An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Human Mind

Front matter

Cultural Dynamics of Social Representation

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO THE HUMAN MIND

SUBJECTIVITY, SCIENCE AND EXPERIENCES IN CHANGE

Contents

The aim of the book 7

Human mind and natural science 17

The cognitive revolution 20

Index

Acknowledgments

During the time of writing this book I have been inspired and influenced by events and people that have significantly affected my thoughts. I want to thank The Centre for Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, co-founded by the Danish National Research Foundation and Aalborg University under the Niels Bohr Professorships Scheme, for letting me stay there as a visiting researcher during a period in the Fall semester 2016. During my stay there the first parts of the book were sketched out. I also want to thank the University of South-Eastern Norway for granting me research funding and research time during that period.

I want to thank my research colleagues, students, and PhD candidates at the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo for inspiring and influencing my work. So have my colleagues at the University Colleges of Volda by their admirable ways of striving for developing interdisciplinary ideas and Faculties.

Finally, yet importantly, I want to thank Robert E. Innis, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Obel Foundation Visiting Professor at Aalborg University, for the way that he has motivated and encouraged me through the work on the book. Thanks to his knowledge of what is to be a human being struggling with the distinctive forms of academic interdisciplinary work, I have managed to bring my work to completion.

Series editor’s preface

Structuring experience: health as representation

Line Joranger’s book is a masterful integration of history into general epistemology of the social sciences. She demonstrates how contemporary research on representation processes needs to start from theoretical synthesis, rather than from common sense discourses about appealing but fuzzy notions like ‘mental health’ or the like. Contemporary psychology has forgotten the importance of theoretical primacy in its ever-vociferous calls for ‘more data.’ Joranger demonstrates that before getting more data one needs to know what the data could do for our knowledge. And this is the message the readers need to consider with full seriousness.

In the social sciences are historical particulars. What that means restores the relevance of historical contexts for human social representations to the center of our science. The corresponding general notion to representation is participation — on the basis of our representing our goals-oriented standings in our life-worlds we participate in something we loosely call ‘society.’ Such looseness is the weakness of our social sciences — as the intricate manifold of the forms of social relationships in which the person is involved needs to be presented in its kaleidoscopic totality, Joranger’s book attempts to accomplish precisely that.

In order to participate we have to present the context for such participation. My personal goal to join the organization of ‘volunteers for X’ requires that I present — to myself and to others — what X is. To present X I need to represent some image of X — and it is precisely here where the societal tacit knowledge and my personal goal-oriented striving meet. Still, it is necessary to go beyond locating where and when they meet and answer the question of how they modify each other. Sometimes such modification is lethal — the young men who volunteered to join the armies of European countries at the beginning of World War I were operating with the social representation of the poetic image of the ‘Great War.’ Their bones — carefully accumulated in the Verdun War Memorial — may be the only remaining proof of the hazards any person encounters when ‘joining the society.’ Social representations — at least some of them — may be detrimental to our health.

Interestingly, the notion of health — in all of its versions (physical, mental, public) — is a social representation of fuzzy and indeterminate nature. The only

Series editor’s preface ix clear feature of this representation is its implicit value — health is good (rather than non-good, or ambivalent) and if it falters the unquestionable goal to be put to place is its restoration. This goals-setting is replicated at all levels of organization. The immediate agent in the evaluation of one’s health and its restoration or improvement is the person who lives one’s life — and dies in the end. Reflexivity about health is thus a basic hyper-generalized sign-making activity that is fully in the service of personal life course philosophies (Zittoun et al., 2013). It is a deeply subjective meaning system in which it is impossible to make comparability assertions about any other person than oneself. My way of ‘being healthy’ is different from each and every other’s subjective notions of similar kind — despite the fully comparable objective indicators of our blood tests.

