Bath of Steel: The Erasure and Regeneration of Marginalised Psychologies

By Dean Whittington

Attachment Theory, the Self Medication Hypothesis and Individual Psychology are brought together to revitalize marginalized men. Bath of Steel shows how therapy validates trauma through building a purpose by finding a meaning to live. This is the psychological escape ladder from chronic depression. Drawing on Frankl, Adler, Stack Sullivan, Bowlby, Khantzian, Winnicott and Fromm, hope is kindled. Then a practical therapeutic team intervention from skilled life builders harnesses this energy to create a custom built future. This is a psychologically informed environment.

Detailing early traumatic lives through 40 case histories of homeless men Dr. Dean Whittington PhD illuminates the various self medication strategies used to obliterate memories. Substance use allows these men to negate meaninglessness through creating a psychological withdrawal from the world. Psychologists, psychotherapists, psychopathologists, social policy makers, gender practitioners, criminologists and addiction experts will all find this revelatory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781467883665

Dean Whittington

Dr Dean Whittington previously worked for 16 years as a psychotherapist within the addictions/self-medication field, initially based in Deptford SE London, and then latterly working across South London. In the process he devised the first BAME, Women and Men’s therapeutic drug services along with support for young people at school. This therapeutic work unearthed issues relating to trauma in childhood during the 1990’s, dynamics that later shaped adolescence and adulthood often hidden from mainstream services. Therapeutic insight became a way of understanding the young people’s behaviour as opposed to imposing labels, idealisations and projections upon them. In the therapeutic work undertaken with the homeless from 2006-2011, underlying traumatic issues were unearthed. This discovery provided the basis for the launch of psychologically informed environments, later used by the Dept of Communities and Local Government in a more truncated form. The basis of LIFE is a return to the more expansive holistic and phenomenological foundations of PIE; erased within the current ideations. This expansiveness is highlighted here: Emotional recovery and positive interventions require building on key individual strengths whilst working towards a life vision. All of this necessitates working through trauma whilst requiring constant reflexivity when entering the bath of steel. The impetus for the service is grounded upon praxis drawing from both theory and practice to think about how best to support everyone. As someone who is mixed ethnicity and grew up in various environments where I faced several predicaments, I eventually undertook a reflection on my experiences. I became aware for example that the people around me had assisted me with my emotional growth and from this reflection I began to see how other young people can also be assisted to embark on a similar trajectory: although no two journeys are ever the same. In thinking about how best to support young people I can see that working through early trauma and building a positive sense of the future are essential. As someone who is involved in setting up the service, my role is in building the container where the staff team can innovate whilst working with the young people to enhance their creativity. It requires working through their defences, needing significant patience in both building, and then sustaining trust. It also entails thinking about the long-term impact of inter-generational trauma, in particular, how this shapes the present-day worlds of individuals: providing the basis to reflect on how to change the young people’s internal scripts.

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© 2012 by Dean Whittington PhD. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/22/2015

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8365-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8367-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8366-5 (e)

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PART 1: KNIGHTS AND KNAVES

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

Anti-Social Silences

System Failure

Understanding the Genealogy of Institutional Failure

The hidden emotional realm

Psychiatry as a will to power

Harm Reduction; from liberation to iron cage

The Rehab Ponzi Scheme

The Bureaucratic Bars

Psychiatry and Psychology as a mirror of the alienated persona.

The Pathology of Normalcy

Rationalism, Empiricism and the Erasure of the I

Social Darwinism as a Ponzi Scheme founded upon In Groups and Out Groups due to trauma erasure

Who is more Human?

The Philosophical Legacy of Eugenics

CHAPTER TWO

Don’t Give Me Problems

Dissolving Nihilism; Belief and Vision

Reclaiming the Other

Beyond Recovery

Overcoming Work Alienation; Autonomy and Praxis

Understanding the Causes; Self-Medication

CHAPTER 3

The Immoral Maze

Addiction as a Label of Constraint

Social Science Delivery From Paralysis

The Psychological Shadow: Practice

Tiers of Miscommunication

Commissioning Roles

CHAPTER 4

The Water Carriers

Carrot and Stick

Discipline and Punish

Collapse of a Good Idea; Arrest Referral

Hidden Lives and The Probation Service

Nursing and Emotional Denial

Nurse 1

Nurse 2

Legalisation and Psychological Erasure

CHAPTER 5

Image And Reality

Managing Appearances

Alternate Realities

Case History; Work And Alcohol As Self-Medication

Case history: Emotional Literacy And Illiteracy

Case history: Informed Practice

Case history: The Informed Decision

Case history: Invisible Black Masculinities

CHAPTER 6

Into the Future

Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship

Emotional Literacy and Emotional Shock Troops –

The Knights.

Batons of Trust

Therapeutic Models

Dissolving Self-Medication

Ideal for Living

New Visions: Emotional Regeneration

PART 2: GENERATING EMOTIONAL RECOVERY

CHAPTER 7

Background and Case Histories

Background: The Psychology of Buildings

Therapeutic Environments

Evidence Based Relational Methodology in Action

Case History 1; I Only Wanted To Be Loved

Case History 2; Only Making Plans for Jamie

Case History 3; Beating the Brat

Case History 4; Attack!

