An Internet Publication
By David Smail, Clinical Psychologist
Ever since I first started to think about the processes involved in the origins and experience of psychological distress, the question of responsibility has over and over again forced itself upon me. In this way, the view put forward here seems to have evolved through a kind of dialectical process, itself shaped by changes and developments in the socio-political context in which the phenomena of and explanations for 'mental disorder' have been set.
At first, in the early 1960s (in Britain), the dominant philosophy in both psychiatric and psychological spheres was crudely mechanistic and 'objective' in the sense beloved of behaviourists. 'Mental illnesses' were illnesses like any other, imposed on the hapless victim through events beyond his or her control and largely devoid of meaning as far as his or her personal life was concerned; or else they were the result of 'maladaptive' habits acquired through more or less accidental processes of conditioning. Alternative views (as for example psychoanalytic ones) were marginal and largely discredited, and treatment approaches relied on the application of medical or psychological techniques based on biological or behavioural assumptions which paid no attention at all to the patient's subjectivity.
In this setting, certainly, patients were not held officially accountable for their difficulties (though the various forms of 'treatment' meted out often contained a distinctly punitive element that, to the reflective onlooker, belied the morally neutral stance of the practitioners). As responsible agent and subject, the individual person was simply an irrelevance.
When, therefore, theoretical innovators arrived on the scene such as R.D. Laing in psychiatry and Carl Rogers and George Kelly in clinical psychology, their introduction into the picture of notions like meaning, subjectivity and responsibility (often borrowed from European phenomenology and existentialism) brought fresh, new perspectives which many of us seized on with relief and enthusiasm. The 'organism' that had been the object of the clinical gaze became a human being whose troubles were to be understood as the product of a particular life.
This new 'humanization' was reflected clearly enough in my own thinking and writing, and my first solo effort - Psychotherapy: A Personal Approach - duly contained a chapter on freedom and responsibility which draws heavily on Sartrean ideas. My concern in that book was to elaborate a view that tries to acknowledge the person's subjectivity and agency while rejecting any element of blame. These are themes which I have come back to again and again in my writing, and while I would still not repudiate the view put forward in that early work, it has since become modified to an extent which renders it, I think, more or less obsolete.
For what seems to me to have happened over the years is that a mechanistic and objectivist approach to people's distress that, while it didn't overtly blame them, dehumanized them, has been replaced by a 'humanist' and 'postmodernist' one that interiorizes the phenomena of distress and - often explicitly and nearly always tacitly - holds people responsible for them. Even though the pendulum seems to have swung from an almost entirely exterior approach to an almost entirely interior one, the problem of responsibilty has not been solved: formerly we had people for whose condition nobody was responsible while now we have people whose condition is largely if not solely their own responsibility. The reason for this is to be found in what these two extreme positions have in common: a studied avoidance of the social dimension.
It is true that, as the pendulum began to swing (for example with Laing's work), the social power-structure did indeed become visible for a moment, even to the extent of spawning 'radical psychology' movements. However, as far as the mainstream is concerned, the possibility that emotional distress is the upshot of the way we organize our society has never been seriously entertained and at the present time is if anything further than ever from any kind of official recognition. The imputation of responsibility is absolutely central to this state of affairs.
'Responsibility' is, however, not a unitary concept, and is in fact used in a confusing number of overlapping senses, usually depending for their interpretation on the rhetorical ploy the utterer is seeking to adopt. The most frequent everyday use is that of responsibility as blame: 'who is responsible?' is equivalent to 'who is to blame?'. This is the sense in which people suffering emotional distress usually understand 'responsibility', and I would maintain that for the most part they are not mistaken in their anticipation that this is how society also understands it in relation to 'psychological disorder'.
Once the concept of responsibility is invoked in this sphere it raises the question of who is to blame for my suffering - I, or someone else? The message of the therapeutic industry has been that the blame lies with the sufferer; it is of course not stated as crudely as this, but is implied in the notion that somehow the individual lacks the moral fibre to face up to his or her difficulties and mobilize the necessary internal resources to deal with them. Most sufferers feel this keenly without any overt prompting from those around them: a guilty sense of weakness and moral inadequacy is one of the most frequent and uncomfortable accompaniments of distress.
With the exception of legal responsibility, which largely concerns the external imposition of clearly defined and codified rules and obligations that, it is assumed, the individual may choose to observe or transgress, 'responsibility' is usually seen as a kind of praiseworthy moral faculty internally available to everyone who is not in some way exceptionally damaged, as for example by brain injury or madness. 'Responsibility' is thus a kind of virtue (closely related to 'will power') which may be appealed to, a 'sense' which may when necessary be sternly invoked, or a capacity for resolve which may be stiffened through therapeutic intervention.
