Introduction
This is the fourth of a five-part series of posts that criticize a book that serves to oppress individuals, whether they have mental health problems or not.
As I indicated in another post (see Critique of a Book Used by Many Psychologists and Psychiatrists to Oppress Patients, Part One), I engaged in a partial critique of the book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns, M.D. (1999). This book is used by many psychologists and psychiatrists as a basis for the psychological technique called “mindfulness”–and with reason since Dr. Burns defines human problems independently of social context–quite convenient for the class of employers since the economic, social and political oppressive and exploitative contexts are thereby ignored–or rather suppressed.
The reason why I read the book was that I was required to see a psychologist as a condition of receiving disability benefits from the Manitoba Teachers Society (see A Worker’s Resistance to the Capitalist Government or State and Its Representatives, Part Ten). Mr. Alan Slusky, a psychologist in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, recommended the book and, in fact, it was supposed to be part of my “therapy”–bibliotherapy. According to Wikipedia:
Bibliotherapy is a creative arts therapies modality that involves storytelling or the reading of specific texts with the purpose of healing. It uses an individual’s relationship to the content of books and poetry and other written words as therapy. Bibliotherapy is often combined with writing therapy.
I refer occasionally to John Dewey’s philosophy of science, which I will look at in the last post in this series. I also refer much more often to my dissertation. My doctoral dissertation compared the philosophies of human nature of John Dewey (an :American philosopher of education and author of, among other books, Human Nature and Social Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology and Democracy and Education, and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry) and Paulo Freire (a Brazilian philosopher of education and author, among other books, of Pedagogy of the Oppressed).
I refer in more depth to John Dewey’s philosophy, which includes a philosophy of nature, of human nature and human conduct, ethics and education. I also include references to Karl Marx’s theory of money and commodity fetishism. Unlike earlier comments, the following includes more theoretical concerns. Therefore, my comments in this post are more difficult than earlier comments in this series of posts.
Critique of the Contents of the Book
Let us now turn to the contents of the book and some of my criticisms. My critical comments are usually either in square brackets or separate points as a continuation of my comments.
Page 30: “Figure 3-1: The relationship between the world and the way you feel. It is not the actual events but your perceptions that result in changes in mood.” [Note the implicit definition of the human being as a pure internal being, without any relation to the environment. This is a decidedly anti-evolutionary view and treats human beings as entities unto themselves—not living beings. From my dissertation:
The characteristic aspect of inanimacy is its indifference to all but a few processes or events in the world. The occurrence of an event does not lead to diversified responses to maintain the event in its identity:
The most notable distinction between living and inanimate beings is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continual action. (Dewey, 1916/1980a, Democracy and Education, page 4)
Dewey thus distinguishes the animate from the inanimate in terms of a way of responding to the world. The inanimate world responds according to its own nature, but it does not do so—except accidentally—in such a way that the consequences of its response maintain it and indeed enhance its functioning. By contrast, the animate world is characterized by responsive patterns that tend to maintain the animate being by leading to consequences that feed into the animate being’s own actions.
The life process involves animate beings maintaining or reproducing themselves by means of action on the environment; animate beings are active beings with teleological (purposive) tendencies. Unity with the environment is a presupposition, but it is also an achievement. For living beings, actions tend to produce consequences that alter the environment and the organism but in such a way that the relation, at a minimum, maintains the characteristic pattern of activity of the specific kind of organism. Changes made to the environment must be such that they do not negate the conditions for the life process to continue; changes must produce certain stable conditions relevant to the maintenance of the specific life process itself.
The environment is an emergent aspect of the world as soon as animate beings emerge and is inseparable from their existence. If all animate beings ceased to exist, in other words, there would be no environment. The environment is some part of the physical world to which the animate being usually responds (Dewey, 1916/1980a, Democracy and Education, page 15).
Despite this spatio-temporal separation physically, the functional nature of the environment is internal to the organism. Its functions as a life process include a spatial extension beyond its immediate existence and a temporal process beyond its immediate self that are relevant for its reproduction or self-renewal in the temporal process of living:
Every “mind” that we are empirically acquainted with is found in connection with some organized body. Every such body exists in a natural medium to which it sustains some adaptive connection: plants to air, water, sun, and animals to these things and also to plants. Without such connections, animals die; the “purest” mind would not continue without them. An animal can live only as long as it draws nutriment from its medium, finds there means of defense, and ejects into it waste and superfluous products of its own making. … At every point and stage, accordingly, a living organism and its life processes involve a world or nature temporally and spatially “external” to itself but “internal” to its functions. (Dewey, 1925/1981, Experience and Nature, 212)
An environment, then, is an emergent characteristic of the world when animate beings emerge. The functional unity of living organisms with their environment applies just as much to human life as it does to other forms of life. This functional unity is expressed as purpose in action, whether by a non-human animal or by a human animal.
The result of the functional unity of the organism with its environment is the negation of any ontological distinction of organism and environment. When there is harmony between an animate being and its environment, the distinction becomes superfluous since both involve each other (Dewey, 1898/1976a, 298). Nothing external to the life process is required since the environment is included within the life process, and the environment is generally specific and, ultimately, functional, to animate beings.
