Agency, Health And Social Survival

The Ecopolitics Of Rival Psychologies

Caroline New

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781135344054
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: General Health

This text addresses the interface of sociology and psychology which, it argues, is the key to political change. Offering a comparison of a range of psychotherapeutic theories of human nature, including those of Freud and Anna Freud, Klein and Kleininans and Lacan, humanisticpsychology, and feminist, trans-cultural and other radical psychotherapies, the book focuses on each theory's psychological concept of health and its political implications.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Moments of conception

One of several moments of this book's conception took place in a classroom in Newfoundland in the early 1980s. I was teaching a course on 'Classical Social Theory' in Memorial University's summer school. To illustrate a point about Marx, I showed the students a film on the increase in productivity in the fishing industry. Newfoundland and Labrador is Canada's easternmost province, a relatively underdeveloped region of high unemployment. Newfoundland itself is an enormous rocky island, so scattered with lakes and pools that it looks lacy from the air. Stunted conifers cover its infertile soil. Beyond its rocky coast swim not only whales, but schools of cod, and capelin, a sardine-like fish on which both cod and whales feed. Every summer the beaches are strewn with the stinking corpses of the male capelin, which die after breeding. And every summer huge Japanese ships dock in St John's harbour, their hulls stuffed with the bodies of the female capelin, prized for their roe. Once upon a time the inshore fishermen in the 'outports' could make a living by fishing as long as the seas weren't frozen. In the 1980s they tended to work ten weeks a year, to entitle them to unemployment pay for the rest of the year. Only the trawlers, the deepsea fishers who pull up everything, could reach the remaining cod. Now, in the 1990s, there is a moratorium on fishing.

In the classroom, the whirring images of these trawlers showed their decks covered continuously, sometimes 24 hours a day, with squirming silver fish endlessly taken from the deeps. Here was Newfoundland's wealth, through that increased productivity of which both Marxists and capitalist apologists approved, being squandered at source. Even I, a long-time believer in economic progress, was forcibly struck by the reality of the finitude of resources and the likelihood of a relationship between that greedy plunder and the undeniable evidence - outside the classroom - of Newfoundland's dying, hostage economy.

By the time of this unpleasant and urgent realization, an earlier and long-drawn out moment of conception had already occurred. In the first half of the 1970s I was first an Althusserian intellectual and then a socialist feminist activist. In Althusserian circles I met others who, like me, took the basic truth of psychoanalysis for granted. Yet, unlike me, most of my highly theoreticist comrades seemed totally uninterested in things personal or psychological. For them the subject was an illusory construction, yet they hailed psychoanalysis (in the abstract) as scientific. What also came to puzzle me was the structuralist rejection, in the name of anti-empiricism, of any causal role for subjective experience. How could this be reconciled with our active political aims and affiliations? This puzzlement came to a head when I had my first baby. Various aspects of women's position in society which I had previously 'known' hit me with the force of a sledgehammer and I could not account for the power of this new way of knowing. Some years later I was still distancing myself - but now as a socialist feminist - from those parts of the women's liberation movement which extolled women's experience as the unproblematic source of knowledge. At that period I used to wonder to what extent various psychoanalytic theories were really compatible with feminist aims. I still do. The intellectual acceptance of psychoanalytic theory by non-clinicians often remains abstract, unrelated to political and theoretical tenets and aims with which it may actually be inconsistent.

My two emerging questions were: 'How can human societies become both sustainable and just?' and 'What does the human mind have to be like, if socialist and feminist aims are to be achievable?' or, coming at it from another angle: 'What are the political implications of psychoanalysis and other theories of human subjectivity?' The long history of my own refusal to think about the need for sustainability served to underline the point that rationalist notions of political consciousness were extraordinarily naive.

