Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 and Society

S. Alexander Haslam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000337310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Diseases & Allergies

In the Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 series, international experts introduce important themes in psychological science that engage with people's unprecedented experience of the pandemic, drawing together chapters as they originally appeared before COVID-19 descended on the world.

This book explores how COVID-19 has impacted society, and chapters examine a range of societal issues including leadership and politics, community, social status, welfare, social exclusion and accountability. Addressing the social and psychological processes that structure, and are structured by, our social contexts, it shows not only how groups and individuals can come together to manage global crises, but also how these crises can expose weaknesses in our society. The volume also reflects on how we can work together to rebuild society in the aftermath of the pandemic, by cultivating a shared sense of responsibility through social integration and responsible leadership.

Showcasing theory and research on key topics germane to the global pandemic, the Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 series offers thought-provoking reading for professionals, students, academics and policy makers concerned with the psychological consequences of COVID-19 for individuals, families and society.

1
LEADERS

Barry Richards

RAGE AND RETRIBUTION

You bleed for those sons of a bitch. How many? Three thousand? I kill more if only to get rid of drugs.¹

When I say, ‘I will kill you if you destroy my country’, and ‘I will kill you if you destroy the young of my country’, I am asking everybody to find me a fault in those two statements.²

If I make it to the presidential palace I will do just what I did as mayor. You drug pushers, holdup men, and do-nothings, you better get out because I’ll kill you.³

These are statements made during a successful campaign in 2016 by a candidate for election to the presidency of a country of more than 100 million people. Rodrigo Duterte is a middle-class, universityeducated career politician, currently president of the Philippines, who was explaining his strategy for tackling the country’s major drugs problem. He is an extreme example of a politician, well-known for the violence and misogyny of his language, but is head of state in one of the world’s largest democracies. Later in this chapter we will discuss what responsibility leaders have for the climate of feeling in their countries – in this example, why is the rage about drug trafficking so focussed on savage retribution? But first we must walk through some more general ideas about, and analyses of, the dynamics of leadership.

AUTHORITY AND THE SUPEREGO

Leadership is a central issue in most aspects of human society, perhaps most obviously so in areas such as organisational life and politics. Yet it is one aspect of a wider and perhaps even deeper topic, that of authority. Authority is at the centre of all human relationships, including personal and intimate ones, because it is intrinsic to the questions of how we conduct ourselves, and how we make decisions; what rules we choose to follow, or to break; what standards we seek to achieve, or to subvert; what we expect of people, including ourselves. All such moral questions are at one level about authority, because they are about which or whose rules and standards we relate to, and about how we experience ourselves as moral agents able to act on our own authority.

These are not only questions about which people we respect and which codes we try to adhere to. They are also about a more subterranean area of human life, in which forms of pre-verbal relating to the world hold sway. These are laid down early in our psychological development, when we learn who or what to trust, and what we have to do to keep safe and to fit in with the world. In the technical language of psychoanalysis, it is the area of early superego development. The superego is that part of the mind in which the restraints and rules of the culture are embedded, transferred from one generation of superegos to the next (though with modifications along the way), and which is therefore core to our development as civilised beings. Out of the ‘parental matrix’, which was described in Chapter 1, there emerges a constellation of feelings and capacities in the developing person which we can call their ‘superego’, and which define that person’s relationships with authority. This includes their own sense of personal authority, the capacity to make judgments and to act independently. So the superego is deeply linked to the individual’s experience of both safety and dignity.

In the over-simplified versions of psychoanalysis sometimes found in general psychology textbooks, the term ‘superego’ can mean much the same as ‘conscience’. It is usually painted in severe terms, as a punitive enforcer causing much painful guilt. Undoubtedly, guilt is a major source of pain, and the superego can in some persons be capable of great cruelty. However it is important to see it as a much broader and more complex region of the self, including not only fearful images of a forbidding censor, but also impressions of authority as caring and supportive. Indeed the capacity to feel guilt and remorse will not develop authentically if driven by fear alone, and needs a trusting and loving connection with whoever is doing the prohibiting or commanding.

