Human Behaviour

Towards a practical understanding

Jill Ford

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138845473
• eBook ISBN: 9781317541912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1983, this clear-sighted study built an understanding of what human behaviour meant at the time: an understanding which can still be of practical use for those who work with people in their everyday lives today.

The various influences on the individual are carefully examined, with theoretical approaches from different standpoints considered in relation to one another, from the development of the personality and behaviour patterns to the effect of family and social life, culminating in the picture of a 'whole', responsive person. Relationships are seen to be important, and this is reflected in the selection of material. Ford argues that it is the social worker's role to offer guidance relating to the nature and quality of an individual's interaction with society, and that this can be done more effectively if there is a practical understanding of how this interaction evolves. Examples of social work practice are given throughout to show how such understandings may be used.

Chapter one Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315728100-1

This book is written on the assumption that in order to help people in their social situations it is useful to understand as much as possible about people, about social situations and about the processes of their interaction. It is also assumed that this is not of itself sufficient. Understanding the nature of a problem and how it could be changed will only help us to act when combined with a knowledge of available services and with practical ability. Understanding the sort of effect people have on each other can only help us decide which direction our effort should take when combined with a credible and coherent system of values. Increase in understanding can of itself be used for good or ill, effectively or ineffectively. This book, however, is about the understanding and it is for example only that illustrations are given to show how such understanding can be used to inform and enhance values, skill and choices.

Behind these assumptions is another, that helping people in their social situations is an important part of social work. Defining social work is a tricky business. It has areas of overlap with the work of other professions and with friendship and good neighbourliness. It is hard to frame a description which could not be applied in part to doctors or teachers or housing managers; we, too, are concerned about people’s health, their ability to learn in various ways and about the suitability of their housing. They, if they do their job well, will also be interested in these different aspects of people’s lives but their own major concern is readily identified: health, education and housing provision. For me the central concern of social work is to do with the ‘social’ in social work. As I have said elsewhere (Ford, 1979),

Social activity, people in their social situations, involves people being in contact with others, in some way relating to them. Social work then, is primarily about social relationships, both of a wider kind (with employers or public services) and of a more immediate kind (within the family, with neighbours and so forth). It is about helping people to repair those relationships that have gone wrong, to develop those which are not good enough, and to promote conditions in which constructive relationships can flourish.

Clearly this needs elaboration. The type of relating, and the type of social work help, appropriate to facilitate the development of a growing child and to engineer a change in housing policy, are likely to be somewhat different in character. Nevertheless both are about people interacting in and with their social environment.

To understand more about people in their social world is a complex task when what we are about is the ‘whole’ person as he is within his situation. The whole person includes his physical health, how he ‘looks’ and behaves, what he thinks and feels, his attitudes and beliefs; different professional and academic disciplines have contributed volumes to each of these aspects of the individual. The social situation includes family, community, social class, place of work and wider society and again there is a wealth of research and opinion from a large number of contributors. It is the job of social work, and the purpose of this book, to select the relevant contributions and combine them into a new whole which we can use, test and refine in practice.

To select appropriately is one problem, to decide which opinion is correct when there is disagreement is another. Most, if not all, writers give evidence for their conclusions and usually sound convincing. Experimental evidence is notoriously difficult to assess in the social sciences as it is virtually impossible to isolate or control variables and the more that this is done the less relevance for ‘real life’ situations seems to emerge. Large scale surveys give reliable information about averages but seldom suggest reasons for individual variation within categories. Detailed information from individuals who can only share what is important to them with someone they know well enough to trust presents the same defect in reverse. The validity of evidence gained through the use of special techniques cannot be tested directly without special knowledge and, if we are not trained psychoanalysts or physiologists for example, we must assess it on the basis of indirect evidence. Often, to compare evidence gained by using different methods is not fruitful as different techniques usually measure different facets of a situation. On the other hand any hypothesis about human behaviour and interaction must be reformulated if it does not take account of what evidence we have. Sometimes we must suspend belief or, more usefully, use as a working hypothesis one which we know may need to be changed or developed. Indeed, to work from a hypothesis is to test it, to compare hypothesis and reality, theory and fact. Different explanations may also fit the same facts.

The contributions outlined here will focus on insights into human behaviour offered by writers from different perspectives. Each writer uses evidence from his work over time, from experiments, from surveys and/or from experience. The contributions selected here as valuable for social work seem to me to be based on evidence carefully assembled, not to my eye distorted and offering explanations which make sense. Why they make sense to me, however, and why the evidence seems ‘real’ is that I have found them useful in social work practice. Sometimes I have been helped to work out appropriate action and at other times I have been able to make sense in retrospect of a baffling happening and later use the understanding gained. Very often, as another human being, I am helped to understand and use my own experiencing and interaction, when with clients and colleagues.

This is not the book I would like to have written. In almost every chapter the work and approach which I find most useful for considering people in relation to each other derives from ‘basic’ work either pioneered by important individuals, such as Freud, Marx or Piaget, or assembled over time, as by physiologists or the early behaviourists. I would like to have included an outline of these findings and analyses, partly to give an idea of the continued development which is possible and partly because although they are available elsewhere I have not found them all assembled from a social worker’s point of view. However, space did not permit this and the present, shorter, version is probably more focused and immediately relevant as a result. My hope would be that where the basic work is not already known these ‘starting points’ will be found and read also.

