Instances and General Ideas: Parts and Wholes

by Thomas J. Scheff (April 2010)

 

Art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.
                            —   William Blake, c.1803–1820

 

Abstract: One possible direction toward better understanding the human condition may be developing clear definitions of basic ideas. Connecting parts and wholes, as suggested by Spinoza, implies moving back and forth between concrete instances and abstract concepts to enrich our understanding of both instances and concepts. Blake expressed a related idea in a single sentence. Perhaps it can also serve as a transitional method between descriptive and systematic studies. The advantage of changing to the part/whole method is illustrated by the 44 years it took me to give the concept of normalization its rightful part of labeling theory. Most studies focus on either parts or wholes. However, some are described that seem to balance between them.

The study of self-esteem is a huge field employing some 200 standardized scales. The almost 20k published studies attest to the need for a concept, since predictive validity of the studies is virtually zero. Scheff and Fearon (2004) reported that all of the many reviews of these studies came to that conclusion. We also proposed that like alienation scales, self-esteem scales confound multiple dimensions. Particularly relevant is the confounding of cognitive (self-evaluation) and emotional (self-feeling), the same confound that occurs in the dictionary definitions.

As indicated, the ultimate purpose of abstract concepts is to develop theories that can be tested. However, a transitional methodology may be needed, one that goes further than the grounded theory method toward general concepts, and ultimately general theories.

Parts and Wholes

Art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.” (c.1803–1820). This extraordinary sentence is hidden in a paragraph-long caption for one of Blake’s drawings. Yet within it is compressed a vast wisdom. For a 21^st century echo of the Blake and Spinoza idea about the importance of particulars, see the small book by Dennis Wrong (2008). He doesn’t  convey, however, the close link between the particulars, the least parts, and the organizing idea, the greatest wholes (abstractions) the way that Blake and Spinoza did. Nor does he offer examples of any particulars to help make his point.

Part/whole methodology may be a path leading toward integrating ideographic and nomothetic methods by serving as a transition between them. However, it needs to work both ways, since in dealing with complexity, we are in constant need of examples to bring out the meaning and implications of abstract concepts, and abstract concepts to bring out the meaning of the examples. The chapters of my 1997 book show the application of this idea to various kinds of research. For example, to make sense of the absence of negotiation meetings immediately prior to the beginning of WWI, I analyzed the text of the telegrams exchanged between the heads of state of Germany, England, and Russia.

Normalization as the Opposite of Labeling

Instances

Early in the session, the Doctor asks:

Has Lars been functional, does he go to work, wash, dress himself?

This dialogue establishes limits the film sets to normalizing: able to take care of self, unlikely to harm self or others. However, there are many other limits that must be set in order to avoid enabling. For example, does he take drugs? In the educational context, to be discussed below, the teacher must take care not to reject the student as a person, yet without enabling their mistakes.

(Preliminary normalizing statement, rejecting diagnosis)

In this fable, Lars has been scripted to find an extraordinarily unconventional doctor. Not prescribing psychdrugs for symptomatic patients now amounts to heresy, or at least is not acceptable practice.

A Normalizing Psychiatrist

I have a friend who is a real life Dr. Dagmar. She left her first and only fulltime job under pressure because she normalized rather than prescribing psychdrugs.

For example, she treated a young man who unable to keep still, complained of restlessness, fidgeted, rocked from foot to foot, and paced. She told him and his employer that he was not mentally ill, but drugged by the antidepressant he was taking (Prozac), which proved to be correct. Lest this instance seem too obvious, I know of many similar cases where the presiding physician decided that the problem was not too much drug, but too little. A vast difference of outlook separates the great majority of labeling physicians from the few normalizing ones.

My startled response to these concrete instances suggests that until examining them, I didn’t understand the non-labeling half of my own theory. I hadn’t realized that in the actual dialogue, in order to normalize suspect behavior, the authority must specifically translate the discourse out of the labeling mode and into the normalizing mode, and be prepared to accept the consequences from the world of automatic labeling. In the fictional case, the doctor said, in effect, you are not mentally ill, you are just communicating. In the real case, the psychiatrist said, you are not mentally ill, you are just drugged. It seems to me now that these concrete instances were needed in order for me to develop the theory and its recommendations for practice, as indicated in the next section.

Inadvertent Normalization

It is ironic that because I didn’t understand the actual look of normalization, I didn’t recognize it occurring in my next study. At the time that my book was being first published (1966), I observed a series of very brief recoveries from depression. As a visiting researcher at Shenley Hospital (UK) in 1965, I was present for all intake interviews of male patients for 6 months: 83 patients in all. Of this number 70 patients were sixty or older.

The comments that follow concern the older men. Every one of them presented as deeply depressed in their speech and manner. However, to my surprise, there were moments in some of the interviews that seemed miracles of recovery. It took many years for me to understand what I had observed in terms of labeling theory.

