Social Conflict and Mental Health
217
Social Conflict and Problems of Mental Health
KENNETH
B. C L A R K
Future historians, I suppose, will try to find some way of describing our times succinctly. Some suggestions may be that this was a period of chronic crisis or continuous social conflict or of terrific pressures by society upon individuals. I would like to suggest that our times might be accurately described by future historians as that period in which man succeeded in getting to the moon before he had developed a fool-proof public address system. This is a period of almost normal, normative conflicts with types of conflicts related to extraordinarily rapid changes in various aspects of our society. The most obvious are tremendous technological changes, industrialization, ~.hanges in modes and techniques, and rapidity in transportation and communication. And with these, of course, come increased demands for political and social changes, domestic and international. Characteristic of our times is the fact that the European-American invention of democracy has been taken seriously by non-Europeans, nonKEZ~NETX~B. CLARK,PH.D., is President of the Metropolitan Applied Research Center, Inc., and Professor of Psychology of the City .College of the City University of New York. He has been a member of the New York State Board of Regents since 1966, and is a trustee of Howard University. He serves on the Academy's Advisory Committee. This paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Mental Health in Boston on November 21, 1968. 9 by Kenneth B. Clark, 1969.
218
Journal of Religion and Health
Americans, and other peoples of the world who demand and indeed, insist-that democratic ideologies become the basis of their way of life. With these demands come rather rapid changes in status relationships among groups of human beings, demands for a shift in power arrangements. On the international front this is manifested in the fact that white Europeans no longer are the social and political masters of the peoples of Asia and Africa as they were in the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. Clearly, with these political shifts and social and status and power rearrangements has come a need for psychological readjustments, for changes in perspective. It may not be too distorted a perspective of the essential conflict of our times to suggest that the lag in psychological adjustments may be the essence of our present conflicts in our own nation and throughout the world. In America, most of our social conflicts seem to be centered in problems related to our cities, minority groups, and youth. Ironically, it seems that part of our problem is our inability to integrate success and affluence there has been a rapid rise in economic status of the masses of American whites during the last decades, but this success and affluence have not reached certain other groups. Between World War I and World War II, and increasingly after World War II, the masses of Negroes in the United States ceased to be Southern and rural; almost imperceptibly they became residents of cities, particularly in the North. By the latter part of the 1950's and throughout the 1960's, the civil rights struggle in America had, therefore, shifted its center of gravity from the southern states to northern urban centers. Most of our methods and techniques for dealing with this social conflict seem appropriate to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries version of the problem and certainly have so far not been particularly appropriate for dealing with the current civil rights problem. W e have not yet been able to make a readjustment in our thinking or in our methods or techniques that would seem relevant and appropriate to solutions.
Social Conflict and Mental Health
219
Certainly, neither litigation nor civil rights legislation has been successful in dealing with these Northern social problems. Nor have the more dramatic methods of direct confrontation, sit-ins, and boycotts seemed particularly relevant in raising the status of Negroes in northern urban centers. Specifically, the problems of the Negro in the North appear to be so complex, so deeply imbedded in our society as not to lend themselves to standard and customary remedy. Let me be specific. My own state of New York has a history of some of the strongest civil rights legislation in the areas of education, housing, and employment to be found anywhere in the United States. But ninety per cent of the children in New York City attend segregated schools. The Negro children in predominantly Negro schools are subjected to criminally inferior patterns of education similar to those common in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, or any of the seventeen states whose laws require or permit racial segregation in the schools. New York State has one of the strongest open-housing laws to be found in the nation. Yet more than ninety per cent of Negroes in the cities of New York are confined to residential ghettoes. New York State has a strong law prohibiting discrimination in jobs. The fact remains that the majority of Negroes, particularly males, are discriminated against in jobs. The difficulties that we face, the social conflict, seem to me to be clearly related to the fact that we are seeking to deal with present problems in relation to perspectives of the past. Indeed, if we look at the field of mental health we will see that this is so. I plead guilty here for my wife and for myself, for in setting up Northside Center for Child Development in the middle of one of the largest ghettoes of America, namely Harlem, we tried to set it up on the basis of the perspectives and the needs of the mental health field as it had developed for the middle-class white community. Our psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers sought to help emotionally disturbed children by means of the one-to-one doctor-client, doctor-patient relationship. I am almost
220
Journal of Religion and Health
