An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Human Mind

Subjectivity, Science and Experiences in Change

Line Joranger

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315309675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

One of the main aims of modern mental health care is to understand a person's explicit and implicit ways of thinking and acting. So, it may seem like the ultimate paradox that mental health care services are currently overflowing with brain concepts belonging to the external, visible brain-world and that neuroscientists are poised to become new experts on human conduct. An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Human Mind shows that to create care that is truly innovative, mental health care workers must not only ask questions about how their conceptions of human beings and psychological phenomena came into being, but should also see themselves as co-creators of the mystery they seek to solve.

Looking at the human being as a being with a biological body and unique subjective experiences, living in a reciprocal relationship with its sociocultural and historical environment, the book will provide examples and theories that show the necessity of an innovating, interdisciplinary mental health care service that manages to adapt its theory and methods to environmental, biological, and subjective changes. To this end, the book will provide an innovating psychology that offers a broad kaleidoscope of perspectives about the relations between the history of psychology, as a scientific discipline oriented to interpret and explain subject and subjectivity phenomenon, and the social construction of subjectified experience.

This unique and timely book should be of great interest to critical and cultural psychologists and theorists; clinical psychologists, therapists, and psychiatrists; sociologists of culture and science; anthropologists; philosophers; historians; and scholars working with social and health theories. It should also be essential reading for lawyers, advocates, and defenders of human rights.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315309682 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 licence.

Chapter 1
Introduction

I hope the book will bring out the artist and the dancer in you.

Mental health care workers and psychologists in public offices and public institutions in the Western world suffer from a deep frustration that seems to have taken up residence in their bodies and their minds. They feel dependent and alienated in a language that is not theirs and in a bureaucratic behavior that is indirectly and directly pushed upon them. Their language is medical and instrumental. By using it, they lose sight of the creative and soul-like parts of themselves and the human beings they are supposed to help. Schooled to adapt a total system of control and procedures, their behavior creates a welfare state system continually looking for evidence and evidence-based methods of treatment and facilitation. The frustration seems connected to the fact that within the novel political sphere of public welfare, health care workers, despite that they are expected to empower people, are also expected to reduce peoples’ needs and expectations so as they fit into neat manuals and schemas for reporting and classifying. In parallel with facilitating user involvement and ensuring that the service users get what they are entitled to, today’s health care workers are supposed to make savings according to principles of control and efficiency demanded by public investment in the welfare system.

Looking inside the Western welfare state there are different cultures and values confronting each other. There is a standardized, bureaucratic, and technical one and a humanistic and subjective one (cf. Habermas, [1968]1971; Snow, 1959). The bureaucratic and technical one is represented by rational aims and objective values. Rational aims and objective evidence-based values inside the health care system have two components: a methodological and a political. The methodological component consists of randomized controlled trials and their systematic review that make use of a difference-making conception of cause. The political component makes the recommendation for uniform intervention, based on the evidence from randomized controlled trials (Anjum & Mumford, 2017). The policy side of evidence-based health care praxis is basically a form of rule utilitarianism. A utility maximizer should always ignore the rule in an individual case where greater benefit can be secured through doing so. In the medical health care case, this would mean that a mental health care worker who knows that the patient or service user would not benefit from the recommended intervention has good reason to ignore the recommendation. This is indeed the feeling of many mental health care workers and welfare workers who would like to offer other interventions but do not do so by reason of an aversion to breaking clinical guidelines (Anjum & Mumford, 2017). The regime of personal virtue and trust, and of subjective feelings and experience, seems in the bureaucratic welfare system to be a lost regime for orientation and development (cf. Bendixsen, Bringslid, & Vike, 2018).

By personal virtue and trust, I mean the personal strength to extend and go beyond the ordinary system of thought and practices. This involves a practical and interdisciplinary flexibility, and a historical and cultural knowledge. This also involves knowledge about how contemporary sociocultural and academic environments produce knowledge and concepts customized to political and modern scientific goals, that is, goals that often counter people’s needs and wishes. Possessing knowledge about yourself and the world around you enables you to come to terms not only with your own limitations and potential but also with the limitations and potentials inherent in the bureaucratic system to which you belong. It means gaining self-possession, fearlessness, and independence, the conditions of all success and realistic goals.

