My degrees, my history
Up front I must state that I am not a licensed therapist. I have no interest in becoming a licensed therapist, prefering the broadly analytical anthropological approach over the clinical. Although this approach is strongly Cognitive-Behavioral (CBT), what I do falls under what used to be called Alternative therapies, and is now called Complementary and Integrative. Does that mean it is ineffective or in some sense new-agey or wishy-washy? Absolutely not. What counts as therapy is too often institutionally defined, the definition then used as a means of controlling the field. For those of a Catholic mindset, for example, their priest is usually their therapist, with the Confessional (and counseling in the Parish office) standing in for the licensed therapist’s consulting room. Where I have worked in the Middle East and Turkey, the therapists are often Imams, while those who are licensed as actual therapists with often-Western training practice a faith-aligned formula they call tawakkul (trust in God) – which wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to us in North America. To put this another way: we (patient and therapist) don’t all fit into the same mold, despite our best attempt at institutional definitions. Some of us, if we are to make lasting change, prefer – even need – to operate outside that mold, particularly those of us who experience any kind of crisis in our culture(s).
BA, Psychology, with a minor in Philosophy – Concordia University, Quebec Canada
PhD, Anthropology – Rutgers University, New Jersey USA
Somewhere in between the BA and PhD a philosophical change of heart led to my jumping disciplines out of Psychology into Anthropology. It cost me the first year of my MA, but was more than worth it.
Here’s why the change: while psychology was my gateway to working with the human mind, which has always been my passion, I found it all-too-often worked with that mind out-of-context, which is to say in laboratory conditions of some sort, or with models and exercises we didn’t actually see in real life. Moreover, it focused on mind in the abstract, as an object, not a person in the world who was also part of that world. Even the courses I attended in clinical psychology involved a patient-therapist relationship – which is always asymmetric – where we students got to watch a professional “work” on a patient in what I considered a highly artificial setting (generally a room with no windows, or with the curtains drawn), using rules and methods that objectified the patient’s issues. While this was fine and has provided us with unparallelled understanding of the structure and nature of the human brain along with offering legitimate therapeutic results, it did not wrestle with the questions I was interested in.
I was born in Madrid, Spain. My first language was Spanish (Castellano). My family moved to Quebec the summer before I turned five, just in time for kindergarten that fall. My first solid memories are of being beaten up because I did not speak English. I remember the bus driver sitting me up front to protect me because the trip to and from school was a terror. I have a memory of being locked in a closet by my teacher because I didn’t understand what she wanted. Hell of a way to learn English, right?
But it didn’t stop there. For although I began in Quebec in an English school and largely an English world, that world turned French (politically then legally) in my early teen years. So now, not only did I have to learn French, but I found myself fighting “the Francophones” as “an Anglophone” (which on the inside I was not). And so I have not-so-pleasant memories of being eleven, maybe twelve, running from the French kids in my neighborhood, trying not to get myself beat up. Good times.
Did the five-year-olds have mental problems? Did the my kindergarten teacher? Did the French (and English) kids suddenly develop some? Nope. Their behaviors came naturally to them, and they were given to them by the community and culture they lived in. There’s no point in saying these individuals were nasty, or stupid or bigoted or anything like that. They just were. To them, I was an outsider, and what they did to me wasn’t personal, although of course I couldn’t do other than take it personally. It took me a long time to understand that – into my graduate years, in fact – and to accept it. In the end it became my research focus.
Philosophy has been called the art of wondering. Psychology, the art of wondering about the mind. Anthropology on the other hand asks why people do what they do, where they do it in, and what they do it for. Philosophy’s abstractions tend to have very little to do with lived realities. To read Heidegger is to interrogate the nature of being. To read Fodor (under whom I studied at Rutgers) is to hypothesize about mental structures that interface with the world through some kind of inaccessible language (mental representations). To practice psychology (as I did in the labs for my BA and then a truncated MA), was largely to explore those mental structures with scoring cards. Great stuff. But none of it said a single thing about how I felt on that school bus or in that closet, or why others would do that to a five-year-old. Or why, now that I was older and spoke English, I should have to battle the French kids with whom I’d earlier had no beef.
Enter anthropology, which seeks to understand how people live in communities in a world they largely create, and that they are so tightly bound to the community in that world that there’s no room for anyone else. The community will forcibly keep you out so that identity not be compromised. It’ll do this at the clan level, the tribe level, the nation level, the language level. Indeed, language itself doesn’t just evolve; it evolves differences between nearby groups of speakers – what we call regional accents – in effort to maintain group cohesion.
This is so effective and so all-pervasive and so naturally occurring that we take it for granted, like the air we breathe. In fact, we could call it the cultural air that we breathe. And sometimes that air can be toxic.
Anthropology, in its holistic capacity, studies this “cultural air” – the context in which our selves arise and exist – somewhat in the manner that interpersonal psychology does, but goes further by embedding that self in the traditions, and in the social norms and the social mores that make a given community the community it is (social norms are a community’s shared expectations for you, while social more are when the teeth come out if those expectations are not met). As anthropologists, we really do look at you in the context of your world. An Applied Anthropologist takes it a step further by introducing variables into that context and observing outcomes.
Does the holistic approach, which is both interdisciplinary and observation-based, have therapeutic value? You bet it does. I believe that it is not enough to understand ourselves in order to grapple with our inner problems. We have to understand ourselves in relation to our community (and today, we largely live at the intersection of various communities). When we probe, we too often find that far too many of the “sicknesses” we feel, the anger, the despondence, does not come from us, it is neither biological or a consequence of individual failings, but is the result of pressures put on us by that community. These pressures reappear inside us in the form of beliefs – beliefs about how we ought to be, who we ought to be, and why. When these beliefs produce conflicts inside us – a tension between what we want and what the community wants – the conflict manifests in the form of bad feelings. Managing these bad feelings requires changing these beliefs, and this in turn requires some understanding of what the community is trying to do to us. That right there – that type of understanding – is at the heart and soul of anthropology.
No, I’m not saying it’s not your fault that you feel a certain way or have certain thoughts. I absolutely am not saying it’s society’s fault (whatever that means). What I’m saying is that “fault” doesn’t come into it because this is a naturally occuring phenomenon, like walking, talking, laughing, or eating. In our sessions, we examine that phenomenon together, wrap our heads around it, then use it to bring about inner change.
