We don't challenge
authority because we're scared, because we're identified with the aggressor,
because we're self-blaming, because we're parented asymmetrically,
etc. At its worst, we're subtly told by psychoanalysts that we're narcissistic,
gripped by various infantile fixations, vulnerable to the passivizing
manipulations of the media and the power elites behind them.
All this is probably
true - no, it is definitely true. I have been part of this discourse
and continue to believe that psychoanalysis has a great deal to teach
us about what makes people conservative, whether it be in the consulting
room or in the public arena. In particular, several variants of object-relations
theory offer a powerful model for exploring how we get attached t our
oppressors and resist change because of deep and terrifying fears of
loss and guilt.
But what about how
and why people do transform themselves? After all, people strive to
transcend social alienation all the time, in both large and small ways.
And, contrary to popular belief, people do actually change in psychoanalysis.
They get better - feel happier, freer to love, to work, to recognize
others, to be productive. What, then, can psychoanalysis tell us about
transformation that can help us understand that process a it occurs
socially? Or can psychoanalysis only help us understand resistance?
We
need to disconfirm the
reasonable - but ultimately
pathologically cynical -
collective expectations of
the inevitability of corrupt
political leadership and
the hopelessness of change.
Psychoanalyst Joseph
Weiss and his colleagues in San Francisco have been in the forefront
of the study of the change process in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
Their work is summarized in two volumes (The Psychoanalytic Process,
1986, Guilford, and How Psychotherapy Works, 1993, Guilford). For the
social theorist, Weiss's research and theory provide fertile insights
into the process of transformation that can potentially be used in
analysis of social and political change processes.
Weiss believes that
people suffer from grim unconscious beliefs about themselves and the
world, beliefs formed through the interaction of two important factors.
First, these beliefs reflect actual experiences with parents upon whom
the child is completely dependent, who have the awesome authority to
define reality and morality for the child. Second, these pathogenic
beliefs are shaped through immature modes of cognition and mental functioning
characteristic of earlier stages in psychological development. A child
may infer, for instance, from observation and real experience that
normal efforts to assert herself or elicit admiration are systematically
rejected by a self-involved or depressed parent. She may then generalize
this experience to adult beliefs and expectations that people are not
likely to be interested in her, will resent her assertiveness, and
are inclined to punish her for her wishes to show off.
Children do more
than simply observe reality, however; they construct it. Most commonly,
they do this by assuming responsibility for what happens to them: I
not only won't get praise, I'm not supposed to get or even want it.
I don't get it because it's forbidden or because I don't deserve it.
Children don't make adult judgments about cause and effect. Their thinking
is often egocentric and omnipotent in nature. If my father was depressed
during my adolescence, I probably came to feel unconsciously guilty
about it, as if my adolescent rebellion were ultimately responsible
for his sorry state. If my mother seems to feel bitter and depressed,
then my exuberance or autonomy or sexuality probably is responsible.
Many of the unconscious
beliefs that Weiss believe plague his patients involve permutations
of this kind of guilt. Children are exquisitely vulnerable to feeling
responsible for their parents' real and imagined injuries, depression,
worries, failures, illnesses, temper - and even overt parental abusive
behavior. Thus, happiness is thwarted by intense, guilt-based conflicts
over having more than, leaving, surpassing, or otherwise hurting one's
family. The ubiquity with which we all tend to take responsibility
for our own experience and that of important others makes some version
of these guilt-related pathogenic beliefs appear in all of us. The
difference between a so-called "healthy" and a "pathological" outcome
is one of degree. Clinically speaking, to the extent that someone's
capacities and desires to love, feel competent and productive, and
have pleasure are significantly impaired by pathogenic beliefs, then
we tend to see the kind of symptoms and suffering that bring someone
into therapy.
While people come
into therapy crippled by guilt and other pathogenic beliefs, Weiss
argues that they also come with a powerful unconscious desire and plan
to master and overcome these problems. People seek to "disconfirm" their
pathogenic beliefs in therapy because these ideas and feelings are
painful, and because on some level they recognize their irrationality.
In other words, children and, later, adults, never fully buy into their
symptoms and pathological view of the world. They enter therapy and
set out to "test" the therapist to see if it's safe to face
and work through their traumas and free up their underlying wishes
and capacities for health and growth.
