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A review by morgan_blackledge
Embracing Disillusionment: Achieving Liberation Through the Demystification of Suffering by Frank Gruba-McCallister
5.0
Words fail to express how utterly blown away I am by this book.
It’s a monumental achievement.
Embracing Disillusionment is Psycholgist Frank Gruba-McCallister’s magnum opus on the mystification of suffering in late capitalism.
A great companion read with The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. See my review of it here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4416717264
Amongst other things, this book is a fantastic introduction to Liberation Psychology and Critical Psychology.
Liberation Psychology studies the impact of internalized and oppressive sociopolitical structures on the psychology of marginalized and impoverished people, and seeks to alleviate suffering via social and political change.
In other words:
Liberation psychology wants to understand how stuff like capitalism, colonialism, neoliberalism, materialism, and consumerism effects how you think, feel, behave, relate and understand yourself and your place in the world.
And how we can free our minds from all that toxic deviltry.
Critical psychology is a closely related subfield that draws extensively on critical theory in order to deconstruct and challenge the individualistic, reductionist meta-narrative undergirding mainstream psychology.
Critical psychology rejects many of the assumptions of conventional psychology, particularly those that that locate the source of suffering as exclusively within individuals.
Critical psychology asserts that conventional psychology fails to consider how power dynamics between social groups impacts mental health. And identifies conventional psychology as complicit in the mystification of oppression and class/race/political based suffering by explaining psychology predominantly at the individual level.
Critical psychology asserts that social inequities and injustices are also important sources of suffering, and as such promotes social change as a means of preventing and treating socially determined psychopathology.
Critical psychology asserts that the study of the psychology of the individual, isolated and decontextualized, is the study of the “wordless person”.
In the same way cartesian dualism is criticized for perpetuating a harmful “mind/body” split. Critical psychology asserts that conventional psychology perpetuates an equally spurious and harmful “person/environment” split.
This is problematic because people are in fact, highly impacted by their environmental and sociopolitical context.
If someone is anxious because they are subjected to racism or poverty or political oppression, aren’t we part of the problem if we pathologize their actually quite appropriate anxious response?
By directing clients to “look within” cultural workers, including clinicians, are perpetuating the notion that master narratives like capitalism, neoliberalism, racism, and classism are “natural facts” and further mystify the suffering they cause by exclusively focusing on adapting the individual’s internal process and behavior.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of addiction treatment. When people become addicted to drugs and alcohol, we focus exclusively on their individual factors, and only secondarily refer to social determinants of addiction.
It can be said that capitalism is just as addicted to drugs and alcohol as any junkie. Capitalism is dependent on the mechanisms of addiction.
Capitalism is also addicted to industrial medicine. Capitalism needs people to become addicted, and it needs people to be sick.
Medicine treats pain, at the expense of suffering. Addiction is suffering born from avoidance and resistance to pain, and a failure to value suffering as an opportunity for growth in and of itself.
The reductionistic biomedical model’s focus on masking or deferring pain in the immediate short term, in denial of the likely or inevitable suffering this practice engenders in the long term, is rooted in neoliberalism, mind/body dualism, and a general failure to understand the mechanisms of suffering and the value of radical acceptance.
Drugs and alcohol do not solve the problem of suffering. They simply mask it temporarily, while concurrently lowering the threshold overtime, and disempowering users and so far as they imprison us in addiction, and corrode our mental and physical health, and make our lives unmanageable in the process.
The environment is becoming ruined, and we are all commodified, and as such, we are all caught in a vicious cycle of addiction.
In an America that makes happiness an imperative and promotes the myth that nothing stands in your way except your own shortcomings and pathologies, much of human suffering becomes mystified.
Demystification entails not just insight and personal change, but concomitantly clear vision as to external mechanisms of suffering, and an eye toward progressive social change.
Great book.
This thing is a MONSTER
It’s a monumental achievement.
Embracing Disillusionment is Psycholgist Frank Gruba-McCallister’s magnum opus on the mystification of suffering in late capitalism.
A great companion read with The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. See my review of it here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4416717264
Amongst other things, this book is a fantastic introduction to Liberation Psychology and Critical Psychology.
Liberation Psychology studies the impact of internalized and oppressive sociopolitical structures on the psychology of marginalized and impoverished people, and seeks to alleviate suffering via social and political change.
In other words:
Liberation psychology wants to understand how stuff like capitalism, colonialism, neoliberalism, materialism, and consumerism effects how you think, feel, behave, relate and understand yourself and your place in the world.
And how we can free our minds from all that toxic deviltry.
Critical psychology is a closely related subfield that draws extensively on critical theory in order to deconstruct and challenge the individualistic, reductionist meta-narrative undergirding mainstream psychology.
Critical psychology rejects many of the assumptions of conventional psychology, particularly those that that locate the source of suffering as exclusively within individuals.
Critical psychology asserts that conventional psychology fails to consider how power dynamics between social groups impacts mental health. And identifies conventional psychology as complicit in the mystification of oppression and class/race/political based suffering by explaining psychology predominantly at the individual level.
Critical psychology asserts that social inequities and injustices are also important sources of suffering, and as such promotes social change as a means of preventing and treating socially determined psychopathology.
Critical psychology asserts that the study of the psychology of the individual, isolated and decontextualized, is the study of the “wordless person”.
In the same way cartesian dualism is criticized for perpetuating a harmful “mind/body” split. Critical psychology asserts that conventional psychology perpetuates an equally spurious and harmful “person/environment” split.
This is problematic because people are in fact, highly impacted by their environmental and sociopolitical context.
If someone is anxious because they are subjected to racism or poverty or political oppression, aren’t we part of the problem if we pathologize their actually quite appropriate anxious response?
By directing clients to “look within” cultural workers, including clinicians, are perpetuating the notion that master narratives like capitalism, neoliberalism, racism, and classism are “natural facts” and further mystify the suffering they cause by exclusively focusing on adapting the individual’s internal process and behavior.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of addiction treatment. When people become addicted to drugs and alcohol, we focus exclusively on their individual factors, and only secondarily refer to social determinants of addiction.
It can be said that capitalism is just as addicted to drugs and alcohol as any junkie. Capitalism is dependent on the mechanisms of addiction.
Capitalism is also addicted to industrial medicine. Capitalism needs people to become addicted, and it needs people to be sick.
Medicine treats pain, at the expense of suffering. Addiction is suffering born from avoidance and resistance to pain, and a failure to value suffering as an opportunity for growth in and of itself.
The reductionistic biomedical model’s focus on masking or deferring pain in the immediate short term, in denial of the likely or inevitable suffering this practice engenders in the long term, is rooted in neoliberalism, mind/body dualism, and a general failure to understand the mechanisms of suffering and the value of radical acceptance.
Drugs and alcohol do not solve the problem of suffering. They simply mask it temporarily, while concurrently lowering the threshold overtime, and disempowering users and so far as they imprison us in addiction, and corrode our mental and physical health, and make our lives unmanageable in the process.
The environment is becoming ruined, and we are all commodified, and as such, we are all caught in a vicious cycle of addiction.
In an America that makes happiness an imperative and promotes the myth that nothing stands in your way except your own shortcomings and pathologies, much of human suffering becomes mystified.
Demystification entails not just insight and personal change, but concomitantly clear vision as to external mechanisms of suffering, and an eye toward progressive social change.
Great book.
This thing is a MONSTER