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On This Day … 31 March [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1930 – Yehuda Nir, Polish-American psychiatrist (d. 2014).

People (Deaths)

  • 2007 – Paul Watzlawick, Austrian-American psychologist and philosopher (b. 1921).

Yehuda Nir

Yehuda Nir (31 March 1930 to 19 July 2014) was a Polish-born American Holocaust survivor, psychiatrist and author of The Lost Childhood.

Nir posed as a Roman Catholic and learned Latin to escape Nazi persecution in Poland during World War II. Nir’s ordeal led him to a career as a psychiatrist, specialising in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and severely ill children. He immigrated to the United States in 1959 to complete medical residencies in New York City and Philadelphia. He served as the chief of child psychiatry of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre from 1979 until 1986.

Paul Watzlawick

Paul Watzlawick (25 July 1921 to 31 March 2007) was an Austrian-American family therapist, psychologist, communication theorist, and philosopher.

A theoretician in communication theory and radical constructivism, he commented in the fields of family therapy and general psychotherapy. Watzlawick believed that people create their own suffering in the very act of trying to fix their emotional problems. He was one of the most influential figures at the Mental Research Institute and lived and worked in Palo Alto, California.

Who is Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus?

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Introduction

Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus (born 07 March 1978) is a Brazilian psychologist, writer, and LGBT activist.

Biography

Jesus is the daughter of a computer operator and a mining science teacher. She has a sibling, a younger brother. Jesus lived most of her life in Ceilândia.

A good student, she studied chemistry, for a year before switching majors. She holds an M.Sc. in Psychology from the University of Brasília, and a PhD in Social Psychology, Work and Organisations from the same institution.

She worked at the University of Brasília from 2003-2008 as a diversity adviser and also coordinated a centre for black students. She was one of the organisers of Brasilia’s Pride parade, and participated in the development of Brazil’s goals for the UN’s Millennium Dome. Jesus has proactively addressed discriminatory actions, refusing to accept passive prejudice. She began her human rights activism in 1997, with “Estructuración”, a Brasilia homosexual group, serving first as secretary and in 1999, became president. In that period, she worked alongside government and educational institutions, in fighting prejudice and valuing differences, speaking at the opening of the 5th National Conference on Human Rights.

Jesus participated in various social movements. In 2000, with Luiz Mott, she co-founded the Academic Association of Gays, Lesbians and Sympathizers of Brazil, serving as general secretary. She was appointed to the editorial board of the Grupo Gay Negro de Bahia; and founded the NGO Acciones Ciudades en Orientación sexual.

Key Publications

  • Homofobia : identificar e prevenir, 2015 (tr. “homophobia: identifying and preventing”).
  • Ainda que tardia : escravidão e liberdade no Brasil contemporâneo, 2016 (tr. “Although late: slavery and freedom in contemporary Brazil”).

Who was Morton Bard?

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Introduction

Morton Bard (born 07 March 1924 in Brooklyn, New York and died 04 December 1997) was an American psychologist, known for the research he undertook on the psychology of crime victims. He was a one-time member of the New York Police Department, a psychologist, and a professor who studied the reactions of crime victims.

Bard, in partnership with the police, conducted studies of crime victims (e.g. hostages, rape victims, and the families of murder victims). He published two volumes on domestic violence and crisis intervention. He also is recognised for having laid the foundation of victim-focused training into many law enforcement academies and the FBI National Academy.

In 1979, Bard co-authored The Crime Victim’s Book. This volume provides practical information on how best to identify and support the needs of crime victims. The Crime Victim’s Book was considered a “bible” for not only advocates but also crime victims. He is considered to have been a pivotal critical thinker in the development of the modern discipline of crisis intervention. He also wrote scholarly articles on the training of police officers in the application of different forms of crisis intervention out in the field.

Education

Bard received a bachelor’s degree in 1947 from St. John’s University. He later went on to receive a master’s degree in 1948 and a doctorate in 1953, both in psychology from New York University.

Career

Bard started off his career in health psychology. From 1951 to 1961, he was a member of a clinical and research group at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre. There, he analysed the psychological effects of cancer and cancer surgery. During this time, Bard shifted the psychological focus from the role of personality in predisposing one to illnesses to the psychological consequences of living with illnesses like cancer.

From 1965 to 1970, Bard taught at the City College of New York and was the director of its Psychology Centre. In 1971, Bard joined CUNY’s graduate school and university centre. He was a professor in the graduate school’s doctoral programs in social psychology and criminal justice. At the CUNY Graduate School, Bard studied hostage situations, third-party interventions in disputes, and the effects of personal crimes. Bard was a psychology professor at the City University of New York until his retirement in 1986.

In 1982, Bard was named chairman of the American Psychological Association’s task force on victims of crime and violence. In 1982, he was awarded the New York State Psychological Association ’s Kurt Lewin Award.

In 1985, he was appointed to a committee to advise the New York Mayor, Edward I. Koch, on the police department. The panel went on to make recommendations that included comprehensive changes in the training of police officers. Bard laid down the groundwork for training police as specialists in family crisis intervention. This included training for police officers on innovative crime prevention and mental health techniques so they were better able to provide immediate crisis intervention when emergencies arose and other professionals (e.g. social workers, psychologists) were not available.

In the 1980s, Bard was a consultant in psychology to the departments of medicine and neurology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, which in 1987 awarded him the Arthur M. Sutherland Award for “pioneering research in psycho-oncology.”

He was also the American Cancer Society’s national vice president for service and rehabilitation from 1986 to 1991.

Personal Life

Bard married Arlene Cohen in 1948 and had two daughters (Erica Riley and Pamela Richlin).

Death

Bard died of cancer in his home in Atlanta, Georgia at the age of 73 on 04 December 1997.

Publications

Bard, M., & Sutherland, A. M. (1955). Psychological impact of cancer and its treatment IV. Adaptation to radical mastectomy. Cancer, 8(4), 656-672.

Bard, M., & Berkowitz, B. (1967). Training police as specialists in family crisis intervention: A community psychology action program. Community Mental Health Journal, 3, 315–317.

Bard, M. (1969). Family intervention police teams as a community mental health resource. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science, 60, 247–250.

Bard, M., & Sangrey. D. (1986). The Crime Victim’s Book. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press.

Zacker, J., & Bard, M. (1973). Effects of conflict management training on police performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 58(2), 202.

What is Foreclosure (Psychoanalysis)?

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Introduction

Foreclosure (also known as “foreclusion”; French: forclusion) is the English translation of a term that the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan introduced into psychoanalysis to identify a specific psychical cause for psychosis.

Brief History

According to Élisabeth Roudinesco, the term was originally introduced into psychology ‘in 1928, when Édouard Pichon published, in Pierre Janet’s review, his article on “The Psychological Significance of Negation in French”: “…[and] borrowed the legal term forclusif to indicate facts that the speaker no longer sees as part of reality’.

According to Christophe Laudou, the term was introduced by Damourette and Pichon.

Freud vs Laforgue

The publication took part against the background of the Twenties dispute between Freud and René Laforgue over scotomisation. ‘If I am not mistaken’, Freud wrote in 1927, ‘Laforgue would say in this case that the boy “scotomises” his perception of the woman’s lack of a penis. A new technical term is justified when it describes a new fact or emphasizes it. This is not the case here’. Freud went on to suggest that if one wanted to ‘reserve the word “Verdrängung” [“repression”] for the affect, then the correct German word for the vicissitude of the idea would be “Verleugnung” [“disavowal”]’.

