP eye.
Personal
Construct Theory & Practice, 9, 4-15, 2012
(Retrieved from http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp12/warren12.html)
Contact:
William.Warren@newcastle.edu.au
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Received: 21
September
2011 – Accepted: 5 April 2012 –
Published: 12 May 2012
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