Case History 5; Pin a Label

Case History 6; Lost In Rooms

Case History 7; Beaten into Violence

Case History 8; Isolation

Case History 9; Finding a Purpose

Case History 10; Gun in Your Hand

Case History 11; Will to Live

Case History 12; Codes of Silence

Case History 13; All I Feel is Revenge

Case History 14; Violence Grows

Case History 15; Emotional Rescue

Case History 16; Madness is a State Of Mind

Case History 17; Equal Opportunities

Case History 18; Waiting to be Rescued

Case History 19; Magic Carpet Ride

Case History 20; A Waiting Game

Case History 21; Faith

Case History 22; Anger Blasts

Case History 23; Disdain

Case History 24; Dispelling the Fugue

Case History 25; The Inward March

Case History 26; Melting The Ice Man

Case History 27; Lost Childhood

Case History 28; Managerial Descent

Case History 29; Non Prodigal Son

Case History 30; I Did It My Way

Case history 31; Detox Explosion

Case history 32; A Great Unsaid

Case history 33; Rejection As A Way of Life

Case history 34; Man Who Fell to Earth

Case History 35; Man In A Lizard’s Skin

Epitaph

PART 3: THE ROLE OF THE KNIGHTS"

CHAPTER 8

Small Is Not Only Beautiful But Also Psychologically Effective

Emotional Literacy

The Knights

REFERENCES

But beyond the idea that it was good for medicine, many doctors believed that war was good for the men who fought in it. In a nation beset by nervous crisis, plagued by fears of degeneration, epidemics of neurasthenia, and unchecked traumatic neurosis, war emerged as a nervous cure all, a collective nerve corrective. Like the naive poet sons of the European bourgeoisie, doctors and social critics alike expressed longing for what Franz Marc called war’s purifying fire. Psychiatrists valorized the mighty healing power of the iron bath (Stahlbad) …"

Lerner P. (2003) Hysterical Men, P46

Insanity in individuals is something rare-but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Nietzsche F. (1886) Beyond Good and Evil, N156

Dedicated to those without emotional shelter

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Nick, Alan, Anthony and Patsy along with the project workers at the hostel who provided the infrastructure for a recovery program. I would also like to thank Chris Maddox and Laishan for their support and direction. Thanks also goes to Tony for his continuing support over the months this was written. Also thanks to Mike Hyden from Bedfordshire thinking through some of the ramifications of becoming psychotherapeutically informed and how the ideas can be put into practice.

In terms of reworking the ideas I would also like to thank my students who provided valuable insights. Mark McQuinn and Jane Johnston greatly assisted in the reading and proofing along with the invaluable support of Dirk Belau.

However nothing was possible without my wife who supported me over the months this book was put together.

PART 1:

KNIGHTS AND KNAVES

A very special island is inhabited only by knights and knaves. Knights always tell the truth, and knaves always lie.

You meet five inhabitants: Peggy, Zippy, Joe, Carl and Bozo. Peggy tells you that it’s not the case that Joe is a knave. Zippy says that either Joe is a knight or Bozo is a knight. Joe says that it’s not the case that Zippy is a knave. Carl says that Bozo is a knight and Joe is a knave. Bozo says, `Joe is a knave.’

Can you determine who is a knight and who is a knave?

Smullyan R. (1978) What Is the Name of This Book? The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles

PREFACE

The aim of "Bath of Steel was to capture the breadth of what took place within a homeless hostel and then rethink why a social policy disaster occurred and continues within the wider world in 2015. The homeless hostel is a microcosm for understanding what takes place within social care and health, criminal justice, substance misuse and mental health. It stands as a metaphor. Within the hostel I worked within and then thinking about the wider sphere, it emerged there is a silent disaster consuming lives and resources in a never-ending cycle; creating despair, suicide and violence - forever sending ripples throughout the rest of the social structure.

The people who end up at the bottom of the social heap are those who were seemingly broken within family structures from birth, then never supported to recover. These are the people, men and women, who were annihilated and vandalised in childhood, then subsequently crushed within austere institutions, erected firstly to silence and then tame their rebellion. This was undertaken within an institutional process founded upon changing their aberrant behaviour through discipline and punishment often delivered unconsciously by those who worked within the various systems.

The common retort, from those who lack a theory of mind (TOM), is I know someone who went through this system and they are a: stockbroker, racing driver, family man or hard working therefore you cannot blame their childhood. But this only masks the fact that these people found an enlightened witness, someone who connected to them and offered support at a particular juncture. For the mass populace who sink to the social bottom were never offered that support and they revolve around the services subsequently tasked to change their behaviour by the operation of power. These austere institutions never look at the causes, and following the work of Skinner (1938) and Watson (1913) they operate nudges based on grades of humiliation to change behaviour. The overall ideal was based upon the concept that mainstream society had evolved through a dialectic, and these people at the bottom of the social heap had not evolved. But I will argue this is a product of false thinking, the same critique that Adorno (1966) applied within Negative Dialectics as society can move backwards at the same rate it appears to move forwards. Lacking a theory of mind, the socially included cannot see within the individual and concentrate on what can be observed; the behaviour which results from an individual malaise. The alternative is to offer a psychologically informed perspective (PSIP) and then develop a psychotherapeutic escape ladder from the perpetual treadmill. This necessarily focuses upon the private logic of each individual to understand how they have constructed their world in order to escape from it. As a result this analysis stands as the antithesis to the various academic pronouncements which negate the phenomenological perspective and challenges the basis of this knowledge from the standpoint if offers no sense of emotional recovery.

Within the first version of the book, published in 2012 various ideas materialised from indwelling and deep reflection (Moustakas 1990) as I began to reflect further on what I had experienced as a practitioner and academic. My internal heuristic reflection lies on the opposite polarity to focusing on the objectivised demonised behaviour. Alternatively I began to reflect on what is unique about the human condition, the ability to introspect and make decisions and this emerges within the case histories. And it is from this on-going reflection this new version emerged as a dialectical critique. Within the first version I pulled some of the punches, because I was still encased within the field of social care, emotionally writhing with the sense of not wanting to upset people. I too was entrapped. This is part of the conundrum of any critique; being involved in it whilst exposing its gaping flaws and expecting things to change. It upsets people when the flaws are shown as they base their interactions upon their philosophies handed to them without introspection. The second aim is to show how life can be different, by offering vision and answers to the various questions, which have arisen. After finally leaving the field and seeing few positive changes taking place, this makes this critique far sharper.

