Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 11:46:00 EDT
Subject: Re: [HAB:] re: The good of dialectical therapy 


 
In a message dated 7/24/2004 4:36:54 PM Eastern Standard Time,  
coherings-AT-yahoo.com writes:
 
Hi Gary,
 
We need to return to the themes of patholigical communication and  
colonization of the lifeworld.   am referring to real situations of  interpersonal force 
and violence where vindictiveness and hate predominate  within family, 
neighborhood, and workworld.  I want to explain harassment  and injury in homes and 
on jobs as well as interpersonal conflict which involves  hitting and yelling 
between family members or at work.  Other subtle  rituals of exclusion belong 
in this also.  In these two contexts, there is  simply no recourse to 
adjudication.  Before police can step into a  conflict, an act of assault must be 
reported.  At best, legal restraints  will separate the participants in the 
conflict for a short time period, and  then???  But, at the cognitive-emotional 
levels, there is no  intervention.  There is no way to collect the force of the 
community to  stop particular forms of harassment. It is often said that we are 
litigious  society, but only if you can afford the lawyer and this precludes 
most from this  avenue.  From a global perspective, this is obvious in cases of 
widespread  or folk sexism, racism, ageism, and classism.  Childrearing 
practices still  include the element of threat and punishment.  These phenomena 
then filter  down into interpersonal relations within families and at work sites. 
 I  have always felt that one weakness in Habermas' theory was the 
achievement of  autonomy or competency.  I do not interact with many autonomous people 
who  could at least take an impartial look at their own beliefs and 
reflectively  assess how their beliefs have led to atttitudes, ideas, and behaviors which 
are  immoral.  I do not think humans are naturally autonomous as I do not 
meet  them.  From the perspective of memes, which these cultural problems like  
racism and sexism seem to be, humans are learning by imitation to practice  
racism and sexism.  If we claim that these beliefs, and not other  macroeconomic 
processes, lead to increased fitness and hence reproduction, then  your 
defense of teleology might work, but population statistics indicate  that fertility 
is decreasing or that child-bearing strategies are optimizing by  limiting 
reproduction.  But, racism and sexism, globally and  microsociologically, are not 
abated and institutions have been slow to address  the hostile co-worker or 
workplace due to their empirical-positivistic  incompetence.
 
Fred Welfare   

G: But  are the elements of conflicts in opposition to
each other? If one is  conflicted between, say,
obligation to family and obligation to career,  it's
not that one obligation is opposed to the other; or is
a negation  of the other. Also, the person isn't
opposed to either obligation. Rather,  the conflict
arises, in part, from *identification* with both or
from  high valuation of both. 

Also, why characterize a conflict as  *basically*
dyadic? Its elements are not only two obligations, but
two  identifications or high valuations, none of which
are opposed to the  other's status. The conflict may be
a matter of each deserving more time  than seems
feasible. Thus, the conflict becomes one of  *time
management*: giving adequate time to each seems
mutually  exclusive; oppositions seem to lie in the
trivial "physicality" of not  being able to be two
places at the same time or at each place enough.  

But maybe the conflictual sense of infeasible time
management  belongs to misunderstanding between oneself
and one's supervisor: unfair  workload, and conflict
resolution at the workplace needs to happen.  What's
dialectical about that? If we delve into that
conflict, we will  find another ethos of multiple
identifications, and a transposition of the  problem of
time management to the workplace itself. 

Or maybe it's a  matter of misunderstanding between
oneself and one's partner about one's  commitment to
family. Delving into that will lead to a similar
internal  ethos of multiple identifications.

Or probably, it's both: problems at  home *and*
problems at work. Or problems at work brought into the
home;  or conversely.

So, where's the essential dyad among all the  dyads?
All dyads are merely proximal. Basically, the ethos of
the  lifeworld is very multimodal. Really dialectical
processes belong---I would  argue---to the structure of
interaction in *some* conflict resolutional  processes
and to *some* parts of therapeutic interactions.

Even  inasmuch as *dyadic* conflicts can be located
within an ecology of  relations, the notion of
dialectic contributes nothing to understanding  the
dyads, and the ecology is not a set of relations
awaiting conflict  in order that there be change.
Indeed, the development of the  ecology---the
lifeworld---doesn’t need conflict for learning,  rather
only *appeal* or interest that motivates processes of
discovery  and formation. A child loves to learn, which
(we hope) becomes a lifelong  love, which never was (or
never should have been, given human nature, I  would
argue) basically a matter of conflict resolution. 

Learning  *can* be theorized as problem-solving, *in
part*, but the motivation to  learn merely *includes*
problem-solving, rather than being constituted by  it:
Fascination can't be understood as something
essentially  problematic. Rather, it's a motivating
appeal. 

I agree that,  *ideally*,…

F> … a shifting  theoretical perspective responsive  to
social and temporal changes resonates with our
historical and  intellectual (aesthetic) awareness.

G: But to see [F} "our nature and  social context" as
"bifurcations" that "seem to take up a  dialectical
perspective readily" involves a seeming that takes up
that  perspective in the first place, whereas (I would
argue) the lifeworld's  social and temporal resonance
is fluidly multimodal or manifold (rather  than even
fluidly multi*dyadic*). 

F> So, I do agree with you  that psychological
processes should be addressed but I don't mind if  
other social scientific fields address them also.  

G: Neither  do I. I don’t wish to reduce everything to
psychology. Yet, I wouldn’t  characterize psychology as
one among "other social scientific fields."  Rather, I
would characterize the *social* sciences and
psychology as  part of the *human* sciences or, better,
*anthropological* sciences and  argue for the primacy
of psychology in anthropological sciences  *inasmuch*
as:

--- Learning is important to  understanding
development. (Habermas appropriately implies that  only
individuals learn; _CES_: 121.)
--- The bases of insight are key to  understanding
problem-solving. 
--- Individuation is important to  understanding others
as "ends in themselves."
--- Reason is a matter of  intelligence prior to
after-the-fact accountability.
--- The creativity  of action is necessary for social
innovation and political economic  progress.

F> However, my main claim in all of this is  that
anti-communicative processes,  namely
force/coercion/manipulation/harassment  through
emotions/ideas/frameworks are unaddressable  by
governmental/institutional/community procedures.   

G:  I would argue contrary to that. One aspect of
Habermas’s _BFN_ is to show  how coercion can be fair.
Force can’t be equated with manipulation  or
harassment. 

Also, teleological action is not as  such
anti-communicative, since communicative action is
necessary for  actualizing social purposes, while
social purposiveness is primordial for  social life. 

A key power of communicative action is to  bring
articulation of needs and desires ("emotions") into
social  relevance, thus giving lifeworld "frameworks"
potential for influence  (i.e., power---granting
empowerment) within community processes  and
institutional procedures. 

F> Basically, there is no  referee/umpire/common
authority for social-emotional and  psychological
processes.  

G: Yes and no. Let me just say no  (though I could just
say yes.) Habermas’s work is largely about the  nature
of social authority. Mature autonomy may speak truth
to power  because it is *both* autonomous (to a
sufficiently insightful degree) and  mature (e.g.,
credible from points of view that claim to be
nonpartisan,  bipartisan, or impartial); i.e.,
individuality may reasonably be its own  authority
about its own needs and desires and may become able to
stand  well as reasonable person relative to social
authority that is fair.  

F> The best we have at this time are learning 
processes,  education and therapy, which help
individuals to negotiate   transitions.


 


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