Lacan’s Introduction of Foreclosure

In 1938 Lacan relates the origin of psychosis to an exclusion of the father from the family structure thereby reducing this structure to a mother-child relationship. Later on, when working on the distinctions between the real, imaginary and symbolic father, he specifies that it is the absence of the symbolic father which is linked to psychosis.

Lacan uses the Freudian term, Verwerfung, which the “Standard Edition” translates as “repudiation”, as a specific defence mechanism different from repression, “Verdrängung”, in which “the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with its affect and behaves as if the idea has never occurred to the ego at all.” In 1954 basing himself on a reading of the “Wolf Man” Lacan identifies Verwerfung as the specific mechanism of psychosis where an element is rejected outside the symbolic order as if it has never existed. In 1956 in his Seminar on Psychoses he translates Verwerfung as forclusion, that is foreclosure. “Let us extract from several of Freud’s texts a term that is sufficiently articulated in them to designate in them a function of the unconscious that is distinct from the repressed. Let us take as demonstrated the essence of my Seminar on the Psychoses, namely, that this term refers to psychosis: this term is Verwerfung (foreclosure)”.

Lacan and Psychosis

The problem Lacan sought to address with the twin tools of foreclosure and the signifier was that of the difference between psychosis and neurosis, as manifested in and indicated by language usage. It was common analytic ground that “when psychotics speak they always have some meanings that are too fixed, and some that are far too loose, they have a different relation to language, and a different way of speaking from neurotics.” Freud, following Bleuler and Jung had pointed to ‘a number of changes in speech…in schizophrenics…words are subjected to the same process as that which makes the dream’. Lacan used foreclosure to explain why.

When Lacan first uses the Freudian concept of Verwerfung (repudiation) in his search for a specific mechanism for psychosis, it is not clear what is repudiated (castration, speech). It is in 1957 in his article “On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis” that he advances the notion that it is the Name-of-the-Father (a fundamental signifier) that is the object of foreclosure. In this way Lacan combines two of his main themes on the causality of psychosis: the absence of the father and the concept of Verwerfung. This ideas remains central to Lacan’s thinking on psychosis throughout the rest of his work.

Lacan considered the father to play a vital role in breaking the initial mother/child duality and introducing the child to the wider world of culture, language, institutions and social reality – the Symbolic world – the father being “the human being who stands for the law and order that the mother plants in the life of the child…widens the child’s view of the world.” The result in normal development is “proper separation from the mother, as marked out by the Names-of-the-father.” Thus Lacan postulates the existence of a paternal function (the “Name of the Father” or “primordial signifier”) which allows the realm of the Symbolic to be bound to the realms of the Imaginary and the Real. This function prevents the developing child from being engulfed by its mother and allows him/her to emerge as a separate entity in his/her own right. It is a symbol of parental authority (a general symbol that represents the power of father of the Oedipus complex) that brings the child into the realm of the Symbolic by forcing him/her to act and to verbalise as an adult. As a result, the three realms are integrated in a way that is conducive to the creation of meaning and successful communication by means of what Lacan calls a Borromean knot.

When the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed for a particular subject, it leaves a hole in the Symbolic order which can never be filled. The subject can then be said to have a psychotic structure, even if he shows none of the classical signs of psychosis. When the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father re-appears in the Real, the subject is unable to assimilate it and the result of this collision between the subject and the inassimilable signifier of the Name-of-the-father is the entry into psychosis proper characterized by the onset of hallucinations and/or delusions. In other words, when the paternal function is “foreclosed” from the Symbolic order, the realm of the Symbolic is insufficiently bound to the realm of the Imaginary and failures in meaning may occur (the Borromean knot becomes undone and the three realms completely disconnected), with “a disorder caused at the most personal juncture between the subject and his sense of being alive.” Psychosis is experienced after some environmental sign in the form of a signifier which the individual cannot assimilate is triggered, and this entails that “the Name-of-the-Father, is foreclosed, verworfen, is called into symbolic opposition to the subject.” The fabric of the individual’s reality is ripped apart and no meaningful Symbolic sense can be made of experience. “Absence of transcendence of the Oedipus places the subject under the regime of foreclosure or non-distinction between the symbolic and the real’; and psychotic delusions or hallucinations are the consequent result of the individual’s striving to account for what he/she experiences.

What is Functional Analysis (Psychology)?

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Introduction

Functional analysis in behavioural psychology is the application of the laws of operant and respondent conditioning to establish the relationships between stimuli and responses.

To establish the function of operant behaviour, one typically examines the “four-term contingency”: first by identifying the motivating operations (EO or AO), then identifying the antecedent or trigger of the behaviour, identifying the behaviour itself as it has been operationalised, and identifying the consequence of the behaviour which continues to maintain it.

Functional assessment in behaviour analysis employs principles derived from the natural science of behaviour analysis to determine the “reason”, purpose, or motivation for a behaviour. The most robust form of functional assessment is functional analysis, which involves the direct manipulation, using some experimental design (e.g. a multielement design or a reversal design) of various antecedent and consequent events and measurement of their effects on the behaviour of interest; this is the only method of functional assessment that allows for demonstration of clear cause of behaviour.

Applications in Clinical Psychology

Functional analysis and consequence analysis are commonly used in certain types of psychotherapy to better understand, and in some cases change, behaviour. It is particularly common in behavioural therapies such as behavioural activation, although it is also part of Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy. In addition, functional analysis modified into a behaviour chain analysis is often used in dialectical behaviour therapy.

There are several advantages to using functional analysis over traditional assessment methods. Firstly, behavioural observation is more reliable than traditional self-report methods. This is because observing the individual from an objective stand point in their regular environment allows the observer to observe both the antecedent and the consequence of the problem behaviour. Secondly, functional analysis is advantageous as it allows for the development of behavioural interventions, either antecedent control or consequence control, specifically designed to reduce a problem behaviour. Thirdly, functional analysis is advantageous for interventions for young children or developmentally delayed children with problem behaviours, who may not be able to answer self-report questions about the reasons for their actions.

Despite these benefits, functional analysis also has some disadvantages. The first that no standard methods for determining function have been determined and meta-analysis shows that different methodologies appear to bias results toward particular functions as well as not effective in improving outcomes. Second, Gresham and colleagues (2004) in a meta-analytic review of JABA articles found that functional assessment did not produce greater effect sizes compared to simple contingency management programmes. However, Gresham et al. combined the three types of functional assessment, of which descriptive assessment and indirect assessment have been reliably found to produce results with limited validity Third, although functional assessment has been conducted with a variety host of populations much of the current functional assessment research has been limited to children with developmental disabilities.

Professional Organisations

The Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) also has an interest group in behaviour analysis, which focuses on the use of behaviour analysis in the school setting including functional analysis.

Doctoral level behaviour analysts who are psychologists belong to the American Psychological Association’s division 25 – Behaviour analysis. APA offers a diplomate in behavioural psychology and school psychology both of which focus on the use of functional analysis in the school setting.

The World Association for Behaviour Analysis offers a certification for clinical behaviour therapy and behavioural consultation, which covers functional analysis.

