Introduction

According to C. G. Jung, “fanaticism is always a sign of suppressed doubt. In times when the Church begins to waver, it becomes fanatical in its behavior, or fanatic sects arise, because a hidden doubt must be suppressed.” (Jung, C. G. : Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice. Prague : 1992, p. 163.) For social work this is a major challenge: it has to confront reality constantly, related and adjacent scientific disciplines, and itself—with its own theory and practice.

1 Social work as a theoretical-empirical-applicative science

“I. A. Bláha (1934, p. 17) understands social work in the broader sense as the activity of a social policy worker, educational worker, psychologist, educator, or social hygienist, one who studies a wider area of problems.” (Novotná, V. – Schimmerlingová, V., 1992, p. 22.) Social work therefore includes knowledge and activity of scientific disciplines that directly concern the human being. According to I. Tomeš, “social work is one of the tools of social policy.” (Tomeš, I. In: Matoušek, O. et al., 2001, p. 155.) A democratic pluralistic society, if it is interested in maintaining social peace, carries out social policy aimed at eliminating material and social deprivation among as many layers of the population as possible. In this interest, it uses theoretical knowledge from the sciences, which in their theories also include social work, and, on the basis of empirical knowledge from practice, applies the optimal procedures for solving social problems.

“Social work in a narrower sense, as understood by the theoreticians of this field and highly qualified experts, is characterized by direct, intentional, and prepared contact of the social worker with the client (group, community) for the purpose of establishing a social diagnosis and performing social therapy.” (Novotná, V. – Schimmerlingová, V., 1992, p. 22.) A social worker, on the basis of a scientific approach and a synthesis of scientific knowledge from sciences and scientific approaches that serve the human being, helps the client primarily overcome social deprivation. According to Š. Strieženec, “the understanding of human life in social work is always positive. It can be characterized as help toward self-help.” (Strieženec, Š., 2001, p. 8.) This truly requires a highly responsible social-work approach not only toward the client but also toward knowledge about the given social problem.

In responsible performance of their mission, a social worker has to reckon with the problems created by workers of some other helping professions, especially those with economic and medical overlap. Social work, “already in its American beginnings, indeed established itself as a profession helping people outside so-called majority society to adapt to that society.” (Řezníček, I., 1994, p. 16.) Generous sponsorship contributions to some civic associations with a humanitarian social-help label, which are often overseen by the same person, can never truly reach the officially stated target group. Under our legislative conditions, genuine sponsorship is still only a donation. (Act No. 595/2003 Coll., § 50 (1) a–b.) In a market mechanism no one gives anything for free to anyone. Financial flows that are routed through accounting for social purposes, according to the natural laws of this mechanism, cannot ultimately be spent on them. “The market mechanism is socially blind. It assigns goods to those who can pay the most (who have a sufficient number of money units—votes), not to those who need them the most.” (Lisý, J. et al., 1998, p. 44.) As for possibilities of genuine cooperation with other professions, of financing effective social work, of exercising rights of persons in social deprivation, and of legal support for social work, all these areas are very limited for social work and there is still no sign suggesting a shift toward progress.

2 Social work and sociology

Sociology is “the science of human society, of its origin and life (...).” (Hartl, P. – Hartlová, H., 2000, pp. 549–550.) Its knowledge is foundational for social work. According to sociologist Š. Strieženec, it is a “discipline focused on empirical research into social reality and its mapping.” (Strieženec, Š., 1996, p. 203.) Without question, social work was initiated also by the general need to apply theoretical conclusions from sociological empirical research to practice for effective social prevention.

3 Social work and psychology

Š. Strieženec understands psychology as a science “of the laws governing the development and functioning of the human psyche as a distinct form of life activity. Psychology is often divided into so-called pure (theoretical) and applied psychology.” (Strieženec, Š., 1996, p. 177.) Many branches and approaches have so far been developed in psychology. Social work is work with the person as person. Each of these approaches contains positive elements, but for social work perhaps the approach most acceptable is the client-oriented approach of C. R. Rogers. This “is probably the most important humanistic author who influenced social work. (...) According to Rogers it is essential that the helping professional in a therapeutic relationship strives for congruence and truthfulness, unconditional positive regard, and empathy.” (Navrátil, P. In: Matoušek, O. et al., 2001, p. 203.) A different approach is narcissism, which is part of the breakdown syndrome and initiates a deepening of neurosis in both client and society.

