Book Symposium: Frank C. Richardson, Blaine J. Fowers and Charles B. Guignon, Re-envisioning Psychology: Moral Dimensions of Theory and Practice (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999).

Charles Guignon, Co-Author, University of South Florida

I am very pleased to have the opportunity to say a few words about Re-envisioning Psychology. The book is a collaborative effort by three authors: Frank Richardson, a professor in Educational Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, Blaine Fowers, in Educational and Psychological Studies at the University of Miami, and myself, the token philosopher. What we share is a belief that psychology in particular and the social sciences in general can be effectively criticized and rethought from the standpoint of what is called “philosophical hermeneutics.” The loosely knit approach to philosophy called “hermeneutics” is primarily a continental movement, developed over the last hundred years or so by such thinkers as Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, and Paul Ricoeur. But a number of English-speaking philosophers also have either explicitly or indirectly aligned themselves with this movement—I am thinking of Charles Taylor, Bert Dreyfus, Alasdair MacIntyre, Thomas Kuhn, Michael Walzer, Georgia Warnke and others.

The core assumption of hermeneutics is that human beings must be understood as always caught up in webs of significance of their own making. Humans are beings for whom things matter or have relevance in various ways. So any attempt to make human phenomena intelligible in a reductionist way by describing them in statements referring only to physical objects and causal interactions must fail to account for what is peculiarly human about our lives together. One of the things we criticize in our book, therefore, is reductionism in psychology. Hermeneutic thinkers also recognize that, insofar as contexts of significance emerge and evolve over the course of history, any attempt to understand human phenomena must be sensitive to the historical and cultural context in which those phenomena show up. So a crucial aim of our book is to develop what has been called a “historically situated psychology.” That is, we think it is important for practitioners in the field of psychology to recognize that human agency, as well as our attempts to make sense of human agency, are always situated in and so reflect a particular historical constellation of meanings. It follows that the dream of discovering timeless, unchanging truths about humans on a par with the promised findings of the physical sciences is made problematic. What we need are not universally valid generalizations, but concrete descriptions and narratives about historically and culturally situated humans winding their ways through a world of meanings.

In our book, we try to understand both our contemporary self-understanding and the enterprise that tries to make sense of it—psychology–-as products of what has been called the “rise of the modern worldview.” The outlook of modernity is a framework of ideas that emerged slowly and fitfully from the time of the Renaissance through such pivotal figures as Montaigne and Shakespeare, up to the ways of thinking that dominate the present day. The most important development in this story is, of course, the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hermeneutic theorists point out that the emergence of the modern worldview has led to an outlook very different from that characteristic of earlier periods in Western thought and quite different from the worldviews of cultures such as those found in traditional Africa, China, Japan and India.

One of the central assumptions built into the modern worldview is what Robert Bellah and his colleagues, in Habits of the Heart, call“ontologicalindividualism.”¹The term“individualism”has a number of meanings, but for Bellah et al. it is used to refer to a specific conception of the nature of human reality. Ontological individualism is the view that human beings at the deepest level are discrete, self-encapsulated individuals, distinct centers of experience and will, with no inherent or defining relations to anything outside the boundaries of their own skin. On such a view, social groups—what are typically called “associations”—must be regarded as products of purely contractual arrangements entered into by individuals for their own personal purposes. This conception of the nature of human existence is evident in Hobbes and Locke, and you can also see how it is presupposed in Adam Smith’s project of laying the theoretical foundations for capitalism. It is a conception reinforced by the tendency, found in Descartes and his successors, to see the human self as a knowing subject only contingently related to a surrounding world.

