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PROMOTING EMOTIONAL HEALTH AND CLEAR THINKING
Editorial: Volume 8, No. 1 — 2001
Why cats need nine lives ...
NO society can flourish without curiosity. Closed societies like Galileo’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s USSR, and cultures around the world which are steeped in fundamentalist doctrines discourage it, thereby restricting thought and enquiry.
Yet, while curiosity is often admirable, a sign of intelligence, and a necessary component of learning, it is also of variable quality. Anything which focuses our attention arouses our curiosity but it also raises our emotional temperature, thus making us less able to see clearly. If we are afraid, we can be highly curious about the cause, so as to appease it and survive, in which case curiosity makes us passive. We can also become endlessly curious about sexually arousing matters, relationships, conflict, violence and status — the staple diet of news media is conflict and relationships.
Thus arguing, fighting and dramatic news and entertainment (currently becoming harder to distinguish) arouse curiosity and hold our attention but do not raise our understanding. In other words, curiosity can narrow down our options as much as it can open them up.
We can become obsessed by what we are curious about — the lives of film stars, for instance, or the latest soap opera. This may be harmless enough and bring pleasure, but it doesn’t stretch us. Indeed, curiosity can make us vulnerable to conditioning if it keeps locking our attention on the same old emotional stimuli without new learning taking place. It is hard to see things other than in a mechanically conditioned way when we are overexcited.
Of course there is an emotional component to all thought. Indeed, emotion precedes thought (something cognitive therapists will have to come to terms with; see the article on the APET model on page 13). But, to make progress in any field, the curiosity we need must contain the optimism that the situation we are curious about can be understood and, therefore, that in the understanding of it, some wisdom will be gained. When curiosity is crude it does not motivate at this level.
It is in the interests of furthering the former kind of curiosity that we have changed the name of this journal and opened it up to a wider audience. We believe that our society needs to refine its level of curiosity about psychology and behaviour. As The New Therapist, we introduced a more scientific approach to counselling and psychotherapy. Because that work was based on research and larger organising ideas, it turned out to appeal to a far wider readership than we had expected, including many people who would never in a million years describe themselves as therapists — such as teachers, social workers, police, solicitors, physicists, GPs, scientists, youth workers, business people, etc.
What attracted them was the bigger picture about problems in society which they found on offer in our pages — a new, jargon-free, way of thinking about mental health; about how people can adapt to a rapidly changing world; and what happens to those that can’t or don’t change. This way of thinking, based on our ever growing scientific knowledge about the nature of human beings, is what we now term the human givens approach.
The meaning of the word ‘radical’ is to go back to the root. It is by uncovering the mind/body connections, and how human beings get their needs fulfilled, that we can root out the causes and find solutions to society’s problems today.
So Human Givens: radical psychology today is for people in all walks of life whose curiosity is still being refined; people who are working with people in difficult circumstances but who, nevertheless, make time to stop and think in a quiet, curious way in order to increase their understanding.
We hope you like it, contribute to it, and encourage other thoughtful people to read it too.
The Editors
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