procreation,
contact with the surrounding world, victorious contact in order not to
perish". This is the same striving
that Spinoza defined as man’s essence, the conatus. For Adler, however, this is not a drive
since although this striving is a "coercion
to carry out a better adaptation (that) can
never end" it is given direction by a normative ideal: Gemeinschaftsgefuehl. This is a goal to help co-create and
contribute, not to any given or partial society but to an ideal society which leads to the perfection of "all
mankind sub specie aeternitatis" (Adler,
1933, p.40).
How
do we know this? We know it through the
results of science, i.e., the work of Darwin. We know it through reason. We must understand that reason for Adler,
however, is not pure reason. Reason has
general validity only when it is
combined with social interest and is compatible with common sense (Adler, 1928.
P.44). We may also speculate that this
Social Interest is "innate--"innate"
also in the categorical (metaphysical sense), namely as a necessary and general
premise for human cultural development" (Adler, 1933, p.40). Although Gemeinschaftsgefuehl
may reside in the germ cell as a potentiality, it must be developed by
upbringing and the creative power of the individual.
Since
Social Interest is the ultimate normative value, if one speaks in the realm of
Aesthetics, valuable art would be that with which we can empathize, which
expresses Gemeinschaftsgefuehl, and contributes to
the progress of mankind. In the realm of
Ethics, it means that I am my
brother's keeper and I should learn to love and treat my brother as
myself. One must practice Mitmenschlichkeit, "being a fellow man," as well as
"co-humaneness" (Adler, 1933, p. 39).
In the realm of Political Philosophy, it means advocating and working
for a liberal democracy based upon mutual respect. This latter concept was fully developed in Dreikur's last major work: Social Equality: The Challenge for Today. This, then, is an attempt
to apply the three questions to one essay by Adler and perhaps see new
dimensions of meaning.
Another
thing Philosophy can often help us do is to satisfy our historical
curiosity. In his biographical essay on
Adler, Carl Furtmuller describes the group that broke
away from the Freudian circle and at first met in Adler's apartment. Among them were "students of Spinoza,
Kant, the Neo-Kantians, Nietzsche, and Bergson." (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1964, p.355).
Though these philosophers were discussed in this group, which ones were actually
influential on Adler and Dreikurs? General references of this type are
sometimes helpful, and sometimes not.
When
it comes to the incorporation of major ideas, Adler and Dreikurs
usually give credit to previous thinkers.
So for example, the direct influence of the Neo-Kantian, Hans Vaihinger's work on
fictions, The Philosophy of As If, is generously cited and so is Jan Christian
Smuts' Holism and Evolution. At other times, although sources are not
cited, key words reveal the philosophical influence. For example, when Dreikurs
defines man as a zoon politikon,
he is using Aristotle's definition of man as a social-political animal. When Adler states that we must view mankind's
goal sub specie aeternitatis,
under the aspect of eternity, he is using a phrase that is essential in the
Philosophy of Spinoza. When Adler
discusses movement and duration, his words echo Bergson's
Creative Evolution and our sense that
Bergson was influential is confirmed when he uses the
odd phrase: intellectual auscultation which is Bergson's
definition of empathic intuition.
Adler's view of empathy was also influenced by the aesthetic theory of
Theodore Lipps.
Adler's most poetic and profound definition of Social Interest is in
terms of empathy: "To see with the
eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of
another". This definition, unfortunately, is identified only as being by
"an English author" (Adler, 1964, p.42). I have been unable to
identify that author. If anyone can do
so, please share your information with me.
Philosophy
can also provide a historical context, an acknowledgment of our predecessors
and ancestors, and a sense of belonging. Just as an individual has a need to
belong, so a theory may also profit from belonging. Adler states:
What we find when we enter our life is always the
contribution of our forbears. This one
fact alone could enlighten us as to how life will move on: We shall approach a
condition of larger contributions, of greater ability to cooperate, where every
individual presents himself more fully as part of the whole-- a condition for
which of course all forms of our societal movement are trials, and only those
will endure which are situated in the direction of this ideal community.
