a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Over the last several years, I have been in a transition: winding down my psychoanalytic practice and reorganizing myself to live in Toronto; turning my work attention to finishing a book and starting another and writing this blog.  My thoughts have gone again and again to what I learned from my nearly twenty years as a therapist, and these retrospective thoughts often intersect with my reactions as I read the daily newspapers and immerse myself in the stream of books that enter our house from the little independent and used bookstores that are thick in our neighborhood. (Jane Jacobs lived in this neighborhood, the Annex, when she became an ex-pat, working for a sustainable Toronto, and then writing her last book, A Dark Age is Coming.)

What impressed me most over my therapy years was how difficult it is for people
(including myself) to change,  how recalcitrant are our deeply entrenched patterns of feeling, thinking, living,  and especially relating to others.  I worked with adults, not children,  and thus faced at the beginning of each therapy the habits of a developmental  course, whether that was a course of twenty-five years or (my oldest patient) seventy-five.  No wonder it took more than a few years of effort for my patients to see what might be called their second natures, the thickening characters they had formed into, as trees form with their annual rings.

But there the analogy ends:  a grown up tree is not going to walk into your office and say “I need help, somehow my life is not what I hoped it might be, I feel trapped in myself.” Or, to take the specific example of a brilliant, charming young man of thirty-five:  “Well, I’m a philosophical paradox. You know, that one about the Cretan Liar. You see, I lie all the time about myself, I tell different lies to different people, to make myself look great or interesting or at least normal. So many that I cannot remember –and I live in terror that I am going to be found out. Two people will compare what they know about me, and, boom!  But, here I am telling you this, and maybe I am lying to you, too –how would you know?  How would I know?”  I wrote in my notes:  “He will be a Sherlock Holmes case; the mystery will  get solved when we can see what  could NOT be said.  What is his secret?”

This young man found giving up his lying—which he did– as hard as others would find giving up drinking or smoking or drugs or gambling or internet pornography or fetish-collecting or any other kind of ineffectual effort at self-healing or self-medicating. When I was training in psychoanalysis, I learned to categorize my patients as neurotically  or psychotically into habits like these. Psychotics, so the distinction went, are shaped primarily by the ways in which they do not or cannot connect to reality in the present or to a traumatic reality in the past. Neurotics are caught in their self-defeating Oedipal conflicts or unable to overcome  their pre-oedipal “deficits” from early experiences of neglect, lack of attachment,  loss, abandonment.  This was a helpful distinction as far as it went, but clinical experience  and wider acquaintance  with the psychoanalytic literature taught me that many neurotics have periods of psychosis or anxieties that are psychotic in intensity, many psychotics function pretty well in the world although they do come to defeat themselves neurotically.

What remained for me of the neurotic/psychotic distinction were some clinical rules of thumb. For example,   I distinguish between people who can consult with others –including me—and ask for help and those who turn away from the world or most people in the world,  insisting on their rightness or righteousness or even omnipotence.  Roughly: the self-defeating and the deluded.  My young liar was not encased in a delusion, but he feared that his web of lies was getting so thick that he could not see through it; it was keeping him from reality and from any coherent sense of himself, any confidence that he was not fragmented into as many parts as there were lies.

People differ very complexly in their capacities to grasp that they are deluded or that they are defeating themselves. But all of us have in common our incapacity to see how our delusions or conflicts or deficits are playing out in the present with relentless consistency. We have real trouble seeing the accumulated past playing out in therapies, with the therapist.  Déjà vu all over again.  More technically,  Freud spoke of the universal  “compulsion to repeat.”

It is this kind of self-blindness over repetition that I think about most often when I read the newspaper. I seldom use categories of any sort to judge individual people I read about, because newspapers seldom give  the kind of information –like a case report—that you need to “get” an individual with any accuracy. But there are organizations and programs and policies that strike me as particularly ”unreal,” by which I mean, simply, “formed to avoid or deny reality.” There is something more or different in such organizations and programs than the confusion, the contradictoriness,  the self-defeatingness of everyday political life.

Organizationally,  I think that groups and programs that reinforce a conviction –a delusional conviction–that  their  “we” is completely distinct from all other groups are different than
groups that are full of talk, consultation, deliberation,  asking for help, and all the inevitable political muddle. That is, an extreme prejudice-group binds members in their feeling for their own righteousness and the reasonableness of their partiality or their partisanship. The political term would be “fascistic.” People in a fascistic group are encouraged to take their little part of the human whole as the whole  by the group’s unifying program –like “we want government off our backs!” or “freedom means freedom from regulation!” The group members do not speak of “we the people” but of “we, who are the only people who count…” They pronounce themselves: “we whose  right to own a gun is the most important right in the world.”

Fascism is group-partiality taken to the max, which often means to violence; it is the complete opposite of cosmopolitanism. Groups like this are most often over on the right politically, because left groups have a tradition of whole-community concern and cosmopolitan thinking; but there have been left groups that have become fascistic, that is, convinced  that their specialness, their correctness, justifies inflicting their view on others and using violence  to do so.  In my Sixties youth, there were lots of left groups in which world-alienation  turned into terrorism,  or in which the utterly horrifying history of Stalinism or Maoism was ignored.

