Social Symptoms of Identity Needs

Why We Have Failed to Solve Our Social Problems and What to do About It

Mark Bracher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781855756540
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429919336
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Explains how our major social problems, including crime, violence, terrorism, war, substance abuse, and prejudice, are the result of efforts by their perpetrators to maintain a secure identity, or sense of self. It locates the root causes of these social problems and counterproductive responses in certain identity-damaging social and cultural phenomena that force identity to defend and maintain itself by socially harmful means.

Part I
Identity and the Causes of Social Problems

Introduction

The causes of social problems

“The true criterion of reform is … whether it goes to the roots and attempts to change causes—or whether it remains on the surface and attempts to deal only with symptoms”

(Fromm, 1955, p. 273)

Social symptoms

“Psychical symptoms”, as defined by Freud, are “acts detrimental, or at least useless, to the subject’s life as a whole, often complained of by him as unwelcome and bringing unpleasure and suffering to him” (Freud, 1916–1917, p. 358), but which are, none the less, “found to be useful in asserting the position of the self and becom[e] more and more closely merged with the ego and more and more indispensable to it” (Freud, 1926d, p. 99, my italics). Social symptoms, similarly, are collective actions that are detrimental to a society’s life as a whole, often complained of by people as unwelcome and bringing unpleasure and suffering to them, but which are, none the less, indispensable to them in maintaining their identity, or “asserting the position of the self”. There are three basic types of social symptom:

1. Harmful behaviours, including crime, delinquency, violence, war, terrorism, and addictions.
2. Ineffective or counterproductive efforts to prevent or reduce these behaviours, such as the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terrorism.
3. Production of (or acquiescence in) material, political, social, and cultural conditions that are both unjust and traumatogenic, the elimination of which would significantly reduce the first two types of symptom. Such conditions include hunger, poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and lack of adequate health care, child care, and education.

These social problems continue to exist mainly because we have failed to take the necessary steps to solve them, despite having the knowledge, the resources, and the avowed desire to do so. The very fact that we have the knowledge, the resources, and the express desire to reduce problems like crime, violence, substance abuse, terrorism, war, and poverty and yet have not done so suggests that some part of us does not want to solve these problems.

A central argument of this book is that people avoid knowledge of how to solve social problems because solving these problems is threatening to them. Indeed, many people are threatened by the mere understanding of these problems, or, more precisely, by a comprehensive understanding of their causes. Such an understanding is easy enough to come by, for researchers have compiled substantial bodies of evidence for the causes of all of our major social problems. While the causes are often multiple and various, the matrix of variables in each case is usually no greater than that involved in numerous cognitive tasks that most people are quite capable of performing, as they often do, for example, in troubleshooting a malfunctioning tool, appliance, or motor vehicle, perfecting a recipe, starting a small business, or analysing the performances of their investment portfolio or favourite sports team. Yet, when it comes to social problems, many people fail to recognize the full array of causes, both proximal and distal, that combine to produce the social problem at issue. Instead, they attribute social problems to the supposedly flawed characters of certain segments of the population (Schorr, 1988, p. xxvii). Thus, crime is seen as caused by immoral and violent people, the drug problem by self-indulgent people, poverty by lazy people, and so on. Simply put, people like to assume that social problems are caused by harmful behaviours and that these harmful behaviours are themselves caused by flawed character, period:

Flawed character → Harmful behaviours → Social problems

As William Ryan pointed out several decades ago, most public policy concerning social problems in the USA is based on this (usually tacit) view that their ultimate cause lies in the individual character of their immediate perpetrators or bearers, and efforts to solve social problems therefore consist of various interventions to eliminate, incapacitate, or reform these individuals (Ryan, 1971, pp. 3–29).

This cognitive symptom—the truncated view of the causes of social problems—protects people’s sense of self, or identity, by enabling them to avoid recognizing their own role in producing the social problems, a recognition that would undermine their self-image as innocent, socially productive, generous people. Sociologist Michael Lewis argued several decades ago that our ineffective and counterproductive social policies are not failures at all, but resounding successes, accomplishing exactly what the majority of Americans want and need: the production of various types of “inferior” people in relation to which the rest of us can feel successful (Lewis, 1993, pp. 51–79). Closer examination in later chapters of some of these “failed” policies will explain how these “failures”—either to take any action or to take effective action, as the case may be—are motivated by our need to maintain our identities, or sense of self, and how solving these problems would thus constitute a significant threat to many “normal, law-abiding” members of society by depriving them of powerful scapegoats and foils for establishing and maintaining their own identities.