ashamed to say that we continued this pattern for more than fifteen years. Only during the past five years did it occur to us and our staff that this was a bottomless-pit approach. Only then did we realize that we had to involve our Board of Directors and our staff in trying to rethink our approach and to develop techniques more appropriate to t h e nature of the problems that these children faeed. As a result, we dared to try to change the approach of Northside from the one-to-one relationship and to address the problems of the community, problems of justice and injustice, problems of inequity. It became clear to us that it was impossible, for the forseeable future at least, to train the number of clinicians and therapists necessary to attempt to salvage the vast number of human beings who were being wasted and in some eases destroyed in the Harlems throughout this nation. It became clear to us that we could not, given the negative realities inherent in the ghettoes of America, believe that we were really helping if we ignored these realities and if we attempted to get individual children and their parents to adjust to the fact that the schools of America's ghettoes are so criminally inferior as to be dehumanizing; that the filth and degradation this affluent society permits make it impossible for human beings to be creative, to be constructive; that the housing to whieh the masses of ehildren and their parents were sentenced by a society that had the economic resources but seemed not to have the moral resources or commitment to change; that we at Northside would be accessories to the soeial immorality if we asked our children and their parents to adjust to these pathologies, partieularly when it was clear to us that they were remediable. W e dared, therefore, to shift our emphasis to what we considered prophylactic eommunity concerns even as we continued to help individuals. Let me note what this required in terms of the desired health of the individual. Onee this perspective was clear, at least to us, it had to follow that the goals of therapy for individuals, which we eontinued, coexisted with our particular emphasis upon community and social change; that within the walls of the clinie we must try to develop in the parents and the children
Social Conflict and Mental Health
221
the personal strength, not to adjust to remediable pathology, but to attempt to change the pathology. Our standards of effectiveness, then, would have to be the number of parents and children who joined in community action geared to rational and effective social action and social change. W e felt that this was the only way in which these human beings could really deal with the problems of self-esteem and self-image in a positive way, that this was the only way in which it would be possible for them to resolve positively the negative self-image that a racially cruel society sought to impose upon them and their children. I must also confess that when we changed our perspective, in all candor we de-emphasized our eoneern for desegregation. W e postponed the pursuit of the goals for the desegregation of the schools and put in its place our concern with building the ego strengths of our families, parents and children, so that they could grapple effectively with the injustices surrounding them. W e do not claim that this was necessarily a new approach, but it was a new one for us. It was a new approach to social psychiatry. W e believe that those in the field of mental health who are really serious in their concern about the problems of social conflict are required to become involved with the problems of social change. It must now be recognized that such changes cannot be brought about merely by wishing for them or by good intentions, that the manifestations of social and racial cruelty tend to remain unless directly challenged and directly changed. There appears at least, and I now must talk of myself, no indirect way to the attainment of social justice. Social injustice degrades human beings, not only the victims of the injustice, but the perpetrators and the passive spectators of it. All human beings appear to me to be degraded and in a mental health crisis as long as they are active or passive participants in a society that inflicts or refuses to remedy the remediable inequities. Social psychiatry, I believe, must function on the basis of that obviously value-laden premise. Effective social change is a necessary antecedent or a
222
Journal of Religion and Health
concomitant of increasing the proportion of the human beings who are able to lead more effective lives, and this can come about only through the mobilization of the power required to change long-standing habits and practices in the social, economic, racial, and political realms of our society. A public health community approach to psychotherapy must seek to combine the skills, the methods, and the techniques of value-sensitive social scientists, socially-oriented clinicians, and social workers. The skills that are needed to develop a serious approach to community or prophylactic psychiatry and psychotherapy must be part of a value perspective of a value-oriented personnel and, I throw in, because I am not myself a clinician, with social scientists as part of the team. An initial step in this approach must involve the identifying, the appraising, the mobilizing, and the using, if possible, of the economic and social power within the larger community and developing as much constructive and creative and effective power in the victimized community as possible. Realistically, one must face the possibility that the corroding of facts of long-standing determinants and patterns of social and personal pathology might make the sources of reliable power and the basis of commitment minimal, quixotic, or nonexistent within the deprived community itself and certainly in the larger community which considers itself privileged or which is the beneficiary of the deprivation of others. This is an aspect of the diagnosis that cannot be avoided by sentimentalism or wishful thinking. The commitment to attempt to rescue the creativity and effectiveness of human beings must anticipate problems, difficulties, failures, exasperations of various sorts, because the attempt is in fact new, novel, frightening, and therefore must be approached as if one were conducting a large-scale human experiment. An effective approach to community psychiatry must also try to develop programs that will discourage dependency in the victims of oppression in our society and encourage a sense of initiative, a pride and confidence based upon reality and effectiveness and a demonstration of effectiveness. It would seem to me more important for the present victims of America's