What does all this early psychology have to do with the psychology of politics? The superego is a core part of the self which is not only an internal regulator but is also a set of powerful templates, deeply embedded in the adult mind and able to shape our experience throughout life of people and organisations we encounter which in one way or another represent authority to us. Our experiences of these authorities will carry the stamp of that early parental matrix, and any social institution or person carrying some meaning as a source of authority will occupy a quasi-parental place in the life of the adult citizen. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be trusted or followed. As we saw in Chapter 1, there is much ambivalence to be overcome in relationships with parents.

THE EXTERNALISED SUPEREGO

One of the earliest psychological theories of leadership is still a rich source of understanding its dynamics. It was set out by Sigmund Freud in his 1921 essay on group psychology. He noted that when individuals inhabit a collective identity, they merge a part of themselves into that identity. The part in question is what Freud a little later came to call the ‘superego’. His crucial observation was that group members were often prepared to hand over their superego functions, at least in part, to the leader of the group, and so were prepared to act in ways that as individuals they would probably not allow themselves. Group membership is therefore a reversal of the process of emotional maturation. Having spent the years of growing up in efforts to internalise restraint, and to build our own internal capacity for self-regulation, we project that back out there, to someone (or something) in the external world, when we commit to a group which is emotionally significant to us. In return for this loss of full selfhood, of psychic autonomy, the individual can gain the safety and the dignity of belonging to a group, under the protection and blessing of its leader. This experience may however be illusory, and so be a long-term threat to the well-being of the individual. Moreover, there is another more obviously dangerous consequence of this dynamic of group membership, in that group members may find themselves acting on feelings or impulses which are destructive or self-damaging.

There are many ways in which this dynamic can play out, with very different consequences, depending on what feelings the group leader is giving permission to group members to release, or what actions the leader is demanding of the group. In criminal gang cultures, the permission or demand may often be for violent behaviour. In bohemian communes, it may be for promiscuity and other hedonistic activities. In political parties or movements, it is a demand for belief in what the organisation stands for, and for action to promote its aims. The content of that demand will vary according to the ideology involved. The demands may conceal permissions as well – to engage in antagonistic behaviour, for example, perhaps even violence, or to take yourself away from your relationships with family or friends.

As was noted in Chapter 1, we are more familiar with the negative versions of this phenomenon. Freud’s model of group dynamics has influenced many attempts to explain the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. Indeed, a general implication of the model is that group membership is intrinsically a form of diminished selfhood, a condition into which people with less integrated superegos (i.e. less psychic maturity) are more likely to fall. Freud was influenced by the rise of totalitarianism, in response to which he and many other intellectuals held a suspicion of the collective and an idealisation of the autonomous, fully self-possessed individual who would be less vulnerable to the seductions of leaders.

However, developments in psychoanalytic thinking since Freud about the superego and about groups enable us to expand his model such that we can see leader-follower or leader-public relationships in terms of a wide range of possibilities. Our perceptions of and feelings about leaders may be the result of various aspects of the self being projected onto them, with different elements in leaders’ personalities acting as the hook or target for those projections. So to an important degree, we create our leaders through projection. But a leader must be willing and able to inhabit and to own the projected feelings and identities.

What about the leaders themselves? The choice to become a political leader may, in the person’s internal unconscious, be an attempt to inhabit a superego role in the external world. At its worst, this might mean gaining the power to inflict on others whatever punishments the person feels they have been threatened with by their own superego. (Our discussion of terrorism in Chapter 4 will explore that scenario.) At its best, it might mean the leader becoming a benign and protective authority, thereby either reproducing their own good developmental experiences of superego figures, or filling a gap in their personal development. Justin Frank’s (2012) psychoanalytic study of Barack Obama links both merits and flaws in his leadership style to – amongst other factors – his early loss of a father. His parents separated when he was one, and his father moved away. In later life, including in his role as president, Obama sought to be the father he had missed while also being very ambivalent in his relationship with his internal image of father.

There are a number of ‘psychobiographies’ of leaders which try to trace their emotional development and its shaping of their adult characters, and to examine the fit (or sometimes the lack of fit) between the person and the office occupied, with its political demands and opportunities to respond to the emotional profile of the public. Some recent American presidents have been the subject of interesting psychobiographies; as well as Frank’s study of Obama, and an earlier one by him of George W. Bush, there is also one by Vamik Volkan on Richard Nixon’s very difficult childhood and his subsequent narcissism and self-destructiveness (Volkan et al., 1997).

