I only wish to suggest that the psychoanalytic theory of personality [i.e., classical theory] is deficient in suggesting what makes for a ‘desirable’ well integrated personality; and this because it over stresses the importance of the inner life to the neglect of the total man as he deals with human and social environment.
(ibid., p. 21)5
In light of the fact that the “extreme” environment of the concentration camp so swiftly and invasively shaped the person for better or worse, Bettelheim concluded, “What psychoanalysis has achieved for the personality within a stable social context must now be done for personality and social context in their interaction, when both of them are changing” (ibid., p. 57). Bettelheim thus recognized some of the deficiencies in psychoanalytic personality theory which, as he intimates, forced him to modify his psychoanalytic perspective with insight from the field of social psychology and sociology6 (i.e., the role of the social environment in changing personality). Social psychology questions the assumption of “personality” as a disposition, since the “classic” experiments described in this book point to the fluidity of personality—that it is not fixed but dependent on situational forces, usually unacknowledged.
This being said, Martin Bergmann, a prominent psychoanalyst, noted that “we have a very rudimentary social psychology as psychoanalysts” (Luel & Marcus, 1984, p. 216), while the former President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Robert Wallerstein, wrote that “the psychoanalytic study of reality” has been “relatively neglected or taken for granted in usual psychoanalytic discourse” (Wallerstein, 1973, p. 5). He believes that this neglect is implicit in the long-standing belief in a fixed world “out there,” of an unvarying “average expectable environment” (ibid., p. 7). More recently, psychodynamic psychologist Tamara McClintock Greenberg noted, “within mainstream psychoanalysis, there has been relatively little emphasis on ‘real events,’ including the effects of adult-onset trauma,” such as illness in old age (2016, p. 43). Indeed, a recent definition of reality reinforces my claim that not much has changed in how psychoanalysis reckons with the notion of reality since Wallerstein made his observation: “By ‘reality,’ psychoanalysis means what is actually out there, can be objectively perceived and consensually agreed upon” (Akhtar, 2009, p. 240, italics added). For example, Freud described a particular kind of psychosis called “hallucinatory confusion” wherein the “ego breaks away from the incompatible idea” (an idea that is overpoweringly painful or distressing) so that it has “detached itself wholly or in part from reality” (1962, p. 59). Social psychology questions this foundational assumption by suggesting that reality is perception, not fixed. Kurt Lewin, “the founding father of experimental social psychology” (Aronson et al., 2014, p. 16), emphasized this point when he wrote,
If an individual sits in a room trusting that the ceiling will not come down, should only the ‘subjective probability’ be taken into account for predicting behavior or should we also consider the ‘objective probability’ of the ceiling’s coming down as determined by engineers? To my mind, only the first has to be taken into account.
(ibid., p. 18)
The counter-intuitive claim of my book is that experimental/scientific social psychology (henceforth, social psychology), especially the classic experiments like Asch’s line judgment studies (highlighting the moral conflict of “conformity versus independence”), Latané and Darley’s bystander studies (highlighting the moral conflict of “helping versus indifference”), and Milgram’s obedience studies (highlighting the moral conflict of “obedience versus resistance”), have experimentally demonstrated that what is “actually out there,” how it “hangs” together, what we expect of it and how we behave, is not entirely obvious. As John Lennon allegedly said, “Reality takes a lot of imagination” (Frank, 2013, p. 79). Indeed, in significant instances these experimental findings challenge many presumed psychoanalytic ideas and explanations regarding issues pertinent to psychoanalytic moral psychology and the analysand’s efforts to help fashion a moral life (what might be called clinical ethics). Even more importantly, these experiments suggest what is psychologically necessary for people to develop to resist these potentially dangerous social dynamics: by acting in ways that are humane, life-affirming and life-promoting. Other examples of classic experiments include: Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, which highlights the way social influences, like assigned roles, can contribute to “normal” people engaging in brutal tyranny while other assigned roles can contribute to “normal” people engaging in behaviors associated with extreme victimization (Haney et al., 1973); Festinger’s cognitive dissonance studies, in which individuals aim for consistency between attitudes and behaviors, and may not use rational or moral methods to achieve it (Festinger et al., 1956); and the Rosenhan experiment, which highlights the lack of validity and reliability of psychiatric diagnosis about what is “normal” versus “abnormal,” and the disempowering and demeaning nature of patient care experienced by the study participants (Rosenhan, 1973). This path-breaking experiment is particularly pertinent to psychoanalysis because it raises intriguing questions, such as whether madness is the inability to fake sanity, or as sociologist Erving Goffman implied, whether society is an insane asylum run by the inmates. In other words, I will consider how these divisions of sane and insane operate, often negatively, for the clinician and analysand, patient or client.
