psi

Here we go again. . .

I’m doing some reading for a counseling course I’m taking and find myself thinking a lot about the “psi establishment”. (In my college days we used the Greek letter psi (ψ ) to stand for Psychology and “psi establishment” is a good blanket term for all psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health counselors, etc.) I keep being struck both by these professionals’ sincere desire to help a group of very unhappy people and the necessary judgementalism that accompanies any definition of mental health. We all think we know what a happy and well-adjusted person looks like, but do we really know how to define what a not-so-well-adjusted person should do to get there? I can’t help wondering what the true meaning is of a phrase like this: “shows punctuated sensitivity to the feelings of others, extreme loyalty, isolation, and an appearance of superiority that masks feelings of low-self-worth.” (referring to codependency). There are a lot of words there that may have a vaguely agreed-upon locus of definitions to those in the field, but you can’t get around the fact that this type of concept is like a quantum cloud of electrons—impossible to accurately define a location in time or space. Each of the terms in that sentence is a covert judgement, a method of analysis that uses a culture-specific net of concepts to portray an incredibly complicated human personality in very large pixels.

If you wish to call psychology a science, you will have the support of all in the psi establishment, but a good deal of argument from those in the physical sciences. It really is a branch of philosophy (maybe we should call it Applied Philosophy) and as such uses words, and concepts defined in words, as its tools. You cannot do philosophy or psychology without language. And it goes without saying (!) that the language you choose will strongly define the concepts you use. I used to get into arguments with psychology professors about their blanket statements applying certain terms and definitions of behavior to all of humanity when I already knew for a fact from my time in Japan that such was not the case. But it really ruins your cherished notion of being a “scientist” when somebody tells you that your carefully constructed theories of toilet-training angst are meaningless in Asia.

If nothing else in learning a language as different as Japanese, I have learned to mistrust definitions of words and the concepts they supposedly represent. There really is not a one-to-one correspondence between words in English and non-Indoeuropean languages. Here are some Japanese words followed by words in English that are commonly used to translate them. Can you really understand the word by reading the translation?

気 (ki or chi in Chinese)--spirit, air, feeling, strength
心 (kokoro)--heart, center, soul, feelings
わかる（解,分,判） (wakaru)--to understand, plot, divide, judge, measure
あまえ (amae)--dependency, sweetness, childishness,

(Can those of you who don’t have a Mac see the Kanji characters on your screen? If not, please install the Japanese language support for your Windows program. Try this link: Or get a Mac--it will make your life so much more enjoyable!)

I have come to realize through long exposure to such words and in getting used to a lot of what from my English-speaking mind is a lot of variability in meaning, that I also no longer really understand what is meant by English words such as “will”, self-worth”, love”, “confidence”, “self-identity”, the list could go on. If I’m not careful at times my central language processor completely breaks down and I find myself tongue-tied and unable to think, let alone choose appropriate words.

Which brings it around again to psi stuff—I truly believe there is a lot of good in people trying to help other people with their problems (define “problem”) and that those who think they can define emotional and mental health should try to do so and in the process try to help those who, by anybody’s definition, are not mentally healthy or happy. But they should never lose sight of the fact that anything they say, any terms or concepts they attempt to use to portray their patients or the path they feel their patients should follow, are very slippery stones with wide cracks between. Only the narrow-minded and the chauvinistic can truly have the balls to tell another human exactly how they should behave, what they should do, how they should live their life. Yet those who find themselves in the “helping professions” must do this on a daily basis. The good ones do it with a large dose of humility and awareness of the one insurmountable monad of a fact that all these words are nothing more than bees and tsetse flies buzzing around our heads, that in the end there are no words, all is one, the universe exists as it is, problems or no problems, sanity or no sanity.