By subjective feelings and experiences, I mean the authentic feelings and experiences belonging to our inner private selves, or what one generally refers to as the ‘mind.’ These are feelings and experiences expressing the painfulness of pain, the anxiety of anxiety, the strength of bodily and mental forces, and the polar experience of the sudden will to give up and the simultaneous will to fight forever. Or, as Goethe would have said it: If you don’t feel it, you won’t catch it (Goethe, 2003). These feelings and experiences can be trigged when you are forced to adopt a rigid or even inhuman bureaucratic system, or when you have lost everything in war, or when you are seeing a beautiful landscape, hearing a dog bark, tasting a mango, or hearing shots and bombs in the distance. Subjective experiences are related to memory, expectation, and intuition, and to the capability to dream and imagine. Such experiences relate to all those feelings and experiences that go beyond the external bureaucratic world and which express ultimately the ‘me’-ness of me in action, and the fact that it is I, and nobody else, who is driven to action by these feelings and experiences (Joranger, 2015).

Although subjective experiences are related to intra-psychological phenomena, there is a reciprocity in these experiences. Experience not only has form, it has meaning.

As human beings, we attach meaning to the environment in which we are located, as well as to the behavior of others and to ourselves. We attach meaning to inhuman mental health care bureaucracy, to the ethical dilemmas that we encounter every day, and to irrational behavior. We need to figure out if someone is angry because they are bad-tempered or because something bad happened, or if the health care system in which we are located is inhuman because of the people who work there or because of bad political decisions. This meaning-making process is connected to attribution. Attribution deals with how human beings perceive information arising not only from themselves but also from the environment in which they are located in order to arrive at causal explanations for events (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Heider, 1958). It examines what kind of information we gather and how it is combined to form a causal judgment. Attribution then, deals with how and why individuals explain events as they do.

How and why individuals explain events as they do depends on the development of language and of conceptual structures and processes in which information from and about the environment is actively gathered, assimilated to appropriate concepts, and thereby interpreted (Foucault, 1972; Wozniak, 1993). Perceiving information, in other words, is a process in which experience is co-constructed in the interaction between an environment that provides structure over time and the subjective mind that provides knowledge and the functioning of knowing processes (cf. Wozniak, 1993). The cognitive processes through which structures relevant to incoming information are accessed, through which that information is assimilated to the cognitive system, are acts of meaning attribution. As a cognitive system, the human mind is the device for the generation of meaning.

However, “our understanding and our experience of our reality is constituted for us, very largely, by the ways in which we must talk in our attempts… to account for it” (Shotter, 1985, p. 165). We must talk this or that way because the requirement to meet our obligations as responsible members of a particular society has a morally coercive quality. Not only do we tell our lives as stories, but also there is a significant sense in which our relationships with one another are lived out in narrative form (Gergen & Gergen, 1988, p. 18). Language here is understood as a complex of narratives of the self that our culture makes available and that individuals use to account for themselves for events in their own life. Talk about the self is both constitutive of the forms of self-awareness and self-understanding that human beings acquire and display in their own lives and constitutive of social practices themselves, to the extent that such practices cannot be carried out without certain self-understandings.

(A) man is always a teller of stories… he sees everything which happens to him through these stories; and he tries to live his life as if it were a story he was telling.… While you live, nothing happens. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings… an interminable and monotonous addition.… But when you tell about a life, everything changes;… events take place in one direction, and we tell about them in the opposite direction.… I want the moments of my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. I might as well try to catch time by the tail.

(Sartre, 1964, pp. 56–59)

To Viktor Frankl (1963) storytelling weaves together scattered meaningless bits of life events into a coherent sense, to make a meaningful ‘history’ out of life events, to make sense of life, and meaningfulness makes life whole – and to make whole is to heal. If we find ourselves experiencing ourselves as self-contained, self-controlled individuals, owing nothing to others for our nature as such, we need not, then, presume that this is a fixed or ‘natural’ state of affairs. Rather, it is a form of historically dependent intelligibility requiring for its continued sustenance a set of shared understandings (Foucault, 1972; Shotter & Gergen, 1989).

In an overregulated mental health care environment, there is no agreement about ‘who can speak,’ or from ‘what position one can speak.’ One can say a lot about a system by studying what relations are in play between the persons who are speaking and the object of which they speak, and those who are the subjects of their speech. One might think here of a regime that, at any particular time and place, governs the enunciation of a diagnostic statement in mental health care, a scientific explanation in biology, an interpretive statement in psychoanalysis, or an expression of passion in an erotic relation. They are not put into speech through the ‘unifying function of a subject,’ nor do they produce such a subject as a consequence of their effects: it is a matter here of “the various statuses, the various sites, the various positions” that must be occupied in particular regimes if something is to be sayable hearable, operable; the mental health care worker, the social worker, the scientist, the therapist, the lover (Foucault, 1972, p. 54).

