Hi AnneK,
Each year, I teach the freshmen (mostly women, actually) enrolled in Gannon University's Occupational Therapy program. It is a course called "Individual, Society, and Culture," and it is designed to help OT students and graduates cope better with the diversity among the clients with whom they will work in their professional lives. I make Lonergan's transcendental imperatives -- be: attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and loving -- central to the prescriptive dimension of the course. I spend a fair amount of time on each of these, using examples from OT practice, and, above all, eliciting responses from the students on how they think these imperatives might relate to their professional practice as they imagine it, and are learning about it in the courses they take in the OT program.
I also draw upon Carl Rogers' general law of interpersonal relations to get them to imagine their interpersonal relations with diverse kinds of clients. I modify it somewhat, calling it a general law of interaction. The basic argument is that good interactions are characterized by consistency between experience, awareness, and communication (openness and honesty) and bad interactions are characterized by inconsistency between these three elements (defensiveness and deceit). I connect this with Lonergan's "be attentive," because defensiveness (Lonergan's dramatic bias) makes it difficult to be aware of one's own experience, thus interfering with a person's ability to follow the other transcendental imperatives. I teach them Eugene Gendlin's "focusing" as a practical means of becoming more aware of their own experiences.
I also spend a good bit of time on Lonergan's discussion of kinds of bias, and their effects on individuals and communities. I point out that psychologists have written about a long list of biases (google bias and be overwhelmed), but argue that Lonergan's four categories of bias are more general categories that include most of these other kinds of bias. Four categories are heuristically much more useful than a list of 20 or 30.
In connection with "group bias" -- which I prefer to call "category bias," because I prefer to limit the meaning of "group" to sets of persons who interact face-to-face, unlike "all males" or "all females," I get into the problem of stereotyping. Some knowledge about the culture or subculture of a group or category of others can be dangerous, because it can result in thinking that knowledge of the culture provides a person with knowledge of the personal characteristics of individual members. The anthropologist Anthony Wallace, a leading figure in the field specialty of "culture and personality" -- now transformed into "cultural psychology" and "psychological anthropology" -- demonstrated quite conclusively that the individual members of any cultural group are psychologically highly diverse. Nobody in the tribe fits the "typical personality" that anthropologists and others derive from knowing some things about the social and cultural arrangements of the tribe.
Because one of the fields we focus on in the course is "race," I draw upon current research in population genetics that demonstrates that "race" is not a valid biological category. The genetic diversity within any specified category of individuals is great, and there are no specific genes or gene complexes that distinguish one culturally defined "race" from another. I use the PBS documentary "Race: The Power of an Illusion" to drive this point home (it's now on UTube).
Within-group psychological diversity is analogous to within-group genetic diversity. Genetic diversity does not contradict the fact that there is very little genetic diversity within the human species. Fruit flies, for example, have ten times the genetic diversity as humans -- two fruitflies, in the same population of fruit flies, may be more genetically different from one another than a human is from a chimp. And psychological diversity does not contradict the fact that the basic structure of human actions -- experience, understanding, judgment, and decision -- is present in all humans. It is the content of learned dispositions that are so diverse.
Even though I am not myself a health care-giver, perhaps my efforts to use Lonergan in teaching future care-givers will prove useful.
Best regards,
Dick Moodey