Return to reality: What does the world ask of us?

Abstract

This article introduces the project Return to Reality: What Does the World Ask of Us? This project evolved from a concern that frameworks in mental health operate with knowledge as their primary mode in such a way that reality is lost from sight. This is not primarily an epistemological problem, but an ethical and existential one: ethical because a knowledge-mediated relation to the real can make us blind to the ethical imperatives found in encounters with reality; existential because to be a subject is to respond to what is real. The works of Gert Biesta are a key inspiration. We use Levinas’s, Lingis’s, and Arendt’s ideas to elaborate these concerns. A return to reality is needed; a shift from knowledge-based to reality-sensitive approaches. We relate these ideas to the Open Dialogue approach, with the key imperative of responding to the presence of those present, and to Reflecting team practices, which Tom Andersen describes as being guided by people’s bodily responses.