The Political Self

Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness

Roderick Tweedy, Roderick Tweedy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429921766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book explores how our social and economic contexts profoundly affect our mental health and wellbeing, and how modern neuroscientific and psychodynamic research can both contribute to and enrich our understanding of these wider discussions. It therefore looks both inside and outside - indeed one of the main themes of The Political Self is that the conceptually discrete categories of 'inner' and 'outer' in reality constantly interact, shape, and inform each other. Severing these two worlds, it suggests, has led both to a devitalised and dissociated form of politics, and to a disengaged and disempowering form of therapy and analysis.

INTRODUCTION

Where three roads meet

Rod Tweedy

Oedipus: If I understand you, Laϊos was killed At a place where three roads meet.

Iocaste: So it was said; We have no later story.

Oedipus: Where did it happen?

Iocaste: Phokis, it is called: at a place where the Theban Way Divides into the roads toward Delphi and Daulia.

—Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

Individuals live not only their own lives but also the life of the times … Once we see that there is a political self who has developed over time, we can start to track the political history of that self—the way the political events of a lifetime have contributed to forming the individual’s political myth.

—Samuels, Politics on the Couch

This book explores how our social and economic contexts profoundly affect our mental health and well-being, and how modern neuroscientific and psychodynamic research can both contribute to and enrich our understanding of these wider discussions. It therefore looks both inside and outside—indeed one of the main themes of The Political Self is that the conceptually discrete categories of “inner” and “outer” in reality constantly interact, shape, and inform each other. Severing these two worlds, it suggests, has led both to a devitalised and dissociated form of politics, and to a disengaged and disempowering form of therapy and analysis.

Like Oedipus, we are standing at a crossroads, facing on the one hand remarkable new discoveries about how our brains work and are shaped and sculpted by the world around us, and on the other hand an increasing awareness of the deeply dysfunctional and divisive nature of many of our traditional political and economic institutions. This convergence—a bringing together and alignment of the inner and outer—is one of the defining characteristics of this age; and what makes this period of history particularly exciting in terms of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy is the new receptivity and willingness among many mental health practitioners and professionals to address and engage with social reality as part of the necessary therapeutic process.

As Andrew Samuels, one of the pioneers of this new integrated approach to psychotherapy, has observed: “From a psychological point of view, the world is making people unwell; it follows that, for people to feel better, the world’s situation needs to change. But perhaps this is too passive: perhaps for people to feel better, they have to recognize that the human psyche is a political psyche and hence consider doing something about the state the world is in” (2001, p. 21). This recognition requires seeing that the human psyche is not some abstracted entity operating in splendid isolation from the world, but is on every level profoundly involved in the world: we are embedded, embodied, and embrained, and the world—for better or worse—is hardwired and mirrored within us.¹ “For us to feel better” we therefore need to adjust not only ourselves but our worlds, our surrounding contexts—the powerful matrix of forces, pressures, ideas, and interests constantly acting upon us. And for this to happen, Samuels notes, we also need to adjust and update our model of the human psyche from the crude seventeenth-century version—conceived as a separate, atomised, rationalised unit (which unfortunately still drives mainstream political, and indeed psychoanalytic, discourse)—to a more twenty-first-century dynamic model, based on a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of the interdependent, interactive nature of our psyches: we need to recognise, as Samuels puts it, that “the human psyche is a political psyche.”

As the symbolic “father” of the psychoanalytic and therapeutic industries—as well as one of the most influential and important of the early explorers of the modern psyche—the figure of Sigmund Freud is particularly significant at this juncture. Freud’s pioneering work profoundly challenged the mechanistic, rationalising, literalist world of nineteenth-century science—opening up the vast symbolic realms of the human unconscious onto the unsuspecting materialism and respectability of Viennese and Victorian bourgeois living rooms, and transforming our appreciation of the human mind in the process. Freud drew powerful attention to the role of repression in concealing uncomfortable—unspoken—truths about society. And the method he instigated to reveal and resolve these repressions and hidden realities, which became the basis of “the talking cure”, heralded a new emancipatory role for analysis in addressing and transforming them. As Adam Phillips—one of the ablest proponents of Freud’s thought today—has remarked, while the aims of therapy (in helping people) are fairly conventional, “the method is revolutionary”: “It dawned on Freud very early, that what he was opening up by letting people say what they thought and felt, was really very very explosive—and would really have unpredictable consequences” (Phillips interview, 2014). It is this aspect of Freud’s discovery that the present book draws on in suggesting a new multidisciplinary, integrated, and contextualized model of therapeutic practice for the twenty-first century. Letting people say what they think and feel still has unpredictable consequences.