It was patently evident to me that a huge miscalculation had taken place on how the socially included treats the outsider. To a large extent the values of the socially included rest upon who is defined as not me. Currently a vast array of advertising imagery is deployed to build a social consensus, to construct a social norm, thereby making people feel good; by defining what is in and what lies outside the group circle. Happiness is constructed by journalists, PR men and academics then bench-marked within the various lifestyle magazines as people apply themselves to these surrogate milestones. These operate as an ideal type but they are constructed as chimera. They are derived from the lessons Bernays (1928) makes clear in his book Propaganda, detailing the ability to change consciousness by formulating benchmarks, which people aspire to, as if they delivered happiness.

As each individual chains themselves to these external beliefs they acquire a habitus according to Bourdieu (1984); a collection of manners and tastes, deployed to show their social inclusion. What is defined as normal is carried an ideal picture into everyday life, as a measure of all values; it demarcates who is in and who is out of this throng. But in my analysis it only allows another set of adults, who were also smashed within childhood to assume adult superiority at the expense of their personal childhood inferiority, so they can project their self-worth as somewhat desirable. Whilst the sense of the norm is always under threat, the social consensus reaffirms this collective ideal as so many people have invested energy and emotions in upholding it. This is the first Ponzi scheme; faith and belief in this pseudo system and it leads to all types of knavery. It is gradually unravelling as the number of sex scandals are unfolding from yesteryear to puncture this ideal type. The world of the socially included as a result is no longer being perceived as the moral centre of goodness. In fact it lies on a cauldron of vice, because those who were smashed as children, those men and women formerly in children’s homes, the runaways and the tearaways are a major component of the homeless hostel. Due to their emotional collapse they are hidden away and labelled. These are the people subject to the cruelties of the socially included who can cast off the aberrant and cling onto beliefs which justify their choices.

Those who apply themselves to this central scheme then find an elevated social role as a result. This is deemed to have an objective value, existing apart from those who have manufactured it; those who operate in the higher echelons above. Social roles are defined by the economic system, the need to generate money and by the operation of powerful constrictions delineate the role according to the operation of power discourses. Those who access the rungs of power set the benchmark to ensure no one clambers after them. Increasingly however it is perceived as a smokescreen but this does not deter those who cling to the role. Each role stands alone, isolated; unaware of other people and due to advances in science it can continue for decades in its disconnection and lack of awareness. Atomised individuals project their world-view as if it is sanctified and anointed, no longer by god but by science.

Within this central world the focus is on becoming an automaton, someone operates with a narrow social vision. Each individual operates as a series of disconnected entities and this becomes the field of operation (Bourdieu 1984, 1989). It is where each isolated individual resides. Each individual then becomes an object, a marketing character; someone who is involved in striving for him/herself within the designated field. It is what I draw upon to delineate as a Ponzi Scheme and it is based on the manufacture of the self.

A Ponzi Scheme is named after Charles Ponzi in the early part of the 20th Century, a clerk in Boston USA who set up a fraudulent investment scheme, promising high economic yields for minimal risk. The scheme runs because each new investor pays off the investment of the older investor. As a result the new investor can see that the scheme produces results even though it may be fraudulent, but he/she joins accordingly. Therefore every person has a social and economic investment in continuing the fantasy in order to become paid out and reap the rewards. Any disruption of the fantasy, anyone who pricks the bubble or destroys the faith or belief to deflate it, is perceived as a major threat to all the players. Therefore it is not what is true which becomes the issue, but that which is believed to be true which becomes more important. It operates as Vaihinger (1924) outlines as As If it was real and has substance. People live within these fantasies.

Michael Polyani’s book Science Faith and Society (1946) for example looks at how science is based upon faith and requires a collective ideal to bring people together. By thinking through Polyani’s critique and by drawing on Vaihinger’s (1924) work of As If another rework of the social myth becomes visible. People believe in facts, which are not true, but appear to be true due to a collective consensus and this is what Adorno (1966) in his dense prose was trying to articulate. Polyani (1946) is important because he de-mystifies science and strips away the pedantic methodological approach in the first chapter of his book. For example he views the various scientific breakthroughs as nothing more than visions built upon what we already tacitly know. He views science as a collection of individuals bound by an empirical ideal to continue their faith in science, despite the empirical flaws. Polyani (1946), as a scientist recognises that ultimately he cannot assert the truth of science over anything else. Science is founded upon people believing it works and being indoctrinated into how it works to find out other theories which also show it works. As a result science is another Ponzi scheme based on an illusion, one that brings particular rewards in its domination of nature later transferred to the domination of human beings.

Polyani (1946) believes ultimately science will provide the steps to liberate mankind, but within the social sciences these empirical methods are being used to imprison people. My initial critique draws on Polyani (1946) and Vaihinger (1924) to unpick the current credulity. Just citing these authors along with their dates will drive the frivolous academic into a frothing fervour as these men, like the others I draw upon, emerge from yesteryear. For modern academia prides itself on up to date science, authors who have published their work within the past ten years. In response I dredge up the debris laying underneath the slabs of amnesia, the thoughts previously by-passed and then ask the awkward questions. Why have these people been forgotten and what is so great about modern research? The answers lie within Adorno’s (1966) critique of modernity as there is an ongoing reification, holding knowledge aloft as if it exists apart from the minds of those who have created it. Modernity by definition is deemed to be superior to the past because it is viewed as progression or an evolution. The fact that societies can de-evolve, move to the sideways and stagnate is obliterated within this belief system. It is only by unpicking power and standing back whilst also recognising an individual immersion that it can be exposed as a Ponzi scheme.