The means of communication in writing is inevitably language and misunderstandings can arise through different meanings being ascribed to the same word. Words like ‘personality’, ‘intelligence’, ‘interaction’ and ‘healthy’ can be differently used and at times it can be important to know exactly what is meant. Here, however, they are not defined in advance and it is hoped that they are used in a sufficiently everyday meaning to make sense. Where other writers have devised words to convey a concept, or have used everyday words in a special sense, their meaning in that context is explained. A major problem throughout is the use of the third person singular personal pronoun. Words like child, adolescent, adult, individual, person and parent clearly refer to someone who may be of either sex. The continued use of ‘he or she’, ‘him or her’ and ‘his or hers’ becomes intrusively clumsy. Even then it could be ‘she or he’, ‘her or him’ and ‘hers or his’. In the end I have plumped for the use of ‘he’, ‘him’ and ‘his’ as this still seems to have a more generic flavour, in context, than the feminine equivalent. In all instances, however, when a statement about the individual is followed by ‘he’ it should be read as ‘he or she’. Eventually it may be possible to use ‘one’ to mean ‘he or she’, but at the moment its use by certain people to mean ‘I’ makes it not only strange but actively misleading. One deplores the present situation but one’s ingenuity has not yet found a solution which satisfies.

This book is about individuals in relationship, how they grow and how they behave, constructively and destructively, and some of the factors which contribute to these processes. It concentrates on the norm, making only some reference to unusual circumstances. It is important to remember that some individuals are born physically different from the majority, or are not brought up in a family, or never marry or die young. No ‘unusual circumstance’ is explored as fully as is deserved; although some implications can be drawn for individuals and groups who do not follow the average pattern, they will need to be pursued elsewhere. As it is, each chapter is as much an appetite whetter as a definitive statement and it is hoped that the reading suggestions provide a more substantial diet.

The ever present problem of looking at a multi-faceted, complex issue is that to look in detail at any of the parts risks partialisation and to look globally at the whole can miss the subtleties of the hidden parts. The approach here is to look in some detail at some of the parts, but considering their relationship to each other, and then to look at the whole (that is, the person), seeing each whole individual as more than the sum of the parts and in constant relation to the wider whole of which he is a part. If it were easy to study the parts and remember the whole, or in thinking of the whole to bear in mind the parts, it would have been done long ago. Fortunately for the enquiring mind it will never, certainly in our lifetime, be done without the possibility of further doing.

Virginia Satir (1977) suggests that if something as small and as tangible as a fingerprint is unique it is scarcely surprising that each human being is in himself unique. There are also discernible patterns in human growth and human interaction. The people we meet should not be made by us to fit theory but theory used to enrich our understanding of and our interaction with them. Social workers, too, are unique and, while subject to the same types of external and internal influences as anyone else, must use their understanding in their own unique way. I am unique and my understanding presented here will be what I have made of what I have found when meeting people and learning from others; it is what I have created from what is. Others can use what is here to create something that is again new and again able to be used by them and others.

Patrick Phelan (1980) once said:

By humour I mean the warmth and humanity conveyed by people who maintain a sense of humour, direct descendant of a sense of proportion and mirror image of our old friend and sparring partner, common sense. A sense of humour and common sense are the same phenomena moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is common sense dancing.

The two most important characteristics needed in social work, he suggests, are a sense of humour and integrity. Integrity, he says, is ‘the hallmark of the striving-to-beintegrated person, whose goal is to be in touch with him or herself with the object of being in true touch with other people.’ A great deal of the book is about integration, integration of the disparate parts of the self and integration of the inner world of hopes and fears with the objective reality of the world without. When this is not the case, hopefully a sense of humour will be brought into play so that ideas which seem odd may still be read, studied and understood impartially enough for a genuine appraisal to be reached.

Chapter two The world within

DOI: 10.4324/9781315728100-2

Its Place in the Personality

The world within each individual is populous. ‘I was beside myself with rage,’ I might say, or: ‘I didn’t want to do it but I couldn’t help myself.’ ‘I wanted to go ahead but something inside me seemed to hold me back.’ I could chatter on. How ‘I’ feel about myself and my situation, about other people and their intentions towards me is often the deciding factor both in my sense of wellbeing and selfconfidence (or unhappiness and confusion) and in how I actually behave.

During the war large numbers of children were moved out of their slummy, overcrowded, deprived inner city, urban environments to the space, health and inside toilets of the countryside. It was a considerable surprise to a lot of people that many of those children were really very homesick. Now it seems an elementary error. We expect relationships and security to be important for children and the loss of them to produce distress, even when material conditions improve. It is true of adults, too. I worked with a family whose income was never quite enough to last the week and Mr Bath, husband and father, often had no bus fare to take him to work for the last night or two before pay day (he worked night shifts). Suddenly the marriage relationship went right again and he walked ten feet tall. He was imbued with sufficient imagination and energy to find in an old junk yard enough pieces to put together a battered old bicycle which took him safely to and from work daily for free.

