FROM PERPLEXITY TO IMAGINATION: WORKING WITH MADNESS by Andrew Phelps Note: You may reproduce this material if: your recipients may also reproduce it, you do not change it, you include this notice and my name. Please let me know where it is being distributed at . Abstract This article explains how social constructionists might relate productively to the mental health clients movement. The replacement of the old, clinic/medication centered paradigm is assumed to require a new practicum for working with madness. Referring to practical experience in mental health client organizing, we identify the intractible social dimension as habituation to perplexity versus sensitization to imagination. An historical episode serves as metaphor for the contorted problematic the clients face having their creativity become seen as 'for real'. This implies there is a 'clearing' for professionals/support persons to provide the interpretation and social construction necessary for nurturing and mainstreaming these creative products. The stressful political impact of this paradigm shift could be handled by an analog - at the societal level - of the doctrine of reasonable accommodation of mental health impacted individuals in the workplace. Integration with Renaissance humanist traditions is suggested. _The perplexity question_ "We can now distinguish `insanity' from `folly' (Wahn ). Insanity takes place whenever man is incapable of meeting that which we can name the claim of Being This is always manifest for man in a concrete situation, urging him to the appropriate response so as to meet the claim made on him. The `situation' in which man respectively finds himself determines his `environment'. Therefore, insanity is the incapacity of `getting down' to things, of arranging things in the right manner, having the ends meet with respect to the environment. It is an illness: the insanity of Ajax." - [0,Grassi,E, Folly and insanity in Renaissance literature] Practical madness work Unsatisfied with the scientific claims of psychology, social scientists have posited a new paradigm widely known as 'social constructionism'.[1,Gergen] Today, there is a substantial body of literature developing this line of thinking,[2,Shotter] yet this school remains marginal in mainstream psychology. In real life, we are analyzing social theory as 'discourse' "over here," while 'hearing voices' serves as a diagnostic criterion for madness "over there!" [3,H.V.N.] By indicating how to reconcile of texts like these, I aim to map out a practical agenda for replacing the old paradigm in psychology with a new one informed by Gergen's idea. The heart of such a program is a description of the kind of work that needs to be done on the 'other' of current psychology. My assessment here is that the area of productive involvement with confusion/madness is the 'territory' that needs to be 'conquered'. The present paradigm of psychology achieved its position of central significance due acceptance in field work of its social engineering protocols (especially, clinical ones).[3.1, psychoanalysis] For social constructionism, the opportunity is to prove itself by providing better social engineering protocols for the underlying agenda of working with madness.[3.2,Kendall;3.3,JMB] I have argued elsewhere that what needs to be worked on is the empowerment approach to practical madness work.[4,A.P.] In this paper I will address what kind of work program needs to be undertaken in order to upgrade the empowerment approach and render it fully adequate. There is a history of partial challenges to the clinical approach to 'madness', for example humanistic 'personal growth'[5,Esalen] or challenges to institutionalization,[6,see Foucault] among many.[7,P&G] I claim that a common agenda with the clients/survivors movement[7.5,JMB] can result in a practicum, informed by these partial solutions, which also moves beyond them. I present practical experience indicating that empowerment politics is problematized by an irrational experience popularized as 'political correctness'. Hypocritical and one-sided resolutions of disempowering situations stem from habituation to perplexity and have institutional causes and effects.[8,Internet] This leads to an issue of sensitization, to the provision of a proper theoretical and practical defense for the ontological 'foxholes' of the empowerment partisans. Finally I look at the challenge society will face as those old habits are extinguished in tandem with an amelioration of the institutional basis for the perplexity. Mind control and irrationality The irrationality of crowds, of people playing to the crowd, is widely identified as an obstacle to good process and to making good decisions.[9,LeBon,Freud] Thus, in Pinafore, Captain Corcoran is caught pandering to this irrationality, when he exclaims, "Damme, it's too bad!"[10] His swear word transgresses 'good breeding' and illustrates for us the boundaries of 'official' hypocrisy. Like his challenger the common seaman Ralph Rackstraw, the mental health clients lose their 'voice' when social power merges with this kind of normative expression of group rationality. In the clients movement, normative expressions of conventional rationality establish, in effect, boundaries for hypocrisy/irrationality. By way of example, at a seminal meeting of the California Network of Mental Health Clients (C.N.M.H.C) in San Mateo, an agenda of changing work relations was undermined: In March, 1996 the first Bay Area Regional Meeting of the C.N.M.H.C. was organized under the theme of "revisioning" and the slogan, "changing the way we organize ourselves." A carefully crafted agenda met with organized irrationality, and a reality framework developed where this agenda was battered down to a shell of itself. At the point of decision the architects of irrationality raised a storm of protest and rendered the integrity and rationality of the adherents of the agenda suspect. This event is a case study on the problematic interface of client activism with the default social norms that develop in that under-structured organizing environment.[11] "Getting on with business" and a 'healing ceremony' mystification served to put a kind of institutionalized perplexity firmly in command. The direct impression was that the availability of the topics of change shriveled up and a moment pregnant with the makings of change lurched away. To the extent that organizing techniques do not anticipate and manage anomalous hypocrisy, irrationality will prevail and client business will suffer. Such 'anomalous hypocrisy' is maintained by practicing the rituals and advocating the traditions which sustain the perplexity. The personal capacity to influence the hypocrisy in an originary 'madness' environment requires involuntary mind discipline that distances the activist from the heat of the moment. The logic of mind control, of devices inducing mind discipline, appears to be the text for controlling the threat of real change.