Maturity as Responsible Linkage--Overstreet's the Mature Mind, Szasz, Zilbergeld Doc

7/27/2019 Maturity as Responsible Linkage--Overstreet's the Mature Mind, Szasz, Zilbergeld Doc

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Growing Up as Growing Into:

The Creative Linkages of Mature Responsibility

From The Mature Mind by H.A. Overstreet, Angus & Robertson, 1950

The human individual is not self-contained. His physical survival depends upon

constant access to resources outside his body. In like manner, his growth into

psychic individuality depends upon his having linked himself in one way or

another with his environment.

The life that is psychologically poverty-stricken is on that has few such linkages

and these routine and noncreative. The life that is rich and happy is one that is

fulfilling its possibilities through creative linkages with reality.

mature person is not one who has come to a certain level of achievement and

stopped there. He is rather a maturingpersonone whose linkages with life are

constantly becoming stronger and richer because his attitudes are such as to

encourage their growth rather than their stoppage.

!hen "iderot made his startling remark that all children are essentially criminal,

he was saying in effect, that human beings are safe to have around only if they are

as weak in their powers of e#ecution as they are in their powers of understanding.

n infant with the strength and authority of a man would be a monster$ for an

infant has, as yet, established no linkages with life save those that minister to his

own immediate desires.

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He has no knowledgetherefore his acts of power would be also acts of

ignorance. He has no mature affection, but mostly an ego-centered pleasure in

those who give him what he wantstherefore his acts of power would aim solely

at self-gratification. His imagination about other people is still a potential, not a

reali&ed powertherefore his acts of power would be acts of ruthlessness.

In short, it is safe for a human being to grow in physical strength and self-

determination only if he is building such linkages of knowledge and feeling that

what he chooses to do is creative rather than destructive, social rather thanantisocial.

'y this standard, we might say that a person is properly maturingwhether he be

five years old or fiftyonly if his power over his environment is matched by a

growing awareness of what is involved in what he does. If his powers of e#ecution

forge ahead while his powers of understanding lag behind, he is backward in his

psychological growth--and dangerous to have around.

The most dangerous members of our society are those grownups whose powers of

influence are adult but whose motives and responses are infantile. (.'. )hisholm

has said, *+o far in the history of the world there have never been enough mature

people in the right places. ever yet have enough people come to their adulthood

with such sound linkages between them and their world that what they choose to

do is for their own and the common good.


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The human being is born irresponsible. /ne of the strong ties that must

progressively link the individual to his world is that of responsibility$ resentment

against that fact, or inability to reali&e it in action, indicates a stoppage in

psychological growth.

0ature responsibility involves both a willing participation in the chores of life and

a creative participation in the bettering of life. The individual has to learn to accept

his human role. To mature is progressively to accept the fact that the human

e#perience is a shared e#perience$ the human predicament, a shared predicament.0aturity involves the development of a sense of function1that there is work a

person accepts as his own, that he performs with a fair degree of e#pertness, and

from which he draws a sense of significance.

0aturity also involves the development of function-habits. child does not yet

know how to work out spheres of orderliness1his attention-span is too brief to

enable him to have constancy of purpose. In a very real sense, * boys will is the

winds will. good many grownups, without any legitimate reason, are as veering

and unstable as children. +uch seem so to lack a sense of cause and effect that they

are always miserably discovering that they have done the wrong thing. +ome are

self-e#cusing1others are self-dramati&ing.

The 2ourney from irresponsibility to responsibility is full of ha&ards. 0an does not

grow automatically from dependence to independence, helplessness to

competence, irresponsibility to responsibility. The human being is born self-

centered. To be sure, he has as yet no clearly defined *self in which to center. 'ut

even less does he have any power to relate himself to other selves.

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person is not mature until he has both an ability and a willingness to see himself

as one among others and to do unto those others as he would have them do to him.

The very e#istence of society implies certain forces that temper the raw

egocentricity of the newborn$ for without such tempering, there cannot be mutual

support, common purposes, structured reliance of man upon man.

(rowing up means growing intogrowing into a comple# set of social

relationships4 linkages of affection, sympathy, shared work, shared beliefs, shared

memories, good will toward fellow humans.

5rom the moment of birth the infant has things happen to him that give him

feelings of well-being or ill-being. These are direct and immediate e#periences. t

first he knows them only as his own. s he matures, however, he develops an

increasing power to make mental syntheses *of new ideas from elements

e#perienced separately.

He is able to turn hise#perience into humane#perience. He grows in social

imagination. 5or every additional power that he has taken on will have been

matched by an additional sensitivity to what it means to be human. He will do unto

others as he would have them do unto him because he will feel their feelings as he

does his own.

!e enter imaginatively intoanother persons life and feel it as if it were our own.