Social Conflict and Mental Health,
223
inequities to learn how to work for social change themselves rather than to continue to have others provide them with occasional palliatives, gimmicks, token gestures, panaceas, or worse. This I believe to be the essence of serious and effective community public therapy. It combines the treatment of individuals, the techniques for the treatment of the society, and a persistence in confronting those aspects of the society that would resist the changes necessary before effective functioning in mental health becomes possible in the masses of the under-privileged and the privileged. It assumes that as the individual sees the possibility of becoming a part of meaningful social action, he not only develops a more positive self-image supported by the reality successes of his social action at least, but he also contributes to the movement of the society toward greater stability and justice. There will be many discouragements and problems and irrationalities from the point of view of the middle class; but these initial disturbances cannot be avoided, and one's motivation to pursue this approach will have to be based upon the seriousness of the goals. This is a part of the cyclic factor, the cycle of affirmation, the resistance to the initial demands and assertions of the victimized group, the continuation of the demands and affirmation, and the emergence of intelligent social action culminating in a new sense of human dignity. This cycle has been demonstrated in New York City in the decentralization-United Federation of Teachers struggle and the persistence of the people in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in their demand that they control the schools in order to be able to control the destiny of their children. Let me remind you that all the power of organized labor in New York City was initially arrayed against a rather straggly group of local board members; yet, in the agreement that ended the strike, the U.F.T. received only a verbal token price for calling off that strike--the basic substance of community control remained in the hands of the people of Ocean HillBrownsville. The night after the agreement, I visited with them. There was some
224
Journal of Religion and Health
paranoia, some suspicion, some evidence that the lack of the experience of victory in their lives made it impossible for them to believe that anything other than trickery or defeat was their lot again. But even as some of the more militant of the community people in Ocean Hill-Brownsville insisted that they had been tricked once more, I could see in many in that audience signs of the beginning of the possibility of renewed pride as I listed for them what the union had failed to achieve in its original demands: that it did not get the closing of the junior high school it had demanded; it did not get the abolition of the local governing board; it did not get the removal of the Negro Unit Administrator; it did not get the transfer of the seven principals. Albert Shanker, head of the U.F.T., had said that he would not settle that strike--he would not reopen the schools--until those four things were delivered to him by the political officials and by the Board of Education. Despite these ultimata, he was required to reopen the schools without the delivery of the price he had demanded. Many of the people on that community governing board felt that, because social action had not resulted in the continuation of rejection and defeat for them, whatever the final outcome, there was a possibility of victory. Effective social and community action in psychotherapy, community psychotherapy, cannot proceed without confrontations, without trauma, without resistance, without difficulties and myriads of crises and setbacks. Without these, the therapy is superficial and irrelevant to the basic and deepseated problems. This therapy will have to be even more disturbing, abrasive, threatening, confusing, and I must add, to all parties, than personal therapy can be or has been. No serious experiment in community mental health is without risk. All meaningful experiments involve risk of failure. The experiment suggested here involves not only the risk of failure, but also of intensification of conflict, the removal of all the defenses and the devices that sought to protect the insensitivity to injustice. I personally am not at all disturbed by backlash statements that result from such experiments or by suggestions that Negroes or any other oppressed
Social Conflict and Mental Health
225
minority groups should tone down their demands, because confrontation does not create backlash--it merely exposes it. The basic questions remaining, therefore, are: Has our society the moral resources and the strengths to accept the inherent challenges of serious social psychotherapy? Can we dare to open up the complex and difl]eult areas of long-standing social injustices and racial and economic dehumanization and expose them to the type of analysis and therapy that seems essential for cure? Or will we contrive to hide behind the many defenses and rationalizations and self-serving gimmicks and tokenism that seek to retard or to block relevant social action and social change? I think the answer to these basic questions will also be the answer to the question of whether the social and racial sickness afflicting America is still remediable or whether it is terminal. Social therapy, therefore, with all of its problems, with all of its pain, with all of its discomfort, is essential to national effectiveness if not to national survival.
