Occupational psychosis
Occupational psychosis occurs when one's occupation or career makes one so biased that one could be described as psychotic. Especially common in tight occupational circles, individuals can normalize ideas or behaviours that seem absurd or irrational to the external public.
Overview
The term was created by John Dewey.[1] The most accessible introduction to this concept is Chapter III of Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change.[2] Burke is careful to say, "Incidentally, it might be well to recall that Professor Dewey does not use the word 'psychosis' in the psychiatric sense; it applies simply to a pronounced character of the mind" [original emphasis] (pg. 49.).
In fact,
Dewey's concept of occupational psychosis rests upon much the same observations. As a result of their day-to-day routines, people develop special preferences, antipathies, discriminations and emphases. (The term "psychosis" is used by Dewey to denote a "pronounced character of the mind".) These psychoses develop through demands put upon the individual by the particular organization of his occupational role.
The concepts of both Veblen and Dewey refer to a fundamental ambivalence. Any action can be considered in terms of what it attains or what it fails to attain."
And again Merton footnotes Permanence and Change (1935), pp. 50, 58–59: "I believe that John Dewey's concept of "occupational psychosis" best characterizes this secondary aspect of interest. Roughly, the term corresponds to the Marxian doctrine that a society's environment in the historical sense is synonymous with society's methods of production. Professor Dewey suggests that a tribe's ways of gaining sustenance promote certain specific patterns of thought which, since thought is an aspect of action, assist the tribe in its productive and distributive operations. This special emphasis, arising in response to the economic pattern, he calls the tribe's occupational psychosis. Once this psychosis is established by the authority of the food-getting patterns (which are certainly primary as regards problems of existence) it is carried over into other aspects of the tribal culture."
See also
References
- ^ Merton, Robert, Social Theory and Social Structure, Simon & Schuster, 1968, p. 252.
- ^ Burke, Kenneth (1954). Permanence and Change. Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications.