Craig Newnes

Modernist professionals, including psychologists, tend to act as if their present knowledge results from the accumulation of many years of trial and error, history inevitably leading us to a new enlightenment.1 It is difficult to remember, as do some post-modernists, that any knowledge is little more than a way of emphasizing (privileging) certain ways of seeing – ways that serve interest rather than describing immutable truths.2 Even so-called post modernists can imagine they are in a meta-theoretical position: as Iris Murdoch3 remarked, “What follows post-modernism?”

A technocracy such as psychology will emphasize ways of seeing the world, and those within it, which can be measured. Such measurement takes the form of quantifying assumed internal characteristics (intelligence, introversion, depression) of individuals. Hence the popularizing of computerized Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT). Jose Luis Borges (quoted in Foucault4) suggests an intriguing typology of animals rather different from our own: beasts with feathers, beasts owned by the Emperor, and so on. It is possible to imagine a similarly challenging typology of persons, less reductionist and more visible, than that currently embraced by the profession of psychology. A walk along a crowded beach in summer can give us a starting point. We might categorize people in the following, less technical, ways: those that play with children, those that show off their bellies (tanned or otherwise), those that can balance a football on the back of the neck, those that scream as they run into the sea, and more, ad infinitum. Such ways of seeing people can be developed in more subtle and equally easily verifiable ways. Let us continue: those that regard history as a biased account of the past, those that see G-d in everything, those that understand planting rhythms, those that smoke to change their consciousness (albeit briefly) and those that do so out of habit, those that prefer touch (healing) to talk (mouthfuls of air5 ), those that prefer giving to receiving oral sex. The list is endless.

Historiography is key here. It is all too easy to forget that belief systems come and go. Ways of seeing change too. Historians too can write as if history systematically uncoils to the present, entire systems of thought being replaced along the way. But systems of thought move in cycles, privileging certain principles (the importance of theism or rationality, for example) for centuries, before moving again to a previously discarded doctrine. We are, for example, inclined to see various schools of therapy or psychological theories as ineluctable and logical truths destined to last many life-times. But Freudian concepts are barely a hundred years old, Beck’s not yet fifty. Compare such theories with Catharism, a credo surviving over two hundred years or the views of Anselm, a determined theistic rationalist who was influential for centuries.6

Systems of thought are maps. And as any cartographer will tell you, maps constantly change. Indeed, cartography is a more revealing instance of the way interest shapes practise – the Indian sub-continent shrank at the hands of Mercator, keen to give the impression that the countries around the Mediterranean were more important.7 Maps are, of course, never the territory. A brain scan tells you nothing of love, pacifism or gloominess. Even memory is almost entirely contextual, being triggered by events or actions. A map of the temporal lobe will tell you little of how concert pianists play nocturnes – recall is through their fingers, not their brains.

To return to the temporary and cyclical nature of conceptual systems. In the world of academic psychology, the extraversion-introversion split was popularized by Eysenk but simply didn’t exist as a way of seeing things in the nineteenth century. Even depression, so beloved of drug companies and that slave to self interest, psychiatry, was not in common parlance in the 1960s. As a probationer clinical psychologist, in the late 1970s I received many referrals of people labelled agoraphobic, but none for depression.

To summarize. History moves in cycles, its recording determined by vested interest. Professional theory and practice is at a point on the cycle, not some glorious end-point. Rationality is only a system of thought, not the system. Persons can be categorized according to any system (even the existence of persons can only be inferred, not logically proven8). That system could be based on visible conduct rather than invisible, wholly imagined, attributes. Psychology itself is simply a system, with no way of discerning either truth or the order of things. What might be the implications of all this?

A nod towards utility

We could begin by asking what the most useful system might be for selecting therapists, politicians, friends, etc. Would you rather your therapist could play with children or had an IQ of 135 and a low score on the Beck Depression Inventory? Would you vote for a politician who was an extravert with an average rating on the Hamilton Anxiety and Depression scale or smiled in a way that warmed your heart and played pontoon for pebbles? Do you want friends who help you out or see a bat perfectly clearly on card V of the Rorschach? Of course, such descriptors are not mutually exclusive. It is perfectly possible that your therapist has a high IQ and helps people off buses (assuming your therapist uses public transport). For all I know the inaptly named Innocent IV, in addition to being fearsomely intelligent was a master of the cunnilingual art.

The advantage of a new typology it that it has immediate, non-technical meaning to the majority. Barely literate people understand real kindness, calm and intimacy. If such constructs were to be emphasized in the professional world of psychology we might, just, develop a useful way of being with others. In the order of things professional psychology might struggle. To out-live the Cathars would be achievement enough.

References

1 Calder, J. (2005) Histories of abuse. In. C. Newnes and N. Radcliffe (eds) The making and breaking of children’s lives. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books

2 Smail. D. (2005) Power, interest and psychology. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books

3 Murdoch, I. (1992) Metaphysics as a guide to morals. London: Chatto and Windus

4 Foucault, M. trans. A Sheridan (1971) The order of things. New York: Random House

5 Burgess, A. (1992) A mouthful of air: Language and languages, especially English. London: QPD

6 Stenfert Kreuse, W. (2005) The way ahead. St Anselm, rationality and the modern world. Journal of Critical Psychology Counselling and Psychotherapy, 5, 2,

7 Crane. N. (2002) Mercator: The man who mapped the planet. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholoson

8 Russell, B. (1912/1991) The problems of philosophy. Oxford: OUP

Email address: craignewnes@aol.com

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