The Person Of Flesh And Blood: Need For Anthropological Mediation
In the Mediation room, the mediator asks himself:
What path should I follow? Should I choose a specific answer?
The mediated person, in the presence of the mediators, has the inescapable impression that the reason that led him to the mediating encounter can radically affect his life, therefore his being; It is something that he cannot, but rather has to be chosen, and this is because the mediator is forced to choose between meaning and meaninglessness, dialectical framework, narrative and becoming, stagnation and vital projection. It is, in a word, biography. AND, In this process of biographical apprehension, mediators participate
But the practice of the mediator, that is, the exercise of that knowledge, is not only a practice, but it is “a way of knowledge”; As Von Weizsaeker (1962) points out: “we have to work to reach deeper knowledge.” Hence Mediation knowledge is always anthropological knowledge A scientific knowledge of the person, and, therefore, a human value, and without human measurement and calculation it is not possible to speak of Mediation.
If we take into account that the knowledge of Mediation has its meaning in that it is a knowledge to “solve”, the vocation and desire for help then becomes the basic foundation of mediation action. But need precedes help and therefore, the constitutively needy character of the mediate is the basic assumption of the mediating activity and vocation. Mediation, as a science of mediation, must base its knowledge on anthropological knowledge, but, as we have already said, it creates anthropological knowledge.
The topic of anthropology has become urgent and necessary knowledge for Mediation. Without a doubt, when having to develop this theme of the human in Mediation, examples of anthropological knowledge from literature and cinema come to mind that, although they give us many answers, it is possible that they propose more questions that leave new resonances in the mind of the reader or spectator.Questions that build paths and bridges and that through personal events help us reflect on aspects of Mediation, without pretending to be a finished theory of it.
In the daily practice of Mediation we find two biographical subdomains as a divergent logical system –in the sense of Valdés-Stauber, 2001-. On the one hand, the ordinary person that Don Miguel wanted “the one who is born, suffers and dies… the one who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and loves: the man who is seen and heard, the brother, the true brother.” ” (Unamuno, 1986); On the other hand, the fascinating and mythological cinematographic figure of Harry Lime played by Orson Welles in The Third Man, whose anecdote of the cuckoo clock at the top of the Ferris wheel in Vienna expands the depth of the character in a charming interpretation that has ever been never from a villain.
This logical model tries to account for the Unamunian human being, of flesh and blood, real because it is biographical as opposed to the human being as a “point”, which turns him into an opaque, anonymous being without physiognomy, just as Welles shows us plastically in the script by Graham Greene and Alexander Korda. These Hollywood noir characters who sometimes attend Mediation are the best candidates for performing psychometric Simulation tests such as: SIMS (Windows and Smith, 2015); TOMM (Tombaugh, 2011); or the Multidisciplinary Manual coordinated by González, Santamaría and Capilla (2012). Family cases that seem simple at first and, however, contain a diversity of issues complicated by the complexity and extraordinary mixture of strange romances, gothic mysteries and romantic agony in black and white, baffle and disillusion and only the luminous beauty of their illusion turns the mediator into a hero.
A Sartrean perspective
An important fact related to the Existence of those mediated who opt for Simulation and that will determine their “original choice” regarding the type of “solution” they pursue, is the notion of “bad faith” (Sartre, 1993) that replaces the Unconscious. of Freud, which in the hands of the creator of Psychoanalysis was only a psychological concept that is also transformed by Sartre into a moral concept, thereby breaking with the entire tradition – of profound consequences in Mediation – of separating facts from values, disease of sin, themes that in Sartre’s hands force a new reflection since it is not about focusing on this or that particular problem but rather we need to see that the problem arises as a whole, and this is basically the personal choice of the mediator. that acts with “bad faith” regarding the type of existence that it wishes to carry out, which does not mean that it is unchangeable since at a given moment it can change its position.
“Bad faith” is in fact a lie –global and not supported by data- that leads to certain approaches related to what was called the “existential heresy” –in the sense of Von Gesbsattell, 1966- in which instead of observing people with symptoms in the Mediation room Clinicians typical of the mediating process (e.g., depression or anxiety) come with identity crises, fear of responsibility, and suicidal behaviors that would connect with the Sartrean mauvaisefoi notion – the case study: “The divorce of Lola and Emilio” ( Conflict Analysis) by Professor Pascual Ortuño (2020) is a good reference for disconcerting behavior in the figure of Emilio, who hides a surprise in his anguished face.
