Nancy McWilliams, PhD
I have been asked to speak this afternoon about whether psychoanalysis can help us to understand modern conflicts. My immediate response to the question was that it is impossible for me to imagine understanding contemporary conflicts without psychoanalysis, without the legacy of Freud. Let me illustrate this by talking briefly about two different kinds of conflicts: those inside each of us and those between ourselves and others.
Intrapsychic Conflicts
Despite the universals in which we psychoanalysts are often fond of talking, cultures change, psychopathologies change, and individual psychologies change. There is always a tension between what changes and what remains continuous and unchanging. One of my favorite instances of significant change amid overall continuity concerns the observations of Martha Wolfenstein on “fun morality.” When Freud’s writings became popular in the United States and were assimilated into the utopian sensibilities of Americans, many well-intentioned people concluded, on the basis of Freud’s observations about the neurotic suffering that attends severe self-criticism, that we should be reducing the harshness of children’s superegos. Permissive pre-schools flourished, especially on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and many families adopted a child-rearing ethos that eschewed criticism and encouraged children to “just have fun.”
Wolfenstein discovered that the superegos of children in these environments were just as harsh as those of children reared under more traditional supervision, but that the content of those superegos was different. The children were just as prone to guilt as their traditionally reared peers, but what they felt guilty about was not having enough fun. They worried that they were disappointing their parents if they were not having a good enough time.
I doubt that Freud could have conceived of the current sheer velocity of technological and social change or fully envisioned the mass, consumeristic society we now inhabit. He may have seen it coming; he was fond of referring to the United States as “Dollarland.” But that was a hundred years ago, before Madison Avenue had scarfed up his own ideas in the service of its agenda to increase our desires and offer lucrative material solutions to our most private conflicts. Could Freud have foreseen Fromm’s “marketing personality”? Or Kohut’s narcissist, devastated by covert shame and thwarted needs to idealize; or Kernberg’s narcissist, dominated by envy and the need to spoil? Could he have imagined contemporary expressions of borderline dynamics–the relentless self-cutting, self-mutilating, vomiting, exercising? Several times in recent years I have heard case presentations of individuals who are “addicted” to their computers; they compensate for an abyss in their self-esteem by claiming false identities and having virtual love affairs with strangers in far-away countries, while their families suffer from their distractedness and neglect.
Freud tended to assume a sense of agency, and he was keenly aware of the inevitability of grief, loss, and limitation. How could this man who emphasized the importance of compromising with painful realities have spoken with people raised, as are so many in this culture, with messages such as “You can be anything you want to be” and “You deserve only the best”? In purely descriptive terms, such messages border on the psychotic. How could he have functioned in a culture where limits are resented and denied, and pathological entitlement is relentlessly stoked? Could he have imagined the doomed pursuit of physical “perfection” that now haunts our children? We live in a society in which a common graduation gift of affluent parents to their teenage daughters is breast surgery–either implants or reductions. In seductive invitations to improve their bodies, our young people are being relentlessly pressed to damage them.
Freud himself may have had no talent for, or patience with, some contemporary psychopathologies, as he admittedly lacked the personal qualities to work with psychotic patients. Yet as in the case of people suffering psychoses, I cannot imagine helping these newer patients without the concepts I have assimilated from Freud, without the appreciation of unconscious conflict itself, without his humbling and upsetting reminders that our rational faculties are far weaker than the synergy of our biological dispositions and our upbringing, and without his eventual conclusion that it is the loving relationship that cures. And neither can my colleagues of other orientations, whether they know it or not, as they continue to rediscover concepts, now arrayed in new nomenclature, that were originally postulated by Freud.
Interpersonal Conflicts
Many of the other participants in the conversation this afternoon have mentioned the disturbing political developments of our time. Again, I cannot imagine trying to understand these without the Freudian concepts of projection and denial, the repetition compulsion, and the other psychic processes that Dr. Merlino has enumerated. How can we comprehend the passions of contemporary international antagonists without Freud’s observations about the need to have an enemy–a dynamic he recognized in himself at both the personal level, in his comment about his ongoing need for both a supporter and a critic, and at the subcultural level in his identification as a “godless Jew”? How else can we understand the sweet pleasure it gives us to see evil as coming from outside the self?
If we do not appreciate these processes in the twenty-first century, I think we are in deep trouble. How else can we comprehend the Islamic extremist’s suicidal appetite for holy war? Or the fanatical determination of Taliban devotees to cover women in an effort not to feel desire? What sense could we make of the Christian extremists who try to avoid sexual ambiguity by vilifying homosexuality? Or of the terrifying genius of American political leaders who pander to our wishes to disown and project with concepts like “the enemy” and “the axis of evil”? Or even of the psychoanalytic fundamentalists who reject the foundational psychoanalytic stance of being willing not to know, whose paradigm wars distract us from reaching out beyond our professional communities and competitions to use our knowledge in the service of our fellow human beings?
The neuroscientist and psychoanalyst David Pincus recently summarized the enduring contributions of psychoanalysis as including the concepts of a dynamic unconscious, a valence to all mental life, a developmental viewpoint, the inevitability of conflict and defense, and the ubiquity of transferential processes. If we lose these ultimately Freudian perspectives, our descendants may not see the twenty-first century through to the twenty-second.