The UK Society for Behaviour Analysis also provides a forum for behaviour analysts for accreditation, professional development, continuing education and networking, and serves as an advocate body in public debate on issues relating to behaviour analysis. The UK-SBA promotes the ethical and effective application of the principles of behaviour and learning to a wide range of areas including education, rehabilitation and health care, business and the community and is committed to maintaining the availability of high-quality evidence-based professional behaviour analysis practice in the UK. The society also promotes and supports the academic field of behaviour analysis with in the UK both in terms of university-based training and research, and theoretical develop.

Who was Adolf Meyer?

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Introduction

Adolf Meyer (13 September 1866 to 17 March 1950) was a Swiss-born psychiatrist who rose to prominence as the first psychiatrist-in-chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital (1910-1941).

Adolf Meyer.

He was president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1927-1928 and was one of the most influential figures in psychiatry in the first half of the twentieth century. His focus on collecting detailed case histories on patients was one of the most prominent of his contributions. He oversaw the building and development of the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, opened in April 1913, making sure it was suitable for scientific research, training and treatment. Meyer’s work at the Phipps Clinic is possibly the most significant aspect of his career.

Meyer’s main theoretical contribution was his idea of ergasiology (a term he derived from the Greek for “working” and “doing”) to describe a psychobiology. This brought together all the biological, social and psychological factors and symptoms pertaining to a patient. It considered mental illnesses to be a product of dysfunctional personality not a pathology of the brain. Believing that whole-life social and biological factors should be central to both diagnosis and treatment Meyer was one of the earliest psychologists to support occupational therapy as an important connection between the activities of an individual and their mental health, and incorporated community based activities and services to develop people’s everyday living skills.

Personal Life and Education

Adolf Meyer was born in Niederweningen, Switzerland, in 1866. He was the son of a Zwinglian pastor. Meyer received his MD from the University of Zurich in 1892, where he studied neurology under Auguste Forel. During his time at the university, he studied abroad in Paris, London and Edinburgh, working under John Hughlings Jackson and Jean-Martin Charcot. Unable to secure an appointment with the university, he emigrated to the United States in 1892. Meyer married Mary Brooks on 15 September 1902. They had one daughter, Julia Lathrup Meyer, on 14 February 1916. Meyer died on 17 March 1950, in Baltimore, Maryland, at the age of 83 of a heart attack.

Medical Career

Early Career

After moving to the United States, Meyer first practiced neurology and teaching at the University of Chicago, where he was exposed to the ideas of the Chicago functionalists. He was unable to find a paid full-time post at the University of Chicago, so his time at the university was short-lived. From 1893 to 1895, he served as pathologist at the new mental hospital at Kankakee, Illinois, after which he worked at the state hospital at Worcester, Massachusetts from 1895 to 1902, all the while publishing papers prolifically in neurology, neuropathology, and psychiatry.

Time in New York

In 1902, he became director of the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospital system (shortly afterwards given its present name, The Psychiatric Institute), where in the next few years he shaped much of American psychiatry by emphasizing the importance of keeping detailed patient records and by introducing both Emil Kraepelin’s classificatory system and Sigmund Freud‘s ideas. While in the New York State Hospital system, Meyer was one of the first importers of Freud’s ideas about the importance both of sexuality and of the formative influence of early rearing on the adult personality. Meyer found many of Freud’s ideas and therapeutic methods insightful and useful, but he rejected psychoanalysis as a wholesale etiological explanation of mental disorders in favour of his own theory of psychobiology. He never practiced psychoanalysis and always kept it at arm’s length from Johns Hopkins because of Freud’s increasingly dogmatic insistence on the psychical causation of mental illnesses. As he wrote in his presidential address to the 84th Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association: “Those who imagine that all psychiatry and psychopathology and therapy have to resolve themselves into a smattering of claims and hypotheses of psychoanalysis and that they stand or fall with one’s feelings about psychoanalysis, are equally misguided”. Meyer was Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University from 1904 to 1909.

The Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins

In 1908, Meyer was asked to become the director of a new psychiatric clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital after Henry Phipps Jr. donated 1.5 million dollars to open the clinic. Meyer accepted the offer, which he described as “the most important professorship [in psychiatry] in the English-speaking domain.” He oversaw the building and development of the clinic and made sure the building was suitable for scientific research, training and treatment. The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic opened in April 1913.

Meyer’s work at the Phipps Clinic is arguably the most significant aspect of his career. His model for the Phipps Clinic combined clinical and laboratory work, which was the first time these elements were combined in a mental institute in the United States. Though the Phipps Clinic did not use the clinical model of Emil Kraepelin, Meyer did incorporate some of Kraepelin’s practices into the clinic. These practices include extensive observations of the patients and studying both the pre-symptomatic and remissive phases of mental illness, along with periods of acute illness.

Meyer also served as a Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine from 1910 to 1941. In his beginning years at Johns Hopkins, Meyer helped oversee the work of a few of his aspiring students. Phyllis Greenacre, from the University of Chicago, and Curt Richter, a Harvard graduate, both had the opportunity to study under Meyer. Most notably, Richter studied the behaviour of rats with Meyer and John Watson, a behavioural psychologist. Adolf Meyer worked at Johns Hopkins until his retirement in 1941.

Legacy

People

Many of Meyer’s students went on to make significant contributions to American psychiatry or psychoanalysis, though not necessarily as Meyerians. Most of the founders of the New York Psychoanalytic Society had worked under Meyer at Manhattan State Hospital, including its chief architect Abraham Arden Brill, and Charles Macfie Campbell.

Meyer and William Henry Welch played an instrumental role in Clifford Beers’ founding of the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene in 1908. Under Meyer’s direction, Leo Kanner founded the first child psychiatry clinic in the United States at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1930.

Contributions to Psychology

Meyer’s main contribution was in his ideas of psychobiology, where he focused on addressing all biological, social and psychological factors and symptoms pertaining to a patient. Meyer coined the term “ergasiology”, which has Greek roots for “working” and “doing”, as another way to classify psychobiology. One of his ideas was that mental illnesses were a product of a dysfunctional personality and not from the pathology of the brain. He also stressed the idea that social and biological factors that affect someone throughout their entire life should be heavily considered when diagnosing and treating a patient. Another contribution of Meyer was that he was one of the earlier psychologists that supported occupational therapy. He thought there was an important connection between the activities of an individual and their mental health. Taking this into consideration he looked for community based activities and services to aid people with everyday living skills.

Meyer was a strong believer in the importance of empiricism, and advocated repeatedly for a scientific, and, particularly, a biological approach to understanding mental illness. He hoped that the Phipps Clinic would help put mental illness on the same ground as every other human illness. He insisted that patients could best be understood through consideration of their “psychobiological” life situations. He reframed mental disease as biopsychosocial “reaction types” rather than as biologically specifiable natural disease entities. In 1906, he reframed dementia praecox as a “reaction type”, a discordant bundle of maladaptive habits that arose as a response to biopsychosocial stressors.

Meyer was also involved with the Eugenics Records Office, which he viewed as a natural extension of the mental hygiene movement which he helped to create. He served on the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society for 12 years, from 1923 to 1935. Meyer’s views on eugenics have not yet been studied closely and his association with the Eugenics Record Office cannot be equated straightforwardly with the extremism of some eugenicists, especially in light of the fact that the fundamental premise of Meyerian psychobiology contradicted the genetic determinism that underpinned scientific racism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Publications

Meyer never published a textbook. Between 1890 and 1943, he published roughly 400 articles in scientific and academic journals, mostly in English, but also in his native German and in French. Most were published together after his death in 1950 in four bound volumes called The Collected Papers of Adolf Meyer.

