Growing

Up as Growing Into: the creative linkages of mature responsibility

From The Mature Mind by H.A. Overstreet
The human individual is not self-contained. His physical survival depends upon constant access to resources
outside his body. In like manner, his growth into psychic individuality depends upon his having linked himself in
one way or another with his environment. The life that is psychologically poverty-stricken is on that has few such
linkagesand these routine and noncreative. The life that is rich and happy is one that is fulfilling its possibilities
through creative linkages with reality. A mature person is ot one who has come to a certain level of achievement
and stopped there. He is rather a maturing personone whose linkages with life are constantly becoming stronger
and richer because his attitudes are such as to encourage their growth rather than their stoppage.
When Diderot made his startling remark that all children are essentially criminal, he was saying in effect, that
human beings are safe to have around only if they are as weak in their powers of execution as they are in their
powers of understanding. An infant with the strength and authority of a man would be a monster; for an infant
has, as yet, established no linkages with life save those that minister to his own immediate desires. He has no
knowledgetherefore his acts of power would be also acts of ignorance. He has no mature affection, but mostly
an ego-centered pleasure in those who give him what he wantstherefore his acts of power would aim solely at
self-gratification. His imagination about other people is still a potential, no a realized powertherefore his acts of
power would be acts of ruthlessness. In short, it is safe for a human being to grow in physical strength and self-
determination only if he is building such linkages of knowledge and feeling that what he chooses to do is creative
rather than destructive, social rather than antisocial.
By this standard, we might say that a person is properly maturingwhether he be 5 years old or 50---only if his
power over his environment is matched by a growing awareness of what is involved in what he does. If his powers
of execution forge ahead while his powers of understanding lag behind, he is backward in his psychological
growth--and dangerous to have around. The most dangerous members of our society are those grownups whose
powers of influence are adult but whose motives and responses are infantile. G.B. Chisholm has said, So far in the
history of the world there have never been enough mature people in the right places. Never yet have enough
people come to their adulthood with such sound linkages between them and their world that what they choose to
do is for their own and the common good.
The human being is born irresponsible. One of the strong ties that must progressively link the individual to his
world is that of responsibility; resentment against that fact, or inability to realize it in action, indicates a stoppage
in psychological growth. Mature responsibility involves both a willing participation in the chores of life and a
creative participation in the bettering of life. The individual has to learn to accept his human role. To mature is
progressively to accept the fact that the human experience is a shared experience; the human predicament, a
shared predicament. Maturity involves the development of a sense of functionthat there is work a person
accepts as his own, that he performs with a fair degree of expertness, and from which he draws a sense of
significance. Maturity also involves the development of function-habits. A child does not yet know how to work out
spheres of orderlinesshis attention-span is too brief to enable him to have constancy of purpose. In a very real
sense, A boys will is the winds will. A good many grownups, without any legitimate reason, are as veering and
unstable as children. Such seem so to lack a sense of cause and effect that they are always miserably discovering
that they have done the wrong thing. Some are self-excusingothers are self-dramatizing.
The journey from irresponsibility to responsibility is full of hazards. Man does not grow automatically from
dependence to independence, helplessness to competence, irresponsibility to responsibility. The human being is
born self-centered. He has as yet no clearly defined self in which to center. But even less does he have any power
to relate himself to other selves. A person is not mature until he has both an ability and a willingness to see himself
as one among others and to do unto those others as he would have them do to him. The very existence of society
implies certain forces that temper the raw egocentricity of the newborn; for without such tempering, there cannot
be mutual support, common purposes, structured reliance of man upon man. Growing up means growing into
growing into a complex set of social relationships: linkages of affection, sympathy, shared work, shared beliefs,
shared memories, good will toward fellow humans.

