eye of the beholder, The

MANY YEARS AGO, IN THE REMNANTS of our oral tradition of storytelling, children were regaled with entertaining stories that contained tacit messages. Messages embedded in stories and the manner of their telling made it more likely that they would be woven into a child's developing awareness that the meaning of things was deeper than what appeared on the surface. Such stories inoculated children against some of the social and interpersonal pitfalls of life or enabled them to understand what otherwise might be missed. One such childhood story was The Emperor's New Clothes. As I recall its telling, the story (in this very abbreviated version) was of an emperor who was to make a public appearance to show off his new clothes to the common folk of the land he ruled. But, two scoundrels had convinced him that for a handsome amount of money they could weave cloth so fine and wondrous that it would seem invisible and the clothing made from it would, in fact, be invisible but only to those who were too stupid and incompetent to appreciate its true quality. While neither his prime minister nor the emperor himself could see the phantom cloth, they, nonetheless, described it as wondrous so that they wouldn't appear stupid.

Wearing the illusory clothing, the emperor was paraded through the streets naked but he didn't worry since only the ignorant would fail to see the clothing and, being so labeled, they didn't much matter. Everyone in the crowd remarked to one another about how beautiful the emperor's new clothes were and watched their neighbors to see whether they were one of the stupid or incompetent ones who failed to see the clothes. No one wanted to admit that they saw nothing because they would be admitting to their own stupidity. Disregarding the obvious, they cheered and outdid one another in describing the wonderful colors of his clothing. Traveling on, the royal procession passed a small child who, seeing with the unsullied eyes of an innocent, cried out "The Emperor is naked!" His father tried to hush him, fearing the crowd would perceive him as stupid. But the boy's keen observation was murmured from person to person until all agreed that he spoke the truth. The king realized that they were right but continued the procession anyway, finding it easier to see others as incompetent or stupid rather than admit to his own fallibility and illusions.

Such stories served to remind both storyteller and audience that we are all quite capable of being cultured into seeing what we are expected to see. We saw a similar phenomena demonstrated in Rosenhan's (1973) classic study, Being Sane in Insane Places.

Rosenhan's study is a real-life story that remains disquieting. In brief, he tells of an experiment in which his research assistants had themselves voluntarily admitted to psychiatric institutions after describing vague symptoms and then, once admitted, begin acting entirely normally. What they found was that after their supposed condition was diagnosed and they were admitted, no staff member could "see" that they were sane, or sound of mind. Once diagnosed as being mentally ill, everything they said and did was interpreted as further confirmation of their diagnosis. Normal behaviors were entirely overlooked or misinterpreted. Even when treatment staff were told that an imposter would be admitted they still could not detect the normal/sane person, the diagnostic label having had such a filtering effect on what they perceived. Real patients, however, who relied on judgement rather than an analytic mode of thought or the institutions' cultural expectations, were able to discern that the research assistants weren't actually mentally ill.

Once people were diagnosed they became the locus of problems that arose; the stressful context and provocations of staff were ignored. Rosenhan also spoke of the experience of depersonalization and powerlessness that result from being categorized and labeled by others. People become invisible; seen but not known, described but not understood. We cognitively recognize the effect of labeling yet blindly continue doing it in subtle and insidious ways. People, collectively, compromise their perceptions of others with filters of our collective devising.

A colleague recently informed me that Rosenhan's term "sane" is now considered archaic and has fallen into disuse in professional literature. She noted that we have developed an ample body of literature on diagnosing illness but little on the detection of sanity. Is sanity, or soundness of mind, merely the absence of a defined illness or the lack of perceptual blindness? Like the term itself, has the concept of sanity fallen from favor-parsed into oblivion? As noted by Chambon (1999), concepts shape what we see, and if we are losing the concept of sanity might we also be losing the ability to see it? Might we assume that, in the first story, the child who saw the obvious was the only sane person in the crowd? What of the second, where only the other patients could see who had a sound mind? Or, to paraphrase Wittgenstein (1967), could it be that life's most important things (such as sanity or strengths) are often overlooked by their very simplicity and familiarity? Like members of the crowd in the children's story, and the staff in the hospital, it is easy to see what one is expected to look for and to gain a sense of belonging by sharing illusions.

The two stories have much in common. One a fable with a message and the other a 'reality' with a message. One used humor to illustrate a phenomenon and the other a troubling account. In both stories the story teller demonstrated that people's blindness to what is real is sometimes a barrier to understanding and to perceiving soundness of mind. Goldstein (2001), speaking with appreciation of Saleebey's work, noted that we need to perceive more than just information about clients' lives and we need to know how it is to be in their circumstances. That is, we need to have the mental flexibility to move beyond the exclusionary use of professions' textbook and cultural descriptions as our analytic lens and learn to better understand the "dailiness" of life from our clients' perspective. Zerubavel (1991, p. 122) noted that:

The world can be so much richer than the rigid mind with its either/or logic would allow us to realize.... We must stop reifying the [mental] lines we draw and remember that the entities they help define are, after all, only figments of our mind.

Both Zerubavel and Goldstein affirm the notion that coming to understand a greater reality about our clients and their lives and their strengths requires multiple and flexible ways of seeing and thinking, different ways of organizing experience, it involves work that respects meaning, and apprehends them in the situational context of their lives. Reality is infinitely more complex than that we create with our unexamined concepts, our labels, categories, and diagnoses-it also includes that which is obscured by our mental habits and the illusory lines that separate us. In this special issue we are offered an opportunity to examine practice beyond the filter of problems and needs; we are provided sound examples of practice that focus on client strengths.

References

Chambon, A., Irving, A., and Epstein, L. (1999). Reading Foucault for social work. New York: Columbia University Press.

Goldstein, H. (2001). Experiential learning: A foundation for social work education and practice. Alexandria, VA: Council on Social Work Education.

Rosenhan, D. L. (1973). Being sane in insane places. Science, 179, 250-258.

Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Wittgenstein's lectures and conversation on aesthetics, psychology, and religious belief. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Zerubavel, E. (1991). The fine line: Making distinctions in everyday life. New York: The Free Press.

by William E. Powell, Editor

Copyright Families in Society May/Jun 2001
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