The mediator may understand that the party pursues a satisfactory “solution” even with “bad faith”, but I can only say that, at least, this is not the task of the Mediation, but always with the utmost respect for his consideration as a person. to his consideration as a spiritual being.
That’s why It may happen that there are healthy people, but with “bad will” and healthy people who are not happy Do we understand that only those who flee from pain are healthy, even with “bad faith”? I don’t believe it. The escape from pain may be a healthy attitude, but also its acceptance finding meaning in it.
Anthropological Mediation
Despite its sullen and pessimistic character, Sartre’s approaches provide an interesting way of studying human existence and in the future they will prove to be enriching in the exercise of Mediation. Today, we said, the topic of anthropology has become an urgent and necessary knowledge for Mediation, and I would like to draw attention to the current need for every mediator to reflect on the problem of the person and what they have as a person. , because I prefer to think that the person is both nature and person. And this means that the task of knowing in order to mediate with a person as such, requires considering at the same time what in human reality is nature and what in it is a person – recently the Department of Philosophy of Law of the Complutense University of Madrid has reactivated personalist anthropological knowledge with the thesis of Rosa Rodríguez (2022) that transcends classic French and North American personalism with the incorporation of a wide range of authors and schools.
It should be noted here that American personalism has been one of the most widely disseminated philosophical currents in North America, to the point that, somewhat exaggeratedly, personalism has been considered a typical product of American thought. The Harvard school, led by the anthropologist Ury (2011a, 2011b), defends – in our view – a type of personalistic anthropology that understands that the nature of the person is intimately governed from an intimate center that transcends them the center in which freedom and responsibility have their origin, their headquarters and their term of imputation.
Two questions seem to need to be answered: Why an Anthropological Mediation article? And why within our Spanish society?
The second question is justified by two reasons. The first is that anthropological knowledge has been, without a doubt, one of the knowledge best cultivated by anthropological psychotherapy – integrated into the “culture” of the holistic-contextual model of psychotherapy (human science) in debate with the “culture” of the positivist model. -biomedical psychotherapy (natural science) (Wampold and Imel, 2021; Pérez Álvarez, 2019, 2021); and, the second, by the undersigned. The reasons for this fact are clear, I feel, intellectually, heir to a generation that made anthropological knowledge the central knowledge of Psychology and Psychiatry, a knowledge that could easily have a distinctly Spanish style, by being able to settle in our main contemporary philosophers such as Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset and Zubiri, and not necessarily philosophers, who have had a long list of important authors in our country, from Novoa Santos, and Letamendi to Laín Entralgo and Rof Carballo.
In relation to all of the above we can try to answer the first question: Why an article on Anthropological Mediation? Because We have an immense wealth of knowledge that cannot be ignored but that, we believe, constitute or rather should constitute one of the basic and fundamental sciences of Mediation. But this knowledge is, we would say, peculiar knowledge, in the sense that the knowledge of Mediation is not pure scientific knowledge, nor is it applied knowledge. It is a knowledge different from the rest of the Sciences. It is not pure knowledge. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but it has a clear intention: It is knowledge to find a “solution”.
I would like the anthropological orientation for current Spanish Mediation not to remain a good wish. It will not end with this article because it is also a national trait and has been pointed out by Ganivet (1981): “We have the main thing, the person, the type; We just need to tell him to get to work.”
The topic that I have chosen interests everyone, because it is a basic concern of all people and because we are all, really or potentially, clients of Mediation, and because to a large extent the attitudes of the mediators depend on the attitudes of Society and therefore of the attitudes of all of us.
We propose the need to integrate a personalist anthropology in the scientific theory of Mediation Without which it cannot be fully Mediation of two or more people present in a room attentive to a “friendly dialogue” – as a theoretical model (Regadera, 2023) in the sense of Buber (1947, 1979, 2006) and Friedman (1956) – about an event that occurs in their lives and about which they know many things about its situation but few about its “solution”.