  • The Collected Papers of Adolf Meyer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1951).
  • The Anatomical Facts and Clinical Varieties of Traumatic Insanity (1904).
  • The Nature and Conception of Dementia Praecox (1910).
  • Constructive Formulation of Schizophrenia (1922).

On This Day … 30 March [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1882 – Melanie Klein, Austrian-English psychologist and author (d. 1960).

People (Deaths)

  • 1873 – Bénédict Morel, Austrian-French psychiatrist and physician (b. 1809).

Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein (née Reizes; 30 March 1882 to 22 September 1960) was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis.

She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein suggested that pre-verbal existential anxiety in infancy catalysed the formation of the unconscious, resulting in the unconscious splitting of the world into good and bad idealisations. In her theory, how the child resolves that split depends on the constitution of the child and the character of nurturing the child experiences; the quality of resolution can inform the presence, absence, and/or type of distresses a person experiences later in life.

Benedict Morel

Bénédict Augustin Morel (22 November 1809 to 30 March 1873) was a French psychiatrist born in Vienna, Austria.

He was an influential figure in the field of degeneration theory during the mid-19th century.

Who is Tanya Byron?

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Introduction

Tanya Byron (born 06 April 1967) is a British psychologist, writer, and media personality, best known for her work as a child therapist on television shows Little Angels and The House of Tiny Tearaways.

She also co-created the BBC Two sitcom The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle with Jennifer Saunders, and still contributes articles to various newspapers.

In 2008, she became Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Edge Hill University and is the first and current Chancellor of the same institution.

Early Life

Byron’s father was the film and television director John Sichel, founder of ARTTS International in Yorkshire. Her mother was a nursing sister and a model.

When Byron was 15 years old, her German-born paternal grandmother was murdered by being battered to death by a woman who abused illicit drugs. Her grandmother knew the woman, who was in pursuit of money. Byron was perplexed by this cruelty, and at about that time she began to try to understand how anyone could do such a terrible thing and began to be interested in psychology.

Education

Byron was educated at North London Collegiate School, University of York (BSc Psychology, 1989), University College London (MSc Clinical Psychology, 1992), and University of Surrey (PhD, 1995). Her PhD thesis was entitled “The evaluation of an outpatient treatment programme for stimulant drug misuse”, and was completed at University College Hospital.

Career

Prior to training in Clinical Psychology, Byron worked as a researcher on the BBC’s Video Diaries documentary series. Once she qualified, Byron worked in the British National Health Service for 18 years in a number of public health areas such as drug addiction, STDs, and mental disorders.

In 2005, Byron was featured on French and Saunders’ Christmas Special as herself, who came in to sort out Dawn and Jennifer’s childish behaviour on the show. Subsequently, she co-wrote the series The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle with Jennifer Saunders. Byron has also co-authored a book on parenting based on the Little Angels show and two other books on child development and parenting, as well as writing weekly articles for The Times and contributing to several women’s magazines. She has also worked with the Home Office on the current changes to the Homicide Act as it relates to children and young people, and she also works with the National Family and Parenting Institute advising government and ministers on related policy.

In September 2007, it was announced that she would head an independent review in England – supported by the Department for Children, Schools, and Families, as well as the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport – into the potentially harmful effects of both the Internet and video games on children. This was published in March 2008 as “Safer Children in a Digital World”, but is commonly called the Byron Review.

In April 2008, Byron fronted a four-part show called Am I Normal? exploring the boundaries of acceptable behaviour.

In May 2008, she was elected as the first Chancellor of Edge Hill University, in Lancashire and installed at a ceremony in December 2008. Edge Hill University also appointed her to the post of Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, and she delivered her inaugural lecture, “The Trouble With Kids”, in March the following year.

In 2009, Byron was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of York.

Byron is the patron of Prospex, a charity which works with young people in North London. She is also a partner in a media company, Doris Partnership.

She has published The Skeleton Cupboard: The Making of a Clinical Psychologist in 2015.

Personal Life

Byron married The Bill actor Bruce Byron in Barnet, London, in 1997. They have a daughter (born 1995, Hendon, London) and a son (born 1998, Barnet). Tanya and Bruce met when Bruce applied to the very first ARTTS course.

Television

Little Angels

Tanya Byron, Stephen Briers, Rachel Morris and Laverne Antrobus became household names working on the British TV show Little Angels (which ran for three series), a docu-soap that follows the lives of families where the children have behavioural problems that are causing the parents difficulty. The show is seen as a ‘life line’ by the parents who are effectively calling professionals with years of experience of working with children and families to help them fix a problem that they believe beyond their ability to fix. Tanya Byron, Stephen Briers, Rachel Morris and Laverne Antrobus, monitor the behaviour of the family and the children before discussing with the parents the real underlying causes of the problem (which are nearly always in some way either caused by or contributed to by the parents themselves – usually by inadvertently rewarding inappropriate behaviour with their attention). They then discuss a course of action with them and later they coach them in how to change their own and their children’s behaviour to improve the situation (this is frequently done in scenes where the family is filmed doing something together with the parents receiving advice from the attending professional via an ear piece). The show is intended to be instructive to viewers in how to deal with common problems as well as of real help to the family being filmed (and of course entertaining).

The House of Tiny Tearaways

In 2005 Tanya began to host her own show called The House of Tiny Tearaways, a reality TV style show that brings three families experiencing problems into a large, purpose-built house where they are monitored and aided for a week. The show is vaguely similar to programmes like Big Brother, in that all the rooms have cameras in them and the families are frequently monitored in their activities with the audience shown highlights of a particular day. Each family stays in the house for six days in which time Tanya monitors them all for one day before having very honest and direct discussions with the parents about the issues and how they can be dealt with, and then guiding the families through courses of action, exercises and deliberate changes of behaviour on the parents’ side to deal with the problems. Tanya does not do this entirely singlehandedly, as one element of the programme is the support the parents receive from the other families who are in the house with them at the same time.

The show is characterised by: scenes of children misbehaving, therapy sessions between Tanya and the parents of the children (which are often very emotional and are sometimes the first time they have ever really discussed the problems they are facing), tasks in and outside the house which the families are set to help them practice the skills they have learnt (often having to do things they would normally find difficult, like take a child with eating problems to a restaurant) and by the ending, the families review any improvements or shortcomings they’ve made.

In 2007, Byron stated that she did not want to make any more television programmes on parenting as it had become “a well-marketed area”.

Am I Normal?

In 2008 Tanya presented a four-part series called Am I Normal? exploring the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. The episodes explore the themes of addiction, faith, sex and body image. The programme presents both behaviours and treatments which Dr Byron is able to explore objectively but with some common sense cynicism. Is having sex with 5,000 men within the range of normal behaviour? Is being attracted to pre-pubescent girls okay if you do not act on that attraction in a way that harms or coerces them? Are sex addiction or addiction to computer games real physiological addictions? Is hearing God different to hearing voices? These are the questions that she explores, without yielding to the temptation to give easy answers. This was based on the radio series presented by Vivienne Parry.

Radio

In 2020, Tanya Byron presented “Word of Mouth”, on BBC Radio Four, featuring an investigation into the benefits of ‘Talking to Strangers’. Previously, she presented All in the Mind, a BBC magazine radio programme about psychology and psychiatry.

