Introduction to Special Issue on Community Psychology and the Hermeneutics of Love

Eight years ago, I was hired at Point Park University, and I was charged with the development of a new graduate program in Clinical-Community Psychology. Robert McInerney (or “Bob,” as he prefers to be called), who is one of the authors in this special issue, worked closely with me and other faculty members to develop the mission of the program. The clear imperative for us was to develop a program that took a community approach to clinical issues with an emphasis on an underlying humanistic and phenomenological approach in dialogue with existentially informed psychodynamic theory, critical theory, poststructural trends in continental philosophy, and social psychology. A hermeneutic phenomenology, which I will describe shortly, was an important philosophical and literary tradition that helped pull these threads together.

The impetus for the development of a clinical-community program came from the awareness that mental health issues must be understood within their sociocultural context, and also a critical engagement with the way that certain ethical presuppositions and values were guiding clinical practice and diagnosis in unreflective and potentially oppressive ways. An outcrop of this activist spirit included protests against the DSM-5 and its system of diagnosis, which led to the Open Letter to the DSM-5 Task Force, coauthored with Sarah Kamens and David Elkins and sponsored by Division 32 of APA and dozens of other organizations, as well as more than 15,000 individuals who were primarily mental health professionals (Kamens, Elkins, & Robbins, 2012). One of the criticisms of this widely used clinical nosology was its tendency to individualize human behaviors and suffering in ways that often de-emphasize their social context, potentially scapegoating those labeled with mental illness who are often primarily expressing symptoms traceable to cultural pathologies (Robbins & Friedman, 2014; Robbins, Karter, & Gallagher, 2015). This style of explicating the cultural context of psychopathology has a long tradition in humanistic and existential psychology and can be located in seminal thinkers such as Erich Fromm (1990), Herbert Marcuse (1974 ), R. D. Laing (1983), Rollo May (1996), Viktor Frankl (2006), and Michel Foucault (1988), as well as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (2009), to name a few. More recently, humanistic psychology’s critical engagement with positive psychology has mounted similar critiques of unexamined presuppositions of mental health in positive psychology, which while emphasizing socially valued states and traits, nevertheless tends to avoid genuine critical engagement with the cultural context of its value systems (Friedman & Robbins, 2012; Robbins, 2008, 2015 ). Community psychology shares such concerns with humanistic and existential psychology, and like humanistic and existential approaches, points in the direction of concrete alternative therapeutic practices, including community interventions and action research—both with explicit value-claims aimed at social liberation (Diaz-Laplante, 2007).

The initial spark that kindled the flames of this special issue occurred spontaneously about 5 years ago, as Bob McInerney and I were engaged in one of our reveries of extended dialogue in the break room of our department. Picture the two of us there waving our hands and raising our voices with exuberance as we lighted on new insights and shared enthusiasm for the unfolding project of developing the new program. In an unguarded moment, I voiced the importance of articulating an explicit ethical foundation for a clinical-community psychology and suggested a “hermeneutic of love” operate as our guiding vision. Bob lit up and startled out of his seat, completing my sentence for me: “A hermeneutics of love as a utopian potentiality!” The moment had a feeling of destiny to it, and we knew we had to do something with this still very unformulated insight. This special issue is, to date, the fullest realization of that aha-moment not so long ago.

At the time, I did not yet realize that, all along I had been drawing quite liberally, though somewhat unreflectively, on this latent idea of a hermeneutics of love. As a graduate student at Duquesne University, I had the fortune of taking a graduate class with the brilliant Fred Wertz. It was a condensed summer course on Freud’s case studies, which of course we examined in the careful, charitable style of the phenomenological tradition that Wertz brought with him from his own training in Duquesne’s doctoral program several decades earlier. At that time, I wrote a paper (Robbins, 2000) on one of Freud’s lesser known case studies, based on the memoirs of Daniel Schreber, whose diary provided a firsthand account of his journey through psychosis. I intuitively resisted Freud’s interpretations of Schreber’s psychosis as an expression of his latent homosexuality, a finding that seemed to impose itself too heavily on Schreber’s own personal narrative. I suggested that an alternative reading of Schreber’s memoirs would yield a richer and more generous interpretation of Schreber’s experience if it were approached with an attitude less steeped in incredulity but rather, instead, from within an affected state of love and affection for Schreber. Not long after that, I wrote a book review (Robbins, 2001) of a memoir titled Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art and Madness, about a brother’s account of his sister’s descent into psychosis. Again, as I noted in the review, I saw something profound in the author’s understanding of his sister’s madness when it was articulated through the loving eyes of her brother. It seemed appropriate to call this attitude a “hermeneutic of love.” But it was not until my conversation with Bob, many years later, that this idea realized its trajectory as a guiding vision for a new graduate program and a program of study and research in clinical-community psychology.