4 Social work and psychiatry

Psychiatry is “the medical science of recognizing, preventing, and treating mental disorders, and researching their causes and pathogenesis; the term was first used by German physician Johann Christian Reil (1803) in the study of manifestations of madness ‘Rhapsody on Mental Disorders.’” (Hartl, P. – Hartlová, H., 2000, p. 470.) So far, it remains a discipline without a very strong scientific basis, although it is practiced by medically trained people. The recent nineteenth century brought efforts by medically educated people to subject mental problems to biology. “The art of individuation, which during the introduction of standardized diagnostic and treatment schemes in the 19th and 20th centuries almost lost its significance, represents an important element of poetic medicine. It includes precisely that each illness and its course, and yes, every form of health displays not only general traits but also traits that are completely individual, which are difficult to fit into usual patterns of medical approach.” (Danzer, G., 2001, pp. 53–54.) Psychiatry, without understandable justification and especially without scientific justification supported by long-term research, usually treats the somatic consequences of psychological problems as their causes and applies chemical preparations to them, most often neuroleptics. (Annual turnover in the artificial vitamin trade is estimated in billions of Czech crowns (millions of euros). In no country has it so far been possible, under pressure from pharmaceutical companies, to legally restrict their over-the-counter sale and regulate dispensing by prescription. Pharmaceutical products that affect mental states are an even more profitable item.) Most so-called scientific evidence of psychiatry is in the spirit of a well-known joke: “We catch a rabbit and beat it until it confesses it is a lion.” Mild and severe neuroses are, by tendency, mostly labeled as schizophrenia, whose international classification also does not have a very strong scientific basis. For some conclusions to become truly scientific within psychiatry, it would have had to have been constituted in antiquity and heredity research on mental illness begun already at the birth of Christ. To grasp the essence of its existence, it is useful to return to the collective unconscious. “Jung discovered the collective unconscious while studying the unconsciousness of African Americans in America, where he found that archetypes are not collective patterns given by racial inheritance, but a priori categories of imagination, because they are analogous in each white person and each Indian. (...) Archetypes are patterns, motifs common to all humanity that slumber in us and emerge without our will or awareness.” (Puškárová, M., 1997, p. 23.) With the sharp rise of science in the progressive 18th and especially 19th centuries, a vacuum remained after witch trials, where an accusation by a competent authority had once been enough to carry out a burning. Although trials of those possessed by the devil have even proceeded in this century—for example, “witch trials were still held in court in the Peštiny region in 1938 (!)” (Hermann, I., 1998, pp. 17–18)—the social status of inquisitors gradually passed to modern, equally unscientific psychiatry. It still holds it today. (During the Second World War, concentration camps briefly relieved it of the task of eliminating unwanted and surplus individuals.) In addition, criminal law now grants it great powers.

Psychiatry can also be called a theoretical-applied discipline. It has developed a theory that it applies in practice. A psychiatric solution to a client's social deprivation is certainly not adequate. It is not based on experience. “On one hand the person is required to be normal, conforming, and reasonable; on the other hand, they live in a distressing environment of urban industrial society. Psychiatric treatment then, through its methods (medication, electroshock, therapy), tries to adapt these individuals externally and leaves them to their inner problems.” (Munková, G., 2001, p. 110.) The psychiatric approach is a love of death and therefore part of the syndrome of collapse.

Social work in the true sense has no common points with psychiatry. Among other things, practices of psychiatry directly or indirectly initiate the activity of many destructive cults and sects. If in practice collaboration occurs between a professional psychiatrist and a social worker, it is likely a purposeful symbiosis. It is not in the client’s interest.