Our pursuit of ignorance and failure

This refusal to recognize the root causes of social problems supports two basic strategies by which we avoid solving them. The first is to make little or no effort to solve them. This response is often rationalized by asserting that certain problems, such as poverty, crime, and delinquency, cannot be solved, and berating and ridiculing efforts to do so. It is nowadays often claimed that programmes such as those of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society were fundamentally misguided, ineffective, and even counterproductive, and that we need to abandon such efforts and instead provide “tax relief” and “get big Government off people’s backs”. Such claims turn a blind eye to irrefutable evidence that government efforts to promote justice and equality, reduce poverty, provide health care, and rehabilitate drug addicts and violent criminals not only can work but actually have worked quite remarkably in many instances to lift people out of poverty, improve their health, and provide them with other opportunities to flourish (Currie & Skolnick, 1997, pp. 9–11; Schorr, 1988, pp. xxiv-xxvi, 1998, pp. xxv-xxvi). Ignoring such evidence allows people to believe that nothing can be done to relieve certain types of human suffering and injustice, and this belief enables them to perpetuate social problems with a clear conscience.

The second strategy we use to avoid solving our social problems is to take some action apparently aimed at solving them, but to ignore available knowledge of how to do so and to pursue instead policies that are ineffective and even counterproductive. Lisbeth Schorr notes, for example, that “the nation’s rich body of knowledge about improving the life prospects of disadvantaged children remains largely unutilized” (Schorr, 1998, p. 19). The same is true of knowledge about how to rehabilitate criminals and drug addicts, help people get out of poverty, and prevent teen pregnancy (Currie & Skolnick, 1997, p. 10; Schorr, 1998, pp. 169, 194, 234ff.), and also to prevent war and terrorism.

The War on Drugs is a prominent instance of such a symptomatic, counterproductive response, based on the failure of the American public and policy-makers to identify and address the key causes of the problem. Policy-makers and the general public have correctly recognized two proximal causes that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient to produce the drug problem: a demand for drugs and a supply of them. And they have correctly concluded that eliminating either the supply of drugs or the demand for them will eliminate the drug problem. Problems arise, however, with the next logical step: how to eliminate the supply and/or the demand. Rather than enquiring into the causes of the behaviours of production and consumption (that is, the psychological needs and environmental circumstances that give rise to these behaviours), policy-makers and the general public simply assume that the causes are character flaws in the users, producers, and distributors of the substances. More precisely, they assume that greed and pleasure are the prime motivators of both the production and the consumption of drugs. From this it follows that both the supply of and the demand for drugs could be eliminated by decreasing the pleasure they produce, a conclusion that supports the idea that the problem can be solved by prohibition, which reduces the net pleasure gained by drug production and consumption by inflicting severe unpleasure for such behaviours. Hence the three primary interventions of the USA’s drug policy, which are three forms of pleasure reduction: (1) incarceration for possession of illegal drugs, which dramatically alters the net pleasure resulting from their production and use; (2) moral condemnation (including the “just say no” slogan), which aims both to produce the displeasure of social censure and to inculcate an internal source of displeasure in the form of a superego opposition to drug production and use; and (3) education concerning the physiological, psychological, and social harm that can result from drug use, which aims to produce an awareness of future suffering that production and consumption may effect.

Unfortunately, these programmes, like Prohibition in the 1920s, have proved largely ineffective. The major reason is because the fundamental assumption about human motivation on which they are all based—the assumption that people produce and consume illegal drugs because of an excessive desire for pleasure inadequately controlled by ego and superego constraints—is invalid. As we will see when we examine the research on addiction and substance abuse, drug use is caused not primarily by the desire for pleasure but rather by the need to maintain a sense of self, or identity, in the face of threatening internal or external circumstances.

The other front in the USA’s drug war, the supply side, suffers from a similar failure to understand the deep motivation of drug production and trafficking. Here, too, it is assumed that the pleasure principle—in this case, in the form of greed—is the fundamental motivation of the manufacturers and distributors. From this assumption, it follows that the way to eliminate or reduce drug manufacture and trafficking is to reduce the yield of pleasure such behaviours produce, by arresting the producers and traffickers and finding and destroying their supplies and production facilities. Here, too, however, the primary motivation is not pleasure, but the need for an identity, for a sense of self as a force that matters in the world, which drug trafficking can provide much more readily and powerfully than any of the other (often severely limited) options available to those who engage in these illegal activities. This point will become clear when we investigate the motivations of criminal activity in general.

The failure to recognize the motivations of drug users and producers is a major reason we have not formulated a more successful drug policy in the USA. To prevent a persistent behaviour it is always helpful and often necessary to alter its motivations. Concerning the drug problem, we need to recognize what motivates people to produce and consume drugs in spite of the significant risk of dire consequences for such behaviours. But this level of causation-motivation is rarely if ever given careful consideration by policy-makers or the public at large.

Why is this the case? Why, moreover, do policy-makers, along with most of the general public, continue to support a drug policy that has not only failed to solve the problem of drug abuse but has actually created new problems, such as the development of organized and violent crime around drug production and distribution, the criminalization and incarceration of large segments of the population (particularly young black men), and the expenditure of considerable public resources for enforcement of the laws prohibiting drug manufacture, distribution, and possession? What are the causes of this socially harmful behaviour of policy-makers and ordinary citizens: that is, their/our insistence on sticking with an ineffective and counterproductive policy and their/our failure to recognize and understand the psychological needs that cause substance abuse, as well as the environmental causes of these psychological needs?