From the moment of birth the infant has things happen to him that give him feelings of well-being or ill-being.
These are direct and immediate experiences. At first he knows them only as his own. As he matures, however, he
develops an increasing power to make mental syntheses of new ideas from elements experienced separately. He
is able to turn his experience into human experience. He grows in social imagination. For every additional power
that he has taken on will have been matched by an additional sensitivity to what it means to be human. He will do
unto others as he would have them do unto him because he will feel their feelings as he does his own. We enter
imaginatively into another personss life and feel it as if it were our own. We stop being an outsider and become an
insider. Those genuinely released from immature egocentricity into mature sociocentricity are rare among us.
There are many reasons for this. One is obvious: a vast number of children receive their first influence from
parents who are themselves emotionally and socially immature. Such parents confirm the child in his egocentricity
instead of helping him to outgrow it.
The human being is born to a world of isolated particulars. He has to mature into a world of wholes. At first he has
only this pain; this satisfaction; this fearthe newborn has as yet no experience of wholenessthat is, of parts
significantly related to one another; of many parts making a total from which each separate part draws meaning. It
is in the direction of whole-seeing and whole-thinking that growth must take place if maturity is ever to be
achieved. Life is a process of entering intoas well as creatingwholes of meaning. When that which is whole is
come, that which is in part is not so much done away as it is lifted up into its full significance. As we develop the
power thus to lift up the part into the whole, our linkage to life becoomes philosophical. The person is mature in
the degree he sees whole and takes into account all that is involved in a situation and ties to that all both his
present behaviors and his future plans and expectations. Situations beyond number are distorted by the influence
of full-grown men and women who still see in part and prophesy in part. They see with the small eyes of their
own little, limited world. And on the basis of what they see they prophesy. That is, they act in term of cause-and-
effect linkages that are faulty and restricted as their seeing. Plato saw slight hope for human society until such time
as philosophers should be made kings. The right places for philosophersfor people who have a mature power to
see wholeare all those places where influence extends from one individual to another. For the philosopher
knows that in this world of intricate mutual relationships no person is safe to have around if he has grown to his
adulthood without building a fairly sound philosophical linkage with his world.
This linkage theory of maturity sees man as a creature who lives by and through relationships; who becomes
himself through linkages with the nonself. It sees him, as a unit of psychic experience, both capable of lifelong
growth and subject to arrest of growth at any point where he habitually makes immature efforts at problem-
solving. This linkage theory sees the individual, not as finely mature in one phase of his being and woefully
immature in another, but as possessed of a character structure in which the several maturities or immaturities are
closely related to one another. We have liked to believe that a person can be ruthless in his business dealings and
yet be a good husband and father. We have defended our illusions in this respect by making the definitions of
success and goodness so narrow that even fairly flagrant immaturity can qualify. Thus, by ordinary standards, a
man is a vocational success if he earning a good living. He may achieve his success by means that do profound
hurt to other people. But he will not commonly be called a failure unless he loses his position or wealth. We must
rid ourselves of such illusions as have made us accept immaturity as maturity. Because of the interdependence of
our powers, maturity in one area of our life promotes maturity in other areas; immaturity in one area promotes
immaturities in other areas. In fact, the human individual is a fairly tight-knit pattern of consistency. This, then, is
the first basic fact about the linkage theory of maturity: it does not measure psychological maturity by any single,
isolated trait in a person, but by a constellation of traitsby a total character structure.
The linkage theory does not make maturity synonymous with adjustment. While it recognizes that an immature
person who is also unadjusted is in a miserable state and needs help, it recognizes no less that, given certain
cultural conditions, the immature person is likely to effect a smoother adjustment than is the mature person.
Such a person is not on that account a more genuinely fulfilled person. Nor is his influence any less disastrous: his
immaturities may be so like the accepted immaturities of the people around him that he and they will move in
remarkable harmony; but his immaturity and theirs will continue to create situations in which human powers are
frustrated. The standards these immature types set will reward grown men and women for acting like children:
ignorantly, irresponsibly, eogcentrically, and so on. It is no longer safe or sufficient to judge immaturities and
maturities of men by the average practices of any institutions or any total culture. Rather, institutions and cultures

must be judged by the extent to which they encourage or discourage maturity in all their members. Homes,
schools, churches, political parties, economic and social institutions, nationsthese are made for man; not man
for them. Human nature arrived on the scene first. The test of any institution is the releasing service it renders to
that nature.
From Thomas Szaszs The Untamed Tongue:
The natural state of mankind is poverty; wealth is something man must create. Similarly, the natural state of
mankind is mental illness (in the sense of being undisciplined, useless, and infantile); mental health (in the sense
of being competent, self-responsible, and caring for ones family) is something man must create. It is therefore
wrong to think of poverty or mental illness as being caused, but it is right to think of wealth or mental health that
way: this is why poverty and mental illness must be overcome by the personal effort of the affected individual
while a person may lose his wealth and mental health without his participation or even against his will.
Legitimacy rationalizes; rationality legitimizes. Legitimacy is weaked by defiance: that is why it seeks consensus
and compliance. Rationality is strengthened by defiance: that is why it is indifferent to consensus and eschews
coercion.
Most people want self-determination for themselves and subjection for others; some want subjection for
everyone; only a few want self-determination for everyone.
People are free in proportion as the State protects them from others; and are oppressed in proportion as the
State protects them from themselves.
Mysticism joins and unites; reason divides and separates. People crave belonging more than understanding.
Hence the prominent role of mysticism, and the limited role of reason, in human affairs.
A glossary: Bad: obsolete; superseded by insane, mentally ill, sick. Good: obsolete; superseded by sane,
mentally healthy, healthy. Ethics: obsolete; superseded by the diagnosis and treat of disease.
The liberal-scientific ethic: if its bad for you, it should be prohibited; if its good for you, it should be required.
New models of mental illnesses are now produced faster than new models of automobiles, perhaps because they
sell faster.
We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.
From Bernie Zilbergelds The Shrinking of America:
It is a basic tenet of the therapeutic ideology that people are not okay as they are; thats why they need therapy.
Therapists would make the whole world into a hospital. Most forms of human discontent are the result of the
disparity between what we have and are and what we feel we should have and be. Therapeutic thinking serves to
widen the discrepancy both by finding out more things wrong with how we are and by holding out increasingly
utopian notions of what we should be. Vast dissatisfaction with oneself is one of therapeutic thinkings most
important products.
Therapists tell us we should trust our feelings but they have made us fearful of trusting anything not validated by
experts. The more we rely on professionals, the more we have to rely on them because we fail to develop our own
resources. We forget that logical and critical thinking are not the special province of a particular group of experts
and that we could just as well check our own thinking or get help from those around us.
There are limits to how much each of us can change. Life is not a continuous series of peak experiences or a
process of ever-expanding satisfaction. Murphys law is not amenable to therapeutic manipulation. Somewhere
deep down we also know that life in profoundly unfair and democratic. Therapy is not a cure for the human
condition. The aimlessness, loneliness, confusion and dissatisfaction we feel and that lead many of us to try to
change, are simply some of the prices we pay for liberating ourselves from traditional belief systems and the
institutions that supported them. The simple fact is that freedom is not easy to live with. But neither is anything
else. The care provided by counselors may be comforting, at least for a while, but it has no answers to the riddles
and hazards of our time. Every human characteristic is double-edged. In short, everything has a price.