217
Social Conflict and Problems of Mental Health
KENNETH
B. C L A R K
Future historians, I suppose, will try to find some way of describing our times succinctly. Some suggestions may be that this was a period of chronic crisis or continuous social conflict or of terrific pressures by society upon individuals. I would like to suggest that our times might be accurately described by future historians as that period in which man succeeded in getting to the moon before he had developed a fool-proof public address system. This is a period of almost normal, normative conflicts with types of conflicts related to extraordinarily rapid changes in various aspects of our society. The most obvious are tremendous technological changes, industrialization, ~.hanges in modes and techniques, and rapidity in transportation and communication. And with these, of course, come increased demands for political and social changes, domestic and international. Characteristic of our times is the fact that the European-American invention of democracy has been taken seriously by non-Europeans, nonKEZ~NETX~B. CLARK,PH.D., is President of the Metropolitan Applied Research Center, Inc., and Professor of Psychology of the City .College of the City University of New York. He has been a member of the New York State Board of Regents since 1966, and is a trustee of Howard University. He serves on the Academy's Advisory Committee. This paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Mental Health in Boston on November 21, 1968. 9 by Kenneth B. Clark, 1969.
218
Journal of Religion and Health
Americans, and other peoples of the world who demand and indeed, insist-that democratic ideologies become the basis of their way of life. With these demands come rather rapid changes in status relationships among groups of human beings, demands for a shift in power arrangements. On the international front this is manifested in the fact that white Europeans no longer are the social and political masters of the peoples of Asia and Africa as they were in the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. Clearly, with these political shifts and social and status and power rearrangements has come a need for psychological readjustments, for changes in perspective. It may not be too distorted a perspective of the essential conflict of our times to suggest that the lag in psychological adjustments may be the essence of our present conflicts in our own nation and throughout the world. In America, most of our social conflicts seem to be centered in problems related to our cities, minority groups, and youth. Ironically, it seems that part of our problem is our inability to integrate success and affluence there has been a rapid rise in economic status of the masses of American whites during the last decades, but this success and affluence have not reached certain other groups. Between World War I and World War II, and increasingly after World War II, the masses of Negroes in the United States ceased to be Southern and rural; almost imperceptibly they became residents of cities, particularly in the North. By the latter part of the 1950's and throughout the 1960's, the civil rights struggle in America had, therefore, shifted its center of gravity from the southern states to northern urban centers. Most of our methods and techniques for dealing with this social conflict seem appropriate to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries version of the problem and certainly have so far not been particularly appropriate for dealing with the current civil rights problem. W e have not yet been able to make a readjustment in our thinking or in our methods or techniques that would seem relevant and appropriate to solutions.
Social Conflict and Mental Health
219
Certainly, neither litigation nor civil rights legislation has been successful in dealing with these Northern social problems. Nor have the more dramatic methods of direct confrontation, sit-ins, and boycotts seemed particularly relevant in raising the status of Negroes in northern urban centers. Specifically, the problems of the Negro in the North appear to be so complex, so deeply imbedded in our society as not to lend themselves to standard and customary remedy. Let me be specific. My own state of New York has a history of some of the strongest civil rights legislation in the areas of education, housing, and employment to be found anywhere in the United States. But ninety per cent of the children in New York City attend segregated schools. The Negro children in predominantly Negro schools are subjected to criminally inferior patterns of education similar to those common in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, or any of the seventeen states whose laws require or permit racial segregation in the schools. New York State has one of the strongest open-housing laws to be found in the nation. Yet more than ninety per cent of Negroes in the cities of New York are confined to residential ghettoes. New York State has a strong law prohibiting discrimination in jobs. The fact remains that the majority of Negroes, particularly males, are discriminated against in jobs. The difficulties that we face, the social conflict, seem to me to be clearly related to the fact that we are seeking to deal with present problems in relation to perspectives of the past. Indeed, if we look at the field of mental health we will see that this is so. I plead guilty here for my wife and for myself, for in setting up Northside Center for Child Development in the middle of one of the largest ghettoes of America, namely Harlem, we tried to set it up on the basis of the perspectives and the needs of the mental health field as it had developed for the middle-class white community. Our psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers sought to help emotionally disturbed children by means of the one-to-one doctor-client, doctor-patient relationship. I am almost
220
Journal of Religion and Health