[12, 'Greenbaum'] Thus when the envelope of hypocrisy emerges, an uncanny experience of enforced ineffectuality alienates those entrapped in it from themselves[13,apophany]. The out-of-control subjective process that takes over is descriptively known variously by terms such as 'primary process' or 'limbic process'.[14;15;16,Vico] The existential experience of being stuck on such institutionally supported confusion makes us fall out of contact with our own originary reactive behaviors. My hope and expectation is that with constructionist support such ontological problems can be rendered accessible in real time so we can keep people from having their minds 'blown'. The information commodity The popular model currently for 'process' is the information system, with its 'inputs', 'outputs', 'feedback', etc.[17,Haugeland] A rationalistic Cartesian or Enlightenment logic of this sort sets discursive 'boundaries' for expectations, interactive dynamics, cognitive representations in general.[18,LW] This rationally articulated system at the center of modern thought uses abstract terminology that belies 'voice', belies metaphor, belies discourse itself.[19,Derrida] I call this conceptual system, that channels social behavior into a simplistic logic of 'information processing',[20,McNeill] that alienates through mind/body splitting [21,Perls], an institutionalized perplexity system. When we take for an epistemology the 'consumption' of a 'knowledge commodity', we degrade our grasp on involvement with truth. Phronesis,[22,CPEL] the traditional knowing by practical involvement, is passed up in favor of rigid formulations which constrict expression and entrap people in their logics. Mental health clients are exceptionally impacted by rigid logics inasmuch as they are trained to this practice by the diagnostic labeling and personal case managing they receive. When they accomodate themselves to a 'consumer' role, they identify themselves - and get socially defined - as low-functioning.[23,McLuhan] Within the perplexity system, the over-reliance on some cognitive constructs and under-reliance on others creates tension points in the social fabric. Thus interactions among clients when under pressure range from irrelevant social banalities to astonishing, subjective, and ungrounded mental collisions: The classical text on unqualified egotistical behavior [24, Stirner] reflects and illustrates the formation of socially unaccountable attitudes. Experience in the clients movement shows conflicts are liable to reduce to dyadic psychological violence that is moreover embedded in the logic of the perplexity system. At the root of this problematic however is not some primal or limbic automatism, but an ontological confusion which reflects the current psychological paradigm. For a direction of remedy, I recommend that people look into the work of Donnel Stern on 'unformulated experience'[25], which addresses this lacuna in the clinical practicum. We see thus that 'fighting words' like "damme" quoted from Pinafore above serve to express the other of the logic of the perplexity system. Reduced, labeled interactions replace genuine dialogue with 'politically correct' monologues that spin off 'off- color' tension-releasers for counterpoint.[26,Shotter,PC] From information seen as 'commodity', we have looked through client communication breakdowns and come around to disinformation as the 'other' of that 'commodity'. To express, without undue frenzy, the underlying irrationalities which we have identified, we need to articulate a humanistic discipline.[27,Gadamer] In order to support this we have to develop a hermeneutics of creative expression by clients[28,Sass,MM] and oversee the construction of a logic for its social acceptance. In other words, social constructionism should be involved in opening the 'clearing' for a viable ontological approach to 'process'. Blame and brainwash 'Creative expression' here means using language as a rhetorical production, to invent and persuade, to meet the claim of Being.[29,Grassi] Our involvement in and connection with the topics of 'common sense' gives us the capacity to inform and persuade people by way of the 'social poetics'[29.25,Shotter] using metaphors and other tropes. The very social connectivity of the act of language production, on the other hand, thrusts us, as speakers or writers, into an expectation of social accountability[29.5,Shotter] for our talk. When our model of knowledge - such as the logic of 'information' - neglects or downplays the capacities of involvement, we become shrill persuaders and deficient in accountability.[30,Haan] The rationalistic perpexity system induces 'explanations', in other words, stilted if structured metaphors, which lead to unclarity and confine Being within 'blind spots'. This 'fallenness'[30.5,Dreyfus] is characterized by a kind of tension points, where confusing, overly condensed expression muddles clarity and is experienced as 'soul deadness'. Moreover, forcing rhetorical expression from this modality can cause the soul deadness to reflect itself in florid (but not lucid) metaphor where the tension points appear as blaming.[31,Gadamer] Logical argument in this mode tends to blunt and divert sense; when forced and focused with instrumental precision, it becomes a mode of induced irrationality, or brainwash. The clients, being strongly habituated to this blaming/brainwash modality, are especially vulnerable to the irrationality and confusion emanating from the perplexity system itself. Separating their ideation from the resonant effect of the 'dumb thinking' reinforced by perplexity is hard, and calls for articulated work with the 'other' of the impacted conceptual process.[32,Freud;32.5,Rosch] The costs of emergence from this kind of ontological 'foxhole' and 'walking freely' determine our capacity to empower the compromised clients. Bypassing blaming, managing florid metaphor - going beyond brainwash mode - will require not only substantial resources but also an adequate theoretical backing. When a perplexity complex gets deconstructed in its particulars, we open a 'clearing' for an empowered self-healing work process. The monological, soul deadening qualities of rationalistic 'information processing' will lose their capacity to overawe and recede into a context accessible to rhetorical expression.