In October 2013 she was the guest for BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Her choices were “Absolute Beginners” by David Bowie, Baba O’Riley by The Who, Take Five by Dave Brubeck, “I Want That Man” by Debbie Harry, Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps by Doris Day, Uncertain Smile by The The, Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel and That’s Life by Frank Sinatra.

What is Ataraxia?

Published on by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

Ataraxia (Greek: ἀταραξία, from alpha privative (“a-“, negation) and tarachē “disturbance, trouble”; hence, “unperturbedness”, generally translated as “imperturbability”, “equanimity”, or “tranquility”) is a Greek term first used in Ancient Greek philosophy by Pyrrho and subsequently Epicurus and the Stoics for a lucid state of robust equanimity characterised by ongoing freedom from distress and worry.

In non-philosophical usage, the term was used to describe the ideal mental state for soldiers entering battle.

Achieving ataraxia is a common goal for Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism, but the role and value of ataraxia within each philosophy varies in accordance with their philosophical theories. The mental disturbances that prevent one from achieving ataraxia vary among the philosophies, and each philosophy has a different understanding as to how to achieve ataraxia.

Pyrrhonism

Ataraxia is the central aim of Pyrrhonist practice. Pyrrhonists view ataraxia as necessary for bringing about eudaimonia (happiness) for a person, representing life’s ultimate purpose. The Pyrrhonist method for achieving ataraxia is through achieving epoché (i.e. suspension of judgment) regarding all matters of dogma (i.e. non-evident belief). The Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus summarized Pyrrhonism as “a disposition to oppose phenomena and noumena to one another in any way whatever, with the result that, owing to the equipollence among the things and statements thus opposed, we are brought first to epoché and then to ataraxia… Epoché is a state of the intellect on account of which we neither deny nor affirm anything. Ataraxia is an untroubled and tranquil condition of the soul.”

Sextus gave this detailed account of ataraxia:

We always say that as regards belief (i.e., dogma) the Pyrrhonist’s goal is ataraxia, and that as regards things that are unavoidable it is having moderate pathē. For when the Pyrrhonist set out to philosophize with the aim of assessing his phantasiai – that is, of determining which are true and which are false so as to achieve ataraxia – he landed in a controversy between positions of equal strength, and, being unable to resolve it, he suspended judgment. But while he was thus suspending judgment there followed by chance the sought-after ataraxia as regards belief. For the person who believes that something is by nature good or bad is constantly upset; when he does not possess the things that seem to be good, he thinks he is being tormented by things that are by nature bad, and he chases after the things he supposes to be good; then, when he gets these, he falls into still more torments because of irrational and immoderate exultation, and, fearing any change, he does absolutely everything in order not to lose the things that seem to him good. But the person who takes no position as to what is by nature good or bad neither avoids nor pursues intensely. As a result, he achieves ataraxia. Indeed, what happened to the Pyrrhonist is just like what is told of Apelles the painter. For it is said that once upon a time, when he was painting a horse and wished to depict the horse’s froth, he failed so completely that he gave up and threw his sponge at the picture – the sponge on which he used to wipe the paints from his brush – and that in striking the picture the sponge produced the desired effect. So, too, the Pyrrhonists were hoping to achieve ataraxia by resolving the anomaly of phenomena and noumena, and, being unable to do this, they suspended judgment. But then, by chance as it were, when they were suspending judgment the ataraxia followed, as a shadow follows the body. We do not suppose, of course, that the Pyrrhonist is wholly untroubled, but we do say that he is troubled only by things unavoidable. For we agree that sometimes he is cold and thirsty and has various feelings like those. But even in such cases, whereas ordinary people are affected by two circumstances – namely by the pathē themselves and not less by its seeming that these conditions are by nature bad – the Pyrrhonist, by eliminating the additional belief that all these things are naturally bad, gets off more moderately here as well. Because of this we say that as regards belief the Pyrrhonist’s goal is ataraxia, but in regard to things unavoidable it is having moderate pathē.

Epicureanism

Ataraxia is a key component of the Epicurean conception of the highest good. Epicureans value ataraxia highly because of how they understand pleasure. Epicureans argue that pleasure is the highest good. They break pleasure down into two categories: the physical and the mental. They consider mental, not physical, pleasures to be the greatest sort of pleasure because physical pleasures exist only in the present; whereas mental pleasures exist in the past, the present, and the future.

Epicureans further separate pleasure into what they call kinetic and katastematic pleasures. Kinetic pleasures are those pleasures which come about through action or change. Such an action could be satisfying a desire or removing a pain, as that very sort of act is pleasurable in itself. Actions that feel good, even if not done to satisfy a desire or remove a pain, such as eating good-tasting food, also fall under the category of kinetic pleasures. Mental pleasures could also be kinetic in nature. Epicurus is said to have described joy as an example of a kinetic mental pleasure.

Katastematic pleasure is pleasure which comes about from the absence of pain or distress. This sort of pleasure can be physical or mental. Physical katastematic pleasure comes in freedom from physical disturbances, such as simply being in the state of not being thirsty. Comparatively, mental katastematic pleasure comes in freedom from mental disturbance. Those who achieved freedom from physical disturbance were said to be in a state of aponia, while those who achieved freedom from mental disturbances were said to be in a state of ataraxia.

Katastematic pleasures were regarded to be better than kinetic pleasures by Epicurus, believing that one could feel no more pleasure than the removal of all pain. Indeed, he is reported to have said:

The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together.

Being both a mental and katastematic pleasure, ataraxia has a supreme importance in Epicurean ethics and is key to a person’s happiness. In the Epicurean view, a person experiences the highest form of happiness should they ever be both in a state of aponia and ataraxia at the time.

Stoicism

Unlike in Pyrrhonism and Epicureanism, in Stoicism ataraxia is not the ultimate goal of life. Instead, a life of virtue according to nature is the goal of life. However, according to the Stoics, living virtuously in accordance with nature would lead to ataraxia as a byproduct.

An important distinction to be made is the difference in Stoicism between ataraxia and the Stoic idea of apatheia. While closely related to ataraxia, the state of apatheia was the absence of unhealthy passions; a state attained by the ideal Stoic sage. This is not the same as ataraxia. Apatheia describes freedom from the disturbance of emotions, not tranquillity of the mind. However, apatheia is integral for a Stoic sage to reach the stage of ataraxia. Since the Stoic sage does not care about matters outside of himself and is not susceptible to emotion because of his state of apatheia, the Stoic sage would be unable to be disturbed by anything at all, meaning that he was in a stage of mental tranquillity and thus was in the state of ataraxia.

Buddhism

Buddhism, a religion based on the teachings of Siddharta Gautama in the sixth century BC, affirms that the main cause of pain due to anguish is desire (any desire, which, because it is always associated with fear and hope, makes the heart anguish). So the flight or redemption of pain lies in the extinction or nakedness of all desire or disturbing affection, as especially the desire to live.

What is Eudaimonia?

Published on by Andrew Marshall5 Comments

Introduction

Eudaimonia (Greek: εὐδαιμονία [eu̯dai̯moníaː]; sometimes anglicised as eudaemonia or eudemonia) is a Greek word literally translating to the state or condition of ‘good spirit’, and which is commonly translated as ‘happiness’ or ‘welfare’.

