A beautifully-crafted response. Many thanks.
Tom Wengraf
-----Original Message-----
From: The UK Community Psychology Discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Carl Walker
Sent: 23 June 2014 18:18
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Response to Professor Adrian Furnham
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/
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