Respectfully
Resocializing
Going Down the
Rabbit Hole
Emerging from
Post Doctoral
Clinical
Sociology Research
Currently a live
document with multiple updates every day.
Tues
day 28th March
2017
Email: tcenablers@gmail.com
About ways that work in transforming people
and society:
o Respectfully re-socialising
o Stopping conflict in all of its forms[1]
o Evolving enabling[2]
atmospheres and environments
o Evolving Vibrant Communities
o Increasing effectiveness in Therapeutic Communities
o Setting up community processes for:
o Stopping family violence
o Stopping bullying
o Stopping addictive behaviours
o Stopping racism
o Re-constituting[3]
society following man-made and natural disasters
o Enlivening schools in areas of situated poverty
o Revitalizing Grandparenting, Parenting and Childhood
o Re-locating, settling, and habilitating displaced people
o Re-socialising the Radicalized
o Evolving thriving multicultural communities
o Evolving humane caring alternatives to Criminal and
Psychiatric Incarceration
o Reviving closed Therapeutic Communities
o Having vibrant Community doing things and being the change process (rather than
government, organizational, or business services)
o Evolving our Unique Potentials in making better Realities
perhaps
it’s a source of precious gems
not
a manual
and
whether gems
depends
on you
as
the potency of these gems
is
a function of you
not
the gems
and
a function of how
you
weave
the
gems
and
imaging a special place
filled
with these gems
healing
transforming power
only
tapped by folk
relating
with them in special ways
and
using these same ways
in
relating with each other
within
contexts
framed
in special ways
something
to do with subtle loving energy
surrendering
for
evolving
potent
realities
Contents
Assuming a
Social Basis of Mental Illness.
Margaret Mead the Anthropologist
Visiting Fraser House
Constituting
Fraser House as an Institution.
The
Potency of Social Relating
The Resocializing Program
– Using Governance Therapy
The
Potential Potency of Small Moments
Identifying with Transforming
Action
Legitimising Fraser House by
Establishing the Psychiatric Research Study Group
Legitimation Supporting
Fraser House and All Involved
Legitimating Under Threat of
Reality Breakdown
Research
Questionnaires And Inventories - Neville Yeomans Collected Papers
A List Of Advisory Bodies And Positions Held By Dr
Neville Yeomans
DIAGRAMS
Diagram 1 Map of Section of Gladesville
Diagram 2 Resident Committees and the Staff Devolving their Traditional Roles to
Become Healers
Diagram 3 Recast of Diagram Two
PHOTOS
Photo 1 One of the
Fraser House Dorms
Together we make things happen
and together we’re transformed in the process
Pervasively, throughout the
world social systems of systems have evolved with a massive array of control
processes for the control of everyone with no one in control.[4] The expression ‘going
down the rabbit hole’ hints at entry
into the unknown. The red pill and its opposite, the blue pill, are popular culture
symbols representing the choice between embracing the sometimes painful truth
of reality (red pill) and the blissful ignorance of illusion (blue pill).
You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe
whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and
I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
In the Matrix[5] film the term red pill referred to a human that is aware of the true
nature of the Matrix. In Fraser House they were re-defining
the nature of the red pill – here you’ll experience living well in the Matrix
and support re-humanizing the Matrix. The Matrix is the Social System of
systems of control with no one in control.
A major means of control is
socializing. Within that a major means of control is the slowing down of
imagination so that a fundamental mural[6] about reality can be set
in concrete and therefore never noticed and rarely or never questioned. It’s
about time - this E-Book looks back (to the 1960s) to look forward to present
action towards respectfully re-socializing in the process of evolving new realities where people can thrive in evolving new thriving Again -
it’s about time.[7]
In the early 1960s
there was an example of Resocializing that Worked. In this E-Book
‘Resocializing’ refers to actions that profoundly respect the individual and
the collective.[8]
This 1960s example may be a model for our Age. This social action example was
an experimental facility called Fraser House, an
uncharacteristic psychiatry Unit exploring non-drug community processes.
This
Unit took in seriously at-risk Residents transferred from the wards at the back
of mental hospitals where these hospitals would put patients that they could not help.
Fraser
House also took in people from jails whom the authorities would not give a day
of parole. Processes that worked were replicated or adapted in later contexts
within the Unit. After operating for some months this Unit was returning these
Residents to living well in Society within twelve weeks. In the early drafts
of this E-Book it commenced as a dense account unravelling how the tightly woven
Fraser House Way worked in re-socialising
these people. This E-Book has emerged as something very different. It is now
more a dense account of how the Residents
socialized Fraser House and found
themselves in the process. Before coming to Fraser House, the Residents
tended to experience life as without meaning (meaningless), and without norms
(normlessness). They were typically isolates that did not belong. They were
misfits.
Yeomans
set out to evolve a dense process for establishing shared meaning, and shared
norms, and supportive friendships and a strong sense of belonging to something
of great value.
It
is also about how the Residents found out
things about how society at large shuts down, controls and limits[9]
people and how they began taking back
agency in acting together for a better world.
The
founding director of Fraser House was Dr Neville Yeoman (1928-2000). The Unit
was exploring the evolving of non-drug community-based re-socialising
approaches within psychiatry (and without psychiatry) in Sydney, Australia
during 1959 to 1968.
A
concerted attempt has been made to make this E-Book understandable. One of the
challenges is that Dr Neville Yeomans’ Way was very eclectic, multifaceted and
guided by the moment in context.
Neville’s way can never be adequately expressed
in words. It can never be externalised.[10]
His
Way pervasively involves engaging the flux between internal and external realities, phenomena, and
experience within and between people – inter-subjectivity.
Yeomans’
Way is encapsulated in one of more than 1,000 poems he composed.[11]
The Way
is
searching
for the way
This
is one reason why this E-Book is not a step-by-step manual where the potency is
externalised and pinned down with words. Any attempt to do that looses the Way
Some aspects mentioned may appear paradoxical - though
these aspects are
typically at
different logical levels, where the term ‘logic’ is
used in an original
meaning – namely,
the pattern whereby all
things are connected.
Where typically a book may have
many sentences to state a good idea, many of the
sentences in this E-Book have a number of good ideas stacked in one sentence,
or sentence fragment. Sometimes just two words within a sentence embody a very
potent idea. This is consistent with Dr Neville Yeomans’ Way and the Ways being
explored in this E-Book
Some
sentences may need a few readings and some reflection, as like Alice, we are
going down the rabbit hole - perhaps to find a Wonderland.
Yeomans evolved Fraser House assuming a social
basis of mental illness. This has links to the important role social cohesion
plays in preventing mind-body-spirit sickness in Australian Aboriginal culture.[12]
Regardless of conventional diagnosis, in Fraser House it was assumed that
dysfunctional Residents would have a dysfunctional inter-personal family friendship
network. This networked dysfunctionality was the focus of change. Consistent
with this, the Fraser House process was sociologically oriented. The Way was
based upon a social model of mental dis-ease and a social model of change to
ease and wellbeing.[13]
That the public at large never thought much about
social causes of dis-ease was discussed by Smelser in the BBC Series The
Century of the Self[14]
in speaking about the United States public post Second World War:
.......that they would in fact
adapt to the reality about them. They
never questioned the reality. They never questioned that it might itself be a
source of evil or something to which you could not adapt without compromise or
without suffering or without exploiting yourself in some way. So there was this
fit with the politics of the day
Yeomans
used a very holistic approach weaving together the biological aspects of the
physical body, the psycho-emotional aspects of people, and how everyone’s’
body-mind interacted with the social-life-world (the bio-psycho-social).[15] Yeomans was exploring
links between the social and the bio-psycho aspects of all. In drawing upon
sociological perspectives Yeomans included the Sociology of the Body and
Clinical Sociology – discussed later.
Yeomans
was interested in the re-constituting of the physical body moving in space[16] and how movement
interacts with the illness-wellness continuum; exploring moving beyond:
o feeling down (de-pressed)
o feeling heavy (with compressed vertebrae activating
kinaesthetic receptors through the spine increasing subjective sense of weight)
o feeling crushed,
o being on the back foot
o being off-side,
o feeing being bitter and twisted
Yeomans
was equally interested in Ways for re-constituting the body of the Fraser House Collective.
Yeomans said that he and all involved in Fraser
House worked with the notion that the Residents’ life difficulties were in the
main, from ‘cracks’ in society, not them. Yeomans took this social basis of
mental dis-ease not out of an ignorance of diagnosis. Yeomans was a government
advisor on psychiatric diagnosis as a member of the Committee of Classification
of Psychiatric Patterns of the National Health and Medical Research Council of
Australia.
Yeomans was familiar with twin sociological notions
that people are social products and at the same time people together constitute[17]
their social reality.[18]
Yeomans said[19]
that he took as a starting framework that people’s internal and external
experience,[20]
along with their interpersonal linking with family, friends, and wider society
are all inter-connected and inter-dependent.
Given this, Yeomans held to the view that
pathological aspects of society and community, and dysfunctional social
networks give rise to criminality and mental dis-ease in the individual. As
well, his view was that ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ behaviours emerge from dysfunctionality
in family and friendship networks.
This was compounded by people feeling like they did
not belong - being dis-placed from place and dislocated. Problematic behaviours
may be experienced as feeling bad or feeling mad, or feeling mad and bad.
While Yeomans recognized massively inter-connected
causal process were at work, he also recognized and emphasized this macro to
micro direction of complex interwoven causal forces and processes within the
psychosocial dimension.
Working with the above framework, Yeomans set out to
use a Keyline[21]
principle, ‘do the opposite’ to interrupt and reverse dysfunctional
psychosocial and psychobiological processes (biopsychosocial). That is, he
would design social and community forces and processes that would inevitably
lead from the micro to the macro towards Fraser House Residents reconstituting
their lives towards living well together. Yeomans told me a number of times
that the aim and outcome of Fraser House therapeutic forces and processes was
‘balancing emotional expression’ towards being a ‘balanced[22]
friendly person’ who could easily live firstly, within the Fraser House
community, and then in their new, expanded, and functional network in the wider
community.
Andy Brooker in an email wrote of:
Institutions promoting decontextualized forms of personal
responsibility - ‘often implying (through the veil of diagnosis) that the
person themselves, or their family are the cause of their problems; while
consistently failing to highlight the real cause of social harm and its[23] role in creating the
interlinking forms of oppression, at the root of their suffering.’
In
this view, dysfunctional behaviours may be seen as ‘defence patterns’, and as ‘the
best that people could do` in endeavouring to cope with and accommodate
societal pressures.
Fraser House took
people who were profound dropouts – people who were shutdown and largely disconnected from
society mentally and physically.
These were people who had had society
disconnect them from their friends, relatives, acquaintances, and society at
large by locking them up in prison cells and the back-wards in mental
hospitals. They had had ‘society’ ‘knocked’
out of them by the system. What had happened in their worlds had also happened
inside of them - people were dissociated[24] and dis-connected.
These residents had
profound shutdown in response to not fitting within the dominant system. Some
had the added overlay of addiction.[25] Fraser House was
originally called the Alcoholics and Neurotics Unit.
The aim in Fraser
House was to have these people engaging collectively in doing their own transforming of their own making
in dis-alienating and re-socialising
themselves so that they were not only able to cope, they were also able to live well with others and be resilient in the face of dominant system
pressures.
What Yeomans did do
was to constantly stack possibilities
for contexts to emerge where Residents engaged in their own transforming.
After leaving Fraser
House ex-Residents were able to live
well in Society. In many cases they became social catalysts creating social
innovation (rather than fighting the existing system or returning to being
‘dropouts’).
When
Yeomans was approached by me relating to doctoral research into Fraser House he
referred me to past staff, Residents, and Outpatients of the Unit, as well as
to Alfred Clark, the head of the Fraser House External Research team at Fraser
House.
He
and Yeomans wrote the book, Fraser House – Theory, Practice, and Evaluation of
a Therapeutic Community.[26] Alf Clark[27] went on to obtain his PhD[28] based upon his Fraser
House Research.
When
Clark left Fraser House he worked at the Tavistock Institute in the UK; then he
became Professor and Head of the La Trobe University’s very radical and
critical Sociology Department in Victoria, Australia for fourteen years.
He
was head when I completed my Social Science degree in his department – majoring
in Sociology of Knowledge.[29]
Clark
writes in his 1993 book, ‘Understanding Social Conflict’[30] that Fraser House and its outreach[31] is still the best model
for resolving social conflict around the
world that he has found.
None of these interviewees referred by Yeomans were able to shed any
light whatsoever on what actually
made Fraser House work. They could outline the timetable of activities - that
kept being altered by Residents in committee. They could confirm that Fraser
House processes did work extremely well and had good results in healing people
in an original sense of that term meaning to
make whole; to integrate. People did transform. This transforming was a
matter of degree - at times bit by bit, at other times big changes.
Interviewees confirmed that the Residents and Outpatients engaged in
mutual-help[32]
and self-help through being fully involved in re-forming their way of life together.
The interviewees could describe the many things that happened. However,
every one of them said that how all
this ‘worked’ and what made the processes work in being transformational was
‘beyond them’.
Yeomans was enriching practical
wisdom[33]
in the common person.
In a resonant way Postle[34] has introduced the term
‘the psyCommons’.
The psyCommons is a name for the universe
of rapport – of relationship between people – through which we navigate daily
life. It describes the beliefs, the preconceptions, and especially the learning
from experience that we all bring to bear on our own particular corner of the
human condition. To name these commonsense capacities ‘the psyCommons’ is to
honour the multitudinous occasions of insight, affect, and defect that we bring
to daily life: in parenting and growing up, caring for the disabled and
demented, persisting with the love that brings flourishing and success,
supporting neighbours visited by calamity, joining friends and family in
celebrations of life thresholds. As my colleague Andy Rogers described
it, the psyCommons is a rich resource of ‘ordinary wisdom’ and also, more
controversially, ‘shared power’. The air we breathe, the radio spectrum, the
oceans and the land we occupy – all these are commons, or ‘common pool
resources’; they belong to us and we belong to them. The psyCommons is one of
these commons. And, in parallel with the history of the enclosures of common
land in the UK and elsewhere, the psyCommons too has enclosures. In that
insidious way that politics can be invisibly present in daily life, the
psy-professions – psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, psycho-therapy and
counselling – have enclosed the
psyCommons.
Yeomans Way at Fraser
House could be characterised in part by the notion of exploring all manner of
ways for enriching the psyCommons within
all attendees.
As pointed out by
Bob Dick:[35]
The harming
consequences of the dynamics of the larger system would have been also affecting
the Fraser House Psychiatrists and Psychologists (including
Yeomans). Their behaviour was also a consequence of system dynamics.
To quote the Biography on Yeomans
work life:
In the early days of Fraser House,
permissiveness within the staff-Resident relation was embodied[36]
in the slogan, ‘We are all patients here together’.
The self-help and mutual-help focus was supported by the slogan:
We are all co-therapists.[37]
However, recall that boundaries
were maintained between staff and Resident in that any staff needing
psychosocial support would either receive this within an all-staff support
group, or if the situation warranted it, the staff member would enter Fraser
House as a voluntary patient[38]
The following three paragraphs are repeated text (without
the footnotes – though you may want to refer back to these) from earlier in
this segment.
In writing and rewriting this E-Book I read through
these three paragraphs many times. Then it suddenly dawned on me that these
three paragraphs are the very heart and soul of Neville Yeomans’ Way. In many
respects they sum up the whole E-Book. Perhaps you, like me may get more significance
out of the repeat reading with interspersed comments.
Note that it reports Yeoman saying the following is
his starting frame work.
Yeomans said that he took as a starting framework that:
a) people’s:
a. internal, and
b. external experience,
b) along with their
interpersonal linking with family, friends,
c) and wider society
d)
are all inter-connected and inter-dependent.
Time and again we will be
referring to the following)
a)
the inter-play between
a. internal, and
b. external
b) the experience of all involved (again the mingling of the internal and
external aspects of experiencing)
c) Residents interpersonally:
a. inter-linking, and
b. inter-relating
d) with family and friends
(and learning about and experiencing belongingness and locatedness; and
expanding and enriching their sense of identity)
e) Re-connecting all involved
f) in new ways to society (new ways that are
functional and tapping the unique potentials)
Note this influencing is going
from micro – to macro; linking the individual to the group and the group to
society. Each of the above points are being done simultaneously; they are also:
a.
Inter-connected, and
b. Inter-dependent.
Given this, Yeomans held to the view that:
a)
pathological aspects of:
a.
society, and
b.
community, and
c.
dysfunctional social networks
give rise to criminality and mental dis-ease in the
individual.
Note the framing (dis-ease). Yeomans does not use dominant
system metaphors - ‘hygiene’, ‘health’ or ‘illness’ in referring to phenomena
of mind (mental)
As well, his view was
a) that ‘mad’ and ‘bad’
behaviours emerge from dysfunctionality in family and friendship networks.
This was
compounded by:
b) people feeling like they
did not belong - being dis-placed from place and dis-located.
Problematic behaviours may be experienced as:
c)
feeling bad or
d)
feeling mad, or
e)
feeling mad and bad.
While Yeomans recognized:
a)
massively inter-connected causal process were at work,
(going
from the macro to the micro – society to individual)
he also:
a)
recognized. and
b)
emphasized:
this macro to micro direction of complex interwoven
causal forces and processes within the psychosocial dimension.
Yeomans is referring to socialising, and particularly
in context, problematic aspects of, and consequences of societal socialising.
Working with
the above framework,
That is, the starting
with the framework that:
a) people’s internal and external experience,
b) along with their
interpersonal linking with family, friends,
c) and wider society
are all inter-connected, inter-related and inter-dependent
– a complex multi-variable system.
Dynamic transformational engaging with this inter-connecting,
inter-relating and inter-depending entails sensing everything as a complex
multivariable system. There is absolutely no way that this complex system can
be understood from an analysis of the parts. So many crucial aspects only emerge at the certain levels and kinds of
integrated complexity. For an example in nature - the property of sweetness
associated with glucose only emerges when carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen are
combined in a very particular way in very specific proportions (C6H12O6). You can analyse carbon,
hydrogen and oxygen separately and you will never find sweetness. Yeomans
Transformational Framework involved honing in on evolving inter-connecting,
inter-relating and inter-depending relational networking.
The living world with Fraser House was a Network of
Intersubjective Relating within Relational Networks involving networked
thinking. This concept is embraced by the German expression vernetztes denken
which translates as joined-up-thinking.[39]
Yeomans was a pioneer in linking ecology and social
ecology in using a living systems approach in engaging with people on the
margins. Living systems that are adaptive
and thriving well, while being provoked and challenged by the surrounding
ecosystem are usually in far from equilibrium states.[40] In complexity terms, every aspect of Fraser House was
structured by Yeomans and others to maintain the Unit in a far from equilibrium
state. When situations within Fraser House became stuck, Neville would
intentionally perturb it, and then use the evoked heightened emotional
contagion as emotional corrective experience. It follows that there multiple
ways to engender transforming in complex systems.
Yeomans set out to:
a.
use a Keyline principle (do the opposite)’
b. to interrupt, and
c. reverse
d.
dysfunctional
i. psychosocial, and
ii. psychobiological processes (biopsychosocial).
Yeomans is interrupting
society’s sustained socialising and reversing it by re-socialising all involved
in a micro-life-world of their own
making – where their way of life together
is wholesome and promotes ease (rather than dis-ease) and wellness in all of
its forms.
That is, he would design:[41]
e.
social, and
f.
communal
i. forces[42],
and
ii. processes
g.
that would inevitably[43]
lead from the micro to the macro
towards
Fraser House Residents reconstituting their lives towards living well together.
Yeomans told
me a number of times:
b) that the aim and outcome of
Fraser House therapeutic forces[44]
and processes was ‘balancing[45]
emotional expression’
c) towards being a ‘balanced
friendly person’
d) who could easily live
firstly, within the Fraser House community, and
e) then in their new,
expanded, and functional network
f) in the wider community.
There are a lot of ideas stacked in these three repeated
paragraphs. They came directly from my recording of Neville Yeomans telling me
stories about his days in Fraser House. And it was stories that I was hearing.
My retelling makes the words have overtones of explaining and
describing. Neville used the narrative form. I had written Yeomans words down
in the 1990s and added them to this E-Book without the denseness and import sinking
in. They were not some ‘introductory snippets’. They actually are succinct
dense statements encapsulating Yeomans Way.[46]
Margaret Mead the anthropologist visited Fraser House in the
early 1960s. Mead was the co-founder of the World Federation of Mental health
and the third president of that organisation during the years 1956-57. In August 1999, Yeomans was recorded as saying that
during that Fraser House visit, Mead stated that Fraser House was the only
therapeutic community she had visited that was totally a therapeutic community in every sense. Fraser House
anthropologist-psychologist Margaret Cockett confirmed what Dr Yeomans had said
about Mead’s comments.
By this term ‘total’ I sense Mead was referring to the
pervasively complex inter-connected, inter-related denseness of the
interweaving of every aspect of the
Unit’s densely inter-connected and
inter-related ways towards Resocializing and return-ing
Residents to living well in community. All
of my Fraser House informants also spoke of this dense holistic inter-related
‘total’ nature of Fraser House.
Maxwell
Jones the pioneer of therapeutic communities in the UK said of Fraser House:
......given
such a carefully worked-out structure, evolution is an inevitable consequence.[47]
Perhaps
Maxwell Jones (like Margaret Mead) could sense Resocializing (outlined in this
current E-Book) as being implicit in Clark and Yeomans’ book if one had
capacity to read between the lines and sense all of the rich implications of
Fraser House Ways, especially the inevitability of evolving.
The Fraser House roles for professional staff
did not involve using their academic training – rather, the evolving and using
of a very different set of competences. For context, Yeomans profoundly respected the
psyCommons in everything he did. While the psy-professions generally had
totally enclosed the psyCommons of these potential
residents of the Fraser House (coming as they were from psychiatric hospitals
and prisons), Yeomans enclosed residents within Fraser House Commons and
regularly brought residents’ family friend network into the Fraser House
enclosure. Then via Governance Therapy and the Resocializing Program (see
later), Yeomans had all of the professional
staff stepping out of their
psy-profession roles (read experts ‘doing things to or for people’) to become
supporting the enriching of the psyCommons – as ‘healers’, (the term meaning
‘to make whole again’ – and enablers[48]
(a term meaning to support others to be able) – hence, supporting Residents and
Outpatients to do everything for themselves – mutual-help) in the context of
what Postle termed a 'universe of rapport' within relating between people.
Yeomans
wove together and adapted understandings from working with his father in
evolving Keyline, a process within sustainable agriculture. Neville Yeomans,
his brother Alan and their father P.A. Yeomans discovered ways to make nature
thrive.[49]
Neville
extended this work in exploring how to have human nature thrive. Neville used
bio-mimicry in setting up embedded contexts – the context within the context –
to multiple levels – and imbrications.[50] Within Fraser House,
Yeomans was continually setting up meta-contexts[51] and co-locating[52] people and things; as
well as combining[53]
people, things, and contexts[54] – the context for the
emergence of significant contexts.
Another
thing Yeomans was doing is perhaps summed up by the term ‘stacking’. He would
literally pile things on top of each other in a stack. He would stack each day
full of transforming possibilities[55] – something recognised by
Margaret Mead with her use of the term ‘total’.
Another
significant adaptation was engaging with indigenous understandings of the
geo-emotional and the links between land topography and social topography.[56]
Yeomans
said[57], that any psychiatrist
entering Fraser House would experience ‘their maximal career dis-empowerment’
as nothing in their academic training or their professional experience or
career to date would have prepared them for their new role of sustaining healing contexts; where all
involved - including all staff - were Resocializing
themselves by finding themselves
(their selves). As Maxwell Jones
observed, within Fraser House, evolution was an inevitable consequence – and this applied to the staff as well.
What’s
more, they would be working in an environment where Residents and Outpatients
who had already being involved in Fraser House living everyday and every night
for many weeks were far more experienced in Fraser House transforming ways than
these psy-professionals.
Residents
in writing one of the Fraser House Staff Handbooks[58] wrote:
So
you have decided to join Fraser House. Good career move!
The
Residents recognised firsthand the potency of this potential new area within
the psy-professions of having the role of being enablers of self-help and mutual-help within the psyCommons using uncharacteristic
community as the transforming medium (therapeutic community).
Yeomans said[59] that when staff returned to work everyone wanted to get the
latest news and catch up on everything that had been happening. So engaging was
the work that staff had to be sent home at the end of their shift; they did not
want to leave.
When I commenced this research
into Fraser House I assumed that some traditional
change process was being used. I would ask questions like, ‘what type of
therapy did you use’? Gestalt? Cognitive? Behavioural? The typical reply was:
It was not like that.
I
cannot pinpoint the time when I realized that in Fraser House ‘community’ of a peculiar and
uncharacteristic kind was the therapy and that ‘therapeutic community’ was the change process, not a just a name.
I
sense it came from conversations with a friend and colleague of mine, Dr Andrew
Cramb.
All
of the Resident Community Governance (refer later) and other ‘work’ by
Residents were change process. Everything was change process. Processes were eclectically spontaneous and not driven by
compliance with steps or theory.
Mead
recognised that with her use of the word 'Total'. ‘Community
being the change process’ was mentioned in the archives. However, I had just
not sensed it.
Once I had this understanding about socio-therapy and
community-therapy and that Neville viewed Fraser House as a complex
self-organising living system, it became clear that all that Neville had said
about his father’s interest in living systems was central and not peripheral.
One
of Yeomans’ mantras was:
Nothing
happens unless the locals[60] want it to happen.