We
can thus look at the history of Philosophy and discover the origins of Adlerian concepts in Aristotle, Epictetus,
Spinoza, Kant, Vaihinger, Nietzsche, Bergson, Smuts, and others.
We can find Dreikurs' list of the basic
assumptions of Adlerian Psychology in the writings of
previous thinkers. (1) the social embeddedness of man (2) self-determination and
creativity (3) subjectivity of
perception (4) teleo-analytic
interpretation of behavior and (5) the
holistic approach (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1964, p. 322).
I will not cite references from all of these authors but only note that
I regard two of them as especially important:
Kant and Spinoza. Among other
things, Kant is important for his insistence on the unity of the personality
and his distinction between private logic (sensus privatus) and common sense (sensus communis). Spinoza is also important for his insistence
on the holistic nature of the human being, the centrality of the body, and his
identification with the whole of nature.
Finding
one's theory and practice embedded a long historical context may provide
counselors with a sense of continuity, a sense of security, and a sense of
consolation or even a sense of comfort.
They will no longer see themselves as isolated but view themselves as
embedded in a long historical tradition.
Several
years ago, I wrote a paper on Spinoza and the Stoics. In doing so, I included a short parody on the
history of Psychology. I will include
that here so you may know that a philosopher is not always grimly serious.
How the Physician of the
Soul Became a Pharmacologist
What follows is a short
history of psychology. One might call it
a little fingernail sketch since it is too short to be a thumbnail sketch.
Plato,
and presumably Socrates, believed that the soul, though tripartite, was an
eternal and immortal part of us. Thus
the field of psychology, psyche-logos, was thinking about or reasoning about
the soul. In the beginning, psychology
was wisdom of the soul.
With the materialists,
psychology became the study of very fast and very slippery atoms, the pneuma, or vital breath.
Chrysippus and the Stoics refined psychology so that it
became the study of the hegemonikon, the mindful body
or holistic human being whose movements in the world were shaped by his dispositions,
attitudes and value judgments.
For the Church Fathers, psychology
became the study of how our sinful and all too human emotions, our earthly
passions, conflicted with our heavenly aspirations. Psychology was the study of the unequal relations
between the human mind and the immortal soul.
With
the British Empiricists, the mind became a heap of ever-changing
impressions. Psychology was thus the
study of sense data and sensations.
The
German Idealists claimed this overlooked the unity of the self. Hence, psychology became the study of the
transcendental unity of apperception, and beyond that, the states, levels and
dynamics of consciousness.
Along
came Sigmund Freud. Freud claimed that
consciousness was a sham. Conscience
itself was merely the introjection of social
repression; reason was rationalization.
Psychology, said Freud, was the study of unconscious instincts, the
libido and its drives.
The
Russians, who had a surplus of salivating dogs, decided that the unconscious was
unnecessary. Psychology then became the
study of the stimulus response arc. This
view was refined by the Americans who claimed that internality was irrelevant. Psychology was a matter of molding behavior
through operant conditioning and manipulation of the environment.
Meanwhile,
the physiologists were at work. The
physiologists said that what the psychologists were really studying were the
cranial hemispheres and the brain cells.
Not so, countered the neurologists.
Psychologists study neurons, ganglia and synapses.
Then
along came the chemists. They claimed
that psychology was really studying neurotransmitters and receptors that either
bonded or failed to bond. Psychology,
said the chemists, was the study of chemical imbalances.
So
the history of psychology is this: first psychology lost its soul, then it
became breathless. Soon it lost its
unity, it became dyadic and it lost its mind.
But then it lost hope just before it lost its senses. Psychology then lost consciousness only to
have to relinquish its unconscious instincts.
It ceased to respond to stimuli, deserted its brain, lost its nerve and
became chemically dependent. This is the
path by which the Physician of the Soul became a Pharmacologist.
