Mother and grandmother are walking home with young grandson who is riding his bike. At a crossing point he appears to be ignoring an approaching bus. His mother shouts at him very loudly. An hour later he is still very upset and tearful because his mother had been so angry and shouted at him. Grandmother says that his mother wasn’t angry with him, she was afraid because he was in danger. Hearing this, his distress evaporates.
The development over the last hundred years of psychology, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, counselling and psychiatry and especially their professionalisation, appear to have blinded us to the value of the ordinary wisdom on which the human condition runs. It is time to take back this professional expertise and integrate it into the psyCommons that belongs to all of us.
When we sit with friends and family how do conversations unfold? Through stories of our interests and needs - needs that are met, or not met – discussion draws on a collection of shared ideas, understanding, practice, and knowledge about how to live life – about the human condition – birth, parenting, living together, house-holding and so on. Some of it may be haphazard, even hazardous, but it generally works, life goes on.
The basis of the ‘psyCommons’ proposition is that everyone develops such a store of knowledge about their own and others' motivations, how we and they make decisions, and so on. The scripts of these human condition dramas, with the, insights and understandings they contain, are a shared resource of daily life – a commons – a psyCommons - that we tap into and add to and on occasion challenge.
Along with this commons of the street and the household, the psyCommons includes lots of ways in which, if we paint ourselves into a corner, we can find help. Think of the hundreds of thousands of books, tapes, CDs and DVDs about psychology; add to them survivor groups, user groups, help lines, self-help manuals, and 12 step programs; And this would be leaving out infant massage courses, five rhythms dancing, Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning in schools; radio agony aunts, meditation, co-counselling, and so on.
The psyCommons, or more accurately, commoning, a process, rather than a thing, is a wildly diverse meadow of relationship, some of it face-to-face and skin to skin, some more distant, via wire, in rooms that are miles or worlds away.
To help grasp the notion of the psyCommons and appreciate why it matters, some general definitions of commons might be helpful.
The commons—a hazy concept to many people—is a new paradigm for creating value and organizing a community of shared interest. It is a vehicle by which new sorts of self-organized publics can gather together and exercise new types of citizenship. The commons can even serve as a viable alternative to markets that have grown stodgy, manipulative, and coercive. A commons arises whenever a given community decides that it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with special regard for equitable access, use, and sustainability. The commons is a means by which individuals can band together with like-minded souls and express a sovereignty of their own. 1
The psyCommons is all around us. In caring for, and looking out for ourselves and others. In being ‘streetwise’. In being ‘savvy’ about promises and threats and prices. In making and keeping friends. In knowing when to say ‘yes’ and when to say ‘no’. There’s always been a psyCommons but digital media have brought it into focus as never before because the psyCommons also functions as a knowledge commons…
…organized around shared intellectual and cultural resources. It can be argued that in many contexts, unlike material resources, these intellectual and cultural resources are non-rivalrous and non-subtractive because one person learning or using knowledge does not prevent another person from doing the same. Further, a knowledge commons can be generative in the sense that it “can ‘scale up’ as it develops: the more users, the better the commons functions, since the marginal cost of adding users is zero, and new users are not only the recipients of the gifts of non-rival knowledge from others in the commons, but also reciprocate by producing new knowledge for them refined on the basis of knowledge previously received.” 3
To summarise: the psyCommons gives a name to the daily round of chat with neighbours, getting to work, remembering birthdays, dealing with admin - the likes and dislikes - the responsibilities and commitments of the human condition – and how we choose to live, love and work within it.
But isn't this merely a catalogue of everything? Well not quite everything. Aren’t there specific psychological ideas and practices that could only be safely used by, or in the presence of a ‘professional’? How do the psychology professions fit into the psyCommons?
The development of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and counselling has provided welcome channels of relief from suffering. It has also meant that a great deal of valuable human psychological understanding is out of reach, confined in these professions. Sadly, this has led to a huge gulf between the psychological professions and the psyCommons – the ‘knowhow’ the ‘know when’ the ‘know if’, we pick up from each other and our immediate surroundings.