!e stop being an outsider and become an insider. Those genuinely released from

immature egocentricity into mature sociocentricity are rare among us. There are

many reasons for this.

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/ne is obvious4 a vast number of children receive their first influence from parents

who are themselves emotionally and socially immature. +uch parents confirm the

child in his egocentricity instead of helping him to outgrow it.

The human being is born to a world of isolated particulars. He has to mature into a

world of wholes. t first he has only thispain$ thissatisfaction$ thisfear1the

newborn has as yet no e#perience of wholenessthat is, of parts significantly

related to one another$ of many parts making a total from which each separate part

draws meaning.

It is in the direction of whole-seeingand whole-thinking that growth must take

place if maturity is ever to be achieved. 7ife is a process of entering intoas well

as creatingwholes of meaning. !hen that which is whole is come, that which is

in part is not so much *done away as it is lifted up into its full significance.

s we develop the power thus to lift up the part into the whole, our linkage to life

becomesphilosophical. The person is mature in the degree he sees wholeand takes

into account allthat is involved in a situation and ties to that *all both his present

behaviours and his future plans and e#pectations.

+ituations beyond number are distorted by the influence of full-grown men and

women who still *see in part and prophesy in part. They see with the small eyes of

their own little, limited world. nd on the basis of what they see they *prophesy.

That is, they act in term of cause-and-effect linkages that are faulty and restricted

as their seeing.

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9lato saw slight hope for human society until such time as philosophers should be

made kings. The *right places for philosophersfor people who have a mature

power to see wholeare all those places where influence e#tends from one

individual to another. 5or the philosopher knows that in this world of intricate

mutual relationships no person is safe to have around if he has grown to his

adulthood without building a fairly sound philosophical linkage with his world.

This linkage theory of maturitysees man as a creature who lives by and through

relationships$ who becomes himself through linkages with the nonself. It sees him,as a unit of psychic e#perience, both capable of lifelong growth and sub2ect to

arrest of growth at any point where he habitually makes immature efforts at

problem-solving.

This linkage theory sees the individual, not as finely mature in one phase of his

being and woefully immature in another, but as possessed of a character structure

in which the several maturities or immaturities are closely related to one another.

!e have liked to believe that a person can be ruthless in his business dealings and

yet be a *good husband and father.

!e have defended our illusions in this respect by making the definitions of

*success and *goodness so narrow that even fairly flagrant immaturity can

:ualify. Thus, by ordinary standards, a man is a vocational success if he *earning a

good living. He may achieve his *success by means that do profound hurt to other

people. 'ut he will not commonly be called a failure unless he loses his position or

wealth.

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!e must rid ourselves of such illusions as have made us accept immaturity as

maturity. 'ecause of the interdependence of our powers, maturity in one area of

our life promotes maturity in other areas$ immaturity in one area promotes

immaturities in other areas. In fact, the human individual is a fairly tight-knit

pattern of consistency.

This, then, is the first basic fact about the linkage theory of maturity4 it does not

measure psychological maturity by any single, isolated trait in a person, but by a

constellation of traitsby a total character structure.

The linkage theory does not make maturity synonymous with adjustment. !hile it

recogni&es that an immature person who is also *unad2usted is in a miserable state

and needs help, it recogni&es no less that, given certain cultural conditions, the

immature person is likely to effect a smoother *ad2ustment than is the mature

person.

+uch a person is not on that account a more genuinely fulfilled person. or is his

influence any less disastrous4 his immaturities may be so like the accepted

immaturities of the people around him that he and they will move in remarkable

harmony$ but his immaturity and theirs will continue to create situations in which

human powers are frustrated.

The standards these immature types set will reward grown men and women for

acting like children4 ignorantly, irresponsibly, eogcentrically, and so on. It is no

longer safe or sufficient to 2udge immaturities and maturities of men by the average

practices of any institutions or any total culture.


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=ather, institutions and cultures must be 2udged by the e#tent to which they

encourage or discourage maturity in all their members. Homes, schools, churches,

political parties, economic and social institutions, nationsthese are made for

man$ not man for them.

Human nature arrived on the scene first. The test of any institution is the releasing

service it renders to that nature. Holding in mind the kinds of linkage that are

essential to human fulfillment1we shall affirm, as mans inalienable right, the

right to grow in an environment conducive to growth.

There are three theories about human misbehaviour. The first is the goodness-

badness theory. The business of life is to persuadeor compelpeople to stop

being bad$ and to persuadeor compelthem to be good. This theory has been

most strongly upheld by believers in an authoritarian code.

The second traditional theory is the knowledge-ignorance theory. belief in it

implies a confidence that the person has powers which, if they are properly

developed, will make him see what is right and therefore naturally impel him to do

what is right. >et when we regard the curious perversities to be found among many

*educated adults, we are forced to wonder whether the dispelling of ignorance is

anything more than the merest beginning of wisdom, not its achievement.

either traditional theory is ade:uate. In their stead we must place the maturity-

immaturity theory. Increasingly we must see that human behaviours are immature

ways of solving problems that should be solved in ways that are mature.

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The person in trouble is assumed to be in difficulty because he is somehow out of

gear with life1such a person needs, neither preachment nor mere facts, but a new

character orientation toward his world. @ach person is a wholeperson and that it

will be in his wholeness that he will reveal such fi#ations and emotional

disturbances as keep him immature.

5or e#ample, a mans behaviour on the 2ob is not treated as though it could be

isolated from all his other behaviours. It is treated as revealing his over-all

relationship to life. If a worker is habitually self-defensive or belligerent, hisattitude derives not from inherent badness, nor from factual ignorance, but from

some deep-lying emotional problem or set of problems that clutters up his life and

prevents his full maturing.

The aim is to help individuals to see their own lives whole$ to recognise problem-

points in those lives and to do something ob2ective about themin general, to

move toward life with creative confidence, rather than away from it with fear and

hostility.

The task of our generation is not merely that of applying the maturity-immaturity

concept1but of also maturing those who are to help others to mature. The chief

2ob of our culture is, then, to help all people to grow up.A

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5rom Thomas +&as&s The Cntamed Tongue4

The natural state of mankind is poverty$ wealth is something man must create.

+imilarly, the natural state of mankind is *mental illness Din the sense of being

undisciplined, useless, and infantileE$ *mental health Din the sense of being

competent, self-responsible, and caring for ones familyE is something man must

create. It is therefore wrong to think of poverty or mental illness as being *caused,

but it is right to think of wealth or mental health that way4 this is why poverty and

mental illness must be overcome by the personal effort of the affected individualwhile a person may lose his wealth and mental health without his participation or

even against his will.

7egitimacy rationali&es$ rationality legitimi&es. 7egitimacy is weaked by

defiance4 that is why it seeks consensus and compliance. =ationality is

strengthened by defiance4 that is why it is indifferent to consensus and eschews

coercion.A

0ost people want self-determination for themselves and sub2ection for others$

some want sub2ection for everyone$ only a few want self-determination for

everyone.A

9eople are free in proportion as the +tate protects them from others$ and are

oppressed in proportion as the +tate protects them from themselves.A

0ysticism 2oins and unites$ reason divides and separates. 9eople crave belonging

more than understanding. Hence the prominent role of mysticism, and the limited

role of reason, in human affairs.A

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glossary4 *'ad4 obsolete$ superseded by *insane, mentally ill, sick. *(ood4

obsolete$ superseded by *sane, mentally healthy, healthy. *@thics4 obsolete$

superseded by the diagnosis and treat of disease.A

The liberal-scientific ethic4 if its bad for you, it should be prohibited$ if its good

for you, it should be re:uired.A

ew models of mental illnesses are now produced faster than new models ofautomobiles, perhaps because they sell faster.A

!e prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual

responsibility.A

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5rom 'ernie Gilbergelds The +hrinking of merica4

It is a basic tenet of the therapeutic ideology that people are not okay as they are$

thats why they need therapy. Therapists would make the whole world into a

hospital. 0ost forms of human discontent are the result of the disparity between

what we have and are and what we feel we should have and be. Therapeutic

thinking serves to widen the discrepancy both by finding out more things wrong

with how we are and by holding out increasingly utopian notions of what we

should be. ast dissatisfaction with oneself is one of therapeutic thinkings mostimportant products.

Therapists tell us we should trust our feelings but they have made us fearful of

trusting anything not validated by e#perts. The more we rely on professionals, the

more we have to rely on them because we fail to develop our own resources. !e

forget that logical and critical thinking are not the special province of a particular

group of e#perts and that we could 2ust as well check our own thinking or get help

from those around us.

There are limits to how much each of us can change. 7ife is not a continuous series

of peak e#periences or a process of ever-e#panding satisfaction. 0urphys law is

not amenable to therapeutic manipulation. +omewhere deep down we also know

that life in profoundly unfair and democratic. Therapy is not a cure for the human

condition. The aimlessness, loneliness, confusion and dissatisfaction we feel and

that lead many of us to try to change, are simply some of the prices we pay for

liberating ourselves from traditional belief systems and the institutions that

supported them. The simple fact is that freedom is not easy to live with. 'ut neither

is anything else. The care provided by counselors may be comforting, at least for a

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while, but it has no answers to the riddles and ha&ards of our time. @very human

characteristic is double-edged. In short, everything has a price.A

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Maturity as Responsible Linkage--Overstreet's the Mature Mind, Szasz, Zilbergeld Doc