Ontological individualism is so deeply engrained in our thinking that is has come to seem self-evident in our thinking today. Our view of reality, in the broadest sense of that word, is based on a distinction made between, on the one hand, subjects of experience, regarded as autonomous and self-defining units, and, on the other hand, a world of material objects. Most hermeneutic theorists agree that achieving this distinctively modern conception of reality has brought tremendous gains. It carries with it the distinctively modern ideal that Martin Schönfeld speaks of in his Presidential Address published in this volume, that is, the Enlightenment ideal Kant formulated with the injunction, Aude sapere! Dare to know! Have the audacity to question and find out for yourselves! The emphasis on individuals courageously questioning age-old traditions, superstitions, and prejudices reflects the spirit of anti-authoritarianism that runs through the whole modern period ever since the Enlightenment. The commitment to emancipation has driven the commitment to religious freedom in America, the anti-slavery movement, the fight for women’s suffrage, and the extension of rights to people of diverse ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations. No one questions the good effects that the modern outlook has brought in its wake.

At the same time, however, hermeneutic theorists have noted some baleful and generally unnoticed side effects of the new, modern way of thinking. In our book, we suggest that the ascendancy of the self-responsible individual has been accompanied by pervasive feelings of isolation, as well as alienation from nature, others and even one’s own self. It has been argued that this extreme ontological individualism is also at the root of some of the most distressing psychological problems in the contemporary world—for example, narcissistic personality disorders. In addition, hermeneutic thinkers have noted that this individualistic outlook seems to be connected to another fundamental problem in modern life. Given this view of life, it becomes very hard to see how moral commitments can be binding or authoritative for individuals. If it is the case that I am an absolute center of agency and decision and nothing is binding for me unless I choose that it be binding for me, then it seems that the commitments I make are on shaky grounds. For my commitments are something I opt into, and so they are something I can just as easily opt out of. Nothing holds me to a commitment except my will, and that will is obviously changeable given different vicissitudes of circumstance and mood.

The problem ontological individualism poses for morality is highlighted in a famous quotation from Iris Murdoch we use in our book. She describes the negative impact of ontological individualism in this way:

Philosophy . . . has been busy dismantling the old, substantial picture of the “self,” and ethics has not proved itself able to rethink this concept for moral purposes. The moral agent then is seen as an isolated principle of will, or as a burrowing principle of consciousness, inside, or beside, a lump of being which has been handed over to the other disciplines. . . . On the one hand a Luciferian philosophy of adventures of the will, and on the other natural science. Moral philosophy, and indeed morals, are thus undefended against an irresponsible and undirected self-assertion which easily goes hand in hand with some brand of pseudo-scientific determinism²

 

As this quotation suggests, the ontology that is taken as self-evident in contemporary life is not only morally problematic, it is one that leads to deep tensions. For it seems to offset an unquestioned faith in free will against an equally deep-seated commitment to scientific determinism.

Throughout the course of our book, we discuss a number of problems that arise within the distinctively modern conception of the self and its relation to the world. These include the loss of a sense of belongingness, a reduced ability in modern circumstances to feel indebted to anything outside oneself, and a loss of willingness to participate in public life or care about the traditions of one’s own historical culture (where the word “tradition” is used in MacIntyre’s sense to refer to an ongoing argument about what is really important in life).³Philip Rieff has described the condition of modern life as one in which we have been freed to choose, only to find that we then have no choices worth making.⁴

The radical autonomy we have gained through modern individualism has been purchased at the price of losing any strong sense of community or involvement in the larger whole.

Our worry is about what this image of life might entail in terms of what people actually experience in their relationships. One of my co-authors, Blaine Fowers, is a specialist in marriage counseling, and some of my favorite chapters in this book consist in his accounts of the shortcomings of contemporary marriage counseling. In his attempt to work out a historically situated psychology, Fowers considers some of the recent historical accounts of how the experience of marriage has evolved in the last couple of centuries. According to these accounts, in earlier periods in Western history, and in fact well into the nineteenth century, marriage was experienced in terms of what is called the “companionate marriage.” At the heart of a marriage is companionship between two people functioning together in a wider setting. In these earlier periods, the basic unit of social life was the household, a form of life in which man and woman worked side by side, usually in the context of an extended family that included grandparents and children and aunts and orphaned nephews and so forth. Marriage was experienced as a shared enterprise aimed at sustaining the life of the household.