100 years of therapy: an analysis of psychoanalysis

Freud’s concept of repression is particularly useful in understanding the reasons for psychoanalysis’s own history of disengagement from social reality. As we’ll see, this disconnection or “dissociation” from reality has been observed by a number of commentators. “The great illusion of psychoanalysis”, notes Joel Kovel (see Chapter Three), “has been to imagine itself free from society.” By abstracting itself from society and turning “inwards”—literally—psychoanalysis forged for itself a more respectable role in the turbulent decades of the mid-twentieth century, especially in America, but in doing so it also lost its earlier radical, genuinely liberating, therapeutic role, as it quickly became co-opted by the social and economic structures it inevitably came to serve. “The main theme of the history of psychoanalysis,” Kovel therefore notes, is “that of the absorption of critique by the dominant culture” (p. 64).

Many others have drawn the same conclusion: the eminent psychoanalyst and social philosopher Horst-Eberhard Richter, for example, observed that orthodox psychoanalysis lacks “social analysis”: for Richter, “the traditional psychoanalytic near-exclusive focus on the inner world of the individual … is negligent when it ignores the socio-economic dynamics that contextualize the person’s experience” (Warnecke, 2015, p. 11). Indeed, this lack of context—or rather deliberate severing and de-contextualising of the person’s experience—led to a form of therapeutic dissociation that was itself rather pathological. “It was in fact as if the world had split in two,” notes David Smail, whose remarkable and compelling analysis of the root causes of this fracturing of analytic consciousness, post-Freud, forms the opening chapter of the present collection.

The most striking thing of all is how “psychotherapy”, in becoming one of the greatest cultural and commercial success stories of the Western world, remained over the past hundred years almost hermetically sealed off from the rest of reality. (p. 3)

And where psychoanalysis did engage with social reality, it was often in order to bolster the very systems of political control and commercial exploitation that were generating much of the distress and ill health in the first place: as Kovel notes, “It was Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and the founder of public relations, who spearheaded the appropriation of psychodynamics by advertising and the mass media in general” (p. 65). If psychoanalysis itself was reluctant to incorporate social reality, social reality was only too happy to co-opt psychoanalytic thinking in order to help sell us washing machines, cars, and holidays—as Joel Bakan’s compelling analysis of the rise of the corporation, in this book (Chapter Nine), brilliantly demonstrates.

Thus, despite its promising beginnings and radical potential, Sue Gerhardt notes (see Chapter Four), “Psychological discoveries have more often been used … to manipulate customers, and to increase our consumption through advertising, with its empty promises of sexual fulfilment. In other words, like so much else in this phase of human history, psychology has been subordinated to material pleasure and comforts” (p. 77). One of the aims of the present book is to show how deeply this manipulation occurs: how these everyday processes of advertising and consumption rely for their success on reshaping our desires, our psyches—how, as Sue Gerhardt’s research shows, corporate capitalism shapes our brains and reworks our nervous systems in its own image. Indeed, as a number of contributors in this volume suggest, economic practices are necessarily and simultaneously psychological practices—encouraging and embodying specific ways of relating to or attending to the world—which is another reason why the current dislocation of inner and outer, “economic” issues (percentage rates, algorithms, taxes, productivity) and “mental health issues” (addiction, compulsion, autism, depression, trauma) is so misleading and unhelpful. Within every economy, to paraphrase Neil Postman (1992), there is always embedded a psychology, an ideology, a way of doing things.²

It’s important to note that many individual therapists and analysts were, and still are, often wholly unaware of this process of co-option, and of the deeper social currents acting on their profession—in part due to the very dissociation and conscious uncoupling of psychoanalysis from these broader contexts—and were therefore largely unable to prevent this powerful drift. As David Smail notes, “The capitalist counter-revolution of the late twentieth century in the West co-opted therapy as part of a technology of profit, and it did so so swiftly—in part by engaging the interests of therapists and counsellors themselves—that many, perhaps most, practitioners still find it hard to accept their complicity in a political and economic system they in all likelihood deplore” (p. 24). The most persuasive reason for this historical lack of awareness, or unconsciousness, as Smail suggests, is actually a familiar one to the profession: repression—in this case, the repression of powerful but largely unconscious interests, as his chapter compellingly demonstrates. It is, perhaps ironically, Freud’s own concept of repression that therefore provides the crucial key to understanding the process by which therapy became “a central tool of ideological power” in the latter half of the twentieth century. To blame individual therapists and analysts for this, Smail adds, is to completely miss the point—is precisely to “psychologise” an issue which is collective and political at heart: “This would of course be to psychologise the account in exactly the way I am arguing against throughout: it is not that the individuals decide to act in accordance with interest (theirs or others’), but rather that, not least because interest is repressed, they find themselves caught up in a system in ways they cannot fully understand and would—if they could understand it—undoubtedly deplore” (p. 14).