This book can be described as a social psychology of “witness” in that it has an overarching goal of increasing the individual’s capacity to act in an autonomous, integrated and humane manner amidst the moral challenges one faces in the attempt to fashion a flourishing moral life that includes an understanding of the visible and invisible external social forces that influence behavior. As Foucault noted, the role of philosophy, and I would add the role of social psychology and psychoanalysis, is not so much “to discover what is hidden, but to render visible what precisely is visible, which is to say, to make appear what is so close, so immediate, so intimately linked to ourselves that, as a consequence, we do not perceive it” (Cavell, 2004, p. 33). In this way one can “think differently” about one’s situation: “Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem” (Foucault, 1984a, p. 388). For instance, there were individuals in Asch’s line drawing studies (1951) who did not cave in to group pressure and told the truth as they perceived it, there were people in Latané and Darley’s bystander study (1968) who intervened in an emergency situation, and there were individuals who refused to shock an innocent victim in Milgram’s study (1974). In this book, I use these classic social psychology studies, which together can be called the “sacred cannon,” as analogous to compelling, modern “morality plays”: to delineate the important insights about the conditions of possibility for potentiating the “worst” and “best” about human behavior, what psychoanalysis needs to integrate into its understanding of the human condition,7 and how these social-psychological findings can be pragmatically integrated into clinical practice. For example, helping the analysand develop better “situational awareness,” defined as increased awareness of one’s surroundings (e.g., of time and space) and identifying potential threats and dangerous situations, is a mind-set and an ego-strength that has enormous benefit in helping an analysand maintain personal and collective security. This increased awareness goes against denial and complacency in a world that feels—and often is—menacing. Such skillful situational awareness is in sync with how sociologist Anthony Giddens describes the modern self: “as a reflexive project, for which the individual is responsible” (1991, p. 75). Rather than taking for granted or passively inheriting who we are, as in traditional culture, we actively shape, reflect on and monitor our selves, fashioning our biographical narratives as we move through life. We view our identities as a project, something that we actively construct and are alone responsible for. Any psychoanalytic social psychology worth its salt includes responsibility as a core valuative attachment of its intellectual and practical activities.8 Indeed, throughout this book, in part drawing from social psychologist Milton Rokeach, I suggest that the person who fashions a self-identity that includes strongly felt, flexibly and creatively applied, transcendent-pointing moral beliefs and values that are primarily other-directed, other-regarding and other-serving, tends to behave in morally praiseworthy, life-affirming and life-promoting ways.
Many eminent psychoanalytic personality and social theorists have investigated the role of culture on the individual, such as the way that one socially constructs a self within the context of family and the broadly conceived environment (e.g., the role of gender, patriarchy, race, economics, etc.). While these theorists have tried to delineate the ways that individuals are shaped by social circumstances, including acknowledging social context as being a primary determinant of behavior, intra-psychic properties (e.g., desire and fantasy) tend to dominate the analysis of why people behave the way they do. For example, one psychoanalytically influenced sociologist, Anthony Elliott, points out that the analyst and analysand attempt to understand how social and cultural forms are given shape internally, involving critically reflecting on how the self is constituted culturally as a manifestation of “internal depth”: “[T]he self is a work of active construction and reconstruction, built on inner workings of fantasy and its unconscious contortions—anxieties about difference, about otherness and strangeness, about intimacy and proximity—in the wider frame of culture, society and politics” (2015, p. 187). Elliott fu...