Psycho-social Explorations of Trauma, Exclusion and Violence

Un-housed Minds and Inhospitable Environments

Christopher Scanlon, John Adlam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000536249
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The central theme of this book is the operation of intersecting discourses of power, privilege and positioning as they are revealed in fraught encounters between in-groups and out-groups in our deeply fractured world. The authors offer a unique perspective on inter-group dynamics and structural violence at local, societal, cultural and global levels, dissecting processes of toxic 'othering' and psychosocial (re-)traumatisation.

The book offers the Diogenes Paradigm as a unique conceptual tool with which to analyse the ways in which those of us who come to be located outside or on the margins of dominant social structures are, in one way or another, the inheritors of the legacies of centuries of oppression and exclusion. This analysis offers a distinctive psycho-social redefinition of trauma that foregrounds the relationship between the inhospitable environments we generate and the experiences of un-housedness that we thereby perpetuate.

Written in an engaging and accessible style, Psycho-social Explorations of Trauma, Exclusion and Violence directly addresses pressing global issues of racial trauma, human mobility and climate disaster, and offers a manifesto for the creative re-imagining of the places and spaces in which conversations about restructuring and reparation can become sustainable. This is an essential and compelling book for anyone committed to social justice, especially for all practitioners working in health, social care and community justice settings, and researchers and academics across the behavioural and social sciences.

Part I

Un-housed minds

The Diogenes Paradigm

DOI: 10.4324/9781003223115-1

We are the desperate

Who do not care,

The hungry

Who have nowhere

To eat,

No place to sleep,

The tearless

Who cannot

Weep

(‘Vagabonds’ (Langston Hughes, 1959, from Selected poems, 1999, p. 91))

The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.

(Leviticus 25:23 (King James Bible, 1611))

Chapter 1

Un-housed minds and psycho-social traumatisation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003223115-2

As safe as houses?

ROSALIND: Well, this is the Forest of Ardenne.

TOUCHSTONE: Ay, now am I in Ardenne; the more fool I. When I was at home I was in a better place; but travellers must be content.

(As You Like It: Act 2, Scene 4 (Shakespeare, 1623a, p. 714))

This book summarises, reframes and develops what, for we-the-authors, has been two decades of our working closely together on issues of homelessness and social exclusion, and the related phenomena of dangerousness and disturbance.

We locate ‘the problem of homelessness’ in the continuing inability of this society in which we live, and of those systems of care in which we have been working, to recognise and to integrate into its responses and interventions to this problem, both the sociological fact of dispossession or not having a ‘fixed abode’ and the psychological experience of feeling disrespected or of not feeling welcomed or accommodated. Our concern is therefore with what it might be like to not have a place to belong – with the experience and the phenomenology of ‘vagabondage’, in Hughes’ usage in his poem that opens Part I of this book (Hughes, 1959, p. 91) – of what it might feel like to have nowhere to go and no one to turn to in order to feel ordinarily safe (or safe enough) or to find refuge or asylum.

One key challenge is to unpick our notions of ‘safety’ and ‘security’. Is to be ‘safe and secure’ a fact or a feeling? As ‘safe as houses’, goes the old saying, but how does safety correlate to housing? Is safety a recognisable idea to somebody who does not feel or never has felt safe and does this change with the introduction of a house? Who gets to write the book on states of un-safety? This is the question incisively put by the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952):

Where were the historians today? … What did they ever think of us transitory ones? … We who write no novels, histories or other books.

(Ellison, 1952, p. 354)

How secure do any of (‘we’) the housed feel inside our alarmed houses, as ‘we’ build more and more perimeter fences and gated communities? When we speak of safety, of whose safety do we speak? Who gets to make a ruling or have the last word as to how ‘safe’ and ‘secure’ one could or should feel?

******************

In my Father’s house are many mansions …

(John 14:2 (King James Bible, 1611))

Foster and Roberts (1998) wrote that “homelessness may be not only a physical reality but also a state of mind” (Foster and Roberts, 1998, p. 31) and their use of the term ‘housed minds’ (ibid.) was one of the hooks upon which we first hung our own long explorations into the multiple psycho-social phenomena which we are now grouping here under the head of the term ‘unhousedness’.¹ We have previously noted the ready availability of ‘house’ and ‘home’ as metaphor for mind, especially for the mind that holds another mind in mind (Scanlon and Adlam, 2006; see also Campbell, 2019). Plato’s theory of forms and the allegory of the cave that he offers in his Republic (Plato, 4th Century BCE) evoke both the early home of the human collective unconscious and the anguished imagining that we are all permanently and eternally displaced into a universe of shadows dancing against the wall. Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, likens memory to “a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds which are conveyed to it by the senses” (Saint Augustine, 397/8, Book X, p. 214).

Ever since the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900), the overlapping metaphors of house and home, housed and homely, have been beloved of psychoanalytically-inclined theorists in particular. Jung’s self-reported dream (1963, p. 155) offers a vivid example of this symbol of the mind as a house with many rooms and storeys (and mansions?). For Winnicott (1986), home is where we start from – and so, we must psycho-socially presume, is homelessness. Bion (1962) offered the concept of ‘maternal’ containment in order to explore, in psychoanalytical terms, the projective, and introjective, processes whereby internal object relationships are lodged within the mind or evicted from it (note how we introduce two further ‘housing’ metaphors in representing his ideas in this way). Brown’s edited collection, Psychoanalytic Thinking on the Unhoused Mind (Brown, 2019; to which we contributed (Scanlon and Adlam, 2019)), continues this tradition and reaches out beyond the consulting room to attend to the sociological realities of homeless populations and the political and cultural structures in which housing problems are located and played out.