Maybe social transformation can be brought about by people deliberately and collectively acting in ways they have reason to believe will be transformative. If so, it does not follow that they will take such action because they have read a leaflet or gone to a public meeting setting out 'the facts'. Generations of political thought did not seem to have progressed far beyond this model. Both social theorists and activists needed psychological theory, I came to believe, but needed to approach it cautiously and critically because of the occupational hazard of its own creators, the tendency to treat the subject as presocial (Henriques et al., 1984). As a materialist, and therefore a philosophical realist, I was assuming that the world held answers to my questions, even if these answers were never vouchsafed to me. (Of course, the answers might be of the Wittgensteinian sort which deconstruct the question and the sense of puzzlement with it.) I assumed (and still assume) that the human mind has certain capacities, certain developmental tendencies, which permit certain social possibilities and forbid others; and that we can come to know these structures, capacities and tendencies through theorizing their effects. I assumed that approaching such questions from the direction of the social - both what psychological theorizing presupposes about the social and what it implies about the social - would begin to put flesh on the bare bones of the concept of agency. I had not really taken on board poststructuralist and postmodernist scepticism about the subject, about agency and about knowledge. A dialogue with postmodernism is the third of the formative moments of this book.

In one of the many conversations that composed this dialogue a friend and I grew tired of the obstinate counterposition of concepts and arguments that slid past each other without really engaging. Instead, she asked me why I so disliked poststructuralism, especially its relativism and scepticism about reality outside of discourse. I replied that it seemed to lead to nihilism and political cynicism or self-deception. If I were really to accept its rejection of the possibility of knowledge, I would feel I was going mad. But why did she, a working-class feminist; hold to it so strongly? Because, she said, her inner fragmentation felt so extreme that only a theory that articulated it could prevent her feeling she was going mad. For a while there was not much more either of us could say. I began to see that philosophical disputes may be reflections of contending anxieties.

Contending philosophies: Contending anxieties

Postmodernists rightly insist that knowledge is always partial and always situated. For me, this indicates the nature of the foundations of knowledge rather than undermining them. The autobiographical history of ideas above is offered in a postmodern spirit by a writer - a middle-class, middle-aged, white, English, female writer who is intellectually and politically committed to the Enlightenment ideal of human emancipation. I am uncomfortable with Habermas' phrase 'the project of modernity' to summarize this commitment, because I find 'modernity' too broad and too tendentious a concept. Wherever we draw its boundaries, modernity spawned many and inconsistent projects, including those firmly opposed to emancipation. Habermas also describes this project as aiming to bring society, like nature, under control for the emancipation of humankind generally (1983, p. 9). Here I would agree with postmodern critics that what we do not need, and what is arguably behind the disastrous poverty of Africa today, is the attempt to control society in the way industrialized nations have attempted to control nature. How we control society, and who 'we' are, remain unanswered for the present, but my starting point is that we must do so in order to prevent continuing, even increasing human suffering and eventual social extinction. This, then, is the source of my anxiety and of my hope.

Following Foucault (1980, p. 131), many postmodernists find the very epistemology of modernity, the insistence on the distinction between Truth and Rhetoric, inherently authoritarian. For some, characterizations of social reality are rationalizations of 'aspirations for social authority' (Seidman, 1992, p. 55). Knowledge is always situated and relative, never universal; it can have no sure foundations. The only philosophically (and therefore politically) defensible route open to postmodernists interested in social theory is as providers of 'contextualized local narratives' (op. cit., p. 50). 'People do not suffer as members of categories, but in specific times and places ... An ironic general social theory, a postmodern social theory, requires the easy sacrifice of a modernist commitment to a reality that cannot be confirmed' (Lemert, 1992, p. 41). For these thinkers, the Marxist notions of ideology and false consciousness, the feminist conviction that women are everywhere oppressed, whether or not they describe themselves as such, simply constitute further evidence for the postmodern belief 'that the Enlightenment project was doomed to turn against itself and transform the quest for human emancipation into a system of universal oppression in the name of human liberation' (Harvey, 1990, p. 13).