The subjective notion of health becomes generalized to abstract conglomerates of different individuals characterized by some socially desirable or undesirable activities. Thus, at the level of societal communities, the abstracted and stigmatized category ‘smokers’ evokes the discursive use of the social representation of health in ways very different from that of the category ‘active users of treadmills.’ The societally negative valuation of the given activity becomes accentuated through the discourses of ‘health concerns’ by the socially powerful ingroup towards the marginal and powerless outgroups. Health becomes a rhetoric device in the relations of special interest groups and individual human beings for both increased segregation and for potential actions towards them for ‘saving’ them from their ‘bad habits.’ The former is exemplified by administrative forcing of the ‘smokers’ in airports to special ‘smoking rooms’ where they can make their personal decisions to smoke sharing the smoke with other ‘smokers.’ There is no concern about the health of the smokers — risks for diseases are increased by inhaling of ‘secondary smoke’ in this sharing context.

The world today is also filled with various missionaries for health. These are persons and community institutions that claim to ‘save the health’ of active ‘risktakers’ (e.g., ‘smokers’) or ill-informed wide public by way of propagating various ways of abstinence from ‘bad habits’ or prescriptions for the ‘right ways’ of living. The number of various dietary advices — all in the service of ‘healthy living’ — and all kinds of dietary supplements become economically profitable on the basis of the internal self-dialogues of persons who are successfully made into worriers for their health. The power of internalized worries about one’s own health are the basis for social success of the restless fighters for the health of the others.

Finally, there are the governments and their ministries — among which the issues of health operated at the social policy level. The social representation of health is here juxtaposed with other ministerial-level uses of social representations — of justice, defense, education, to name a few. These hyper-generalized representations become schematically defined through various legal documents that regulate the activities of both the community organizations and particular individuals. The inherently fuzzy — both at individual subjective level and in communal rhetoric uses — becomes politically defined as ‘health policy.’ New borders between acceptable and non-acceptable medical treatments (e.g., abortions made x Series editor’s preface available — or not — and at this but not other level of gestation) are introduced and implemented. The subjective understanding of health is no longer relevant at this level — the feelings of disgust by a young pregnant woman feeling that abortion is the killing of a baby and the feelings of another woman who considers availability of abortion as the freedom of personal choice, are dismissed similarly at the societal policy level. The use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports becomes the witch-hunting grounds for various societal institutions for concerns for ‘fairness’ and ‘athletes’ health’ while the directives by a ministry of defense prescribe the use of such drugs to soldiers sent on a combat mission. Politics of ‘health’ is as selective as any other politics — with individual citizens left far behind.

In the middle of such three-level confusion about the shared theme of health remain social scientists — trying to satisfy the various interest groups by evidence-based scientific materials. The present book is an eye-opener to many of them who are sincerely involved in their helpful efforts towards society and people in it. The need for theoretical conceptualization that is the central message of this book should lead them to new understanding of their benevolent social practices. And this would be the best social impact of this book. I hope that reading it leads to many new ideas that can transform current practices — in an ‘epistemologically healthy’ direction.

Jaan Valsiner Aalborg, 29 June 2018

Reference

Zittoun, T., Valsiner, J., Vedeler, D., Salgado, J., Gonçalves, M., & Ferring, D. (2013). Melodies of living. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foreword

Ihave always felt that I do not belong to a Faculty or to a specific knowledge area. When colleagues ask what research group I belong to, or what Faculty I belong to, I have difficulty answering. I do not know what exactly to say. To request funding I have to choose an area, and I have to choose a Faculty and Department, but I never feel quite at home there. I always try to extend the research area where I work or the Faculty and Department in which I am situated. I meet people in everyday life who feel the same. Most of them are health care workers, therapists, and psychiatrists working with people in public offices and mental health care institutions. They feel themselves in situations of dependency and alienated in a language that is not theirs and entangled in various ways in unavoidable webs of bureaucratic behavior. 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.

