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Article Excerpt
The author examines the concept of alienation and how it can be used to understand low-income, urban clients. A description is presented of 4 dimensions of alienation: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, and social isolation. Case illustrations are provided, and recommendations are made for counseling alienated clients.
Increasingly, urban areas or inner cities are bereft of adequate housing, safe neighborhoods, employment opportunities, primary health care facilities, and effective schools (Uchitelle, 2000). Large cities, characterized by the complexities that are common to urban areas, fail to respond to the needs of significant numbers of families and individuals, a particularly compelling conclusion given that America's cities now claim more than 50% of the nation's population (U. S. Bureau of the Census, 2001). These deteriorating urban areas are often plagued with demoralizing social conditions (e.g., poverty, homelessness, crime), which in turn promote maladaptive behavior and other pathologies that affect the wider society, especially low-income ethnic communities. Social and behavioral scientists (Calabrese, 1990; Erikson, 1986) have generally agreed that these circumstances perpetuate a phenomenon called "alienation." In this article, I review the literature regarding alienation and then discuss counseling strategies that can be used with low-income, urban clients experiencing alienation.
WHAT IS ALIENATION?
The word alienation is derived from the Latin word alienare, meaning estrangement (Mann, 2001). Many poor individuals and families in urban communities could be said to experience estrangement or alienation from society and "mainstream" American realities. For instance, mainstream values such as parent participation in school events, purchasing an automobile, spending money for leisure activities, and buying name-brand items are often "foreign" to low-income, urban clients. Indeed, the poor are often alienated from what counselors might assume they should be involved in, namely, the personal growth and self-actualizing process.
There is no consensus among disciplines (e.g., sociology, education) of the scope of alienation (Geyer, 1980; Glasgow-Winters, 1993). In fact, the term alienation has been applied to various situational concepts. For instance, parental alienation syndrome refers to an attempt by one parent (usually a custodial parent) to alienate the child or children from the other parent (Gardner, 2002; Szabo, 2002). Likewise, the term student alienation has been coined to describe students' alienation from the learning process (Mann, 2001) and from the school community (Mills-Novoa, 1999). Many researchers believe that alienation is unidimensional, whereas others believe that it is multidimensional. Researchers who support the multidimensional formulation argue that each of the different concepts subsumed under alienation--powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, social isolation--is unique and should be treated as such. Conversely, Seeman (1983) indicted "that the themes that are classically brought under the alienation rubric refer to the fundamental ways in which the individual is related to the social structure" (p. 171).
As a form of human adaptation, alienation is particularly debilitating in terms of outcomes for the self and for society at large. Glasgow-Winters (1993) argued that alienated individuals feel the need to protect the remnants of the self by turning away or absenting themselves, consciously or unconsciously, from society. They reject the values and norms of the dominant society that rejects them. When they cannot comprehend the inherent complexities and adverse effects of their daily existence, their abandonment is intensified. Alienated individuals' reactions range from benign passivity, to acceptance and adherence to societal norms, to deliberate disregard for established norms. Some alienated persons engage in marginal or antisocial behavior whereas others turn their feelings of desolation inward, blaming themselves (Schaff, 1980). Alienation emerges as one outcome of an individual's dissatisfaction and misidentification with the social, economic, and political structure of society and may...
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