Many of the patients were virtually silent, or gave one-word answers. Long before I came, some of the interviewing psychiatrists had found a way of getting more response to their questions. In the interviews I observed, 41 of the patients were asked about their activity during WWII. For 20 of those asked this question, the responses shocked me. As they begin to describe their activities during the war, their behavior and appearance underwent a transformation.

Those who changed in the greatest degree sat up, raised their voice to a normal level instead of whispering, held their head up and looked directly at the psychiatrist, usually for the first time in the interview. The speed of their speech picked up, often to a normal rate, and became clear and coherent, virtually free of long pauses. Their facial expression became lively and showed more color. Each of them seemed like a different, younger, person. The self-blame that was a feature of many of the interviews disappeared.  

The majority changed to a lesser extent, but in the same direction. I witnessed 20 awakenings, some very pronounced, however temporary. The psychiatrists told me that they had seen it happen many times. After witnessing the phenomenon many times, like the psychiatrists, I also lost interest.

Shame and Normalizing

Many years later, because of my work on shame, I proposed an explanation (2001) of depression: it involves the complete repression of painful emotions (such as shame, grief, fear, and anger), and lack of a single secure bond. The memory of the patients’ earlier acceptance as valued members of a nation at war relived the feeling of acceptance. This feeling generated pride that counteracted the shame part of their depression. I argue that although other emotions are also repressed in depression, shame is the ruling emotion because it is also applied to the expression of the other emotions, such as grief, fear, and anger.

Telling the psychiatrist about belonging to a community during WWII had been enough to remove, however temporarily, the shame of being outcasts. Conveying to the psychiatrist that “once we were kings,” had momentarily relieved their shame and therefore their depressive mood.

When the psychiatrists asked the depressed outcast men about their experience during WWII, they were inadvertently normalizing the patients, returning them, for just a few moments, to what it felt like to be an accepted member of society, rather than labeled and rejected. My recent article on depression (2009) explained some of the implications for social, rather than medical treatment of mental illness.

However, because I had not used enough concrete instances in my theory, I still had not recognized the way the psychiatrists’ question could be interpreted in terms of labeling theory. The psychiatrists’ intentions were to continue to label the patients: “You are mentally ill, so I need more information to assist me with your diagnosis.” However, twenty of the patients understood the meaning as normalizing:”Perhaps you are not mentally ill if you were ever accepted even once as a valuable member of a community.” Perhaps a long-term therapy based on this and other social ideas might lead to more than just temporary recoveries.

Having recognized normalizing from these concrete instances, I realized that there were many others that I had not understood in these terms. For example, a half-way house that students organized one summer for ten street people, most of whom were either delusional or hallucinating, was extraordinarily successful (Scheff 2007, 92-95) All ten either recovered or had taken steps in that direction. At the time I had thought that the specific therapies the students used had been effective (such as co-counseling), but now I think that it was mostly normalization.

Studies that Balance Parts and Wholes

It is easy enough to find approaches that focus almost entirely on either parts or wholes. The disciplines of history and linguistics, and the sub-discipline of ethnography are based largely on particulars that are seldom organized by relating them to general concepts. The work of the brilliant founder of Conversation Analysis, Harvey Sachs, provides an example. The concepts generated by his precise studies of dialogue are at a very low level of generality, tending to be limited to the local organization of the dialogue itself, with little reference to the motives of the participants, the social relationship between them, or the relation of the dialogue to the social structure within which it occurred.

Similarly, there is no dearth of studies in which there are few if any particulars. Durkheim’s study of suicide, which formed the basis for modern sociology, is an example. It is based not on specific moments of human behavior, but on numerical rates of suicides by religious membership, region and nation. Most systematic studies in current social and behavioral science follow this pattern, using standardized scales or questionnaires that avoid any particulars of the subjects’ responses.

Another approach that avoids examining particulars can be found most clearly in the discipline of philosophy. These studies tend to be given over to abstract discussions of an abstract topic, and abstract discussions of other abstract discussions of that topic. More than just a hint of this approach can also be found in the discipline of economics.

The novelist Milan Kundera makes the point about particulars tellingly:

Try to reconstruct a dialogue from your own life, the dialogue of a quarrel or a dialogue of love. The most precious, the most important situations are utterly gone. Their abstract sense remains (I took this point of view, he took that one. I was aggressive, he was defensive), perhaps a detail or two. but the acousticovisual concreteness of the situation in all its continuity is lost….

The present—the concreteness of the present—as a phenomenon to consider, as a structure, is for us an unknown planet: so we can neither hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination… (Kundera 1995)

Kundera goes on to say that only the greatest of poets and novelists are able to notice, remember, and use particular moments. My earlier article on To the Lighthouse (2000) entertains this idea. It further considers a well-known incident (“the brown stocking”) with two adjacent moments in the far-ranging thoughts of the protagonist that takes Woolf many pages to describe. If studies of the human condition are to be more than a collection of superficial or untestable ideas, they must be grounded in such images.