[33,Port Royal Logick] More and more we will find the wherewithal to support everyday conversations regarding madness, with people at risk from the pressures of brainwash. Rather than address the person as reification or 'diagnosis', we will move toward a humanistic advocacy built upon its traditions from rhetoric, philology, jurisprudence, and poetry. _The client predicament_ "Suspense, the worst of evils, was at length determined by the ministers of death, who executed, and perhaps exceeded, the inhuman mandate of Theodoric. A strong cord was fastened round the head of Boethius, and forcibly tightened till his eyes almost started from their sockets; and some mercy may be discovered in the milder torture of beating him with clubs until he expired. But his genius survived to diffuse a ray of knowledge over the darkest ages of the Latin world .." [34,Gibbon,E,The decline and fall of the Roman Empire:(abridged version)] The 'soul deadness' experience The perplexity system presents itself to the client activist as a maddeningly difficult obstacle to the equilibration of his/her personal situation. Self-expression is aversively conditioned and the stigma experience[35,Goffman] is reinforced as economic discrimination due to the implausibility of employment. His/her exercise of imagination is discouraged or channeled, so that role expectations lend disrespect for creative activity and provoke blame for its being originary irrationality of behavior. Subjectively limited, lacking an explicit rational justification for the 'internal tools' of creativity, the client has little capacity to cope with pejorative objectification. The attitude and social reinforcement that categorizes/objectifies the client at the very point of creativity itself presents a peculiar, direct block for self-development. The impropriety of the topic of self in this circumstance leads to a narrow and rigid reification, while neglect of the tropes of self promotes 'blind spots' of underdeveloped personality.[36,res/verba] The ostensible 'limbic' or 'primal' predilection of the mad personality at these points thus presents poorly, tends to appear irrational/explosive, and is liable to excess and heedlessness. Overall, there arises a kind of dynamical 'power vacuum' of personal expression that needs to be 'made reasonable' in everyday interaction. The stress from blame, the degradation from brainwash, and the emotional wallow in 'soul deadness' that the client experiences lead to hard choices around the creative modality. One approach is to get into florid (and lucid) metaphors of Vision, to exhibit the exuberant creative reach of the likes of Hildegard von Bingen or William Blake. The more commonplace alternative is to bog down in confusion and illusion deriving from peculiarities of "education, habit, and accident."[37,Bacon] The identification/articulation of the nature of the poorly grounded talent/defect of madness has subversive implications for the 'information commodity' thought norms of the perplexity system.[37.5,'Stastny'] Thus the topics, the commonplaces, of client creativity arise in an irrational situation and will have to be drawn from the antecedents of rationalistic thought. Viewed this way, the 'mandate' of creative insight/expression comes along with the burden of a prodigious task of resolving intense confusion reasonably. In conflict with the way that the perplexity system challenges personal integrity and deadens the soul, the client- centered perspective[38,AB14] must be nourished and protected. The potential value of social constructionism is in its capacity to help define, structure, and support the work conditions of client creativity meaningfully and productively. Uncontrollable imagination Living with the manifest irrationality of the 'uncanny', inchoate frame of the madness experience is in the first place a vulnerable social condition for the client. In our competitive society, how then can we afford any reasonable expectation to the client that his/her voice will be heard, or conviction have impact? Worse yet, the typical criterion of institutional discharge being social conditioning to 'docility', the client has a reasonable expectation of being misconstrued! Behavior identified in the perplexity framework as 'incorrigible' may likely in fact amount to a kind of beleaguered hard-headedness, combined with a sensitive or visionary quality which is problematically productive in nature.[39,Dennert] Many believe in effect that 'wickedness' (the root meaning of 'illness') is the bottom line nature of client irrationality. An alternative model may be found in the idealism of Boethius, who wrote a visionary text that captured the pathos of the feudal experience while he was awaiting execution at the hand of the Ostrogoth Emperor Theodoric: Boethius (d. 524) was the leading Roman intellectual of his era, a time when the Ostrogoths ruled a fallen Western Roman Empire. His pure but impolitic activity as Senator was deemed treasonable, apparently due to its opacity to the barbarian Ostrogoth ruler Theodoric whose credulity was strained. While awaiting execution in prison, he wrote The consolation of philosophy[40] which became one of the great inspirational texts of the medieval and Renaissance periods. The 'mad' or irrational character of his life's resolution is symbolized by his eyes nearly popping out as he was garotted by the executioner.[41,Gibbon] The dilemma that Boethius faced in full rationality was so deeply irrational that it serves as metaphor for the way that the 'bizarre' client experience reflects historical possibility. Are not the conventional 'solutions' to madness - exorcism, punishment, medical insult, control - the outcome of provider despair, imposing irrational response onto terrible predicament? In extremis, the client loses coherence or measuredness of being, so that habituation to this situation, even if 'symptom-free', leaves people with little to lose but their disempowerment.[42] This implied revolutionary paradigm may lead people to think to challenge and confront perplexity, but the terrible social consequences give pause. While a creative person may invoke the spiritual implications of putative insight, take the risk, and hope to transcend conditions, still client status obstructs the capacity to deter control.