There
is a dense subtlety to this mantra:
o The Residents
(the locals) had the say as to what, when, where, and how. This had the
processes always changing, largely by
input from Residents and Outpatients. Residents and Outpatients would play a
part in writing up the latest Staff Handbook, which was a catch-up depicting
what had already being put into
place.
o The collective was evolving their own Way of
life together, and it was the collective
that was Resocializing. Yeomans was never
engaged in Resocializing the Collective. It was never service delivery [61]
o Residents and
Outpatients were the one’s involved in helping themselves in self-help and
mutual-help
o They are the
ones doing the doing
o They are
collectively engaged, again, if they want to
o The foregoing
sets up the context for outsiders – staff - (working with some or more, or all
of the locals) in supporting locals to be able, or more able
o It presupposes
that any in the enabler role gain and sustain rapport
o For Yeomans, all
of the enabler language is in the passive voice. Everything is soft – never
imposing or directing – never ‘telling them what to do’ – rather, suggesting
possibilities – suggesting experiences
Yeomans did:
o
Set
up Fraser House as a purpose built infrastructure
o
Select
the staff
o
Set
up the intake process and the balanced intake of kinds of Residents
o
Set
up Big Group and Small Group Framework
o
Set
up the Governance Committee process that Residents and their family friend
network attended
o
Set
up tight constraints within Big and Small Groups
This replicates in a peculiar way that life
happens within constraints. Residents had come from psychiatric hospitals and
prisons that were filled with pervasive constraints.
In Fraser House, Yeomans set up a mini life
world[62]
with extremely tight socially ecological
enabling constraints[63]
that set up extremely attractive rich contexts for them to engage the mantra:
Nothing happens unless the locals
want it to happen.
Here we together evolve our reality, and as we
do this we may find ourselves finding our self, and enriching our self.[64]
Yeomans described his role as relational
mediator[65] between those involved
and life’s possibilities.[66]
Yeomans was involved in highly effective
sustained promotional activity. This is discussed later under, ‘Legitimating
Fraser House’. Yeomans typically had a waiting list of people wanting to attend
and or be residents at Fraser House.
Often, ex-Residents would be negotiating
re-entry for a further stay. And this context where people wanted to be
involved also applied to Yeomans’ outreach work where he was setting up micro
therapeutic community houses in Mackay, Townsville, and Cairns; he had no
difficulty obtaining residents.
In Fraser House the ‘locals’ were the Residents
and Outpatients. Yeomans applied the same mantra (Nothing happens unless the locals want it to
happen) during Fraser House Outreach up the East Coast of Australia, across the
Top End, and in his SE Asia Oceania work. The mantra embodies self-help and
mutual-help.
Upon
leaving Fraser House they were leaving the peculiar Fraser House Constraints;
no longer the daily round of activities. However, they now had internalized
Fraser House within them as re-socialized selves.
They
had an extensive repertoire of life competences; they had a new relating with
what things mean (meaning making) – and increasing wellbeing in their life with
others.[67]
They
could recognise themes[68]
and be aware of changing contexts,[69]
and new frames[70], reframes[71]
and new definitions of the situation[72]
relating to their relating to the
reality of everyday life.
This
world is rather crazy, not me!
Another
key component not yet mentioned was that Fraser House Residents in large part
went home on the weekends throughout their stay. This was a weekly reality
check on how they were transforming.
If
any had strife – call on your network of friends and acquaintances over the
weekend, or bring it up in a group on Monday.
Those
interviewed for the PhD said that they could not make any sense what-so-ever of
what actually made Fraser House
‘work’ in having people transform. While the people interviewed were still
working (or participating as Residents or Outpatients) in Fraser House in the
1960s, they had accepted Fraser House worked just like they accepted as a fact
that the sky is blue.
Yeomans himself stated that finding out how Fraser House worked was my research challenge; Yeomans knew how
it worked though he was not going to do my PhD for him (or for me).
Neville never described Fraser House to me or attempted to explain it in
any way. We discussed the limits of explaining and describing many times. In
summary:
‘Explain’ means to make (an idea or situation) clear to
someone by describing it in more detail or revealing relevant facts (facts are
slippery and depend on human interest).
The Romans realised that explaining
involved an abstracting process – the leaving out of the richness of the
original.
The word explain is derived from ex- a word-forming
element; in English meaning usually ‘out of, from’ - from the Latin ex ‘out
of, from within; from which time, since; according to; in regard to’. Explain
is also derived from plain - ‘flat,
smooth’: from the Latin planus ‘flat, even, level’. In combination ex-planus literally meaning ‘out of the plain’ (out of the
two-dimensional); that is, reducing the multi-dimensional to two dimensions.
Yeomans was very wary of explanations (and the inadequacy of ‘describing’).
In place of explaining and describing Neville told stories and told me
to ask my interviewees to tell their stories. He told me to visit Fraser House
building and personally sense the place. He also teed up many contexts of
similar form and therein created contexts for me to experience things of great
potency.
The PhD has been completed[73] and revised and extended
as a biography[74]
on Dr Neville Yeomans’ life work. This Resocializing E-Book has been written as
a stand-alone piece, although reading the Yeomans biography and other
references may enrich understanding.
An associated text, ‘Coming to One’s Senses – By the Way’[75] provides scope to
complement understanding.
This current E-Book also draws upon:
o Berger and Luckmann’s, ‘Social Construction of Reality - A Treatise in the Sociology of
Knowledge’ (1976),[76] and
o Pelz’s, ‘The
Scope of Understanding in Sociology - Towards a More Radical Reorientation in
the Social and Humanistic Sciences’, and
o Clinical Sociology[77]
to explore some of the essence of Fraser House
Re-socializing Ways.
Setting
out in words how Fraser House worked is a near impossible task. You had to be
there. You had to experience it. In fundamental ways words are inadequate.
Words are used sequentially. Sentences are also sequential. Fraser House was
fundamentally a profoundly dense, interlinked, integrated, holistic process. So
much was happening below awareness. So much was happening simultaneously. There
was constant Flux and Flow. There was continually stacked framing, reframing,
functional boundary ambiguity and co-locating of multiple realities.[78] Sometimes the
participants were all together. Sometimes they split up and were in anywhere
from two to eighteen rooms, or scattered throughout the facility.
All
were engaged in this splitting up and re-joining – what Yeomans’ termed
cleavered unity.[79]
What
was happening in different places also had multiple implications for others
involved. So much was laden with multiple implications.
Masses
of significant and potent things were constantly happening
day and night, day in and day out, with multiple things happening at the same
time in the same place every moment – in a word ‘dense’ and in another ‘total’.
In Fraser House, often what was potent was the most simplest of things.[80] And these significant and
potent things were indelibly linked to place – such as the Big Group room.
Yeomans was hyper-aware of the significance of place and Ways to add to and
enrich the significance of place. He stacked significant happenings inside the Big
Groom room. With ‘place’ looming so large Yeomans was well
aware of what has been termed the method of loci (loci being Latin for
"places") – this is a method of memory
enhancing which uses the phenomenon of knowing linked to place and the
associated spatial memory and visualizing linked to the use of familiar
information about place and one's spatial environment to quickly and
efficiently recall information and re-access psycho-emotional resource states.
Happenings within the Big Group room were readily recalled and along with this
recall; the accessing of psycho-emotional resource states accompanying the recalled
experience. Attendees would re-access these resource states whenever they
re-entered the Big Group room.
The
challenge in this E-Book is to have the reader reading the sequential material and progressively receiving information that
has the quality of being ‘stacked’, while shifting beyond ‘stack’ to receiving
the feel and sense of this non-linear dynamic – to sensing the whole-of-it[81] and beginning to get it –
whatever it is. Not your average
academic or non-academic read.
All
involved in the uniqueness of Fraser House as a social system had embodied
experience leading to embodied knowing (typically without the knowing making
much sense) and also to actual transforming (and hardly noticing the difference
– so they did not sabotage their change work) and to moving back to living more
easily in wider society.
Yeomans[82]
suggested that a starting point for PhD research on Fraser House was reading all
of his father’s writings about agriculture.[83]
Yeomans then said that he had extended
the work that he had done alongside his father towards having nature thriving
by adapting ways from nature[84]
to fostering human nature to thrive. At the time this suggestion made little
sense to me. My own preconceptions about what Neville and his father were doing
was massively limiting both my inquiry and my perception and it was many months
later that I did follow Neville’s very sensible suggestion. Without a sense of
the profound linking between nature and human nature and how Yeomans was using
bio-mimicry to evolve his processes one would never plumb the depth of his Way.
Recall that those interviewed for the PhD said that Fraser House was
incomprehensible – to repeat, they had accepted Fraser House worked just like
they accepted as a self-evident fact that
the sky is blue; Fraser House was just there, like the AMP Society[85] - as part of the ‘nature
of things’. The term ‘reify’ applies. ‘Reification’ is the treating of human
phenomena as if they are natural or ‘god-given’ and not human-made and socially
constituted. Fraser House phenomena were legitimated by their very existence as
‘something in the world’. In this context, both the AMP Society[86] and Fraser House were
reified. This process tends to hide the fact that because these institutions
are made by humans they can also be re-made by humans; they are not fixed in
stone. While this incomprehension was going on among my interviewees back in
the 1960s (and still continuing when I interviewed them in 1998 and 1999),
everyone involved with the Unit during the Fraser House years was continually
immersed in the very processes that constituted Fraser House, namely collectively re-constituting their shared
social reality, while simultaneously, all
were individually and collectively being re-constituted by this same social
reality.
While
looking at reification at the institutional level, the same process can happen
to both roles and identity of self and others.
Reification concretises such that the person becomes the role and nothing more.
The distance between the person and the role shrinks. This same reifying process
had contributed to Fraser House Residents’ way of being prior to, and during their incarceration in mental hospital
or prison – they were those types of people. At that time this typing of these people was accepted as
fact by ‘Authorities’:
A
person diagnosed as thing – she’s a neurotic (she IS a neurotic).
She
is here to be contained (in multiple senses) and looked after – not transformed
beyond assigned typing; to be ‘warehoused’ indefinitely and not to be returned
to society.
Similarly,
these ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ had totally identified
with this socially assigned typing
(typification). In self referential description, some were mad types; some were bad types; and some were both mad and bad types. In Fraser
House they began changing the type of people that they were, and sensed they
were.
Herbert
Mead wrote:
A
self can arise only where there is a social
process within which the self has had its initiation. It arises within that
process.
Many
of the Residents when they arrived at Fraser House were ‘no-bodies from
no-where’. Fraser House evolved a very special social process where the
Residents’ selves could have initiation and arise.
Fraser
House was collapsing old dysfunctional reifications at both role and identity level. Self was
being enriched so that Residents began realising their capacity to take on new
types of roles and maintain distance between their various roles and their core self. They became types in the
process of transforming type; being involved in Self realising.
Here
is more of Herbert Mead’s comments on the self:
A
self can arise only where there is a
social process within which the self has had its initiation. It arises
within that process. For that process, the communication
and participation to which I have
referred is essential. That is the way in which selves have arisen. There the
self arises. And there he turns back upon himself, directs himself as he does
others.
He
takes over those experiences which belong to his own organism. He identifies with himself.
What
constitutes the particular structure of his experience is that what we call his
‘thought’. It is the conversation which goes on within the self. This is what
constitutes mind (my italics).[87]
Outside
of notions of type assigned by others, Residents and Outpatients began refining
and fine-tuning their selves in becoming a fine[88] self[89]
All
involved were learning how to be self-made people and collectively-made people
of high worth through high quality mutual-help and self-help while tapping into and evolving their unique potentials
(refer, ‘Realising Human Potentials’).[90]
At
the same time they were taking on the understanding that:
Here
in this Unit, this is what does
happen for all involved, and that
this changework is our primary role,
and that we only have twelve weeks to do all of this, with all the support we
will need, so we can get on with it now.
Fraser
House existed as both an objective
and subjective reality. People could objectively see and hear it in action.
They could also experience it internally
as a subjective experience.[91]
What
made Fraser House work will be explored in terms of externalization, objectivation, and internalization.
Fraser
House way was exploring processes for the ongoing modification of subjective reality.
Residents
and Outpatients were continually having experiences within powerful contexts
that were altering their internal psycho-emotional and physical states of being
in everyday life.
Little
known and apparently not discussed was the fact that they were also
transforming the way they moved their bodies – the way they sat, the way they
stood, and the way they walked.[92]
While
starting as an idea in Yeomans head, Fraser House became an objective reality; an entity existing in
the externally real world. It became, by various processes, there present to
visit and see on Cox Road in North Ryde on Sydney’s North Shore as an
objectively present complex.
People who
participated at Fraser House were constantly engaged in continual exchange between inner and
outer experience.[93]
They were internalising their experience of
the Unit. These processes of externalization,
objectivation and internalization
were not sequential; rather they were all occurring simultaneously as Fraser House evolved. Everyone involved was also
simultaneously externalizing their internal experience of being in Fraser
House while internalising their
experience as an objective reality. Internalising was evidenced by objectively observing Objective
behaviours and deep immersion in intersubjective relating, while flitting
between inner and outer focus is an inherent aspect of the human condition. To use a metaphor, living in Fraser
House was like living in a fishbowl surrounded on all sides by participant
observers who showed sustained interest in you.
All involved
were ongoingly mutually identifying
with each other in a two-fold sense – firstly, as ‘people involved with Fraser
House’; secondly, in this they were also identifying their own identity in the
process of their transforming. In identifying with Fraser House they were
reforming (re-forming) their own identity. They not only shared this
experience, they participated in the experience of each other’s being.
Together they continually
re-constituted these phenomena – the objective reality of Fraser House. They
became significant in each other’s lives. They became significant others.
Many significant
others became guides and mentors into this strange new reality.
These mentors
were one significant representation
of the Fraser House plausibility
structure in the various roles they played; this process was one way
whereby this new reality was mediated to the new arrival.
The
Fraser House process was clearly not insight-based. Knowing theory was not
required. The processes and the experiences and the meanings and understandings
derived from deep immersion in the lived-life experience of Fraser House were
all pre-theoretical.
To
repeat, when interviewed in the 1990s, no staff, Resident or Outpatient had any
idea whatsoever about what made Fraser House Work. This was also admitted by
Professor Alf Clark who was the head of the Fraser House External Research
team. Clark co-authored with Yeomans the book on Fraser House.[94] That book detailed the
Theory, Practice, and Process of Fraser House. However that book gave no
indication whatsoever as to what would have made such Theory, Practice, or
Process work. Professor Clark went on to be head the Sociology Department in La
Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia for fourteen years.
Perhaps
Clark was looking at Fraser House through the framing filters of psychiatry and
psychology such that he never sensed the potency of the sociological framing or the (here we evolve our own way of life
together; our own culture) anthropological framing within Fraser House. Or
perhaps he too was always being swept up in the dynamic experience of Fraser
House.
Some
dynamic was going on that limited his understanding. One big one - people tend
to not notice socialisation in everyday life and yet it is pervasively present.
Recall
that Residents at Fraser House had had socialisation ‘knocked’ out of them.
Fraser House Way was Resocializing them.
This
Way extended to the whole-of-it;[95] the bio, the psycho, and
the emotional aspects. The Way was supporting them all to evolve their own way
of living well with themselves and each other – their way of life. They were
evolving their own culture, in ways supporting enculture.[96]
Yeomans,
in pioneering therapeutic community in Australia was engaging all involved in
evolving a very uncharacteristic community with processes that led to the
emergence of densely interconnecting, inter-relating, inter-depending,
inter-woven aspects conducive to transforming. Fraser Houses, as therapeutic
community, had community (of this
unique kind) as the therapy (wellness change process).
What
was happening was experienced and internalised as subjective bio-psycho-social
embodied experience.[97]
One
resource that came out of the PhD is the Method Section[98] especially aspects
relating to connoisseurship and contemplation in qualitative method that
informed this current E-Book. Another is the paper, ‘The Art of Seeing -
Interpreting from Multiple Perspectives’.[99] Another resource for
making sense of this E-Book is the Natural Living Processes Lexicon – Obtaining
Results with Others.[100] Another more general
resource is Realising Human Potential.[101]
It
is suspected that Dr Yeomans did know at the level outlined in this E-Book, though
passed on nothing to the others involved; and didn’t pass on such knowledge to
me. No knowledge of theory was needed or
required to make the Fraser House Social System work. Yeomans’ experience
was that Fraser House worked because of what was experienced by everyone involved, staff included.
Thinking,
especially thinking about experience interrupts experiencing experience.
Thinking disconnects people from feeling.[102]
The
Fraser House processes had everyone immersed in being aware and emotionally responding
to the moment-to-moment unfolding action, not distracted by being inside of
themselves up in their front brain mulling over theory, or using theory to
sabotage their own and others’ change work, or theorising other people to
everyone’s utter distraction - thinking
driving one to distraction.[103]
Things
happened extremely fast in Fraser House, and all involved stayed present in the
moment. It was reported that the rich energy even had catatonics coming back to respond to what was happening.[104]
In
Fraser House, exploring re-socialising through
social relating was an aspect of the approach. Like that last sentence, the
passive voice form was typically used by Yeomans when he was speaking. He said
that the passive voice softened things as it was less imposing.
Typically,
people arrived at Fraser House with a dysfunctional family-friend network of
five or less. Prospective Residents were required to sign on ten times as an
Outpatient and attend Big Group[105] with members of their typically
dysfunctional family and friend
network also signed on as Outpatients - and all stay for Small Groups.[106] After these attendances
prospective residents may be accepted to become a Resident as long as their
family friend network members committed to continue regularly attending as
Outpatients throughout the Resident’s stay at the Unit.
Because
of lots of integrated processes Residents
left after being in Fraser House for twelve weeks typically with between 50 and
70 people in a now functional family-friend network. These network members also
had a common experience of Fraser House Big and Small Groups.
After
Residents had been in Fraser House for a time, the people who were now in
Residents’ expanding family friend networks were people they were now in close
regular contact with, with varying degrees of emotional closeness and emotional
dependency in the process of transforming to emotional independency. After
leaving Fraser House, Residents could and would attend Fraser House Big and
Small Groups on a regular basis as Outpatient friends of those still in Fraser
House. Additionally, Fraser House Residents could be accepted for up to three
further stays at Fraser House. These processes extended and maintained their
connecting with Fraser House.
Another
key aspect of Fraser House Way was throughput. Fraser House had a continual and
dynamic streaming of people coming into and leaving with those in the process
of preparing to leave with highly evolve Ways passing these on to new arrivals.
People identified
each other and in so doing identified
themselves – as in, enriched their own identity
and sensing of their own self
identity.
For
all involved, Fraser House was there as a ‘self evident compelling reality’. It
was an enclave (closed society) bracketing off the outer world. While before,
overpowering life-at-large was the paramount
reality, upon entering Fraser House, the extraordinary richness of the
Unit’s processes becomes the new paramount
reality. Like the rise and fall of the curtain marks the beginning and end
of the play reality, after Fraser House had been going for a few months any new
arrival would quickly sense that this Fraser House reality was a very different
one to anything they had every experienced before, especially after learning
they had being assessed by a very competent assessment team who were now to be
their fellow Residents.[107] And then finding out these
very assessors had arrived at Fraser
House not long ago with a diagnosis that could be translated as ‘mad’ and/or
‘bad’ [108]
Then
going into the intensity of the first Big Group. All these unusual things were
markers[109]
for this new and extraordinary reality.
Fraser
House was structured by Yeomans as an INMA
- an Inter-people Normative[110]
Model Area. In this context, ‘Area’ has the connotation of place and space –
firstly, a ‘Locality’ – meaning connecting to place, and secondly, a ‘Cultural Locality’ meaning a place where people become connected
together connected to place – in this case, Fraser House.[111] The term ‘enabling
environment’ also applies to Fraser House; where a physical and emotional
(geo-emotional) environment is evolved and sustained where every single aspect
supports all involved to be more able in tapping into and using their unique
potentials.
Exploring
values and norms was a core focus. Yeomans carried out extensive values
research comparing values held by Fraser House Residents and Outpatients with
over 2,000 respondents in Melbourne and Sydney, the largest research study of
its type in Australia at the time.[112]
Yeomans
did not publically use this INMA term in the sixties, though he had the idea of
an INMA and used the idea of ‘model areas’ in his work in normalising culture.[113]
This
may be the place to introduce Neville Yeomans bio-mimicry of the work he did
with his father in evolving sustainable agriculture.
On
their farms the Yeomans supported nature’s naturally occurring self-organizing
processes;[114]
in particular through tapping the freely available potential energy in complex
systems.
Yeomans
used to engage the free energy rather than struggling to fix the stuck energy.[115]
As
an example, Yeomans’ outreach work that he commenced in 1971 in the Atherton
Tablelands in Far North Queensland continues to this day as a self-organizing
social system after his death in 2000.[116]
All
involved in Fraser House would meet, engage and relate with each other in an enabling
environment[117] bracketed off
from mainstream.
They
would explore as differing types –
initially, types deemed to be deviant by authorities within the mainstream
system, and radically affected by the pressures of the mainstream life.
Residents
would arrive at Fraser House typically with one of two particular types of
sympathetic-parasympathetic tuning:[118]
Either:
A.
Under-aroused,
under-active, over-controlled, and
over-anxious
or
B.
Over-aroused,
over-active, under-controlled, under-anxious, talkative, and noisy
Within
these two particular types there was a whole typology of sub-types of actors.
Types of behaviour quickly became a function of context.
Dr
Yeomans was a member of the Committee of Classification of Psychiatric Patterns
of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. In such a
role he well understood psychiatric diagnostic typing though did not use
diagnosis within Fraser House.[119] Notes in Resident
Progress Records would not distance Residents by using impersonal
categorising/descriptors (she IS a psychotic).
In Fraser House, Resident file notes contained
comprehensive life histories, gathered by the Admitting/Assessing Group and the
Progress Group and as an integral aspect of Psycho-Social Research within the
Unit. File-notes were extremely relational - personal, inter-personal,
biographical and containing notes relating to changes in the living experience
of social relating as a type-of-person-transforming-type. Example: ‘Name of
first primary school teacher’ - useful for age regressing to re-access
psycho-emotional resource states.
In telling their own story they are hearing themselves speaking
and recalling past experiences and identifying with these memories, and in this
identifying they are also enriching their own identity (identifying themselves)
and seeing and feeling their lives emerging as having greater meaning and
purpose especially that of supporting and helping themselves as they are supporting
and helping others.
Yeomans
took in new Residents on an intake balanced in many respects:
o Ensuring that there was a balanced spread of people
with the differing mainstream diagnostic categories[120]
o Gender balance
o Half under-aroused and half over-aroused
o Half under-controlled and half over-controlled
o Half under-anxious and half over-anxious
Within
Fraser House everyone apprehended each
other within a typificatory continuum as a type-in-the-process-of-changing-type.
Two
of Type A[121]
were placed in same sex dorm with two of Type B so there was a natural pressure
to move towards a more normal centre; the more aroused becoming less aroused
and vice versa, with similar shifts in the other aspects.
Photo 1 One of the Fraser House Dorms
Typically,
new arrivals found Fraser House to be a massive improvement compared to where
they had been.
They
had the choice of returning to where they had been, or going along with the
norms of this new place. The report from those involved was that Residents
participated and engaged in all of the processes. Every aspect of day-to-day
life in the Unit was somehow ‘massive’ and ‘compelling’.
Some
many of the aspects of the way Fraser House was composed[122] was attractive – it
attracted people. Many people wanted to attend as visitors.
Residents
at first apprehended others and increasingly comprehended others as different,
though specific types within a
dynamic reciprocated typificatory schema.
Simultaneously, types would be
socially re-constituted in typical (typified) ways in the Fraser House typificatory schema.
The
layout of Fraser House (refer diagram below) meant that Residents were
constantly meeting fellow Residents and relating. There was one long corridor
and enclosed pathway running through the Unit. Chilmaid, a Fraser House psychiatric
nurse during the 1960s was one of my interviewees for the PhD. He stated that
during the day when no one was in the upstairs dorms, on a walk from one end of
the Unit to the other when people were outside of activities and generally
milling around before or after dining you would meet or see everyone in the
Unit.
Typically, Residents were continually being present in
social relating. If people were deep inside, others would attract their
attention. This continual passing of each other and engaging in activities set
up continuous verbal and non-verbal reciprocity within expressive acts.[123] A lot of this ‘expressive
language involved what may be called ‘speech acts’,[124] where the
speech is more than an utterance; the speech is an act with transformative consequences.
An example of a speech act
from another context is the words of the marriage celebrant, ‘I now pronounce
you husband and wife together’.
Relating
Well was ‘continually been held up’ as ‘this is what we do here. We all stay
attending to social relating.’
Residents
in face-to-face contact were simultaneously available to each other. The
‘other’ was in many ways ‘more real
to me than I am.’
To
reiterate, this enhanced typical
apprehending of each other was in a two-fold sense.
Within
the concentrated reality of everyday
Fraser House life there was a continuum
of typifications where, in moving through Fraser House everyone would apprehended; then after a time they
would begin comprehending each other
as a type-in-the-process-of-changing-type.
Diagram 1 Map
of Section of Gladesville
Macquarie Hospital
Showing Fraser House as a Set of Six Buildings ringed by roads on the near
right with a Long Pathway from One End to the Other
By
being involved in activities in the Unit, the Residents and Outpatients
participated in the objective reality
of the Fraser House social life world, or to use Benita Luckmann’s term, a
‘small life world’[125]. Residents gained
experience, confidence, and competence in taking on the various roles within
Fraser House. By internalising these roles, they (the roles) become subjectively real to participants.
Residents had the objective experience
of participating. They could take on the idea:
I
am the person doing these roles at Fraser House, and others are confirming I am
doing them well.
After
a time, doing these various
roles became natural, automatic, habitual, hardly noticed, and rarely or never
questioned.