In the works of Aristotle, eudaimonia was the term for the highest human good in older Greek tradition. It is the aim of practical philosophy, including ethics and political philosophy, to consider and experience what this state really is, and how it can be achieved. It is thus a central concept in Aristotelian ethics and subsequent Hellenistic philosophy, along with the terms aretē (most often translated as ‘virtue’ or ‘excellence’) and phronesis” (‘practical or ethical wisdom’).

Discussion of the links between ēthikē aretē (virtue of character) and eudaimonia (happiness) is one of the central concerns of ancient ethics, and a subject of much disagreement. As a result, there are many varieties of eudaimonism.

Definition and Etymology

In terms of its etymology, eudaimonia is an abstract noun derived from the words eû (‘good, well’) and daímōn (‘dispenser, tutelary deity’), the latter referring maybe to a minor deity or a guardian spirit.

Semantically speaking, the word δαίμων (daímōn) derives from the same root of the Ancient Greek verb δαίομαι (daíomai, “to divide”) allowing to rethink the following concept of eudaimonia as an “activity linked with dividing or dispensing, in a good way”.

Definitions, a dictionary of Greek philosophical terms attributed to Plato himself but believed by modern scholars to have been written by his immediate followers in the Academy, provides the following definition of the word eudaimonia: “The good composed of all goods; an ability which suffices for living well; perfection in respect of virtue; resources sufficient for a living creature.”

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that everyone agrees that eudaimonia is the highest good for humans, but that there is substantial disagreement on what sort of life counts as doing and living well; i.e. eudaimon:

Verbally there is a very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is [eudaimonia], and identify living well and faring well with being happy; but with regard to what [eudaimonia] is they differ, and the many do not give the same account as the wise. For the former think it is some plain and obvious thing like pleasure, wealth or honour…

So, as Aristotle points out, saying that eudaimon life is a life which is objectively desirable, and means living well, is not saying very much. Everyone wants to be eudaimon; and everyone agrees that being eudaimon is related to faring well and to an individual’s well-being. The really difficult question is to specify just what sort of activities enable one to live well. Aristotle presents various popular conceptions of the best life for human beings. The candidates that he mentions are:

  • A life of pleasure;
  • A life of political activity; and
  • A philosophical life.

Eudaimonia and Areté

One important move in Greek philosophy to answer the question of how to achieve eudaimonia is to bring in another important concept in ancient philosophy, aretē (‘virtue’). Aristotle says that the eudaimon life is one of “virtuous activity in accordance with reason”; even Epicurus, who argues that the eudaimon life is the life of pleasure, maintains that the life of pleasure coincides with the life of virtue. So, the ancient ethical theorists tend to agree that virtue is closely bound up with happiness (areté is bound up with eudaimonia). However, they disagree on the way in which this is so.

One problem with the English translation of areté as ‘virtue’ is that we are inclined to understand virtue in a moral sense, which is not always what the ancients had in mind. For a Greek, areté pertains to all sorts of qualities we would not regard as relevant to ethics, for example, physical beauty. So it is important to bear in mind that the sense of ‘virtue’ operative in ancient ethics is not exclusively moral and includes more than states such as wisdom, courage and compassion. The sense of virtue which areté connotes would include saying something like “speed is a virtue in a horse,” or “height is a virtue in a basketball player.” Doing anything well requires virtue, and each characteristic activity (such as carpentry, flute playing, etc.) has its own set of virtues. The alternative translation ‘excellence’ (or ‘a desirable quality’) might be helpful in conveying this general meaning of the term. The moral virtues are simply a subset of the general sense in which a human being is capable of functioning well or excellently.

Eudaimonia and Happiness

Eudaimonia implies a positive and divine state of being that humanity is able to strive toward and possibly reach. A literal view of eudaimonia means achieving a state of being similar to benevolent deity, or being protected and looked after by a benevolent deity. As this would be considered the most positive state to be in, the word is often translated as ‘happiness’ although incorporating the divine nature of the word extends the meaning to also include the concepts of being fortunate, or blessed. Despite this etymology, however, discussions of eudaimonia in ancient Greek ethics are often conducted independently of any super-natural significance.

In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle says that eudaimonia means ‘doing and living well’. It is significant that synonyms for eudaimonia are living well and doing well. On the standard English translation, this would be to say that ‘happiness is doing well and living well’. The word happiness does not entirely capture the meaning of the Greek word. One important difference is that happiness often connotes being or tending to be in a certain pleasant state of mind. For example, when one says that someone is “a very happy person,” one usually means that they seem subjectively contented with the way things are going in their life. They mean to imply that they feel good about the way things are going for them. In contrast, Aristotle suggests that eudaimonia is a more encompassing notion than feeling happy since events that do not contribute to one’s experience of feeling happy may affect one’s eudaimonia.

Eudaimonia depends on all the things that would make us happy if we knew of their existence, but quite independently of whether we do know about them. Ascribing eudaimonia to a person, then, may include ascribing such things as being virtuous, being loved and having good friends. But these are all objective judgments about someone’s life: they concern a person’s really being virtuous, really being loved, and really having fine friends. This implies that a person who has evil sons and daughters will not be judged to be eudaimonic even if he or she does not know that they are evil and feels pleased and contented with the way they have turned out (happy). Conversely, being loved by your children would not count towards your happiness if you did not know that they loved you (and perhaps thought that they did not), but it would count towards your eudaimonia. So, eudaimonia corresponds to the idea of having an objectively good or desirable life, to some extent independently of whether one knows that certain things exist or not. It includes conscious experiences of well-being, success, and failure, but also a whole lot more.

Because of this discrepancy between the meanings of eudaimonia and happiness, some alternative translations have been proposed. W.D. Ross suggests ‘well-being’ and John Cooper proposes ‘flourishing’. These translations may avoid some of the misleading associations carried by “happiness” although each tends to raise some problems of its own. In some modern texts therefore, the other alternative is to leave the term in an English form of the original Greek, as eudaimonia.

Classical Views on Eudaimonia and Aretē

Socrates

What is known of Socrates’ philosophy is almost entirely derived from Plato’s writings. Scholars typically divide Plato’s works into three periods: the early, middle, and late periods. They tend to agree also that Plato’s earliest works quite faithfully represent the teachings of Socrates and that Plato’s own views, which go beyond those of Socrates, appear for the first time in the middle works such as the Phaedo and the Republic.

As with all ancient ethical thinkers, Socrates thought that all human beings wanted eudaimonia more than anything else. However, Socrates adopted a quite radical form of eudaimonism (see above): he seems to have thought that virtue is both necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia. Socrates is convinced that virtues such as self-control, courage, justice, piety, wisdom and related qualities of mind and soul are absolutely crucial if a person is to lead a good and happy (eudaimon) life. Virtues guarantee a happy life eudaimonia. For example, in the Meno, with respect to wisdom, he says: “everything the soul endeavours or endures under the guidance of wisdom ends in happiness”.

In the Apology, Socrates clearly presents his disagreement with those who think that the eudaimon life is the life of honour or pleasure, when he chastises the Athenians for caring more for riches and honour than the state of their souls.

Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth or the best possible state of your soul. … [I]t does not seem like human nature for me to have neglected all my own affairs and to have tolerated this neglect for so many years while I was always concerned with you, approaching each one of you like a father or an elder brother to persuade you to care for virtue.