As I reflected on the notion of a hermeneutics of love, and Bob and I continued to engage in hearty dialogue on the subject, we were also co-chairing the Society for Humanistic Psychology’s annual conference that year. I began to look for traces of this concept of a hermeneutics of love in humanistic psychology and found it perhaps most explicitly developed in the personalist ethical foundations of humanistic psychology (Robbins, 2013). Gordon Allport, who had been a major influence on the humanistic movement, had studied within a personalistic ethical framework as he completed his dissertation in social ethics in Germany. When he returned to Harvard University, he continued a conversation on personalism with the theologians at Boston University. This was an exciting insight for me, because I knew that Martin Luther King Jr. had received his doctorate at Boston University and likely was either directly or indirectly part of this dialogue between Allport and the Boston University theologians on personalist ethics. I began to see Dr. King as at least one major exemplar of a life lived from within the perspective of a hermeneutics of love put into action in the service of social justice and human liberation, and in such a way that it even refused to dehumanize the enemy through violence. For this reason, I worked on organizing a symposium on the relationship between Dr. King and humanistic psychology, which was made the centerpiece of the Division 32 conference held in Pittsburgh, PA, at Point Park University. Among the panelists was Jennifer Selig, a faculty member at Pacifica Graduate Institute who had already published a book on King, Integration: The Psychology and Mythology of Martin Luther King, Jr., and His (Unfinished) Therapy with the Soul of America (Selig, 2012).

Selig, McInerney, and I continued the dialogue on hermeneutics of love the following year at the Society for Humanistic Psychology’s annual conference, which had moved on to Dr. Selig’s home turf at Pacifica Graduate Institute. It was amazing to learn, for example, that Dr. Selig had herself actually been using the concept of a hermeneutics of love in her classes! She had completely arrived at this insight independently from us, but in a way that is remarkably congruent, particularly in the way she has linked it to Dr. King’s philosophy of social ethics. At that conference, Bob and I developed and presented our initial, still somewhat sketchy drafts of the papers represented in this issue. Yet it was clear and somewhat uncanny that the generative nature of these ideas captured the imagination of the audience and created more enthusiasm than I was accustomed to when developing mainly theoretical arguments for a primarily clinical conference audience. Something seemed to be striking a chord. We were tapping into something powerful, it seemed. The next obvious step was to develop these papers into a special issue, and we are grateful to Shawn Rubin, as editor of Journal of Humanistic Psychology, for his agreement to shepherd this project to publication. He has our sympathy for dealing with agape hermeneuts who can at times be a bit Dionysian and prone to verging on chaos; there is an anarchic spirit in way we are engaging in these practices. Dr. Rubin has been instrumental in helping maintain momentum to bring these works to fruition, so, we hope, they can and will be shared widely.

We know the term hermeneutics may be off-putting to some. It may come across to some people as a pretentious and obfuscating technical term that confounds more than it clarifies. We disagree, however, because, just like terms such as existentialism and humanistic psychology, the term hermeneutics designates and organizes a whole history of ideas that have had a lasting impact especially in continental philosophy. And to the extent that continental philosophy has had a major impact on humanistic psychology, especially through existential and phenomenological approaches, it is imperative that our arguments are situated within this larger tradition of understanding. Situating the hermeneutics of love within its historical context is even more important considering that hermeneutics itself places great importance on understanding the history, culture, and context of texts and interpretations. To present these ideas in an a-historical way would be counter to the spirit of the project. And, as former Division 32 President David Rennie (2007) has argued, hermeneutics provides the most appropriate philosophical foundation for humanistic psychology, since it situates the discipline in a sweet spot between the humanities and social sciences.