Which brings us to ‘enclosures’, ‘the private appropriation of resources previously held in common’.(ref p2penclosure) Historically:
The Enclosures ... were fundamentally about bringing realms that had hitherto been exempted into the new and expanding commercial relationships that marked the growth of capitalism. Former ways of providing food and sustenance - strip farming, labour relationships based on obligation and deference, widespread access to, and availability of, common land for grazing, hunting and collection of fuel - were denuded and done away with in the name of efficiency, progress and private property rights. Anthony McCann Beyond the Commons.4
Author David Bollier, connects this past history of enclosures with present developments
…by 1876, after some 4000 acts of Parliament, less than 1% of the population owned over 98% of the agricultural land in England and Wales. (Bollier, 2002) Today we face an unprecedented situation where the private sector is drilling for oil in the oceans, releasing vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, patenting the genes necessary to cure diseases, privatizing water, and claiming seeds as its intellectual property. Its long reach now penetrates segments of society previously considered off-limits to commercial interests. This includes public education, scientific research, philanthropy, art, prisoner rehabilitation, roads, bridges, and so on."5
The psyCommons is a public resource owned by everyone. Over the last hundred years or so, and accelerating in recent decades, what the psychological therapies learned in their relationships with clients has been distilled into expertise, expertise which, as it accumulated privilege and status, protected these assets through becoming professions. Much of what had been free and openly shared became increasingly walled off and enclosed.
These enclosures of the psyCommons are not without value, wonderful condensations of the delights and difficulties of the human condition have been generated. But as with any intensified extension of human knowledge, this has cast a shadow, a very intense one. And, as with enclosures of commons down the centuries, equity has leached out of the psyCommons - the psychological professions have become more and more preoccupied with power and status, meanwhile the intelligence of ordinary wisdom has been demeaned and side-lined. It’s time to take back what has been lost.
How might the psychological professions harm the psyCommons? What has been taken? What is overdue for return? Some of the necessary qualities of commoning do appear to have been compromised by the psychological professions. They include open access to expertise and resources, and especially negotiation around the validity of expertise, in other words shared power around meaning-making.
A few notes on these qualities may be helpful.
Open Access
Access to professional psychological expertise can be an uncertain and erratic process. Recently trying to get some help for an elderly friend meant negotiating entry to a layer cake of distinct domains of expertise: GP, social worker, clinical psychologist, psychiatrist. None of them appeared to talk with each other. It has felt a bit like trying to arrange to meet the queen.
Validity
Validity of expertise in the psychological professions is a continuing issue. The dominant paradigm requires ‘treatment’ to be ‘evidence-based’. This reflects a scientistic hegemony of research based on random controlled trials and ‘meta analyses’ of results. A process closely allied to pharma research. In a reflection of the enclosure ethos of the psychological professions, a handful of academic researchers venture forth over its boundaries, and capture data in the form of measurements of our behaviour. This is research on people. Usually only published in professional journals. Asymmetries of professional power and privilege are diligently sustained. The validity of research deriving from peer relations, of enquiries with people, is under-valued, and even regarded as invalid.
Status
Professional psychological status in the UK generally reflects academic attainment. As a government minister defined it, (Chapter XX page xx) the pecking order is psychiatrists, then psychologists, both of whom have had their status endorsed by state regulation, followed by psychotherapists and counsellors who are on the way to being kite-marked by a state agency. Social workers, many of whom have ‘mental health’ roles, are also state regulated. Continued public enthusiasm for regulation of the psychological professions appears to reflect deep mistrust of them.
Power
All notions of commons and commoning not least that of a psyCommons, raise questions of power. Enclosures sharpen attention to how power is gained, held, distributed, and where and if it is shared.
Perhaps the most important enclosures of the psyCommons are those that entitle a professions, for instance psychiatry and psychology, to have the power to unilaterally make ‘assessments’, to develop, hold, and occasionally to enforce, definitions of what is ‘human’ and ‘natural’. The psyCommons notion is a reminder that walled off in the psychological professions are innumerable definitions of what is, or is not, normal, of what counts as a ‘disorder’. An eIpnosis favorite is ‘oppositional defiant disorder’ (ref) often seen apparently in children.
