From: The UK Community Psychology Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of jacqui lovell
Sent: 24 June 2014 13:54
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [COMMUNITYPSYCHUK] Response to Professor Adrian Furnham

Jacqui Lovell
 

> Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2014 17:17:36 +0000
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Response to Professor Adrian Furnham
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> Hi All
>
> For anyone who may have seen Adrian Furnham's article on malative personalities in the Sunday Times of 15th June (link below), I include a letter of reply below from myself and a group of colleagues from the University of Brighton.
>
> Best wishes
> Carl
>
>
> Original article-
>
> http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/Appointments/article1421886.ece
>
>
> Dear Professor Furnham,
>
> We write with reference to your recent article entitled ‘On Your Head: He’s not differently gifted — he’s troubled’ published in the Sunday Times on June 15th. In preparation for this letter we have tried to find out a little more about your background in order to help understand your article. We notice on your personal website, entitled ‘Adrian Furnham- Speaker’ you label yourself as providing an ‘approachable, practical academic insight into business issues’. On this website you state that you ‘enjoy trying to slaughter some of the more preposterous shibboleths of management gurus and modestly educating the public in psychology. But the cost is often rather nasty hate mail. Put your head above the parapet; be controversial and you inevitably pay a price.’ We hope that this letter might be useful in trying to help you reappraise the responses to your articles.
>
> Forgive us if we are wrong but from our reading of your article it appears that your key concern is to help those in industry to spot people with ‘maladaptive personalities’ so as not to hire them, develop ‘damage limitation’ responses if they have made the mistake of hiring them and reflect on how they might be got rid of once you have hired them. You finish your piece with the bold statement ‘The third is how to rid your workplace of these maladaptive personalities, and that is the toughest question of all.’ We believe, from reading your piece, that three other, equally tough questions arise.
>
> Question 1- Like many mainstream western psychologists your article is littered with a number of deeply questionable opinions presented as ‘truths’. For instance that there is such a thing as a ‘distinctly unhealthy personality’, that there are ‘abnormal traits’ and that clinicians are in any meaningful sense clear and coherent on whether ‘maladaptive personalities’ exist (or indeed whether what clinicians have thought for 20 years is actually important). It is not our intention to enter a detailed academic debate on countering each of these claims other than to generally say that there is a substantial and growing literature that effectively undermines the typically pathologising, individualising ahistoric, acultural accounts of what constitutes ‘maladaptiveness’. There is a long history of psy practioners, academics and researchers who are prepared to blindly and wilfully cast aside their own values, histories and subjectivities in order that they can function as objective scientists and effectively render certain groups of people whose behaviour they don’t like, doesn’t fit, don’t understand or find challenging as ‘harmful’, ‘ill’, ‘deviant’ or ‘maladaptive’. Many psychologists appear happy to hand these subjective labels out with all the care and reflexivity of an ice cream salesman giving cones to children at the beach. However in their defence it is usually with the misguided rationale that their industry can then provide some form of medical cure. It is interesting however that you do this from what appears to be a quite different perspective. This leads us to question 2.
>
> Question 2- Whose service are you at? We are genuinely curious to know who you think you are helping with this piece of work. Our understanding is that, generally speaking, mainstream Western psy practitioners tend to position themselves and their discipline as one that is oriented toward social welfare and the greater good of society. This premise can certainly be contested but seems on the whole to be quite robustly held within the discipline. A cursory reading of the British Psychological Society ‘psychology and public’ website would appear to confirm this. From your article it appears that you are devoting a career of hard-won, scholarly experience to helping wealthy industrialists become more wealthy by marginalising vulnerable people?
>
> Question 3- Can you really not see the irony? That someone who uses their voice to publicly advise others to label people maladaptive, and to reflect on ways that they can be avoided and dispensed with and in the same article ‘others’ these marginalised people for being antagonistic, self-centred, entitled, superior, attention-seeking, experiencing peculiar beliefs, detached and callous then appears to position himself outside of their number? We could honestly have read this piece as a satirical parody of the psy labelling industry had it not been for your determined seriousness throughout.
>
> Your piece strikes us as yet another ‘Clarksonisation’ of modern pop psychology. Jeremy Clarkson revels in his status as the put-upon purveyor of common sense logic, a man attacked by rabid lefties, so crazed by the divisive doctrine of political correctness that they can no longer see the wood for the metaphorical trees. Those who disagree with him are dispelled as such. Your piece disregards the myriad complexities of human social life and intersubjective relationships, the historically mediated economic and subjective relations of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and associated labour market trends and replaces them with common denominator, reactionary common sense. So, people who disagree with your work might not be ‘slaughtering you for putting your head above the parapet’. They may be doing it because they find your perspective naïve, insulting and damaging.
>
> Please do not consider this letter hate mail. We do not know you and certainly do not hate you. If you feel a need to slot it into a category can you please put it in ‘mostly disinterested but with a little bit of confused pity’ mail. We appreciate that this is not as catchy but it better summarises our own mindset when writing.
>
> With best wishes,
>
> Carl Walker, Liz Cunningham, Stephanie Davis, Mark Erickson, Katherine Johnson, Nichola Khan, Orly Klein, Nina Lockwood, Julie Morgan
> School of Applied Social Science
> University of Brighton
>
> Carl Walker
> SASS
> University of Brighton
> 01273 643475
> My debt blog - https://since1545.wordpress.com/
>
> ___________________________________________________________
> This email has been scanned by MessageLabs' Email Security
> System on behalf of the University of Brighton.
> For more information see http://www.brighton.ac.uk/is/spam/
> ___________________________________________________________
>
> ___________________________________
> There is a twitter feed: http://twitter.com/CommPsychUK (to post contact Grant [log in to unmask]
> To unsubscribe or to change your details on this COMMUNITYPSYCHUK list, visit the website:
> http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=COMMUNITYPSYCHUK