[43,Siebert] The harsh choice of amputation of one's Vision is put against the dangerous alternative of leaving oneself available to the social reaction against unwieldy imagination. In sum, the reality problem clients face leads to conflict with the perplexity-driven boundaries of social arrangements and norms. To master the irrationality and become accountable to his/her issues of imagination, the client must make complex choices far exceeding the operational limits of normal expectation. To put in question the core rationality of the society at a moment in history cannot but have a quality of folly about it; it creates a drama larger than life.[44,Erasmus] Another consequence, too, is that the problem of providing appropriate support for impacted agendas of imagination calls for major professional collaboration. Disconnection and perplexity The opening conventionally presented for engaging such vulnerability and confusion is to 'tinker' with a rationalist 'information' construct in order to patch its mismatches. The perplexity system, with its habituated lines of thought, renders the vague images from its other as disconnects lacking rational clarity.[44.5,Descartes] Cleverly compensating rationalities may provide nearly explanatory remedies to conceptual confusion, yet in principle such fixes are of limited scope. The expression of clear insight, of "correct" interpretation,[45,Melanchthon] is not always readily available from the rationalist perspective, so there tends to be a deficit in sensitivity. When our rhetoric consists of an exposition on the topics of the 'information' model our expression is confined within the logic of dialectic. Since the impact of this is likely to be perplexity enhancement and limited articulation, we may prefer rather to draw on targeted expressions of our inchoate sensitivity, as, the perspectives of Melanchthon.[46] Due to the leaden quality of habituation effects, we are bound to find difficulty in working around or re-cognizing our informing rational constructs. The contrary possibility is that social constructionist ideation could offer the potential of helping free up the client's effort to invoke sensitivity.[47,h/s] "Among these dark Satanic mills,"[48,Blake] that is, in an atmosphere of blaming and habit-provoking stimuli, the application of sensitivity is blunted, suffers and may atrophy. The creation and reinforcement of habits of insensitive conceptualizing inflates dead rhetoric and subverts people's sense of well-being: In a disintegrative process the obvious and 'reasonable' gets confused as the focus shifts to blaming and habituated response. The extreme case of insensitive conceptualizing is catastrophic involvement variability, leading toward the dissociation of personality and fragmentation of the unitary self.[49,GHMead;50,Haan] The 'spin' of fugue and self-destruction promotes the breakdown of critical self-conscious behavior, thus, an environment where the effects of such as 'fighting words' and obscenity flourish.[51,fw] What comes about is a legitimate perplexity, a naked interface with what Edgar Levenson calls 'reflexive mentation'.[52,Levenson,PI ] Verbal abuse or 'fighting words' talk exploits this hyper-rational and under-emoted circumstance, challenges critical thought, and hypocritically limits responsiveness. The 'low-functioning' behavior, the 'soul dead' state liable to result from this experience, provides a possible final outcome for the impacted individual adjusting to the culture of perplexity. A client subject to reinforced perplexity is vulnerable to dysphoric experience, but there are likewise dangers from an inappropriate helping process. A supportive environment by itself is not a sufficient cushion, especially, not if the sensitivity is drawn out but its context is not empowering. For example, the discipline of psychosocial rehabilitation aims to develop capacities and sensitivities, yet has restricted impact if not well articulated as a challenge to the values of the perplexity system. In general a 'disconnecting' policy of accommodating prevailing system values is impractical,[53,Albee] disempowering, and prone to interfere with the flow of creativity. Sensitizing reality With the client's opportunity for a wholesome life trajectory so precarious, with the core sense of self challenged,[53.5,O&S] what is to be done about these disruptive and diversionary influences? It is scarcely sufficient for people to realize themselves in habitual low- functioning symptom management regimes and learn to cope and adjust. People's chance to mobilize their imaginations is limited, if their insight is challenged, their constructive efforts 'beaten up', and there is little room for a life that 'makes a difference'.[53.5,WW] In fact the need is to change the 'master terms' of such a life[54,Derrida] and in so doing alter the context of the client's involvement with the world, rendering it more favorable. The client's sensitivity being encumbered, frustration ensues, the expression of personality becomes more difficult, and finally intersubjective experience degrades. Neither social conditioning nor pill fixes are likely to help free up this sensitivity and provide a socially adequate solution for its unhampered activity. Interpretations of traditions that certify or derogate sensitivity as 'irrationality' can provide an historical framework for rationalizing sensitivity and constructing a social justification for it. From an 'archaeology of knowledge' of the forgotten and/or neglected topics of madness and its social control we can hope to construct new empowerments for sensitivity.[55,Foucault;56,Geel] Assuming that the perplexity system is too well entrenched for a direct challenge to succeed, we look toward a less inflammatory and more intricate strategy for change. It's not by challenging system values head-on, but by bringing the topics found by 'archaeology' back to present dialogical conditions that we open social and political clearings. We may thus expect lower costs from designing a structured and rooted challenge to habituated values that 'nibbles' rather than from one that threatens.[57,Said] The opportunity then is to develop a practicum for reframing perplexity by adapting the capacities of the present to reviving neglected alternative possibilities from history. Thus, for a way out of the client predicament - given (1) the liabilities of madness and (2) its social impediments - we need to promote favorably enhanced situations. To this effect, we draw insight from the conflict and bonding of habits and deconstruct that clinch as an uneasy and risky revival of social possibilities from history. In analogy to the survival story of the counter- culture, we postulate rallying the affect by 'warming up' local conditions and informing the imagination by using terms drawn from the revived topics. For empowering sensitivity, we imagine producing analogs of the "be-in" where alternative values may be expressed and may eventually flourish in limited, protected settings.