Stuart Hall, theorising and testifying to the particular experience of being a colonial subject, states plainly that “the dynamics of displacement underwrite all social relations” (Hall, 2018, p. 76). Modern philosophy’s explorations of anxieties about homelessness begin with Marx’s argument that people are alienated from their labour – no longer remembering the needs and necessities and creativity that led them to take up their tools to begin with (Marx, 1844) – and follow on from Nietzsche’s ideas on nihilism as the inevitable consequence of the realisation that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” (Nietzsche, 1887, p. 203). Heidegger (1947) deconstructed what he regarded as the misconceived distinction between ‘being’ and ‘at-homeness’: a collective forgetting, sealed in language, which he felt the Platonic tradition had cemented. He proclaimed that “homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world” (Heidegger, 1947, p. 243).

Maya Angelou wrote: “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned” (Angelou, 1987, p. 214). The secure base concept within attachment theory is another way of arguing that, in ordinary development, there is a core experience of ‘home’ and of ‘safety’, of an experience of one’s self as being securely housed in another person’s mind.

Clinical theories of mentalisation and reflective functioning have built upon the synthesis of attachment theory with contemporary neuroscience (Bevington et al., 2017; Bateman and Fonagy, 2019). Body and mind in these accounts form a permanent home with a ‘lived-in’ feel, which can be valued and looked after. There is an echo here of James Baldwin’s observation that perhaps “home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition” (Baldwin, 1967, p. 88). In contrast to the jester Touchstone, we can, the more privileged amongst us, according to this theory, be confident explorers of the ‘forests of Ardenne’ of our own particular universes, for we have learned from experience that we can make our way back to safe territory if we feel under threat. Others, the less privileged amongst us, for all types of reasons that we shall go on to describe and explore, are less able to retreat to such places of safety.

Unhousedness

Jede dumpfe Umkehr der Welt hat solche Enterbte,

Denen das Frühere nicht und noch nicht das Nächste gehört.

[Each vague turn of the world has such disinherited ones,

to whom the former does not, and the next does not yet, belong].

(Rilke, 1912–22)

These ideas we have briefly sketched on the question of safety and security, and how some of us might feel when we feel ‘housed’ – and the theme of the potential precariousness of this ‘housedness’ that runs along the edges of these theories – lead us into our wanderings in the uncanny woods of ‘unhousedness’: the exploration of which it is the object of this book to recapitulate and to revisit.

By ‘unhousedness’, then, we mean to denote individual and group experiences of having been displaced, in ways that are fundamentally unsettling, from membership of communities, large or small, with which one either identifies or finds oneself problematically identified by others.

Here too, we make no claim to anything more than perhaps a new map for already well-charted territory. Berger, Berger, and Kellner (1974) argue for a psychologically and existentially framed idea of a ‘homeless mind’ dislocated in modernity. And here, too, is Cesarani (1999), whose biography of Koestler is entitled Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind:

So Koestler condemned himself to homelessness. All that remained were the ideas he dragged around with him like Job … Home finally was mind; home was homelessness; Koestler was the homeless mind.

(Cesarani, 1999, p. 573)

Our deployment of the term ‘unhousedness’ here is carefully and explicitly psycho-social. Unhousedness is a concept identifying experience and has a phenomenology all its own. Under the head of ‘experience’, we include experiences of being subjected to acts or processes of being dis-respected, dis-possessed, dis-inherited,² dis-enfranchised, dis-appointed, dis-membered – different yet similar experiences of being ‘dissed’,³ unheard, unseated and ‘un-housed’.

In offering this conceptualisation, we note that one crucial difference between this and the more standard and not precisely overlapping term ‘homelessness’ inheres in the active verb ‘to unhouse’ (or unseat, or displace, etc) – which ensures that we do not forget that someone – those of us who constitute the in-group, in fact! – has done the unhousing to someone else.

“Dispossession! Dis-possession is the word!” I went on. “They’ve tried to dispossess us of our manhood and our womanhood! … they even tried to dispossess us of our dislike of being dispossessed! … These are the days of dispossession, the season of homelessness, the time of evictions.”

(Ellison, 1952, p. 277)

We are therefore primarily concerned here with the psycho-social dynamics of two active gerunds, house-ing and unhouse-ing. By the term ‘the un-housed’, or ‘those who have been un-housed’, we certainly include ‘the homeless’, or ‘those who have been made homeless’. However, the term will not be limited to that grouping, as there are many more ‘dissed’ persons who find themselves in a similar psycho-social predicament – who have never been near a soup run or a local council housing department, yet whose embodied experience of feeling un-housed is a result of feeling ‘dissed’ in ways that finds expression much further afield across time as well as within space and has very little to do with the doorways through which they currently enter and leave buildings:

So the days merge together more and more, each one like...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Prologue
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Un-housed minds: The Diogenes Paradigm
• PART II: Inhospitable environments: Traumatised and traumatising (dis)organisations
• PART III: Reclaiming the agora: Activist research and anti-oppressive practice
• Index