“Psychotic” individuals have delusions; fascistic groups have impossible dreams. Dreams so unrealistic that they become effectively anti-reality. For example,  Reagan’s economic ideas (crafted at the University of Chicago) that markets will correct themselves,  without regulation,  was a wild idea good only for the “we” group of the rich who benefited from it.  It helped organize “the rich” into an interest group, a lobbying group. The idea that you can cut the taxes of those who make the most money and still increase the Defense Department’s budget without  ballooning the national debt was a delusional idea. It was no less delusional when G.W. Bush took it up. Or when the present “limited government” folks offer it for a third iteration.  Sheer wishful thinking.  When the tax cuts for the rich idea was linked to the idea that the wealthy will take their tax break and spend it as consumers, thereby keeping businesses going, workers employed, and the general economy growing,  the distorted thinking grew thicker. But the underlying impossible dream or delusion surfaced: the rich will ride in like white knights or cowboys , save the economy, and make anyone rich who wants to be.  Much of the screaming rage in America now is about disappointment that the fatherly, manly rich have not saved us, they have just gotten richer with tax-payer support. One might welcome the indignation if it were accompanied by some effort to return to reality,  if the puncturing of the delusion had been therapeutic.

But no such luck. There will be a debate in Congress soon about whether the super-rich should have their Bush Era tax cuts renewed.   That we are even having such a debate is unreal.  Doesn’t the proverbial man on the street know Albert Einstein’s famous Freudian definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Apparently not, and this seems to me to be because there is such a lot of plain old self-defeating neuroticism in the Congressional groups that will engage in the up-coming debate about a delusional idea.

Specifically, it seems that the opponents of tax cuts for the rich are operating out of a
history of conflicts that make them unable to articulate a coherent plan for going forward
without those cuts. Not allowing themselves much awareness of their conflicts, they
leap to handy –usually self-defeating—solutions while they are simultaneously leaping to blame others for their own conflicts. Over years of therapy work,  I never met or heard about an exception to the general rule of thumb that people (and groups) blame others for their conflicts or “bad” parts of themselves –which are often what they feel shameful about or guilty for.

Among the Democrats in office and even among many (self-declared) liberals and leftists writing in the newspapers , I think that there is lack of unity around the basic principles of social democracy and lack of coherent opposition to the New Far Right because there is so much guilt in the ranks. Guilt among Old Left (those few remaining),  New Left (those now in their 60s and 70s) and the New Center-Left (Obama’s generation). The guilt has been building since the days when Lyndon Johnson split in two:  there was LBJ the proponent of the Good Society and there was a man, surrounded by “the best and the brightest,”  who did the same wrong things over and over again, expecting different results as he tried to “win” the Vietnam War. The Good Society began to recede and neither the liberals nor the leftists could hang onto it. The Vietnam War went on for five years after Johnson resigned, without the anti-war movement being able to stop Nixon’s pursuit of it (using troops not drafted to the fight –that is, using the inner city and rural poor for whom there was no Good Society). Carter’s effort to change course and reinstate some of the Good Society initiative was a failure.  The opposition to Reagan collapsed, while policies for creating inequality in America flourished and the habit of invading other countries continued with various rationales, none of them even remotely alert to the changing nature of the Cold War world alignment.  Clinton’s effort to change course and reinstate some of the Good Society initiative was a failure, and the habit of invading other countries with various rationales continued.  The opposition to Bush II collapsed, and many of the left’s most prominent legislators and intellectuals lent their support to the invasion of Iraq and the raining of “shock and awe” bombs upon the citizens of Baghdad. Few were the opponents in Congress to this war or to the tax cuts for the rich.

In this dreary history of repetitive defeat and self-defeat on the left, Obama felt like a new beginning –an opponent of the Iraq War, a community organizer concerned about inequality and racism, an inspiration to the young after decades of disaffection with politics among succeeding generations of the young. He is all that. But when a new New Deal was needed to meet the challenge of an economic collapse of monumental proportions, where was the left saying to him “before all else, protect the working people who did not cause this mess, protect the country’s young from serfdom, protect the planet –the habitat shared by all beings– from the exploitation  the financial system has bankrolled”? Where were  the opponents of the on-going occupation of Afghanistan (called Obama’s war ); or the opponents of the undeclared –even unnamed–war against  Islamic peoples (without distinction among them)?

Liberals and leftists who have been complicit in the lack of principled anti-war  and anti-poverty actions have turned into strategizers trying to figure out how to compromise their way out of the impasse they have helped create.  The squabbles among Democrats about
what is to be done are full of old squabbles about what  has not been done — or not said.  So many lies and self-enhancing stories have been told that an old desire for social democracy, for a Good Society, has been largely repressed.  It has become an unspeakable  secret.

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