It is important to note this virtuous quality of responsibility, for while it may constitute a mark of maturity and an index of mental 'wellness', it is not usually seen as something beyond the person's power to summon up if absolutely necessary. Only in the most exceptional circumstances will a healthy adult be considered 'not responsible' for his or her actions. The exercise of this kind of virtuous, morally loaded responsibility is often seen as burdensome. To act responsibly is to act with consideration and restraint; to act irresponsibly is to be selfish, disobedient, disloyal.
There is enormous potential here for hypocrisy, sanctimony and manipulation. For when 'responsibility' of the morally virtuous kind is most earnestly advocated, it is usually by the advantaged for the disadvantaged. To say that someone is irresponsible, 'has no will-power', etc., is not to commiserate with them as having been somehow deprived of virtue, but at least tacitly to accuse them of wilfully witholding conduct that they could enact if they chose. There is, I suggest, a strong positive correlation between a) the height of the rung occupied on the ladder of power, b) the strength of a sense of personal virtue, and c) the firmness of the conviction that those lower down should act more responsibly.
The sense in which therapists and counsellors advocate responsibility for their clients probably derives from the existential view that, to achieve 'authenticity', a person must embrace the inevitability of their own choice of action: your fate is to be free and no one performs your actions but you. While this view does have the merit of escaping the blind mechanism of orthodox (medical and behavioural) approaches, it rarely manages to avoid the moralism which so easily attends the notion of responsibility, and therapeutic practitioners quickly find themselves in a familiar paradox.
For while they exhort their clients to 'take responsibility' for their lives, they concurrently assure them that they know that 'pull yourself together' is a popular prescription that doesn't work. The therapeutic notion of responsibility, it is implied, is altogether different, more subtle, than crude advice about pulling selves together. The trouble is, though, that in practice there is very little difference between these two approaches, and indeed as far as clients experience them they are virtually identical.
A further uncomfortable aspect of this paradox is that the role of qualified, trained professional usually implies that a skill is being offered which does not place the onus for its effectiveness on the client. Reasonably enough, in consulting a therapist or counsellor, clients expect to be cured, not to find that cure is a matter of their own responsibilty. Psychotherapy must surely be the only profession to posit fundamental principles such as client 'resistance' to account for its inability to deliver the goods.
To understand why therapists and counsellors have been locked in this contradiction for so long one need look no further than their interests. Quite obviously, they are unable to claim that their influence can reach in any significant way beyond the consulting room, and if they are to justify taking fees for their activities, it simply must be the case that clients harbour within them the possibility of change. Therapy creates the crucible in which it is forced thereafter to work its magic, and any theoretical consideration of responsibility is inexorably limited to the (supposed) moral resources of the client.
But the paradox of responsibility is escaped easily enough, I believe, if one extends the analysis beyond the walls of the consulting room. For responsibility is inextricably bound up with power, and power is accorded from without, not from within.
People cannot 'pull themselves together' not out of any wilful reluctance to do so but because the power to do so is not available to them. Exactly the same applies to 'responsibility. I can only be held responsible for what I have the power to do, and if I do indeed have the power to choose, only then can I reasonably be said to be responsible for my choices. No responsibility without power; no power without responsibility. And we are not talking here about 'will-power': the exercise of reponsibility in no way depends on the application of any such mysterious internal faculty (see above, 'The Experience of Self') but rather on the availablity of external powers and resources.
Our 'self-as-centre' culture makes it very difficult for us to conceive of responsibility as anything other than the application of personal influence which has its origin entirely within the individual agent. It takes quite an effort of imagination to see the person - as I suggest we should - as a point in social space-time through which powers flow. Though, as an individual, I am indeed that point through which whatever powers and resources available to me may be, so to speak, refracted back into the social world, I certainly did not personally create them out of nothing.
Quite apart from our star-struck admiration of celebrity, we have an enduring cultural tradition of fascination with and deference to power which induces us to see it as an individual quality - even, as I have already suggested, a virtue. We see 'great men' (and sometimes women) as preciously rare phenomena, bestowed upon the world by some nameless providence, and we honour their occurrence with a special kind of awed respect.
While there are clearly aspects of embodiment that contribute to some kinds of exceptional ability - not everyone can be an Olympic athlete - it is altogether an open question whether the kind of admiration we are ready all too often to accord people who find themselves in the position of wielding social power is justified by their personal qualities. It takes a Tolstoy (in War and Peace) to see through the myth surrounding Napoleon and it is only in retrospect that the absurdity of Hitler's status is revealed.
