Human Behavior and Social Environments

A Biopsychosocial Approach

Dennis Saleebey

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780231528863
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Human behavior is a subject so vast that it would seem to defy one's ability to comfortably and confidently grasp its varieties, nuances, shapes, and dynamics. But in this wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of the contexts of human behavior, Dennis Saleebey examines the different social science approaches to understanding the way humans react to and are affected by their environment.

Using a biopsychosocial perspective, this book demonstrates that there are many paths of knowledge, many methods of inquiry, and many perspectives that can guide one's understanding of human behavior. Resilience (how we cope with trauma) and meaning-making (how we see and make sense of the world around us) provide the conceptual framework of the book. Saleebey examines a number of specific theories relevant to the biopsychosocial approach: part/whole analysis, psychodynamic theory, ecological theory, cognitive theory, and radical/critical theory. Human development is presented as a continuing interaction between individual, family, community, social institutions, and culture. Pedagogical devices to aid the student include chapter overviews, case studies, and meaning-making dialogues at the end of each chapter that pose questions for further thought.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Learning is a place where paradise can be created.

—BELL HOOKS

Newspaper headlines announce the perplexities, terrors, magnificence, and drama of human behavior every day. Rebels in Sierra Leone slaughter innocent civilians as civil society disintegrates; a man risks his life to save a cat trapped on a telephone pole; a young woman gives birth to a baby during her senior prom and after delivering it in the restroom disposes of it in the trashcan and returns to the dance; a man who suffered the most egregious abuse as a child now spreads the word to others about how he survives—even thrives—as an adult; the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States continues to grow and fourteen million children still live in poverty; 11,000 tons of flowers and other tokens are laid in front of Princess Diana’s palace in the week following her death; a family survives without food for a week after they were trapped in a mountain gully and are saved when their sixteen-year-old daughter ventures out into the freezing weather and walks ten miles to get help; a Kansas man, two months after being diagnosed with colon and liver cancer and having had much of his colon removed, receiving heavy chemotherapy, runs the Boston marathon in his personal best time. And so it goes. The sacred and profane, the mysterious and the obvious, the mundane and the magnificent, the frightening and the heartening, the destructive and constructive are all elements of human nature and the human condition. As social workers, students of human behavior, we are obligated to understand, as best we can, those forces that shape and drive, constrain and obstruct, the human experience.

Human behavior is a subject so vast that it would seem to defy our ability to comfortably and confidently grasp its varieties, nuances, shapes, and dynamics. But as professional helpers we will be called upon every day to understand and to make judgments about our fellow human beings, judgments that lead to activities that will significantly affect their lives. We also have an interest as human beings and citizens of the world in understanding the bewildering and bemusing diversity of people, groups, institutions, environments, and events that surround us in our daily round of life.

To provide some guideposts and landmarks along this cluttered and twisting path, I will lay out in some detail a framework for approaching the subject matter. Of course, no perspective or framework guarantees truth. Rather, it is merely a means of providing some degree of order and direction to our journey. Perspectives allow us to see what has been hidden from us or to see the familiar in a new light or from a different angle. The framework I will provide is rooted in assumptions, biases, preferences, beliefs, and values that I have collected over the years. I know that for every certainty I hold someone may offer a convincing antithesis. I also realize that much of what we would like to understand about human behavior is shrouded in mystery, wrapped in complexity, or complicated by paradox. Furthermore, some of what we think we know about human behavior is provisional, other notions are probably just wrong-headed, some ideas or conceptions are in transition, and yet others are wishful thinking. Therefore, I ask you to take a critical stance as you encounter the elements of this framework. Think about what might be useful to you or simply interesting as a way of thinking about human behavior and about the physical and social environments that provide the theater for that behavior.

PHILOSOPHICAL PRINCIPLES

Principles direct us in our understanding and appreciation of human behavior and human experiences. They also provide a basis for exercising our moral imagination, taking ethical action, and responsibly consuming knowledge. Because they point our attention to basic attributes of the human experience and the conditions of being and becoming human, they are philosophical. But they are arbitrary, too. Someone else might choose a very different set of principles (or none at all). I have selected these principles because I think they are consonant both with social work values and with the values of humane conduct in general.

Liberation and Empowerment: Heroism and Hope

Liberation refers to the continuum of possibilities for individuals and groups, the opportunities for choice, commitment, and action, sought and pursued in relative freedom or in dire circumstance. Individually and collectively we have fabulous powers and potentials. Some are muted, unrealized, and immanent; others shine brilliantly about us. All around are people and policies, circumstances and conventions, that may nourish or release these powers or that may subvert or oppress them. All humans, somewhere within, have the urge to the heroic: to transcend circumstances, to develop one’s powers, to overcome adversity, to stand up and be counted. Though this is a precious urge, it is also a fragile one. Too often the economic, religious, and political systems of a society drive this craving underground or distort it so that it serves institutional, political, or religious purposes and movements. Nonetheless, the yearning for freedom and the heroic impulse abide. It is the task of the healer, the humane leader, the shaman, the teacher, and, yes, the social worker to promote the liberation of this spirit and this energy, to find ways for that impulse to express itself.