With the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, however, the traditional household came to be replaced by a new social unit, what we today experience as the family. In this new social structure, men and women are segregated into distinct social roles. They are to a great extent cut off from the wider extended family, and are confined to living units made up of two adults and two little ones, all caught up in what Rieff calls a “not so civil war.” In the context of this new social unit, marriage has come to be thought of in terms of what Bellah and his colleagues call “therapeutic contractualism.” The basic idea of therapeutic contractualism is this: I agree to marry you and to remain with you so long as I continue to feel good about myself and feel that I am fulfilled and am growing in the relationship. If at any time it is apparent that I am not reaping those benefits from the marriage, then I am free to cancel the contract and opt out of the marriage. Those are the terms of the contract.

It should be obvious that this contemporary conception of marriage presupposes the understanding of the human condition of ontological individualism. Marriage is an association entered into by two individuals that is based on contractual understandings. What Blaine Fowers points out here is how this understanding of marriage can have certain bad consequences. People enter into marriage with a set of expectations that will be hard to satisfy. Marriage is all about one’s own feelings of happiness, fulfillment and well being as an individual. It is hard to see, on this interpretation, how the marriage unit is part of a larger cultural reality, even when children are involved. It is hard to see that the marriage is not just about a couple of individuals who agree to stick together so long as it is to their benefit as individuals. In older ways of experiencing things, marriage could be seen as a sort of organic unity with a life of its own in a wider environment. But this older way of experiencing things is closed off to ontological individualism, for this tells you that reality consists of nothing other than essentially isolated individuals who have no real or inherently binding connections to one another.

The hermeneutic outlook formulated in our book makes it possible to see an approach to marriage counseling that is historically situated. When Blaine meets with couples, he talks to them about how they understand marriage. Surveys have shown that most people in America think they already know what marriage is all about; they think of it according to the therapeutic contractualist model. On this view, the aim of counseling should be to enable individuals to figure out how to make it work for themselves. Blaine’s approach is to get people to move toward alternative ways of thinking about marriage. Without being explicit about what he is doing, he talks about the Aristotelian conception of philia, saying, “Here is another way of understanding a relationship between two people.” He evokes conceptions of love or friendship from the Nicomachean Ethics or ideas from other cultures and historical periods. In the course of these conversations, it becomes clear that, although most people initially think of marriage in contractualist and individualist terms, they nevertheless have access to deeper resources of understanding that lie beneath of surface of those initial responses. This is what Bellah, et al. refer to when they say that beneath the “first language” of individualism, people have access to a “second language,” built on civic humanist and biblical ideals, in which they can articulate a sense of their lives as deeply connected to the lives of others. Seeing their lives and their relationships in the light of these older ideals, couples often can achieve a richer and more enduring sense of what marriage is. This is not to say, of course, that all married couples should stick it out no matter what. If the marriage is miserable, then it probably should be left behind. But it does show that sometimes people can find new resources for understanding through a historically situated approach.

Blaine Fowers’ approach to marriage counseling provides one example of the concrete practical implications of the hermeneutic outlook. Another practical application can be found in the way it enables people to find meaning in life where before they had encountered only meaninglessness. Frank Richardson has spent years as a practicing therapist, and tells the story of a client who was experiencing a deep depression. This man could see no reason to go on living. He was very successful in his work, he had a wife and children, and so on. He had considered devoting his life to helping his children, but then decided that that would be co-dependent and enabling. As a result, he felt a pervasive sense of futility; all he could see in his life was hopelessness and pointlessness.

The way Frank dealt with this man was to ask him, “Do you ever feel deeply about anything?” The man thought for quite a while and finally said, “You know, although it makes me feel foolish to admit it, when I go to baseball games and they play the national anthem, I sometimes feel tears welling up in my eyes.” Frank zeroed in on this one vestige of commitment and care, taking it as a key to opening this person to a range of other things he cared about. By making clear how such commitments are always already there, part of our being-in-the-world, the man came to see that there are things of which he felt a part that were not just matters of arbitrary choice. Through a therapy that involved gaining ever deeper insight into the resources of meaning embedded in the historical culture in which we are rooted, the man was able to find reasons to go on living.