Today
we have discovered that humans can produce their own chemicals such as dopamine
and endorphins. We now believe that
humans can restore some chemical imbalances by cognitive means. Psychology is coming back to the study of the
mindful body, the holistic human being whose movements in the world are shaped
by his dispositions, attitudes and value judgments.
It
is enough to make one a Stoic. Or an Adlerian.
I have said that Philosophy can also provide us a
base for evaluating new contributions.
It can do this by helping us to see Adlerian
theory as a whole and to determine which new ideas are antithetical to and
which ideas are supportive of Adlerian
Psychology. Adler himself favored
this point of view when he said: "…something new can never be created
through analysis. Here we would have
parts in our hands instead of the whole.
To us Individual Psychologists, the whole tells us much more than an
analysis of the parts. Also, nothing new
can emerge through synthesis if one simply puts the parts together"
(Adler, 1933, p.30). And he adds:
Every new idea lies beyond
immediate experience; immediate experiences never yield anything new. Only a synthesizing idea can do this. Whether you call it speculation or transcendentalism,
there is no science which does not have to enter the realm of metaphysics. I see no reason to be afraid of metaphysics;
it has had a very great influence on human life and development. We are not blessed with the possession of absolute
truth, and on that account we are compelled to form theories for ourselves
about our future, about the results of our actions, etc. (Adler, 1933, p.35).
Given this encouragement, I want to report on a new
book that provides scientific evidence for several key Adlerian
concepts. This new work is by the
neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio. It is called Looking for Spinoza. I will
briefly describe my understanding of his work and how I see it as differing
from and supporting Adlerian Psychology. Looking
for Spinoza is an investigation of the neurological bases of emotions,
feelings, and the mind and at the same time an articulation and verification of
the philosophy of Spinoza.
Kant had hoped that we could control our passionate
nature with dispassionate reason. In
contrast, Damasio points out "Spinoza wished to
combat a dangerous passion with an irresistible emotion. The rationality Spinoza craved required
emotion as an engine" (Damasio, 2003,
p.227). Spinoza, Damasio
and Dreikurs all agree that there are no such things
as emotionally neutral perceptions and that we can manufacture emotions in
order to move. While proper educational
training can teach us to "interpose a nonautomatic
evaluative step between causative objects and emotional responses" this
does not mean that the process is conscious.
Damasio states: "Somehow the
notion of appraisal has been
taken too literally to signify conscious evaluation, as
if the splendid job of assessing a situation and responding
to it automatically would be a minor biological achievement" (Damasio, 2003, p.55).
Emotions proper are bodily responses to an
Emotionally Competent Stimulus that are mapped in the brain as changes in
bodily states. These maps become the
foundational basis for mind because "Feeling, in the pure and narrow sense
of the word, was the idea of the body
being in a certain way…. They
translate the ongoing life state in the language of the mind" (Damasio, 2003, p.85).
"Feelings are not passive perceptions" (Damasio,
2003, p.92) but are interactive and can be modified by consciousness, memory,
association, and a historical self because with humanity "there is
something inalienable: A living organism, known to its owner because the
owner's mind has constructed a self, has a natural tendency to preserve its own
life" (Damasio, 2003, p.170).
Here Damasio clearly seems
to be supporting the concept of the self-determination of the creative
self. Since his work lacks the concept
of a Life Style and its fictional final goal he puts little emphasis upon the
unique subjective perception of the individual.
In fact, he appears to put less emphasis on it than Spinoza who had told
us that when Peter speaks about Paul he tells us much more about Peter than
about Paul. This also means that like
Spinoza, he does not describe the purposive
(telic) nature of human behavior.
When discussing the drive to maintain persistence in existence (the conatus), Damasio
states: "all living organisms
endeavor to preserve themselves without conscious knowledge of the undertaking,
and without having decided as individual selves, to undertake anything. In short, they do not know the problem they
are trying to solve" (Damasio, 2003, p.79).
