“Mental health treatment needs to re-engage with the language of persons. This means suspending the detached, third-person stance toward patients, and attending to their actual experience and circumstances.”
Dr. Davis would replace psychoanalysis with “understanding that can bring unusual and challenging mental states into conversation with a person’s relation to the world.
Recovering this interpretive conversation means sharply circumscribing if not dropping biogenetic talk. It means seeking understanding, which is what people dealing with emotional suffering, like those we interviewed, yearn for. An understanding as persons, embodied and situated in a life-world. An understanding that is the enemy of fear and requires no othering.”
(Joseph E Davis is research professor of sociology and chair of the Picturing the Human Colloquy at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.)
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In theory, this was the breakthrough of the humanist psychologies of the Seventies when Maslow said, “Why are we studying the people who are malfunctioning instead of the people who are thriving?” Of course, Ruth Benedict got him to come visit the Alberta Blackfoot tribes and the climate, the people, the poverty — but it was all too tough for him. He only stayed weeks. That "pyramid" of needs that takes a person to peak experiences is for college-educated folks who live in the city. So maybe he couldn’t recognize strong mental health in terms of survival strategy.
Yesterday I made myself stop writing long enough to go weed whack my parking strip. This year’s weather has somehow made plants jump into growth of such vigor that grass is like bushes and bushes are becoming trees. I’ve never known such growth, and since it coincided with the thriving of microorganisms, both the famous one that is changing the human world and the subtly, not quite invisibly, ones that give us everyday fevers and achey muscles, my house is overwhelmed by green stuff.
An ATV went by and turned back. Happens all the time. But they never stop. This time it was a townsman whose wife has also taught at Heart Butte. I haven’t known them, but knew “of” them. He didn’t mind my filthy and cracked plastic yard chairs so we sat to swap stories. I haven’t done this for a long time. It took the whole rest of the morning that I should have been using at the keyboard, but we were checking out each other’s memories of the past here as well as theorizing about what the bloody hell is going on in the world and explaining each other’s past.
This was a man of intelligence who paid attention — recently retired, prosperous, competent, clued in about the world of irrigation — that historic force that goes back to the invention of cuneiform writing and arises everywhere there are mountains that scrape snow out of the sky so it runs down into canals and rivers in spring. Dams and canals, combined with long stretches of fertile soil, are one of the foundations of American prosperity,
In a sense, melt water is as important as buffalo in terms of feeding people. Valier was founded to capitalize on this and is part of the history of Europeans coming in to combine with industrialization — major ag machinery, railroads. and ocean shipping — that underlie the miles of wheat that’s just now heading up but still green and the huge consumption of fossil fuels. Solar powered combines are not invented.
This man loves Westerns, the good ones like C.J. Box’s or the ones that on TV we know as “Longmire.” I love them, too, but have put them aside for now except that they come out of the dynamics that I try to understand, not just the cultures of Euros on the prairie but all culture as it arises among humans, defining sanity and success. So besides the big macro politics we checked out things like the story of the family next door, which has suddenly taken their noisy dogs and left. We don’t know why or for how long. In prairie towns the townspeople meet in coffee shops before they open work for daily business so they can swap information and theories about what’s happening. Is there danger? Are there funny stories? What about mysteries? Do you remember anything like this?
Some of the talk has no doubt been about the state of my yard and what it is that an old lady does in there all by herself every day. Is there some kind of intervention the town should make to preserve the state of Valier by maintaining short green lawns? In winter we talk potholes but in summer it’s all about demonstrating propriety and sanity by keeping your grass cut.
Great tangles of grass and the rogue weeds of salsify (very bad), alfalfa, thistle, and flax (very pretty blue) are thought to reflect the mental health of the persons living there. This is an import. North of Birch Creek, the boundary of the Blackfeet Rez, people are not so different but not so intent on yards. Although Darrell Robes Kipp one summer declared he was going to reveal the golf course underneath Browning by taking a power lawnmower to the empty lots. Nevertheless, Browning’s economy is about grazing, animals rather than machines.
When Darrell and I continued our intermittent conversation of decades, talking about issues of culture, we were both trying to find out why things have gone wrong that there are so many people twisted and destroyed by poverty. What has happened to Blackfeet families and bands, how do we relate to modern institutions, and why was Maslow such a sissy that he couldn’t live in the West? It’s a time of questions that keep coming back. Maslow’s “discipline” was psychological. Some called it “the talking cure” and it was meant to be like the idea at the beginning of this post, knowing each other as human beings. Older than irrigation.
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