Mental health is for clinical psychology what western society is for anthropology: a negative construct. More often the case, we define ourselves against both notions by leaving either undefined. With Melanesia in mind, the anthropologist Marylyn Strathern emphasises that it is in the western way of explaining things and events to divide in levels of analysis. Better to say – and this one is meant specifically for anthropologists, and within them, to some anthropologists – it is in a western imagination of what Melanesian imagination could conceive western thinking to be (if only Melanesian imagination could), that to explain, one must level-divide. Complex as it may be, there is indeed a value in trying to imagine what the other could imagine us to be if only are categories were a bit closer. Systemic practitioners do it all the time. They call it circular thinking.
Of all branches of psychology, systemic psychology is the one where dividing into levels has assumed greater popularity. There is a problem, there is a family. There is a human need for a systemic formulation, even as a provisory guide. There is the occasional impasse in interpretation for facts do not seem to conform, relations do not seem to fit in our logical schemes as nicely as one would like. There is the last (often comfortable) resource of sending the problem, the family, ourselves, our formulation, to a different level of analysis…and backwards…and forwards…yet how useful are levels of analysis in the human sciences or systemic thinking?
My position on this matter is disappointingly simple: levels are but a direct expression of the amount of information the mind can take in at a time. As systemic practitioners, anthropologists, human scientists, people dealing with mind at one level or the other it is a matter of discipline to learn to take more, and to learn to take more ‘at a time’. I take ‘mixed race’ as an example of what the mind does when we dare not to imagine beyond levels.
In the social sciences, much has been written on the notion of mixed-race. Mixed race is often taken as epitome of mixed identity: capacity to synthesise Englishness and non-Englishness in one single body (Englishness, regardless to say, being the negative construct in this case). Mixed race as an epitome of mixed identity feels to me a strange contradiction. It is example of how a social logic (identity), allegedly conjured up to go beyond biological determinism (race) eventually comes to reproduce biological determinism and ultimately shot itself in the foot (a similar case can be argued for current uses of ‘gender’). Why - let’s say as mere example - do second generations of Eastern European or Portuguese immigrants epitomise less a cross between Englishness and one Other (identity) than the alleged mixed race person? Is crossed biology a necessary condition for crossed identity? Or is the mixed-race/mixed-identity a remnant of an old habit of thought that tells us to divide into levels, starting with basic biology and moving up to people’s social bits?
By this I do not mean to minimize the eventual difficulties that mixed race individuals and families go through in their everyday sociability. I am a clinician as much as a human scientist, even if a clinician currently out of practice, due to circumstances beyond my control. Feelings of the kind should not be silenced in a session. I mean to suggest, nevertheless, that as human thinkers who provide to larger audiences the categories which often become part of popular discourse, if we are to take identity seriously, we should probably be working to show that race, or particular mixtures of biology, are no more a condition for mixed identity than any of the non-mixed race people who, second generations as they are, come to combine the values of a particular Nation State with their particular forms of otherness, whatever their biology is.
Mixed-race as mixed-identity is, to me, a clear example of what divides real researchers from practitioners of research (or even, if you don’t mind me saying, real clinicians from practitioners of clinical psychology): the former start with ideas; the latter can only start with people.
