Book Review: Radical Science

Most of this interesting collection of essays appeared in the Radical Science Journal (1–4) in the early 1970s, although some of the content connects with the Journal's original approach to more recent critiques of science as work (the journal is now produced with the title Science as Culture).

This was timed reading for me, having originally trained in forms of therapy of the 'scientist practitioner' variety, having tackled some of the difficulties of this position in my studies in Regent's College School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, and from my ongoing political activity as a communist.

In the introduction, Bob Young traces the development of 'radical science' as oppositional to the politics of the late 1960s, leading to the development of the Radical Science Journal and concluding with the Editorial Statement of RSJ no.1, January 1974. The main aim of the journal was to provide a facility for serious socialist analyses of the philosophy, history, ideology and practise of science and technology.

After Young whetting the appetite, as it were, the book – rather disappointingly – opens out to a collection of essays which although mostly intellectually interesting, seem poorly juxtaposed. I failed to see the merits, for example, of including Simon Pickvance's rather personal and indulgent account of his own alienation in biology laboratories, in the overall context of the book. Again, Charlie Clutterbuck's 'Death in the Plastics Industry', although a convincing and well argued indictment of the lack of concern many industries have for their workers, may be more at home in a Health and Safety at Work text.

For this reason, I will discuss only what I consider to be the most important papers in terms of their significance for psychotherapy. Although there are no direct references to psychotherapy in the book, these papers make compelling reading and seem doubly interesting to me in that they beg a wealth of consideration of what is implied about the political function of psychotherapy, and its relationship to science. In this sense, while not saying anything new (indeed some of the other papers seem rather dated), they serve to throw light on new ways of considering old judgements.

In the first paper, 'Technology and the Construction of Social Reality', David Dickson attempts to outline the political function of technology. This addresses both machines and the insidious modes of social relations deriving from them, despite the common apprehension of the existence and function of machines as natural and socially necessary.

Dickson argues that the social construction of the benevolence of technology and social relations subsumed within it are legitimized by scientism. His specific example of the relative recency of medical knowledge assuming scientific legitimacy, parallels the uncomfortable position of cognitive-behavioural therapy as a scientific endeavour in terms of its normative function.

Dickson's main argument in this area is that the ideological function of scientism, in relation to technology, is to obscure the

possibility of political emancipation and to render a passive acceptance of the existing state of affairs.

For technology, read psychology and psychotherapy. Although others have made similar or complementary cases (e.g. David Smail, Helen Graham, Nick Heather, Jerome Koveł) usually from a comfortable and self-confident opposition, what appears from between the lines of Dickson's paper is that those psychotherapies that eschew all things scientific in psychotherapy because of the dogmatism inherent in scientism (e.g. outcome studies), are equally guilty of setting up a parallel 'substitute for religious truth' (p. 30).

The real point seems to be how rationality (a la cognitive-behavioural psychotherapies), or the existential model of man are apprehended by its practitioners as systems that are in many senses above, or separate from, humanity. This clearly distracts attention from the means by which such monoliths obscure the historically intelligible nature of unequal relationships between people.

In order to achieve an increasingly adequate understanding of the mediating role of the psychotherapies, 'scientific' or otherwise, in social relations, it is necessary to have some sense of their mediating role in social history. Alfred Sohn-Rethel's paper 'Science as Alienated Consciousness' serves as an important point of departure to begin to consider those issues. One of the strands to this paper is the familiar attempt to debunk the notion that science can claim ownership of a-historical and universal truths. However, in charting the development of abstract reasoning from the Greeks to Galileo he attempts to de-alienate intellectual activity from manual labour in order to support his Marxist thesis that forms of social relations of production determine forms of thought. This seems a potentially fruitful model to use to continue the exploration of the various relativisms of psychotherapies.

The separation of mental from manual labour is seen to parallel the separation of science from society, which in turn bolsters the claim to legitimacy of its logic. This configuration of alienation contributes to a model of deconstructing science on the basis of the polarity between positivistic thought (seeing things as 'out there', mechanistic and waiting to be discovered) and dialectic thought (the interaction and interpenetration of all things). In this area, Sohn-Rethel complements Dickson's brief foray into the historical development of modern science; this has tremendous implications for psychotherapy.

The victory of Cartesian logic over Leibniz's wholistic interpretation of reality contributed, Dickson argues, to the social acceptance of the cleavage between values (the realm of the subject) and facts (the realm of the object). The fact that this cleavage can be traced to almost all forms of cultural activity further strengthens a psychotherapeutic reading of Sohn-Rethel's work on alienation of thought from action, and of object under study (under scrutiny; under therapy) from its social context. Although some psychotherapies protest their independence from this alienating process, a brief survey of the topography of psychotherapy gives the lie to this claim, suggesting many ideological implications. For example, why is there, in some camps, an eschewel of the marriage of 'being' and 'doing', despite the essential

similarity between Epictetus and Sartre in their treatment of freedom in action.

Luke Hodgkin's 'Mathematics as Ideology and Politics' is most explicit in moving away from the crude Marxist 'base causing superstructure' assumption, to deal with the Gramscian and Althusserian view of ideology is universal, inscribed within cultural texts, activity and commonsense. The classroom is cited as coming somewhere in the middle of a complex web of mediations between base and superstructure, fundamentally constraining forms of thought and resulting in a seemingly benevolent but essentially bourgeois science which affords its oppressive role.

As with Dickson and Sohn-Rethel, Hodgkin's paper could be read with psychotherapy in mind. How does the psychotherapy classroom contribute to the bio-social 'givens' of the existence of the aspirant existential therapist, in terms of constraining her or his modes and range of thinking about anything? Specifically, what books are available, what issues are existent, etc.?

Clearly (or at least impressionistically) one non-existent issue in the psychotherapy classroom, and one often responded to with a kind of unspoken, embarrassed sidestepping, is the issue of the politics of therapy outside of the usual micro-political debates on client-therapist. This book, or selected parts of it, may serve well as a starting point to reinstate this very necessary debate.

Alec Duncan-Grant