The main thing to understand is that hermeneutics is a long, centuries-old tradition of thought that is concerned with the interpretation of texts. The initial impetus was to read ancient texts and scriptures in such a way that accounted for the cultural, historical, and motivational context of the author and original readers of the text. Early forms of hermeneutics took a more realistic perspective and believed that understanding the intentions of the author would yield a genuine interpretation of the text. More recent variations of hermeneutics emphasize that the primary dialogue with the text is between the text itself and the reader, where truly generative texts give forth a great range of interpretations, often meanings that were never explicitly intended by the author. The text, in the psychoanalytic sense, is over-determined. The link to phenomenology through hermeneutics is made through Martin Heidegger (2008 ), who saw his existential analytic as guided, in part, by a recognition that human beings are interpretive beings at the core. What we do as human beings is make sense of things, and always within an obscure horizon that reaches into the past and toward an uncertain future. So, not only are literary texts and scriptures of interest to hermeneutics but all of life is. Life, or what phenomenologists call the life-world, is, in the broadest sense, the product of interpretation—a generative act of meaning-making as we are engaged in various projects, always within a social, linguistic, and equipmental context, of course. Life itself is a dialogical, ongoing construction of meaning.

Once we understand that life itself is a dialogical, ongoing construction of meaning, then it follows that we have some choice in the kind of interpretations we are bound to make, and the interpretations we choose have consequences. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur (1977) as a major influence, we can identify at least two very broad interpretative styles—a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutics of love. The hermeneutics of suspicion is widely represented in contemporary critical thought from Nietsche to Marx to Freud, and the many offspring of these lines of critical thought. The idea here is never to take the text at face value but to interrogate it to disclose a hidden, obscured meaning. There is something intrinsically aggressive and violent in the hermeneutics of suspicion. At the extreme, it can verge on paranoia. With that said, hermeneutics of suspicion certainly has its place, and speaking personally, I tend to believe it is most appropriate when directed toward those in power in the service of the oppressed. Yet when situated in the latter context as a liberating movement toward social justice, I think the aim of social justice ultimately signals a hermeneutics of suspicion that has been brought into line, and tempered by, a hermeneutics of love.

As these articles in this issue outline and develop in varied ways, the hermeneutics of love is not a variation on naïve realism by which, in contrast to a hermeneutics of suspicion, the interpretive process simply takes things on face value. Quite the contrary, as is especially explicit in Robert McInerney’s work in this issue, a hermeneutics of love begins with a deep and profound recognition of the radical transcendence of the other, the radical otherness of the other. But rather than reached through an attitude of incredulity, the other is accessed through an attitude of agape love, a generosity of spirit that fosters the kind of trust that genuinely earns the right to gain access to the other person’s most intimate psychological spaces. Hermeneutics of love reveals the depth of the other as much if not more so than a hermeneutics of suspicion, but in a nonviolent way, on the terms of the other, in the service of the other.

We believe the attitude of a hermeneutics of love is essential in community practice. When we are working with groups that are historically oppressed and marginalized, we run the great risk of hubris, where we use people who are suffering in a way that is self-aggrandizing and ego-driven. Outside of a hermeneutics of love, we run the risk of engaging in charitable endeavors that, at the day’s end, are primary self-serving. A hermeneutics of love is an ongoing, never-ending examination of one’s own motives, and a questioning that never ceases to ask whether what we are doing in our service to the other is truly and genuinely being done in the spirit of goodwill toward the other as other. The attitude of agape love requires a willingness to recognize our own tendencies to narcissism, which can easily deflect us from recognition of our self-serving biases, and to accept our own failings are part of the human condition. This acceptance of our own limitations, our finitude, is a first step into the ongoing cycle of ever-renewed commitment to starting over again, beginning with loving regard as the first precarious step onto the quaking, shifting ground of service to the community.