[58,the 60s] _A clearing for social construction_ "The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human understanding, and have taken deep root therein, not only so beset men's minds that truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance obtained, they will again in the very instauration of the sciences meet and trouble us, unless men being forewarned of the danger fortify themselves as far as may be against their assaults." [59,Bacon,F, Novum organum:#38] Hypocrisy residue Let us turn the focus from the client perspective to the problematic of what social constructionists can do to support the healing and productivity of the clients. What to the client is a precarious and frustrating situation presents itself to the professional as an obscured potential for empowered and imaginative being. The client who presents as low-functioning is actually challenged by a kind of institutional perplexity and lives an eclipsed life largely concealed in the other of the perplexity system. The interpretation problematic is thus to know the 'morbid sedimentation' of the logic of habituated accommodation in its historical givenness.[60,PC] Disempowerment manifests itself as a kind of personal power vacuum where we are excessively vulnerable to the deliberate or inadvertent intrusion of other people's business. Civil society intrudes upon the client with both public bureaucratic interfaces and private 'clinical' style interfaces likely to be felt as impositions. These institutional manipulations are not readily assimilated in the service of building the sense of self, so they are difficult to handle, and get introjected with attendant distortion of personality.[61,Reich] The prevailing social links to the client - whose self is other to the perplexity system - will interface with or even coincide with the stress and madness dynamics themselves and reinforce them. The difficult social interface the client experiences mitigates for a self-conscious interpretive approach to involvement where the support person can attend to actual issues. That is, the support person's way of involvement produces distortions and so places a premium on management of the confusion produced by the distortion artifact. Such an involved, historically grounded self- awareness - identifying a kind of participatory 'counter- transference' - contradicts the tenet of 'value neutrality'.[62,Haan] Unavoidably we promote our social values, enmeshing us in a logic of accountability to the system's rationalities that will help sustain its values.[62.5,Shotter] In the contrast to the way the perplexity system induces a hypocritical ambience, the new paradigm invokes a problematic of blending in plausible accountings. Depending on skill and circumstance, either residual hypocrisy may be effective in discrediting a new accounting, or our self-presentation may be rendered so as to achieve acceptance.[63,Billig] The modality of blending is a delicate, pivotal process at the precise point of stress and personal fragmentation where the client profoundly needs appropriate support structures. Social constructionism has the potential to provide what is lacking, to make these interfaces work, and thus to render meaningful an alliance with the clients. Unobservable subversion The focus of this model of madness support work is examining the performance characteristics desirable for 'subverting' the perplexity system by 'reasonable' constructs. The most available approach to challenging the system, 'identity politics', or the celebration of self[64] - derives from an assertion of self-defining personality. While not absolutely counter-indicated in all circumstances, such a reliance upon a personal confrontation style tends to clash with the sensitivity needed for blending in the 'reasonable' constructs. The emphasis in designing such a blending is better not on opposition but rather on making pass an identified radical difference which reflects perplexity's other. Working the 'unobservable' other to the perplexity system seems to require a disciplined and imaginative capacity precisely in locations that are opaque to the system's logic. The task then is to unmask[65,Grassi] the deceptive characteristics natural to the catacomb of relations, based on non-standard truths, that are found in that other: Francis Bacon (1561-1626) invented a philosophy and method for overcoming the universal speculations of medieval thought, by inducing reasonable argument based on practice. He described types of illusions ("idols") of speculative reason and identified their sources in the nature of thinking, personal idiosyncrasy, social interaction, and philosophical bias.[66,N.O.41-44] His work is well known as precedent and model the techniques appropriate to decipher medieval notions and justify presentations of underlying realities as 'reasonable'. As a precursor to Descartes he offers us a standpoint for reworking the perplexity system based on its being, in effect, the incomplete resultant of his own contribution. From this task requirement we see that an aggressive and intrusive involvement is liable to the effects of 'illusion' unless carefully subordinated to a detached way of being.[67,Bh.G.] Ideally, we expound our topics drawing them from the rhetoric of invention, subject to a requirement to discipline ourselves to interpret and transcend illusions of involvement. While a construct may seem reasonable when presented and embellished outside of its context, the same construct may appear less plausible when located in its logical context. For example, in a classic study, Goldstein effectively deconstructs the idea of 'reflex', showing that isolated reflexes are an idealized abstraction of systems effects.[68,Organism] That is, when we examine sensitively the notion of using 'atoms' consisting of isolated reflexes as the units of analysis of behavior we find such an approach fatuous. While the illusion that comes with reification can be strengthened out of its context, it breaks down under an analysis like that based on the mirror of the Bacon's 'idols'. The contrary to the reinforcing effect of individual and conceptual isolation is to put a partnership of clients and support persons on the level playing field of 'blending'. We can interweave the insufficient constructs of madness and the induced forms of constructionist analysis into a tapestry of 'reasonable' forms.