When George Lakoff was developing
his idea of political frames he found that the best
predictor of how a person will vote is connected to
what he thinks about hitting kids. It turns out that
whether you are a liberal or conservative depends on
your theory of infant development and the family. For
conservatives, one of the most influential writers
isn’t David Brooks, Bill Kristol or Grover Norquist, but
James Dobson of Focus on the Family. A writer so
successful he needs his own zip code. And his
views? Let’s just say that in an effort to make his
teachings more humane he admonishes his followers
not to start beating their children with sticks or
whips before the age of 18 months.
Lakoff’s thesis is that our political views are
formed within frames of meaning that are projections
of our earliest experiences of authority, morality, and
community in our first “government”-- the family. It
turns out that whether you are a democrat or
republican is related to how you think the family
works and how kids should be raised. For Lakoff, the
morality that arises from a strict father model shapes
a conservative world view, and one that reflects a
nurturing parent model informs a liberal one.
Now this is a psychological theory. It includes a
version of infant development, human behavior, and
cognition. So let’s look at the metapsychology behind
it.
For Lakoff, the cognitive structures formed from
early family experiences also turn out to be central
to your political philosophy and whether you are a
pessimist or optimist, conservative or liberal.
Conservativestend to believe that children are born
basically antisocial and greedy and that they must be
coerced into behaving in a socially acceptable
manner. What’s more, if you are a conservative you
believe that the world is basically a dangerous
inhumane place and the best you can do for your
kids is to instill respect for authority and discipline,
and teach them that it’s every man for himself in a
dog-eat-dog world. And of course, you believe that
this is the only truly realistic view of the way the
world works and any other is naive.
What gives this conservative view so much
power is that it reflects a theory of human nature
that sees man as split between the enlightened
rational mind and the dark powers of the primitive
unconscious. And if you were to look a little closer at
this model I think you would see a generally
accepted folk metapsychology generated from
Freudian psychoanalytic theory: the idea that the
unconscious mind is a dark cauldron of seething
drives always ready to boil over; it is the stuff of
daytime tv and psychological thrillers.
Now there is a more optimistic view that posits
our underlying nature is more or less benign,
sometimes distorted by deprivation and trauma
perhaps, but, it predicts that human beings, if given
half a chance, would live productive and peaceful
lives. This theory may seem a bit naive in times like
these, but it has the advantage of explaining why we
haven’t rendered our species extinct, that we still
seem to take care of our children and we don’t kill
our neighbors. (speaking locally of course.) This
optimistic theory of human nature happens to be
gaining dominance because it turns out to be
consistent with contemporary research on infant
development, brain studies, and ethological
observation. And of course it has one obvious
advantage over pessimism: namely, that the best
pessimists can hope for is to be wrong.
But! Just as politics are not free from their
psychological underpinnings, neither do psychological
theories arise in a vacuum; they reflect their
particular political climate.
If we look at the beginning of the twentieth
century--the period in which psychoanalysis arose--
we see that it was an extraordinarily turbulent time
in modern history. In general, there was a growing
clash between the ideas of modernism and tradition,
along with a growing fascination with the forces of
the irrational and the unconscious. Writers like
Nietzsche were openly attacking the primacy of logic,
morality, and civilization; in both art and politics
there was a growing excitement about technology
and military power that contributed to the various
fascist movements.
Freud was especially curious about new
experiments with the unconscious mind. He travelled
to Paris to watch Charcot’s demonstrations of
hypnosis because they provided vivid proof that
man’s behavior could be governed by forces beyond
his awareness or control. Freud did not invent the
unconscious: his idea of the unconscious mind arose
out of the ashes of the age of enlightenment and a
sense that the powers of reason were not without
their own limits.
No, what Freud came up with was psychoanalysis
as a bridge between the clarity of reason and the
murkiness of the unconscious: a method that allowed
him to use reason as a way to decipher the
unconscious but without changing the essential view
of its primitive bestial nature.
The classical ideas in Freud’s original
psychoanalytic theory are a mixed bag of optimism
and pessimism. Freud portrays human nature as
greedy at its core and ready to fight tooth and nail
against any insight or change. Metaphorically, the
unconscious mind is a force of darkness and
antisocial by nature, and must be brought into the
light before it can be defanged and its energy
harnessed into sublimation.
Health lay in the possibility of making the
unconscious conscious. Freud’s unconscious
functions not with what we know as rational thought
but by “primary process” a nonlinear amalgam of
symbolism, displacement and condensation familiar to
us in dreams and madness. But even Freud realized
that he had underestimated its full scope, and that,
by portraying a gulf between the rational and
unconscious mind he was leaving out the essential
role the unconscious plays in all thought. In the last
few decades research in cognitive science has shown
us that the unconscious mind and emotion plays an
essential role in decision making and creative
thought, and that furthermore, metaphor (a function
of primary process) turns out to be a key conceptual
structure in any understanding of the world.
