The Blue Monkey Review

Assumption, though, is too mild a word when it comes to the belief in mental health. The taken-for-granted-ness of this idea ranks with God, romantic love, the nuclear family, the goodness of free markets and the wickedness of Communism. For most people, suggesting that mental health might not exist would be like telling the kind of people who read blogs that they could have a meaningful life without the World Wide Web. The reality of mental health gives those of us without it a motivation to keep embracing pain because it builds character, it is part of the healing process, it will make us better people. Therapists serve as oracles of mental health; we accord them authority and status because they have mental health, or else they know how we can gain it. Assuredly, they know what it is, and they know it when they see it (and the fact that they are seeing us means that they don’t see it when we walk into the room). Such an important idea—really a whole set of ideas—deserves our attention. At the same time, though, if we want to simply live in our culture without turning ourselves over to it, we may need to spend some of our store of skepticism on mental health. If you’ve read the title, you know where we’re going.

Contemporary psychology grew out of western culture. Probably the issues that we have universalized to all humanity emerged with the development of a particular notion of “self” in the early modern period. The proliferation of autobiography, beginning in the 17th century, and the meteoric rise of the novel reflects the growing concern for the distinctive development and experience of individuals. Some 20th century psychologists have taken advantage of this literary explosion to search past times for exemplary human beings—models for the rest of us to emulate. I paused in my writing just now to do that for myself, but the first novel I thought of was Don Quixote and the first memoir that came to mind was Casanova’s, so it seemed like a good time to stop.

The conceptual framework, however, for studying the human psyche, and for identifying psychic health go much further back in western thought. Aristotle, in Nichomachean Ethics [I have the translation by J.E.C. Weldon (Prometheus, 1987) but this hyperlink offers another trans.] offers perhaps the earliest, and certainly the most influential, exploration character and mental health. For my taste, Aristotle’s approach, and conclusions, commend themselves to me more than those of many recent authorities. Aristotle identifies “the good” in men’s lives with happiness, and proceeds what happiness means and who achieves it. Most of what people strive for, whether they play flutes or build houses or become C.E.O.s, turn out to be means to achieve a further end. And the end behind other ends is happiness.(22) But not everyone makes it.

In fact, most people don’t make it. Of “the mass of men,” Aristotle writes, “Fuhgedaboutit!” They “present an absolutely slavish appearance, as choosing the life of brute beasts… (15)” “Cultivated and practical people” get closer to the brass ring. They “identify happiness with honour.” Honor, though, depends “more upon the people who pay it than upon the person to whom it is paid.” And here Aristotle offers an observation that will help us a little later go to the core of this issue. “[W]e have an intuitive feelings that the good is something which is proper to a man himself and cannot easily be taken away from him.” He goes on to consider virtue, though he sagely observes that a virtuous man may have a lousy life, and that could hardly move us to describe him as happy. In the end, Aristotle’s definition includes both honor and virtue, but these are combined in a man “who is adequately furnished with external goods, not for a casual period of time but for a complete or perfect lifetime.” (39)

I doubt that Aristotle would have universalized his philosophy to apply to all people in all times and places. But I’m sure he would have agreed that it could be exploited feely by 21st century American culture vultures. Mental health = happiness; which in turn = honor + virtue + adequate “external goods.” For clarity, Aristotle kicks ass. But, by shifting Aristotle’s views to modern times we have to take account of some of his other conclusions. First, he didn’t mean men to be a generic term. He meant men as in adult males. The circumstances of women in 4th century B.C. Athens had so little to do with those of men, that talking about them in the same way made no sense. The same would go for slaves and non-Greeks, and for that matter a lot of Greeks. Okay, times have changed, so let’s mentally retrofit this and assume for the sake of argument that women can have honor, virtue, happiness, and, QED, mental health. Even so, Aristotle makes it clear that we have located a minority, an elite. The “mass of men [and 21st century women]” don’t count as happy and mentally healthy. Today Aristotle’s vision would apply only to therapists, motivational speakers, and liberal academics at some of the bigger universities.

Fortunately, we’ve made progress since 300 B.C. We have new technology, now, that can extend mental health to the great mass of middle-class non-pundits. The best known of recent theories comes from Abraham Maslow. Maslow provided a summary and exposition of his understanding of Humanistic Psychology in Toward a Psychology of Being (Van Nostrand, 1968). There is such affinity between Maslow’s ideas and the Nichomachean Ethics that I’m surprised Aristotle does not appear in the bibliography. I’m not accusing Maslow of plagiarism; rather, I want to point out that the concerns of Humanistic Psychology are continuous with fundamental assumptions of within western culture. As these relate to mental health, we have to recognize that the idea of the psychically healthy (under different terms) has been a consistent figure in the West.

One of these ideas Maslow treats on the first non-introduction page (3) of the text: Each individual possesses an “inner nature…intrinsic, given, and, in a certain limited sense, unchangeable…” This is what Aristotle would call the soul, or what I would call the “self” (I didn’t originate the term). He goes as to characterize the “basic human emotions, and the basic human capacities” as “either neutral, pre-moral or positively ‘good.’” This inner person wants to get out, and when we (or circumstances) suppress or deny it, we become sick. The movement toward the expression of this inner person is what Maslow calls “self-actualization.”