Weiss argues that
patients repeat their symptoms in therapy not because they're fixated
or compelled, but because they are unconsciously seeking a healing
emotional experience from their therapists. This search involves acting
and relating in ways that are unconsciously intended to determine if
the therapist will repeat the patient's earlier painful relationships
and, therefore, confirm the patient's grim expectations. If the therapist
does so, the patient will not change or get worse. If the therapist
responds in ways that are counter to the patient's neurotic expectations
and more in line with the patient's healthier vision of himself and
their work, then psychological growth will proceed.
Patients test in
various ways. One who felt dominated or exploited by a narcissistic
parent might test the therapist by being disagreeable and stubborn
to see if the therapist can tolerate it. If the therapist demonstrates
that he or she can, the patient feels safer and can gradually experiment
with healthier ways to relate to others. If the therapist repeats the
original traumatic situation by acting in a way that the patient interprets
as controlling or defensive, then the patient will have his fears confirmed
and will remain stuck. Or a patient might treat the therapist as the
patient felt he or she was treated by authorities in childhood to see
if the therapist can handle things better and provide a healthier model.
For instance, a patient of mine would verbally attack and attempt to
demean my competence in the same way that his competitive father did
routinely with him. By standing up to him, while still maintaining
a positive ambience, I was able to make the patient feel safer and
more able to remember and work through the traumas of his childhood
and feel trusting enough to begin to develop a more affectionate relationship
with me and with others. He was better able to stand up to abuse and
had less need to abuse others.
The power of Weiss's
theory rests in his insight that behavior that is usually understood
in negative terms - the patient is resisting or undermining the treatment
process and therapist - can be understood affirmatively. If a patient
is provocative, he may be testing the therapist by inviting the latter
to reject him like a parent once did. The patient unconsciously wants
the therapist not to reject him; if the therapist passes the test,
he is relieved and more able to face his pain and be close. A patient
might act abusively or self-destructively with others as a way to see
if the therapist will protect him. In this case, the patient seeks
limits as an expression of care and protection and, if given them,
is better able to face his fears and become more responsible. Or a
patient who has been traumatized by a suicidal and manipulative parent
might assault the therapist with suicide threats as an unconscious
test of the therapists' ability to more adaptively handle the same
feelings of helplessness and omnipotent responsibility that the patient
was traumatized by as a child. In all of these instances, the therapist's
understanding, empathy, and therapeutic options are enlarged by understanding
the patient as actively problem-solving and seeking mastery, albeit
in disguised and often self-defeating ways. The therapist is better
able to get on the patient's "side." The traditional psychoanalytic
view that the patient is intrinsically ambivalent about change and
that the therapist must be careful about neutrally positioning him
- or herself equidistant from all sides of the conflict gives way to
a conception of the therapist understanding the patient's unconscious
plan for growth and doing everything to facilitate it.
Weiss' central presupposition
is that the patient is actively striving to establish more gratifying,
intimage, confident, and joyful relationships with others, as well
as live and work with more self-esteem and sense of personal efficacy
and autonomy all the time, but is hobbled by pathogenic beliefs about
herself and the social world. The patient is not "fixated" or
simply irrationally repeating infantile gratifications and fears. She
or he is actively striving at all times to create and discover conditions
that are safe enough to heal him or herself, to develop richer and
more satisfying relationships and pleasurable experiences of the world.
But this striving is often hidden within the complex and confusing
tests that the patient is always arranging with others. Thus, it is
the therapist's job to decipher the patient's plan, pass his or her
tests, and facilitate the unfolding of the patient's hidden but powerful
strivings toward healthy satisfactions.
On the most general
level, the compatibility of this attitude with a certain kind of political
sensibility is obvious. As contributors to this magazine have so often
opined, a movement for social change has to adopt a similar position
of respect, empathy, and support for the essentially healthy strivings
and rational fears of people that they want to reach. They have to
decipher and compassionately articulate the hidden strivings for recognition,
empowerment, mutuality, and connectedness that often lie behind even
the most destructive and self-destructive attitudes and behavior.
For instance, political
support for vindictive and punitive police measures to combat crime,
might be understood as containing a healthy striving for security and
protection in a social and economic world that offers increasingly
little of it to the average person. Repressive pro-life sentiments
may contain a misplaced longing for the lost innocence of a childhood
that was taken away and damaged in one's own personal and social history,
as well as a distorted protest against perceived attacks on a defensively
idealized vision of family life. Support for militarism abroad carries
with it a wish that "we" not allow ourselves to be "pushed
around" so much in our everyday lives - i.e., we can kick Saddam
Hussein's ass even though we can't do anything about our alienation
or insecurity at home. Even the racist backlash against affirmative
action might in part represent a growing and reasonable (although displaced)
resentment among whites that the American Dream has left them behind
and that it is not for lack of ability on their part.