Another benefit of the hermeneutic approach is that it expands our sense of what psychological counseling should produce. It enables us to see that what is therapeutically effective is not a scientific explanation of behavior, but rather narratives that convey intelligibility and make things clear to people. An important branch of hermeneutics is narrative theory. In an essay titled “Narrative Explanation in Psychotherapy,” I have tried to figure out how narrative works in the therapeutic process.⁵

I could go on further about narrative theory, but instead will say one last thing. One of the central works we rely on in our book is Jerome Bruner’s Acts of Meaning.⁶ Bruner points out in this book that it is essential to understand humans as beings for whom things have meaning—that humans are interwoven with a world in which things have significance. The best way to get clear about this background of significance is not through the sorts of reductionist accounts characteristic of the natural sciences, but rather through what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls “thick description.”⁷ In this sort of description, you use your own sense of what is important and what things mean in order to gain insight into how the other person encounters the world. I know that, put baldly, this view is not very clear or satisfying. But the idea of developing a deeper sense of the complexity and density of real life situations is all part of our attempt to emphasize the idea of situated freedom, freedom that is embedded in a context that defines what sorts of choice make sense. The vision of autonomous agency we are working toward is that of what political theorists call positive liberty, a freedom to or for doing what is genuinely worth doing, not freedom understood a negative liberty, mere freedom from constraints.

Discussion

Audience Member: I have been preoccupied with a statement that you made concerning radical individualism, namely, that nothing is binding unless I choose for it to be and that if I am the sole determinant of what I am bound by, of what I find valuable, then I can always choose to opt out. I remember that there was a quotation from Mill in your book and this was quoted disapprovingly— “Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”⁸

Guignon: I can’t imagine disagreeing with that.

Audience Member: My point here is, what is the alternative? How is it that we become bound by things, aside from compulsion or force, unless one chooses them? And if one doesn’t choose them, if one is simply compelled, is one really bound by them? Is there any other way to somehow take on a set of values?

I also have a second concern, best illustrated by a specific case. I got home very late last evening. On my message machine, was a message from my mother. The message from my mother started out, “Hi sweetheart, I’ve been trying all week. Beep.” The tape was full. My mother has just recently moved to Florida. She is in remission now from ovarian cancer. I hadn’t talked to her all week. There was also a message from a close friend of mine from graduate school. Same thing, “I haven’t heard from you. Why don’t you call me? Don’t you like me anymore?” Is it my sense of individualism that is the problem here? Are the people I care about suffering because I am somehow too taken with the idea of rugged individualism?” This doesn’t strike me as the correct diagnosis. Instead, it seems the problem resides in my membership in different communities. I share a community with my colleagues. This community has both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. It’s not just a paycheck, but has some intrinsic meaning. I have a community with my family—in fact, several different communities, as there have been divorces and so forth. I have a community with my friends. I have to be able to choose autonomously how to navigate through all of this or I can’t participate. But, by definition, I’m part of a collective with my family, with my mother. I stand in a relation to her, a relation that no one else in this world does. It is because I see myself as an individual that I see myself in relation to her as something that has value. The same holds true regarding my relationships with my colleagues, with my friends. It is simply a matter of overlapping communities with sometimes conflicting demands. This seems to me a more appropriate diagnosis of the problem than to say that the problem resides in individualism. Perhaps you could comment on that?