All
of this helped constitute the objective
reality of life in Fraser House, and with this, the reciprocal typifying
comes to have the quality of objectivity.
While
initially, objectivity may be tenuous, the density of the interconnected tasks,
roles, and social actions ‘thickened’ and ‘firmed up’ objectivity.
Now
we’re going to have Big Group......
soon
becomes:
This
is what we do around here.
This
life together starts to be defined (determined with precision) by a widening
sphere of taken-for-granted socially
ecological normative habitualized routines; this in turn sets up the
possibilities for division of labour
and the adopting of tasks and roles requiring and demanding Residents
and Outpatients use a higher level of
attending to what is going on in their respective roles. One attendee of
Yeomans groups stated in writing about Yeomans processes:
They
were good for different people in different ways. It intensifies communication,
that’s what it does. It focuses you. You get down to the specifics of social
and cultural communication rather than just, ‘how’s the weather’?[126]
Residents
and Outpatients who have become competent in a specific task and associated
roles were given the role of mentoring new people to take on these tasks and
roles on the principle:
Here
all tasks and roles are passed to those who cannot
do them so they can learn to do them well with support.
These
roles and role-specific tasks help constitute particular types of relevant being[127]
and action within the continuing role-specific
social action situations. Roles are types
of action by types of actors in such contexts. Further, Fraser House roles
represented themselves. For instance, helping represents the role of ‘helper’.
These
reciprocal typifications were being constantly re-negotiated as people were
transforming in the face-to-face ever-changing located situations where they
were negotiating meaning[128] (Big Group, Small Group,
Governance Committees, etc).
Having
transitory processes that were
being constantly modified by Resident and Outpatient driven community action
was an essential element of the reality of everyday life in Fraser House.
Fraser House as institution itself
typifies individual actors and their actions. All involved begin ‘taking
on’ the Fraser House Way. The institution posits (puts forward as fact) that actions of
type X will be carried out by Residents of type Y. ‘Once you have been here for
a while you will be on the governance
committees and doing social research etc.’
The
helping Resident is not acting on his own, but as helper. Residents were identifying
with these roles, and internalizing
this identifying in enriching and
expanding their own self identity.
Additionally,
the helper role is one part of a dense woven tapestry of roles making up the
conduct of Fraser House Residents – for instance roles such as: assessor,
audience, crowd, mediator, negotiator (especially supporting self and others in
negotiating meaning) role model, facilitator, innovator, researcher, carer,
catalyst, paraphraser, and exemplar.
In
Fraser House there was the continual exploring, trying on, negotiating,
navigating, and experiencing of roles and role-specific behaviours. In any of
these roles the Resident acts as a significant representative of Fraser House.
Later
Yeomans extended his use of roles in Resocializing to setting up what he termed
hypothetical realplay.[129] Participants become
involved in taking on roles (and role specific behaviours) in potent
hypothetical contexts that are very real in their consequences for transforming
with others.
Fraser
House Residents, Outpatients, and all staff were together continually
re-constituting the communal and social reality of their life together in
community. That process was folding back to be individually, socially, and
communally reconstituting firstly, everyone’s being (being-in-the-world) with their own outer and inner states of
conscious and non-conscious experience of their phenomenal experience of their being in the world
with others, and secondly, reconstituting their being-in-the world with others in the
Fraser House extended transitional community, and in this, together constituting their Fraser House social
life world.
The
increasing set of Fraser House roles evolved from the same processes that constituted Fraser House as an institution -
through the internalising of socially
ecological[130] habitualized routines that had been objectified
as routines that could be observed objectively on a daily basis.
As the functional in context was always highlighted, the continual pressure was
towards quality acts – embraced by the Greek term phronesis meaning wise practical acts. These routines also embraced
and constituted tasks and roles that represented and re-presented the Fraser
House institutional order. All conduct by all involved in Fraser House was being
constituted[131]
by these social processes. The roles of Fraser House had a similar constituting
power as every other aspect of Fraser House. This is a reflection of the total nature of the interweaving of
processes within this Unit that Margaret Mead described as total.
While
in one sense Fraser House was a set of buildings on the grounds of Macquarie
Psychiatric Hospital, the human face of this
institution manifested itself[132]
and was represented and re-presented in interacting performed roles. This
was one way Fraser House manifested itself in
human exchange and experience.
Fraser House as institution
soon had its immediate past as history
and the Unit’s transforming processes were being informed by this history that
lived on as repeated stories passed on within Fraser House gatherings and
networked exchange outside of Fraser House. These stories were relived and shared in storytelling when ex-residents and
outpatients got together both inside and outside of Fraser House.
These glimpses of shared experience were framed in story
form and were living on as biography and recallable memory among those involved.
Yeomans in his young life lived with his family among
remote area aboriginal people[133] living traditional
lives and he experienced firsthand the potency of repetition of narrative for
social cohesion and community wellbeing. Narrative therapy was an integral
aspect of Fraser House Way and was a core aspect of Fraser house Research.
While all involved co-constituted Fraser House as
Institution, the institutional framework[134] set limits and
constraints on people that were of their own
making. These limits and constraints set up a framing of contexts (Big Group,
Small Group, Governance Committees and the like) for establishing new patterns
in habitualized conduct leading to transforming in many ways.
Fraser House as Institution was operating at the level
of valued inclination, so people began doing what they were inclined to do. At
the same time, every single aspect of Fraser House was up for constant review.
Within the richness of
Fraser House experience people ‘went with the flow’. There was little sense of
the presence of ‘control’. Anything and
everything could be and was changed in the spirit of inquiry relating to how to
live extremely well together. Everything
was towards open flexible ‘let's try it out’ tentative, not preoccupation with
control.
In Fraser House anything approaching notions of ‘social control’ was under collective control.
There were massive influences towards
transforming. Rather than ‘control’, Fraser House processes enriched
influencers.
In Fraser House Yeomans
applied the latest understandings of complex multivariable systems of motion.[135] For example, looking
at Fraser House through the concept ‘motion’, there may be one or two points in the ‘phase portrait’[136] that
'attracts' the system energy, as in the rest point of a simple swinging
pendulum. From these studies of motion, more complex multivariable systems may
have their movements restricted to what are called 'strange attractors', having
three or more variables. Fraser House as a multivariable system in motion,
continued to have something approaching 'strange attractors' as an essential
aspect adding/ influencing form(s).
A person or group, or aspect would be metaphorically
a 'strange attractor'.[137] For
example, ‘nodal’ people[138] may
influence the complex shape of self-organizing systems by a few strategic
interventions.
This
was a multi-causal process with Yeomans establishing the context for
possibilities.
To
borrow from studies in Chaotic Systems, Neville Yeomans was setting up ‘phase
plains[139]’
and possibilities for the emergence of ‘strange attractors’ influencing
‘multivariable systems’.[140]
Strange Attractors Influencing Multivariable Systems
Fraser House processes continually accessed free
energy[141]
in the system and linked free energy to ‘strange attractors’. An example is the
two residents talking and then one of them linking with the female acquaintance
mentioned in this E-Book.
Gouldner (1970, pp. 222) writes of the
potency of one nodal person:
The
embodied and socialized individual is both the most
empirically obvious human system, and the most complex and
highly integrated of all human systems; as a system, he is far more
integrated than any known ‘social system’. In his embodiment, the biological,
psychological, social, and cultural all conjoin.
And
a single creative individual, open to the needs of other and the opportunities
of his time, can be a nucleus of spreading hope and accomplishment.
Fraser House processes continually supported people learning about
evolving their own personal agency through their embodied experience of their
biologically flexible responding to:
o
their own moving, sensing, feeling, and
o
verbalising in relational social engaging with others
o
in evolving together the Fraser
House culture - as in ‘living well together’
o
with all of this of their own making.
This took place within a culture of continual improvement in tapping
people’s unique potentials[142]
without anyone particularly
noticing any of this.
Professor
Paul Wilson,[143]
psychologist-criminologist writes of this learning how to ‘live well with
others’ in describing his experience of living in Dr Neville Yeomans’
therapeutic community in Mackay, Queensland.
Wilson
was having psycho-emotional difficulties in his life at the time and used his
stay in this therapeutic community house to sort out his life.
Wilson
writes:
Neville
Yeomans created a community free of doctrinaire principles. The Mackay setting
successfully created a sense of belonging. Most people who have experienced
deep personal distress have lacked, in my opinion, any sense of residing in a
group or clan. They, like I, have lived their lives constructing walls around
themselves, to protect themselves from other people. In the process, they have
lacked the knowledge and experience of living in a community.
There
was nothing magical in the process of achieving this sense of belongingness.
Our
day-to-day activities were almost mundane. I would wake up in the morning and
help whoever was up to get breakfast ready. Then as people came in to the
kitchen, we would talk about all sorts of things people talk about over
breakfasts.
Marion
would ask one of us to collect some groceries, or to cut the lawn, or help with
the laundry.
Most
importantly, there were always people around you who you felt cared for you as
a human being. This interconnectedness of person with person was the thread
that bound the community together and gave us a sense of ‘family’ - a unit that
many of us had ignored or not had before.
Wilson
is here highlighting the potency of everyday conversation in maintaining our
subjective reality while living in a world that, in large part, we silently
take for granted.
Given
that Fraser House Residents had been locked out of everyday life in criminal
and psychiatric incarceration (some for many years), an essential feature of
Fraser House processes was reconnecting Residents with the micro aspects of
life (making a bed, paying for a bus ride, keeping things tidy around one’s bed
and the like) with these things adding to Residents’ recipe type knowledge within the Fraser House common social stock of knowledge, with this increasing their
confidence, readiness and pragmatic competence in carrying out routine
performances in everyday life. This was preparing these people to return to
living confidently, competently, easily, and well in society.
Over
the first weeks and months of Fraser House the Residents and Outpatients were key
contributors alongside staff in evolving differing types of habitualized
activities by types of actors. And the reciprocal typification of habitualized
routines instituted Fraser House into a unique institutional form that was itself constituted by all within the
collectivity engaged in mutual help. This soon becomes the now familiar background of shared habitualized
activity that sequentially opens up
differing foregrounds for
anticipating and experiencing social exchange and innovating, with all of this
sitting inside laced with emotion as recent memory. There was some subsequent
deliberating and reflecting. Often everything was a puzzling confusion that
left them alone with their changing self that was not noticing it’s changing,
and hence not sabotaging its change work.
The
nature of the routines ensured that all of the typified habitualized activities
in Fraser House were available and shared in common, even with people who had
been isolates. For example, in a file note in Yeomans’ Archives[144] called ‘colindivism’ he
describes the interactive nature of collective and individual behaviour in
Fraser House. In talking of colindivism, Yeomans spoke about Fraser House as a
place where some people acted as individuals. These people did their own thing,
though linked in with the various micro-networks in the Unit. This linking of
individuals acting as individuals Yeomans called an 'indivity'. Linking of
micro-networks was called a 'collectivity'.
A
linking of an indivity and a collectivity in cooperative activity Yeomans
called a 'colindivity’ - a social form where individuals following their
individual action and interests work well with groups of people who are
following their collective passion and way, and each aspect of this web of
micro-networks and individuals was doing their own thing in a loose
self-organising kind of way. Again these processes soon were accepted as ‘this
is the way we do it here’.
Within
this Fraser House structural framing of
social process in action there was the continual focus on people increasing the quality of their
social relating with themselves
and others thus constituting a social structural overlay of Fraser
House that was, following Berger and Luckmann,[145] ongoingly constituted by the ‘sum total of the typifications among
those involved and of the recurrent
patterns of interaction established by means of them.
Everyday
reality in Fraser House was filled with objectifications
that were framed[146] as, and then in a sense
proclaimed or symbolised as collective
human intention to transform to wellness; every aspect of the Fraser House daily round were such
objectification, e.g. Big Group and Small Group, and all of the other
activities.
Each
Resident, Outpatient, and staff member was constantly interacting with each
other as transforming type engaging
in differing roles in repeated situations
that are typical in this place Fraser
House – for example, Residents being
involved and socially interactive in situations during:
o
Big Group[147]
o
Small Groups[148]
o
Governance Committees[149]
o
At the break between
Groups[150]
- where refreshments were available from the Fraser House kiosk[151] that was Resident-owned,
run, and controlled – an aspect of work as therapy[152]
o
During Psycho-Social
Research[153]
o
Sustained engaging on
the Suicide Watch ‘Specialling’ Duty[154]
o
Six experienced Fraser
House Residents in the Domiciliary Care Group (using the Resident-owned red
Combi Van purchased by Fraser House Residents from the surplus gained from
running their kiosk) visiting Ex-residents to provide Care and Support (before
the Domiciliary Care Group members had become ex-residents themselves) and then
sharing outcomes with the other members of the Domiciliary Care Group following
return to Fraser House[155]
o
Telephone responding
on the 24 Hour Fraser House
Resident-based On-call Community Crisis and Suicide Prevention phone line; and
going on crisis calls with 4-5 other Residents using the Resident-owned Combi
Van [156]
o
Initial and Ongoing
Assessment of Fellow Residents by Experienced Residents[157]
Note
that each of the above involves opportunities to acquire a range of competences
including:
o
concentrating
o
staying present while
sustaining an external focus
o
attending & relating
o
assessing others
regarding the presence of dysfunctional
patterns
o
pattern interrupt[158] of dysfunctional
behaviours
o
spotting role specific
functional in context behaviours
o
supporting others to
be more able
Between
Big Group and Small Groups was a 30 minute break. The Staff would be together
for a review of Big Group.[159] This started with a
report by the[160]
two official observers, and comment by all staff members present, including the
Big Group Leader. Points assessed were:
o Mood, and changes in Mood[161]
o Use of Theme[162]
o Value and Interaction
o The Big Group Leader’s Role[163]
o
Transformational
Processes used, including metaprocesses (that is, processes being used to guide
use of process[164]
From
these reviews came much of the insight[165] and knowledge needed.
The aim was to always look at the community in the ‘BIG’ – as a whole; and this
was certainly no easy matter.[166]
Residents
and Outpatients were allocated to Small Groups by sociological category. This
resulted in continual ‘churning’ of the mix, with everyone meeting and engaging
closely with everyone over time.[167] Both the sociological
category and the composition of small groups varied daily. All the Small Groups
at any one time were based on the same category.
The
social categories were:
(i)
age
(ii)
married/single status
(iii)
locality (a major
contributor to expanding Friendship Networks)
(iv)
kinship
(v)
social order (manual,
clerical, or semi-professional/professional) and
(vi)
age and sex.
Friday’s
Small Groups were made up according to both age and sex for both staff and
Residents. This was the one exception to the non-segregation policy. Often
inter-generational issues, including sexual abuse issues, were the focus of
these Friday groups.
Big
and Small Groups occurred twice a day on Mondays to Fridays. As there were six
categories, anyone always visiting on the same day of any of the first four
days of the week would experience being split up using differing categories[168] – another aspect
increasing the churn towards relating with differing people.
While
in these Small Groups, the different people that they were mixing with and engaging
closely with all had the prior experience of closely attending to each other in
the continually changing Big Group contexts. One of the Fraser House Handbooks
had Notes for Psychiatric Nurses on the Role in Small Groups.[169] This set of Notes was
written by Residents.
Yeomans
set up eight family Units within Fraser House at times with three generations
for transforming inter-generational issues. These people within families
exploring inter-generational issue acted as functional examples for others as they
changed.[170]
These family Units had eight cots for young children..[171] There was evidence that
other residents with histories of family violence, addictions and mental strife
stemming from intergenerational onset could spot the dysfunctional behaviours
in these families in the family units, and find parallels between these
dysfunctional families (in the process of change) and their own transforming
patterns. Yeomans also set up Child-Parent Play Groups as an integral aspect of
these Family Units.[172] Dr Terry O’Neill who
mentored me in Student Counselling at La Trobe University pioneered these Child
Parent Play Groups at Fraser House. Warwick Bruen, one of my PhD interviewees
continued these Play Groups after Terry came down to Melbourne.
Fraser
House had its own structuring that
was generating order within the daily round of life in the unit that varied from
time to time by the Residents and Outpatients mutually helping of each other as
one example of the externalizing of
the internal subjective experience[173] of all involved as the
Fraser House objective reality.
An
example of the routine Monday to Friday rollout:
o Rise, shower, dress, making one’s bed
and attend to the ward neatness
o Breakfast (including social exchange
before, during, and after)
o Big Group (1 hour) – intense interaction
as participant, focal person, audience and/or crowd
o Refreshment Break (30 min) (Snacks and
Drinks from Resident-run kiosk -
co-mingling with Outpatients[174]
o Small Groups (1 hour) intense
interaction as focal person, participant, audience
o Lunch and free time
o Governance Committee Work
o Resident Involvement in Research[175]
o Other groups and activities including
work as therapy[176]
o Recreation – one end of Fraser House was
the recreation centre, the other was the dining room[177]
o Evening Meal
o Big Group (1 hour)
o Refreshment Break (from Resident-run
cafe) – co-mingling with Outpatients
o Small Groups (1 hour)
o Recreation
o Learning how to do the gentle social
banter while getting ready for bed, before and after lights out.[178]
All
of the above became habitualized and shared.
It’s
what we all do in this place. All of this is how this place works, and what we
do, and when we do it.
Below
is some aspects of life within a Therapeutic Community[179] evolved by Yeomans that
he modelled on Fraser House:
o
A community free of
doctrinaire principles
o
A setting successfully
creating a sense of belonging
o Participants having a strong sense of
residing in a group or clan
o Having the knowledge and experience of
living in a community
o Sensing belongingness
o Outside of the groups, committees, and
research many aspects of day-to-day life were almost mundane
o Waking up in the morning and then as
people came in to the dining room talking about all sorts of things people talk
about over breakfasts
o Always people around you who you felt
cared for you as a human being
o Having interconnectedness of person with
person as the thread binding the community together and giving a sense of ‘family’
- a unit that many involved had ignored or not had before
The
transformative experiences were available to everyone involved, even the
cleaners. Each of my interviewees stated that the cleaners were a most
insightful group as they were actually the closest staff to the Residents. The
cleaners[180]
were seeing everything that was going on and hearing all of the small talk.
Each
of my interviewees stated that the most experienced people in this new area of
using community (albeit of a very special kind) as the therapy were the
Residents towards the end of their three months stay.
This
was because Residents lived totally immersed in the Fraser House process all
day every day.
The
cleaners came next in experience of community therapy as they worked close to
the Residents everyday (more so than the professional staff) and they also
attended the Big and Small Groups.
The
professional staff were all new to this form of therapy including Yeomans
himself. They were pioneering this treatment form in Australia. Nothing in the
professional staff training had prepared them for community therapy.
In many ways their Professional training may well have been
a hindrance in Fraser House as they would have had a continual and massive
overlay of 'what does my professional preparation 'say' to do in this context?.’
This would have been continually intruding into their
consciousness as they were doing internal scans of an ever present ‘if this
then that' template for relevant theory driven 'what to do now' that was not
helpful or particularly relevant in engaging 'authentically' in surrendering[181] and staying fully present in the here and now with others
- in being real rather than being 'professional' - and having internal
dialogues about their experience that would continually be getting in the way
and interrupting their experiencing
of their experience.
Constant
and sustained interrupt[182] of dysfunction was a core process at
Fraser House – ‘there’s no madness or badness here’. For examples from life of
using sudden and unexpected interrupt[183] for transforming behaviour, refer Coming to One’s Senses – By the Way.[184]
In the 1960s all Mental Hospital patients were expected to exhibit madness. All
prisoners were expected to be bad. In
stark contrast, within Fraser House, everyone - staff, Residents and visiting
Outpatients alike lived with the continually repeated injunction – ‘No madness or badness in Fraser House’.
There was sustained interrupting[185] of any and every
micro and macro incidence of madness and badness.[186]
Feldenkrais
writes on the potency of
interrupting and dis-integrating habits in changing
emotional and kinaesthetic states (in simple terms ‘how we feel’) temporarily
or potentially, permanently:
A
fundamental change (read as ‘interrupt’) in the motor basis within any single
integration pattern will break up the cohesion[187] of the whole and thereby leave thought and
feeling without anchorage in the patterns of their established routines.
If
we can succeed in some one in bringing about a change in the motor cortex, and
through this a change in the coordination of or in the patterns themselves, the
basis of awareness in each elementary
integration[188] will disintegrate (1972, p.39).[189]
What
they were exploring in Fraser House were ways that worked in breaking up
dysfunctional habitual patterns. Feldenkrais pointed out that potentially, the
easiest entry point for total system transforming of part and whole is through transforming moving. A subtle aspect of
Yeomans way was closely observing how a person stood and moved and sat.[190].
He
was very interested in the sociology of the body[191] and the link between motion and emotion. [192]
Germaine
to sociology of the body is that Gouldner[193]
quote mentioned:
The embodied and socialized individual is
both the most empirically obvious human system, and the
most complex and highly integrated of all human systems; as a system, he is
far more integrated than any known ‘social system’. In his embodiment, the biological,
psychological, social, and cultural all conjoin.
And a single creative individual, open to
the needs of other and the opportunities of his time, can be a nucleus of
spreading hope and accomplishment.
Yeomans pioneered Resident committees in the mental health context
within Australia. Yeomans set up a process whereby Residents and their
family-friendship networks, as Outpatients, were massively involved in meetings
and committee work. Residents and Outpatients effectively became responsible
for the total administration of Fraser House.
Appendix 13 in the Biography on Yeomans life lists the Roles and
membership within the various committees.[194]
Members of Residents’ family friendship networks were required to sign
on as Fraser House Outpatients and to attend Big and Small Groups. As well,
they would be expected to offer themselves for election to serve on committees
and to begin to recognise when they were ready for this role. Others would
accept or reject them to stand for election, and vote for them during
elections, depending on how they were progressing in Big and Small Groups and
in the other Fraser House activities. If they needed to devote more time to
personal transforming they would not be selected for committee work in the
current round.
They would be encouraged to keep on with their change-work and
encouraged to aim for election to committee work in the near distant future and
to begin imagining themselves in these roles (future pacing[195] themself as mental
rehearsal for a new way of being and being in the world).
Fraser House Residents and Outpatients progressively took on
responsibility for their own democratic self-government and governance. This is
fully consistent with Yeomans’ exploring of epochal
transition[196] – how to create
global change to better ways of living in wider society. Yeomans referred to
Resident-based rule-making as creating ‘a community
system of law’.[197] Law evolved out of
evolving Fraser House lore.
As the Fraser House activities evolved there were more and more
structured activities that Residents and Out-patients could be involved in. For
example, the Fraser House vehicle for evolving democratic self-governance[198] initially was a
committee that decided the ground-rules for ward life called appropriately the
Ward Committee. Then other Committees were added till there were ten committees
in the Governance Process that mirrored the roles of every section of Fraser
House’s administration.[199]
Residents and Outpatients were elected to go on these committees by the
staff, Residents, and Outpatients. [200]On every Fraser House
committee, each committee member had one vote. Residents and Outpatients
outnumbered staff on all committees. This meant that Residents and Outpatients
could always out-vote staff by collaborating and cooperating.
Everyone
in these different Committees was also automatically a member of the
Parliamentary Committee. All committees reported to the Parliamentary
Committee. Then a few experienced Residents and Outpatients were elected onto
the Pilot Committee that was like the Privy Council in the Westminster system.[201] The Parliamentary
Committee would refer things to the Pilot Committee. This often happened.
Yeomans set the committee ground rules such that he always had a power of veto.
Dissenting people who felt strongly enough about a decision could take it
before Yeomans and the decision would be held over till he attended the
particular committee where people would present their views.
Yeomans said[202] that he rarely
overturned a decision made by Residents and Outpatients where staff dissented,
as by Yeomans’ reckoning after due consideration, the Residents generally held
the better stance.
In Yeomans’ paper, ‘Sociotherapeutic Attitudes to Institutions’ and
consistent with creating ‘cultural locality’ he wrote:
Patient committees formalize the social
structure of the Residents’ sub-community change’.[203]
Yeomans being ‘dictator’ satisfied the Health Department’s requirements
for top-down control.
However, Yeomans said[204] that he was a
‘benevolent dictator’ and the Residents and Outpatients effectively ran the
place – and by all accounts, they ran it effectively. This was confirmed by my
interviewees.
The
structures and process of the committees were being continually fine-tuned.
Chapters Eight and Nine of Clark and Yeomans’ book[205]
contain a detailed description of the Resident/Outpatient committees at one
point in time.
Diagrams
Two and Three below adapt the top-down traditional organization chart in Clark
and Yeomans’ book.[206]
Yeomans had suggested Diagram Two back in December 1993 and reaffirmed it in
Sept 1998; it shows ‘Resident - Outpatient controlled’ committees, and the
staff devolving their traditional roles to become healers[207]
- meaning to make whole; to
integrate.
Yeomans[208]
said that his book with Clark had not made the comprehensive devolving of
normal duties by staff clear enough to readers.
The respective roles that were devolved to the
committees were (in alphabetical order):
o administrator
o charge nurse
o nurse
o psychiatrist
o occupational
therapist, and
o social worker
These are depicted by the darker boxes.
The various committees that took on aspects of
the foregoing roles are shown in the lighter boxes.
All of the governance committees shown in
Diagrams Two and Three below were isomorphic with mainstream administrative
cleaving of Fraser House’s Administration team that mirrored the rest of
Macquarie Psychiatric Hospital (even following the Federal Government’s
Parliamentary Review Committee - the Fraser House Pilot Committee, and using
the term ‘Parliamentary Committee’).
The Diagrams also indicate the staff standing
down from their professional (do things to and for others as expert) roles and
the taking on of the Enabler Role - as in supporting the psyCommons among
others engaging in mutual-help.
