Research designs and methodology in psychology: advanced qualitative methods

¶ … Hermeneutical Analysis of Psychotherapy as a Cultural Artifact:

A Metabletical Approach

The world and the events that are contained therein are not static; everyone would acknowledge this as fact. A simple reading of history would say that this is so. Also, due to evolutionary variability, living things (animals and plants) have changed over the course of world history. This is also a fact with which most would agree. However, when it comes to psychology, many seem to believe that "man does not change" (Mook, 2008). This is a view that psychology is static, that humans may have evolved from some lesser form of life, but that the psyche of people has not changed over time. This view would seem to be logically antithetical to the nature of every other form on earth. The fact the change exists in all processes is as understandable, anecdotally, as any mathematic proof.

However, psychology has lived on the premise that this is not the case for the human psyche. The views of Freud and similar theorists of the past two centuries are as salient as they were when they were first determined. This view is challenged in the work of noted theorist Jan Hendrik van den Berg. He has come to believe through his own research that "The world and humanity, together and in relation with each other -- through each other we might say -- change in such a way that the very materiality of things and the human body are different in different historical ages" (Romanyshyn, 2008). This is certainly a revolutionary idea, and one that has generated both support and criticism over the decades since its first publication in 1956. Tied to that idea is one in which psychotherapy has changed over time. In fact it is a cultural artifact more than a resolute fact (Cushman, 1995).

Definitions

The artifact in question here is psychotherapy, but an explanation of the method of analysis also has to be understood. In this section all of the principle terms surrounding both the main topic and the underlying method of analysis will be examined. These include how psychotherapy is defined in the writings of Philip Cushman, in which the construct was looked at as a cultural artifact, and the specific building blocks of van den Berg's conception of Metabletics which is the prism through which psychotherapy will be examined.

One of the first statements that Cushman (1995) makes in his book "Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy" is that "Every Era has a particular configuration of self, illness, healer, technology; they are a kind of cultural package" (Cushman, 1996, 7). This may be a foreign idea to many who reside in either an ancient or resilient culture. In those instances the idea of what constitutes healing, etc. is a constant. It is difficult for an individual to see how definitions have changed during the course of their cultural history, let alone during the history of a culture with which they are unfamiliar. Thus, Cushman makes that statement "that I am treating psychotherapy as a cultural artifact that can be interpreted, rather than as a universal healing technology that has already brought a transcendent "cure" to earthlings" (Cushman, 1995, 7). He does this because he says that psychotherapy has different meanings throughout history, and, as a matter of fact, the term would mean nothing to someone who lived many years ago. Therefore, the practice of psychotherapy will be examined as Cushman himself examined it. The practice is an artifact of the culture which invented the practice to deal with mental distress and illness because that culture found former methods to be unsatisfactory.

The underlying analytical tool is called metabletics which also has to be defined to be understood. Culture is the first aspect of the definition that must be fully understood. "Culture…is the set of values, assumptions, and customs, as well as the physical objects -- everything from clothing, dwellings, and cuisine to technologies and works of art -- that a group of people have developed over the years as a design for living to structure their life together" (Sipiora, 2008). This definition does not go far enough when used to help understand metabletics. Culture, according to van den Berg, is also a phenomenon that can only be understood in a single point in time. He illustrated this by using extensive examples from the way Europe changed from the middle ages through present time. One interesting study he made was of three photographs of living rooms: one from the late eighteenth century, one from the late nineteenth century and one from the 1950's (Mook, 2008). The first photograph and the third showed rooms which were neat and sparsely furnished, the second photograph, that of the living room between the other two, was cluttered and disorganized. He used these pictures to show that culture had changed and then changed back again in that area (Holland) of the world (Mook, 2008).

The second concept that van den Berg used to help construct his theory was phenomenology. Early in his career he studied with Heidegger and became entranced by the perfection of phenomenology (Simms, 2008). Phenomenology is, simply, the study of phenomena. It is both a philosophical and a psychological study because one side wants to understand how the person interacts with the world through though processes and insights, and, while the other wants to understand this also, psychology takes the scientific path. Psychology wants to understand how a person interacts with the world.

Metabletics looks at culture from a phenomenological standpoint and adds the concept of history. Some have explained metabletics as a "theory of changes" (Claes). Mook (2009) gives a more extensive definition;

"Metabletics can be described as the systematic study of the changing nature of phenomena of human life as they are lived and experienced. It addresses and explores human existence as given in relationships within a specific historical and social-cultural context. It deals with things, with adults and children, with men and women, and with their relationships to God. Human existence is seen as a whole, and as a matrix of meaningful relationships."

In this definition, metabletics is seen as a study of all aspects of how cultures throughout time viewed the world that the persons involved lived in. This is important because it can be seen that a culture will change over time to reflect the evolving views of the participants, and the new reality of the world around them.

Psychotherapy

Thus with these definitions in place it is now necessary to understand the cultural artifact that is psychotherapy. Sipiora (2008) notes that "the already cited phenomenological conception of culture, as the visibilities of the dialogues particular historical people have with the question of what it is to be human." This is the predominant question throughout history and it is a question that van den Berg believed that psychologists should be asking so that they could understand the people they are working with. It is the essence of being human that people are reaching for, and they can only do this through the time and culture they live in (van Spaendonck, 2008).