On those comparatively rare occasions where psychotherapy has directly engaged with social issues and political reality the results to date have been rather disappointing, to say the least. Freud himself, as Adam Phillips notes, was a “politically naïve liberal” for whom “political participation was unthinkable”, as indeed it was for so many Jews of his generation. But this marginalisation and internalised sense of isolation unfortunately became written into his theorising about psychoanalysis itself, and fed into his disengagement with the political realities of his own day. As Phillips notes, he was “a man who, most strikingly, couldn’t take the Nazis seriously until it was almost too late”, and who even dedicated a copy of his book to Mussolini (Phillips, 2014, p. 33; see also Belilos, 2016).³ “Politics”, concludes Phillips, “was one of Freud’s blind spots” (op. cit., p. 34). Unfortunately, it was also a “blind spot” of Jung’s. “I couldn’t help liking Mussolini,” the founder of analytical psychology once remarked, and he had similarly positive words for Hitler: “There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man” (cited in Masson, 1989, p. 147; see also Samuels’s penetrating discussion of Jung’s politics in his chapter “Jung, anti-Semitism and the Nazis”, 1993, pp. 287–316). How could these founding fathers of psychology have got things so wrong—could have so poorly analysed what was going on? The clue perhaps lies precisely in the decontextualising of experience that they presided over. By so completely severing the inner and outer, the psychological and the political, they were largely unprepared and unable to understand or engage with the major historical movements of their time, or the forces acting on their profession. As Smail trenchantly observes: “The twentieth century, after all, exploded into revolution and war on an unprecedented scale, but you would hardly know it from examining the theoretical speculations of Freud and Jung at the time—and so far as outer events did concern them, it was nearly always as an expressions of inner ‘psychic’ conflicts of some kind (a stance still widely evident among some psychoanalytic writers)” (p. 4).

It is this legacy of disconnect that has been so limiting and harmful both to the theoretical formulations and the practical applications of therapy. From its disastrous pathologising of homosexuality in the twentieth century (only formally declassified as a “mental illness” by the American Psychiatric Association in 1987), to its complicity in the torture programmes of the Pentagon and the CIA in the “war on terror”, and its contemporary involvement in such toxic practices as “psychocompulsion”, psychotherapy has sadly shown itself to be only too amenable as a “tool of ideological power”.⁴

Therapy as a political act: let's talk about power

The difficulty in recognising and addressing the ideological role of therapy within these wider political and ideological systems is also what makes the work of many contemporary therapists and analysts who are engaged with challenging the movement of ideological power so impressive and exciting. Psychotherapist Nick Totton has perhaps done more than anyone to reveal how issues of power profoundly shape our contemporary therapeutic institutions as well as the actual practice of psychotherapy. As he notes, “The structure of psychotherapy builds in stubborn problems of power and control, irrespective of the good intentions or otherwise of the practitioner.” These problems manifest at every level of the psychoanalytic industry: from inequalities in the therapeutic encounter itself, to structural and institutional issues of control and hierarchy, to the cultural status of therapy as a value system or ideological set of beliefs—with many of these beliefs, he notes, often being unconsciously held. “In one way or another, I suggest, all therapists are carrying out a political programme in their work with clients.” The reason for this, he points out, is that “… therapists have their own, often highly developed, beliefs about how people should be and live”:

These beliefs are essentially political in nature; they are also often unconscious and implicit. For us to hold such beliefs is an inevitable part both of our lives as citizens and of our whole approach to interacting with our clients. This is very obvious with therapy styles that think explicitly in terms of cure and adjustment: people should be healthy, should be well adjusted—and, of course, each school and each practitioner has their own set of small print about what “healthy” or “well adjusted” actually means. “Well adjusted” to what? Each practitioner believes their clients should adjust to whatever aspects of life they themselves see as natural or acceptable. (p. 35)

Given the ineluctable presence and potency of these beliefs—which of course constitute and underwrite the very idea and practice of “therapy”—the profession is therefore faced, he observes, “with a fundamental political problem at its heart”.

Totton’s analysis is an eye-openin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION Where three roads meet
• APPENDIX Additional resources
• INDEX