Given the emphasis on socialising within Fraser House the role of the
Social Worker became very significant
and like all the other professional staff, the social workers role was
transformed to being an enabler of self help and mutual help in social relating
and networking among all involved as well as supporting three committees in the
Governance Process:
o
Out-patients and Friends Committee
o
Rehabilitating Committee, and
o
the Follow-up Committee which worked closely with the
Resident-based Domiciliary Care Group.
Diagram 2
Resident Committees and the Staff Devolving their Traditional Roles to Become
Healers
Diagram 3 Recast
of Diagram Two
Every aspect of this committee structure and process was co-evolved by
the Residents and their family and friends signed in as Outpatients. They
helped constitute it, and then they were being re-constituted through their
involvement.
Yeomans
spoke of three levels of governance at Fraser House – local, regional, and
global. Each Resident with their family-friendship network was engaged in their
own local self-governance. The Committee for Locality Based Transport – the
Outpatients, Relatives and Friends Committee was engaged in ‘regional’
self-governance. The Parliamentary-Pilot committees, in association with the
other sub-committees of the Parliamentary Committee were engaged in ‘global’
self-governance of the Fraser House ‘global commons’. This is a micro-model of
the ‘Local Regional Global Self-Governance’ model that Neville detailed in his
‘On Global Reform’ paper.[209]
Thursday
morning Big Group was ‘administrative only’.
During
a 1998 interview/conversation with Neville, he stated that any attempt to bring
up an administrative matter in a therapy group was deemed to be ‘flight’ and
was interrupted with compassionate ruthlessness. Any attempt to bring up a
therapy matter during an administrative group was deemed to be ‘obstruction’
and deferred.
This
set up the context with the theme ‘discovering how to change, organize and
administer’ their individual and collective reality and evolving competence in
the associated administrative tasks and roles; and then identifying with all of
this.
During
Administrative Big Group administrative matters were discussed and Resident and
Outpatient Committee elections were held under the auspices of the
Parliamentary Committee. During this Thursday morning Big Group, reports were
received by the Parliamentary Committee from all of the other committees. This
meant that everyone at Fraser House for Thursday Morning Big Group not part of
the Parliamentary Group (Residents, Outpatients, Staff, and Visitors) became Audience for the Parliamentary Group.
This necessitated Committee Members acquiring report writing and report
delivery competences and the capacity to respond to matters raised by the
Parliamentary Committee.
Residents and Outpatients were involved
in this reporting process. Outpatients came to the Unit to participate in the
committee structure.
The presence of this large Audience for
the Parliamentary Group added ‘performance pressure’ on Group Members as well
as other audience effects. It also meant that everyone knew what was happening
in the various Committees.
The Thursday Administration Group’s sorting out aspects of how
Fraser House as a social system was organized was a major contributor to
socialising both Committees members and all the onlookers (other staff,
Residents, Outpatients and visitors. They were literally all together constituting their reality - their
culture
- their way of life together.
This is similar to the UK experience of re-socializing and
reconnecting the returning prisoners of war with society following the end of the Second World War.
Perhaps it may be timely to reiterate that the people
who had been previous assigned to the category of the mad or the bad were the
ones involved in all of this Fraser House meticulous discussion, reporting, and
decision making. They were involved with administering this large facility with
over 20,000 Outpatient visits a year.
‘Signification’
means, the representation or conveying of meaning. A special case of objectification
in Fraser House was signification.
Many aspects of Fraser House life were marked[210]
in many ways as significant by the
use of signs with an explicit imbedded intention to operate
as a carrier of subjective meanings.
Back
to the minutia of the Unit - a special case of signs was the display throughout
Fraser House of actual signs up on
walls showing slogans such as:
o Bring it up in the Group[211]
o The Wisdom is in the Group
o In Fraser House we get on with our changework
o We are all Co-therapists
o No mad or bad behaviour to take place in Fraser House
o No one is sick all through
o You can only stay three months so get on with your
changework
o Here everyone has an equal voice
Staff
had their own slogans; examples:
o Know what to leave undone in an emergency
o Frequent rounds are a necessity
o Combine the weak with the strong
These
signs as physical objects were placed up on walls with objective messages of subjective intention.[212]
The messages on these signs were capable of:
o being ‘detached’
from time and place, and
o
mediated through
the mediating presence of bodyminds
o
internalised
as internal mantras that could be recalled by self and others
o
influencing
inclination and pre-disposition
o
being used in evolving
guiding principles
o
being recalled objectively and available later, and
o
being used extensively
in social relating – e.g. as in the two residents talking about Jane mentioned
in this E-Book
On
one occasion a sign was put up especially for one catatonic woman who a cleaner
discovered was a talented artist.
He
saw her drawing a beautiful horse during a lucid moment. The sign in front of
where she sat during the day had ‘Mural Space’ written on it in large letters.
Beside her chair were pots of water-based paint and a jar of large brushes, a
jar of water and a rag to wipe washed brushes. Soon this ‘catatonic’ was more
‘artist’ as she became busy creating murals throughout the unit![213]
Both
the slogans ‘the survival of the fitting’ and ‘get on with your own change
work’ guided participants involved in acknowledging reciprocal typification[214]
in interlocking habitualized action of differing types.[215] This links to Marx’s[216] proposition ‘Man’s
consciousness is determined by his social Being’. Notice how individual
transforming is linked into the communal transforming with this simultaneously
supporting all individuals.
Residents
and Outpatients were constantly reminded by staff, as well as other Residents
and Outpatients of the slogan ‘In Fraser
House we get on with our changework’. These and other simple slogans were
used and publically displayed to reinforce this principle as a guide to
action.
In
Clark and Yeomans’ book Fraser House, ‘The Theory, Practice, and Evaluation of
a Therapeutic Community’[217] there is a Resident’s
personal diary where he records a significant trivial conversation between
himself and another male Resident that helps him. In the weeks before this
conversation these two had their sense of ‘attending
closely to their ongoing engaging’ ramped up by their experience of the
intense Fraser House milieu.
What
is said may on first hearing seem fairly simple. The diarist writes of another Resident
telling him words to the affect:
If
you’re having strife, bring it up in the
group; were all co-therapists.[218]
Have
you talked to Jane about it?[219]
No
I have not.
Why
don’t you? She’s been leaning on you for so long now, why not turn the tables
for a change and let her help you?
I
haven’t thought of it, but it sounds logical enough.[220]
The
first speaker is drawing upon his Fraser House knowledge of how the relevances were distributed throughout
Fraser House both within the Unit’s stock
of knowledge and within the specific
stock of knowledge in particular
Residents and Outpatients – which ones had relevant
psychosocial and emotional resources that may be a resource within the current context – in this case, Jane was
probably a very good resource. This is resonant with Postle’s writing of the
psyCommons.
Let’s
explore this for a moment. Many of the relevance structures in Fraser House
were generally shared particularly in the one hour Big Group followed by 30
minutes of social mixing (and letting go some of the emotional charge generated
by Big Group) between Residents and Outpatients (where a lot of the extending
of friendship networks occurred). The thirty minute refreshment break was
followed by one hour Small Group. This pattern was repeated twice a day Monday
to Friday. This particular pattern of activity supported the objective issue with respect to
embracing the integrating of the separate relevances in Fraser House. The
Parliamentary Committee formed the same integrating function within the ten
committees within Governance Therapy.
With
the facilitating patterns and processes evolved by Yeomans, other Big Group
Facilitators began drawing the attention of everyone in Big Group to the role specific functional[221]
bits of everybody who became the focus of Big Group attention from moment
to moment.
This
contributed to a filtering for excellence
in social relating by having the audience focused on the functional and not
attending to dysfunctional and being readily able to distinguish between the
two.[222] Another competence was
recognising their own dysfunctional
behaviours in the behaviour of other.
Goodness,
that’s the very thing I’ve been doing all the time!
In
recognising themselves in other’s behaviours, then adding the role specific
functional behaviours to their own repertoire, this minimised the passing on of
dysfunction into the common stock of
knowledge, so that it became the
repository of ‘what works’.
Establishing
many activities and specific associated roles[223] that were shared by some
of the Residents entailed that there was a social
distribution of knowledge that could be separated into general relevance knowledge and role-specific
relevance knowledge.
Other
Residents ended up having a shared understanding as to who were the ‘go to’
people in the Resident Outpatient collective in terms of specific kinds of
understanding, competence, fit, or support, e.g. Jane.
This
is why the Resident could easily find the idea of asking Jane. Jane was both a
potential resource, and already part of
the other Resident’s Network.
The
common stock of knowledge in Fraser
House had a social base and was a
resource in social change. The
wisdom[224]
within this evolving common stock of knowledge is resonant with Postle’s
concept, ‘psyCommons’.
The
two Residents engaged in discussion knew that this fellow’s friend Jane was a
possible resource.
In
saying the few words -
If
you’re having strife, bring it up in the
group; were all co-therapists.[225]
Have
you talked to Jane about it?
No
I have not.
Why
don’t you? She’s been leaning on you for so long now, why not turn the tables
for a change and let her help you?
Ideas
and suggestions tumble as it were out of the Resident in spontaneous flow. He
does not have to think. Ideas just flow as this Resident hears himself as he
speaks.
His
own subjective meanings are being
made continuously and objectively
available[226] to himself and
hence even more meaningful.[227]
The
Resident’s own language has an inherent
quality of reciprocity that distinguishes it from any other sign system. As
these two Residents spoke with each other there was a continuous synchronised
reciprocal access to both of their subjectivities in intersubjective[228] exchange made
objectively available and subjectively heard making everything more real
including themselves – their respective selves.
Notice
that the speaker is:
o hearing himself engaging in the roles of helper and
enabler
o identifying with these roles
o recognising and
acknowledging the other as a helper
in need of help within a community
identified as co-therapist helpers.
The
speaker is also entering into another significant Fraser House role – that of
the facilitator mediator[229]
between this Resident and Jane. In this process he is increasing his
identifying with his emerging self
identity that embraces himself as a helper of himself and others.
This
rich theme of ‘helping’ is conducive to his own integrating and becoming more
readily available as a response to anyone asking ‘who are you?’ Married
together in this brief exchange between these Residents were two differing
modes of language – firstly,
statements of being (having strife;
you have difficulty) and secondly,
statements of action (helping your
friend; ask her for support).
The
above has been a glimpse of the potential
potency of small moments in Fraser House, where the re-constituting of
these two Residents by themselves with each other, while setting up connecting
to Jane and the wider collective was profoundly social in nature. Each of the
three show evidence of internalizing Fraser House Way.
Jane
did become involved in the helping role aiding her potential transforming, with
the three of them raising this in Big Group, and in the process hearing
themselves speaking about their helping and becoming role models and examples
for others.
At the end of this Resident’s diary it is clear by what
he writes that he has transformed.
Equally, the way he writes makes clear that he does not know he has transformed. He writes that he is ready to
leave and that he has been assessed by his peers in the Assessment Team as
being ready to leave Fraser House and return to the wider world. Nowhere in his
diary does he give any indication
that he has any insight[230] whatsoever about the process whereby change to
wellbeing and functional living is occurring in his life, or that such change
is even occurring. Change is largely occurring below awareness similar to
primary socialization. He has taken on new functional habitual responses. At the same time he was not engaging in any
intellectual sabotage of his change-work – behaviours like faultfinding,
judging, blaming, and condemning. Clark and Yeomans had not commented on the
above features of the young man’s diary.[231] This is an example of self-help through mutual-help.
While these exchanges seem trivial, Neville and the other interviewees said
that time and again the Fraser House experience was that trivial exchange could
be potent.[232]
Warwick
Bruen, a psychologist who facilitated Fraser House Big Group many times stated
in 1998 that attending Big Group was challenging in the extreme, though at the
same time extremely rewarding.[233] In this dysfunctional
tangle there continually emerged themes[234] that held everyone’s
interest – that everyone resonated with – that is, themes ‘conducive to
coherence’.[235]
Yeomans spoke of Fraser House processes generating strong affective (emotional)
states wherein all involved may experience ‘emotionally corrective experience’
of their own making. This may happen when experiencing
something first-hand that challenges a previously held distorting and/or false
belief.
Big
Group explored themes that emerged from Day Sheets that were posted on the wall
prior to each Big Group. Staff, Residents and Outpatients would make entries
upon these Day Sheets that were read out at the commencement of each Big Group.
Themes for Big Group were selected from those on the Day Sheet by the Big Group
attendees-as-community based upon significance.[236] These themes had the
property of being conducive to, or supporting coherence in the Group because
they spanned multiple spheres of reality relevant
to those present in Big Group. These
themes may lift people above where they currently are and engage forms of
linguistic modes and relating whereby transcendence
may naturally follow.[237] This language may be termed symbolic language where what is spoken
is laden with significance.[238]
Yeomans noted that the commencing of a theme influenced the social topography
in the room – sensing metaphorically ‘who took the high ground’, who tended to
be ‘front and centre’, and who ‘hid in the cracks and crevices’. He also
noticed that a change of theme resulted in instant change in social topography.
All were mentored in noticing these shifts.[239]
Once under way in Big Group, Yeomans as facilitator (and model for
others preparing to lead Big Group) would select out of the flow of
conversation the bits that were ‘role
specific functional in context’.[240]
Everyone present was therefore hearing
the sum total of the ‘good bits’ being drawn to their attention (amongst a lot
of dysfunctional behaviour), and these ‘good bits’ would be continually
reflected back to the group and internalised and added to the common social stock of knowledge in
Fraser House.[241] The 'best bits’ would be added to 'social stock of wisdom' within
the Fraser House social life world.
Typically,
little attention is paid to differing realities. Let’s consider a few. We have the rise and
fall of the curtain marking the beginning and end of the play reality. We have
the traditional formats at the beginning and end of movies. We’re familiar with
the dream reality. In the newspaper cartoon, the cartoon frame marks the
enclosure of the cartoon reality. We do not find the cartoon character snoopy
wandering around on the stock exchange report. In all of these realities, the
paramount reality is everyday life. Within Fraser House, the high frequency of
conversation enhanced its reality-generating
function. Everyone was continually being involved in adding to, enriching, and
drawing upon the Unit’s common social stock of knowledge. The collective participating
in this process facilitated the locating
and co-locating[242] of individuals in the
Fraser House society (for example, Jane) and the relating with them in fitting
ways contributing to the survival of the fitting. Residents and Outpatients
were evolving their common social stock of knowledge comprising an extensive
range of relevances relating to living well through relating well with
understanding of the relevance structures of others.
Yeomans
was familiar with Elton Mayo’s[243] Hawthorne experiments during
1927-32 into the effect of changing working conditions on productivity amongst
assembly workers. Mayo found that productivity increased each time progressive
improvements were made to working conditions.
Then
Mayo did a strategic thing – he progressively took away the changes in working
conditions and productivity increased even more. He then took away some of the
benefits that the workers had had originally and still productivity increased.
Mayo
concluded that the change component was not so much the various ‘treatments’ of
the research - rather that it was that the researchers were acknowledging the
workers’ dignity and worth, and showing an interest in them. Change was linked
to the emotional experience of being research subjects. Similarly to Mayo’s
work, Fraser House Residents and staff were the focus of continual research by
Fraser House researchers and the outside research team headed up by Alfred
Clark. Residents were being continually asked to reflect on themselves, other Residents, other staff, Big Groups,
Small Groups and on every aspect of Fraser House as well as aspects of wider
society.
Residents
became involved in both qualitative and quantitative research data gathering as
well as in analysing the data and discussing the results and implications of
the research. Yeomans had the Residents
themselves learning about then participating in all aspects of research process
– including:
o Selection and Formulation of Research Issues
o Research Design
o Exploratory and Descriptive Studies
o Designing Questionnaires
o Data Collecting
o Questionnaires and Interviewing
o Quantitative and Qualitative Methods
o Analysing and Interpreting
o Writing Research Reports
o Applying Research Findings
o Relating the Findings to other Knowledge
Fraser
House Resident and Outpatient involvement in Researching themselves, Fraser
House and the wider world embraced the full gamut of the Research endeavour
including:
o Residents and Outpatients introducing
other Residents and Outpatients to the social research process
o providing their peers experiences for
evolving competences to do all of the aspects of quantitative and qualitative
social research (learning by doing)
o evolving themes to explore
o evolving the research design
o evolving questionnaires and other
research resources
o pretesting resources
o validating resources
o establishing reliability within these
resources
o evolving competence in interviewing
including depth interviewing
o carrying out interviews or other data
gathering research
o doing data analysis
o drawing conclusions
o writing up the research
o preparing papers for possible publishing[244]
o merging the findings with other findings
from Fraser House research
o involving innovative ways to use the
findings within Fraser House processes
Yeomans was using all of this research as
therapy (beyond the Hawthorne Effect
– not only showing and interest in those being research {the residents and
Outpatients}, also actually involving them in the research as co-researchers).
Through
all of this research, Residents learned about the difference between quantitative and qualitative research[245] as well as about the
notions and guides to behaviour ‘trustworthiness’, ‘validity’, ‘reliability-testing’,[246] and ‘triangulation’, and
how these are very useful notions as part of living in a modern community,
especially one with extensive pathology.
In
engaging Residents and Outpatients in this Research, Yeomans was enriching the
psyCommons. He was not training Residents and Outpatients to enter the psy-professions. One Resident
(ex-prisoner) did go on to be a personal assistant to a criminologist.
Residents
were supported in sensing what may be valuable aspects to research within
Fraser House contexts and society at large. For example, Yeomans[247] carried out extensive
values research based on the concepts of Florence Kluckhohn.[248]
In
Kluckhohn’s[249] paper,
‘Dominant and Variant Value Orientations’ (1953, p. 342-357) she identifies
five basic human issues common to all peoples at all times and all places. From
these emerge value orientations that Kluckhohn identified that speak to the
assumptions that we make about ourselves and our relating to each other and the
world, which in turn, guide our actions.
a.
What are the innate predispositions of man? (basic human nature
b.
What is the relation of man to nature?
c.
What is the significant time dimension?
d.
What is the valued personality type?
e.
What is the dominant modality of the relationship of man to other men?
The following questions
based on the above were asked in Neville’s values research:
a)
The nature of the universe In the range ‘is basically good or makes
sense’ through to ‘is basically bad or pointless’
b)
Human nature In the range ‘good or sensible’ through to ‘bad or
senseless’
c)
Can mankind change itself or be changed? Yes, Perhaps or No
d)
Man-nature - what matters
Activity – Who do you take notice of
e)
Direction – Self, Others, What fits
Degree – Unimportant, moderate importance, important
f)
Time important Future, present, past
g)
Verticality place Above, level, below
h)
Horizontality place Centre, between edges, out one edge
Yeomans
in this values research was encouraging all involved to explore basic
human issues common to all peoples – exploring the very essence of their being
– and their being in the world with others.
Fraser
House values research was followed up by questionnaires being completed by over
2,000 people in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane - the three largest cities in
Australia. Neville[250] had placed a Survey
called, ‘The Survey of the Youth of Victoria’ in his Collected Papers Archive.
This survey (using Neville’s values questions as one part of the survey) was
conducted by the Good Neighbour Council and the Commonwealth Department of
Immigration Survey Section, Canberra during 1967. There were 1,035 informants
and 1,017 used in final analysis.[251]
During
1963-1966, research by nurses in Fraser House was supervised by Yeomans.
Neville gave preliminary training to nurses in research methods [252] and also trained the
social worker in research methods. At one time Neville arranged a Fraser House
Research workshop with twenty five associated projects.[253]
As
an example, Fraser House Residents were involved in rating Resident
participation and improvement.[254] In answering, Residents
were not only being encouraged to notice healing micro-experiences (experience
of little bits of behaviour that may contribute to healing), they were
receiving the strong positive emotional experience of forming and expressing
opinions during social relating and experiencing that their opinions were
valued, and that what they thought and felt about things mattered and was
valued as being of value.
Having
come from conflicted family environments where contradictory communication[255] was the norm, doing
reality testing and checking the practical usefulness, validity and relevance
of their observations was valuable. Residents and Outpatients would start
discussing a very diverse range of topics and in the processes evolve their
capacities in forming, expressing, and evaluating opinion and making insightful
and useful observations about human interaction.
There
were also multiple simultaneous Social Action projects to be involved in
supported by academically qualified social researchers among the staff.[256]
The
Internal Research group also had liaison with Alf Clark and other members of
the Outside Research team, as well as with the Psychiatric Research Study Group
that met on the Fraser House Grounds (see later).
Residents
could also be involved in the Domiciliary Care Work and the Crisis Callout
work. Research extended to these two activities as well.
A
massive amount of biographical data was accumulated on every Resident.[257]
An
indication of the way Residents and Outpatients were being extended in their
attitudes, outlook, and identity were research topics such as:
Landscape Planning
Attitudes Questionnaire
Attitudes towards
Overseas Trade
Given
all of these opportunities to engage in research and other activities, anyone
using role specific activity to hide from doing their own change work would very quickly have this pointed out and they
would be supported by their peers to cut back their workload on research,
committee work, and other activity.
From
the Biography:[258]
Residents
were encouraged to have balance between committee work and self-healing. There
was also an element of self-healing in being immersed in the socialising and
sorting out how to live and work well with others within the committee work.
Isolates were learning to re-socialize and form relationships with other
Residents and Outpatients.
The
Committee work required acquiring and using a wide range of personal and
interpersonal communicating skills.
Participants
were encouraged to recognize and respect their own needs and those of others.
This is a reason why the committee work was called the ‘Resocializing Program’.
Any
person ‘hiding’ from their own change-work by being too busy in committee work
soon had other Residents pointing this out to them.
If
Residents put themselves forward for elections too earlier in their stay,
Residents and staff alike would be suspicious of them being on a power trip or
avoiding personal change work and would challenge them about this, or raise the
issue in Big or Small Groups.
The
same thing would apply to a person seeking to serve on many committees.
In closing this segment on Identifying with Transforming
Action perhaps it’s timely to revisit a prior paragraph.
All involved in Fraser House were ongoingly mutually identifying with each other in a
two-fold sense – firstly, as ‘people involved with Fraser House’; secondly, in
this they were also identifying their own identity in the process of their
transforming. In identifying with Fraser House they were reforming (re-forming)
their own identity.
They not only shared this experience, they
participated in the experience of each other’s being.
Objectivising[259] occurred during Fraser House happenings that were
experienced as externalised objective
phenomena [260] happening in the here
and now – the outcomes of human exchange and activity. Fraser House as
institution was objectivated by human
activity.
This
shift has Fraser House becoming real
in a massive way. Once Fraser House started to accept Residents and Outpatients
who were not there at the founding of
the Unit, and did not have that experience as a part of their biography, these
next and later generation Residents were inducted into the history, and
folklore of the Unit. They received the Fraser House ‘way’ as an existing objectivity that was introduced
as ‘this is how this place works’.
Every
aspect had the pre-existing character of objectivity.
New Residents met older Residents who were apprehended as already having a biography
saturated in potent Fraser House
experiences located within the objective
history of the Unit.
I witnessed the upstairs dorm incident.[261]
Then there was the cobalt blue scrotum incident – the effect
was huge! [262]
The
next generation received the body of
Fraser House knowledge, structure, processes, and practices transmitted as objective truth (e.g., here we have Big
Group twice a day Monday to Friday) in the course of their socialisation and internalising this as a significant
aspect of their new subjective reality. For later generations, the Fraser House
way was massively already there upon
arrival – legitimated by its very existence as a fact – a massive facticity - a
given;
unalterable, and self-evident. It is objectively
there, whether the newcomer likes it or not.[263]
Fraser Houses’ objectivity was
in no way diminished by the newcomer’s bewilderment about what they were
finding out about the Unit’s purposes and ways. Confusion and bewilderment
increases the objectivity of Fraser
House as an object in their Social
Life world.
Fraser
House? That’s the innovative psychiatric unit on the grounds of that
psychiatric hospital in Cox Road in North Ryde on the North Shore.
There
is little newcomers could do about Fraser House. For these newcomers, life at large
was typically seen as unfathomable. However, Fraser House ways, while initially
daunting, quickly established regularity and habitual ways of fitting that soon
made its own sense as they were sensing
it.
The
human expressivity of others in Fraser House in the continuing everyday
here-and-now was confronting all involved as objectively observed aspects constituting
human activity; where every aspect of the milieu heightened everyone’s awareness of attending to and noticing the
process and metaprocess (a process relating to processes) of what was going on. Any time anything
significant happened, and often minutia was
significant, a crowd would speedily gather bringing both the wisdom in the
group to resolve what was happening, and to internalise the learning from
subjects’ relating objectively in the real.[264] This heightened objectification of human expressivity. The expressivity of
Self and Others was a constantly attended massive facticity. In this there also
was the ever present hyper-aware internalizing
of the external objective reality. The internalising through the senses was
ongoingly re-constituting both the experienced phenomena of being, along with being
itself. Following Heidegger, people were attending to mood, understanding,
and the ongoing discourse – both idle chatter and words of great pith and
moment.[265]
In
this concentrated totalising milieu, their relational
languaging was constantly accumulating - adding to the repository of vast
quantities of socially shared universes of meaning, ways and experience
relating to relating well with themselves and each other. This was all woven
together and integrated; and in this
process, fine-tuning their most important instrument,
which was their own perceptive self which they were preserving in time and passing
on their remembering and re-membering[266] to
themselves and to following generations passing through Fraser House and then
moving on into networked networks in wider society.
In
all of this richness, everyone in the Fraser House collective were
simultaneously and collectively constituting an on-going Fraser House objective reality that they were
simultaneous and separately internalising
in constantly re-constituting both their respective inner realities and who they were.[267] These objectivations function as essentially sustained indices of the subjective processes of those bringing them into being so they remain
individually and collectively available in memory for future reflection, apprehension,
comprehension, and contemplation, as well as functionally habitualizing - all
beyond the face-to-face context where they were first directly apprehended.
