“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” - Karl Marx
I would argue that one of the central questions for those of us interested in working with young people is how we might assist them in amplifying their capacities in a way that allows them the greatest degree of freedom to live their lives as they would wish. When I think about care in this way, I am reminded of the foundations of our field in humanism and humanistic psychology. In particular, I find myself reflecting on the work of Carl Rogers. Although he is perhaps best known for his emphasis on unconditional positive regard and client centered counseling, his proposals for the conditions necessary for optimal growth as human beings are also both radical and compelling.
As opposed to many models of human growth and change, Rogers did not see any necessity to overcome our flawed human nature, struggle to change our bad habits, or to try to contort ourselves to fit the social expectations imposed upon us by the world around us. He maintained that growth was not changing ourselves into someone new and different from our flawed and broken self. Instead, he saw growth as a process of becoming more of who we already are. He argued for a kind of becoming that is created through a process of discovering the rich and idiosyncratic person that is our living foundation.
For this kind of becoming self, he proposed that we need certain conditions for human growth that are as necessary for us to develop, as sunlight and water are necessary to a tree. He delineated these conditions as producing an environment that is composed of genuineness, acceptance, and empathy. These terms should resonate with us in CYC because they are threaded throughout Garfat, Freeman, Gharabaghi, and Fulcher’s Characteristics of Child and Youth Care.
The ability to live in an environment where we are met with genuineness (or what Rogers also called congruence) in our interactions with others means that the encounter with each other is devoid of pretense. We would do away with the socially proscribed necessity to wear a mask or pretend to feel or be something we are not. Fritz Pearls echoes this in his call for us to make what he called “paper people” into real people.
To feel compelled to expend our energy or living force to mask our capacities in order to “fit in” is a brutal calculus inherent in the logic of our current system of social expectations. So much of who we imagine ourselves to be, under conditions of global capitalist rule, is premised in how well we can fake it until we make it. We are taught how to conceal any aspect of ourselves that distracts us from our role as good employees or consumers. Our lived experience is relegated to background noise, so that we can become more in sync with the social media construction of who we portray ourselves to be.
In Roger’s terms, we are living devoid of the necessary nurturance of congruent relations that could amplify the capacity of what Garfat has called the between in between us. If what arrives in that space is utterly empty of our actual lived capacities, then such a space becomes devoid of any kind of living force. It is empty of the kinds of interactional nutrients necessary for our development and growth. Like much of the virtual environment in which we spend more time, who we are is just a copy of who we imagine we are supposed to be. In this all of us are so far back in the distance of our encounter that we cannot possibly even feel one another much less the broader contours of our lives. We become ciphers or paper people rather than living breathing human beings.
The second element Rogers identified as necessary for thriving as human is acceptance. Acceptance is the foundation of what he termed unconditional positive regard. To live in a world in which we are accepted in all our rich complexity by the society in which we live is an element not just missing from our lives, but almost an oxymoron under the brutal politics of our time. The current flow of social intercourse in our world today is filled with an ongoing rejection of an ever-shifting array of human attributes. Intriguingly, as we enter the 2nd quarter of the 21st century more and more of us are insisting on our right to express ourselves in ways that contest the dominant norms for behavior and identity. However, that insistence on being able to be idiosyncratically complex faces an ongoing backlash that would deny the very existence of alterity.
Certainly, the most obvious example of this is the hatred and attempted erasure of difference in politics, religion, and community. The passage of legislation, the declamations from the pulpit, and the shunning by community designed to deny that human beings are richly diverse is both powerful and ongoing. In addition, the capacity of capitalism to appropriate difference, empty it of its living force and sell it back to us as marketing also eviscerates the lived experience of actual difference. Together these forces make a mockery of acceptance.
That said, those of us who work in CYC know first-hand the power of acceptance and unconditional positive regard. As a field we strive to support and care for the idiosyncrasies of young people, their families, communities, as well as our own friends and colleagues. We hold this as a foundational element in our work. And yet, we also know that there are institutional and economic forces that work against our best inclinations daily. Their influence can at times marginalize our ability to nurture difference and threaten to make unconditional positive regard purely aspirational.
The final element in Roger’s proposal for an environment conducive to our growth and development is empathy. This is also a key component in the Characteristics of Child and Youth Care. We sometimes think of empathy as a kind of static state of positive receptiveness to the other. In a way we think of it as an aspect of acceptance but with an even deeper sense of who the other is. Rogers adds a dynamic fluidity to our concept of empathy. He sees it as a way of moving with someone in such a way that you sense their living movement and move with it without ever losing your own sense of who you are. Mark Krueger referred to this as the dance of Child and Youth Care. It is a delicate negotiation of moving in someone else’s life without any judgement. Like a good dance partner, you share a sense of the world in motion, constantly checking back to be sure you are moving together in harmony. This requires feeling the other without losing yourself.
Once again this supports the idiosyncratic integrity of the other while acknowledging the importance of relationality in producing the dance. Moving together in this way enhances the growing capacity of each partner through the necessity of responsivity moment to moment. Each moment calls forth something new if we learn to pay attention.
This is substantially different from the dance of capitalism which would force us into formulaic movements of infinitely repetitive gestures that are only rooted in the production of the same. In the capitalist dance, innovation is not responsive to the living force of the bodies involved but in the parasitic appropriation of variation to produce more of the same; the money sign. These dances are not spontaneous expressions of creative force. They hold no empathy because they erase the other by absorbing them into the machinery of production.
As an antidote to the depredations of capital, I would propose the use of love. Certainly, we could easily read Rogers’ work in this way and love is another key element in the Characteristics of Child and Youth Care. But I have a particular definition of love in mind here. In our writing on love and CYC, Kathy Skott-Myhre and I proposed what we termed love as a kind of politics. We suggested that the typical forms of love Eros (romantic/sexual), Agape (unconditional love of/by God), and Philia (love of friends) each holds restrictions and traps for anyone interested in love as an avenue to liberation. In each instance we argued that we must give ourselves over to another, be that my beloved, the divine, or my friends. In each case, we must subject ourselves to a form of commandment or rule. For us we were interested in seeking a less hierarchical form of love; a more horizontal set of relations.
The reason for this is we were seeking a collectivity that thrived on difference. An ecological form of affiliation that allowed for a radical distinctness for each of us, while engaging in common projects. Hardt and Negri following Spinoza call this Multitude. In the multitude there is no need for sovereign power or commandment. Such a system of rule is directly democratic and evolves using difference for common purpose.
For us the implications of the Multitude for concept of love include the negation of external authority, the removal of preconceived sets of relations, and the celebration of idiosyncratic social relations. As a result, we began to define our political form of love as a set of relations that amplifies the capacities of all bodies involved. We could comfortably include the elements of Roger’s work here as key components of the kinds of relational capacity building we propose as a political form of love.
When we think of how to assist young people in amplifying their capacities in a way that allows them the greatest degree of freedom to live their lives as they would wish, we would propose a form of political love in which the set of relations engaged increases the capacities of everyone involved. To love each other is to encounter the other in such a way as to open the ability to do whatever they love to do as the impetus for living a life.
When we work with young people, or each other, the act of love should never be any act that diminishes the idiosyncratic capacity of each of us or all of us to explore any and all possible avenues of expression. Love as a political force resists any set of relations that restricts the capacity to act and express as many aspects of who are becoming as possible. As Marx suggests we can do a broad range of activities without ever being bound into a life defined by one of them. The richer life’s activities, the more human we are and the greater the degree of our capacity to thrive. Franco Basaglia once said that psychiatry should be dedicated to acts of liberation. I would suggest we might aspire to that as CYC workers as well.