Ironically, the failure to recognize the most fundamental motivation driving drug production and consumption and the resulting continued pursuit of our failed drug policy are themselves caused by the same fundamental psychological need that motivates drug production and consumption: the need to maintain one’s identity, or sense of self. The War on Drugs supports the identities of “normal” people, first, by freeing them of all responsibility for the drug problem, helping them to believe that their own behaviours—their voting choices, consumption habits, business practices, cultural activities, and so on—play no role in producing the behaviours of substance abusers, and second, by providing them with the image of a depraved Other in comparison with whom they can feel morally pure and (in many cases) blissfully unaware of their own addictions to, and abuses of, various substances, such as alcohol, tobacco, food, entertainment, commodities, money, and so on.

This same deep motivation—the need to maintain one’s identity—is responsible for the fact that policy-makers and the public rarely inquire into the (material, social, and cultural) environmental causes of drug production and consumption, both current environmental circumstances that serve to trigger, and past environmental factors that have created, the psychological needs (including “character flaws”) driving individuals to produce or consume drugs. As later chapters will substantiate, the reason the more effective, environmental interventions are not emphasized by policy-makers and the general public is not because the knowledge of environmental causes is not available to them; rather, it is because locating the causes of substance abuse primarily or even solely in the producers and consumers of illegal drugs answers a fundamental psychological need of “good, normal, law-abiding citizens”: the need to maintain a strong identity, or sense of self.

This same dynamic is motivating the War on Terrorism. The necessity of discovering and addressing the root causes of terrorism, and the refusal of the Bush administration to do so, have been noted by many social scientists and other observers (e.g., Mack, 2002; Perlman, 2002; Rubenstein, 2003). Rather than inquiring into the motives, and the causes of the motives, of the terrorists’ actions, George W. Bush rushed to declare the perpetrators evil and their actions incomprehensible, thus reducing the attacks to a single, inscrutable cause: evil, irrational individuals. Subsequently, on the relatively rare occasions that Bush and the public in general have acknowledged that the terrorists’ motives had causes, the causes have usually been reduced to the single factor of fanatical, fundamentalist Islamic religious teaching. Ignored are past and present events of Western military intervention, economic and political hegemony, and cultural imperialism and the psychological impact of these actions on many Muslims.

Such failure to acknowledge the full array of causes that are responsible for a social problem is perhaps the most fundamental and damaging of social symptoms, for, without taking into account the full battery of causes responsible for a social problem, it is very difficult to formulate effective policies to combat it. Dissolving this symptom can thus make an important contribution toward the solution of social problems. But how can one combat the unconscious defences against recognizing these causes?

There are three levels of intervention. The first is to make explicit, continuously and forcefully, in the face of denials and diversions, all the significant causes that contribute to social problems. The second is to expose the defences against acknowledging these causes and explain what is motivating these defences—that is, explain how they are working to maintain the identities of those who use the defences. And the third and most fundamental level of intervention is to help people develop identities that relieve them of the need to resort to such defences in order to maintain their identities. I will discuss the second and third levels of intervention in later chapters. Here, I focus on the first, not only because it is the simplest and easiest to enact, but also because having a grasp of the entire network of a social problem’s causes is a prerequisite for detecting when specific social views or policies are functioning defensively as a means of avoiding one or more causes and their concomitant interventions.

The web of causality producing social problems

What, then, are the key causes, both proximal and distal, that produce social problems? The most immediate and obvious, as we have already discussed, are the behaviours that constitute these problems and that are the focus of our responses to substance abuse and most other social problems as well. Most policies aimed at ameliorating social problems take into account only these most proximal causes: the behaviours constituting or producing the social problem and the presumed immorality or character flaws of those who engage in these behaviours. But such attribution of problematic behaviours to character faults and/or moral deficiencies provides little or no explanation of the causes of the behaviours; in a tautological move, it simply assumes that bad actions are caused by bad people. How do we know that people who commit bad actions are bad? Because they commit bad actions. No insight is offered about either the internal causes (motivations) or the external causes (situations and circumstances) of such behaviours.

Psychological causes

To prevent or alter the behaviours responsible for social problems, we need to do more than simply attribute these behaviours to a presumed moral deficiency or flawed character of those who engage in them. We need to understand the psychological forces that motivate their harmful behaviours and/or prevent them from engaging in alternative, more benign behaviours. This means understanding the deepest motivations. Most policies aimed at solving social problems fail to recognize and engage these motivations. Instead, they attempt to change t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Dedication
• PREFACE
• PART I: IDENTITY AND THE CAUSES OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS
• PART II: SOCIAL PROBLEMS AS SYMPTOMS OF IDENTITY NEEDS
• PART III: THE ROLE OF IDENTITY IN THE FAILURE TO SOLVE SOCIAL PROBLEMS
• PART IV: SOCIAL CHANGE AND IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
• APPENDIX I: Psychological symptoms as expressions of identity needs
• APPENDIX II: Multiple self-motives and self-esteem
• REFERENCES
• INDEX