It emerges a bit further on that this concern for one’s soul, that one’s soul might be in the best possible state, amounts to acquiring moral virtue. So Socrates’ pointing out that the Athenians should care for their souls means that they should care for their virtue, rather than pursuing honour or riches. Virtues are states of the soul. When a soul has been properly cared for and perfected it possesses the virtues. Moreover, according to Socrates, this state of the soul, moral virtue, is the most important good. The health of the soul is incomparably more important for eudaimonia than (e.g.) wealth and political power. Someone with a virtuous soul is better off than someone who is wealthy and honoured but whose soul is corrupted by unjust actions. This view is confirmed in the Crito, where Socrates gets Crito to agree that the perfection of the soul, virtue, is the most important good:

And is life worth living for us with that part of us corrupted that unjust action harms and just action benefits? Or do we think that part of us, whatever it is, that is concerned with justice and injustice, is inferior to the body? Not at all. It is much more valuable…? Much more…

Here, Socrates argues that life is not worth living if the soul is ruined by wrongdoing. In summary, Socrates seems to think that virtue is both necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia. A person who is not virtuous cannot be happy, and a person with virtue cannot fail to be happy. We shall see later on that Stoic ethics takes its cue from this Socratic insight.

Plato

Plato’s great work of the middle period, the Republic, is devoted to answering a challenge made by the sophist Thrasymachus, that conventional morality, particularly the ‘virtue’ of justice, actually prevents the strong man from achieving eudaimonia. Thrasymachus’s views are restatements of a position which Plato discusses earlier on in his writings, in the Gorgias, through the mouthpiece of Callicles. The basic argument presented by Thrasymachus and Callicles is that justice (being just) hinders or prevents the achievement of eudaimonia because conventional morality requires that we control ourselves and hence live with un-satiated desires. This idea is vividly illustrated in book 2 of the Republic when Glaucon, taking up Thrasymachus’ challenge, recounts a myth of the magical ring of Gyges. According to the myth, Gyges becomes king of Lydia when he stumbles upon a magical ring, which, when he turns it a particular way, makes him invisible, so that he can satisfy any desire he wishes without fear of punishment. When he discovers the power of the ring he kills the king, marries his wife and takes over the throne. The thrust of Glaucon’s challenge is that no one would be just if he could escape the retribution he would normally encounter for fulfilling his desires at whim. But if eudaimonia is to be achieved through the satisfaction of desire, whereas being just or acting justly requires suppression of desire, then it is not in the interests of the strong man to act according to the dictates of conventional morality (This general line of argument reoccurs much later in the philosophy of Nietzsche). Throughout the rest of the Republic, Plato aims to refute this claim by showing that the virtue of justice is necessary for eudaimonia.

The argument of the Republic is lengthy and complex. In brief, Plato argues that virtues are states of the soul, and that the just person is someone whose soul is ordered and harmonious, with all its parts functioning properly to the person’s benefit. In contrast, Plato argues that the unjust man’s soul, without the virtues, is chaotic and at war with itself, so that even if he were able to satisfy most of his desires, his lack of inner harmony and unity thwart any chance he has of achieving eudaimonia. Plato’s ethical theory is eudaimonistic because it maintains that eudaimonia depends on virtue. On Plato’s version of the relationship, virtue is depicted as the most crucial and the dominant constituent of eudaimonia.

Aristotle

Aristotle’s account is articulated in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics. In outline, for Aristotle, eudaimonia involves activity, exhibiting virtue (aretē sometimes translated as excellence) in accordance with reason. This conception of eudaimonia derives from Aristotle’s essentialist understanding of human nature, the view that reason (logos sometimes translated as rationality) is unique to human beings and that the ideal function or work (ergon) of a human being is the fullest or most perfect exercise of reason. Basically, well-being (eudaimonia) is gained by proper development of one’s highest and most human capabilities and human beings are “the rational animal”. It follows that eudaimonia for a human being is the attainment of excellence (areté) in reason.

According to Aristotle, eudaimonia actually requires activity, action, so that it is not sufficient for a person to possess a squandered ability or disposition. Eudaimonia requires not only good character but rational activity. Aristotle clearly maintains that to live in accordance with reason means achieving excellence thereby. Moreover, he claims this excellence cannot be isolated and so competencies are also required appropriate to related functions. For example, if being a truly outstanding scientist requires impressive math skills, one might say “doing mathematics well is necessary to be a first rate scientist”. From this it follows that eudaimonia, living well, consists in activities exercising the rational part of the psyche in accordance with the virtues or excellency of reason. Which is to say, to be fully engaged in the intellectually stimulating and fulfilling work at which one achieves well-earned success. The rest of the Nicomachean Ethics is devoted to filling out the claim that the best life for a human being is the life of excellence in accordance with reason. Since reason for Aristotle is not only theoretical but practical as well, he spends quite a bit of time discussing excellence of character, which enables a person to exercise his practical reason (i.e. reason relating to action) successfully.

Aristotle’s ethical theory is eudaimonist because it maintains that eudaimonia depends on virtue. However, it is Aristotle’s explicit view that virtue is necessary but not sufficient for eudaimonia. While emphasizing the importance of the rational aspect of the psyche, he does not ignore the importance of other ‘goods’ such as friends, wealth, and power in a life that is eudaimonic. He doubts the likelihood of being eudaimonic if one lacks certain external goods such as ‘good birth, good children, and beauty’. So, a person who is hideously ugly or has “lost children or good friends through death”, or who is isolated, is unlikely to be eudaimon. In this way, “dumb luck” (chance) can pre-empt one’s attainment of eudaimonia.

Pyrrho

Pyrrho was the founder of Pyrrhonism. A summary of his approach to eudaimonia was preserved by Eusebius, quoting Aristocles of Messene, quoting Timon of Phlius, in what is known as the “Aristocles passage.”

Whoever wants eudaimonia must consider these three questions: First, how are pragmata (ethical matters, affairs, topics) by nature? Secondly, what attitude should we adopt towards them? Thirdly, what will be the outcome for those who have this attitude?” Pyrrho’s answer is that “As for pragmata they are all adiaphora (undifferentiated by a logical differentia), astathmēta (unstable, unbalanced, not measurable), and anepikrita (unjudged, unfixed, undecidable). Therefore, neither our sense-perceptions nor our doxai (views, theories, beliefs) tell us the truth or lie; so we certainly should not rely on them. Rather, we should be adoxastoi (without views), aklineis (uninclined toward this side or that), and akradantoi (unwavering in our refusal to choose), saying about every single one that it no more is than it is not or it both is and is not or it neither is nor is not.

With respect to aretē, the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus said:

If one defines a system as an attachment to a number of dogmas that agree with one another and with appearances, and defines a dogma as an assent to something non-evident, we shall say that the Pyrrhonist does not have a system. But if one says that a system is a way of life that, in accordance with appearances, follows a certain rationale, where that rationale shows how it is possible to seem to live rightly (“rightly” being taken, not as referring only to aretē, but in a more ordinary sense) and tends to produce the disposition to suspend judgment, then we say that he does have a system.

Epicurus

Epicurus’ ethical theory is hedonistic (His view proved very influential on the founders and best proponents of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill). Hedonism is the view that pleasure is the only intrinsic good and that pain is the only intrinsic bad. An object, experience or state of affairs is intrinsically valuable if it is good simply because of what it is. Intrinsic value is to be contrasted with instrumental value. An object, experience or state of affairs is instrumentally valuable if it serves as a means to what is intrinsically valuable. To see this, consider the following example. Suppose a person spends their days and nights in an office, working at not entirely pleasant activities for the purpose of receiving money. Someone asks them “why do you want the money?”, and they answer: “So, I can buy an apartment overlooking the ocean, and a red sports car.” This answer expresses the point that money is instrumentally valuable because its value lies in what one obtains by means of it – in this case, the money is a means to getting an apartment and a sports car and the value of making this money dependent on the price of these commodities.