Weiss describes patients
as propelled in therapy by powerful motives and wishes to get better.
Similarly, the "American people" are animated by legitimate
and healthy wishes to feel more powerful, connected, and understood
in their economic and political lives. Progressive political leadership
thus needs to respond to political passivity, cynicism, and right-wing
sentiment and reflexes-the worst of who we are politically-by understanding
these phenomena, first, both as a communication of authentic pain and
a healthy, but disguised attempt to transcend it. Second, we need to
disconfirm the reasonable-but ultimately pathogenically cynical-collective
expectations of the inevitability of corrupt political leadership and
the hopelessness of change.
An example might
bring this point into bolder relief. People in our culture have come
to fear that by caring too deeply about the poor, the needy, the victimized-by
loving too much-they lay themselves open to be taken advantage of and,
thus, to experience themselves as weak, helpless, and humiliated. This
is the lesson of the competitive marketplace which, as Hillary Rodham
Clinton has said, "knows the value of nothing" and invites
us to devalue helplessness in ourselves and others. Add to this the
observation of the apparent failure of the welfare state and a growing
bitterness about the souring of American Dream for the traditionally
secure middle class, and you have fertile ground within which identifications
with the aggressor and other pathogenic beliefs will grow. Specifically,
there is a tendency for people to become angry with the poor and want
to punsh and deprive them in the same way that we, ourselves, have
felt treated when we have felt or been-and continue to feel and be-dependent,
vulnerable, and needy. We have learned not to expect of reel deserving
of compassion and caring for our own victimization, and so can't allow
or afford such feelings for others. Our authentic need for empathy
and help and our instinctive capacity for empathy and concern become
strangled, turned into a harsh, punitive, and paranoid reaction against
the poor.
Political leaders
who understand these psychological dynamics need to counteract this
attitude-and not only by supporting the growth of the social welfare
net, or by advocating for greater economic democracy. Taking Weiss's
example, they need to get on the "side" of the patient. The
rest of us need to provide grass-roots support for this shift in attitude
by advocating for the importance of love and compassion as defining
strengths in human beings and the "American character." We
have to develop ways of critiquing the association of care with weakness
in the popular imagination and articulate the legitimate unmet needs
of all of us to be treated in a caring way.
When a therapist
responds with understanding and compassion to her patien'ts aggressive
attempts to hurt others in the same way that he/she has been hurt,
the patient feels cared-for, doesn't need to identify so much with
an aggressive and/or depriving caretaker, and can become more caring
him/herself. Simply put, if I feel entitled to compassion and care,
I can more easily give it to others. Media and education strategies
that involve directly talking about how our needs to be understood,
to be treated with respect, to be protected, and to be cared for are
as vital as our need for economic security-and why-are essential in
changing the political discourse in such a way that our cynicism is
disconfirmed and our natural motivation to be more open and human is
freed up.
The "patient" is
us, the citizens. The test we impose on our political leadership is
our cynicism and punitive, conservative attitudes. We all have a fear
of being humiliated if we express our need for recognition and compassion,
as well as our pain at not getting it, and this results in our tendency
to want ot blame, hurt, and deprive other people in the same way that
we have been victimized. Political leaders and activists have to speak
to the need that underlies this fear, the need and wish for connection
and growth, by carefully developing specific ways to talk about these
needs so that people feel safe enough to express them. That means reframing
political images and language in such a way that cynicism is equated
with weakness, and values such as empathy, compassion, and love are
indicative of strength.
Such discourse can
create conditions of safety, much as Weiss describes in the clinical
situation, in which pathogenic expectations of being embarrassed, exposed,
or manipulated if one is vulnerable are disconfirmed. People can thus
become freer to face some of their longings and fears and redefine
what they think might be possible in the public world.
TIKKUN has taken
the lead in this regard, urging people to expand the discourse of the
public world to include what it calls their "meaning needs," and
legitimating talk about such embarrassing topics as faith, love, compassion,
and even God. By elevating spirituality and recognition to the level
of political goals, a politics of meaning will elicit all the resistances-the
cynicism, passivity, identification with the aggressor, the tendencies
to scapegoat-that have so often daunted people interested in working
for progressive political change in our society. Yet the rapidity with
which the language of a politics of meaning has entered into American
political discourse suggests that underlying passions, longings, and
sensibilities are being freed up for expression because it is now safer
to do so. And this suggests the possibility that the patient is slowly
getting better.
Tikkun Vol. 9, No.
3 p. 11-14