The heroic may be a problem in most societies. Things run more smoothly if people simply play their roles and pay their taxes. Liberation unleashes human energies, critical thinking, and the questioning of authority; challenges to the conventional wisdom; and new ways of being and doing. Not all of liberation is this dramatic. When liberation comes, most of us find ourselves trying out some new behaviors or trying on new thoughts and attitudes, or escaping the drudgery of a difficult relationship or demanding job, or sensing a more generous fund of self-esteem, or surmounting a persistent adversity. But in the cozy confines of our lives such emancipation often is of enormous importance.

Cultures, as Ernest Becker (1973) pointed out so convincingly, also have hero systems. These are available to all. Cultures can encourage and sustain real liberation of the human spirit. The rise of democracy, the spread of public education, the war against fascism, the civil rights movements, the many faces of feminism and liberation theology, for example, all mobilized millions to act beyond their roles, to sacrifice for the larger good, to make a statement about belief over convenience, to sustain epic struggles to survive, or to create something of lasting value for one’s family, community, or society. But often cultures do not celebrate the immense capacity of the individual or group nor do they issue a full invitation to that spirit. In contemporary American society, many of our cultural heroics revolve around celebrity, fawning over and emulating those persons designated as famous or fabulous by the media or marketplace. This is not real heroism; rather, it is a kind of oppression.

The heroic occasionally turns nasty. To liberate oneself at the expense of others—either as a culture or as an individual—to find satisfaction in the imprisonment, hurting, or ridicule of others is, in one sense, heroic. It enables the individual or group to surmount, for a moment, the limitations of self. But the damage wrought far outweighs such transcendence. Far too many of the current heroics in the world today are countenanced at the expense of those least able to resist their persuasions and depredations. Whether it is the slaughter of innocents in the name of a political theology and its leader, or the cavalier slicing of the cord of resources to poor people in the name of restoring the ethic of work and balancing the budget, such heroics do not liberate as much as they suffocate.

Liberation and the heroic depend mightily on hope. No matter how the possibilities of self are captive, hope is the beating heart of becoming free or freer. Paulo Freire, the great pedagogue of liberation, in his last book, a revisiting of his estimable Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1973), said this about hope (a factor he had earlier underestimated):

But the attempt to do without hope, in the struggle to improve the world, as if that struggle could be reduced to calculated acts alone, or a purely scientific approach, is a frivolous illusion. To attempt to do without hope, which is based on the need for truth as an ethical quality of the struggle, is tantamount to denying that struggle as one of its mainstays . . . Hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice. . . . Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle. (Freire, 1996, pp. 8–9)

More practically, but no less importantly, Nan Henderson (1997) says that we must replace our thinking about youth in trouble as “at-risk” and begin to think of them as youth “at-promise,” drafting them into a program of possibilities, hopes, and dreams. Freeing human spirit, energy, and capacity, no matter how modest the venue, is driven by the lure of the possible and shaped by the magic of the vision. Rebounding from serious difficulty, coping with a crisis, and changing the course of one’s life depend on an operating level of hope that is tied to the image of the possible. People overcome unimaginable barriers as well as small hurdles because they see the “possible dream.” The dream need not be panoramic either. It may be modest and focused but nonetheless potent. There are epiphanies and turning points in life as well: moments when the possible becomes suddenly and strikingly apparent. It might be an encounter with a teacher, a book, a self-revelation forged in the fire of real difficulty and pain; who knows what it might be? The practitioners of “solution-focused” therapy and the strengths perspective know well the value of the dream, the hope, the possibility. The “miracle question,” for example, invites the person with a problem to flirt with possibility and hope and to imagine the heroic in ordinary life:

Suppose while you are sleeping tonight a miracle happens. The miracle is that the problem that has you here talking to me is somehow solved. Only you don’t know it because you are asleep. What will you notice different tomorrow morning that will tell you a miracle has happened? (De Jong & Miller, 1995, p. 731)

Freire’s (1996) idea of “untested feasibility” also speaks to the reality of the possible. We are far too often naysayers, unwilling or afraid to consort with the imaginable and potential. Of course, without plans or action, to move to the feasible is naïve, if not harmful. But to deny the plausibility of the possible is also a mistake. Freire’s partner, Ana Maria Araújo Freire, says

