Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: As psychoanalysts we enjoy a particular and privileged position from which to learn about human nature through our engagement with our patients and ourselves. While we spend endless hours debating the nature of the processes involved, the fact is that we spend a lot of time in close relationships and have a lot of experience getting to know people in a deep way. Among the fruits of our specific labors has been a wide and creative array of ideas about what human beings need in general. From Freud's first formulations about instinctual urges we have added important ideas about the narcissistic aspects of human relatedness, and the importance of “object” relationships. To these we have added (thanks to Solms and Panksepp; Solms, 2018) an expanded range that adds seeking, nurturance, attachment and play. And, of course, we must not forget the role of guilt and the superego. Is there a way that what we can use our knowledge about human nature to be useful to society in general? Perhaps by placing a more nuanced understanding of human needs and defenses in a central position for evaluating forms and requirements of governance we can substitute a more meaningful set of metrics by which to measure the success of our efforts to govern ourselves. The political narrative that informs the life of many of us in our American psychoanalytic community (but not all, thanks to our newly opened doors) is a reiteration of western European Enlightenment narratives about individual freedom, authority and governance. Their ideas were retrieved from the political philosophy of the ancient Greeks, who struggled with the issue of how human beings can best live together in a world of city-states. They gave us the terms Politics and Democracy, and it's worth noting that Plato and Aristotle both had skepticism about whether human nature, as they understood it, would allow for a just “rule by the people.” It's important to note that while I am writing as one embedded in an “American” point of view, it is with a recognition that the United States is not the center of the world, and it is my hope that the ideas I'm sharing have a more general usefulness. In other times and other places, societies and governance systems have evolved in very different ways from our own. There is no more poignant (and tragic) example than that of our indigenous population, whose way of living together was based on a different conception of the relation between human beings, property, and the natural world. Their stories were very different than the narrative adapted by our founding fathers from the classical Greeks. The path that leads from western classical ideas about human nature to ideas about “natural law” (Thomas Acquinas) and the rights of man (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) winds its way through two dimensions. One measures homo sapiens according to their capacity for reason. The other, laden with religious overtones, measures us according to our capacity for virtue (are we good or bad?) Our place in the world of animals came later, after our dominant western political narratives were established. And then there was Freud. Freud famously spoke of the narcissistic injury that psychoanalysis presented to the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. He saw himself as adding to the spoiler alerts provided by Copernicus and Darwin, attacking the last vestige of our human exceptionalism, and confronting us with clinical evidence that oftentimes we don't know our own minds. While this is evident in the realm of individual psychology, history demonstrates its relevance in the political realm as well. American exceptionalism is individual grandiosity writ large. There's a crack between who we think we are and who we really are, and events of the last 2 years (in no small measure due to a global pandemic) have blown that crack wide open. One example: many more of us are now able to see the America that James Baldwin saw so many years ago. (Sadly, this does not apply to the America that our indigenous peoples have seen and continue to see.) But the American revolution, like any political action, was not initiated as a matter of principle. The Declaration of Independence that we enshrine was an attempt at a rational justification for action- violent action- that from our current vantage point clearly had more complex motivations. The Constitution that we established was an attempt by some very smart people to use their ideals and best knowledge of themselves and others (i.e., human nature) to create a system more favorable to themselves. We have come to label that system as “Democracy” (even though it's a far cry from the way this term was originally used) and invested it with a quality of feeling that seems almost religious. Religious wars were a dominant theme of western history in the centuries before the period we call “The Enlightenment,” when our version of scientific rationality gained its ascendancy. The freedom of thought brought great ideas including an empirical approach to understanding politics (i.e., the field of political science) and a unique methodology to understand ourselves (i.e., psychoanalysis). But in retrospect, we can appreciate how easily ideas become ideologies that are held fast, as if our self-cohesion depended upon them. As psychoanalysts, we can speculate that it often does. Indeed, as analysts, we recognize the degree to which abstractions can become the object of emotional investment, the psychological functions which these investments serve, and the difficulty we encounter in relinquishing them. This attachment stands in the way of our effort to evaluate the ideas behind our political ideologies. The attempt to apply psychoanalytic