A little later (26) Professor Maslow offers a summary of mental health that contains the core ideas we’ve already seen in Aristotle. “[H]ealthy people have sufficiently gratified their basic needs for safety, belongingness, love, respect and self-esteem so that they are motivated primarily by trends to self-actualization.” They move toward realizing their potential, their talents, toward fulfilling “mission” or “fate.” Okay, this doesn’t exactly mention happiness, but Maslow makes that clear on p. 31: “self-actualizing people enjoy life in general and in practically all its aspects.”

So, if I want to grouse about mental health I have to question Abraham Maslow and Aristotle and probably a huge portion of the psychological thinking that went one between their lives. From my vantage, however, the evidence still stacks up against the concept. Let’s keep our minds on Maslow’s psychology of being, here, and use it to examine the following life histories. Two men, about the same age. They go to the same college. One graduates pretty high in his class and goes on to a brilliant career. He has a loving wife. His colleagues universally respect him. His work is efficient. He has a satisfactory relation to his creator. When he acts, he only does so from the highest motives and even people who do not agree with him respect both his work and his character. The other one graduates from college quite a bit lower in the class. His has indifferent success in his first career. Although he has a loving marriage, he barely manages to support his family as he moves from one career to another. He takes to drink. People who know him have no idea what he is good at; neither does he.

Our first character—let’s call him Bob—meets all the qualities that Maslow attributes to healthy characters. He has achieved self-actualization in most spheres of life and promises to continue to do so. The second one—let’s call him Sam--barely manages to satisfy the deficit needs of “safety” and “belongingness.” Now, let’s add one more element. War breaks out in the country where these men live—let’s call it the United States of America—and Bob abandons his oath of protect the Constitution and accepts a commission in the army of Confederate States of America. He continues to demonstrate self-actualization, becoming one of the great generals of history, fighting to protect the parochial interests of his state and the slaveholding oligarchy that controls his state. The other man, the loser, rejoins the army and becomes one of the great generals or the Civil War. Ulysses “Sam”. Grant, a failure in most of what he attempted in life, including the Presidency, led the forces of the U.S. in defeating disunion, treason, and the possible destruction of the entire nation. This made possible the destruction of slavery in the United States.

I’m sure there are arguments that could patch together a defense of the psychology of being in the face of these contrafactual examples. I’m also sure those arguments would be wrong. It’s impossible to ignore that in terms of achieving self-actualization, Robert E. Lee clearly fits Maslow’s model. Most scholars, whether sympathetic to the North or the South, have managed to ignore or bracket Lee’s treason and recognize the admirable qualities that he possessed. If anyone could have made the slaveholding class appear admirable, Lee could have. But slaveholding, and treason in defense of slavery, have to figure in the mix. And while it seems that we have an Aristotelian critique of Malsow’s ideas (i.e., there’s too little emphasis on virtue), we don’t really have that. “To [slavery] Greece and Rome, Egypt and Judea, and all the other distinguished States of Antiquity, were indebted for their great prosperity and high civilization,” wrote George Fitzhugh in Sociology for the South (1854). From Aristotle’s time to the end of the Civil War, so few people would have chided Lee or anyone else for holding slaves that Lee and the entire slaveholding fraternity could claim all of western civilization, including the blessing of Christianity, as surety for their property in human life.

My criticism of mental health, in part, is the usual post-modern harangue. The idea is no bigger than its culture. In fact, if we think back to the beginning of this rant, mental health is part of the landscape in the therapeutic culture. But it plays a peculiar role. Glance back at the Lear’s definition and you will see that a sense of incompleteness characterizes the t. c. Consequently, mental health becomes one of the good things we seek. In fact, it becomes our major preoccupation. This doesn’t just apply to those of us with o. c. d., alcoholism, hysteria, and / or depression. We all want self-actualization; or to put it in Aristotle’s terms, we want to find a happiness that comes from within and doesn’t depend on the actions and opinions of others. But we don’t. Even people who should have some kind of inside access to the good of mental health offer no reassurance. For one reason or another, I know (past and present) a fair number of people whose vocation is mental health. I know them socially, you understand. Not professionally. And I’m not sure any would qualify as happy, though quite a few would fall into the “messed up” category.

If you visit the Lear’s article, you will see that one of the reasons mental health or happiness always seems like a moving target has to do with Aristotle’s insight that happiness depends upon being “adequately furnished with external goods, not for a casual period of time but for a complete or perfect lifetime.” In modern U.S. culture, if you have regular work, you generally have what you need to provide food, shelter, and a good bit more. But what qualifies as “adequate” when we’re dealing with external goods in Southwestern Pennsylvania (let alone less favored regions)? Just as a random example, if you are driving a seven-year-old Saturn, can you really call yourself a fully functioning human being? All mankind and much of womankind will assent to the proposition that in order to have human dignity you must drive a SUV. But, doubts remain. Does a Toyota RAV count? Or does it have to be something bigger, brawnier? Make up your own example. What do we believe we need in order to really make sense of our lives? Or, conduct your own informal survey—how many people in your experience, yourself included, are happy? Okay, now take that small number and ask, “If you subtracted [fill in the blank] from this person’s life, would s/he continue to be happy?” You can share your results in the Comments section. Remember, there is a purpose to blogging. You are serving the greater good.