Participants
could use shorthand like, ‘The day Neville left for the UK’,[268] or ‘The stabbing the
wall in the Upstairs Dorm incident’,[269] and an immensely rich
amount of information about transforming was immediately available. These
shorthand references to Neville leaving for the UK, or the Upstairs Dorm, are
instances of how language was transcending
the here and now and bridging different
zones within the paramount Fraser House Reality while also integrating them
all into a meaningful whole.
Hence
later, when Residents were outside of Fraser House engaging in their family
friend network, through language and recall, the entire world of Fraser House
could be actualised at any moment with all of their massive reconstituting
experiences of Fraser House accessed, understood, and reinforced in a flash.
The
simultaneous interacting processes involved all in Fraser House in constituting
(to form something or some person new
- to transform) their collective realities, and being reconstituted in the
process:
o The Fraser House social-life-world was socially
constituted
o Fraser House interacting was internalised during
socialising
o
Internalised socialising was externally experienced as an
objective reality
o
All involved in Fraser
House were social constituted
o The Fraser House social-life-world was socially
constituted[270]
Experiencing
Fraser House was realising in the
twofold sense of this word:
o Realising as in apprehending and knowing about the
objectivated reality, and
o
Realising as in
‘making real’ in ongoingly together co-constituting this reality
The above daily unfolding of collective realities
occurred not as some externalised, detached, abstract, theoretical process. Rather
it occurred as an inherent aspect of communal vibrant lived-life experience
where everybody’s’ outward expression was formed and informed by inner
experience.[271]
Was Yeomans composing[272] Fraser House? The term ‘composing’ is derived from the idea of putting together and placing. Yeomans was indeed putting
people together and placing them in various combinations in a place. Then he
placed them in differing contexts within places at the Unit – like in the Big
Group room, and the Small Group rooms, and milling around outside the canteen
after Big Group, and in the Unit’s dining room, and in the recreation room. And
he set up processes whereby people whose normal place of domicile was in specific
localities would regularly be meeting others from the same locality. Composing
was one of the pervasive aspects of Fraser House.
Music Composers use the three beat to compose the waltz with the
emphasis on the first beat (one two
three one two three…). Recall the
three Residents engaging together with one Resident being the accented first
beat that set the pace of the three engaging together.
Along with ‘composing’ is the notion of arranging. Yeomans was constantly arranging links and compositional connectives between
separate episodes and separate parts, along with separate and or conjoined
elements within episodes.
Within Fraser House, one process in compositional
linkages was identifying the functional
in context and repeated examples of variation in the functional in context,
and functional patterns being repeated.
Melodic arrangement in music is pleasing to the ear and soul. So were
aspects of Fraser House composing. Thematic content permeated the whole
experience at regular intervals – again like melodic arrangements – rhythmical
patterns. Repetition of the Big Group, Small Group, Committee Group, and
Research Group supported the sensing of Unity in the Composition that was
Fraser House.
In all of this there is also modulating in the composing – varying
pitch, pace and power; both varying and repeated distance and accent, and
emphasis - with everyone learning how to become exquisite unto the moment. All
of these aspects added to the unity of the whole – along with correlating of
familiar aspects of the parts.
At times in Fraser House, the compositional structure
depended upon and emerged from the moment to moment content – for example, from
the presence of threat, or danger, or high expressed emotion, or conflict or
unity in conflict – where two contending factors (makers) were engaging with
emergent progressive elements and struggles with reacting all taking place
surrounded by audience and crowd with Big Group leader Neville, or someone
modelling Neville, drawing attention to functional in context.
Note that Yeomans composed the dormitory sharing with seemingly
odd juxtapositions of pairs of opposites – two under-controlled over-active,
and two over-controlled, under-active Residents.
This set up a structure of reducing struggle of opposites
linked by the unity of co-constituting (we’re all in this together) towards a
more normal centre (with under increasing, and over reducing)[273] with all of this is taking place within the compositional
framing of the symphony of life living and loving well together.
While Yeomans did compose in the sense of setting up Fraser House as a place where people could be together, once underway everything
was improvisation. Fraser House composing had very much the free form and
variation on themes of jazz music and jazz singing. Everyone in this
metaphorical jazz band was contributing to the attunement that entailed
continual variation.
This is reminiscent of my experiencing of the late night off-stage singing
of Sweet Georgia Brown in the Casino after the show with every repeat of the
lyrics being different. As a relevant whimsical metaphorical diversion, below note
the composing with considerable
whimsy of A. A. Milne writing in a joyful bouncy rhythm of unity of friendship and difference
in the unfolding lives of four friends. Perhaps you can fine parallels in this
poem with the themes of this E-Book.
Four
Friends
Ernest was an elephant, a great big fellow, Leonard was a lion with a
six foot tail, George was a goat, and his beard was yellow, And James was a very
small snail. Leonard had a stall, and a great big strong one, Earnest had a manger, and
its walls were thick, George found a pen, but I think it was the wrong one, And James sat down on a
brick Earnest started trumpeting and raised such a rumpus, Leonard started roaring
and trying to kick, James went on a journey with the goat’s new compass And he reached the end
of his brick. |
Earnest started trumpeting, and cracked his manger, Leonard started roaring,
and shivered his stall, James gave a huffle of a snail in danger And nobody heard him at all. Ernest was an elephant and very well intentioned, Leonard was a lion with a
brave new tail, George was a goat, as I think I have mentioned, but James was only a
snail. |
This invites a comparison with the
themes of this book. What insights and interpretations can fall out of this
poem?[274]
What then of the composing inherent in this E-Book?
The composing of the writing of this book
invites a deep immersion in what is embodied in the German expression Dichter and Denken[275]. The E-Book can
be experienced and contemplated simultaneously from three aspects:
o
The author as storyteller
o The author in the process of composing, and storytelling,
o the composed E-Book - tThe stories themselves
For some
context – there has been years of mulling, contemplating and reflecting prior
to and during the composing. Like Maxwell Jones’ comment on Fraser House – with
all of this deep engaging, personal evolution is inevitable.
As for the
composing, the best metaphor is weaving and constant re-weaving, and
withdrawing threads, and linking bits with other bits and discarding and
re-ordering in a quite frankly bewildering kind of way and currently, the
weaving continues.
This E-book is engaging at one level at the meta-meta
of micro-to-macro - the weaving of the whole-of-it.[276]
I have myriads of bits (some gems) in all this. The bits link in myriad
ways. When to place them and where?
Yeomans was very interested in contours and making use of the contours
of the mind. And so, how to convey theme-based mainlines of action on clearly
traced contours.
Do individual links naturally react to one another? Will another sense
the links. Making everything explicit collapses the Way and complicates.
Simplifying is not the Way. If gems are present within the material[277] will they be sensed by the reader?
And what if later material is relevant to the sensing of the gem? All the timely precursors can’t be
stacked before introducing the gem or gems will be stacked at the back behind
seeming incoherent irrelevancies.
How does one set the gems for ensuring
their influence? Ensuring is hardly the way. Being
calculated is not the Way. How to have a conscious and unconscious juxtaposing
in composing?
How does one compose for the perceiving of unity among connectives? How
to have links to myriad bits being sensed as unified and sensed as wholes
within wholes?
Is there the scattering of points? Do they suffuse into a line - a line
of words that conveys the multidimensional beyond any linear?
And how to use spaces and gaps and cracks that play so large a part in
the Way?
And how to convey the richness of the ‘not said’
– the implications – the scope for reading between the lines?
How to write at times such that the lines cease
to exist – rather, evoking rich realities of immense possibilities. How to do
this for enriching experience and not to have excess having disrupting effects?
And an essence in the Way is stacking, so stacking for providing lived
experience of the Way. Though what of composing and fusing together
(a) exquisite architecture, and
(b) the stacking of stacks?
Stacking generally is not a good look.
Are we as a grandstand of people to be metaphorically blown away by
Usain Bolt’s flash down the back straight or are we to hardly recognise a
lifeless exhibit - resemblance frozen in wax
And so,
Composing my myself for more composing.
A
number of the top people in NSW Mental Health wanted Fraser House closed. They
strongly preferred drug-based psychiatry and in no way accepted the
bio-psycho-social approach (Engel, 1977). In this hostile environment Yeomans
set up a number of layers of legitimation of Fraser House.
A rudimentary first level legitimation was the simple affirmation by existing
Residents and Outpatients to newcomers that ’this is how things are done here
in Fraser House. We have Big Group and Small Group etc.’
A
second level of legitimation was the
use of slogans, wise sayings, mini stories of past superb moments in Fraser
House history and the like.
A
third level was the induction into
the differentiated knowledge relating to different roles within Fraser House.
These
first three levels of legitimation were legitimising Fraser House in the eyes
of all Fraser House participants, with this supporting the effectiveness of the
community based processes.
A fourth level of legitimation, and well ahead
of its time, was the use within Fraser House of evidence based practice. Fraser House Way was not however based upon
'evidence' derived from past research in unrelated contexts that is profoundly
detached and externalised from the lived-life experience of phenomena in Fraser
House. That externalised ‘evidence’ tends to have focus upon input
(compliance with prior research), rather than output – what is the whole-of-it
that is actually happening moment to moment and being constantly evaluated during
Fraser House process. In Fraser House evidence was based upon this output. It was objectively verifiable
empirical differences on many variables between how residents were when they
arrived and when they left. For example, Residents would arrive with a dysfunctional family friend network of
five or less people, and typically leave within 12 weeks with a functional network of between 50 and 70
people - with many of these in the 'regularly in contact' category. It was also
how folk were experiencing and behaving before and after some segment of Fraser
House life. For example, on one occasion (discussed more fully later) everyone
arrived at Big Group as a varied group. In moments everyone was confused and
apprehensive, then angry, then challenged, then resolved to be at their very
best – and they sustained that state. The evidence for this was the independent
reports of eight staff who were immersed in this transformational process.
Another example confirmed by my interviewees, was the stabbing the wall
incident – male stabbing the wall while shouting ‘I’m going to kill her’ –
moments later, after rapid interrupt by Yeomans, he is sobbing and declaring
his love for his wife.[278]
Residents also left the Unit with a wide range
of general competences and a range of very specific competences derived from
their active participation in the many differing aspects of Fraser House life. For
example, competences in engaging in action research, domiciliary care, suicide
prevention, resident assessment, scheduling car pooling and the like – with
these assessments made by highly competent appraisers.
A
fifth level of legitimation framed
Fraser House as a very effective symbolic
interconnecting inter-relating totality - as ‘a unique psychiatric
pioneering endeavour’ that Yeomans constantly brought before a very interested
public in Sydney using all forms of public media and through public
presentations and talks. This fifth level served to further integrate all of the earlier legitimation
into a unified whole and in so doing integrated subjective and objective
aspects.
To
paraphrase Berger and Luckmann,[279] legitimation justifies
institutional order by giving normative dignity (from Latin dignus – meaning
worth) to its practical imperatives. Recall that the habitualized routines of
the Fraser House daily round were one of the first-order ways that constituted
meaning that was objectively available to participants during their social
relating. To support first order ways, Yeomans set up Fraser House legitimating
processes providing a second-order objectivation
of meaning. This legitimation constituted new meanings that served to
further integrate the meanings already attaching to the various aspect of daily
life in the Unit like Big Group and Small Groups.
Legitimising
Fraser House at the level of a universal
overarching total symbolic whole sets up a place for everything and everything in its place as my tidy
mother used to say – having the reality of life in Fraser House as the paramount reality for those involved.
Here in Fraser House there was a universe
of discourse that legitimated all of the everyday Fraser House roles,
routines, and procedures as wholes within the universal whole of Fraser House.
In terms of its intensity and density it was for all participants larger than
their life outside the Unit. Life in Fraser House was all the more significant
and potent because of its massive contrast to the outside reality. The Fraser
House social scene was definitive; the most real - where participants felt the
most alive. Here they could fully return to reality – the reality of their
everyday life within the Unit. Remember these people had been profoundly
disconnected from everyday life.
Margaret Mead commented on this. She said that Fraser House was the most
total place she had been in. Mead was
referring to the current themes been discussed in this E-Book. While Mead could
readily and clearly sense the ‘totality’ of Fraser House, it was highly likely
that the senior health department officials with psychiatry backgrounds would
have no comprehension of what Mead
was referring to; they had attended on the day to get confirmation of their
perceptions that the Unit should be closed.[280]
On
comprehending and reaching one’s limits in comprehending, Martin Heidegger
wrote:
To
the common comprehension, the incomprehension is never an occasion to stop and
look at its own powers of comprehension, still less to notice their
limitations.
To
common comprehension, what is incomprehensible remains merely offensive – proof
enough to such comprehension which is convinced it was born comprehending
everything, that it is now being imposed upon with a sham. The one thing of
which sound common sense is least capable is acknowledgement and respect.[281]
For the psychiatrist heads of the NSW Health Department their
criteria was compliance with accepted psychiatric practice. Nothing -
absolutely nothing outside that practice was given one ounce of brain room or
time. Everything purporting to be of value outside of that practice had no
sense and made no sense in their terms - hence it was dismissed as nonsense.
They had no reason to listen or attend. They had no capacity to comprehend. For
these psychiatrists, there was nothing to comprehend. Consequently, these Senior
Health Department Officials could not comprehend what Margaret Mead was talking
about either. It was outside and beyond their comprehension and they never
realised that.
Within
all of this legitimating relating to Fraser House was the legitimating of
everyone’s transforming identity by
placing their sense of self in all of its aspects soundly within the Fraser
House reality.
This
enriched sense of identity (remembering their previous alienation and lack of a
sense of identity, who they are now, and anticipating who they are becoming)
was passed on to being imbedded within the common stock of knowing within their
enlarged family friend network.
From
being a dropout from mainstream society and profoundly disconnected
subjectively, all involved including staff externalised themselves in the Fraser House small life
world[282]
of their own making, and then internalised their expanding self.
Examples
of the totalising fifth level of legitimation:
o Yeomans invited visitors to attend Big Group as Fraser
House had gained a reputation for being the best place in Australia to
experience the very best in using group processes for transforming action and
organisations[283]
o Yeomans had the strong support of the head of Mental
Health in NSW and Yeomans used this support to legitimise and protect Fraser
House
o Linked to this was having world renowned anthropologist
Margaret Mead attend Fraser House and speak very highly of the Unit to senior
heads of Mental Health who also attended, many of whom were very critical of
Yeomans and the Unit – they favoured drug-based psychiatry and no way accepted
the bio-psycho-social approach.[284]
Yeomans’
extensive outreach from Fraser House also provided legitimation as well as
serving multiple other functions including protecting Fraser House’s very
existence:
o Yeomans presented as an extremely charismatic[285] character that kept
Fraser House continually in the public media[286] of the day, including
popular picture-based magazines that would run human interest stories that
would be widely read, including being avidly read by Fraser House Residents and
Outpatients.
o Yeomans was also active in twenty seven external roles
with mental health, allied health and other resonant organisations where he was
known as the Founding Director and Psychiatrist at Fraser House. [287]
o Fraser House offered primary resident care by skilled
psychiatric nurses to many surrounding organizations.
o A Fraser House social worker was based in the Hunters
Hill Council Chamber’s Administrative Office providing a service to the public
half a day a week.
o Yeomans was continually giving talks to church groups
and other organizations about Fraser House and its processes.
o Yeomans set up what was called the Sydney Therapeutic
Club on the veranda of Ward One at Sydney Hospital.
o Yeomans worked closely with eight social workers at
Sydney Hospital. Some of the social workers were trained in group therapy and
the Consultative Mental Health Programme was established. Six of the social
workers attended Fraser House groups.
o Sociotherapy groups were held regularly at Sydney
Hospital for three years.
o Fraser House Residents and ex-Residents attended these
Sydney Hospital Groups. Yeomans announced the start of these Sydney Hospital
sociotherapy group meetings during a Fraser House Big Group that was very
tense, as a catalyst for change in that Big Group’s mood.
o Yeomans commenced the Psychiatric Business Study Group[288]
o Yeomans also gave many talks and interviews about
Fraser House that were broadcast on TV and radio. This was confirmed by Yeomans
as well as Fraser House staffers psychiatric nurse Phil Chilmaid, and
psychologist Warwick Bruen.
o Yeomans was the Guest of Honour at the All Nations Club
on 30 August 1963.
o A draft of a speech on social problems to the Ionian
Club Sydney entitled, ‘Introduction on the Origins of the Ionians’ is included
in Yeomans’ archived papers. This is consistent with Yeomans wider interest in
re-connecting people back to their own culture, as in their way of life
together.
o A shift to a ‘community mental health’ focus and a
further widening of focus to embrace ‘community health’ via ‘strengthening the
organizational preparedness of the outside community’ was hinted at in the
forward to the second edition of the
Fraser Handbook, ‘Introducing a Therapeutic Community for New Members’:
The
major changes in the programs of the Fraser House Therapeutic Community in the
past 20 months have been the development of an intense Community Psychiatry
Programme, first in Lane Cove municipality in September 1965, and more recently
in the Ryde Municipality. The major Therapeutic function of Fraser House will
now be as the centre for an intense Regionalized Community Psychiatric
Programme. This programme is aimed at reducing the rates of mental and social
illness in this part of Sydney as a pilot programme and involves a vast
increase in the outward orientation and responsibility of the Unit. Groups of
nurses were allocated localities in the suburbs surrounding Fraser House and
supported residents and outpatients from their areas.
The
Fraser House handbook for new staff has a segment on the Nurses Role: Nurses
are assigned in teams to regional areas at the moment; Lane Cove, Ryde, the
rest of North Shore, and other areas. Each regional team is expected to be
responsible for knowing its area, its problems and helping agencies etc.
Moreover, nurses in each team are expected to come to know all in-patients and
out-patients of that area; to be specially involved in the appropriate regional
small groups, both in the community and in the Unit; to record progress notes
on their regional patients; to be part of both medical officer and follow-up
committee planning for the patients of their region.
o In September 1965 the Lane Cove Community Psychiatry
Programme began.
o In June 1966 a similar programme began in Ryde.
o As an example of linking Fraser House to the wider
community and vice versa, during 1965, assistance was given on an individual or
workshop basis by members of the Fraser House Research Group to thirteen
organizations[289]
o Seventeen people from the Parramatta Psychiatric Centre
met monthly under Yeomans’ chairmanship on eight occasions.
o Members of the Salvation Army undertook training in
group leadership at Fraser House. Brief and extended training courses also
included clergymen from all Christian denominations. Also involved were family
welfare agency counsellors, parole officers, and nurses and administrators from
private hospitals.
o Advised the Salvation Army on the development of
hostels.
o Yeomans was the Honorary Consulting Psychiatrist at
Langton Clinic for Alcoholics. He also guided that hospital on therapy, policy
and research.
o On one occasion a TV crew from the ABC came and filmed
a section of Big Group. Despite
extensive inquiry no footage has been located.
In
part for further legitimation of Fraser House, Yeomans set up a Psychiatric
Research Study Group on the grounds of the North Ryde Hospital adjacent the
Unit. At one time there were 180 members on the Psychiatric Research Study
Group mailing list. Every one of these people was well versed in Fraser House
way and became advocates for the Unit. Yeomans wrote:
The
Study Group represents every field of the social and behavioural sciences and
is the most significant psycho-social research institute in this State. The
Psychiatric Research Study Group maintains a central file of research projects
underway throughout NSW and acts in an advisory and critical capacity to anyone
planning a research project. Meetings were held monthly at first at Fraser
House and then elsewhere.
The
Psychiatric Research Study Group was a forum for the discussion and exploration
of innovative healing ideas. Yeomans and the study group networked for, and
attracted very talented people. Students of psychiatry, medicine, psychology,
sociology, social work, criminology and education attended from the University
of NSW and University of Sydney and other places. The Psychiatric Research
Study Group became a vibrant therapeutic community in its own right with a
profoundly close inter-connected relation with Fraser House. Prison officers
and parole officers with whom Yeomans had been working within the prison and
corrective system also attended the Study Group. A 1963-65 Research Report
states:
Tony
Vinson and his team of Social Work 11 students from the University of NSW, with
the Fraser House research Team for a time acting in an advisory capacity
regarding research design and field work methods, carried out a study to assess
the effectiveness of the Lane Cove Community Aid Service and the Fraser House
Community Psychiatric Programme. Tony Vinson also attended the study group. He
is now Honorary Professor, University of Sydney and Emeritus Professor at the
School of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of New
South Wales.
Yeomans
spoke of Tony Vinson doing sociology studies in the early Sixties, obtaining
his PhD in 1972 and becoming the Foundation Professor of Behavioural Science in
Medicine at the University of Newcastle in 1976, and Chairman of the NSW
Corrective Services Commission in 1979. [290]Tony continues to provide
his research findings to the Federal Government and Welfare Agencies on
situated poverty.
The
Psychiatric Research Study Group provided a space where ideas were
enthusiastically received and discussed.[291] Some participants had
been finding it hard to get an audience for their novel ideas within the
climate of the universities of the day. The Study Group was another cultural
locality where the people involved became connected together by deep social
engaging about common interests. Simultaneously they were becoming connected to
place – being just over from Fraser House in the same hospital grounds.
Anything raised in the Study Group that seemed to fit the milieu in Fraser
House was immediately tested by Yeomans in Fraser House. In trying something to
see if it worked, Yeomans spoke of ‘the survival of the fitting’.
The
180 Psychiatric Research Study Group members did speak of Fraser House within
their own social works spreading the word about Fraser House into the
consciousness of people throughout Sydney and wider afield. For example, the
Psychiatric Research Study Group assisted 13 organisations, including the
Federal Department of External Affairs, two NSW government departments, five
Universities and four national organisations.[292] As another example, in
2004 a woman down in Hobart Tasmania - the island off the SE of the Australian
mainland - stated that her social work friends in the 1960s received regular
updates from Fraser House people about ways that worked and these were
immediately tried and adapted in their own work in Hobart both inside and
outside government departments.
One
of the intentions of these media releases, interviews talks and the like was to
have the public know so much about what was happening at Fraser House, that it
would raise a hue and cry if there were any moves whatsoever to close the Unit.
A
question can arise as to how Yeomans was able to do all of this extensive
legitimating work outside of the Unit.
Yeomans
incorporated into Fraser House what he had learnt from working with his father
on the family farms about self-organising systems in nature.[293] Yeomans set up Fraser
House largely as a self-organising system. Once the patterns were established a
number of staff (and on some occasions, competent Residents) became competent
in running Big Group. This freed up Yeomans to do all of his outside work.
After a time Fraser House had many of the features of self-organizing systems
in nature.
All
of this legitimation of Fraser House as a widely discussed ‘innovative
alternative psychiatric centre’ was constituting a framing whereby all of the
other meanings attached to the many aspects of Fraser House would be integrated
as wholes that were aspects of larger wholes making up the whole of Fraser
House. Nothing was a part that was apart; everything was a whole that was melding in with larger wholes. All of this multiple layers of
legitimating served to make all of the first order institutionalised
objectivations more objectively available
and subjectively plausible. Big
Groups, Small Groups, Domiciliary Care Group and the like all made more sense
as seminal aspects of Fraser House as ‘a most widely discussed Psychiatric
Unit’. People including all manner of professionals from Academia, Government,
Church groups, business, and the like were continually seeking permission to
attend the Big Group. It became widely known as a place where one could gain
advanced skills in working with groups.
On
one occasion a group came from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs.[294]
All
of this legitimation supported Residents as they experienced time at Fraser
House in the various phases of what was continually framed[295]
as their transformational journey.
They
passed from being a new arrival to being a seasoned co-participant; and all the
time enabling self and others in using subjectively
plausible community therapy ways that they were all witnessing being used
effectively by others. They jointly brought these to life in objective reality
creating behaviour change that is verifiably
and objectively real by mutual
consensus.[296]
This involved the subjectively meaningful becoming integrated with the
subjective plausibility of Fraser House way – the institutional order.
This
becomes more potent when there were people commencing at Fraser House who were not there at the beginning and who did
not have their own memory of those first days of Fraser House when Residents
were becoming habitualized to maintain the self-evident nature of the Unit. For
these residents that were not in the early days, there was no link between
their biography and the history of the Unit.
The
various forms of legitimation helped communicate what Fraser House was as a pre-existing objective reality.
Legitimation supported the induction of new residents as to what happens and
that they very likely will see miracles happening.
The
reality of everyday life in Fraser House was maintained by being immersed in
daily routines. Fraser House became a social
base – an extremely effective plausibility structure. Every aspect of
Fraser House discussed to date played its part in the plausibility structures and processes sustaining the routine
maintenance of the continuity of the reality of Fraser House. This routine maintenance of reality by
plausibility structures and processes tends to go unnoticed. If our notion of
reality fails we tend to freak out instantly, if only for a moment. An example
is picking up a heavy cardboard box with a lid on it that we think is very
heavy when in fact it’s empty. This gives us a sudden shock for a split second.
Another is the first brush of seaweed on our leg in murky seawater, especially
after just seeing the movie, ‘Jaws’.
The
normal Fraser House reality came under massive threat necessitating critical reality maintenance when
Yeomans was leaving to go overseas for nine months and the department had not
found a replacement psychiatrist. There was the very real possibility of the breakdown of reality – perhaps leading
to an ‘everyone pack; their closing Fraser House’, moment! This threat required
crisis maintenance action as the
Units very existence as an institution was under threat.
At
the very commencement of one morning Big Group (not on a Thursday
Administration Meeting), Yeomans ramped up the emotion in all attendees through
initial confusion as to whether Yeomans himself had had a nervous breakdown.