Through life I have learned that people want simple things. They want to be a good person, a good mother, a good father. They want to be a good friend and a good colleague. They want freedom to think outside rigid systems of thought, to think and behave in unbureaucratic ways and according to their common sense. They want freedom to develop, freedom to speak up, freedom to stop following mechanical and unreasonable pedagogical and therapeutical systems and programs of advice. Paradoxically, all these wishes are hard to fulfill and realize inside the late modern welfare state and inside the late modern mental health care bureaucracy.

This book is directed to all those who feel that they are trapped in a restricted worldview and to all those who dream of having the freedom to develop their ideas along with those they are supposed to help or with those who are supposed to help them. This book is ultimately about people in everyday life. It is directed to those who love and want to understand every single rational and irrational bit of what is to be human being in everyday life.

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Chapter |

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.

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 hardnosed 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 number of different planes, each of which presents us with a world-totality according to different formula, but from each of which our lives take only a fragment along at any given time. As human beings, and as welfare workers, we are caught in the intersection of our crosscutting interests and expectations. Even within a single relationship, moreover, we will not find our experience shaped within a single form. A health care worker may relate to another primarily through one particular form, say, competition; but other forms are invariably involved in his/her experience, such as confidentiality, domination, gratitude, and possibly mutual exploitation or perhaps sociability on occasion.

Like the European political environment, the Western mental health care environment seems to be effected by uncertainty, rapid ideological changes strongly influenced by new technology and political disorders beyond European borders. It may be a fruitful hypothesis to suggest that it is the intense and accelerating normative uncertainties of late modernity that draw upon stress and mobilize these supposedly premodern resources. There is an uncertainty that reaches its highest pitch in many of the scenes in which new scientific knowledge and new technological artifacts are developed and used. According to Steven Shapin (2008, p. 5), late modernity proliferates uncertainties; “radical uncertainty marks the venues from which technoscientific futures emerge,” and it is in the quotidian management of those uncertainties that subjective experience flourishes. Weber never imagines that what the future held was a new age of charismatic persons, such as Margaret Thatcher, Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi, Charles de Gaulle, and Barack Obama. A new age in which the extraordinary is ordinary, in which changes in values and attitude led by the example and personal force of publicly acclaimed personalities, is a characteristic feature of the culture (Turner, 2003, pp. 23-24).

Charismatic persons, ideological changes, and cultural schism cause terms such as fake news, fake truth, and post-factual age. The post-factual age with its competing truths seems to increasingly dominate not only the political discourse of today (Dunt, 29 June 2016; Holmes, 26 September 2016), but also the mental health care discourse. Currently, there seems to be a huge discrepancy between the welfare system’s expressed values and ideologies, such as user involvement, humanity, information, and user adjustment, and the restricted and inhuman economic and rational values that the welfare system actually requires in order to support people (Joranger, 2009). There is also a striking growth of discrepancy inside the welfare system between those mental health care workers who have a medical neuroscientist’s approach to mental problems and those who have a more humanistic relational approach to mental problems.

According to Richard T. G. Walsh, Thomas Teo, and Angelina Baydala (2014), mental health care workers have defined the focal points of their study through either objectivistic natural science-oriented psychology or what they call interpretative human science-oriented psychology. They believe that those with a natural science orientation typically emphasize the prediction and control of behavior and those with a human science orientation generally stress subjectivity (Walsh et al., 2014, p. 6). Those with a natural science orientation often represent neuroscientists as working in laboratories in an attempt to understand the brain and body mechanisms tied to behavior. Those with a human science orientation often represent social and mental health care workers as working in institutions with a variety of human beings with different kind of mental and behavioral disorders.

Both groups, the natural science oriented and the human science oriented, have an understanding of the mind-brain problem but differ sharply in their take on its implications. The neuroscientists, because of their interest in neurology and the structure of the physical brain, are suspicious, sometimes to the point of contempt, of much ‘mind’ talk, suspecting that behind such talk is an effort to introduce ghosts into the machinery of the nervous system. Yet, these very scientists believe that through the contents of other forms of consciousness, such as thoughts, perception, and insights, it will be possible to move toward an accurate impression of reality.