Guignon: One of the central ideas of hermeneutics is the idea of historical and cultural situatedness or belongingness. The point is that, as we grow up in the world, we grow up into a dense, rich cultural context where there are already practices in place, practices that embody understandings of what things mean that have evolved over extended periods of time. These understandings always embody some sense of what is really worth pursuing, of how people should be treated, of what levels of importance can be assigned to things, and so on. So anyone who grows up into an established culture has already absorbed a tacit, perhaps inchoate background of understanding of what life is all about. It is true that this background of understanding is contingent in the sense that it could have been different from what it is. But it is nevertheless binding on us in this sense: the collection of traditions that inhabit us tends to be binding because it is not something that we simply pick out from a smorgasbord of possibilities, but something that is incorporated into us as we grow up into the world. Its power lies in its concrete embodiment in our lives.

One of the great things about becoming a mature individual is that you can start to objectify or thematize bits of this background sense and reflexively ask yourself whether you still want to sustain these particular involvements that you have internalized. You can ask, for example, whether you want to go on being a Catholic or would rather be an atheist, whether you want to hold to the New England customs you grew up into, and so forth. What hermeneutic theory insists on, however, is the fact that you can only evaluate and question some particular set of self- understandings from the standpoint of other commitments that are taken as steady. There is no way to make sense of the idea of an “I” or a self that somehow can step outside of all attachments and traditions in order to put them all in question at once. The modern conception of self as a detached subject with no ties to anything creates the illusion that such a standpoint of total critique is possible. To say that we are always already enmeshed in a shared background of understanding and evaluation is to say that there are a number of traditions that intersect in us, and that we have internalized these without being able to be explicitly aware of them. As reflective, mature people, we can prioritize different commitments and demands. But this is always done from within a background of concerns that are crucially important to us because they make us the people we are.

What is necessary is to see that there are two dimensions of life that play a role simultaneously. There is the dimension of belongingness, embodiment, embeddedness, which provides us with the standpoint or orientation for our actions. But there is also the dimension of mature reflection and autonomous choice available to us as reflective beings. It is up to us to make decisions about how the things we care about are going to play a role in our own life stories. What we are arguing against in our book is the danger that people will lose sight of the dimension of embeddedness and embodiment and start thinking that it is all just a matter of choices being made by a disengaged subject.

Audience Member: You talk about individualism being a risk. However, I think the challenge for the next few decades is actively to strive to become more able to distance ourselves from our communities and traditions. We speak as a member of a “we” that has to go to war with a “they.” This is very dangerous. We have to get to the level where we can make individual choices. Our “us” attitude is dangerous to the planet. We need to admit how little we live like individuals now.

Guignon: That’s a very important point. From my standpoint, what you are pointing toward is a cosmopolitan ideal that was a crucial part of the Enlightenment. We are constantly expanding our sympathies outward. The ideal of freedom, for example, came to be expanded from something that was given only to white male property owners to African-Americans, to women, and so on. So there is this ideal of greater inclusiveness. But this has also been criticized as leading to assimilationism.

Audience Member: I was disappointed that there wasn’t Habits of the Heart Part II in which there was an analysis of ontological corporatism. I think of one of your mentors, Heidegger, and his explicit decrying of the individual in the Enlightenment and the perhaps consequent attraction to the corporatism of National Socialism, which leads to weird psychologies—Adolf Eichmann, for example. It seems you risk negative consequences with both individualism and corporatism.

Guignon: To speak metaphorically, when you have a map that has been rolled up in the closet for a long time, you can’t make it lie flat just by spreading it out. If you do that, it will curl up again. You have to roll it in the opposite direction a bit. I think this is what we are trying to do—to call attention to the other side. But certainly we recognize that there are dangers to any extreme view. What is really necessary is to bring together both of these dimensions.

Audience member: It is not obvious to me precisely how the notion of “disorder” ties to ontological individualism. There are clearly multiple connections, but I’m worried about this normative and potentially problematic notion of disorder. Can you say something about how you see the connections between the potentially problematic, but potentially liberating notion of disorder and the notion of individualism?

