Once upon a time no-one was f---d-up: not because they weren't, but because there was no concept of being normal. Read any philosopher from Plato to John Stuart Mill – not one of them uses the idea of being a “normal” person. They may refer to “savages” (very un-PC) or to “children” as a contrast to mature adults capable of making reasonably prudent decisions, but never to being “normal” (they did talk about “ordinary people”, but that always meant “people who don't hold the silly views I am now criticising”). You won't find the modern therapeutic idea of “normal people” or “functional people (or families)” and certainly not the idea of “dysfunctional people (or families)”. The psychotherapists gave us the idea.
Psychotherapists are not psychologists, though they may have started their training as one. Psychology has two branches: there is a science that investigates the relationship between emotional states and behaviours and brain-states and hormone levels; then there is a a branch of moral philosophy masquerading as a descriptive science, and that's where the ideas of “normal”, “dysfunctional”, “personality disorder” and other such things come from. (In case you're wondering, psychiatry is a branch of medicine, not psychology. Psychiatrists may use Freudian or other ideas to help them, but then some GP's will give alternative medicines a shot as well.) All those personality typologies – Myers-Briggs, 16PF, the “Big Five” - are just well-researched versions of the Ancient Greek “humours”. Descriptions of the various personality types or traits are riddled with evaluative language and often show rather less subtlety than a sophisticated character reading from a horoscope.
Modern psychotherapy starts with that well-known coke-head Sigmund Freud, who stated that the aim of his therapy was to replace neurotic misery with ordinary unhappiness. In this aim, a lot of people have devised a lot of techniques, theories, schools, cliques and cults. People from L Ron Hubbard to Carl Jung, via Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith, have devised therapeutic techniques to cure a wide range of “feeling-bad” and self-destructive behaviour. The idea of a “normal” person arises as a contrast to the parade of human upset, misery, craziness and plain bad behaviour that passes through therapists' consulting rooms every year. A “normal / functioning / healthy person” is someone who doesn't suffer from any of those complaints and also manages to meet a number of basic social norms – for instance, regular washing, holding down a job, paying bills and driving on the proper side of the road.
Now, it is not obvious that a society that only had normal people would make any progress. Normal people are not so ambitious they will sacrifice or set aside much of their lives to achieve a very specific goal – so they aren't excellent at anything (trust me on this, I work in a company full of normal people). Anyone who tells you that an Olympic gold medallist, Oscar-winning writer, or well-known-in-their-profession scientist, engineer, medical consultant or artist is “an ordinary person” is simply not thinking straight. Normal people watch junk TV and spend Saturdays playing amateur sports, recovering from hangovers or taking their children to the zoo – not doing mathematics or practising a Bach cello suite for an upcoming performance on a Sunday.
The therapeutic idea of normality is not the moral idea: a therapeutically healthy person can indulge in hard-core BDSM, extreme sports, make their money from playing online poker and relax by watching endless re-runs of The Simpsons and eating Doritos. As long as they're happy, meeting those basic social norms and not messing up anybody else's life, they count as normal. By contrast, the straightest girl on the block who works diligently for a local accounting firm, plays in an amateur hockey team, works in the soup kitchen Saturday Night and listens to Radios Three and Four, might feel as hollow as an empty oil-drum, as fake as a van Meergeren and as out of place as the proverbial bacon sandwich. Fortunately for the therapy business, almost all criminals and a majority of life's anti-social assholes do suffer from either psychiatric problems or addictions and so couldn't be happy if they tried. It's the jerks who are pleased with themselves who make you wonder if being less of a Good Person might actually have an improving effect on the quality of your life.
A therapeutically-healthy person is not a cohesive character: it's defined by absence, a “healthy person” doesn't do all that stuff. What appears to be positive advice or characteristics - “strong boundaries”, “letting go” - is in fact what you do when you don't do what screwed-up people do. Most ordinary people will have one or two “normality flaws” - things they do that a therapeutically-healthy person should not. This just means they aren't perfect, not that they need to start going to group sessions. Normal / Healthy / Functional is where we start, not where we finish. Though if you've spent twenty years in a cocaine-and-whisky haze, you may be happy just to be at the starting-point, since it's way on from where you were.
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