ashamed to say that we continued this pattern for more than fifteen years. Only during the past five years did it occur to us and our staff that this was a bottomless-pit approach. Only then did we realize that we had to involve our Board of Directors and our staff in trying to rethink our approach and to develop techniques more appropriate to t h e nature of the problems that these children faeed. As a result, we dared to try to change the approach of Northside from the one-to-one relationship and to address the problems of the community, problems of justice and injustice, problems of inequity. It became clear to us that it was impossible, for the forseeable future at least, to train the number of clinicians and therapists necessary to attempt to salvage the vast number of human beings who were being wasted and in some eases destroyed in the Harlems throughout this nation. It became clear to us that we could not, given the negative realities inherent in the ghettoes of America, believe that we were really helping if we ignored these realities and if we attempted to get individual children and their parents to adjust to the fact that the schools of America's ghettoes are so criminally inferior as to be dehumanizing; that the filth and degradation this affluent society permits make it impossible for human beings to be creative, to be constructive; that the housing to whieh the masses of ehildren and their parents were sentenced by a society that had the economic resources but seemed not to have the moral resources or commitment to change; that we at Northside would be accessories to the soeial immorality if we asked our children and their parents to adjust to these pathologies, partieularly when it was clear to us that they were remediable. W e dared, therefore, to shift our emphasis to what we considered prophylactic eommunity concerns even as we continued to help individuals. Let me note what this required in terms of the desired health of the individual. Onee this perspective was clear, at least to us, it had to follow that the goals of therapy for individuals, which we eontinued, coexisted with our particular emphasis upon community and social change; that within the walls of the clinie we must try to develop in the parents and the children
Social Conflict and Mental Health
221
the personal strength, not to adjust to remediable pathology, but to attempt to change the pathology. Our standards of effectiveness, then, would have to be the number of parents and children who joined in community action geared to rational and effective social action and social change. W e felt that this was the only way in which these human beings could really deal with the problems of self-esteem and self-image in a positive way, that this was the only way in which it would be possible for them to resolve positively the negative self-image that a racially cruel society sought to impose upon them and their children. I must also confess that when we changed our perspective, in all candor we de-emphasized our eoneern for desegregation. W e postponed the pursuit of the goals for the desegregation of the schools and put in its place our concern with building the ego strengths of our families, parents and children, so that they could grapple effectively with the injustices surrounding them. W e do not claim that this was necessarily a new approach, but it was a new one for us. It was a new approach to social psychiatry. W e believe that those in the field of mental health who are really serious in their concern about the problems of social conflict are required to become involved with the problems of social change. It must now be recognized that such changes cannot be brought about merely by wishing for them or by good intentions, that the manifestations of social and racial cruelty tend to remain unless directly challenged and directly changed. There appears at least, and I now must talk of myself, no indirect way to the attainment of social justice. Social injustice degrades human beings, not only the victims of the injustice, but the perpetrators and the passive spectators of it. All human beings appear to me to be degraded and in a mental health crisis as long as they are active or passive participants in a society that inflicts or refuses to remedy the remediable inequities. Social psychiatry, I believe, must function on the basis of that obviously value-laden premise. Effective social change is a necessary antecedent or a
222
Journal of Religion and Health
concomitant of increasing the proportion of the human beings who are able to lead more effective lives, and this can come about only through the mobilization of the power required to change long-standing habits and practices in the social, economic, racial, and political realms of our society. A public health community approach to psychotherapy must seek to combine the skills, the methods, and the techniques of value-sensitive social scientists, socially-oriented clinicians, and social workers. The skills that are needed to develop a serious approach to community or prophylactic psychiatry and psychotherapy must be part of a value perspective of a value-oriented personnel and, I throw in, because I am not myself a clinician, with social scientists as part of the team. An initial step in this approach must involve the identifying, the appraising, the mobilizing, and the using, if possible, of the economic and social power within the larger community and developing as much constructive and creative and effective power in the victimized community as possible. Realistically, one must face the possibility that the corroding of facts of long-standing determinants and patterns of social and personal pathology might make the sources of reliable power and the basis of commitment minimal, quixotic, or nonexistent within the deprived community itself and certainly in the larger community which considers itself privileged or which is the beneficiary of the deprivation of others. This is an aspect of the diagnosis that cannot be avoided by sentimentalism or wishful thinking. The commitment to attempt to rescue the creativity and effectiveness of human beings must anticipate problems, difficulties, failures, exasperations of various sorts, because the attempt is in fact new, novel, frightening, and therefore must be approached as if one were conducting a large-scale human experiment. An effective approach to community psychiatry must also try to develop programs that will discourage dependency in the victims of oppression in our society and encourage a sense of initiative, a pride and confidence based upon reality and effectiveness and a demonstration of effectiveness. It would seem to me more important for the present victims of America's