Yeomans then created repeated shifts in group focus:
o Firstly, Yeomans appearing to go
berserk, and
o Then suddenly interrupting this berserk
state to raise, then amplify danger, threat, and consequent fear of loss[297],
o and then interrupting these responses
through generating anger at the Department when he suddenly announced that the
department had not found a replacement psychiatrist
o then interrupting everyone’s anger to
focus on their role as reality
maintainers
o then suddenly interrupting with the very
real challenging amidst all of these social forces, to be at their very, very best as a Resident
was suicidal and needing everyone’s support; and ‘this place has to be superb
when the new psychiatrist arrives
o and then stating – ‘You’re all on your
own as I am leaving! ‘
o Then Yeomans swiftly left the room.
No one suicided - the place was superb
and the replacement psychiatrist changed nothing - an example of the social
re-constituting of realities; in this case also generating rapid enhancement in
competency, capacity, resilience,[298]
and resolve.[299] Also this is an instance
of bifurcation[300]
- a system state change often through perturbing[301] leading to the potential and emergence of
sudden whole system trans-cending transition
to higher and more unpredictable com-plexity and improved performance.
Strategic as ever, Yeomans kept
seven different staff reports of this incident in his archives.[302]
One staff member’s report of the above incident ended with:
This story has no end because we
still continue to function as a unit.
Another staff member wrote a file
note saying:
I have no vivid recollections of
the first week of Dr. Yeomans absence except that the nursing staff
occasionally seemed surprised that the ward was still running and that we were
able to get through staff meetings without Dr. Yeomans.
On
the theme Fraser House and miracles,
in 1998 Yeomans was asked if there were any miracles at Fraser House. Yeomans
replied with a flourish:
Of
course it was miraculous. We were the best in the planet, and we all believed
this, so we would acknowledge our failings, as we were streets ahead of
everyone else.
I
was accused of being an impossible optimist.[303] I sense I was more of a
fatalistic optimist. I was context driven - if I go to ‘creative context’ then
‘everything is creative’ - it worked like that.[304] As for the miraculous -
well that was a calm night – peaceful. Remember we were filled with the very
bad and the very mad - the under-controlled and the over-controlled.[305]
Yeomans
went on to say:
Given
Resident and Outpatient emersion in the Fraser House Governance Therapy
Processes and all of the Unit’s other relational group-work, imagine
psychiatric Residents returning to everyday life with finely honed practical
skills in administering a complex organization having for example, over 12,000
groups a year[306]
and 20,000 Outpatient visits a year. This is what happened.
When
Residents were back in their community and learning to interact with people at
say, the counter in their local Child Endowment office, the Ex-Residents
typically had some understanding about how bureaucracies work (and in many ways
work poorly) through personal experience of working through the challenges at
Fraser House, especially the Committee Work.[307]
Residents
were leaving Fraser House as:
o Able to look after themselves
o Able to mingle regularly with their
expanded family friend network
o Able to plan and host social events.
o Caring natural nurturers
o The exquisite sudden crisp interrupter
of any mad or bad behaviour
o Insightful wise person engaging in
practical action[308] for a better world
o Folk linking with others exploring
better ways of living together
Many Residents and Outpatients left Fraser
House with highly evolved competences that are detailed in the Biography.[309]
Recall that in the film The Matrix Neo commenced by following
the White Rabbit. This E-Book commenced with
Pervasively,
throughout the world social systems of systems have evolved with a massive
array of control processes for the control of everyone with no one in control.
We have found that Yeomans set out to evolve a micro-society
within a micro-life-world were the participants individually and collectively
and ongoingly constituted their realities.
We also found that Fraser house differed from main-stream in many ways - examples:
o
Not top down
o Providing a different set of
roles for the psy-Professionals
o Enriching the psyCommons
o
Supporting Self-help and mutual help
o Holistic total processes
o Community based
o No treatment plan – very
eclectic
o Using social forces
o Using audience and crowd
effects
You
may recall that this E-Book commenced with exploring a dense account
unravelling how the tightly woven Fraser House Way worked in re-socialising the Residents.
Notice
the assumption in the above sentence:
Fraser
House re-socialised Residents.
This
presupposes that this was a one-way causation – X caused Y. That is, it assumes
that as Yeomans set up Fraser House, the assumption becomes:
Yeomans
Re-socialised the Residents.
This
E-Book has taken us far from this assumption. Yeomans set up a context where Residents socialized Fraser House and
found themselves in the process.
In Fraser House, it was never ‘Community
as Doctor’. The medical model was never used. Rather, community of a very special kind was the integrator-transformer in
having all involved realising their personal and collective authentic power[310]
to act in support of their own interests and to secure them. While
there was pressure placed on Fraser House Residents and Outpatients to
transform, rather than the typical mainstream quest for ‘recovery from dominant
system attributed mental disorders/illnesses’ (some may say ‘pathologising the collective struggle of
disadvantaged groups against dominant interests’),
Fraser House Resident and Outpatient
members were supported to embrace, focus and exercise their collective strength
to be able to engage their own agency
in actions towards their own living
well with others in the face of recognised
problematic aspects of wider society. A specific focus was realising their
individual, group, and collective potential to change social realities as
evidenced in the Governance Committees.
There was a potent blending and melding
of the re-normalising and identity re-constituting potency of individuals and
the collective engaging in the mundane practical considerations of community
life - cooking, cleaning, gardening and art making etc. This was continually
blended with potent personal and bio-psycho-social transformative action.
Many glimpses have been provided of
Yeomans Ways. Two themes:
How as a collective, small group or even
an individual to set out to replicate the actions implied in this E-Book.
How to begin in setting up possibilities
for replicating, adapting and extending Yeomans Way in the context of all of
the issues outlined at the start of this E-Book.
This E-Book has been providing many ways
and processes contributing to transforming - and key components are stacking, layering, and weaving. Another is the processes
supporting the evolving, extending, and sustaining of local networking.[311]
Some readers may find that the ‘all of this’ is, to say the least, a bit
much. The social forces of control
imposed relentlessly by dominant and dominating Social Systems of Systems that
was the starting point of this E-Book are more than ‘a bit much’; they are
massive and all pervasive.
Neville Yeomans was well aware of, and
took a leaf out of 16th century author François Rabelais’ book, The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel.[312]
Rabelais makes specific use of massive and hilarious excess[313] to make very telling observations about 16th
Century society. Similarly, Dr Neville Yeomans continually and massively
stacked to excess as an essential aspect of his Way. Another key aspect of
Neville was his relentless persistence and impeccable social ecology.
During
the nine years (1959-1967) Fraser House was running under Yeomans the Unit had
Big and Small Groups occurring twice a day Monday to Friday (with typically 170
– 180 in attendance) with countless other Groups for special purposes, on top
of all of the Governance Meetings of the ten committees reporting to the
Parliamentary Committee with referrals to the Pilot Committee.
During
1959-1968 Fraser House averaged 20,000 Outpatient visits a year and 2,500
visitors a year.
Resonant
with Rabelais’ use of excess, over the nine years Dr Neville Yeomans was
director and psychiatrist at Fraser House the Unit had in excess of:
o 865,000 group
attendances
o 22,500 Big Groups
o 81,000 small groups,
and
o 4,500 Governance
Groups
Fraser
House was a massive endeavour.
Given
all of this activity in the context of the controlling forces referred to both
at the commencement of, and during this E-Book, it is noted that there appears to be no trace that Fraser
House ever existed in the NSW Health Department Records. Powerful
interests wanted Yeomans and Fraser House and everything associated with it to
disappear from view.
The
set of buildings called Fraser House were repurposed as the Lachlan Centre and
later repurposed again; they no longer represent or re-present Fraser House.
Fraser
House as an institution between 1959 and 1968 existed primarily as past and
present Residents, staff and Outpatients were conscious of it. Now it lives on
in memory of those involved, with traces in Dr Yeomans Archives in the Mitchell
Library in Sydney with copies elsewhere. It also lives on in Clark and Yeomans’
book, Clark’s PhD, Yeomans’ Archives,[314] my PhD[315] and my Biography of
Yeomans’ life work.[316] The Collection of
Stories, Coming to Ones Senses - By the Way,[317] the Biography, and the Laceweb
Homepage Archive contain extensive resources towards adapting the themes of
this E-Book to the wider issues outlined at the commencement of this E-Book.
They also detail how Yeomans extended Fraser House Ways into the wider society.
This E-Book has drawn deeply upon action
in the 1960s – and as alluded to in the opening poem – contains gems buried
deep though available for those searching.
The Ways are also very much alive today and being used today by folk very quietly in the
hills throughout many parts of the World. Glimpses may be found in the Laceweb
Archive.[318] Search and you’ll find.
This
E-Book may provide a frame for you adapting Yeomans work for the current age.
Much of the unknown about the Rabbit Hole that was Fraser House is now known,
knowable, and understandable. Interested?
Aristotle, 1980. Aristotle
– The Nichomachean Ethics. The World’s Classics. Oxford University Press :
1980.
Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann (1967). The Social Construction of Reality : A
Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday.
Capra, F. (1997). The Web of Life - A New Synthesis of
Mind and Matter. London, Harper Collins.
Carlson,
J. and N. Yeomans (1975). Whither Goeth
the Law - Humanity or Barbarity -. The Way Out - Radical Alternatives in
Australia - Internet site - http://www.laceweb.org.au/whi.htm. M. C. Smith,
D. Melbourne, Lansdowne Press
Cawte,
J. (1974). Medicine is the Law - Studies
in Psychiatric Anthropology of Australian Tribal Societies. Adelaide,
Rigby.
Cawte,
J. (2001). Healers of Arnhem Land.
Marleston, SA, J.B. Books
Clark,
A. W. (1969). Theory and Evaluation of a
Therapeutic Community - Fraser House. University of NSW PhD Dissertation.
Sydney
Clark, A. W. (1993). Understanding and Managing Social Conflict.
Melbourne, Swinburne College Press. Clark,
A. W. and N. Yeomans (1969). Fraser House - Theory, Practice and
Evaluation of a Therapeutic Community. New York, Springer Pub Co
Engel, G. (1977). The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine. Science.
196: 129-136.
Feldenkrais,
M., 1972. Awareness Through Movement -
Health Exercises for Personal Growth. New York, New York : Penguin Books.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis : An Essay on the Organization of Experience.
Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press
Gouldner, A.W. 1970. The Coming
Crisis of Western Sociology. London, HEB Paperback 0
Hanlon, W. D. (1987).
Taproots: Underlying Principles of Milton
Erickson's Therapy and Hypnosis. London, W.W. Norton & Co.
Heidegger, M. (1968).
What Is Called Thinking? New York,
Harper & Row
Kolb et al. Brain Plasticity and
Behaviour Internet Site accessed Jan 2016.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/cd/12_1/Kolb.cfm,
Kluckhohn, F. (1953).
Dominant and Variant Value Orientations.
Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture. C. Kluckhohn and H. Murray.
NY, Alfred A. Khopf.
Laing,
R. D. and A. Esterson (1964). Sanity
Madness and the Family. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books Ltd.
Lindsay,
J. S. B. (1992). Ward 10B : The Deadly
Witch-hunt. Main Beach, Qld, Wileman.
Luckmann, B., 1978. The Small Life
Worlds of Modern Man. Ed. T. Luckmann. Phenomenology
and Sociology. Harmondsworth, UK : Penguin Modern Sociology Readings.
Marx, K., 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1977, with some notes by R. Rojas.
Mead, G.H, 1936. Movements of
Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Merritt H. Moore. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Mead, G.H, 1954. On Social
Psychology.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mulligan, M. and S. Hill (2001). Thinking Like an Ecosystem - Ecological
Pioneers. A Social History of Australian Ecological Thought and Action.
Melbourne, Vic, Cambridge University Press.
Pelz, W. (1974). The Scope of Understanding in Sociology : Towards a More Radical
Reorientation in the Social and Humanistic Sciences. London, Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
Poole, R., 1972. Towards Deep Subjectivity. London, Allen
Lane The Penguin Press.
Rabelais, F., 2014. The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel. Internet Site Accessed Feb 2017.
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/rabelais/francois/r11g/complete.html
Spencer,
L., 2005. Cultural Keyline - The Life
Work of Dr Neville Yeomans. PhD Dissertation, Internet Source sighted Nov
2016:
Spencer, L., 2013a. Whither Goeth the World of Human Futures A Biography on the Life Work
of Dr Neville Yeomans. Internet Site
Accessed Nov 2016.
Spencer L. 2013b. Coming to One's Senses - By the Way. Books One & Two. TCF Publishing : Melbourne. www.laceweb.org.au/btw.pdf
The Sun Newspaper (Sydney), 1963. The
Big Seven Secrets Australians were first to solve.
Wolff,
K. H. (1976). Surrender and Catch -
Experience and Inquiry Today. In Boston
Studies in the Philosophy of Science. R. S. Cohen and Wartofsky. Boston, D.
Reidel Publishing.
Wilson, P. (1990). A Life of Crime.
Newham, Victoria, Scribe.
Yeomans, K. (2005). Ken Yeomans Website www.keyline.com.au (accessed 1 Oct
2005).
Yeomans, K. B. and P.
A. Yeomans (1993). Water for Every Farm :
Yeomans Keyline Plan. Southport, Qld., Keyline Designs.
Yeomans, N., 1965a. Collected Papers on Fraser House and Related Healing Gatherings and
Festivals. Mitchell Library Archives, State Library of New South Wales.
Yeomans,
N., 1965b. Collection of Newspaper
Clippings, Letters and Notices. Dr. Neville Yeomans Collection of Newspaper
Writings. Sydney.
Yeomans, N., 1974. On Global Reform and International Normative Model Areas (Inma).
Internet Source accessed Dec 2016
Yeomans, N., 2010. Poems by Neville. T Yeomans.
Indooroopilly, Qld. : Autograph Press.
Yeomans, P. A., 1954. The Keyline Plan. Sydney, Yeomans.
Yeomans, P. A, 1955. The Keyline Plan, Yeomans Publishing.
Yeomans, P. A., 1955. The Keyline Plan, Yeomans Publishing - Internet Source Accessed 1
October 2005. www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010125yeomans/010125t
oc.html
Yeomans, P. A., 1956. Now Keyline’s Originator Takes to the Field. The Riverlander (August):
15, 43-45.
Yeomans, P. A., 1958a. The Challenge of Landscape : The Development and Practice of Keyline.
Sydney, Keyline Publishing.
Yeomans, P. A., 1958b. The Challenge of Landscape: The Development and Practice of Keyline.
- Internet Source:
www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010126yeomansII/010126
toc.html
Yeomans, P. A., 1965. Water for Every farm. Sydney, Melbourne, Murray.
Yeomans,
P. A., 1971a. The City Forest : the Keyline
Plan for the Human Environment Revolution. Sydney, Keyline.
Yeomans, P. A., 1971b. The City Forest: The Keyline Plan for the Human Environment Revolution.
Internet Source:
www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010127yeomansIII/01012
7toc.html
Yeomans, P. A. and Murray Valley Development
League, 1974. Preliminary Design Proposal
for the City of Monarto. P. A. Yeomans Collected Materials - Mitchell
Library, NSW. Sydney.
A list of many of the
surveys and questionnaires that Residents and Outpatients were asked to
complete in order to have available very detailed life histories – and at the
same time re-experiencing a comprehensive review of their own life to date.
From Volume 11 of Neville Yeomans Collected Papers in the Mitchell Library –
NSW State Library, NSW.
Elderly People’s
Attitudes Questionnaire
Research Study Group
Student Opinion Record
International Studies
on Drug Dependence
Alcohol Attitudes
Questionnaire
Personnel Study –
Social Problems Record
International Study on
Family Planning
International Study on
Handicapped Children
Fraser House Opinion
Survey – Psychiatric Research Study Group
Opinion Leaders
Inventory – Fraser House Questionnaire
Migrant Attitudes
Questionnaire
Resident and Family Questionnaire
Landscape Planning
Attitudes Questionnaire
Attitudes towards
Overseas Trade
Explore with
others how Ways that have been woven together in this E-Book may be adapted in
the context of the following themes:
o Respectfully re-socialising
o Stopping conflict in all of its forms
o Evolving enabling[319]
atmospheres and environments
o Evolving Vibrant Communities
o Increasing effectiveness in Therapeutic Communities
o Setting up community processes for:
o Stopping family violence
o Stopping bullying
o Stopping addictive behaviours
o Stopping racism
o Re-constituting[320]
society following man-made and natural disasters
o Enlivening schools in areas of situated poverty
o Revitalizing Grandparenting, Parenting and Childhood
o Re-locating, settling, and habilitating displaced people
o Re-socialising the Radicalized
o Evolving thriving multicultural communities
o Evolving humane caring alternatives to Criminal and
Psychiatric Incarceration
o Reviving closed Therapeutic Communities
o Evolving our Unique Potentials in making better Realities
o
A
founding director of the NSW Foundation for the Research and Treatment of
Alcoholism and Drug Dependency.
o
A
founding director of the national body of the above organization.
o
The
Government Coordinator on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Research
and Treatment of Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.
o
A
member of the Council for an International Conference on Alcoholism and Drug
Dependence.
o
An
advisor on an Australian National University Research Program on the Study of
Alcoholism.
o
Chairman
of the Departmental Conference of Clinicians Panel
o
Member
of the NSW State Clinicians Conference
o
A
member of the Committee of Classification of Psychiatric Patterns of the
National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia.
o
An
advisor to the Research Committee of the New South Wales College of General
Practitioners.
o
A
member of the Executive Council of the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs and
the Chairman of their Health Advisory Panel
o
A
patron of Recovery (now Grow) and the organizer of the first group in Sydney
Hospital.
o
The
Patron and Counsellor of Recovery Groups
o
A
member of the Advisory Committee of the Institute of Criminology
o
A
member of the Advisory Editorial Committee of the Australian and New Zealand
Journal of Criminology.
o
The
president of the Total Care Foundation which was the entity used to evolve the
Watson’s Bay Festival.
o
A
Founding member of the Sydney Arts Foundation
o
Member
of the Ministerial Committee involved in the Repeal of the Inebriates Act
o
Member
of the Health Education Advisory Sub-Committee on Alcoholism
o
Organizer
of a Fellowship on Alcoholism
o
In
1980 Neville became a member of the Editorial Board of the academic journal,
The Journal of Therapeutic Communities.
o
An
examiner for the Fellowship Examinations of the Australian and New Zealand
College of Psychiatry – confirmed by Dr. William McLeod, psychiatrist and
former Director of Psychiatry at Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital in Melbourne
for over twenty years.
o
A
founding member of the Sydney Opera House Society (mentioned by Professor E.
Deuk-Cohen)
o
A
member of the Board of Directors of: The Drug Addiction Foundation
o
The
Drug Referral Centre Aged, Sick and Infirm Appeal
o
Having
extensive court experience as an Expert Witness and involved in prison
rehabilitation and prison reform for some years. Neville assisted development
of rehabilitation and research programs by parole and probation officers. Some
of these were involved in the Psychiatric Research Study Group
The initial experience was
powerful – the challenge was to maintain and sustain plausibility. Stay three
months.
Have family and friends as
Outpatients was crucial aspect of reality maintenance – as they were not going
back to people who deny the Fraser House reality.
The reality base of Fraser
House re-socialisation was ever present in the day to day activities.
[1] Professor A.
Clark (1993) considered Fraser House the best model for resolving Social
Conflict that he had found in the World. Understanding Fraser House Way is a
key theme in this E-Book.
[2] ‘Enabling’ –
supporting people to be able
[3] ‘constituting’
- to form some new person or thing - to
transform
[4] A theme in
the film the Matrix – recall Neo following the White Rabbit.
[5] ‘The Matrix’
refers to that System of Systems that was mentioned in the first sentence in
this E-Book.
[6] ‘mural’ (adj.) ‘pertaining to walls’ (mid-15c.),
from Latin muru ‘wall’ (Old Latin moiros,
moerus), from PIE mei- ‘to
fix; to build fences or fortifications’; (source also of Old English mære ‘boundary,
border, landmark’ Old Norse -mæri ‘boundary,
border-land’. Latin munire ‘to
fortify, protect’).
[7] Yeomans was very interested in Dr. Milton
Erickson's use of references to time and what's called 'pseudo orientation in
time'. Erickson (and Yeomans) also intentionally used ambiguity to imbed
multiple meanings in his sentences. In the above sentence, the word 'present'
could mean 'to present' something as a gift' - in this case ‘to present
action’. It could also refer to the present time. The reference above starts
with ambiguity- 'it's about time' could be an idiom or literal. The repeat of
these words leaves the possibility that the first use of the words introduces a
reference to time mentioned in the next sentence. The invite is to go back in
time to gain resources. Then imagine a future using these resources very well,
then returning to present time and using these resource states in the present
moment. Then the repeated words can have their idiomatic meaning. It's about
time people started tapping our unique potentials and learning to use our
unique capacities together in community. Hanlon’s (1987) book ‘Taproot - Underlying Principles of Milton
Erickson's Therapy and Hypnosis’ is a good introduction to Erickson’s work.
Another practical introduction is Spencer, 2013b, Coming to Ones Senses. www.laceweb.org.au/btw.pdf
[8]
This meaning is very different to behavioural modification and control
techniques, imposition, carrot and stick, social engineering, indoctrination,
enslavement, loss of autonomy and the like.
[9] One significant form of limiting is that of limiting
personal agency – ‘agency’ is
the capacity of an actor to act in a
given environment. Personal Agency is almost totally shut down for people
incarcerated in prisons and mental hospitals.
[10] Almost
universal focus on externalization of
experience and simultaneously minimising
and degrading internal experience (you’re being too subjective!) is one of
the potent ways society at large maintains control.
[11] Yeomans, N.
(2010).
[12] Refer Cawte 1974; Cawte 2001.
[13] Yeomans well knew that metaphor can be functional or
dysfunctional and recognised the problematics that can flow from using terms
like ‘hygiene’ (being dirty and contaminated), and the either/or of ‘health’
and ‘illness’ and using these terms to precede the term 'mental'. These terms
reinforce the idea that the ‘shortcoming’ and the cause of shortcoming is
within the person, and has similarity with, and similar features as the
physical, and sets up the framing that hospitals and beds and wards are ‘required’.
Yeomans spoke of dis-ease and focusing on being well, where wellness is a
continuum from lack of wellness to abundant wellness. This is conveyed by two
of the Fraser House Slogans (see later), namely, everyone
has good and bad days. And,
that any problematic is not 'all the way through'. In this E-Book the term 'wellbeing' is used for the experience of wellness in the
Illness-Wellness Continuum. What constitutes wellness may vary considerably
between different cultures, communities and people in their varied habitat and
context. It is about better feeling in context, rather than 'trying to feel
better'. Wellness may mean having integral functioning in all aspects of being
- in mind, body and spirit, in moving, feeling, sensing, thinking and acting,
resulting in an overall feeling described as wellbeing. Wellbeing is holistic
and includes psychosocial, emotional, habitat, environmental, cultural,
economic, spiritual, mindbody, and intercultural Wellbeing. Fraser House
supported wellbeing in all these forms.
[14] Smelser in The Century of the Self at
1:15:40 in Internet Site accessed 18 Mar 2017.
[15] Refer Engel, 1977.
[16] Yeomans
engage a group of 160 people in the later 1980s experientially exploring the
re-constituting the bio-psycho-social aspects of being together - refer Evolving a Dispersed Urban Wellbeing Community
[17] ‘Constitute’ - from Latin constituere,
to cause to stand up, to form something new; to make up or compose.
[18] Refer Marx’s proposition ‘Man’s
consciousness is determined by his social Being’ - Marx 1859; Berger and
Luckmann 1967, page 17.
[19] June 1998.
[20]
Yeomans was very interested in etymology. We discussed the word
‘experience’ deriving from Latin : ex : out of – periculosus: peril;
that is, meaning ‘out of peril’ – learning from adversity. In this, refer
Gadamer, ‘On Experience’ Internet
Site accessed Feb 2017:
http://percaritatem.com/tag/gadamer-on-experience/
Gadamer continues his discussion of experience through an
interesting connection with Aeschylus. On Gadamer’s reading, with his phrase, pathei
mathos (’learning through experience’) Aeschylus also recognized
something essential about the structure of experience. Like Gadamer, Aeschylus
does not claim merely that through suffering we learn to correct our misguided
and false views. Rather, his insight is that through suffering we come to see
‘the limitations of humanity,’ and begin to realize the ‘barrier that separates
man from the divine. It is ultimately a religious insight.’ Thus, genuine experience as Gadamer
conceives of it is experience of our finitude and historicity. The experienced
person comes to see herself for what she is—limited, subject to time, subject
to change, subject to uncertainty. She has come to realize the wisdom in
cultivating an attitude of openness to the other, which involves a willingness
to listen to the other’s perspective not once but again and again. She also
comes to see that being ‘perfectly experienced’ in no way means that experience
has ceased and a higher form of knowledge is reached (Hegel), but that for the
first time experience fully and truly is. In it all dogmatism, which proceeds
from the soaring desires of the human heart, reaches an absolute barrier.
Experience teaches us to acknowledge the real. For Gadamer, given his embrace
of human finitude, the attempt to transcend human experience based on the
scientific model of knowledge is simply not possible. Because we are
historical, finite beings, we must, as Gadamer maintains, take seriously the
role of culture in shaping and influencing human life and thought.
[21] Refer Spencer 2013a, page 308. Internet Source accessed Dec 2016. www.laceweb.org.au/bio.pdf There are constant references to this resource in the footnotes so you
may elect to keep this link open on your computer or mobile for future
reference.