Guignon: The notion of disorder is certainly problematic. The DSM-4, purportedly the complete catalogue of all mental disorder which is published by the American Psychiatric Association, defines a mental “disorder,” in part, as a condition that causes distress or impairment in functioning for a specified period of time.⁹ That definition recently served as the basis for an essay by Stephen Wilkinson titled “Is ‘Normal Grief’ a Mental Disorder?¹⁰In this essay (which won The Philosophical Quarterly Essay Prize for 1999), the author considers every possible way one might argue that ordinary grief is not a disorder, and then shows that every one of them is wrong given the DSM definition of “disorder.” All the characteristics of grieving are comparable to chicken pox or some other familiar disease, i.e., they are “normal,” but they are still a disease or disorder. He concludes that, therefore, normal grief is a mental disorder. As he points out in his essay, you can read this in one of two ways: (1) as a proof that we should do more to provide medical treatment for people who grieve, or (2) as a reductio ad absurdum of the whole notion of disorder—which is the way I tend to read it.

In our modern ontology, we operate with the idea that as humans we are essentially subjects, and that within the sphere of our subjectivity we have a number of things going on–-thoughts and ideas, but also feelings. The feelings we have are either good or bad. If the feelings are bad, then we have a “mental disorder” and need treatment. And we have the notion that we have an entitlement to have feelings that are as good as they can be. This is the rough kind of connection between individualism and disorder I see. Does this get at what you had in mind?

Audience member: What I was asking about is how “disorder” functions as a normative notion. It seems like there might be a connection to individualism, but perhaps it doesn’t matter whether the individual is conceived as radically distinct from or connected to others. It is potentially problematic for whomever is the object of the diagnosis.

Guignon: The notion of “disorder” is clearly a normative notion. The word is used by the scientists who write the DSM to mean “disease” or “pathology.” I don’t think that the notion of a disorder as such is connected to individualism, though there may be some disorders that are caused by individualism.

In general, you might say that the notion of “disorder” as understood today is connected to the kinds of value problems that originate with the historical developments that led to individualism, among other things. To put it into MacIntyre’s vocabulary: In pre-modern periods in Western history, and in non-western cultures today, there is a vision of life in which what is really important is to follow the path that leads to the telos or goal for humans. In this way of seeing things, morality and virtues are understood as enabling conditions that help people along on the path to their telos. Since morality is seen as an enabling condition that makes it possible to be all you can be, there is a great deal of motivation to be moral. People in traditional cultures have a rich conception of what life is all about, a conception in which being moral makes sense. For example, as Aristotle says, what is important is not how you feel, but rather that you discipline and train your feelings so you feel the right way in the right circumstances at the right time. In other words, feelings are not just brute givens; they are things to be cultivated through a process of education and self-discipline.

When you lose that vision of what life is all about, there is a tendency for moral ideals and education and cultivation to not to have a very clear point. Now, feelings are regarded as something just given, and the goal of life is seen as having good feelings—maintaining a durable sense of well- being. The feelings are the determinant of what is worthwhile and what is worth pursuing. So you have people concerned with trying to get good feelings for themselves; the ultimate aim is self- enhancement, self-aggrandizement. In our book, we criticize this whole orientation as sometimes very self-defeating. The notion of mental disorder, seen from a utilitarian standpoint, has to be at least partly defined by bad feelings. It was crucial to the outlook of the radical enlightenment and to the utilitarians that normativity in general be understood in terms of what is conducive to pleasure or pain—there can be nothing other than feelings to provide a basis for normativity. I think the notion of disorder as it is understood in psychology today is a product of this utilitarian way of thinking.

 

Works Cited

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Fourth ed. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. T. H. Irwin. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1985.
Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Stephen Tipton. Habits of the

Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985.

Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Boston, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Guignon, Charles. “Narrative Explanation in Psychotherapy,” American Behavioral Scientist 41 (Jan. 1998): 558-77.

MacIntyre, Alasdaire. After Virtue. Second ed. Notre Dame, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1984.

Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of the Good. London: Ark Paperbacks, 1985.

Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

Wilkinson, Stephen. “Is ‘Normal Grief’ a Mental Disorder?” Philosophical Quarterly 50 (July 2000): 289-304.