5 Criteria for the ideological re-education environment of coercive cults and sects as a vivid example of maximally unethical approach

Cults and sects often operate in the same environment as social work, often use the same or similar methods, often have the same target group, and likewise often name their activity social work. Whether this corresponds to reality is hinted at by certain criteria that even a complete layperson can identify. (Neither use of communication techniques from assertiveness training yet means an assertive person or assertive behavior. What makes people assertive is their approach to these techniques and to the partner in communication, and the way they think. Likewise, scientific rationalization of cult and sect activity does not necessarily mean field social work.)

Based on thought re-education of prisoners in the Korean War in the 20th century, in which the Chinese applied it very successfully, Robert J. Lifton established eight criteria for psychological manipulation. If these are applied in any environment, it turns into an environment of perfect psychological manipulation. These are the criteria:

  1. Environmental control,
  2. Mystical manipulation (planned spontaneity),
  3. Demand for purity,
  4. Confession cult,
  5. Sacred science,
  6. Jargon language,
  7. Doctrine is greater than the person,
  8. Existential provisionality. (Lifton, R. J., In : Hassan, S., 1994, p. 257)

1. environmental control – for R. J. Lifton, this is basically “control of communication in that environment.” (Lifton, R. J., In : Hassan, S., 1994, p. 258) It can be realized either through direct observation or through informants loyal to the organization drawn from members, including neologisms that novices adopt. In a pejorative sense, M. S. Peck also characterizes the cult by so-called special language. According to him, “the closer a given organization is to being a cult, the more particular this inner language becomes. In the end it resembles a secret language understood only by initiates and completely untranslatable.” (Peck, M. S., 1994, p. 198) The initiates are the creators and the venerated inner circle, i.e., the managers of the organization. Thus, through the way ordinary members use it, they can control their thinking as well.

2. mystical manipulation (planned spontaneity) – “Mystics are people who have very vivid experiences of processes of collective unconsciousness.” (Peck, M. S., 1994, p. 198) Every person has lived through an event whose course and atmosphere reminded them of something from the Bible. Mystics are people who, for various reasons, experience such things more often. A coercive organization triggers processes whose result is often meant to be—and often is—the illusion of similar experiences. This is exactly what marriage con artists or women do, for example, when they attempt to secure financial stability through deception.

3. demand for purity – “Absolute purification is a process that never ends. It is often part of a ritual and, as a source of blame and shame, is closely linked to confession procedure.” (Lifton, R. J., In: Hassan, S., 1994, p. 260) In essence, it is the constant need of a severe neurotic to keep washing continuously. A severe neurotic is a coercive organization and has a need to stimulate members to constant sorting of everything into black and white. Closely linked to the demand for purity is fanaticism. “The term fanaticus used to denote a person obsessed with temple cult, a religious zealot. In modern language fanaticism means excessive, uncritical commitment to some belief.” (Bley, S., 1998, p. 33)

4. confession cult – This is a dubious psychotherapeutic method of the hot-chair style. Through the misuse of negative group dynamics, public confession turns into a ritualized humiliation and pledges in favor of the organization. (Despite criticism from leading figures of the Catholic Church, communities of lay Catholics arise where, in closed meetings, members confess their sins to one another and those present offer comments. These are clearly coercive groups.) 5. sacred science – According to R.J. Lifton, “a fitting, though not the only, example is the Church of Unification. It uses current tendencies to combine a sacred system of dogmatic principles with the demand for a scientific approach to human behavior and psychology.” (Lifton, R. J., In: Hassan, S., 1994, p. 261) What authority labels scientific is accepted as such without critique. Within the ideology of the organization this also creates a difficult-to-distinguish synthesis of excellent scientific knowledge and procedures with non-scientific and instrumental conclusions and methods.

