Forward
NOTE: Draft of the book-in progress To Get Home You have to Pass Third by David McMillan, Ph.D. in consultation with Bob Newbrough, Ph.D.
I hate reading Community Psychology Journal articles. I rarely understand them. I remember when I first read John Robert Newbrough’s 1995 article, where he first mentioned the third position. I read it. Didn’t understand a word. Then I put it aside for many years.
Sometime ago I was talking to Bob. We were discussing his career. He said the third position was the idea that he was most proud of. I asked him to explain it to me. As we talked I could see that it was really a simple notion. I began to think about it and use it often in my practice as a clinical/community psychologist. It helped integrate differences and solve conflicts.
It helped me avoid the arrogance trap that I too often fall into. As I thought about how useful this theory was, I realized how few people really understood it from reading Bob’s article. I wanted to find a way to make it accessible and at the same time demonstrate Bob’s consultation style.
The upshot of this was the invention of Father John (John is Bob’s first name). The character represents many of Bob’s students who over the years have been impatient with the academic speak, the invention of words like “factoid,” the extreme care to be politically correct until the threshold for the absurd is crossed, Bob’s penchant for the question rather than an answer, (e.g., question: How do you define community, Bob? Answer: I’m not sure we have a good definition for community. How would you define it?), and various other consequences of Bob’s openness, tolerance and patience.
However, when Bob talked with people in individual conversations, his ideas were elegant, simple and clear. I hope you can see that in his conversations with Father John.
Another thing I hope you will see is the art of Bob’s consulting style. Bob listens. He embraces. He befriends. He offers compassion. He understands. He gives power away. Bob enjoys ambiguity and the search. He encourages those who consult him to include all sides and all perspectives. He finds a way to join with the opposition without giving up his own values.
Bob says the most important job of being a consultant is “to be present with.” I hope you will notice how “present” Bob is with Father John, how patient and open he is to Father John’s feelings and his predicaments.
In these stories the character of Bob models the best of a community practitioner. The most important character trait of a community psychologist is humility. Bob often says of the academy that success there creates a Lone Ranger mentality. There, it is about credit and whose idea this is. Bob always tried to be a collaborator. He always tried not to take credit. My ideas about sense of community were developed under his tutelage. What major professor or advisor of a major theory piece like the McMillan Chavis (1987) piece would not have had his name be on that article?
When you think of Bob you almost always think of Bob and Paul. One of the failings of these articles is that they do not reflect his career-long partnership and collaboration with Paul Dockecki. I hope you can see how much Bob enjoys collaboration, how able he is to park his ego and make room for Father John’s. Father John will get credit for this wisdom in his community, not Bob.
Bob gives Father John the skill that he does not yet possess, but eventually grows into. This is how Bob gives his power away gladly. What Bob has always said is that, as a community psychologist, he does not want power. He wants access. All he wants is a place at the table. With a place at the table, Bob and any good community psychologist can listen, care and nurture others until they have influence. Influence: that is his goal, not power. With influence the community psychologist can help create and protect a process that is inclusive, productive and constructive. This kind of consultation is likely to produce sense of community, mutual respect and the development of people who know how to work well together.
I am writing this from the perspective of a practicing clinical/community psychologist with emphasis on the clinical. When community psychology was born the intention of the founders seemed to be to change the way that practicing clinicians thought about their clients. The founders wanted to be sure that clinicians understood their clients in the context of their communities, that clinicians should work with families’ cultures and communities of their clients, not just the client. While we should help clients grow and change, we should help them join healthy communities and learn how to shape healthy communities for themselves.
Bob considers himself the lone voice among community psychologists to speak against the separation of community psychology from clinical psychology. What he said then has come to pass. He was proud that he and his colleagues were challenging the medical model practice of psychology. He was afraid the field would become primarily diagnostic, dominated by the DSM. He was afraid clinicians would tend not to work with families, and ignore clients’ social ecology. He was afraid the field would focus on illness and dysfunction rather than well-being, person/environment fit and individual strengths. He was right.
Bob, unlike me, doesn’t tend to think of the third position as a major community psychology theory that rivals my sense of community theory or Kelly’s Social Ecology theory or Rapport’s empowerment theory. Rather he sees the third position as a tool to reframe discussions and conflicts. It is a template that one can use to place over reality to organize the discourse. It is a process that one imposes upon communicants that helps contain the debate without losing the richness of the various positions. So let’s review. It is a conceptual tool that reframes. It is a template used to place on reality. It is a process imposed on the major players in an
intellectual contest. It is a conceptual tool, a template that organizes reality and a process that contains and civilizes discourse. To me these are important elements of a theory.
“But,” you say. “It offers no answer to what is, and that’s what a theory does.” True enough. That, however, misses the point of this theory. The point is that there are no answers. There is no constant “is.” “Is” changes. The best we can do is to create a process that answers a problem for the moment. This is what the third position does.
It is a wonderful, extremely helpful construct. While it is truly simple, it expands to work with the most complex ideas and conflicts. As you use it, you can feel it deepen your own skill base and expand your personal character. Discovering the third position can change your life. It did mine. Thank you, Bob, for this and more.
I hope by reading these articles, you the reader enjoy discovering the usefulness as well as the personal growth that can be part of learning the Third Position.
If you have read this and have comments or ideas, please share them with me at drdavidm@drdavidmcmillan.com.