The will of truth and educational intervention

????????????THE WILL FOR TRUTH AND EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTION

?The control and judgment exercised by the social service in interventions with users

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1. Description of the family unit receiving the educational action

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For some time now, the social service has been followed by a family unit made up of a single mother and two minor children. At the moment the lady is unemployed and looking for a new job. Known for a long time for the conflictual modalities implemented, it has a low capacity in relational mediation, marked impulsivity and reactivity.

The current educational intervention is inherent in the school fulfillment of the minor child.

In fact, the boy's mother presents difficulties in managing impulsiveness with the outside world but, at the same time, difficulties in establishing herself within the family, in the relationship with her children.

This, except when she has outbursts of anger, moments in which the woman imposes attention for her emotions on all members of the family, in these moments the relational horizon is saturated by the state of mind of the woman.

Nonetheless, she remains an affective and reference figure.

Precisely for this reason, the youngest child has developed a relational modality centered above all on information and much less on emotional aspects. In fact, he has difficult to make him express his emotions, feelings and moods.

The feeling is as if the boy moves like in a glassware where a wrong movement could damage the surrounding environment. In other words, the boy has learned to cope with the unpredictability of the environment, the reactions of the parental care environment, through the activation of rational thinking and the consequent inhibition of emotions and moods.

In fact, the relational environment of the nucleus in question presents as its main characteristics:

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- autonomy in the management of one's emotions when the mother, as written above, gives priority to her feelings regardless of ways and circumstances. Therefore, emotional autonomy is activated in this specific care environment, through the implicit request to take care of one's unpleasant state of mind when the care environment is not available to be responsive

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- together with the unpredictability of the maternal reactions, the minor reports that sometimes the father (separated for some time) cannot be trusted, he does not know if what he says is true or not. In fact, it sometimes happens that he does not come to pick him up at the agreed time or does not respect the commitments made on how to spend time together. So with the other reference figure, another difficulty is created relating to the reliability of the treatment.

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- poor autonomy of the boy because the lady has the perception that the child is younger than his own age, stimulating him little to autonomous behaviors such as cleaning himself in the bathroom or taking short trips alone.

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- the mother and the children are aware that they are on the edge of the neighborhood's sociability, the lady knows she has the reputation of a brawler and the children referred to as "the sons of the hustler".

The description made of the family nucleus, therefore, indicates a general situation of overt social hardship

where the educational reference points for the children are unstable, unclear and not very constant.

?This article brings some reflections on the effects deriving from the intervention of the social service on such a scenario.

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?2. Theoretical reference assumptions

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?There are three theoretical references identified:

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?I) Foucault describes well how, at the beginning of the 1800s, a passage from sovereign power to disciplinary power was observed, a passage in which, on the one hand, a new conceptualization of the single individual is conceived, no longer seen only as a mass, a group of persons and on the other, a theoretical normalization of the behavior of individuals with consequent intervention in the event of deviations from this line.

Like other agencies such as former mental hospitals for psychiatry or the police, the social service also has this function, ie it intervenes to normalize the deviance.

The normalization intervention conveys control and correction messages that must be taken into account beyond the banal equation - social unease and therefore corrective action -?which means: where there is a situation of malaise, remedial action is welcome!

It is necessary to ask ourselves what the presuppositions linked to the normalization of deviant behaviors entails, the values put into play, for those who receive this intervention, the perception aroused by these assumptions. The analysis must be made more complex by introducing a further level.

Once the "social case" has been described, it is necessary to insert in the analysis of the situation the weight of what implies being called to return to the order established by a regulatory and control agency. I repeat what is written above: thinking of the intervention in purely "orthopedic" terms of correction tout court, as if it were the social service a pure eye that observes with wonderful clarity where a deviation from the norm is detected, is an idea as reassuring as it is false.

It is therefore necessary to think about the social case with social work, since it is from the analysis of this interaction that a more explanatory dimension of the family's reactions emerges.

To do this, we resort to the theoretical help offered by complex thinking.

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II) Edgar Morin theorizes complex thought as a way of thinking about reality, far away, contrary to the mutilating thought typical of reductionism which, with Descartes in the early decades of the 1600s, imposed itself as a guiding paradigm in Western thought.