From this perspective, language itself, even in the form of ‘speech,’ appears as an assemblage of ‘guided’ practices, from counting, listing, entering into contracts, singing, chanting of prayers, issuing orders, confessing, purchasing a commodity, making a diagnosis, planning a campaign, debating a theory, explaining a process. However, these practices do not inhabit a functionally homogeneous domain of meaning and negotiation among individuals. They are located in particular sites and procedures, and the affects and intensities that traverse them are pre-personal. They are structured into variegated relations that grant power to some and delimit the power of others, enabling some to judge and some be judged, some to be cure and some to be cured, some to speak truth and others to acknowledge its authority and embrace it, aspire to it, or submit to it. For Harré (1989, p. 34) “The task of psychology is to lay bare our systems of norms of representation… the rest is physiology.” Rules of grammar concerning persons, or what Wittgenstein termed ‘language games,’ produce or induce a moral repertoire of relatively enduring features of personhood inside the mental health care system.

Heider (1958) believes that people behave like naive psychologists trying to make sense of the social world, and that people tend to see cause and effect relationships even where there is none. He separates in this case between internal attribution and external attribution (Heider, 1958). Internal attribution refers to the process of assigning the cause of behavior to some internal characteristics rather than to outside forces. When we explain the behavior of others we look for enduring internal attributions, such as personality traits; that is, we attribute the behavior of a person to their personality, motives, or beliefs. External attribution refers to the process of assigning the cause of behavior to some situation or event outside a person’s control rather than to some internal characteristic. When we try to explain our own behavior we tend to make external attributions, such as situational or environmental features. By using external attribution as an explanation of our behavior, it makes sense that our behavior inside a bureaucratic technical welfare system seems irrational and inhuman and in conflict with personal values and beliefs.

Because the environment plays a significant role in aiding meaningful internal processes, subjective experience and the environment act as a ‘coupled system.’ This coupled system can be seen as a complete cognitive system of its own. In this manner, subjective experience is extended into the external environment and vice versa, the external environment with its disciplinary objects such as institutional laws and equipment becomes mental institutions that affect our subjective experience and solutions (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Gallagher & Crisafi, 2009). A subjectively held belief attains the status of objectivity when the belief is socially shared (Kruglanski & Orehek, 2011). That is, even if we are trained as hard-nosed health care rationalists, or no-nonsense bureaucrats, or data-driven scientists, research has shown that our decisions are influenced by various institutional practices (Gallagher, 2013). They include bureaucratic structures and procedures, the architectural design of health care institutions, the rules of evidence and the structure of allowable questions in a courtroom trial, the spatial arrangement of kindergartens and supermarkets, and a variety of rituals and practices designed to manipulate our emotions.

Invariant structure has the potential to inform experience, to give it a particular pattern of changing organization over time (Gibson, 1966, 1979). Sometimes the effects are unintentional and are accidental features of the institutional environment; sometimes they are the result of strategic planning. According to Gallagher (2013, p. 11):

The institutional practice of charities that specifies use of a successful presentation style may be an obvious and relatively innocuous example of how different media enter into the cognitive process, and how institutions may use media to elicit certain behavior. I take this to be a case of socially extended cognition because the process of decision making changes, indeed is manipulated, when one set of external factors is introduced rather than another – that is, when images plus narrative are part of the process rather than statistical data – and the whole process is mediated by a certain institutional practice.

Yet, although coupled systems can be seen as a complete cognitive system of its own, human beings rarely if ever experience wholeness in their lives (Simmel, 1918, 1971). The nature of culture, society, personality, and subjective experience is such that the most we attain are fragments of things. The separate and incommensurable worlds of cultural forms make competing claims on our attention. Having access to different knowledge areas and to a plurality of cultural forms and participation in a plurality of membership groups makes it easier for a person to express his/her personality more fully. But wholeness in this endeavor is no less futile than in extra individual realms. Not only are we all fragments of the general cultural and social types we embody, but “we are also fragments of the type which only we ourselves are” (Simmel, 1918, p. 79).

It may be given to a few to devote themselves wholly to a single world, but most of us have an experience of constantly circulating over a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Series editor’s preface
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Mind and epistemology
• 3 A critical and interdisciplinary approach to the human mind
• 4 Freedom and governance in socioeconomic status
• 5 Body-mind-thinking
• 6 The human mind in concept and experience
• 7 Subjective minds and general laws
• 8 Humans, science, and experiences in change
• Index