Social work in the 1950s was criticised in the 1960s for having focused so much on the way people felt about circumstances that the reality of the circumstances was virtually ignored. Although Mr Bath could solve one of his financial problems because he felt so much better in himself, the constant worry about money could well have been a major reason for his lack of energy and initiative in the first place – and indeed for the deterioration in his marriage. Similarly, our homesick, evacuated children could well have been adversely affected by their cramped home conditions. Indeed, the perpetual lack of space and freedom of movement probably contributed to their shaky sense of adventure and self-confidence when moving into a new world.

One reason for a preoccupation with the individual’s inner state seems to have been an enthusiasm for the ideas of Freud. Sigmund Freud stands as a landmark in our attempts to understand the nature of human beings and their (our) behaviour. In my view his most fundamental and abiding contribution, in his analysis of personality structure, was the suggestion that an aspect of the personality which profoundly influences our behaviour is unconscious. When we experience anxiety and fear or hope and excitement too painfully or frighteningly to bear we ‘repress’ them into our ‘unconscious’. Freud’s analysis concentrated on the inner world of the individual and he seemed often to inspire wholehearted adherence in his followers (and extreme rejection in his opponents). For Freud the most likely sources of unbearable conflict were between primitive instinctual (mainly sexual) drives and the demands of acceptable social behaviour. Whether the ‘demands’ are imposed cruelly with dislike or encouraged tolerantly with love did not figure importantly in Freud’s consideration.

Even by the 1950s, however, recognition of different unconscious reactions to different types of ‘demand’ were being seen as important by developers of Freud’s work. D.W. Winnicott had been working and writing since the 1930s, but his collected papers were not published until 1958. W.R.D. Fairbairn’s most important papers had been published during the war but Guntrip’s interpretation of them did not appear until 1961. John Bowlby’s work in the early 1950s on the effects of maternal deprivation in young children did make a considerable impact but it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that it was refined and appropriately generalised. Erik Erikson’s work, which follows Freud’s theory of development very closely but emphasises the importance of the nature and quality of upbringing, did emerge in the 1950s but was not published in its revised and popular edition until 1963.

By the time these works were available, many people in social work had already turned aside and were looking to sociology (for theory) and community work (for action) in order to redress the balance. They often failed, as a result, to grasp the truly fundamental shift of emphasis which has come about in psychoanalytic thinking. This shift re-examines questions, however phrased, which ask whether the individual’s environment or his inner world is more influential in shaping his experience or behaviour and finds them misleading. It is the continuous interaction between how a person feels about his circumstances, what those circumstances actually are and how he perceives and influences them which is seen as crucial.

The inner world of the individual, particularly when seen from the object relations point of view, is primarily about the uniqueness of the individual. General principles are clear, however, and as such can be used to inform decisions and practice about groups or categories of people. The needs of children (including evacuees), the difficulties of the housebound, the reaction of teenagers when told what to do are some straightforward examples. General principles can also, however, give us a basis for looking at individual differences. Why only this particular child in this family, why does that boy always respond with aggression when this one seems to like the same houseparent, why does this old lady hate the thought of moving to a home when the one next door is really quite looking forward to it, why does this family manage fine in spite of living in a delinquent or deviant subculture?

The world within each individual affects his actual personal experience of absolutely everything that impinges on him in any way whatsoever. Sometimes this leads to important differences in how separate people experience the same event; sometimes it does not. It influences not only how people experience and feel about what happens but how they behave as a result. A wife who feels her husband does not give her a fair share of his wages is likely to behave towards him, and even to use the money, differently than if she felt he was being generous. The difference might be obvious or subtle but could well be important for the sense of wellbeing – and hence also the behaviour – of all members of the family. How she feels will be affected by what is generally accepted as a reasonable sum and proportion in her society or, more likely, in her subculture. It may also, of course, be affected by how much money she needs, which in turn can be affected not only by economic factors but whether in general she feels cared for and ‘given to’ or whether she does not. All future chapters, then, will be seen as inextricably entwined with this one.

Object Relations: A World of Dynamic Relationships

The study of our inner world and its influence on our behaviour, our human functioning and human ‘being’ which agrees most nearly to how people are and which is most useful to social work practice is, to my mind, that known as ‘object relations’. Of the many contributors to work and writings of this perspective, three people stand out: Melanie Klein, W.R.D. Fairbairn and D.W. Winnicott. Of these three, Melanie Klein is probably both the best known and most influential. She developed ways of working directly with children psychoanalytically, using particular forms of play which, as had Freud’s free association with adults, helped her to work with unconscious levels of the child’s personality. Her followers are known as Kleinians, a distinction only normally accorded to followers of Freud and Jung. Fairbairn is not well known outside ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The world within
• 3 The world of thought
• 4 The world of behaviour
• 5 The world of the body
• 6 The world of the spirit
• 7 The family world
• 8 The world of society
• 9 The whole individual
• Bibliography
• Index