There are three characteristics of complex thinking that guide our reflection. The description made of the family nucleus, therefore, indicates a general situation of social hardship         

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a) reality is defined simultaneously in terms not only complementary, but also competing and antagonistic

b) the immanence of recursive processes in which the effects are at the same time the cause of the process because they retroact on the system

c) the hologramatic principle in which the whole is in every part that is in the whole

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The sociologist reminds us that reality is not what falls within the logical discourse but what resists it. So make the reflection more complex to explore what resists, that is, the lady's very resistances to correcting problems.

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III) Finally, this reflection is made even more urgent by what Foucault theorized about the order of the discourse.

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In its elaboration, the French philosopher investigates the subtle instances that regulate the diffusion of truths considered as such by a specific society. How they are conveyed by the speeches, that is, by the contents of the language considered true. Among these I remember the will to truth, understood as the disguised order that governs all other instances. I believe that this instance of controlling the circulation of speech is vast and distributed on several levels. Every institutional system seems to be able to include among its emergencies that of the will to truth as the new capacity of the system (which, as Morin recalls, is less and more than the sum of its parts) to inhibit meta-reflection, by virtue of the protection of its own truth. The inhibited meta-reflection, that is the desire not to include the user's opinion in the reflection, potentially destructuring as it brings a different look from the system in question.

?The will to truth can be seen as the will to impose the true discourse because it is pronounced by the holder of the right, who is made, de facto, the holder of the discourse: it is true because he has the right to pronounce it.

This is the perversion of the concluding aphorism of the Wittgenstein Treaty:

“what one cannot speak of, one must be silent”.

Conceived as a limit, that of the Treaty, disconnected from the will to truth, but as a condition of logical legitimacy that oriented towards truth.

In the will to truth, on the other hand, one must remain silent not to orient to truth but to legitimize the holding of the power of the institution which is expressed through the individual personalities who make it operational, on a hierarchical basis in which the lower level is included. user himself made part of the institution. One must be silent just to say the truth, different from the real acceptable.

The social service, institutionally mandated and authorized, is perceived as a source of truth that can produce speeches that define whoever receives the corrective action. Coincidence between detention of law and truth. Whoever holds the right, knows a truth about the other regardless of this.

The relationship between knowledge / power indicated by Bauman with regard to the characteristics of the post-modern age is re-proposed.

The will to truth must therefore be circumvented because it is capable of masking the truth. Tortuous terrain for social work, facing this type of discourse, which is based both on the conditions objectifying the truth of the person, sanctioned with the production of documents by the legal institution, and on the construction of meanings inherent to the human being within vast regulatory contexts in which the “either… or” logic applies.

This is a considerable complexity on which this institution moves, an unstable dividing line because it must integrate the "inside or outside" brought about by the objective order of the law and the disorder, the danger brought about by the personal experience and behavior of the other. much more vague and opaque. On the one hand, a truth is produced about the person being followed as an individual at a disadvantage. This asymmetrical position makes concrete the possibility of generating the vision of truth.

This truth is a pervasive assumption in the perceptions of the professionals involved in the project as it clearly permeates the resulting perception of the person followed.

It is necessary to go against the tide, reflect on the user's personal experience, regarding the inconvenience generated by the intervention of the institution.

1. Terms antagonistic to the corrective action

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Taking up what was written earlier on complex thought, the philosopher indicates, in order to better understand reality, how it is necessary, in fact, to question oneself not only on the complementary terms that reinforce the discourse but also on the antagonistic ones that weaken it. That is not to focus only on a collection of data and observations that go to corroborate the status of a deviant person, but also those observations that disconfirm this status. Otherwise, the risk is that we remain in an enormous narrative tautology that is true "as we say it".

In other words, in the social unease equation, therefore corrective intervention where in a tautological way the intervention of the social service is defined as correct (and the right is represented in a self-evident way by the deviant behavior of the other on which the action falls) corrective), it is necessary to ask what is the share of discomfort brought about by the corrective intervention of the social service itself.