For the incredulous academic the people who have published within the last ten years offer them a beacon, as if the shining light to personal enlightenment is built upon their Hegelian Pollyana fantasy of knowledge increasing in vital stages. For these child-like beliefs I can only refer them back to Adorno’s (1966) Negative Dialectics where he specifically detailed how knowledge returns backwards in the same herd like shuffle, as it can potentially move towards transcendence and enlightenment. The progress of scientific knowledge in the form of eugenics, the scientific grading of people, led to Ravensbrucke, Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz. Within the modern world it is pushing us to the precipice in the developed world of over-consumption to compensate for a psychological lack at the expense of the world around. People create bubbles and exist within them as if they are real rather than constructs and this is based on their private logic.

Neatly glossed over, the modern juggernaut builds on a collective amnesia of the past, present and future in moving forward to yet another catastrophe, for example with its emphasis on neuroscience and the belief in social grading. This emphasis on the newness of knowledge is just another form of academic censorship, as the rule of the terminally incredulous comes to dominate the production of knowledge. By returning back to the past I aim to retread another route to the future based upon what has been deliberately forgotten. This is why I have drawn on Adler (1956), Vaihinger (1924), Polyani (1946), Nietzsche (1968), Marx (1848), Weber (1922), Bourdieu (1984, 1989) and Stirner (1844) amongst many others.

Polyani (1946) states that without an ultimate faith in the empirical scientific method, everything would be a free for all, a collapse into relativism. Alternatively Vaihinger (1924) views scientists as creating fictions where we collectively reside, ignoring anomalies because faith is more important than reality. I build upon one strand of Polyani’s (1946) thought, the concept of tacit knowledge; knowing something without being able to express the knowledge in words. For me finding the words to express an emotional reality is more important than abstract mathematical constructs which bind us. By viewing these as a Gordian Knot, my aim is to scythe through them. Due to the ongoing faith placed in current social science methodologies, warped into some form of mythical belief system I will expose the collective faith as a pseudo-scientific Ponzi scheme. This scheme continuously requires new indoctrinates in order to keep the collective fantasy intact. Universities supply the cannon fodder because they have gained the high-ground of scientific faith. Within the social sciences it is a ball and chain leading to what Weber (1922) terms disenchantment with modernity; as the iron grip of academic rationalism squeezes out emotional reality. Instead it produces the automaton and the reflections within this book detail their pervasiveness.

The result is that academics have been complicit in an institutional cover-up, primarily in psychology and sociology in drowning child abuse narratives by ignoring them. Furthermore by demonstrating a lack of comprehension in how knowledge is produced, disseminated and admitted into the academic cannon, they have colluded with the academic Ponzi Scheme of pushing abstraction and ignoring reality. Whilst psychology and sociology are complicit, psychiatry is the main culprit with its mechanistic reductions of humans to assumed internal chemical compositions; absent is the wider social world. Child abuse was previously silenced in most academic disciplines and this raises a considerable question about the current validity of academic knowledge along with the value of modern academia. The ramifications of child abuse are carried as projected beliefs about the world as nasty brutish short and solitary. They are embodied in the values people ascribe to the world and themselves, the fundamental division between Hobbes and Locke; the selfish individual in the war of all against all versus the concept of the human who wants to connect to others.

One counter question arises is what is wrong with this collective fantasy? The reply to the maintenance of a collective delusion is that psychological depression, alienation, self-medication, suicidal thoughts along with disconnection, dissociation and disassociation are the price people pay to exist. People, those who classify themselves as part of the habitus (Bourdieu, 1984) the mainstream, become isolated aggregates within a collective (a field), composed of other competing isolates. Each exists in a state of adolescent suspension, fearing others whilst wanting to emulate them and so Hobbes is proved correct, it becomes a war of all against all. But this social world is nothing more than a construction as Locke details. It is a mental health catastrophe for those who are socially included yet alone for those who are excluded. The mirror of this delusion is refracted within the casualties who pile up at the bottom of the social strata. In effect these offer the reverse mirage of the madness inherent within the socially included. Out-groups are necessarily demonised to show the socially included the outcome of not joining in the collective madness.

Due to the disassociation prevailing within the socially included mindset, they are unable to see the connections between themselves and their outcasts. Some of these failures are their own children who are labelled and cast off in an amnesic haze. For them these are the other, only explainable by their internal chemical composition; eugenical failures who rightly have floated to the bottom of the heap because they cannot cope. Yet those who cling to this faith fail to see the long-term consequences due to absence of a theory of mind. These children are the products of their actions. Whereas the socially included are rightly lauded with the piling up of their consumer fetishistic displays; varieties of objects documenting their social worth, refracting their social prowess. It is because they believe in the Ponzi Scheme that their lives become embedded within it and then they view the world through this normative disassociated gaze. Furthermore they want everyone else to join them.

Within this book I detail numerous Ponzi Schemes in operation. There is not just one, but a series of interconnected schemes. All require faith and belief in order to exist. The university system is the main Ponzi Scheme founded upon the forms of knowledge which are deployed to comprehend the world lacking practical value. These have a minimal use value or application to real life for creating what Adler (1956) would term a social interest or emotional recovery. University academics primarily are engaged in describing society as if it was a static entity. They have no concern with what could be, or even a thought about how people can tentatively move forward. Universities are a prop for the socially included; as the researcher descends upon the aberrant to describe their malaise through the gaze of those who see life through a disconnected window. All human qualities are erased due to an absence of a theory of mind, forever trying to prove the miscreants malaise, drawing on the fixed point of normalcy; the academic mind which creates ideal types. But what is being normal? How is this defined and is it just a collective hoax? How is the academic mind composed? It is shaped through the knowledge being passed by more knowledgeable others, who pass their views as sacrosanct through a process of grading, thereby weeding out any non-conformists.