Since the environment is functionally internal to the life process, inanimate processes, despite relating to quantitative change, are not irrelevant for animate beings. All animate processes are simultaneously physical or chemical processes, but those material processes are subject to certain constraints or limits to which inanimate processes are not.]
[The independent individual is a figment of Burns’ model—and presuppositions. Emotions are implicated in the world just as much as is the intellect—if not more so since emotions express the tension between a possible break up of the relation between the living being and the environment and the possible unification of the two: “the emotion is, PSYCHOLOGICALLY, THE ADJUST-MENT OR TENSION OF HABIT AND IDEAL, and the organic changes in the body are the literal working out, in concrete terms, of the struggle of adjustment.” John Dewey, “The Theory of Emotion,” in The Early works of John Dewey Vol. 4 (ed.) Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1971), 185.]
[Life itself is a process of the relative (never absolute unless the living being dies) disintegration and unification of the living being and the environment. From my dissertation:
The life process proceeds from a stable equilibrium to an unstable process and a movement to a stable equilibrium again. The life process thus moves towards a stable equilibrium, but that presupposes a movement away from a stable equilibrium, and hence life is a rhythm that occurs within a circle of need, disturbance or conflict, action to meet the need or to resolve the conflict and satisfaction (possible equilibrium, which may or may not be on a wider and more coherent basis): “Empirically speaking, the most obvious difference between living and non-living things is that the activities of the former are characterized by needs, by efforts which are active demands to satisfy needs, and by satisfactions” (Dewey, 1925/1981, 194). The rhythm of life is not a method but a pattern of life in general. Some processes may be expanded and some contracted, but the life process involves all three moments as a total life. Living beings must engage in the three moments if they are to reproduce themselves. These three stages may lead to growth or progress if simultaneous differentiation and cooperation emerge as viable in the evolutionary continuum.]
Pp. 29-30: “It is an obvious neurological fact that before you can experience any event, you must process it with your mind and give it meaning.” [How does he justify such a proposition? Do babies have brains? Do they give meaning to everything that occurs to them? What is meaning according to Burns? This is reductionism. Human beings are pure brains. In fact, we can experience many events without their having meaning. Indeed, in a problematic situation, inquiry is required just because we cannot give meaning to what we experience. Furthermore, what we experience may be meaningless to us—and rightly so, depending on context. A sound that we hear at night when we are alone in a dark alley may be a clue of danger and therefore have meaning (even if the meaning turns out to be false). On the other hand, we may hear a sound and simply ignore it when we are studying. Does the sound have meaning? If we cannot identify the sound as one of a kind, it has no meaning—anymore than the following: xbzr. The letters are physical entities but without meaning. Did the reader not see xbzr? Or did we give it “non-meaning?” But how did we give it non-meaning? We might even say that the letters have the meaning of “nonsense” (of the kind called nonsense)—because we already have a set of meanings that enable us to identify nonsense—just as someone with some training would be able to identify whether Burns’ proposition is nonsense or not.]
“You must understand what is happening to you before you can feel it.” [Proof? This is an assumption that requires much justification. I guess human beings are pure rational beings before they are living beings. Burns should write a work on his anti-evolutionary presuppositions—since this is what he presupposes.]
P. 30: “All experience must be processed through your brain and given a conscious meaning [my emphasis] before you experience any emotional response.” [Proof? Our objective relationship to the environment may be disintegrating. That can be objectively an experience without our being aware of it. If we are aware of it, we may feel such a problem before we can identify the real nature of the problem. Burns has it backwards in many cases if not in all cases. It is tautological if Burns means by experience “conscious meaning.” What is required if we are feeling that there is a disequilibrium in our relationship to our environment, either actual or impending, is inquiry into the situation in order to become conscious of the meaning of the situation. Is the situation dangerous? Is it pleasurable? Annoying? We often feel that there is a problem without being able to identify the kind of problem—the conscious meaning of our experience.]
P. 30: “If your understanding of what is happening is accurate, your emotions will be normal.” [So, a person who understands that we live in a dictatorship of employers and that we are employees—what is the normal emotion for such a person? As indicated before, if understanding is such a problem for so many people, then perhaps the school system is a problem. Why not mention this? And what if the social world in which we live is organized in such a way that our understanding of our situation is for the most part inaccurate? How many people understand the economic system in which they live? If a lack of understanding is common place, would then it not follow that abnormal emotions then are normal?
