As a master’s counseling student back in the 1990s I took a course in group therapy. In that course I learned about group dynamics generally. I also learned about family systems theory and family therapy more specifically. My instructor recommended a 1988 book on family therapy entitled The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy by Augustus Napier and Carl Whitaker. Suffice it to say that Family Crucible has become a classic in the world of family therapy. Napier chronicles his experiences working with Whitaker in a very approachable way that reads more like a novel than a psychotherapy text. As such, the information it contains is available to both mental health professionals as well as the general public. If you are considering family therapy for your family system, Family Crucible will give you an in-depth look at this process. As the subtitle suggests, it’s intense, however, well worth it if you and your family system stay with it.
I mention Family Crucible because it describes a concept drawn from family systems theory known as “the identified patient.” The book also provides clear examples of the identified patient taken from sessions Napier and Whitaker facilitated. Allow me to briefly describe the process of “identifying a patient” within a family system as this concept will form the foundation for this and subsequent posts in this series.
Napier and Whitaker point out that typically in the early sessions of family therapy, one family member will be identified as the “patient” or the family member who needs help. Honestly, this could be anyone in the family system: young brother, older brother, sister, mother, father, even an aunt or uncle. In many respects the identified patient becomes very much like a scapegoat upon which the other family members can “project” (using a Freudian concept) their individual psychological difficulties, which otherwise remain hidden. Once the identified patient has been chosen, then the manifest narrative of the family takes the form of, “If only Billy or Susie or Aunt Felicia could get their act together, our family would be great.” Fortunately, psychotherapists are (hopefully) trained to recognize the systems process of the identified patient, and then, very slowly, get at the real problems like dad’s heavy drinking, or mom’s emotional infidelity with an online romantic interest, or brother Billy’s increasing drug dependency. Again, I recommend Family Crucible if you would like to read about actual examples of the identified patient.
Why am I bringing up the concept of the identified patient here? In my last post I mentioned that the DEI movement (diversity, inclusion, equity) in large part draws its sense of identity from events from the past, namely, slavery and the displacement of Native Americans. In her 2024 book A Just Future: Getting From Diversity and Inclusion to Equity and Justice In Higher Education, historian and DEI department administrator Nimisha Barton points out that many of the big-name colleges and universities are built on land taken from Native Americans. Barton argues that if only students could take colleges and universities back from white oppressors, then things would be great (echoing the manifest narrative of the identified patient).
This idea of creating an identity around events from the past is not new. In their 2023 book entitled We Don’t Speak of Fear: Large-Group Identity, Societal Conflict, and Collective Trauma, psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan and his colleagues talk about how countries will reach back centuries to conflicts in the past that have the ability to coalesce a sense of identity. In many respects these conflicts from the past become an identitfied patient around which a narrative of unity can be built. I would suggest that this is what we are looking at with respect to the DEI movement. The identified patients are slavery and the displacement of Native Americans. If my suspicions are correct, then the next step is to look for the issues or problems in the present that are hidden from view. This process is talked about in We Don’t Speak of Fear. Vamik Volkan and his colleagues, working within a group known as International Dialogue Initiative (IDI), in essence conduct family therapy with countries in conflict. In this and subsequent posts in this series I would like to reveal what I consider to be hidden issues that are not being looked at in the “family system” that would be DEI. Consider this to be an IDI intervention of sorts. The first hidden issue I would like to talk about is automation.
In my last post I ended by saying, “I think there are present-day traumas that are not being looked at. One in particular is the slavery that Norbert Wiener predicted not long after he and a group of information scientists [working in the 1940s and 50s] developed cybernetics, which forms the roots of the AI or artificial intelligence movement that now surrounds us.” I first ran across this idea by reading economist Jeremy Rikin’s 1995 book entitled The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. I wrote about End of Work in my 2011 book entitled Bowlby’s Battle For Round Earth. Allow me to provide an excerpt from Bowlby’s Battle:
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Here’ s a startling statement by Rifkin: “Permanent joblessness [brought on in large part by automation and mechanization] has led to an escalating crime wave in the streets of America’s cities and the wholesale disintegration of black family life.” At this point in his book, Rifkin briefly talks about Norbert Wiener, arguably the father of cybernetics or the study and development of mechanical feedback and self-regulating systems (like those used to guide missiles). According to Rifkin’s research, Wiener predicted that “the automatic machine … is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor” (quoting Wiener here). Wiener continues his thought thus: “Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.” Rifkin chimes in by pointing out that, “not surprisingly, the first community to be devastated by the cybernetics revolution [ushered in by Wiener and his colleagues] was black America.” Here’s Rifkin’s “bottom line” on cybernetics, and, along with it, information science: “The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine.” I’d be remiss if I did not point out that John Bowlby, arguably the father of attachment theory, was very much aware of cybernetics and its focus on mechanical feedback and self-regulating systems, but consciously decided to use an organismic approach to living open systems as a backdrop to his attachment theory. (In contrast, cybernetic systems, by design, are closed and externally determined.) Rifkin notes that even Robert Oppenheimer, arguably the father of the atomic bomb, worried that the opening of the atomic age could spell the end of human labor as we know it.
Rifkin allows that “America’s underclass, which is still largely black and urban, is likely to become increasingly white and suburban as the new thinking machines relentlessly make their way up the economic pyramid, absorbing more and more skilled jobs and tasks along the way.” Rifkin continues, “A near-workless world is fast approaching and may arrive well before society has sufficient time to either debate its broad implications or prepare for its full impact.” Even Wiener (as mentioned above, a central architect of cybernetics) worried that his brainchild might turn out to be a monster. Wiener (as quoted by Rifkin) writes: “If these changes in the demand for labor [e.g., a decrease in demand brought on by automation] come upon us in a haphazard and ill-organized way, we may well be in for the greatest period of unemployment we have yet seen.”
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As I tried to point out in 2011 (and Rifkin back in 1995) automation has brought back the prospect of a new form of slavery. And, yes, this new form of slavery is rapidly taking over “and may arrive well before society has sufficient time to either debate its broad implications or prepare for its full impact” (quoting Rifkin again). In my opinion, this rise of a new form of slavery is the economic narrative that is not being looked at by the DEI movement with its focus on slavery from the past. However, I would be remiss if I did not point out that this “new” slavery was in many respects presaged by the slavery of old.
For certain slavery was a central focus of the civil war. However, if we look a bit closer, there were economic themes as well. Writing in his 2000 book entitled Rule By Secrecy, investigative journalist Jim Marrs points out that one of the central themes of the civil war centered on a conflict between two forms of labor. The south advocated for slave labor as a means of production whereas the north advocated for more a humane form of labor, that of conditioning men (and some women and children) in the direction of the machine and the factories that housed those machines. Today automation is surely conditioning us in the direction of the computer as more and more of us sit in front of screens hours on end (as I am doing right now). However, automation is also tacitly sending us the message that automation no longer needs human labor anymore. Heck, in the YouTube video below, futurist and industrialist Elon Musk uses the term “biological intelligence” as a contrast to artificial or machine intelligence. Musk says that today (2024) there is only about one percent biological intelligence in existence. I think this may be a gross underestimation of biological intelligence, but his point is well taken. Musk allows that biological intelligence may serve a role as a “background” of some kind (maybe in the wilderness where silicon chips have a hard time). In his mind, biological intelligence has already run its course. Add to this that 50% of the Nasdaq is being undergirded by the tech stocks known as the Magnificent Seven: Alphabet (GOOGL), Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. And this nicely leads us toward the identified patient we will look at in the next post: money.