In the rest of this chapter we will however focus more on the ‘followership’ side of leadership. We will consider how broad changes in society have affected leadership styles, by modifying what we want and need to see in leaders. These changes bring the psychological dimensions of leader-follower relations more into focus. We will discuss the question of whether leaders are made in the image of their followers, or vice versa. Then we will look at some examples of how leaders respond to their public’s needs for safety and dignity, and of what containment they can offer of the anxieties around those needs.

AMBIVALENCE TOWARDS AUTHORITY

Perhaps the most obvious form of authority in everyday life is that of the law. The law is easily pictured both as an external superego in both a patriarchal, punitive mode, as something designed to oppress rather than protect us, and also as a fundamentally benign source of collective strength and rectitude. There may be many specific situations in external reality which fit one or the other of these dichotomised images of a ‘good’ law and a ‘bad’ one. We may consume, in rapid succession, media reports about the heroism of some police officers and the corruption of others. An ‘official’ and widely shared rhetoric about the goodness of the law and those employed to enforce it exists alongside many narratives that assume the opposite. This cultural ambivalence towards the law reflects the mixed nature of reality, but also echoes the ambivalence towards parental authority which is especially noticeable in adolescence and its oscillations between needy dependence and resentful hostility.

The psychological basis of ambivalence towards authority, in the process of development from infancy through adolescence, is present in us all, though as individuals we are able to resolve it to varying degrees, and express either or both sides of it in endlessly varying ways. These will be strongly influenced by our social environments. It seems that social media have hugely expanded the scope for public expression of negative feelings about politicians, sometimes testing the legal proscription of hate speech. However there is reason to think that expression of the negative side of the ambivalence was gaining strength some decades before social media, due to a number of factors but in particular the broad cultural trend over at least the last half century of falling levels of trust in traditional institutions and professions, and growing scepticism about some types of expertise. Politicians have been especially affected by the weakening of deferential trust in their integrity and competence. They are the least trusted profession in the UK, according to IpsosMORI’s annual Veracity Index of 2017,⁴ which reports that only 17% of the public trust them to tell the truth.

Globally, the overall picture of trust in politics is complex. Trust in politicians is not quite the same as trust in government, and both differ from trust in political institutions, so recorded levels of trust in politics will depend on the questions asked. And as the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer shows,⁵ there are international year-by-year variations, with some countries such as Argentina, France and Germany showing surprising increases in trust in government since 2012, with fluctuations in between. So some positive attitudes towards authorities remain, but negative ones towards politicians are probably on a long-term rising trend, with some people becoming relentlessly disparaging of them. To be cynical about politics (‘I don’t trust any of them’) seems to have become for many people a criterion of basic worldliness. Amongst other people, positive attitudes may be inflated to the point of idealisation, in denial of a disappointing reality. If we try to understand all this psychologically, we can see it as regressive splitting, a difficulty in holding on to a complex, mixed view of vital social institutions, instead retreating to the simplicities of a black-and-white world. This may suggest that some erosion of our general capacity to trust has occurred, a diminution of emotional capital in society as a whole. In representative democracies, there is obviously risk to the democratic process when attitudes towards elected politicians are dominated by splitting and the negative side of the ambivalence is becoming stronger, a situation facilitating the rise of ‘populist’ leaders.

THE CHANGING STYLES OF LEADERSHIP: INFORMAL, EMOTIONAL, PERSONAL

Another cultural trend of relevance to understanding the changing dynamics of leader-follower relations has been called the informalisation of everyday life (the sociologist Cas Wouters [2007] has led the way in defining this trend). This refers to the fact that social formalities and conventions, including those related to differences in status and authority, no longer regulate social exchanges to the extent that they used to. For example, dress codes are much more relaxed than they were, and less indicative of rank. First name address is common even across wide gaps in age and status. This trend may sometimes mislead by obscuring the hierarchies that cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: COVID-19 and society
• 1 Leaders
• 2 Trust and politics: The Emperor’s not very new clothes
• 3 Community as social ties
• 4 Social status and disadvantage
• 5 Human welfare
• 6 Dealing with social exclusion: An analysis of psychological strategies
• 7 Social accountability and action orientation: Strengthening the policy-making capacity of psychologists