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The intervention is generated starting from a defect situation, the recipient is introduced into ?context in which he is required to repair, to intervene on an incorrect situation.

The opening words are linked to the devaluation: this is the amount of discomfort that is given to the person in the first place. Devaluation, experiences of inadequacy, discomfort, perception of loss of a share of freedom and self-determination to the extent that the court requires intervention. Due to the nature of this type of intervention, that is the macro context of management of the order in which it is inserted, it is inevitable that such mechanisms are generated. These considerations should be included in the above equation, making it more complex :

social discomfort therefore corrective action therefore increased discomfort

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It is therefore necessary to include the antagonist term discomfort as the first characteristic of the complex thinking mentioned above.

By doing so, the second characteristic is also highlighted, that is, the recursive character in which the effect of the corrective intervention is at the same time a cause on why it also generates the discomfort it is trying to solve.

The will to truth unfolds on this level in which the complexity of reality is hardly accepted and observed.

Corrective action is done because they are in default beyond doubt.

The prerequisites for the intervention do not need to be revised since they are self-explanatory.

In other words, the mechanism in which the observer is included in the observation is inhibited at its root: the institutional system that observes itself, which places in the heart of the will to truth, always equal to itself, the unspeakable, a other, different share of truth.

The use of the meta-reflexive mechanism compensates for the amount of discomfort generated by the implementation of the intervention itself.

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3. the service observes its own intervention

This mechanism imposes mutual recognition on the user-service relationship on a level of co-responsibility for the process.

If the observer, the service operator, observes this reflection, he will retroactively affect his relationship with the user.

It is not a trivial matter, the subtle forces of relationships are hardly perceptible and very present.

In Paul Watzlawick's five axioms of communication, the first indicates that it is impossible not to communicate.

So if the perception is that any act of the person is because it is what is expected of individuals who need regulatory interventions, that is, that these people can only produce dissonant behaviors to be reduced with the imposition of the correct mode of action, then this will be communicated beyond the purely verbal level and, paradoxically, the person's behavior will be reinforced rather than extinguished.

The social service needs to be aware of the discomfort generated in the person who is the subject of the intervention so that it can be transformed from "case" to individual.

In a horizon of order in which the path of action is traced, in which the doubt introduced by the self-analysis of one's act is denied and not foreseen, in which, we could say that the unknown is removed, it is necessary to introduce the given risk from the questioning of one's own assumption of interventionist correctness.

The risk, the disorder, the chaos, as Edgar Morin explains, can be generative.

In writing the equation "social discomfort therefore corrective intervention therefore increased discomfort", we observe a hellish recursion attributable, as we said, to the second characteristic of complex thinking reported above: the coincidence of the cause with the effect. The equation could be further complicated as follows:

social unease then corrective action then increase in unease then corrective action then increase in unease then increase ...

This is what happens.

The person in question is seen as eternally correctable, namely the gaze of correction will be continuous until further indicated. Maybe progress will be observed and the person will be recognized but the chain of discomfort - correction - discomfort - has not yet been broken ...

The gaze that is extended to the individual

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4. suspension of the intervention

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It is necessary to suspend "the eternal intervention", each meeting is eternally corrective, in which the relational space is saturated by the perception, by the gaze, that the service sends back to the user. It is necessary to introduce the observation of the service on oneself that allows to identify the revision, the revision to be made to the action of the service itself.

And the review coincides with the suspension of the corrective action.

In the case in question, it was possible to create an educational alliance with the mother when a message was introduced in which the person felt that she could ultimately decide on the fate of her intervention.

Once the terms of the situation were clarified, the decision on whether to accept or not was left to the lady. This made it possible to launch an indispensable message, namely that the authority represented by the social service believed it capable of competence and autonomy in its own self-determination, collapsing the aspect of the only negative judgment without interruption.

This small junction in the perception that service operators may have of their work, this small introduction of the suspension of the intervention (although it requires a long process of elaboration ...), of the empty space not saturated by the corrective action, of the hazard that affects on the will to truth through the free choice of the other, has allowed the action of the social service to pursue a deeper goal than the already important one of school attendance.