What is the relation of thought to emotion? Dewey had his own theory, distinct from those of Darwin and James. From Jim Garrison, “Dewey’s theory of emotions: The Unity of thought and emotion in naturalistic function “co-ordination” of behavior,” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Volume 39 Number 3, pages 419-420:
Dewey explicates the role of cognition and interpretation in his theory of emotion by exploring in detail James’s example of meeting a bear, becoming frightened, and running. Every organism strives to maintain functional coordination. When disrupted, tensions arise that the behavior-agent must overcome if they are to restore equilibrium. Functional coordination involves the affective and the cognitive as temporal phases within a single unified trans-action. Successful coordination requires emotional clarity and cognitive conciseness. Whether clear or confused, “it is the kind of co-ordination of acts which . . . constitutes the bear a fearful or a laughable or an indifferent object” (p. 175). What we begin with is not a specific stimulus or other behavior-object (idea, ideal, etc.). Instead, we begin with a confused situation that confounds action that we must clarify to coordinate our trans-actions successfully. Coordinated activity “constitutes” the teleological, intentional behavior-object that controls the “co-ordination” of the transaction. It is a circle wherein the cognitive object (e.g., bear) and emotion are constituted together reciprocally within the unity of the coordinated trans-action. Disrupted, conscious behavior involves tension because we do not have a definite object with which to coordinate our activity; we feel discomfort and experience cognitive confusion, so we do not know how to act. To restore coordinated functioning we should pursue a process of “intelligent” action, or inquiry: The outcome of this co-ordination of activities constitutes, for the first time, the object with such and such an import – terrible, delightful, etc. – or constitutes an emotion referring to such and such an object. For … the frightful object and the emotion of fear are two names for the same experience, (p. 176) Objects emerge in a kind of behavioral hermeneutic circle of coordination; they are the objectives of inquiry. The emotional attitude and the cognitive object are two phases of one unified, functionally coordinated behavior. Considering the coordination of activities as functional processes allows us to unite what dualism needlessly severs.]
[There is certainly a cognitive aspect to emotion (as opposed to feeling—non-human animals feel but they lack emotion since they cannot concretize the feeling into a determinate kind—which is what cognition does).]
[Cognition does not “cause” emotion but is co-constituted with it in the context of a problematic situation.]
[Both the object (of the environment, or if you like the stimulus) and the emotion (or, if you like, the response) are ambiguous in a problematic situation and need to be reconstructed together.]
P. 30: “If your perception is twisted and distorted in some way, your emotional response will be abnormal.” [This will not do. Apart from Dewey’s criticism, there is the kind of society in which we live, which involves, systematically, distorted perception.]
[In volume one of Capital, Marx refers to commodity fetishism.]
[It appears as if money had the power of exchangeability in itself—the power to purchase anything and that it is money that expresses its value in other commodities.]
[The condition for money to have this power is an organization of production in which the acts of production occur independently of each other.]
[With a division of labour, the separate acts must still be linked to each other since, materially, they are interdependent.]
[The commodities produced then lack unity, and it is through the selection of a particular commodity that they gain unity—in an external and non-conscious form.]
[Once money arises, however, the source of this power of money vanishes in the very form of money itself.]
[Money then appears to have magical powers independently of human relations.]
[Relations between human beings assumes the form of a relation between things (between commodities produced and money).]
[This is not an illusion, but it leads to illusions.]
[Marx develops this concept of systematic distortion of human relations].
[Capital is, for example, a social relation, and yet it appears as a power of things (physical objects).]
[Neoclassical economists, for instance, attribute profit to the means of production—to their marginal productivity.]
[In relation to Dewey, Burns assumes that understanding is something that simply occurs.]
[Understanding, however, is needed when the relation between human beings and their environment is upset in some fashion.[
[Dewey writes somewhere that what something is experienced as is what that experience is—initially.]
[If we experience something as frightening—given the context—and later find, through inquiry that our response was unwarranted, the initial response could easily be still rational.]
[A loud sound that resembles gunfire might lead to a response of fear in the north end [in Winnipeg, an inner-city area], but after inquiry, we find that it was only the backfire from a car.]
[Was our initial emotion of fear irrational? Given that our cognition is false, it would seem so.]
[Why, however? A nun from the north end used to hear gunfire often in the mid 1990s].
[Burnss “theory” simply fails to account for many things that we experience.]
P. 30: “Depression falls into this category. It is always [my emphasis] a result of mental “static”—distortions.
[So, if everyone thought perfectly, then there would be no depression? If all Guatemalans, during the civil war, especially during the 1980s when the Guatemalan military, under the command of the Evangelical president Rios Montt, began a campaign of genocide against the rural Aboriginal population, would anyone be justified in depression?]
[Does Burns even inquire into the kind of society in which we live?]
[It is incredible how such “theory” parades itself as scientific.]
P. 31: “I have always been fascinated by the ability certain people have to create illusions.” [So have I. And Burns is a good example of “the ability of certain people to create illusions”—the illusion that thoughts, and only thoughts, create depression.
P. 32: “When you are depressed, you possess the remarkable ability to believe, and to get the people around you to believe, things which have no basis in reality.” [Burns should apply that to himself and to his theory.]
“As a therapist, it is my job to penetrate your illusion, to teach you to look behind the mirrors so you can see how you have been fooling yourself.” [Bad schools do not do that. But someone wrote once: the educators themselves need to be educated. Burns himself needs to penetrate his illusions of thought creating depression. Burns himself needs to look behind the mirrors so he can see how he has been fooling himself.]
The Abolitionary 