It is here that society has become stuck and is in danger of withering through its preaching of dis-association and dissociation as a norm to aspire to. Academia constructs a backward gaze and tries to unpick the past or completely ignores it and creates ideal types to gloss over any deeper introspection. Whilst it has an obsession with the outsider, someone who exists outside of the bubble, its gaze is dispassionate and elevated. For the academic never wishes to assist, only to label and explain the reason why the other is lower and the academic is higher; using terminologies that lack a theory of mind; any ability to understand or comprehend the other person; to be able to walk in his or her shoes. The other become part of a greater morality play, bolstering the prestige of the university department as they are dissected and paraded within peer reviewed journals. It is through being dispassionate, levitating away from social bonds and self-reflection, the researcher sees the world through the eyes of a disconnected automaton. This becomes the normative gaze.

From this perception numerous other problems flow and they also operate as a Ponzi Scheme, embedded within advertising imagery, promising everything with its end-products. The product replaces human connection, offering instead an entry into a custom built dream world concocted from the fantasies. Bernays (1928) also depicts this in his book Propaganda, how reality is constructed through the manipulation of slogans and images. As a result people are currently made to feel insecure, by the application of Adobe photo-shop depictions of normality and aspiration to create ideal types. As they feel devalued and worthless, their self worth is destabilised as they compare themselves to the hoax that is broadcast as the norm. Meanwhile they are given a future promise that if they buy a particular product their lives will improve.

Advertising imagery sells everyone a piped dream and thereby aims to offer reassurance whilst also making individuals feel uncomfortable about their bodies, lifestyle and beliefs. Advertisers’ then provide a surefire quack remedy. So people are taught to believe in its necessary fictions regardless of personal veracity; their own self worth. This corresponds to Asch’s (1951, 1952, 1956) line experiment where he placed an individual with a group of other believers who convinced the individual the shorter line he/she was seeing was in fact the same length as the longer ones. The experiment detailed the power of persuasion or the role of the herd and these concepts fed into industrial psychology. Within the everyday world people are taught to negate themselves and then seek an external verification by measuring themselves against the virtues of this aspirant dream, even in rebellion; but rarely in transcendence. Asch (1951) showed how an external recognisable reality is distorted through the application of social power. Bernays (1928) previously outlined how this social power could be drawn upon to sell products by using personalities to market them to recreate the Asch line experiment (1951, 1952, 1956). However this bubble is not total and this book aims to weave a thread to lead the reader out of the maze.

There is a quality within people that cannot be calibrated by the clumsy pseudo scientific measurements; the will, consciousness plus their hopes and dreams. Many people out think the advertisers by ignoring them, but those most susceptible lack self worth and belief forever caught upon the treadmill. These are people who use objects as a form of personal deflection. They become superior through their consumption and compensate for their inferiority-complex through ostentatious displays, to beam a sense of hollow superiority. But as Adler (1956) details superiority lies within a polarity to a deep sense of inferiority and objects are deployed as a form of emotional compensation. The consumption of objects is based on a psychological lack, which is never filled and this lies within the emotional realm.

These herd like views are carried into social care and applied to those who remain trapped outside of this collective bubble. It is felt that within the treatment of substance use, homelessness and psychological health, people can be at best managed rather than enthused to engage. If they become better, then the special place where those who inhabit the dream begins to dissolve. It comes under threat, because it undermines the collective chimera. This becomes especially acute when the outcasts reveal their complex trauma histories implicating those in the collective centre. Eugenics is one of the staple beliefs fuelling the Ponzi Scheme, the delusion that those who take part are special, a self anointed elite who obtain power. Marginal people are not assisted (or scaffolded to recover with support) to transcend their predicament because it is viewed as a waste of resources. Instead they are tagged as genetically incapable, marginalised and silenced. The application of this view generates a paradigm paralysis, as it is self-fulfilling; as practitioners fail to develop any skill base to release them from their entrapment. Those on the lowest rungs are kept at the bottom.

Treatment of these other (Sartre 1943) people, the socially excluded is based on a series of miscalculations around their worth as human beings. These operate as psychological projections, similar to cinema projections, as attributions are ascribed to these other people, beamed onto them as if these socially included ideologies are true in themselves; rather than a construct or presentation. Those who then beam, then act as if their projections are real, and this is another delusion. This is how reality becomes socially constructed and why Polyani (1946) is prescient. Instead he posits the ideal of how society could be and this is embedded within this book. However his use of science as a liberator is a flaw. He does detail how the phenomenological world cannot be reduced to the empirical one; where dreams aspirations and insights cannot be measured. It is this observation which requires liberating.

Previously the unresolved psychological projections of those who attained power halted the social, psychological, regeneration of people, during an era of economic abundance evident up until 2008. It still continues with the debased idea entitled payment by results broadcast by the present government according economic value to each social interaction. Absent is any theory of human value and any reflection on the quality within a human interaction. Polyani (1946) advocates sensory perception and this is the missing key within any deep reflection on how we as a collective inhabit the world; the ability to sense others. Meanwhile vast resources are being poured into a bureaucratic infrastructure, producing a paucity of outcome results, based on measurement of behaviourist fantasies. The concept of the rational man who requires a nudge is just part of the insider fantasy, where everyone is coaxed to emulate a collective hallucination. Absent is any reflection on the private logic of each individual and why they choose the path of self-destruction or euphoria. For the socially included to look into the nihilistic abyss entails gazing into a social mirror. This is quietly shunted away out of view as it disturbs the culture of manners. Instead a market fiction is embraced to provide meaning to human existence where every transaction is reduced to monetary transactions.