Above it was written that the lady has difficulty in reproaching herself, in imposing herself on her son regarding school attendance.

Thinking back to the personal history of women, we see a normativity that coincides with coercion, devaluation.

The rule is used only to impose, the world is a place of conflict, lack of trust, continuous doubt about the intentions of others.

Towards her child, this mother does not dare to use force, the parental norm: it literally short-circuits because the educational action that the norm cannot be done out of love.

This is not what ?she experienced.

You either love or discipline.

This dichotomy does not give the woman access to implement maternal action in a deeper way, an idiosyncrasy that emerges in the perception of the younger child: the mother followed by a service is not sufficiently suitable for the task.

A defective mother. Different from other mothers.

Why should it be monitored in educational action?

What makes it different, out of the ordinary?

The awareness of being in a fallacious, disqualified family emerges from the interviews with the boy, over time he managed to talk about his emotional states more.

Where the service refers to the woman, verbatim, "she decides", it performs an operation in which it allows the person in question to be meritorious to return to the discourse of the order.

Through the suspension of the corrective gaze, the possibility opens up of giving a new gaze with which the lady can look at herself, in addition to the usual gaze.

A small opening that allows an alliance with the norm embodied by social work.

The possibility of having a normative background from which the lady is recognized in positive terms, with which she has created an equal alliance and a coherence of intervention together with the school, gives the entire nucleus a better perception of herself through the improvement of the image of self of the lady.

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5. changes

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It was observed that the mother began to tolerate being able to be more authoritative towards her child without fear of being experienced as a bad mother, because part of the improvement in her self-esteem was saved by the social service itself in the act of suspending her own. action.

The willingness to face much feared medical examinations with the support of operators was also an indirect consequence of the intervention.

Again, the lady has decided to invest energy to attend training courses by improving their job opportunities.

In fact, over time it has been observed that the focus of the educational action, through direct intervention on the child, has been to involve the mother in the educational action itself, allowing her through a recognition of competence to share fears and difficulties.

The boy was given back a more adequate, more acceptable mother, an ally of the order that requires children to go to school among other things. In other words, a less dissonant mother who is more immersed in the role.

This has a profound feedback on the boy himself beyond the direct action of the woman regarding school attendance, that is, the perception of a parenting background that is more caring that acts correctly, that takes care of deciding for the boy's sake regardless of the whims of the moment.

By introducing the hazard, the unknown data, brought about by the suspension of the will to truth connected to the continuous corrective action, allowing the person to make his or her choice, it has led to another truth.

Mind you: it is possible, if not certain, that for other situations the intervention should be implemented in different ways. The modality in which it has been declined is not unique for every situation, it is good for a class of interventions and not necessarily for all the others.

Nevertheless, the considerations inherent in the value of a control function relating to social service, the will to truth as an order of the present and pervasive discourse, the suspension

of continuous corrective intervention, are common reference points for all interventions that can be declined according to the situation, in different ways.

This is because, I presume that the interventions of care, educational, institutional must not only be the expression of a pre-established order in which the representation of the person is only postponed as safe and certain, but can clear new representations of the individual to the individual himself, others truths inherent in the person.

If we assume that what each of us is is never established forever, but is modified indefinitely by the people and stimuli he will encounter in life and that those people and those stimuli will modify us as only they could, it follows that our evolutions future reside in the world events we will encounter.

?What we will be resides in us but also outside of us, outside of any will to truth.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Edgar MORIN, ?Introduzione al pensiero complesso – Sperling e Kupfer

Edgar MORIN,?Il Metodo?Vol. I La natura della natura – Raffaello Cortina Editore

Edgar MORIN , Il Metodo Vol. II La vita della vita – Raffaello Cortina Editore

Edgar MORIN , Conoscenza, ignoranza, mistero – Raffaello Cortina Editore

Paul WATZLAWICK, Pragmatica della comunicazione umana – Casa Editrice Astrolabio

Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN, Tractatus logico – philosophicus –???Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi

Michel FOUCAULT , L’ordine del discorso – Giulio Einaudi Editore

Michel FOUCAULT, Il potere psichiatrico – Feltrinelli Editore