theory in the social field go to Freud's later works, especially “Civilization and Its Discontents,” where he attempts to apply his theory of drives to the history of human efforts to construct society. Later on, in the 1940s, pioneering work in exploring the role of psychological needs and motivations in assessing political systems was done by psychologist Abraham Maslow, who proposed a hierarchy of 5 needs. There are five levels in Maslow's pyramid. From the bottom of the hierarchy upwards, the needs are: physiological (food and clothing), safety (job security), love and belonging needs (friendship), esteem, and self-actualization. Maslow himself was not a psychoanalyst, and his work took place at a time when analysts were more concerned with unconscious wishes than unmet needs. But contemporary psychoanalysis has expanded our view of the unconscious elements subsumed my Maslow's attention to love, belonging and self esteem. Our emphasis on wishes has given way to a deep appreciation of the role of object relationships and narcissism in mental health and mental illness. In addition to the realm of needs there is the realm of values. From Freud to Kohut, Psychoanalysis has had much to say about the way our individual psychology is shaped by our values as well as the problems (including guilt and shame) that occur when we don't live up to them. These values are to a great extent derived from those we look up to, literally as small children and figuratively as members of a society. Freud described the tendencies of groups to regress and surrender their own superego function to leaders who, too often, only value their own power. Kohut spoke of the way that ideals are necessary for a cohesive self, and the rage that occurs when our idealized others fail us. Throughout the world, since ancient times, societies have identified themselves with aspirational values, virtues and ethics that have fostered the idealizing needs of their citizens to a greater or lesser degree. Another important psychoanalytic measure of the success of a political system, then, might be the degree to which a system provides and fosters ideals to identify with and the nature of those ideals. But an even more important contribution may come from our psychoanalytically informed appreciation of the problems that occur when, inevitably, we don't live up to the values that we espouse. The ways we manage the resulting shame and guilt as individuals- that is, our defenses- come to shape our individual character. In addition to the discoveries we've made about psychological needs, Psychoanalysis has taught us much about the ways in which we protect ourselves against the awareness of unsettling aspects of our nature. Our acquaintance with the phenomena of denial, projection, splitting, disavowal and repression has been a unique hallmark of our discipline in its investigations of human psychology. While as analysts we are used to thinking of projection and splitting as pathological individual defenses, there is heuristic value in applying these concepts to the social field as well. As with individuals, societies tend to romanticize and idealize themselves and project their more negative qualities onto others. In fact, the tendency to split into good and bad seems to be one of the hallmarks of our nature, and one attribute to consider when it come to issues of governance. Stated a bit differently, we could say that among human psychological needs there is a need to defend ourselves against an awareness of our needs, and that efforts to establish governing systems without a recognition of this aspect of our nature are not likely to be successful. We may also ask, as psychoanalysts: How does a society's approach to its own moral shortcomings affect its own governance as well as the psychological well being of its citizens? Where does a society sit on the continuum between disavowal and “truth and reconciliation?” How well does a political system do at managing its own hypocrisies? To return to my central point, I think that our expanded knowledge of human psychological needs can help us better consider the relationship between ourselves as individuals and the political structures we need to best get along. No one would argue that one function of government is to protect and support the lives of its citizens. History demonstrates our appetite for individual liberty (which is to my mind supported by what neuropsychoanalysis is teaching us about the SEEKING system). Now, I think our analytic work has given us additional insights into what goes into “the pursuit of happiness.” The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of means to satisfy psychological needs that have remained largely unacknowledged in political theory discourse because they have been split off (and this includes the need to protect ourselves from being overwhelmed by the inconsistencies in our own nature). Our tendency to split is certainly one factor that contributes to our polarized political landscape. (Perhaps this is what George Washington had in mind when he warned against political parties in his farewell address). For example, take the strong sentiments attached to the ideas of “democracy” (literally, power from the people) and “oligarchy,” (literally, government by the few), terms that are linguistically value neutral. However, in common usage they are (at least in the west) saturated with the affects that travel with them: “Government by the people” is associated with goodness and freedom, while “government by the few” is associated with slavery and domination. (Plato and Aristotle, the Greek philosophers who bequeathed us these terms, had a much more sophisticated view of the advantages and disadvantages of each). One problem with our contemporary use of the term “Democracy” is that while we use it to designate government from the “bottom up,” we also define it in terms of social justice and equal opportunity. Given the proclivity of free people to take away the freedom of others, the term is inherently contradictory. Neither Plato or Aristotle were fans of the bottom up approach which they equated with mob rule and anarchy. Indeed, there are many situations where “government by the few” (the literal translation of oligarchy) has advantages- depending, of course, on the quality of the leadership (think corporations, or the military). One of the main pros of government by the few is that it puts power in the hands of people who are often experts and can make informed decisions for the populace or company. It therefore is more efficient than every single person being able to make decisions, and can often free up people to focus on their own work or lives. The problem with government from the top down, of course, is that “the few” are usually highly motivated to preserve their own economic power at the expense of the many, blocking others from attaining their privileges and easily devolving into tyranny. One of the insights into the democracy-oligarchy continuum well known to anyone who has belonged to a professional association or large condo board is what sociologist Robert Michels (1915, p. 241) called the “Iron Law”: when democracies become too large, the power and the work is shouldered or grabbed by a small number of people, tilting them toward oligarchic forms of organization. In other words, political forms are not inherently polar opposites, good versus bad- it is our tendency to split that makes them seem so. To a great extent, forms of governance are less important than the qualities of those who govern, including their ability to manage the splits within themselves. Perhaps greater appreciation of our own human nature can help us ask more complicated and less dichotomous questions about how best to govern ourselves (Instead of battling between “isms”). For example, how much democracy is optimal? How much regulation is necessary to keep sexual and aggressive drives in check? What sublimations are available for sexual and aggressive drives? What role does government have in facilitating object relatedness and healthy self esteem? How does government address our need for values and a healthy ego ideal? To what degree does overregulation impact the SEEKING system? To what extent is the need to play (by societal rules) within the 60–40 range that Solms (2019, p. 7) identifies as necessary to keep us in the game? Given that these needs inevitably conflict with each other in groups as within individuals, what are the best compromises that can be worked out? Thinking along these dimensions, one might speculate that societies where “Seeking” impulses are welcome are likely to be more motivating than top down systems with respect to worker initiative and productivity. At the same time, one might expect that such societies create disparities that adversely impact on narcissism and our sense of social justice. In the same vein, we can speculate that when Societies ignore the narcissistic needs of their citizens they may engender grandiosity and compensatory drug addiction, or rage that undermines social stability, thereby interfering with our need for emotional connection. Perhaps societies that do not consider the need for emotional connection invite tribalism in reaction, as individuals seek to meet these relational needs by identifying with increasingly circumscribed groups. This is a particularly important concern at present as the world grapples with the way covid and technology have has pushed us farther away from physical contact with each other. One opportunity presented by the global covid pandemic would be to study the way in which the responses of 3 major world powers, each occupying a different position on the democracy-oligarchy spectrum, impact on the mental and emotional health of their citizenry when faced with the same crisis. One of the dangers inherent in these considerations is the fact that governments that have concerned themselves with the state of citizens' souls have done, and continue to do, horrible things to the bodies and souls of the governed. Perhaps one reason this is so is that those who seek to govern have the same conflicting motivations as those who are governed, and benevolent intentions are too readily employed in service of the less benevolent aspects of our nature. So we are left with the paradox that whatever psychological benefits occur from good governance can be undermined by governance systems that adopt this purpose as a specific intent. But recognition of the role that these needs play in those who would govern us, and the systems that are set up to do so, may have a more useful effect by moving us to a more nuanced and dispassionate kind of political discussion. My colleagues in academic Political Science tell me that Political Theory is on the wane, replaced by a focus on Political Economy, which measures political entities according to economic metrics. At this time, when the old narratives are crumbling, I think there is a window of opportunity for us to translate recognition of the needs we've come to recognize in ourselves–our contemporary understanding of human nature- into a psychoanalytically informed political theory that may help us in creating new, improved narratives. That may be of real value in addressing the age-old problem of how human beings can live together more productively. Author has no conflicts of interest regarding this publication.
DOI: 10.1002/aps.1762
Author: Neal Spira
Institutions: Northwestern University, Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,550
OpenAlex ID: W4292666554