The danger, from a postmodern standpoint, lies in essentialism and universals, in refusing to relativize. The postmodern anxiety is that emancipationists are engaged in telling other people what they experience and what is good for them. Pretending to have privileged access to objective knowledge - the 'view from nowhere' (Haraway, 1991) - they are actually bidding for domination. Bauman (1989), for instance, believes that emancipatory practice, which insists on the validity of universal values and categories, cannot ever be genuinely emancipatory from the viewpoint of those whose own experiences, categories and values have been subordinated to the supposedly 'universal' and 'objective' ones of the 'liberators'. He argues that the greatest cruelties and disasters of modern history result from the emancipatory 'project of modernity'. For him, social engineering is entirely discredited (1989, p. 4); the Holocaust can only be understood in its normality, as a climax of instrumental rationality (op. cit., ch. 4); while socialism 'put modernity to its ultimate test. The failure was as ultimate as the test itself' (Bauman, 1990, p. 23). From this point of view the project of emancipation is no more or less than the 'will to power'. The only safe course, from this point of view, is to reject the 'totalitarian myth of the Ideal City' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 190) and to give up global aspirations other than those for diversity, tolerance and pluralism.

Epistemologically there is something puzzling about this preference for the local. People suffer in specific times and places, true, but very frequently because they are members of certain social categories. So why this emphasis on the local as,the only admissible form of knowledge claims on the one hand and the site of 'safe' (i.e. non-oppressive) politics on the other? First, 'local narratives' admit to their origins, are contextualized in this sense. Their validity, or lack of it, depends on their status within the local discourses within which their stories are told. If we, as social scientists, want to provide a gloss on the stories the locals tell, we can at least refer it back to their own versions and respectfully offer it them as potentially useful knowledge (Bauman, 1989a, p. 50). But this attempt to reconcile the practice of social science with postmodern scruples cannot hold water. For local narratives inevitably universalize and make wider claims, or at least do so implicitly by ruling out certain ways of thinking. Social scientists cannot push the cup of meta-judgement from their lips. As Sayer says: 'We can't simply refuse to make any evaluation, negative or positive, because unless we decide whether the actors' own explanations of their actions are right, we cannot decide what explanation to choose ourselves' (1992, p. 40). The postmodern insistence that relativism is a necessity of the current epoch is itself, as many have pointed out, a universalizing claim.

Even if there is no good philosophical reason for privileging 'local' knowledge, might there not be good political reasons for both acting and thinking locally rather than globally? Foucault's insistence on the ubiquity and dispersion of power necessarily suggested a micro-politics. In the case of say, Baudrillard, this becomes nihilistic, while in some cases the 'new pluralism' is not readily distinguishable from the old. However, not all postmodern thinkers reject political action on an international scale. Laclau and Mouffe argue for 'radical democracy', in which decisions are made 'from below' on the basis of many communities and identities, 'breaking with the provincial myth of the "universal class ..there is no a priori centrality determined at the level of structure, simply because there is no rational foundation of History' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 77).

Aaronowitz (1988), who suspects that their 'radical democracy' assumes some universal values and is therefore not as postmodern as they claim, argues for a process of deconstructing 'given' political categories to result in an ever more complex pluralist paradigm, in which new social movements speak 'a language of localism and regionalism, a discourse that... addresses power itself as an antagonist' (Aaronowitz, 1988, p. 61). Despite his strictures to Laclau and Mouffe, he nowhere explains why power is always to be opposed, using the word 'progressive' as if its meaning were unproblematic.

These confusions occur because there are two major strands in postmodern thinking. One is extreme anti-foundationalism of the sort that sees the world as constructed in language: 'outside of any discursive contexts objects do not have being; they only have existence' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987, p. 85). Combined with Foucault's Nietzschean view of power, this is an idealism that effectively makes politics entirely subjective and prohibits rational argument about it. The other strand is a periodization thesis which points out the specific features of the current epoch and the inadequacy of Marxist and other modern sociological characterizations of it (although in fact it is very dependent on them for many of its key concepts). This, essentially realist, position is often combined with an essentially universalist ethical rejection of domination and a valorization of autonomy, self-determination, tolerance and diversity.