Everything becomes visible when New Labour, Coalition and Conservative policies are analysed to see if any emotional recovery took place. The answer is minimal and this appears as a basic proposition with the current Conservative government. It is evident that its apparatchiks lack a theory of mind derived from their years of being trained to drown their emotions within their public school pedagogies. After all they brought the market fiction into being with the reliance on the spook of the hidden hand, merely a spook or a ghost. It provides them with a personal meaning, because this is all they all they comprehend; fictions. Human interactions are meaningless to those trained to render them invisible.

Up until 2010 vast sums were poured into the various silos; mental health, homelessness, crime and substance use for no apparent purpose other than keep people entrapped. Within substance use the notion of recovery has been an issue forever ongoing, since the launch of the National Drugs Strategy in 1998. New Labour for example defined itself as the overseers of parking off its constituents into a methadone netherworld to appear tough on crime. All across the UK local communities were swamped within amitriptyline, Prozac, Valium and methadone to quieten them down, whilst cheap alcohol flooded the corner shops displacing a social problem; a lack of hope onto overstretched liver units. The effects of cheap alcohol on the poor were noted in the 1720’s in Hogarth’s era with the Gin Palaces, so the strategy had forerunners. Therefore flooding people at the bottom of the social heap was nothing new. It was a cynical strategy of social containment beginning in 1979 and formalised in the 1997 policy reviews.

This book is primarily about homelessness. It is founded upon working directly with homeless men over a six year period; delivering therapy within a homeless hostel. In this respect the book is very similar to Erving Goffman’s (1961) Asylums. It is grounded within an immersion within a social environment. The aim is to re-evaluate all values, following Nietzsche (1968). It is clear that the homeless sector, substance use, mental health and criminal justice is filled with good intentions, but it lacks any focus, structure and perspective. Totally erased was any social ideal of emotional recovery.

Instead there are too many competing nihilistic remedies, too many people with a vested interest in keeping the homeless and marginal men entrapped forever caught within their silos, ensnared to further the socially included personal ascent. There are also too many academics who promote themselves as seers without any immersion and without any sense of this praxis (Freire 1970) leading to the death knell of practical knowledge.

As a result the poor, the miscreant and the outcast have become the raw material for the Gradgrind charitable sector, gorgons which produce glossy PR brochures, consummate graduate schemes whilst rattling tins at every opportunity to try and obtain unrestricted funds. These are used to pay off its burgeoning management salaries, where micro-managing the practitioner is the focus to induce containment. Meanwhile, within the collection tins, unrestricted money, when appropriately targeted can provide liberation for clients but if unaccounted for it can also be ensure their entrapment. People who donate need to ask what their money is being used for; management salaries or new emotional recovery initiatives? It is your money and everyone should demand charities invest and upskill their staff. Currently handing money over to charities thinking they know best only rewards a blossoming management salary structure, the sector who fail to generate emotional recovery because this undermines their power base.

Due to the government chant of austerity, charities have frozen or cut project worker wages, fired vast reams of managers and rewarded CEO’s. In re-reading the Communist Manifesto, we have arrived in the same situation Marx predicted in 1848. Charities are slick ventures extracting the surplus value out of the poor and using it bolster CEO and senior management salaries; those who survived the management cull. Those who enter the arena are engaged in ascending the managerial hierarchy in a manner patented in Macbeth. The client-base has become the raw material for these combines.

Meanwhile homeless men, the overwhelming gender of the client group are picked up from the streets by outreach teams, placed in a rolling shelter, then a hostel and after a period of years they are referred to either semi-independent or independent accommodation. When they lose their tenancies they re-appear at the beginning of the treadmill, once again. This rolling system costs billions and is overseen by the charities who continuously extract the surplus value from this morass and construct the appearance of care. The whole language is couched in care but it is ersatz. Latterly the homeless men are rehoused in private rented accommodation where they have tenancy support for six months; usually someone unqualified popping around every two weeks, or once a month to see how they are coping. Meanwhile due to the high rents they are encased within a nihilistic atomised lifestyle, where if they did work, the excess money would be gobbled in housing costs. At least the streets provide camaraderie. Absent is any psychological, psychotherapeutic or cost analysis insight into how they create communities. From each component of this service, charity hierarchies make money from this merry go round; street rescue, hostels and tenancies. Then everyone sits back in amnesiac contemplation on what is taking place. Absent is any analysis of the phenomena, devoid since New Labour introduced the Social Compact in 2003. Charities en-masse accepted the kings shilling and became drones to the system; acting under orders to deliver the perpetual treadmill.

Furthermore, within academia it is interesting that since the feminist revolution throughout the late 20th Century, these marginal men have become invisible within the various marginal university constructed discourses. They have been rendered invisible by the psychological projections of researchers disguised as being objective. Take for example the current domestic violence strategy with its focus on women and girls. This is taken as the norm. But where is the impact of parental violence on boys? By taking one facet of violence and viewing it through the lenses of gender, boys become rendered invisible, as if they can take the punishment.

Their plight is ushered away within social worker training, drugs worker and nurse training as the feminist academics have created a world based upon their perceived victimhood. So void is any focus on the masculine plight within sociology, criminology, psychotherapy and psychology. As a result these marginal men, those who are crushed within families are erased, as the concept of masculinities is perceived as a threat to their feminist hegemony; another Ponzi Scheme, rather than an offshoot or a relocation of gender. For men to be forever demonised, by a group of women engaged in a will to power, they have to have certain categories deemed as essential to their gender and in a reverse polarity they have created the ugly man. This allows the feminist academic to arise.

