The person of flesh and blood: Need for an Anthropological Mediation

In the Mediation room, the mediator asks himself:

Which way should I go? Should I then choose a specific answer?

The mediated, in the presence of the mediators, has the inescapable impression that the motive that has led him to the mediating encounter can radically affect his life, and therefore his being; it is something that cannot, but rather has to be chosen, and this that the mediated is forced to choose between sense and nonsense, dialectical framework, narrative and becoming, stagnation and projection vital. 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 this knowledge, is not only a practice, but rather it is "a way of knowing"; as Von Weizsaeker (1962) points out: “we have to act to reach a deeper knowledge”. Hence the knowledge of Mediation is always a knowledge anthropological. A scientific knowledge of the person, and, therefore, a human value, and without measurement and human computation, it is not possible to speak of Mediation.

• Related article: "Mediation or family therapy? Which to choose?"

The Fundamentals of Mediation

If we take into account that the knowledge of Mediation has its meaning in that it is a knowledge for "solve", the vocation and desire to help then becomes the basic foundation of the mediating action. But the need precedes the help and therefore, the constitutively needy character of the mediated is the basic assumption of the mediating activity and vocation. Mediation, as a mediating science, must base its knowledge on anthropological knowledge, but it, as we have already said, creates anthropological knowledge.

The subject of anthropology has become an urgent and necessary knowledge for Mediation. Undoubtedly, when having to develop this theme of the human in Mediation, examples of anthropological knowledge typical of Mediation come to mind. Literature and cinema 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 viewer. 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 he sleeps and thinks and wants: the man who is seen and heard, the brother, the true brother” (Unamuno, 1986); on the other hand, the fascinating and mythological film figure of Harry Lime played by Orson Welles in The Third Man, whose anecdote about the clock of cuckoo on top of Vienna's Ferris wheel extends the depth of the character in a charming interpretation that has never been done before in a villain.

This logical model tries to give an account of the Unamunian human being, of flesh and blood, real by biography in opposition to the human being as a "point", which makes him an opaque being, anonymous and without physiognomy, as Welles plastically shows us in the script by Graham Greene and Alexander Korda. These characters from the black genre of Hollywood who, sometimes, go to Mediation, are the best candidates for Simulation psychometric 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, nevertheless, contain a variety of issues complicated by the complexity and extraordinary mixture of Strange romances, gothic mysteries, and black-and-white romantic agony baffle and disillusion, and only the luminous beauty of their illusion makes a hero of the mediator.

A Sartrean perspective

An important fact related to the Existence of those mediated who opt for Simulation and that will determine their "choice original” with respect to the type of “solution” they pursue, is the notion of “bad faith” (Sartre, 1993) that replaces the Unconscious of Freud, which was in the hands of the creator of Psychoanalysis only a psychological concept that is also transformed by Sartre into a concept moral, with which he breaks with the entire tradition -of profound consequences in Mediation- of separating facts from values, disease from sin, some issues that in the hands of sartre they force a new reflection since it is not about focusing on this or that particular problem but we need to see that the problem arises as a whole, and this is basically the personal choice of the mediated who acts in "bad faith" regarding the type of existence that he wishes to carry out, which does not mean that it is unchangeable since at a given moment he can change his 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 by Von Gesbsattell, 1966- in which instead of observing people with clinical symptoms typical of the mediation process in the mediation room (p. g.: depression or anxiety) come with identity crises, fear of responsibility, and suicidal behaviors that would connect with the Sartrean mauvaisefoi notion – the practical case: “The divorce of Lola and Emilio ”(Analysis of the conflict) by Professor Pascual Ortuño (2020) is a good benchmark of disconcerting behavior in the figure of Emilio who hides a surprise-.

The mediator may understand that the mediator 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, for his consideration as a being spiritual.

That's why It can 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. Escape from pain may be a healthy attitude, but also its acceptance, finding meaning in it.

Anthropological Mediation

Despite his sullen and pessimistic character, Sartre's approaches provide an interesting way of study human existence and in the future they will prove 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 need present in every mediator to reflect on the problem of the person and what he has 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 he is a person -recently the Department of Philosophy of Law of the Complutense University of Madrid has reactivated anthropological knowledge personalists 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 North 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 personalist anthropology that understands that the nature of the person is intimately governed from an intimate center that transcends him, center in which freedom and responsibility have their origin, their headquarters and their term of imputation.

Two questions seem to have to be answered: Why an article on Anthropological Mediation? And why within our Spanish society?

The second question is justified by two reasons. The first is that anthropological knowledge has undoubtedly been one of the knowledges best cultivated by anthropological psychotherapy - integrated into the "culture" of the model. holistic-contextual psychotherapy (human science) in debate with the “culture” of the positivist-biomedical model of psychotherapy (natural science) (Wampold and Imel, 2021; Pérez Álvarez, 2019, 2021); and, the second, by the one who subscribes. The reasons for this fact are clear, I feel, intellectually, heir to a generation that made anthropological knowledge the central knowledge of Psychology and of Psychiatry, a knowledge that could easily have had a purely Spanish style, being able to settle on our main contemporary philosophers such as Unamuno, Ortega and 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 which, we believe constitute or better should constitute one of the basic and fundamental sciences of Mediation. But this knowledge is a knowledge, we would say peculiar, in the sense that the knowledge of Mediation is not a pure scientific knowledge, nor is it an applied knowledge. It is a knowledge different from the rest of the Sciences. It is not a pure knowledge. A knowledge to know, but has a clear intention: It is a knowledge to find a "solution."

I would like the anthropological orientation for current Spanish Mediation not to remain a wishful thinking. This article will not end 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 down to work”.

The topic I have chosen interests everyone, because it is a basic concern of all people and because we are all, actually or potentially, clients of the Mediation, and because to a great extent the attitudes of the mediators depend on the attitudes of the Society and therefore on the attitudes of all 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 their situation but little about their "solution".