There are several outstanding studies that manage to propose general ideas by close examination of particulars. Because I am most familiar with studies of emotion, three of the five exemplary studies come from that literature. The first is by the psychologist Helen Block Lewis (1971). For her study of emotions in psychotherapy sessions, she applied a systematic technique (Gottschalk et al, 1969.) that classified vernacular words that imply emotions. (For example, the expressions annoyed, irritated and “pissed off” imply anger). Perhaps because she was surprised to find that shame/embarrassment indications were more frequent in the sessions than all the other emotions combined, she examined each of the moments where shame was indicated.

This step took her into the contextual particulars of each episode. Her book provides examples of word by word changes in emotions, such as the interaction between anger and shame, and shame and withdrawal into silence. She found that not only was shame by far the most plentiful emotional response, but also that the patient or the therapist referred to it only rarely. In this way she developed the concept of unacknowledged shame as a cause of confusion, conflict or withdrawal.

The range of this study is extraordinarily broad both in the number of cultures compared and its historical dimension. Using excerpts from manuals of etiquette in five European languages from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, Elias outlined a theory of modernity. By examining advice concerning table manners, body functions, sexuality, and anger, he suggested that a key aspect of modernity involves shame. Elias’s central thesis was that decreasing shame thresholds at the time of the breakup of rural communities, and decreasing acknowledgment of shame, have had powerful consequences on levels of awareness and self-control.

The work of Erving Goffman provides a case also, although Goffman was not always completely clear on the general meanings implied by the particulars that he examined. Nor were his choice of these particulars systematic, but seemingly chosen at random from a wide variety of sources. One of Goffman’s general ideas, the way in which we spend a great deal of our time imagining what others are thinking, especially what they are thinking of us, will be used to illustrate his use of particulars to make a general point about the way selves are organized:  the looking glass self.

Cooley stated that “we live in the minds of others without knowing it,” but failed to give concrete examples of specific episodes. Goffman provided many, many examples:

Knowing that his audiences are capable of forming bad impressions of him [1], the individual may come to feel ashamed [2] of a well-intentioned honest act merely because the context of its performance provides false impressions that are bad. Feeling this unwarranted shame, he may feel that his feelings can be seen [3]; feeling that he is thus seen, he may feel that his appearance confirms [4] these false conclusions concerning him. He may then add to the precariousness of his position by engaging in just those defensive maneuvers that he would employ were he really guilty. In this way it is possible for all of us to become fleetingly for ourselves the worst person we can imagine that others might imagine us to be. (1959, p. 236, numbering added)

In this paragraph, Goffman suggested 4 internal steps, three of which involve living in the mind of the other. These 4 steps could all together easily occur in less than a second. Perhaps it was examples like these that lead Bourdieu (1983) to call Goffman “the discoverer of the infinitely small.” One of the things that is minute about Goffman’s particulars like this one is the time scale of his instances: quarters of a second in this example.

Another example of balance is the study of marital quarrels by Retzinger (1991). She analyzed films of quarrels recorded by four couples, second by second, noting not only the words but also gestures (such as facial expression) and manner (paralanguage). This mode of analysis involves inspection of many megabites of information for a single moment in a quarrel. Retzinger’s particulars are by far the most minute of the studies described here, and closest, therefore, to Kundera’s kind of moments.

Her study attempted to find causes for the 16 escalations of anger and aggression that occurred in the quarrels. She found that each instance was preceded by an insult that was not acknowledged by the insulted party. She proposes that in these instances, unacknowledged shame lead to anger and aggression.

Conclusion

A part/whole methodology, as implied by Spinoza and Blake, can at least serve to increase our understanding of both instances and concepts. This report has described how the use of minute particulars in a single instance helped recognize some unstated implications of labeling theory. A list of studies that found balance between parts and wholes was reviewed.  Rapidly cycling back and forth between instances and abstract concepts, giving each its due, may also help to integrate descriptive and scientific methods

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References:

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Charmaz, Kathy, and Anthony Boyd. 2007 Sage Handbook of Grounded Theory. London: Sage.

Elias, Norbert. 1994. The Civilizing Process. London: Blackwell (1939).

Giddens, Anthony (1984. The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity

Goffman, E. 1959. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor.

___________1964. Behavior in Public Places. New York: Free Press.

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Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lewis, Helen B. 1971. Shame and Guilt in Neurosis. New York: International University Press.

Retzinger, Suzanne. 1991. Violent Emotions. Newbury Park, CA: Sage

Sacksteder, W. 1991. Least Parts and Greatest Wholes: Variations on a Theme in Spinoza. International Studies in Philosophy. 23, 1, 75-87.

. Hawthorne, New York: Aldine    Transaction.

_____________2007. Easy Rider: Poems, Essays, Memoir. Lincoln, Nebraska: iUniverse.

Seeman, Melvin. 1975. Alienation Studies. Annual Review of Sociology 1: 91-124.

Basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory   Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications
Wrong, Dennis. 2005. The Persistence of the Particular. New Brunswick: Transaction

 

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