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Psychology is concerned with exploring the mind and understanding behaviour. Part of its concern is to bring healing to troubled people, and to do that it needs to make assumptions about the fundamental nature of the human psyche. This means that psychology is derived from and rooted more in philosophy than in medicine. Philosophical considerations are always present in the background when we attempt to heal. Without consciously intending to do so, we always make tacit assumptions about philosophical questions: e.g., what is reality? what is truth? It is, thus, not surprising that psychologists, and especially analysts, will be tempted to delve into issues which historically have been considered the realm of philosophy.
In this book, John Beebe, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst from San Francisco, attempts to tackle an issue in moral philosophy, that of integrity. Dr Beebe notes that the concept ‘integrity’ properly belongs to philosophy, but, surprisingly, philosophers seem to have been very little concerned with it. Indeed, neither the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica nor its current edition makes mention of the term. Nor have I found any mention of it in encyclopaedias of philosophy. I did find an entry for it in the New Catholic Encyclopaedia, which defines integrity (not surprisingly) as the ‘exemption from concupiscence’. Dr Beebe feels that before philosophers can contend with integrity it will have to be dealt with by psychologists. He then launches into a fascinating exploratory journey into the realm of integrity.
The journey starts with etymology. The Sanskrit root of ‘integrity’, ‘tag’, means ‘to touch’ (whence words like tactile, tact, tangent, taste, tax, contact and contamination, as well as the game of tag). Thus, integrity has to do with ‘not touching’, respecting the boundaries of another. It is clear that ‘integrity’ encompasses a rich microcosm of meaning: wholeness in the sense of completeness, of embracing everything; and