Social Conflict and Mental Health,
223
inequities to learn how to work for social change themselves rather than to continue to have others provide them with occasional palliatives, gimmicks, token gestures, panaceas, or worse. This I believe to be the essence of serious and effective community public therapy. It combines the treatment of individuals, the techniques for the treatment of the society, and a persistence in confronting those aspects of the society that would resist the changes necessary before effective functioning in mental health becomes possible in the masses of the under-privileged and the privileged. It assumes that as the individual sees the possibility of becoming a part of meaningful social action, he not only develops a more positive self-image supported by the reality successes of his social action at least, but he also contributes to the movement of the society toward greater stability and justice. There will be many discouragements and problems and irrationalities from the point of view of the middle class; but these initial disturbances cannot be avoided, and one's motivation to pursue this approach will have to be based upon the seriousness of the goals. This is a part of the cyclic factor, the cycle of affirmation, the resistance to the initial demands and assertions of the victimized group, the continuation of the demands and affirmation, and the emergence of intelligent social action culminating in a new sense of human dignity. This cycle has been demonstrated in New York City in the decentralization-United Federation of Teachers struggle and the persistence of the people in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in their demand that they control the schools in order to be able to control the destiny of their children. Let me remind you that all the power of organized labor in New York City was initially arrayed against a rather straggly group of local board members; yet, in the agreement that ended the strike, the U.F.T. received only a verbal token price for calling off that strike--the basic substance of community control remained in the hands of the people of Ocean HillBrownsville. The night after the agreement, I visited with them. There was some
224
Journal of Religion and Health
paranoia, some suspicion, some evidence that the lack of the experience of victory in their lives made it impossible for them to believe that anything other than trickery or defeat was their lot again. But even as some of the more militant of the community people in Ocean Hill-Brownsville insisted that they had been tricked once more, I could see in many in that audience signs of the beginning of the possibility of renewed pride as I listed for them what the union had failed to achieve in its original demands: that it did not get the closing of the junior high school it had demanded; it did not get the abolition of the local governing board; it did not get the removal of the Negro Unit Administrator; it did not get the transfer of the seven principals. Albert Shanker, head of the U.F.T., had said that he would not settle that strike--he would not reopen the schools--until those four things were delivered to him by the political officials and by the Board of Education. Despite these ultimata, he was required to reopen the schools without the delivery of the price he had demanded. Many of the people on that community governing board felt that, because social action had not resulted in the continuation of rejection and defeat for them, whatever the final outcome, there was a possibility of victory. Effective social and community action in psychotherapy, community psychotherapy, cannot proceed without confrontations, without trauma, without resistance, without difficulties and myriads of crises and setbacks. Without these, the therapy is superficial and irrelevant to the basic and deepseated problems. This therapy will have to be even more disturbing, abrasive, threatening, confusing, and I must add, to all parties, than personal therapy can be or has been. No serious experiment in community mental health is without risk. All meaningful experiments involve risk of failure. The experiment suggested here involves not only the risk of failure, but also of intensification of conflict, the removal of all the defenses and the devices that sought to protect the insensitivity to injustice. I personally am not at all disturbed by backlash statements that result from such experiments or by suggestions that Negroes or any other oppressed
Social Conflict and Mental Health
225
minority groups should tone down their demands, because confrontation does not create backlash--it merely exposes it. The basic questions remaining, therefore, are: Has our society the moral resources and the strengths to accept the inherent challenges of serious social psychotherapy? Can we dare to open up the complex and difl]eult areas of long-standing social injustices and racial and economic dehumanization and expose them to the type of analysis and therapy that seems essential for cure? Or will we contrive to hide behind the many defenses and rationalizations and self-serving gimmicks and tokenism that seek to retard or to block relevant social action and social change? I think the answer to these basic questions will also be the answer to the question of whether the social and racial sickness afflicting America is still remediable or whether it is terminal. Social therapy, therefore, with all of its problems, with all of its pain, with all of its discomfort, is essential to national effectiveness if not to national survival.