[22] On the notion
of ‘balance’ refer ‘Healing the Mind Body’. Internet Site accessed Feb 2017.
www.laceweb.org.au/hmb.htm and on and
‘balance levels’, refer www.laceweb.org.au/hmb.htm#topd
[23] Note Brooker
sets up an ambiguity as to what ‘its’ refers to. Typically the mind hunts for
‘So what is the cause of social harm? Then the later part of the sentence tends
to have you hunting for the ‘cause’. Then Brooker’s meaning emerges - that the
‘social’ is the cause of the harm that he has been referring to.
[24] ‘Dissociation’ (means
the same as dis-association) is any of a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate
surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experience.
The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment
from reality, rather than a loss
of a sense of reality. From Latin dissociatus,
past participle of dissociare,’to separate
from companionship, disunite, set at variance,’ from dis- ‘apart’
+ sociare ‘to join,’ from socius ‘companion’
[25] Yeomans was the co-founder and member of twelve advisory bodies
relating to addiction. Refer Spencer 2013a, Appendix 24, page 603.
For nine of Yeomans’ research papers on addictions, refer Spencer,
2013a, Appendix 20, p. 592 - 597. These lists are also indicative of research
done within Fraser House; a lot of the research done with the assistance of
Residents.
[26] Refer Clark & Yeomans, 1969
[27] Yeomans
always used the Name Alf in referring to Clark.
[28] Refer Clark 1969
[29] In the 1970s Latrobe University Sociology department
had an academic staff in Bundoora campus of over 35. Now it has one. Internet
Source sighted Feb 2017.
In terms
of synchronicity – Yeomans was very dissatisfied with the book written by Clark
and himself and went on a search to find a person to complete another PhD on
his life work. Yeomans encouraged Clark to firstly go to Tavistock Institute in
the UK, and secondly, to set up a radical and critical Sociology Department at
La Trobe University that had opened in 1967 in Melbourne. As well, Neville had
links with Terry O’Neil a psychologist from Fraser House who had moved to
Melbourne and had taken a post as head of La Trobe University Counselling Unit.
All of this was in part, Yeomans ‘fishing’ for a talent pool from whence a PhD
candidate with interest, capacity and inclination to study Yeomans’ life work
may appear. I found Terry O’Neil, was trained by him and became an on-call
para-professional crisis counsellor in his Unit. I found Dr Werner Pelz and Dr
Richard Trahair (Sociology of the Firm) and studied under them, and through
them established rapport with Professor Alf Clark - all 8 years before I found
out about and met Dr Neville Yeomans. The ‘excess’ that Yeomans may have gone
go to the length of contributing to setting up a University Department to find
me is replicated in the more than 90 activities that Yeomans involved me
(Spencer, 2013a, Appendix 4, pages 373 – 377). The biography on Yeomans’ life
work shows eighteen types of social action, with over fifty examples of these
types that Neville had been engaged in prior to my meeting him.
The third
column in Appendix Four shows over ninety mirroring contexts that Yeomans set
up and/or arranged for me to be involved in from 1985 onwards. Many of these
were not just for me; large numbers of people were also involved - 100s and
1,000s. This meticulous extensive strategic thoroughness was typical of Neville
Yeomans. He knew that if ever I started a PhD based thesis and a biography on
his work life, I would have potentially embodied this extensive action
research, and associated writing, and may have this embodied experience to draw
upon. These are more examples of Yeomans
massive use of stacking of possibilities. As stated elsewhere I did commence
the PhD on Yeomans life work in 1998 (2 years before Yeomans died) and finished
seven years later.
[30] Refer Clark 1993, p. 61, 117.
[31] Refer ’Evolving a Dispersed Urban
Wellbeing Community.’ Internet Site accessed Feb 2017. http://www.laceweb.org.au/hsb.htm
Also refer ‘Un-Inma Atherton Tablelands Inma Project - A Fifty Year Longitudinal Community Wellbeing
Action Research Project’. Internet Site accessed Feb 2017.
http://www.laceweb.org.au/uninma.htm
[32] For a discussion on the
differences between mutual-help and service delivery, refer Dr E. De Castro et
al - ‘Recognising and Evolving Local-lateral Links between Various Support
Processes’ Internet site accessed Feb 2017.
http://www.laceweb.org.au/lll.htm ‘Self-help’ is like DIY
(Do It Yourself) healing; ‘Mutual-Help’ as the term implies, involves Doing It (healing) With Others (DIWO).
[33] Refer Practical Wisdom in
‘Aristotle – The Nichomachean Ethics’ 1980, p.154. Also refer ‘phronesis’ (Ancient Greek:
φρόνησις, phronēsis) - a Greek
word for a type of wisdom or intelligence. It is more specifically a type of
wisdom relevant to practical things,
requiring an ability to discern how or why to act virtuously and encourage
practical virtue, excellence of character, in others. There was considerable
evidence that Fraser House transforming processes were not based on people
gaining insight. Transforming tended
to involve areas of the brain relating to emotional and sensory cross-over, and
habitualized behaviours – integrated moving
differently in the gravity field and feeling differently – refer Spencer,
2013b, Appendix 10. Internet Site accessed Feb 2017.
www.laceweb.org.au/btw.pdf . All involved seemed to take on what could be
called unconscious competences. Refer ‘unconscious competences in Realising Human Potential. Internet Site
accessed Feb 2017.
http://www.laceweb.org.au/rhp.htm. Also refer Spencer, 2013b, page 455 on Raitaku people in Southern
Bougainville and a concept called loving wisdom in action.
[34] Refer Postle’s paper, ‘The Richness of Everyday Relationships’ where he
introduces the term the psy-Commons. Also refer the second reference in:
[35] A networking friend of a colleague discussing the psyCommons – refer
[36] ‘Embodied’
meaning, ‘to give a bodily form to’; to experience knowing or
understanding as bodily phenomena
[37] This slogan
was also a reminder to all staff to stay in the ‘enabler of psyCommons Wisdom role and not revert to the psy-professional role
[38] Spencer 2013a, page 107
[39] Capra 1997,
page 37
[40] Refer Fritjof
Capra, 1997. The Web of Life – A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter, pages 30-55,
85-94, 102, 110, 175-178, 187.The whole book is a relevant read.
[41] ‘design’
derived from Latin designare, meaning
‘to mark out’. Design was integral to Fraser House. Refer later Segment called
Composing. Neville Yeomans’ father P.A. Yeomans was the first person to
introduce design into Australian Agriculture refer http://yeomansplow.com.au/8-yeomans-keyline-systems-explained/
[42] Note the use of the term ‘social and communal
forces’. In simple terms a ‘force’ in this context is a push or pull upon one or more people resulting from interaction with
other people. Whenever there is an interaction between two or more people,
there is (or there is potential for) a force upon each of the people involved.
Yeomans created contexts and used contexts where functional and socially
ecological force(s) would emerge as a system property. Examples are included
later.
[43] Neville
Yeomans was designing the inevitable. This inevitable aspect of
Fraser House structuring was recognised by Maxwell Jones in the UK – refer the
next Segment.
[44] Note Yeoman’s
use of the term ‘therapeutic forces’
[45] Refer ‘tuning’ and ‘retuning’ in Healing the Mindbody. Internet Site accessed Mar 2017. http://www.laceweb.org.au/hmb.htm#tuni
[46] For other
examples of dense engaging refer Coming
to One’s Senses – By the Way. Spencer 2013b. Also refer the later Segment Composing.
[47] Clark and Yeomans 1969, Forward, p. vi.
[48] ‘Enable’ – refer, ‘Enabling
Others to Engage in Mutual-Help For Community Wellbeing’ http://www.laceweb.org.au/enab.pdf
[49] Spencer,
2013a. Neville Yeomans’ youngest brother Ken continued his Father’s Keyline
Consulting. Ken has written a book on Keyline (Yeomans & Yeomans, 1993).
Also refer Ken Yeomans’ Website: www.keyline.com.au (accessed 1
Oct 2005).
[50] In sedimentology ‘imbrication’ refers to a
primary depositional fabric consisting of a preferred orientation of clasts
such that they overlap one another in a consistent fashion, rather like a run
of toppled dominoes. Imbrication is observed in conglomerates and some
volcaniclastic deposits.
[51] A ‘meta-context’ is the context that is made up of
multiple contexts. Meta-context perception provides a ‘lens’ through which
someone may make sense of embedded contexts.
[52] Sharing a location with someone
else; also ‘juxtapositioning’ as in an act or instance of placing close
together (shoulder to shoulder in Big Group) or side by side, especially for
forming friendships, relating, comparison, contrast, energy exchange,
networking and the like as self organising phenomena. Refer ‘self-organizing systems’ Internet Site accessed Dec 2016.
[53] Refer Spencer
2013b, pages 458-475 for many examples of combining.
[54] Refer Spencer, 2013b,
pages 181, 420, 457 - 475.
[55] On
transforming possibilities, refer “Realising
Human Potential’. Internet Site accessed Feb 2017. http://www.laceweb.org.au/rhp.htm
[56] Refer Spencer, 2013a, pages 261 –
265; Chapters 7 & 8. There is some very subtle potency in the potential of
links between ‘theme’ and Keypoint, and Cultural Keypoint.
[57] 1998.
[58] There were a
few Handbooks written; initially by staff, later by different small groups of
experienced Residents. The Handbooks were written to include the changes in
processes that had already occurred. As processes were always changing some
Handbooks differ from others. The Handbooks served as an induction process for
new staff, Residents, and Outpatients who also received a verbal induction by
all involved - staff, existing Residents, and Outpatients with experience. No
manual was ever written. Yeomans stated that he want the process to be always
in transition and guided by the moment-to-moment context and guided also by the
expanding stock of wisdom in the Group. The closest to a Manual perhaps were
the inclusion of two sections in the Handbook titled, ‘Notes on Roles of Fraser
House Nurse’s’ and ‘Fraser House Big
Groups.’ Refer Spencer, 2013a, Appendix 7 and Appendix 8.
[59] July 1998.
[60] In the Fraser
House context ‘locals’ refers to Residents and Outpatients
[61] Refer ‘Governments and Facilitating Community Grassroots Wellbeing Action’,
Internet Source accessed Dec 2016. www.laceweb.org.au/gfg.htm
Also refer, ‘Revisiting Governments
and Facilitating Community Grassroots Wellbeing Action’, Internet Source
accessed Feb 2017. http://www.laceweb.org.au/gfc.pdf
Also refer,
‘Interfacing Alternative and Complementary Well-being Ways for Local Wellness’. Internet Source accessed Feb 2017. www.laceweb.org.au/int.htm.
Also refer, ‘Recognising
and Evolving Local-lateral Links Between Various Support Processes.’ Internet
site accessed Feb 2017. http://www.laceweb.org.au/lll.htm
[62] Luckmann, B. 1978, p.275.
[63] This differs markedly from a Psychiatric Unit called Ward 10B in
Townsville, which was a classic example of what not to do (Lindsay, 1992).
Refer Spencer 2013a, Pages 507-508. Dr. Lindsay gave his version of events at
the Townsville Unit in his book, Ward 10B - The Deadly Witch-Hunt. I sense that
Ward 10B can stand as a warning to anyone who may want to implement ideas
culled from my thesis, or my Biography on Yeomans’ life work, or this current
paper without allowing for the interwoven richness of Neville Yeomans’ way and
value underpinnings, especially processes relating to attuning to and enriching
peoples’ connecting to social localities. To lump Ward 10B and Fraser House
together is like blending chalk and cheese. To dismiss Fraser House because of
Ward 10B is like the expression ‘throwing the precious baby out with the bath
water.
[64] Note how this
fits with Yeomans’ Framework outlined in the three repeated paragraphs. One
introductory resource on ‘enriching being’ is ‘Living’. An Internet Resource
accessed Mar 2017. www.laceweb.org.au/livi.htm
[65] Refer ‘Relational Mediation’ Internet Site accessed Dec. 2016: www.laceweb.org.au/rmdob.htm Also refer
Carlson and Yeomans (1975) Whither Goeth
the Law – Humanity or Barbarity. Internet Site accessed Jan 2017.
www.laceweb.org.au/whi.htm This paper
details the history of Mediation.
[66] Refer ‘Realising Human Potential’.
Internet Site accessed Feb 2017. www.laceweb.org.au/rhp.htm
[67] This is in marked contrast to their prior experience of meaninglessness
and normlessness; some had experienced a painful emptiness called anomie, or
emotional pain that extended beyond the body, or an all pervasive numbness.
Refer E-Book ‘Coming to One’s Sense – By
the Way’, Spencer 2013b pages 344 - 368. Internet Site accessed Dec 2016. www.laceweb.org.au/btw.pdf There are constant references to this E-Book in the footnotes so you
may elect to keep this link open on your computer or mobile for future
reference.
[68] Refer Spencer 2013b pages 345 - 346
[69] Refer Spencer 2013b pages 346-349
[70] Refer Spencer 2013b pages 349-350
[71] Refer Spencer 2013b pages 351-352
[72] Refer Spencer 2013b pages 352-367
[73] (Spencer, 2005)
[74] (Spencer, 2013a). The
Biography includes the rollout of Neville’s life work beyond his death.
[75] Spencer 2013b
[76] Berger & Luckmann, 1967. In 1998, Yeomans told me that he was very interested in the Social
Construction of Reality and that he was familiar with Berger and Luckman’s
work. Yeomans was also delighted that I was familiar with their writing as
well. For me, on first reading, Berger and Luckman’s book was intriguing. On
many subsequent readings and after long reflection, more sense came through.
Likewise (in multiple meanings of the word ‘likewise’) this current paper talks
to me on every reading. Yeomans was informed by theory, and pre-reflective
theory (theorein - refer Pelz, 1974, page 71). He was familiar with Symbolic
Interactionism. Given this, Yeomans was guided by context rather than theory.
Refer Spencer, 2013b, pages 346 - 368
[77] Where the focus is on respectfully re-socializing and integrating
dysfunctional, collapsing or collapsed collectives, communities and societies;
[78] Refer Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis : An Essay on the
Organization of Experience.
[79] Refer ‘cleaver’ and ‘cleavered unity’ in Spencer, 2013a, pages 90, 279,
318, 381, 497, and 914-5.
[80] An example, provided later in this paper is the two residents speaking
of healing and asking Jane for support.
[81] Refer the term ‘whole-of-it’ (Spencer, 2013b, pages 30, 75, 133, 159,
174, 199, 243, 258, 338, 570).
[82] 1998
[83] Yeomans, P. A. (1954), (1955),
(1956), (1958a), (1958b), (1965), (1971b), (1974). However, the reader may find
that Dr Neville Yeomans’ challenge to understand his work by reading his father’s
work in Agriculture may be a massive challenge. Also refer Spencer, 2013a,
pages 274-320 & 472-482. The challenge I had when Yeomans suggested that I
read about agriculture, and specifically about his father’s work, was that to
me it made no sense at all to do this. I hit a brick wall and what I initially
did not realised was that what I was experiencing was the limits of my own
capacity to comprehend. I assumed that my comprehension was fine and that
Neville’s suggestion was bizarre. When I did start to read PA Yeomans writings
I began to slowly get the sense of Keyline, though even then I could draw no
connexion between what I was reading and Neville’s work. Then when I did draw
some connexion on some aspect there tended to be a spill of understandings.
‘This means X, Y, and Z, and also A, B, and C. There were all sorts of ‘fits’
and ‘starts’ – with this expression reframed by Yeomans as ‘the survival of the
fitting and restarting’. Yeomans had anticipated that I would have this
struggle and he let me struggle, as explaining
and describing would hold me back.
The way of the Way was to experience
the struggle as lived life experience
and be transformed during deep immersion in this struggle. I am the better
person for going through ‘ordeal’ - as in Metaphoric
extension to ‘anything which tests character or endurance’.
[84] Refer ‘bio-mimicry in Spencer, 2013b, pages 26, 27, 572.
[85] AMP Society – Short for Australian Mutual Provident Society, a Life
Assurance Mutual that has since transformed into AMP Limited; when the idea of
forming the AMP was first discussed by four men in a coffee shop it was just an
idea – later turned into a reality, then a stand-alone institution -
legitimized by its very existence as a massive fact of life (hence reified).
The Insurance giant Lloyds of London had a similar Coffee Shop conversation
start. Something about a conversation
over cup of coffee can be added to the mix of transforming ways. My
research is that Pizza is nowhere near as good as a conversation primer. My
first full time job was with the AMP Society in 1957 and this job commenced by interest in the power of
mutual-help and mutual action and pooling of the potential in groups.
[86] In the 1960s there were over 45 Life assurance organizations in
Australia, with the majority being Mutuals. In the 1960s, the idea that all
mutuals would cease to exist in Australia was inconceivable. Now there are no
Mutuals in Australia.
[87] Mead, G.H, 1954, page 42.
[88] ‘Fine’
(adj.) – meaning ‘unblemished, refined, pure, free of impurities,’ also ‘of
high quality’, ‘choice,’ from Old French fin ‘perfected,
of highest quality’.
[89] ‘Self’ is a reference by an individual to
the same individual person. This reference is necessarily subjective and it
follows that self is a reference by a subject to the
same subject – in essence, being. Internet Source accessed Nov 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self
‘Self’ - A person's essential being
that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of
introspection or reflexive action. Internet Source accessed Nov 2016.
[90] Refer Internet Site. Accessed Nov
2016. http://www.laceweb.org.au/rhp.htm
[91] Again,
evidencing Yeomans starting framework of engaging with the internal and external
experience of all involved and interplaying between the associated inner and
outer realities of all involved.
[92] The Feldenkrais segment titled ‘Where to Begin and How’ is
well worth a read (Feldenkrais, 1972, p. 30-39). Refer the term
whole-of-it (Spencer, 2013b, pages 258, 338, 570. Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann
(1967), p 203.
[93] As set out in
Yeomans’ starting framework (in the three repeated paragraphs).
[94] 1969
[95] Refer the term whole-of-it (Spencer, 2013b, pages 258, 338, 570.
[96]‘Enculture‘ is the process by which
people learn the requirements of their surrounding culture and acquire values and behaviours
appropriate or necessary in that culture. As part of this process, the
influences that limit, direct, or shape the individual (whether deliberately or
not) include parents, other adults, and peers. If successful, enculturation
results in competence in the language, values, and rituals of the culture.
[97] Refer ‘bio-psycho-social’ in Engel, 1977.
[98] Spencer, L, 2013a. ‘Method Used in Researching and Writing the
Biography’. Internet Site Accessed Nov 2016. www.laceweb.org.au/bio.pdf
[99] Spencer, L. 2016. ‘The Art of Seeing - Interpreting
from Multiple Perspectives’. Internet Site Accessed Nov 2016. www.laceweb.org.au/imp.htm This document is an introduction to the hermeneutic tradition in
interpreting.
[100] Refer ‘Natural Living Processes
Lexicon’. Internet Site Accessed Feb 2017:
[101] Refer Internet Site Accessed Feb 2017:
http://www.laceweb.org.au/rhp.htm
[102] Refer Attending, Listening and Remembering. Internet Site accessed Nov
2016. http://www.laceweb.org.au/alm.htm
[103] ibid
[104] Refer Spencer, 2013a, p.407.
[105] Spencer,
2013a, page 223. Big Group - Using Collective Social Forces
[106] Hence having their Big Group experiences to draw upon in Small Groups
[107] In the PhD
Research I had access to embargoed Fraser House records that include some of
the reports of the Initial Assessment Committee made up of Competent Residents.
I read restricted material including case records and the Resident-run
Assessment Committee’s initial assessment on the same Residents. It was
apparent that the insights in the initial assessment were congruent with the
dynamics that unfolded for particular Residents. The assessments by Residents
read like they were written by extremely skilled, insightful and psychosocially
emotionally wise and discerning community psychiatrists. This is consistent
with the expression, ‘It takes one to know one’.
[108] Dr Yeomans did use these colloquial terms, including calling the
residents ‘patients’ and their visiting Family Friend Network members,
‘Outpatients’. He stated that he was well aware of the negative connotations of
labeling though not to call them ‘Residents’, ‘Family’ and ‘Friends’ was too
hard to sustain within a Unit embedded on the grounds of a large State run
Psychiatric Hospital. Family and Friends were legally signing in as
‘Outpatients. However the benefits of Fraser House processes far outweighed the
effects of negative labeling. Also refer Spencer, 2013a, pages 580-584.
[109] On ‘markers’, refer Goffman (1974); Spencer 2013b, pages 346-347 &
411-412.
[110] ‘Normative’, establishing, relating to, or deriving
from a standard or norm, especially of behaviour.
[111] Refer Spencer, 2013a, pages 7
& 508 – 510.
[112] Spencer, 2013a, p.257. Yeomans was using the INMA term in the 1970s.
Refer Yeomans, N., 1974. On Global Reform and International Normative
Model Areas (Inma).
[113] Refer Un-Inma Atherton Tablelands Inma
Project – a Fifty Year
Longitudinal Community Wellbeing Action Research. Internet Site Accessed Nov 2016. http://www.laceweb.org.au/uninma.htm
[114] Refer ‘self-organizing systems’ Internet Site accessed Dec 2016. http://www.laceweb.org.au/sos.htm
Also refer,
Natural Living Processes Lexicon:
[115] On using free energy in complex systems, refer Spencer, 2013b, pages
406 – 410.
[116] Refer Un-Inma Atherton Tablelands Inma Project – a Fifty Year Longitudinal Community Wellbeing Action
Research. Internet Site Accessed Nov 2016.
http://www.laceweb.org.au/uninma.htm Also refer the ‘Un-Inma’ reference in ‘From the
Outback’. Internet source accessed Feb 2017 http://www.laceweb.org.au/out.htm
[117] Refer ‘Enabling Environments’.
Internet Site accessed Nov 2016. http://www.enablingenvironments.com/
[118] Refer
‘tuning’ - http://www.laceweb.org.au/hmb.htm#tuni
Also refer
the full article ‘Laceweb - Healing
The Mindbody - Embracing Ancient Indigenous Wisdoms and the Latest from the
Neurosciences’. Internet Site accessed Nov 2016.
[119] For notes on the differences
between a ‘diagnose and prescribe’ expert delivery model and Mutual-Help, refer
‘Interfacing Alternative and Complementary Well-being Ways for Local
Wellness’. Internet Source accessed Nov 2016. http://www.laceweb.org.au/int.htm.
Also refer, ‘Recognising and Evolving Local-lateral Links Between
Various Support Processes.’ Internet
site accessed Feb 2017. http://www.laceweb.org.au/lll.htm
[120] One of the few times that Fraser House way made use of diagnostic
categories – here to contribute to spread in the kinds of people involved.
[121] Type A were Over-Active and Under-controlled and Type B were
Under-Active and Over-controlled.
[122] How composing
was embraced in Fraser House is discussed in a later segment.
[123] Refer
‘Tikopia - Celebrating Difference to Maintain Unity and Wellbeing’, Spencer,
2013a, pages 315-319.
[124] Refer ‘speech
acts’, Spencer 2013b, pages 82-84
[125] Luckmann, B., 1978, p.275
[126] Spencer, 2013a, Page 731
[127] And in the
process enriching being. Also see
firstly, prior footnotes about Herbert Mead and secondly, the last paragraph in
this section.
[128] Refer ‘meaning’ (Spencer, 2013b, pages 344-364)
[129] Refer
Globalocal Realplay – Healing Nightmares - A Process for Transforming Senior
Bureaucrats. Internet
Site accessed Feb 2017. http://www.laceweb.org.au/gr.htm
[130] Having a deep
immersion in his father’s work in ecological engaging with land topography in
the 1940s and 1950s, Neville Yeoman and his father PA Yeomans are recognised in
Mulligan & Hills’s book (2001). Thinking
Like an Ecosystem - Ecological Pioneers. A Social History of Australian
Ecological Thought and Action
[131] This E-Book
has many ambiguities embedded in the text for those interested in the
therapeutic use of ambiguity to find. In this case ‘being constituted’ has one
connotation ‘in the process of being made’. Another connotation is that it is
being made by beings in the process of enriching their being-in-the-world.
[132] ‘manifested
itself’ is so it's easy to say,
because human-made organisations take on a ‘separate existence’, particularly
those that become seen as ‘institutions, they take on ‘a life of their own’
through reifying.
[133] Refer
Spencer, 2013a, pages 58-60, & 61-63.
[134] ‘Framework’ and ‘frame’ – refer Goffman, 1974; Spencer 2013b, pages 349
– 368.
[135] Refer
‘Attractors’ and ‘Strange Attractors’ in the Natural Living Processes Lexicon.
Internet Site Accessed Jan 0017.
[136] Refer
‘Phase Portrait’ in the Natural Living Processes Lexicon. Internet Site
Accessed Jan 0017.
[137] For example,
Margaret Mead, Tony
Vinson, Paul Wilson, and Margaret Crockett, were ‘strange attractors’ in the
Fraser House context. Later we’ll see Jane as a ‘strange attractor’ with two
residents in context 'attracted to her.
[138] ‘nodal’ denoting
a point in a network or diagram at which lines or pathways intersect or branch.
Also refer ‘Nodal’ in By the Way pages 214-215. Internet Source sighted Jan
2017. www.laceweb.org.au/btw.pdf
[139] A phase portrait is a geometric representation of the trajectories of a
dynamical system in the phase plane. Each set of initial
conditions is represented by a different curve, or point.
[140] Refer Natural Living Processes Lexicon. Internet Site
accessed Feb 2017. Phase Portrait: www.laceweb.org.au/nlp.htm#phas Also refer Emergence of Resonant Strange Attractors in Business:
www.laceweb.org.au/nlp.htm#emerg
[141] Refer
‘Free Energy’ in the Natural Living Processes Lexicon. Internet Site Accessed
Jan 0017.
[142] Refer ‘Realising Human Potential’ Internet Site accessed Dec 2016.