[69,networking] This defines a piecemeal, 'bottom-up' process of constructing engines of innovation within the tradition of invention envisioned by Bacon. If we can manage the 'rational visibility'[70,Billig] of novelty, keeping it low-profile or relatively so while it takes root, we can aspire to establish its institutional viability. Gaze and involvement We reflect on the impact of the attitude that a support person takes when participating in the drama of involvement with the mental health client environment.[71,comm.int.] This posture, or 'gaze', typically shows up in the current paradigm in the form of clinical and/or 'value-free observer' attitudes which are not informed by intersubjectivity. While the gaze which reflects involvement with personal confrontation and identity challenges is a hardened one, distorted by the violent and disorderly character of interactions. The hermeneutic or interpretive gaze is itself also problematized by attitude and demands a clear divination of its own institutionally based intrusiveness to produce an optimal relatedness. Now consider the cogito, the ground of the rationalist gaze, as just one kind of involvement, rather than as that exceptional ground that derives from 'first principles'. At the fringes of the confines of that 'rationality', the interpretive gaze is yet socially accountable for the attitude it presents in engaging madness at the point of inspiration/affliction. One accounting is to deconstruct the privileging of the clinical gaze by rendering the diagnostic view of madness as 'bizarre' behavior[72,DSM-IV] over into a way that is philosophically comprehensible. Sass, for instance, following Wittgenstein, has already presented us such a theory - of the inspired, cryptic, incomplete realization or 'apophany' of mad Being.[73] In the contrary case, where attitude serves as obstruction and fails as touchstone for balanced conversation, the unwieldiness of the gaze muddles the intersubjectivity. When this fails consistently - and it's hard to avoid from time to time - it produces the quality of 'beating up' the client or even outright character assault: The prejudice that is at the core of habituation to tradition[74,Stern] magnifies the 'professional' gaze and turns it into an opportunity for psychological domination. The social relatedness of their involvement renders the institutionally privileged party liable to stereotype the vulnerable party and thus lends a free hand for insult and abuse. Interpreting this relatedness is thus central to maintenance of balance, with the risk being a fall into a kind of habituated counter-transference that demeans the character of the client. H.G. Gadamer offers us a process puzzle where in some undetermined but unavoidably creative way it is necessary to ask 'open questions' in order to 'disconfirm prejudice'[75,ibid.] The hazard for the client here is developing an irrational interface with hermeneutic blundering; he/she should show attentiveness to prejudice and complexity of response. The support person on the other hand wields a privileged social situation and must show accessibility and detachment as well as imagination and discipline of understanding. The clinical approaches coming from the old paradigm, and even many current hermeneutic and constructionist approaches, reflect an individualist practicum. When we network and blend constructions of a new 'reasonableness' we provide what is essentially a social construction with social implications. This new involved-interpretation scheme networks around the logic of the perplexity system and erodes prevailing rules, standards, and norms. Such a program challenges prevailing social relations that are lived out by individuals as marginally valuable habits[76,B.H.] and weakens the bindings of the traditions underpinning the perplexity. Paradigm authorship Since the social clearing available does not provide robust opportunities for client Vision, it provides by default a broad opportunity for unscrupulous exploitations. There is a fundamental choice of whether to minister to dysfunction to the point of collaborating with it, as against making advocacy for and growing new insights and values. The vulnerable 'new shoots' are readily demeaned by blunt hypocrisy that emanates from the irrationality of the rationalist representations of the perplexity system.[77,calumny] And any effort to resist this blaming invokes calumnious rhetoric and aggressive, domineering behavior that batters sensitivity and dulls the tool of imagination. The alternative advocated here is empowerment through partnership with enlightened support persons who help shoulder the burden of being beaten up.[78,C.K.] History provides multiple examples of alliances between psychiatrists and client activists which are 'gaze-driven' and adversarially impacted by personal agendas of the professionals.[79,L.C.;80,Torrey] Dependent solutions of this sort impede the available social clearing and divert the clients from any program of freely asserting their creativity. My experience is that the best connection with support persons is when they're near to the being of madness, interface socially with the clients, and jointly author innovations.[81,A.P.] An agenda of advocacy for the 'paradigm shift' offers the clients room to be imaginative; it also provides openings for institutional support for projects oriented away from the clinical paradigm.[82,Rawland] One sort of such openings might involve construction of new and sensitive approaches to patients rights and innovative support modalities for people facing stress. Another might extend the notion of self-help and peer counseling to the development of alternative provider institutions and the training of qualified support persons. We have to brainstorm and identify the social value we can produce and how to construct thereby the financial basis for a new style of system seamlessly integrated into the community. Especially in this century, the agenda of psychiatry and allied disciplines of building the clinical system has resulted in a hegemonic practice that sets the standards. This system is deeply flawed, is now in fact institutionally challenged, and is being restructured into economics-based practices such as managed care. As things proceed, mental health service provision has depended and will increasingly on client/community control and advocacy of humane outcomes. By theory and activism deconstructing the old paradigm[83,P&G] and by authoring a social constructionist 'madness' agenda, we can compete for the social management of services.