Hi Gregg,
I'll provide a fuller response later, but just to clarify:
- A genealogical critique is not limited to developmental antecedents.
- The primary concern is with justifications as cultural systems, with their own complex history (that may stretch back centuries).
- Admittedly, a lesson in history may not be especially helpful to persons in states of extreme distress.
- However, justifications can be reconsidered as relational constructs, emerging from dynamic interplay of person and culture.
- As justifications are revealed as historically contingent, they are effectively disarmed.
- To employ an example from your article: I might say “It doesn’t matter what I do, the end result is always a failure.”
- This statement, considered as a thought, can certainly be analyzed. Moreover, it is possible to demonstrate that it is patently false, i.e., there is a relationship between behavior and consequence. As such, we are tempted to believe that our primary challenge is to help people choose better thoughts. e.g., "It seems I consistently don’t get the results I want. I wonder if I should learn a new approach.”
- This approach meshes well with (and effectively reinforces) cultural justification systems that establish an autonomous, self-contained individual (cf. Sampson, 1988) free to pass judgment on this or that belief system.
- As I mentioned in a previous message, I understand that it may be appropriate to perpetuate this myth on occasion.
- But we should recognize that justification systems choose us even as we subject a few token systems to critical scrutiny. So, in addition to analyzing this or that justification, we should be asking: How did this justification system come to be in the first place, and why did it choose me?
- To return to the example, I might ask: whose interests does it serve for me to believe that there is no relationship between behavior and its consequences?
- For some reason, I'm reminded of recent listserv discussions of the law of attraction, which seems to reflect the opposite belief: "I can have whatever I want if I put my mind to it." But this too should be subjected to a genealogical critique. It's not enough to demonstrate that it's false (and to encourage such magical thinkers to choose better beliefs). Rather, it needs to be shown for what it is: a "just world" ideology that serves certain interests.
- My point here is not that we shouldn't subject justification systems to critical scrutiny. Rather, we need to view them holistically, as embedded in a constellation of other beliefs that themselves have a long history. Moreover, there is no archimedean perch from which we can view all the choices available to us, as if we were in a Justification grocery store. And, to continue with this shopping metaphor: We are as much the product of our justification systems as are the buyers. CBT, it seems to me, is a psychology of the (self-contained) consumer. And it promotes this mythology even as it helps people adopt less "rigid" justifications.
~ Steve Q.