The Social Trifecta of Human Misery and Problematical Constructions of the Self: Implication for Formation and Supervision
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Coupled to this strategy, Cushman demonstrates, is its spiritual partner-"the promise of individual salvation through the liberation of the self." 2 Freedom was redefined.It no longer meant freedom of conscience, religion, or speech.It now meant freedom to consume-whatever, whenever, and as much as we want.This has produced what Andrew Bacevich contends lies at the root of the current US crisis-a profligate society who's right to consume must be defended, politically and militarily, at all costs.This is the new democracy. 3hilip Cushman goes farther, however.He notes that the predominant configuration of the self in this society-the "empty self"-is "the engine that makes it all run." 4 The empty self is a hungry self, insatiable toward anything that might fill the void.He shows that the psychological theories that came to dominate psychotherapy in the US-object relations theory and the self psychology of Heinz Kohut-became popular precisely because they articulated so well the dynamics of the empty self.What they failed to recognize, however, is that this form of the self is not universal or inevitable, but is itself the product of a society based on consumerism.Further, by treating the sufferings inherent to the empty self without recognizing its social origins, psychotherapy in the US has inadvertently become a supporter of the status quo.In Cushman's words: "Psychotherapy is permeated by the philosophy of self-contained individualism, exists within the framework of consumerism, speaks the language of self-liberation, and thereby unknowingly reproduces some of the ills it is responsible for healing." 5 Cushman also notes that the most dominant theory of psychotherapy in the US-cognitive-behavioral therapy-became important as a way to professionally manage the self as a component in the marketplace of production and consumption.Although it is difficult to isolate the impact of consumerism on human suffering apart from the other two factors of the 'social trifecta,' I believe that it is a major contributor to the fragmentation of society.This fragmentation, in turn, leads directly to many, if not most, of the problems which bring people to pastors and counselors for help.In a groundbreaking study, for example, Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander uses sociological and historical critical analysis to demonstrate that all the various addictions now proliferating globally are primarily due to psychosocial disintegration.In order to delineate the meaning of psychosocial disintegration, he understands psychosocial integration as follows:'Psychosocial integration' is a profound interdependence between individual and society that...reconciles people's vital needs for social belong-
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".