6. jargon language – Lionel Trilling called the lexicon of neologisms “the language of non-thinkers.” (Lifton, R. J., In: Hassan, S., 1994, p. 261) In addition to control of environment and thinking for the group's management, the long-term violence caused by its use also harms the victim and can truly lead to brainwashing, followed by identity change. According to Z. Vojtíšek, “with simple truths and usually only one recipe for all questions, authority can easily fill the feeling of emptiness, a feeling that can be especially painful in a consumer society and in certain life situations.” (Vojtíšek, Z., 1998, p. 20)

7. doctrine is greater than the person – M. S. Peck called this criterion God in captivity. “In their distorted relation to God and their satisfaction with dogmatism, cults always somehow feel they have God in their grasp, that they have captured Him.” (Peck, M. S., 1994, p. 198) The human being, as the image of God, is in comparison with the ideology of a harmful organization only a barking voice. When seeking a fraction of one's own human rights, a person is induced to feel failure and called paranoid, another mechanism of harassment is started against them, the organization cuts all contact with them, or they are killed. Z. Vojtíšek called this in 1998 underestimating reason. “It often hides behind science (for example, by claiming that the left brain hemisphere is too developed at the expense of the right, emotional one), or reason is attributed mainly to wars, catastrophes, and threats of the 20th century. Experience, feelings, and perceptions are preferred before reason.” (Vojtíšek, Z., 1998, p. 21.) (Labeling a traumatized, abused, and neglected child as having a mild brain dysfunction diagnosis is exactly this case. Hyperactivity and hypoactivity testify to perfectly functioning central nervous system.) 8. existential provisionality – As the name suggests, this criterion refers to life in permanent uncertainty, which members compensate through collective narcissism—the pride of belonging to it. If a member does not wish to share this provisionality, they are usually labeled an enemy. For example, according to the Church of Scientology, this is everyone who says anything about it other than praise. According to its founder L. R. Hubbard, “one may be prepared to lose property (...), or be harmed in any way by any Scientologist, without that Scientologist being disciplinarily punished.” (Škvaril, R., 1995, p. 40.)

Conclusion

The English positivist philosopher H. Spencer (1820–1903), an exponent of society as an organism, of evolutionary thought and social Darwinism, “sought a parallel between the biological and social organism, and also between biological and social pathology.” (Hroncová, J., In: Hroncová et al., 2004, p. 6) His inadequate approach was repeatedly and justifiably criticized. The human being is ineluctably also a biological being. Social pathology by necessity has something in common with failure of the organism, with its affliction from outside (a virus, infection...), or with deformation of the organism by malignant or benign tumors. For example, in bullying, which also initiates and maintains cult dependency, the term “real virus of bullying” is commonly used. (Kolář, M., 1992, p. 27) This is the triggering of mechanisms of harmful behavior, i.e., activation of certain archetypes in people’s collective unconscious within class collectives. (C. G. Jung demonstrates the force of such infection in the rise of fascism and Hitlerism: “Of course, we cannot call fascism or Hitlerism ideas. They are archetypes, so we can say: Give people archetypes, and the whole crowd moves as one man, and no one can resist it. Because archetypal images have this enormous dynamic force; you cannot disprove them with arguments.” (Jung, C. G., 1992, p. 173.) In the spirit of philanthropy, one should, when assessing a person, trust one’s own feelings, while also keeping a certain helicopter perspective. This helps not only in effective communication between individuals but also between cultures.

When assessing a person, archetypal archaicism and nihilism are also very dangerous regarding criteria of judgment. For example, although S. Freud again publicly revealed the unconscious part of the human psyche after a long period, as practical experience showed, not least according to C. G. Jung, “Freud’s psychology applies mainly to him alone.” (Říčan, P., 2002, p. 178) As indicated above, in forming judgment about a person, caution is appropriate, but also understanding the person as a real bio-psycho-social being.

Author: PhDr. Peter Ďurkovský List of bibliographic references

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The lecture was delivered at the international scientific conference Applied Ethics in Social Work and Other Helping Professions, which took place on 20.–21 October 2010 in Piešťany and was published in the proceedings of this conference: MÁTEL, A. – SCHAVEL, M. – MÜHLPACHR, P. – ROMAN, T. 2010. Aplikovaná etika v sociálnej práci a ďalších pomáhajúcich profesiách. Zborník z medzinárodnej vedeckej konferencie. Bratislava : VŠZaSP sv. Alžbety. 413 s. ISBN 978-80-89271-89-4.