[84,Shotter] _Visionary directions_ "One way in which the word 'cause' is used is for that from which a thing is made and continues to be made - for example, the bronze of a statue .. A second way in which the word is used is for the form or pattern .. for example, the ratio 2:1 .. A third way in which the word is used is for the original source of change or rest, for example, .. the father causes the child .. A fourth way in which the word is used is for the end .. this is what something is for, as health, for example, may be what walking is for .." [84.5,Aristotle,Physics,II.3] New personality type As "one becomes a personality by socialisation and enculturation,"[85,Levitin] he/she develops a 'normal' or 'abnormal' psychology that reflects social and historical conditions. A person who has adjusted his/her personality to the perplexity system should not be presumed thereby to have a clear ontological window. In general the 'normal' personality reflects the deficiencies of the perplexity system, while the 'abnormal' personality clashes with and/or deviates from its logical framework. We explore the task of growing new, more sensitive, variant personalities, using constructions of 'reasonableness' to extend the capacity of 'normality' as explanation for personality. This construction of 'reasonable' representations of originary client material means remarkable things being produced by 'ordinary' people under everyday conditions. The work we are doing is by-and-large modifying social context and thus creating social conditions for 'visionary' personalities, cloaked as 'reasonable', to flourish.[85,Jean d'Arc] The subtle problematic of Boethius' misfit with his times reminds us how deep is the challenge of picking away at the perplexity and making and promoting insights. Alliances of clients and support persons must find ways to sustain a complex dialogue where new social possibilities are articulated right within the shadow of the old social dynamics. The other of 'rationally disclosed' personality - the 'irrational' interface of our attitudes and habits of being - expresses in personal form the other of the perplexity.[86,Sampson] The construction of that personality, with its development of new attitudes and habits expressing that 'visionary' other, implies a new personality type. Since its untrammeled expresssion interfaces dissonantly with the perplexity system, it needs meticulous articulation and rationalization in order to survive and thrive. The labor of rationalization of the new personality type requires the training and skills necessary to identify illusions that impede the inductive method. The new type of personality that we privilege is driven by Vision or originary insight rather than by ambition, with the emphasis placed on invention rather than control. Such personalities are liable to present a foolish aspect due to non- control and a moral or spiritual aspect due to non-ambition. The current restrictive understanding of personality tends to support a hostile environment militating against such 'disturbing' orientations toward creative self-expression. Our proposed construction based on client and support person alliances provides an opening in the face of potential character assault for an alternative way of social being.[87,Mead,MSS] Mindshield grounding Starting from the raw client experience of 'passing' or creating the appearance of 'rationality', we consider the labor involved in a more comprehensive construction. Clients nowadays learn how to justify their problematical behavior and values to others by opaque argumentation, based on some kind of private intuition/critical thinking.[88,C.S.] The potential support framework envisioned from constructionist contributions needs to carry the burden of the great philosophical conundrums of history. Clients will need to be trained in such matters as the illusions of inductive reasoning and, following that, how to manage attendant social disjunctures. How is the client to negotiate questions about 'reasonableness' in ill-disposed circumstances while maintaining appropriate modesty of presentation? Inaccessible, metaphysical monologue or dialogue reflecting irrationality is assertive, obscure, deflects criticism, but it lacks ground in traditional argumentation:[89,DIF] Aristotle, known as 'The Philosopher', conventionally stands as a rock or "bottom line" in Western tradition, where rational explanation delineates itself from confusion and brainwashing. Against the cold logic of self-interest politics in the perplexity system we set Aristotle's doctrine of causation[90,Aristotle, ibid.] and especially the material cause of client need and being. The facticity of this cause transforms into a practical advocacy of cause and effect and reasonable explanation, where metaphysical excuses can be worked through meaningfully. As with pre-modern thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to Meister Eckhart to Nicolas of Cusa, imagination can be cast thus in the mirror of rational argumentation with substantial social impact.[91,Fox] By working on history and by clarifying narratives of systematic abuse we can generate the text for the causes and effects making the appearance of 'reasonableness'. This philosophical grounding provides the client activist the chance to sustain a brainwash 'mindshield' so that he/she can achieve a 'high-functioning' kind of coherent reasonablenss.[92,Leary] In our imagination we can envision the sedimentation of deconstructed texts of perplexity being fed back to the system as 'reasonable behavior' and blurring its logic. In this scenario, mental health service institutions will experience 'dissociated' social interfaces with clients as they attempt to accommodate people's expectations.