For these academics, this theoretical void maintains their power as they seek superiority within the academic Ponzi Scheme in seemingly fighting oppression, but in reality only wanting a larger slice of the cake for themselves; formulating their views in conferences, research papers and books. Each piece of research is a thinly disguised autobiography. Therefore these projections appear as gossamer curtains in their research. Academic knowledge as Polyani (1946) depicts, is not science in any shape or form. Within the social sciences the construction of knowledge operates within a thin veneer of science and stems from being self-disguised. Ideally it should be based on a phenomenological view drawing on intuition, improvisation, reflection, tacit knowledge and hunches, making connections to the other (Moustakas 1990). Researchers projections should be tacitly stated at the beginning of each piece of written work, such as what drove them to study the participants. My views are embedded all the way throughout. This book is based on my projections, which aim to strike a chord after careful reflection to generate emotional recovery.

Currently we have empirical or rational science. It has become a shield behind which the empirical academic cowers and then asserts him/herself. Any analysis of the current state of social science research including the hard science of neuroscience can be critiqued for recompensing the researcher for their previous childhood humiliation after being made to feel inferior. Within their objective neuroscience they are inflicting symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1989) as they cut themselves off from the subject and then posit themselves as superior in their analysis; objective and without any emotional connection.

Academia is not about constructing knowledge, as it offers no sense of transcendence and the operation of any discernible vision. It does however have a subtext based on turning a human being into an automaton; the neo liberal craze. This is why these men in these case histories have become erased from normal view. They provide an uncomfortable reminder of reality, whilst male and female academics inhabit their self-constructed hyper-reality.

Interestingly the modernist feminist perception is founded on the same eugenicist principles as the average psychology department. Boys are not mentioned in the current domestic violence strategy because men commit violence. Therefore the emphasis must be on protecting the vulnerable. The simplistic nature of this scenario lacks any theory of mind. Young boys as detailed in Beaten into Violence (2007a) learn to be violent as they adapt to their family dynamics. They are not born violent as the female academic projections depict. As they lack a theory of mind so they project their parataxic distortions (Stack Sullivan 1953) as a social norm. Power becomes invested in these fictions through an indoctrination process of learning to be a feminist; a woman who has no sons or brothers; someone devoid of male contact. They may have a father but even this is erased. The end result means that domestic violence only becomes tackled through the operation of various punitive measures enacted upon labelled violent men. I am not saying that violent men do not exist. I have worked, lived and come into contact with many violent men. But the difference between me and the feminist researcher is that I ask why. A key feminist author Nancy Chodorow (1978) provided considerable insights in her book Reproduction of Mothering revealing the family tensions, jealousies and rivalries. However her insights have been glossed over with the erasure of men in feminist discourses. The concept of relationship is perceived as distasteful and therefore hidden and men are recast as genetic brutes; sons, brothers and fathers are turned into the other. Ordinarily however academia descends on those labelled by the state to focus on why these men are violent based on the first projection; they are born this way. Therefore the Ponzi scheme becomes self-fulfilling and acts as a moral straight-jacket.

For after all, the social narcissist is only concerned about me, me, me. Knowledge construction operates as another field according to Bourdieu (1989), or another Ponzi scheme. Anyone can analyse what takes place within each university department to observe the thinly veiled autobiographies masquerading as objective research. To seek veracity focus on any psychology, psychotherapy, probation training, social work training and substance use, then think about what they teach about marginal populations; women, men, minorities and the disabled. There is a glib lip service to the interconnection between mothers and sons, sisters and brothers, mixed relationships and how people interact on a daily level.

Due to this academic black hole numerous economic and social resources are drawn upon to contain these marginal communities. A large numbers of practitioners are used as a form of social containment. Each practitioner intervenes in marginalised peoples’ lives with a behaviourist mind-set; to change them, but the deep lying psychological issues; their trauma forever remain untouched because it is uncomfortable. There is an increasing exploration of trauma by the use of questionnaires and then trying to make objective connections between being abused as a child and later aberrant adult behaviour through a mechanistic lens. The only thing this magnifies is the absence of any theory of mind (TOM) in the first instance.

Due to the hegemony of this absence of any TOM, this void trickles down. Each practitioner is tasked to act upon socially defined behavioural issues, outlined as a problem by the state; begging, addiction, anti-social behaviour or crime. Linked to the homeless industry are the mental health, addictions and criminal justice agencies. Each department intervenes, based on similar flawed philosophies founded upon Skinner (1938) and operant conditioning viewing the human being as a mechanical doll to be nudged. This type of perception is termed social autism; and it propels practitioners who can apparently function in the real world but who lack a TOM; an understanding of human relationships. Furthermore they cannot put themselves into the world of another person and retain empathy. Instead they remain enslaved to their own perception and cannot escape it; largely unaware of their entrapment, as for them being self-absorbed appears to be the norm. They look around and see other people entrapped and reflect this stasis. On this basis they operate according to their sense of personal entitlement, the measure by which to cast judgement upon the world. As a result they project their own sense of emptiness as a social norm by which to measure others and this leads to the others immobility as they are bound up in labels. The clients of their services are then subject to these forms of symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1989) as they are instructed according to their label. They are measured by what they are not; the culture of manners, the habitus.

In order to think through the multiple dynamics this book is split into three parts. The first part concentrates upon social policy and its failure to regenerate the marginalised, as it lacks emotional literacy. This is a term derived from Claude Steiner (2003). Unable to conceptualise emotions, due to an absence of a theory of mind (TOM), the various government initiatives have floundered, as the money has been squandered on nudges; those which can be measured by those academics who also lack a TOM as they measure their self-composed ersatz reality.

In this respect, drawing on Polyani (1946) another Ponzi scheme operates. I explore how this mind-set arose and introduce remedies, necessarily over turning many of the sociological and psychological sacred cows. One remedy is to replace the theoretical mess at the conceptual level by ensuring all knowledge is grounded in practice. I make no apologies as I draw from my experience from over twenty-five years to depict the various follies previously put in place and to show how each led to a social catastrophe. If it makes you squirm and angry, then this book will have achieved its purpose; to puncture the shell erected to deflect any inspection of an absence of TOM.