But when the political reality changed, so did
psychoanalytic theory: when Freud and most of the
psychoanalytic community were finally forced to flee
Hitler’s Austria and Germany, a transformation took
place in the focus and the formulation of the
unconscious mind that had enormous implications for
our understanding of the basis of human nature. In
England, at the Hampstead Clinic, Anna Freud studied
children who had lost their parents and survived
Auschwitz-- children who hadn’t the luxury of
working through the family drama of the oedipus
complex. What she found amazed her: these kids
adapted to their harsh reality with astounding
resiliency; they made use of the little they had and
found strength in their relationship with each other
and survived intact human beings.
Now, we already had theories of infant
development that were based on the assumption
that babies had to be forced to adapt to reality and
give up their fantasies of gratification; they offered
quite compelling and titillating ideas about how the
mind arose from the chaos of infancy. Freud had
drawn a picture of the infant embarking on a
veritable tour through a series of sexual stages: from
oral, to anal right up to genital. His view of child
development was a sexually charged bodice-ripper
that culminated in the defeat and final resolution of
the Oedipal complex. Heady stuff. Klein and her
followers envisioned an even more sensational
model. In her theory the infant has to endure a
fantastic trek through psychopathology to reach
maturity. As a sort of foreshadowing of the DSMIV,
the poor babe had to be ready to assume the
paranoid, schizoid and depressive positions just to
make it to kindergarten.
As projections of adult preoccupations, these are
fertile constructions, but they didn’t really match up
with what doctors saw when they actually looked at
real babies. And none of these theories could have
predicted the results Anna Freud found at the
Hampstead Clinic-- that the primary drive of the
children she studied was to unflinchingly face and
adapt to a real though utterly hostile world that
allowed not the slightest withdrawal into fantasy and
to survive relatively intact against all odds.
It’s unclear whether it was looking at real kids, or
their own personal experiences of adapting to a more
open culture, but psychologists began to shift their
focus away from the fantastic world of the id to the
reality based ego and its defenses.
In America, the change was more radical. It was
as if, freed from the constraints of Vienna and Berlin,
psychologists broke out of their own stifling isolation
into the larger world. As they were freer to
participate and were integrated into an open and
democratic society in America, their view of the
unconscious seemed to expand too.
Leaving aside the traditional wings of the
psychoanalytic institutes which attempted to keep a
more Freudian than thou fundamentalist thing going,
you can see a radical transformation from Freud’s
rarified conflicted view of the relationship between
the unconscious mind and the world to the more
pragmatic and optimistic ideas that evolved into the
increasingly more humanistic theories of Rogers,
Perls, and Maslow. This change was manifested in
Hartmann’s ideas of “conflict-free areas of
development” and Holt’s view of “adaptive
regression” as they reconsidered the role of the
unconscious mind, itself, in adapting to reality rather
than seeing adaptation as a monopoly of the ego or
conscious mind. This evolution not only reflected a
liberal and optimistic view of human nature inherent
in our democratic ideals; but it also reflected the
new scientific research that was changing our
definition of the roles of both conscious and
unconscious thought.
It was in this social and intellectual context that
Control-Mastery Theory arose. If Freud’s early theory
could be seen as reflecting the pessimism and turmoil
of Europe before and during the two world wars,
Weiss and Sampson’s writings were nurtured by a far
more hopeful period. At the end of the second world
war, America basked in the prosperity following the
New Deal and the allied victory over fascism.
Americans believed that a progressive government
could improve man’s lot and bring order and peace to
the world. Children of immigrants and the working
class could buy homes and attend college through
the GI bill. It was a time that paved the way for a
creative surge in intellectual pursuits and cultural
creativity that reached fruition in the sixties. It was
also a time that valued the importance of security
and believed in man’s abilities to thrive if given safety
and nurturance. And it was a time that allowed for a
reexamination of the nature of the human mind.
In his seminal short paper, “Crying at the happy
ending,” Joe Weiss laid the foundations for a new
perspective for the scope of the unconscious mind.
The implications of Weiss’s observations, that people
are free to experience repressed emotions only when
it is safe to let one’s guard down, opened the way to
see the unconscious mind, itself, as weighing
experience and adapting to reality. It overturned
Freud’s idea that repression was a defense of
infantile cravings from the harsh reality of the world
and, critically, replaced it with the idea that
repression can act as a protection to help one adapt
to the world. Weiss’s theory is that the
fundamental human impetus is adaptation to reality
rather than avoidance of it, and furthermore, it
assumes that humans are fully engaged in their
physical and social world from infancy. And unlike the
earlier theories of infant development spelled out by
Freud and Klein, Weiss and Sampson’s view that
babies are fully tuned into their surroundings is
consistent with what the contemporary baby
watchers like Daniel Stern and Allison Gopnik have
actually found in their labs.
This is a far more optimistic and pragmatic idea
of human nature and the unconscious than Freud’s.
For one thing, Weiss assumed that psychopathology
arises as a function of pathogenic beliefs that
interfere with our ability to adapt to the real world.
And so psychopathology is a failed effort at
adaptation. Beliefs are pathogenic not because they
are a defense against reality, but as a response to a
reality that is no longer operative or useful. What is
crucial to this theory is that, unlike drives, beliefs
can be changed when they get in the way. And that
is why people come to therapy and why therapy
helps.