[93,dissociation] Circumstances will continue to push them away from a discourse of control and traditional values and into a discourse where text and reasonable constructions are privileged. Absent severely reactive responses, or even in spite of such, these institutitions will find they need increasingly to reinforce new rationalities and to manage their own irrationalities. Today client energies center on the brainwash-mediated dialogue of low-functioning identity and depend on the likes of individual psychotherapy and medication management When empowerment becomes focal, due to the joint work for the 'blending' described above, new helping problems more and more play a central role. Workspaces of imagination then produce 'reasonable accommodation' texts[94,Mancuso] for subverting perplexity in 'rationally invisible' arrangements. Progressively the supposed 'preconditions' of 'mental illness' get confounded with incidental material influences that become known as support for creative disturbances. Identity deconstruction Society can possibly be trained to tolerate a certain degree of 'abnormal' counter-culture style behavior that is not operationally too disruptive. While this will happen spontaneously only with evolutionary speed, with careful constructionist support new personalities and new social expressions will emerge more rapidly. The perplexity system will react sharply and hypocritically to challenges to its habitual patterns of control and pose newly constructed contrary institutional forms. There will certainly be a contested area where the vigor of the 'new paradigm' apparitions and the micro-management of their introduction will need to take trouble to survive.[95,Derrida,Specters] Nowadays the epithet usage, "That's crazy!" has become the colloquial expression of choice when a person wants to inform the listener he/she is making a mistake. In the face of such conditions, the dyadic interactions of the low-functioning client 'gulag' are readily degraded and tend to take on a mean and abrasive quality, for coping or whatever. With constructionist support, the commonplaces of that talk can transform themselves from 'boundary' challenges that abrade the self to interpretations of the perplexity system. The confusion of 'crazy' and 'wrong' can be made to become - for 'normal' people - a self-consciousness regarding perplexity's intrusive role in their lives. The result of this work will be society experiencing the involvement of numbers of new personalities, leading to personality management/cult awareness issues.[96,FMSF] The perplexity system will need to contrive a 'cover job' to provide the usual phony justification/obfuscation to its hypocritical and habituated constituency: A frosting of factoids like the Freudian belief in 'repressed primal memories' will have to be construed as a story for explaining away inconvenient social facts.[97,Masson] Individuals with belief systems which collide with the new cover stories will have to have their characters impugned and be themselves made socially marginal.[98,Ginsberg] The cover stories will have to be deconstructed as 'immaterial causes' and rendered accessible to the clients and support persons negatively impacted by them.[99,Sarbin] We will be led to mind the historical location of what Philip Cushman calls the "bounded and masterful self" whose agenda justifies this toxic environment of psychological abuse.[100,P.C.] It will be the job of the social constructionists to map out the cover stories and render them doubtful, if not downright risible on account of their fabricated nature. The conflict of credibility will be occasion for technical work, that is, low-level politics, concrete and not so threatening as to invite the most drastic of responses. As this work develops, more and more the general society will face the daunting prospect of challenged identities and itself not meeting 'the claim of Being'. The pre-existing and continuing problem is that this perplexity could be disturbing to the point of social disorder and produce dysfunctional people en masse. The 'new paradigm' will gain its social acceptance precisely because it has a superior capacity to provide some relief for this sort of uncanny disturbance. When 'normal' people have difficulty explaining themselves and the clinic is relatively incompetent too, society will react against unreasonable fixes and be grateful for authentic validation![101,meds] Imagining reasonableness In conclusion, we indicate a clearing in the arena of theoretical and practical psychology with productive possibilities for the 'new paradigm' lurking right near the surface. We identify a kind of social construction of imagination workspaces as the kind of help that the client-driven empowerment movement needs critically. We can provide an alternative to the regime of punishment management and chemical control in the mental health service system by involvement in and support for client activism. We lay open a possible agenda for social and, at last, financial viability for a class of institutions a 'generation' beyond the provider-oriented control systems that predominate today. How far-fetched is the notion that 'causal' thinking would get subverted by, and mindshields constructed for a culture of 'reasonable' mimics of the perplexity system? Making this effort will lead to intense dialogue and politicking in re conditions for and outcomes from creating/negotiating new social institutions for support and healing. We imagine a humanistic 'dramatic rehearsal' approach which scripts the workings of the new 'madness' institutions challenging meaningfully the present goal-based planning and control process. Again this rests on a program of making social constructions which insert themselves into the planning process and indicate clearings for 'knowing by involvement'. Of course this agenda reaches to the roots of the perplexity system itself with challenges by a kind of new 'counter-culture' or widespread rationalization of humanistic alternatives. Such a challenge will be met systematically by suppressive adversarial agendas such as that exemplified by the "false memory syndrome."[102,FMSF] The "idols" to which these adversarial advocacies owe allegiance can be challenged by the variety of discourses where new (and more humane) 'master terms' prevail. This is indeed a recipe for a low-grade evolutionary deconstruction of the perplexity system, privileging sensitivities to life and subverting habituation to rigid structural patterns. The initial impetus of this thesis was an impulse to find what kind of assistance social constructionism can and properly should provide the clients. We identified the problematic of the client 'low-functioning ambience' as a mind-boggling and dynamically unstable condition of subordination to habituation with blaming overtones. We considered how constructionists could provide the texts and discourse supports for imaginative client activity by sensitizing society as well as by education. We arrive at a vision for a society with the institutional capacity to transform endemic madness into the cutting edge for a homeostatic degradation of this unreasonable perplexity system. (c) Andrew Phelps 1997