Each false belief is based on false thinking principally founded upon behaviourism and the pedagogy of the public school; discipline and punish leading to positive reinforcement. The book is interspersed with my recollections as I draw upon my self in reflection. The focus however is on knights and knaves, concepts taken from philosophical problem solving, reworked by Julian Le Grand (2000). Both categories of knights and knaves necessarily reduce the world to binary concepts. So these designations are here akin to those who are emotionally literate and those who lack a theory of mind. The book is split into three parts; philosophy, beliefs action and the offering of remedies. The second section is based primarily on the case histories, whilst the third focuses on an ideal vision.

Within the first part of the book the focus is on the battle over the hegemony of philosophical ideologies. I necessarily challenge the pseudo-science within neuroscience and trace it back to eugenics. I also challenge feminism and the erasure of masculinities. Then there is a shift into how these beliefs have shaped policy and practice before looking at how practitioners have been constrained by this hegemony. The flow of the chapters details the various dynamics between what is and what could be, as it moves top down and cascades onto the work of the practitioner and finally constrains the client.

The second part of the book outlines how psychotherapy, undertaken within a homeless hostel enthuses emotional recovery. It is the basis for the regeneration of individuals. One aim is to detail the huge gulf between people’s lived experience and how they are articulated within research methods within academia, founded upon an absence of a TOM. Within psychology, sociology, health, criminology and development, the emotions: trauma, joy, vision, ecstasy, self-doubt, shame, hatred and revenge, for example are expunged. Instead the fiction of the rational unemotional actor is positioned as an ideal, the psychological projection of the rigid researcher. The world is then viewed accordingly, as this fiction; is benchmarked as the ideal. As a result academia churns out students who are in effect fleeced; they have no marketable skills and this is how the Ponzi scheme operates. Those who work their way through Doctorates re-enact the same forms of learning and symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1989) they were subject to. Academia is no different to any other sector of society, it is just a frozen pond filled with people who need to thaw.

Only by undertaking a relational (Gilligan 1989, 1990a, 1990b, Mearns and Cooper 2005) stance with the homeless clients do their lives improve by building networks. Without this sense of recovery, each was trapped within the perpetual treadmill. The case histories in the second section detail the hidden realms existing beyond the perception of those who administer treatment systems. These case histories are the antidote to the static world of mental health; where those without a TOM operate these Ponzi Schemes with supreme functionality. This is where Weber’s (1904) sense of iron cage of rationality has become the norm; where emotions have been expunged and the tick-box reigns supreme as adherents learn to play the game within a field. Weber (1904) was one of the first of the social theorists to notice the mindset being produced within bureaucracies and his perception is prescient.

The third part of the book, outlines an ideal situation, a teleological end goal and begins to portray how homeless hostels could shift to become rehab centres, with workers becoming the more knowledgeable other (MKO) and offering emotional scaffolding to the clients (intense multiple support) so they obtain autonomy and work through the Eriksonian (1954) psycho-social stages. However this does not mean the introduction of the ubiquitous 12 Steps and the teleological march to heaven. This imposed paradigm has previously failed these men, because it negates their complex past histories; asking them to surrender and repent, without comprehension of their emotional predicament.

CHAPTER 1

ANTI-SOCIAL SILENCES

System Failure

The basis of all failure is the ascription of human action to the invisible gene rendering the individual to becoming a cypher, some who lacks a will, instead of being a social agent. The main treatment intervention was the 12-step model propounding the gene fallacy; the addictive gene genetically passed down as an inheritance due its adherents being unable to encapsulate emotions. The gene fallacy is beloved by psychiatry and is an offshoot of 1920’s eugenics, constantly used to make sense of the world. A disease is drawn upon to locate existential issues: anguish, despair, lack of self worth and absence of a future, reworked as a physical ailment and therefore ascribed to medicine. This however falls down within the current ideological stance when Borderline Personality Disorder is discussed. Within the medical profession a standard mental health label is applied. It is applied to people previously sexually abused when they were children. As a result, due to their adult existential issues: anguish, despair, lack of self worth, psychiatry has realised it has nothing to offer them. The same issue arises with addiction and weave throughout all the standard diagnoses.

Ironically science and religion meet at the AA crossroads. The AA model is highly dangerous for marginal people, because, as I discovered many of these men were abused within religious organisations. This is why its steps were perceived as irrelevant. In effect the 12 Steps often re-traumatises people by telling them their complex trauma histories are not connected to their current predicament because they have a disease. Some people apparently recover using AA despite this critique and therefore if they recover why should anyone seek to say otherwise? The truth is the 12 steps provides camaraderie and offers an outlet for the lonely and isolated. It does however halt trauma narratives. This can be viewed easily in the lack of any analysis emanating from the organisation.

Instead, by drawing on the outlined therapeutic methods, an emotional regeneration can occur as opposed to active forgetting (Whittington 2007a) along with repression and silencing. Forever forgetting does not offer a resolution; it only postpones the existential crisis until a later date and people are stopped from emotionally growing. Furthermore it means people never learn from their life experiences leading to the transmission of inter-generational trauma in their parenting. It is not the substance use which is the problem but the life style (Adler 1956) along with the thoughts which underpin it. This is not genetic, where the individual is provided with a diagnosis, but societal and is encoded within the views of the wider public who believe the state mantra. As a result the general populace is taught to disassociate memories and remains emotionally stunted due to an absence of a theory of mind because it was never allowed to develop. This is also an inter-generational legacy of negative parenting as described by Demause