The closest he seems to come to the concept of Life Style is when he
says: "Occurring in an
autobiographical setting, feelings generate concern for the individual
experiencing them" (Damasio, 2003, p. 178). These statements do not contradict the
theory of the dynamics of unconscious goals, but they do not directly support
it either.
When it comes to individuality and holism, however, Damasio is quite emphatic.
He forcefully denies that we are machines. He states:
On the contrary, every elementary part of our organism, every cell in the body, is not just
animated but living. Even more dramatically, every cell is an individual living organism--an
individual creature with a birth date, life cycle, and likely death date. Each cell is a creature (Damasio,
2003, p. 127).
and he adds:
Our brains and minds have a
global concern for the integrity of our entire living real estate, every nook
and cranny of it, and underneath it all, every nook and cranny has a local,
automated concern for itself.
One might say that each cell, by contributing to the
good of the whole, displays Social Interest.
In another passage (p.137), he likens the self to a
musical score. As some biologist once
said: "Every organism is a melody
singing itself." Damasio expresses this holism in a more succinct
manner: "No body, never mind"
(Damasio, 2003, p.213).
One might think that this would lead one into an
egoistic theory. On the contrary, Damasio credits Spinoza with providing a biological basis
for the iron clad logic of social living.
Spinoza had said: "our good is especially in the friendship that
links to other humans and to advantages to society" (Ethics, Part IV,
prop. 10) and Damasio says "Good actions are
those that, while producing good for the individual via the natural appetites
and emotions, do not harm other
individuals" (Damasio, 2003, p. 172). Concern for others is exhibited in empathy, a
feeling attitude that Damasio calls "the
as-if-body-loop" (p.115) a phrase reminiscent of Vaihinger
and Adler. What Damasio
means by this is that when empathic the maps of our bodily states may mimic the
maps of another, as if we were the same. Damasio
goes beyond this using the word "innate" with reference to social
responses (p.157) and echoes Adler's speculation that Gemeinschaftsgefuehl
is in the germ cell when he says:
"It is reasonable to hypothesize that the tendency to seek social
agreement has itself been incorporated in biological mandates in part, due to
the evolutionary success of populations whose brains expressed cooperative
behaviors to a high degree. Beyond basic
biology there is a human decree which is also biologically rooted but arises
only in the social and cultural setting" (Damasio,
p.173). This is certainly strong support
for the concept of social embeddedness.
Spinoza had advocated that we cultivate an
intellectual love of God or Nature. From
our personal and subjective point of view science seems to tell us that nature
is cruel and indifferent. Lao Tzu was
right: "Nature is inhumane. She treats men like straw dogs". We have no solace for the trauma of birth,
the pathology of illness, the decrepitude of age, and the phobia of death
except acceptance. Yet, as Damasio says, if we take a combative stance, it "seems
to hold the promise that we shall never feel alone as long as our concern is
the well-being of others" (Damasio, p.287) and
he provides this optimistic note:
"We should seek joy, by reasoned decree, regardless of how foolish
and unrealistic the quest may look. If
we do not exist under oppression or in famine and yet cannot convince ourselves
how lucky we are to be alive, perhaps we are not trying hard enough." (Damasio, 271).
References
l. Adler, Alfred, 1928, "Brief Comments on Reason, Intelligence,
and Feeble-Mindedness" in Ansbacher H., and Ansbacher R., Superiority
and Social Interest, 1964, Evanston, Northwestern University
Press.
2. Adler, Alfred, "On the Origin of the
Striving for Superiority and of Social Interest" in Ansbacher
H., and Ansbacher R., Superiority and Social Interest, 1964, Evanston, Northwester University Press.
3. Ansbacher H., and Ansbacher R., Superiority
and Social Interest, 1964, Evanston, Northwestern University
Press.
4. Damasio, Antonio, Looking for Spinoza, New York, Harcourt,
Inc., 2003.
CALENDAR OF SOCIAL EVENTS
June 3 - 5 North American Society of Adlerian Psychology, Annual
2004 Conference, Springmaid Beach
A
Publication of the