This strand of postmodern thinking is, I believe, inconsistent with the first strand's rejection of ontological realism and values of universal scope. Yet they are frequently held by the same people and even put forward in the same works (e.g. Beck, 1992; Laclau and Mouffe, 1987; Bauman, 1989). I suspect that the postmodern anxiety about discursive domination, and about the oppressive potential of 'emancipatory' practices, would be better converted into an attitude of caution and insistence on continuous critique (cf. Isaac, 1990). If allowed to stifle political activity, confine it to micro-politics or resign it to cynicism, it prepares the ground for the emergence of the other anxiety, the one that haunts emancipationists. Perhaps the squirmings of Laclau and Mouffe, for instance, are merely attempts to navigate an impossible path between the Scylla and Charybdis of these two awful visions.

The emancipationist anxiety comes from the secular perception of human beings as uniquely self-conscious and alone in a universe we cannot control, powerless in the face of the unintended consequences of our own social practices. This has a new poignancy in the late-twentieth century, when, in Giddens' words, humanity is riding a juggernaut, 'a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control and which could rend itself asunder' (1990, p. 139). Emancipationists might agree with Bauman that the Gulag and the Holocaust can only be understood in theif normality, in their continuity with periods and practices that are taken for granted rather than denounced and represented as alien. Nevertheless, they would want to explain these specific oppressive practices in terms of particular and complex historical causes, rather than as the inevitable result of Utopian endeavours or a universal, essentialist 'will to power'. For emancipationists, postmodern politics amount to an uneasy choice between a sentimental celebration of cut-throat diversity, an espousal of laissez-faire capitalism dressed up as a new pluralism, or a neo-anarchist commitment to resistance that eschews any alternative forms of power. Such offerings weigh light indeed when balanced against the fear of social and physical extinction.

Postmodernists and emancipationists may well share various emotions: anger, repugnance and fear evoked by social structures which necessitate and justify human suffering; fear especially of social and environmental degradation and death. These can become fuel for emancipatory projects when combined with 'Utopian' beliefs about the possibility of other ways of living, immanent in existing structures, and an 'objective' concept of oppression. To be coherent, the concept of emancipation requires one of oppression, and the justification of projects of emancipation depends on being able to offer objective indices of oppression. We must be able to say that slavery is wrong, even if slaves appear to accept it.

I shall argue in Chapters 1 and 2 that such emancipatory critique is most powerfully rooted in conceptions of human nature, especially human needs, and in notions of positive health. Philosophically, such conceptions require us to be realists, claiming that it is possible to identify and theorize the human capacities which underlie social life and partially determine the range of its possible forms. For these purposes, the most useful recent 'underlabouring' for the human sciences has been done by critical realists such as Bhaskar, Benton, Soper, Collier, Rustin and others. I use and build on this approach in this book.

Critical realism

Critical realism (sometimes called 'transcendental' or 'scientific' realism) assumes that:

1. At any one moment reality exists independent of human descriptions of it, though it may, the next moment, be affected by such descriptions. (The social world is particularly so affected, but the relationship is causal rather than reductive, cf. Giddens (1990, p. 43)). The universe existed and had certain characteristics before there were any human beings around to perceive them, and may do so again. Its being 'experienced or experienciable' is not an 'essential property of the world' but an 'accidental property of some things' (Bhaskar, 1975, p. 28) - for some other things may exist which human beings are incapable of experiencing.
2. We can know what the world is like, though our knowledge is always fallible and incomplete (Sayer, 1992, p. 79; Giddens, 1990, p. 47). Knowledge is always partial and a mere stage in an ongoing process which is by no means obliged to be unidirectional. However, in making a statement about social reality I need not be laying claim to special access to the view from everywhere, but co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Starting points
• Chapter 3 Conflicting concepts of health
• Chapter 4 Freud and the inevitability of discontent
• Chapter 5 Melanie Klein: A social emotion
• Chapter 6 Jacques Lacan: Exposing the myth of agency
• Chapter 7 Humanistic psychology: Saved by synergy
• Chapter 8 Four radical approaches
• Chapter 9 Conclusion: If humanly possible
• Notes
• References
• Index