Thus, the “untested feasible” is an untested thing, an unprecedented thing, something not yet clearly known and experienced, but dreamed of. And when it becomes something “detached and perceived” by those who think utopian wise, they know that the problem is no longer the sheer seed of a dream. They know the dream can become reality. (p. 206)

Empowerment as a philosophy and a practice refers to the work of helping others to see the wisdom and strength within and around and to use these resources in the journey toward the possible. Empowerment requires of us at the least a belief in the dreams and hopes of others, a respect for the basic and innate wisdom of others, a willingness to collaborate with others in the project toward achieving the “untested feasible,” and a dedication to helping others understand the sources of their fears and the oppressive mechanisms that delay the realization of their prospects. Roger Mills (1995), in his compelling and effective approach to individual and community health and empowerment, says that the work of freeing people must begin with a profound and unremitting belief in the innate wisdom and health of the mind, body, and spirit. These may have been concealed with the esteem-blowing negative opinions, behavior, and attitudes of others in one’s life. But at some level the wisdom and health always remain.

Stephen Rose (1994) says this about empowerment:

Empowerment . . . is a relationship among people, based upon mutual connection, designed to produce knowing, creative, connecting persons who experience themselves as subjects [emphasis added] and who work together to create a world . . . where subjects are welcome. (p. 35)

As social workers it is incumbent on us to keep alive the dream, speak to the wisdom, promote the health, exalt the possible, create the connections, and treat people as subjects, not objects. It must be so since we often find ourselves confronted with people, groups, and communities whose lives, at least for the moment, have been compromised by the suffocating actions and policies of others.

Alienation and Oppression: Anxiety and Evil

The evidence around us cannot let us deny the reality of severe and repressive institutions, relationships, circumstances, and regimes. War, bigotry, hatred, condemnation, and, more subtly, setting people aside, acting as though they do not exist, making them invisible are all daily reminders of the reality of despotism and brutality. Why is evil the seeming companion to the heroic? There are no certain answers, but we can speculate.

A family or personal or a cultural or social history of oppression lends impetus to its continuation. Cruel individuals and brutal nations do not easily have a change of heart. To be raised in an environment where others who are different are defined as a threat and are to be dismissed or discriminated against is a difficult catechism to resist. The tradition of domination of certain others may be passed on from generation to generation. But where does that need come from? How often do you and I stand, mouth open, horrified, when we encounter in the news or through our own eyes incredible acts of violence or vicious acts born of intolerance? How, we cry, can this happen? Yet, it may be that some of us at one time or another have been encouraged to act or have been a party to actions that have inflicted emotional or physical pain to others, others who are often different from us. And this to assure our own place in the cosmos, the scheme of things.

Human beings are only motes in the eye of an enormous cosmos (Becker, 1973; Fromm, 1973; Wilber, 1995). We tremble at the smallness and frailty of our being in the face of the magnitude of time and vastness of space. On occasion our trepidation and fears are best handled by taking matters into our own hands and dealing the instruments of fear and trembling to others. Thus, we calm our own uncertainties and obscure our very smallness. It may even be, as some have suspected, that these acts of oppression and violence are “immortality projects” designed to blind us to the reality of our own organismic vulnerability and eventual collapse (Becker, 1973; Rank, 1941).

Another possibility hinges on the fact that as human animals we have no sure way to get into our world. Instincts for the most part fail us. We cannot walk with the assuredness of the cat nor fly with the effortless ease of the eagle. Our existential needs place us in the position of attempting to find security in a world we did not make, a world whose dimensions and unpredictability can be stupefying and frightening. Cats and dogs, bees and wildebeests probably do not hang around wondering about their place in the universe, their worth, or the meaning of life. Their places are fairly well secured by the knot of instinct. Clearly, the capacity to learn varies by species, but it is probably true that even the highest primates do not have the degree of self-consciousness and awareness that humans do. Such self-reflexivity does impose burdens on us, however. We must assess our place and position vis-à-vis others, past and present. We must find ways to mute the occasional anxiety and despair that overtakes us as we loo...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Meaning-Making
• Chapter 3. Strengths and Resilience
• Chapter 4. Biopsychosocial Understanding
• Chapter 5. Nature and Nurture, Neurons and Narratives: Putting It All Together
• Chapter 6. Theories: Part I
• Chapter 7. Theories: Part II
• Chapter 8. Person/Environment, Part I: Families-The Variety of Us
• Chapter 9. Person/Environment, Part II: Coming Into Being in the Family and Community
• Chapter 10. Person/Environment, Part III: Growing Up in Family and Community
• Chapter 11. Person/Environment, Part IV: Coming of Age in Family and Community
• Chapter 12. Person/Environment, Part V: Maturing and Aging in Family and Community
• Chapter 13. Reprise, Vision, and the Final Conversation
• Index