As far as the psyche of a person is concerned, they can divine the meaning of their existence through a knowledge of the recent past though. "Meanings are generated through the discursive practices of the culture, transmitted from adults to children within various cultural contexts" (Gergen & Gergen, 2003). Thus, Psychotherapy can be seen as a recent cultural invention because the term was not even coined until Freud began his practice in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Along this same vein, it is interesting though that van den Berg understood that even the concept of childhood was a recent cultural invention (Simms, 2008), and therefore a cultural artifact. However, throughout history age has been important as a portal for those who are younger to understand the importance of who they were through the cultural experience.

To understand psychotherapy at its core, one must first understand what modern psychology is, and in what ways modern psychologists differ from those who undertook the practice, though under different nomenclature, in times past. The variance in the two ideas of history is the primary dividing point. Claes (nd) says that "a psychology founded on the postulate of immutability would view life in past ages as a variation on a well-known theme; the postulate of change, however, allows for the view that in earlier generations life was truly different from ours." Psychologists see history as just as a set of different events through which people, who were basically the same as present people, reacted to their environment the same way people today do. Van den Berg's "approach stands in sharp contrast to modern psychological theories which are based on the postulate of continuity and sameness, a result of their adoption of a natural-science model which presupposes a uniform, objective, and unchanging world wherein phenomena are seen as continuous and quantifiable" (Mook, 2009). Of course, this is necessary for psychology to try and understand human behavior, but metabletics sees the change in human behavior over time, and explains it, also. To think that time does not change the most elemental of properties that a people interact with is ridiculous to metabletics. The people change because the world around them goes through fundamental changes. Romanyshyn (1989) may put it best when he says "history is a psychological matter and that humanity's psychological life, its hopes and its dreams, its fantasies and fears, its images and inspirations, are shaped as a cultural world" (12).

The prism of history is not flat because different people have walked through different periods of time, and culture changed with that passage. The present developed from the past in some ways, but not because of a growth of knowledge throughout history (Sipiors, 2008). The evolution of ideas has happened because the world has grown as people have progressed. The environment changes in elementary ways as time changes, and this is the primary reason why a concept such as psychotherapy is viewed as cultural in nature. The alternative is to say that psychotherapy has always been around and that psychologists were always dispensing pills and interventions. A brief look at history shows even the casual observer that this is not true. In times past (and even in different cultures which are present now) the concept of psychotherapy was completely foreign. People did not go to someone else to solve their problems, they saw the local shaman, talked it out with their family or they dealt with the issue by sacrificing something acceptable to the current deity that was en vogue and dissatisfied. Psychotherapy came about because people saw the need to solve issues that had previously been considered both highly personal and spiritual.

Thus it is necessary to understand how a historical psychologist would view the change that occurred which determined the creation of psychotherapy. How did van den Berg propose that people understand what had happened historically? If life had changed so fundamentally then it should be impossible for people in the present reality to connect with people from the past and understand psychology from their perspective. "Van den Berg prefers to start his study of a historical incident by transporting himself mentally to that space and that period in which the incident took place. He is careful not to romanticize; he studies his material and rationally sums up his discoveries" (van Spaendonck, 1984). He would consider a time and try to empathize with the people of that time. he would conduct research on the culture that he was studying, read historical writings, study art forms, he would do whatever it took to get into the particular mind of the time. "By living through the historical moment and trying to understand it, historical psychology probes for what lies at the root of things" (Claes).

This understanding the smallest facets of the culture would finally lead to the psychological foundations of the people of that time. "With every basic idea of psychology, the historical psychologist asks himself the question: what way of life and thinking necessitated this idea?" (Claes). Since formal psychology is less than two hundred years old, it may seem difficult to determine what the psychological thought of times prior to that were. This does not present a difficulty for van den Berg. His belief is in the changing structure of the universe over time. "The world and humanity, together and in relation with each other -- through each other we might say -- change in such a way that the very materiality of things and the human body are different in different historical ages" (Romanyshyn, 2008). In viewing psychology from this perspective, van den Berg did not see that neuroses could have been possible prior to the coining of the term. People had not envisioned neurosis yet because it was not a part of their reality.

Van den Berg believed this was true for all elements of a time. Ancient people believed that four elements -- earth, wind, fire, and water -- existed because that is all there was. The people of the time determined what the reality of the time was. With this view of history, it is easy to see why people believed that the world was flat and would imprison and execute those who thought that it was not. In their time, in their culture, the earth was flat. It does not matter what present people see as reality, to that people a flat world was reality. Viewing the world through a historical prism means that the researcher had to take the world at that time from the people of that time's perspective. So, a present day researcher into the artifact of psychotherapy has to understand another facet of the practice, if they are to believe van den Berg. Psychotherapy would not have worked in times previous to the one that invented it. The very chemical composition of the brain was different in times past, so the act of psychotherapy could not have altered the reality of the people who were experiencing mental illness at the time. These people required the treatments that were available because they were what worked for that time period and that culture. Because of the phenomenological concept of experiencing the world that one lives in, this view of psychotherapy actually makes sense. The people of another time and culture would not have reacted the same because they were not capable of accepting the concept of psychotherapy as it is practiced in the modern world.