'The psychology of leaders,' Chomsky writes, 'is a topic of little interest. The institutional factors that constrain their actions and beliefs are what merit attention.'1 And that is precisely the point: circumstances choose the person, not vice-versa. Since circumstances decree that there can be only one leader, we make the mistake of concluding that the leader who emerges - Hitler, say - is unique, either (at the time we adulate him) in his virtue or (after his fall from grace) in his evil. It is, however, the office (and what sustains it) that is unique, not the person. Just look at the politician who is voted from power or the pop star who falls out of the charts - victims of instant ordinariness! Here, before our very eyes, we observe what happens when social power ceases to flow through the embodied locus which constitutes our individuality. In fact, as the cynical manipulators of the popular culture industries well recognize, the 'unique star' can be elevated from a very wide range of very ordinary people, but, having been selected, it takes a rare and exceptionally balanced head for the manufactured celebrity not to believe in his or her own image.
The notion of 'responsibility' lies at the heart of what none might well call our suppression of the social. Whatever it is we seek to understand - ranging from the reasons for personal distress to the 'evil' of spectacular crime or the failure of public servants to avert some social disaster - it is always to an unanalysed and unanalysable individual, internal world (where 'blame' is harboured) that we turn our gaze. This evasion of the obvious - that it is the way our society is organized and structured that constitutes the main source of our difficulties - is understandable only in terms of the extent of the powers which are deployed to maintain it. This can be seen very clearly in current political discourse.
As essential cogs in the vast economic machine designed to extract profit for the minority at the top of the social pyramid, politicians have an important role in representing disadvantage as personal moral failure. How wittingly they perform this role is open to question but, as a matter of 'commentary', is a question of little interest. The distal pressures on the advocates of the 'third way' to reinforce an interiorized view of responsibility are enormous.
Policies of 'naming and shaming', the imputation that inadequacies in health and education are somehow due to the unwillingness of individual teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, etc., to apply themselves to the full, linkage of 'rights' with 'responsibilities', and so on, all help to constitute the political paradox that those in the position (or so it would seem) of being most able to shape distal influences, expend the greatest energy in representing them as proximal (indeed internal).
In fact, of course, national politics does not so much exercise power as serve it. Where multinational capital dominates, the local political role becomes that of obscuring the true sources of power and the effects these have on the objective and subjective wellbeing of the citizenry. 'Politics' has become a form of management that itself actually destroys the public space in which political activity can take place. Our possibility of playing an active part in influencing those social structures that ultimately impinge intimately on our lives is whittled away to nothing, while our relative immiseration becomes internalized as personal fault.
Poverty, for example, is represented in 'third way' politics not as an evil that causes social disintegration and personal emotional damage, but as an unwarrantable 'excuse' for individual moral failure. The crumbling of public services, increase in crime, etc., are represented as the result of the incompetence, intransigence and irresponsibility of public sphere workers and of the 'evil' apparently endemic in the 'criminal element' of society.
When it comes to trying to decide what people can be held accountable for and what not, the subjective sense of 'responsibility' is almost entirely unreliable. Everyone is familiar with liars and self-deceivers who claim that something was not their fault when it obviously was. What presents more of a challenge to psychological understanding is those people who claim and feel responsibility for things that are in fact obviously outside their control. Perhaps it is the greater authenticity of the over-conscientious person compared with the deceiver that gives us a clue as to why any 'internal' account of responsibility is invalid. The conscience, after all, does not lie: it reports (commentates) faithfully enough on how it feels to be the instrument of wrong-doing. But, as is clearly demonstrated by those in whom it is over-developed, the conscience can be mistaken. What it is mistaken about is not the feeling of responsibility, but the origins (or possibly the definition) of the 'wrong-doing'.
It is the feeling of responsibility (conscience) that the powerful seek to exploit in others in order to divert attention from the actual (distal) causes of their discomfort. I am host to the powers that flow through me and, if I'm honest (authentic), I cannot deny the sense of ownership that they create in their passage. The person who does seek to deny this sense of ownership, possibly by claiming 'it wasn't me', or 'it's not my fault, I had a terrible childhood', etc., is indeed being inauthentic. But not necessarily inaccurate from a causal perspective. As a society we attach, in this instance, much greater weight to authenticity than to accuracy.
For the purposes of understanding how and why people experience and act in the world as they do, and what freedom they may have to act otherwise, the concept of 'responsibility' has become virtually useless. What we need is a psychology that switches its attention from a metaphorical 'inner world' to try instead to elaborate the ways in which powerful influences in the external environment of social space-time serve to liberate or enslave us as well as to shape our consciousness of ourselves. As things are, it is not at all clear how far individuals are able to marshal and control the influences that flow through them. Furthermore, in our attempt to understand the processes involved we are constantly misled by the assumption that our commentary refers directly to them.
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