[143] Wilson, P. (1990). A Life of Crime. Newham, Victoria,
Scribe, Chapter Six. Also refer Spencer, 2013a, ppges 737 and 738.
[144] Refer (Yeomans, 1965a).
[145] 1966
[146] Refer Goffman, 1974. Frame
Analysis. Also refer Spencer, 2013b, pages 349 – 368.
[147] Refer Spencer, 2013a,
Chap 5. Some of the roles – as focal person, member of audience, member of
crowd (a different dynamic compared with audience. Also refer Spencer, 2013a,
pages 223-224. Enabler, resource person, mentor, & exemplar.
[148] Refer Spencer, 2013a,
Chap 6. Some of the roles – as focal person, member of audience, negotiator of
meaning, enabler, resource person, mentor, exemplar.
[149] Refer Spencer, 2013a,
Chap 4. This was also called the Resocializing Program and Governance Therapy
[150] The dynamic in these
folk was in part ‘we're about to go into Small Groups.’.
[151] Spencer, 2013a, p. 215
[152] The process used in work as
therapy was that all jobs would be given to those who could not do them
(with full support) so that they could learn to do them. This established
work-based roles to add to their identity through identifying with the role.
[153] Spencer, 2013a, p.
256-257
[154] Spencer, 2013a, p. 218
[155] Spencer, 2013a, p. 216.
[156] Spencer, 2013a, p. 218.
[157] Spencer, 2013a, p. 214.
[158] Spencer,
2013b, p. 27-47.
[159] Spencer, 2013a, p.
229-230
[160] Observers
kept notes in a big red book. There was no such book in the NSW Health
Department’s records
[161] Refer ‘stimmung’ Spencer, 2013, pages 236-238
[162] Refer
‘Cultural Keyline in Groups’ (Spencer, 2013a, pages 477-481
[163] Refer ‘On Neville’s Role as Leader and His Group Processes’ Spencer
2013a, p.240
[164] On ‘metaprocess’ see Spencer, 2013b, pages 219, 220, 257, 258, 264,
377, 381, 418, 502, 505, 550. Also refer ‘Healing Group Processes –
Socio-therapy’. Internet Site accessed Dec 2016 http://www.laceweb.org.au/hgp.htm
[165] Recall Fraser
House transforming was from the micro to the macro.
[166] While review was
looking at the Community in the BIG, Big Group engaging was
sustained in-the-moment micro. Participant awareness was concentrated on
the specific ‘if this then that’ and sense the moment and acquire habitual ways
of speaking and responding from what just happened
[167] Yeomans adapted the social patterns of the people of Tikopia in the
Solomon Islands Group in setting up the constant churning within Small Groups.
Refer Spencer 2013a, pages 90-91 & 315-319.
[168] The six categories rotating through four days
[169] Refer Spencer
2013a, pages 395-400
[170] Refer Spencer, 2013a, pages 95, 112, 255. For notes relating to
transforming child behaviour refer Spencer, 2013a, pages 253-255.
[171] Refer Spencer, 2013a, pages 95 & 112.
[172] Spencer,
2013a, pages 253 – 255.
[173] This inter-acting between the inner and outer realities is resonant
with the Philippines concepts of Loob and Lobas. Refer Loob Internet Site
accessed Nov 2016.
[174] A major process for extending family-friend networks. Small Groups were
based on types – for example, based upon Locality; and this particular typing
was a major contributor to expanding friendship networks.
[175] Refer Spencer, 2013a, Appendix for a list of 36 examples of the kinds
of self-referential data collected by Residents and Outpatients as part of
Research as Therapy.
[176] For example, residents tendered for and won the contact on open tender
to build the Fraser House Bowling green (Spencer, 2013a, pages 266-268)
[177] Yeomans used the ‘pathway’ between
the recreation room and the dining room; refer Spencer, 2013a, pages 315-319
[178] Refer prior discussion on the
potency of everyday banter (Wilson, P., 1990. Chapter Six)
[179] This was discussed earlier in this paper (Wilson, P. (1990). A Life of Crime. Newham, Victoria,
Scribe, Chapter Six).
[180] Refer, ‘The Case of the Insightful
Cleaner’ (Spencer, 2013a, p. 407
[181] On
‘surrendering’ refer Surrender and Catch
- Experience and Inquiry Today (Wolff, 1976). Also refer Spencer (2013B
pages 456, 508-509). Also refer poem at the commencement of this E-Book.
[182] Interrupt being unexpected is critical
[183] Such as using the sudden rise of the palm, like the policeman’s ‘halt’
gesture in traffic control, accompanied by -
not here!
[184] Spencer 2013b, p. 27-40
[185] A set of examples of ecologically using interrupt to transform contexts
and people may be found at Spencer, 2013b, pages 27-40.
[186] Refer ‘Associating’ in Spencer, 2013b, pages 327-331
[187] ‘Cohesion’ from Latin cohaerere ‘to cleave together’, ‘be coherent or
consistent’ - from com- ‘together’
(see co- in Latin), the form of com- in compounds - meaning ‘together, mutually, in
common,’ + haerere ‘to adhere, stick’. ‘Cleaver’ is
interesting and apropos as implying ‘together in separateness’; as in ‘meat
cleaver’ & the expression ‘cleaver unto one another’ in the marriage
ceremony. ‘Close together in our separate uniqueness’ was the flavour of Fraser
House engaging.
[188] Refer ‘Jaw, hands and belly anger
interrupt’, Spencer, 2013b, pages 28,
32, 33, 35, 45
[189]
The Feldenkrais segment titled ‘Where to Begin and How’ is well worth a read
(1972, p. 30-39).
[190] Refer ‘associating’, Spencer 2013b, pages 327-329
[191] Refer the term whole-of-it (Spencer, 2013b, pages 258, 338, 570.
[192] Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann (1967),
p 203
[193] 1970, page 222.
[194] Spencer, 2013a, page 412-419
[195] Future Pacing’ - After exploring
and experiencing a resource state and effective ways of functioning, Future
Pacing involves using Mental Imagery placing yourself in the future in a given desired situation where you can find yourself again
seamlessly accessing similar states of being and functioning as a powerful way
of anchoring or connecting changes and resources now to future situations or a particular event to ensure the changes are available in
the everyday world.
[196] Similar to the change of epoch that happened when England changed from
a feudal system to an industrial system – this issuing in a new epoch. Also
refer ‘Extegrity - A Process for Reconstituting Collapsed or Collapsing
Societies’. Internet Site accessed Dec 2016. http://www.laceweb.org.au/ext.htm.
[198] This approximates
small village life in South Bougainville, PNG where therer has been effectively
no government since the Civil war in the 1990s - where the young are absorbed
into the local way. Refer Tikopia
- Celebrating Difference To Maintain Unity And Wellbeing. Spencer, 2013a, pages
515-519. Also refer Spencer,
2013b, page 455 on Raitaku people in Southern Bougainville and a concept called
loving wisdom in action.
[199] Refer Spencer, 2013a Appendix 13, p. 412. ‘The Roles of
The Fraser House Patient/Outpatient Committees’
[200] Being elected on to Governance
Committees is resonant with Oceania village life where elders are those who can
consistently sense the mood of the group very well; for example. They speak in
the village gathering, ‘so seems that the place to make the rope bridge is on
the narrow bend near the big tree and the rocky cliff’. If this person finds
that they have already begun making the bridge the next day - he had sensed the
mood of the group. If he keeps doing that sensing he becomes recognised as a
leader.
[201] The Privy Council was formerly acted as the High Court of Appeal for
the entire British
Empire (other than for the United Kingdom itself),
[202] Aug 1998.
[203] Refer Yeomans, N. 1965a, Vol. 12, p. 46, 60-61. This is working on a general
principle that often one makes friends among one’s work mates.
[204] July 1998.
[205] Refer (1969); also Spencer, 2013a, Appendix Thirteen, pages 412 - 419.
[206] Refer (1969, p. 66).
[207] ‘healers’ - meaning to support others to become whole; to integrate; enablers of personal integrating in twofold sense integrating within the person, and secondly, the person doing the integrating.
[208] Dec 1993.
[209] Refer Yeomans, N. (1974). ‘On
Global Reform and International Normative Model Areas (Inma)’. Internet
Source -Sighted Dec 2016 www.laceweb.org.au/gri.htm
[210] On ‘mark’, ‘marker’ and ‘marking’ refer Spencer,
2013b, pages 346, 347, 412, 463, 521.
[211] Note that it was not ‘bring it
up with the staff’ – Fraser House was mutual self-help not service delivery
[212] Note the
interplay of the inner and outer as mentioned as a starting point of Yeomans
framework - the three repeated paragraphs.
[213] Spencer, 2013a, p. 407.
[214] At the moment you are being this type of person and I am being that
type of person
[215] Refer Functional interrupt of
dysfunctional habits and dis-integrating/re-integrating, Spencer, 2013b,
pages 27-40. Also refer ‘Flexibility and
Habit’ www.laceweb.org.au/fh.htm
[216] Refer Marx 1859/1977
[217] 1969.
[218] Note the use of two of the Slogans
[219] This Jane had
already been helped by the Diarist.
[220] Refer Clark and Yeomans, 1969, p. 231, Spencer, 2013a, Pages 108-109.
Note the outcome from this conversation.
[221] While Yeomans was identifying the functional
in the sense of ‘what is working in context’ he, was well aware of shortcomings
in the social theory called Structural Functionalism – refer:
[222] Spencer,
2013a, page 223. ‘Chapter Five – Fraser
House Big Meeting’; also refer page 240, ‘On Neville’s Role as Leader and His Group Processes’. (Note the
reference making the point that the same behaviour may be functional or
dysfunctional depending on context.) Also refer ‘Meaning’ in Spencer, 2013b, Pages 344 - 368
[223] Refer ‘The Roles of the Fraser House
Patient/Outpatient Committees’. Spencer, 2013a, Pages 412-419.
[224] This wisdom
can exist at unconscious levels. Fraser House Way involved little use of
insight. Refer
‘unconscious competences’ in Realising Human Potential. Internet Site
accessed Feb 2017 http://www.laceweb.org.au/rhp.htm.
[225] Note the use of two of the Fraser House slogans
[226] Another
glimpse of this inner engaging with outer at the heart of the Yeomans
framework.
[227] Refer ‘unconscious competence’ in ‘Realising Human Potential’. Internet
Source accessed Feb 2017. www.laceweb.org.au/rhp.htm. Also refer ‘Speaking from Unconscious Levels’.
Spencer, 2013b, page 429.
[228] Refer Poole,
1972. Towards Deep Subjectivity.
[229] Dr Neville Yeomans ended up calling his way ‘Relational Mediation’ and ‘Mediation
Therapy’ in the last decade of his life. Refer ‘Connecting and Relational Mediating’. Spencer, 2013(b), p. 368-402.
[230] Refer Experiential Learning. Internet Site
accessed Feb 2017. www.laceweb.org.au/exle.htm
[231] Spencer 2013a, Page 109.
[232] This links
with Wilson’s reference (1990, Chapter Six) to the potency of banter in a Therapeutic Community
set up by Yeomans in Mackay, Queensland. This talk of potency appears to
contradict the idea that my interviewees (and attendees of Fraser House) lacked
insight. People will say that primary
socialization is potent. However, rarely does anyone notice it happening, or
understand how it happens, or can express much about socialization in words, or
can understand or sense the significance of what they are saying, or can weave
together some of the ways it all works – as this E-Book is endeavouring to do.
Also refer Spencer, 2013a, pages 737 and 738.
[233] Spencer 2013a, Page 479.
[234] On themes,
refer Spencer 2013b, pages 345-346.
[235] For the links
between ‘theme’, ‘Keypoint’, and ‘Cultural Keypoint’, refer Spencer, 2013a,
pages 146, 247, 472, 480, and 579.
[236] Refer Cultural Keyline in Groups, Spencer 2013a, Pages 477-483
[237] Some arrived incoherent and confused, and unable to express themselves.
Some had few or no opinions on anything, or if they had an opinion, they were
unable to ‘put it in words’. Fraser House processes evolved people supporting
themselves and each other in discovering how to form ideas and express them
succinctly. One such context would be making a succinct entry on a day sheet.
An example, ‘June’s Grandfather attending today’. Everyone would know that June
is the young girl in one of the families in the family suite, and that this is the
first attendance of the grandfather who is suspected of inappropriate behaviour
towards June. This is a definite priority theme. The wisdom then is when to
strategically introduce this theme into Big Group to maximize transforming
potential.
[238] Refer
Spencer 2013a, Chapters Five & Six. Also refer ‘significance’ as in
meaning, connotation, implication, import, consequence, and worth. Refer also
‘Interpreting from multiple Perspectives’. Internet Site accessed Dec 2016.
www.laceweb.org.au/imp.htm Also refer ’Hermeneutic Perspectives’
Spencer, 2013a, page 9
[239] Refer Spencer, 2013a, pages 420 to 483.
[240] An example from Big
Group – Yeomans draws all attendees’ attention to a wife’s functional use of
yelling to attract her husband’s
attention. She continues yelling at him after getting his attention. Yeomans
switches attendees’ attention to how the husband is not responding emotionally to his wife’s continuing yelling. The
wife’s behaviour was functional in getting attention and moments later the same
behaviour is dysfunction in the continuing conversation – an example of drawing
attention to the role specific functional
in context.
[241] Refer Spencer, 2013a, pages 223-248
[242] ‘co-locating’
- to share a location with someone else.
[243] Refer (Trahair 1984). The Hawthorne effect is a type of reactivity in which individuals modify or improve an aspect of
their behaviour in response to their awareness of being observed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
I studied Sociology of the Firm with Richard
Trahair at La Trobe University in the 1970s.
[244] Refer
Research Papers List - Spencer, 2013a, pages 592 – 597.
[245] Refer ‘Method’ in Spencer 2013a,
Appendix 1, pages 113 – 161.
[246] ‘reality testing’ - the capacity of subjective and objective
perceiving, sense making and evaluating of emotion or thought against real life ; the function
by which the objective or real world and one's relationship to it are reflected
on and evaluated by the observer; the
process of distinguishing and comparing the internal world of thoughts
and feelings and the external world
[247] Yeomans, 1965a
[248] Kluckhohn, 1953, pages 342-357; Also refer:
http://fs2.american.edu/zaharna/www/kluckhohn.htm
[249] Spencer
2013a Appendix 17.
[250] Refer (Yeomans, 1965a, Vol. 13).
[251] This
involvement in extensive values research with outside organizations is
consistent with Yeomans continual outreach for legitimizing Fraser House
discussed in later sections of this E-Book..
[252] Refer (Yeomans, N. 1965a, Vol. 12, p. 69).
[253] Refer (Yeomans, N. 1965a, Vol. 12, p. 86-99).
[254] Refer Spencer 2013a, Appendix 16)
[255] Refer (Laing and Esterson 1964).
[256] This is another example of giving roles and tasks to those who cannot
do them with suitable support so they can learn to do them well. Refer Appendix
A for 36 examples of Research questionnaires and inventories evolved by the
internal research team that included Residents.
[257] Refer Spencer,
2013a.Appendix 18 & 19.
[258] Spencer, 2013a, p 202.
[259] ‘Objectivising’ (what Pelz called
‘Capital ‘O’ Objectivity that included the subjective, compared with small ‘o’
objectivity that excluded the subjective) as in extending the objectively real
that is external to inner personal phenomena while fully sensing and respecting
the being of others and not ‘thingifying’ them - as in treating them
as an inanimate thing or object. Objectivising subjects - neither treating subjects
as objects or subjugating. An example of treating a person as a thing is an
impositional masseur who grabs and shoves a person like a piece of wood. In
contrast, a simple touch can set off millions, perhaps billions, even trillions
of responses in nervous system neural networks; these can cascade in a massive
self-organising array - that is the body's extraordinary capacity for
transforming states. What the toucher may do is to introduce possibilities and
potentials for the body to use as 'action potentials'. The body does the change
work; the masseur is a catalyst for the body’s state changes that are
self-organising. A person pioneering this type of process is Dr Andrew Cramb in
Melbourne, Australia
[260] Becoming close to others in all of their
richness - coming to know them in objective experience in our external focus
while being aware of our inner (subjective) experience of being with them.
[261] Spencer, 2013a, p. 583.
[262] Spencer, 2013a, p. 247-248
[263] All of this is resonant with the human baby being born into a
pre-existing world.
[264]
Very different to mainstream crowds that may just stare or encourage
dysfunction. This positive
group behaviour in Fraser House was sustained by slogans signs and induction into this Way from
the moment participants first arrive.
[265] To quote Shakespeare.
[266] As in re-connecting to their
members – their arms and legs – their embodied self in all of their unique
potential
[267] On internal and external refer the Filipino concepts ‘Loob and Lobas’.
Internet site accessed Nov 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loob
[268] Spencer, 2013a, p.575.
[269] Spencer, 2013a, p. 583. This is one example of how whenever any
incident occurred a group was immediately called to tap into ‘the wisdom in the
group. This incident in the Upstairs Dorm is a classic example of Yeomans way
of working ‘with the free energy in the context’. Additionally, this way had
multiple people included in lived experience with scope to take on new
competences and identify with being co-healers
[270] Note the last of these dot points is the same as the first; and all of
these dot points were going on simultaneously.
[271] Note the
emergence again of Dr Neville Yeomans’ ‘initial framework’ mentioned in the
three repeated paragraphs – engaging the interplay of internal and external
experience.
[272] Compose – Composing – (verb) ‘put together, arrange, write’ a work from com ‘with, together’
+ poser ‘to place,’ from Late Latin pausare ‘to
cease, lay down’
[273] Refer ‘tuning’ in Healing the Mindbody, Internet Reference accessed Mar 2017 http://www.laceweb.org.au/hmb.htm#tuni
[274] On
‘interpreting’, refer Ways of Seeing.
Internet Site accessed Mar 2017.
www.laceweb.org.au/imp.htm
[275] Exploring
simultaneous subject, verb, and object. Also refer Spencer 2013b, page 549.
[276] ‘The concept,
‘the-whole-of-it’ is explored often
throughout Coming to Ones Senses – By the
Way. Spencer 2013b
[277] ‘Present
within the material’ as opposed to gems lying out in plain sight. For many,
‘gems’ in plain sight are not noticed. Neville Yeomans always created
opportunities for people to hunt for gems. He never handed them out. Freud’s
notion of people ‘swallowing’ ‘gems’ whole without adequate savouring
(introjections) is pertinent and germane.
[278] Refer, Spencer, 2013a, p. 583.
[279] 1967
[280] Refer ‘The Art of Seeing –
Interpreting from Multiple Perspectives.’
Internet Site accessed Dec 2016.
http://www.laceweb.org.au/imp.htm - An
introduction to the Centuries old tradition of Hermeneutics; the branch of knowledge that deals with
interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts..
[281] Heidegger
1968, p. 76-77
[282] Luckmann, B., 1978, p.275
[283] Refer Spencer 2013a, page 225. News ‘got out’ about Fraser House that attracted people (something about the
composition of the place). Often there were visitors and invited guests
attending Big Group. People who attended the Fraser House Psychiatric Research
Study Group (discussed later) also attended Big Group, along with people from
religious, business and government organisations interested in learning group
skills. Fraser House became a major centre for learning group skills, with
people from many government, academic and non-government organizations
attending. Neville said that much of the training was done by Residents.
[284] Engel, 1977. Refer, ‘The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for
Biomedicine.’ Author(s): George L. Engel. Source: Science,
New Series, Vol. 196, No. 4286 (Apr. 8, 1977),
pp by: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Internet Site accessed Dec 2016.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1743658?origin=JSTOR-pdf&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
[285] For example,
during this time Yeomans drove a very expensive and distinctive red car. Later
when he has evolving networks up the East Coast of Australia he kept a very low
profile to minimize interference in his action research.
[286] The (Sydney) Sun newspaper (1963) included Neville’s groundbreaking
work in psychiatry and therapeutic community with six other Australians under
the heading, ‘The Big Seven Secrets Australians were first to solve’. Neville
was included with people like Sir John Eccles, Sir Norman Greg and Dr. V. M.
Coppleson. How all the above diverse social actions by Neville are related and
were interlinked by him and others are the foci of this Work Life Biography.
Sir John Eccles – A Nobel Prize winning (1963) Australian neurophysiologist who
won the Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse; Sir Norman
McAlister Gregg an Australian Ophthalmologist who discovered the congenital
rubella syndrome; Sir Victor Marcus Coppleson (1893-1965), surgeon, academic
and researcher on shark attacks.
[287] Spencer 2013a, Appendix
24, p. 603.
[288] Refer Spencer 2013a, page 560. Yeomans’ fifth level legitimation
extended to letting it be known that his work was fostering caring and being
humane in every aspect of life including work-life. During 1969 and the early
Seventies Neville held a regular small group in Sydney for young businessmen
who were ‘on their way up’. Neville and Margaret Cockett both told me in Aug
1999 about setting up a discussion group with business people to explore the
intercultural conflict they were having in establishing and sustaining trade
within SE Asia. Yeomans was delighted when he found out that I had studies in
Sociology of the Firm with Dr Richard Trahair on inherent dysfunction in top
down bureaucracies.
[289] Listed
in Spencer 2013a, Appendix 22.
[290] Refer, Yeomans, N. 1965a, Vol. 12, p.
45-90.
[291] In 1985 Yeomans
replicated his 1960s Psychiatric Research Study in forming what was called
Healing Sunday that evolved to included around 160 people living in Sydney
Australia. A key focus of this group was body approaches to transforming
(somatic and sensory sub modalities
approaches applying and extending the work of Steve and Connirae Andreas.
Yeomans had just returned from a workshop by the Andres when I first met him)
For a glimpse of Awareness in
Somatic Approaches refer, ‘Living’.
Internet Site accessed Feb 2017 http://www.laceweb.org.au/livi.htm. Also refer ‘Evolving a Dispersed Urban Wellbeing Community’. Internet Site
accessed Feb 2017 http://www.laceweb.org.au/hsb.htm. Also on
body-based approaches, refer ‘Coming to
Ones Senses’.. http://www.laceweb.org.au/btw.pdf
[292] Refer Spencer, 2013a, page 600.
[293] Refer Self-Organizing Systems. Internet Site accessed Dec 2016.
[294] The person from the Foreign Affairs Department whom arranged and headed
up that visit was the son of Dr Mitchell, the co-head of the Therapeutic
Community within Kenmore Psychiatric Hospital in Goulburn NSW who had had
Yeomans visit and establish that Therapeutic Community (Spencer, 2013a, p.488).
[295] Goffman 1974; also refer Spencer, 2013b, pages 349 - 368
[296] Refer Brain
Plasticity, or Neuroplasticity; Kolb et all ‘Brain Plasticity and
Behaviour’ Internet Site accessed Jan 2016. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/cd/12_1/Kolb.cfm
[297] Refer ‘Gain, Loss, Threat, and Frustration’. Spencer, 2013a, p. 246.
[298] On
‘resilience’, Yeomans’ outreach continues to this day as a self organizing
phenomenon linking networks of healers through the East Asia Oceania
Australasia Region. A Resource on Resilience Ways is RAD & Resilience. Internet Site accessed Feb 2017. http://www.laceweb.org.au/rr.htm
[299] Spencer, 2013a, p. 577.
Refer ‘bifurcation’ - a natural phenomenon where perturbing results in a jump
to a new higher order of system complexity. Internet site accessed Jan 2017 www.laceweb.org.au/nlp.htm#bifu
[300] Refer ‘Natural Living Processes Lexicon
- Obtaining Results with Others’ Internet Site Accessed Dec 2016.
[301] ‘perturbing’ refer www.laceweb.org.au/nlp.htm#pert
[302] Using foresight in setting up scope for a PhD researcher to compare
staff perceptions of a key incident illustrating Yeomans’ Way.
[304] There is
something potent in this processes of being completely congruent with intention
aligned with accessing all internal psycho-emotional resources by aligned conscious
and unconscious means and in this congruent focused state going ‘creative
context’ – and then ‘everything is creative’. Now another potential is to go
for other aspects than ‘creative context. For example I went for ‘easily
finding natural nurturers in SE Asia’ – and the outcome – I found them easily..
[305] Spencer, 2013a, p 244
[306] More than
2,500 Big Groups, 9,000 Small Groups, & 500 Governance Groups. Also many
other groups as need.
[307] Spencer, 2013a, p. 210
[308] Refer Practical Wisdom in ‘Aristotle – The Nichomachean Ethics’ 1980,
p.154
[309] Spencer,
2013a, pages 214-215
[310] Increase in Authentic Power increases the total power in the system;
compared with zero-sum power where, if I have more, you have less.
[311] Refer ‘Laceweb
Sociograms - Figures Depicting The Evolving of Indigenous and Small Minority
Healing Networks in East Asia Oceania Australasia’.
http://www.laceweb.org.au/soc.htm
Also refer Spencer, 2013a
pages 792 - 814
[312] A relevant reference pointed out to me by Dr Werner Pelz. Refer Internet Site Accessed Feb 2017: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/rabelais/francois/r11g/complete.html
[313] For example, refer Chapter 22 on the massive number of games played. A
browse of the book soon highlights the use of extreme excess.
[314] Yeomans, 1965a & 1965b. Also refer Yeomans writings in the
references in the Biography of Yeomans’ work life. Internet site accessed Jan
2017. www.laceweb.org.au/bio.pdf
[315] Spencer 2005.
Cultural Keyline – The Life Work of Dr Neville Yeomans. Internet Site accessed
Feb 2017
[316] Spencer,
2013a
[317] Spencer,
2013b
[318] Laceweb.
Internet Archive accessed Feb 2017. www.laceweb.org.au
[319] ‘Enabling’ –
supporting people to be able
[320] ‘constituting’
- to form some new person or thing - to
transform