Epicurus identifies the good life with the life of pleasure. He understands eudaimonia as a more or less continuous experience of pleasure and, also, freedom from pain and distress. But it is important to notice that Epicurus does not advocate that one pursue any and every pleasure. Rather, he recommends a policy whereby pleasures are maximised “in the long run”. In other words, Epicurus claims that some pleasures are not worth having because they lead to greater pains, and some pains are worthwhile when they lead to greater pleasures. The best strategy for attaining a maximal amount of pleasure overall is not to seek instant gratification but to work out a sensible long term policy.

Ancient Greek ethics is eudaimonist because it links virtue and eudaimonia, where eudaimonia refers to an individual’s well-being. Epicurus’ doctrine can be considered eudaimonist since Epicurus argues that a life of pleasure will coincide with a life of virtue. He believes that we do and ought to seek virtue because virtue brings pleasure. Epicurus’ basic doctrine is that a life of virtue is the life which generates the most amount of pleasure, and it is for this reason that we ought to be virtuous. This thesis – the eudaimon life is the pleasurable life – is not a tautology as “eudaimonia is the good life” would be: rather, it is the substantive and controversial claim that a life of pleasure and absence of pain is what eudaimonia consists in.

One important difference between Epicurus’ eudaimonism and that of Plato and Aristotle is that for the latter virtue is a constituent of eudaimonia, whereas Epicurus makes virtue a means to happiness. To this difference, consider Aristotle’s theory. Aristotle maintains that eudaimonia is what everyone wants (and Epicurus would agree). He also thinks that eudaimonia is best achieved by a life of virtuous activity in accordance with reason. The virtuous person takes pleasure in doing the right thing as a result of a proper training of moral and intellectual character. However, Aristotle does not think that virtuous activity is pursued for the sake of pleasure. Pleasure is a byproduct of virtuous action: it does not enter at all into the reasons why virtuous action is virtuous. Aristotle does not think that we literally aim for eudaimonia. Rather, eudaimonia is what we achieve (assuming that we are not particularly unfortunate in the possession of external goods) when we live according to the requirements of reason. Virtue is the largest constituent in a eudaimon life. By contrast, Epicurus holds that virtue is the means to achieve happiness. His theory is eudaimonist in that he holds that virtue is indispensable to happiness; but virtue is not a constituent of a eudaimon life, and being virtuous is not (external goods aside) identical with being eudaimon. Rather, according to Epicurus, virtue is only instrumentally related to happiness. So whereas Aristotle would not say that one ought to aim for virtue in order to attain pleasure, Epicurus would endorse this claim.

The Stoics

Stoic philosophy begins with Zeno of Citium c. 300 BC, and was developed by Cleanthes (331-232 BC) and Chrysippus (c. 280-c. 206 BC) into a formidable systematic unity. Zeno believed happiness was a “good flow of life”; Cleanthes suggested it was “living in agreement with nature”, and Chrysippus believed it was “living in accordance with experience of what happens by nature.” Stoic ethics is a particularly strong version of eudaimonism. According to the Stoics, virtue is necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia. (This thesis is generally regarded as stemming from the Socrates of Plato’s earlier dialogues.)

We saw earlier that the conventional Greek concept of arete is not quite the same as that denoted by virtue, which has Christian connotations of charity, patience, and uprightness, since arete includes many non-moral virtues such as physical strength and beauty. However, the Stoic concept of arete is much nearer to the Christian conception of virtue, which refers to the moral virtues. However, unlike Christian understandings of virtue, righteousness or piety, the Stoic conception does not place as great an emphasis on mercy, forgiveness, self-abasement (i.e. the ritual process of declaring complete powerlessness and humility before God), charity and self-sacrificial love, though these behaviours/mentalities are not necessarily spurned by the Stoics (they are spurned by some other philosophers of Antiquity). Rather Stoicism emphasizes states such as justice, honesty, moderation, simplicity, self-discipline, resolve, fortitude, and courage (states which Christianity also encourages).

The Stoics make a radical claim that the eudaimon life is the morally virtuous life. Moral virtue is good, and moral vice is bad, and everything else, such as health, honour and riches, are merely “neutral”. The Stoics therefore are committed to saying that external goods such as wealth and physical beauty are not really good at all. Moral virtue is both necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia. In this, they are akin to Cynic philosophers such as Antisthenes and Diogenes in denying the importance to eudaimonia of external goods and circumstances, such as were recognized by Aristotle, who thought that severe misfortune (such as the death of one’s family and friends) could rob even the most virtuous person of eudaimonia. This Stoic doctrine re-emerges later in the history of ethical philosophy in the writings of Immanuel Kant, who argues that the possession of a “good will” is the only unconditional good. One difference is that whereas the Stoics regard external goods as neutral, as neither good nor bad, Kant’s position seems to be that external goods are good, but only so far as they are a condition to achieving happiness.

Modern Conceptions

“Modern Moral Philosophy”

Interest in the concept of eudaimonia and ancient ethical theory more generally had a revival in the 20th century. G.E.M. Anscombe in her article “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) argued that duty-based conceptions of morality are conceptually incoherent for they are based on the idea of a “law without a lawgiver.” She claims a system of morality conceived along the lines of the Ten Commandments depends on someone having made these rules. Anscombe recommends a return to the eudaimonistic ethical theories of the ancients, particularly Aristotle, which ground morality in the interests and well-being of human moral agents, and can do so without appealing to any such lawgiver.

Julia Driver in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains:

Anscombe’s article Modern Moral Philosophy stimulated the development of virtue ethics as an alternative to Utilitarianism, Kantian Ethics, and Social Contract theories. Her primary charge in the article is that, as secular approaches to moral theory, they are without foundation. They use concepts such as “morally ought”, “morally obligated”, “morally right”, and so forth that are legalistic and require a legislator as the source of moral authority. In the past God occupied that role, but systems that dispense with God as part of the theory are lacking the proper foundation for meaningful employment of those concepts.

Modern Psychology

Models of eudaimonia in psychology and positive psychology emerged from early work on self-actualization and the means of its accomplishment by researchers such as Erik Erikson, Gordon Allport, and Abraham Maslow.

Theories include Diener’s tripartite model of subjective well-being, Ryff’s Six-factor Model of Psychological Well-being, Keyes work on flourishing, and Seligman’s contributions to positive psychology and his theories on authentic happiness and P.E.R.M.A. Related concepts are happiness, flourishing, quality of life, contentment, and meaningful life.

The Japanese concept of Ikigai has been described as eudaimonic well-being, as it “entails actions of devoting oneself to pursuits one enjoys and is associated with feelings of accomplishment and fulfillment.”

Positive Psychology on Eudaimonia

The “Questionnaire for Eudaimonic Well-Being” developed in Positive Psychology lists six dimensions of eudaimonia:

  • Self-discovery;
  • Perceived development of one’s best potentials;
  • A sense of purpose and meaning in life;
  • Investment of significant effort in pursuit of excellence;
  • Intense involvement in activities; and
  • Enjoyment of activities as personally expressive.