Exclusivity
The selection, education and training for the psychological professions tends to privilege people from white middle-class backgrounds. Professional psychological expertise is shaped by these values and priorities. In the last 20 years, becoming a psychological therapist moved from an awakening to vocation, to a career/job option. This has been accompanied by a demand for academic attainment. An MA and/or a Ph.D. costing tens of thousands of pounds, has become essential for a practitioner qualification that might result in a job. This has sharpened the divide between the psychological professions and the psyCommons
Effectiveness
Part of an illusion that the psychological professions, together with the public collude in sustaining, is that they are effective. Effective in the sense that if I have a ‘mental ill-health’ problem then there will be specific expertise that can be applied to fix it. The dominance of the medical professions tends to mean that too often such human condition difficulties are met by a medical model of assess, diagnose, and treat, and all too often, treat means dispense; pharma products. For example, in the UK, prescriptions for anti-depressants hit a record high of more than 31 million in England in 2006. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7263494.stm> However inhabitants of the psyCommons can be entranced by the promises of such ‘expertise’ and it can take a long time for recipients of this form of help to realize that it may only be palliative.
These are headlines that could be held to merit a much longer, more detailed exposition. The task here is not however some attempt to demolish the psychological professions, but rather, to seek to activate their generosity of spirit, to build a valued place for the ordinary wisdom and shared power that shapes daily life. To embrace the psyCommons.
The invitation to the psychological therapies asks them to come down off the pedestal of professional status and privilege - to open up their walled gardens of professional expertise and to join with other psyCommoners in figuring out how better ways to survive, recover and flourish might become commonplace.
The identification of a psyCommons in this article is offered as an opportunity, a ‘therapy future’. If you see the value of it, how might it be embraced? There are things we can do right away:
But isn’t there a point of difficulty here? A psyCommons may be an opportunity for the psychological therapies but will it not be seen as an obstacle in the way of them becoming a fully professionalized bastion of the state? Doesn’t the cream of our psychological knowledge reside in the professional psychology enclosures and won’t they claim to own it? Yes, that's perhaps so, but ultimately all this knowledge arose from relationships with clients. Ownership may have to be contested.
As with many other radical proposals for cultural innovation, as a therapy future, a psyCommons presently makes most sense as a proposal for transition. A move from tightly professionalised psychological expertise - towards democraticization – shared power – and alongside this, the comprehensive valuation of our ‘ordinary wisdom'.
the commons is one of the most potent forces driving innovation in our time. […] Through an open, accessible commons, one can efficiently tap into the “wisdom of the crowd,”nurture experimentation, accelerate innovation, and foster new forms of democratic practice. This is why so many ordinary people—without necessarily having degrees, institutional affiliations, or wealth—are embarking upon projects that, in big and small ways, are building a new order of culture and commerce. It is an emerging universe of economic, social, and cultural activity animated by self-directed amateurs, citizens, artists, entrepreneurs, and irregulars.8
To add a psyCommons to the existing lists of commons – oceans, airwaves, seeds, aquifers, bytes and silence – and suggesting it is in the same league, may seem an audacious step, but it is one, eIpnosis believes, whose time has come.
It looks like we are faced with the task of boldly venturing where academia and professionalized therapy might fear to tread!
References:
1. Bollier David (2009)Viral Spiral <http://www.viralspiral.cc/download-book>pxii
3.<http://www.idlo.int/publications/TraditionalKnowledge.pdf>
4.<http://www.beyondthecommons.com/understandingenclosure.htm>
5.<http://a-institute.org/global_commons_enclosure.htm>
6. ‘Oppositional defiant disorder’ <http://www.behavenet.com/capsules/disorders/odd.htm>
7.Anti-depressant usage <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7263494.stm>
8. Bauwens, Michel: Peer to Peer and Human Evolution: on “the P2P relational dynamic” as the premise of the next civilizational stage. Integral Visioning: <http://integralvisioning.org/article.php?story=p2ptheory1>
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A Psychological Commons
Ordinary Wisdom - Shared Power
Denis Postle
This text will appear later in 2011 in a forthcoming book THERAPY FUTURES - Obstacles and Opportunities a PCCS Books/eIpnosis/WLR Production