Psychoanalysis, Classic Social Psychology and Moral Living

Let the Conversation Begin

Paul Marcus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000734782
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In Psychoanalysis, Classic Social Psychology and Moral Living: Let the Conversation Begin, Paul Marcus uniquely draws on psychoanalysis and social psychology to examine what affects the ethical decisions people make in their everyday life.

Psychoanalysis traditionally looks at early experiences, concepts and drives which shape how we choose to behave in later life. In contrast, classic social psychology experiments have illustrated how specific situational forces can shape our moral behaviour. In this ground-breaking fusion of psychoanalysis and social psychology, Marcus gives a fresh new perspective to this and demonstrates how, in significant instances, these experimental findings contradict many presumed psychoanalytic ideas and explanations surrounding psychoanalytic moral psychology. Examining classic social psychology experiments, such as Asch's line judgement studies, Latané and Darley's bystander studies, Milgram's obedience studies, Mischel's Marshmallow Experiment and Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, Marcus pulls together insights and understanding from both disciplines, as well as ethics, to begin a conversation and set out a new understanding of how internal and external factors interact to shape our moral decisions and behaviours.

Marcus has an international reputation for pushing boundaries of psychoanalytic thinking and, with ethics being an increasingly relevant topic in psychoanalysis and our world, this pioneering work is essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, moral philosophy scholars and social psychologists.

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INTRODUCTION

Psychoanalysis and social psychology: Let the conversation begin

“Normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes,” said Freud, “but also far more moral than he knows” (1974, p. 52). Indeed, he noted that the psychoanalysts’ “art consists in making it possible for people to be moral and to deal with their wishes philosophically” (Hale, 1971, p. 121); that is, more kind, humane, reasonable and rational. Psychoanalysis has often prided itself on being the most comprehensive psychology of human behavior, a claim that includes understanding and promoting the moral life, by which I mean “a commitment to a rigorous and truthful account of the psyche that is itself trying to promote what it finds to be good about human being” in the world (Lear, 2017, p. 191). In psychoanalysis, a moral life is typically instantiated by a person’s capacity for deep and wide love and creative and productive work, a life that is guided by reason and ethics and is aesthetically pleasing (a judgment that the analysand makes, usually in consultation with the analyst).

While the overused term, moral psychology, is at the interface of ethics, psychology and philosophy, I wish to mainly address the issue of moral behavior, the way in which one acts or conducts oneself, especially toward others in morally challenging circumstances. I focus on behavior that is lodged in moral emotions such as the four “social,” “higher-order” or “self-conscious” emotions of guilt, shame, embarrassment and pride (Simons, 2009).¹ These are judged by the person and by the consensus of others to be life-affirming and life-promoting. The moral life, “ethics,” is “consciousness of a responsibility towards others” (Levinas, 1996, p. 76). In this view, says the eminent sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, the “I being for the Other, I bearing responsibility for the Other,” is what matters most (1992, p. 42).² Indeed, such a view resonates with the wisdom of the great religious/spiritual traditions that affirm that man is never closer to God, never more animated by the spirit of the Divine, than when he behaves compassionately (Marcus, 2003). Moreover, such behavior, and the virtue-based outlook it is typically associated with, can be designated as reflecting a well-lived life, what has been aptly called a “flourishing” or “good” life by the great Greek philosophers (i.e., eudaimonia).³

Psychoanalysis has been masterful in describing the wide range of alleged reasons and ways that individuals act immorally, focusing on their warped and corrupted internal life (e.g., irrationality and deviant wishes), the so-called dispositional perspective (roughly, the concepts and drives of personality and what makes individuals respond in certain manners). What both devotees and critics of psychoanalysis have criticized about the theory and practice is that it has not developed an adequate social psychology. This especially includes a social psychology that gives a prominent role to the external environment, the circumstances and perceived “reality” considerations that are pertinent to understanding and explaining important moral conflicts and the resultant behavior. It also centrally focuses on group dynamics and situational forces rather than mainly intra-psychic ones to account for moral and immoral behavior. It is these conscious and non-conscious group dynamics that powerfully influence the moral and immoral behaviors of individuals in striking and unanticipated ways. The nine groundbreaking studies discussed in this book create significant moral dilemmas and the requirement is to examine the situational forces that influence and create individual responses. While the general assumption is that the individual is in control of decisions and actions from within, these studies show that there are dramatic and often invisible forces at work that influence behavior in surprising and unpredictable ways that are relevant to psychoanalytic theory and clinical work (like helping analysands to enhance their social intelligence and sharpen their social cognition).⁴ Such situational forces within the everyday realms of love, work, consumerism, political action and helping or harming others can have the power to shift behavior in important ways.

With regards to the social environment, Bruno Bettelheim, a former Nazi concentration camp prisoner, noted that during his imprisonment, “The impact of the concentration camp … within a few weeks, did for me what years of useful and quite successful analysis had not done” (1960, p. 12). It significantly reduced his sense of autonomy, integration and humanity. Moreover, he said,

I only wish to suggest that the psychoanalytic theory of personality [i.e., classical theory] is deficient in suggesting what makes for a ‘desirable’ well integrated personality; and this because it over stresses the importance of the inner life to the neglect of the total man as he deals with human and social environment.

(ibid., p. 21)⁵

In light of the fact that the “extreme” environment of the concentration camp so swiftly and invasively shaped the person for better or worse, Bettelheim concluded, “What psychoanalysis has achieved for the personality within a stable social context must now be done for personality and social context in their interaction, when both of them are changing” (ibid., p. 57). Bettelheim thus recognized some of the deficiencies in psychoanalytic personality theory which, as he intimates, forced him to modify his psychoanalytic perspective with insight from the field of social psychology and sociology⁶ (i.e., the role of the social environment in changing personality). Social psychology questions the assumption of “personality” as a disposition, since the “classic” experiments described in this book point to the fluidity of personality—that it is not fixed but dependent on situational forces, usually unacknowledged.

This being said, Martin Bergmann, a prominent psychoanalyst, noted that “we have a very rudimentary social psychology as psychoanalysts” (Luel & Marcus, 1984, p. 216), while the former President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Robert Wallerstein, wrote that “the psychoanalytic study of reality” has been “relatively neglected or taken for granted in usual psychoanalytic discourse” (Wallerstein, 1973, p. 5). He believes that this neglect is implicit in the long-standing belief in a fixed world “out there,” of an unvarying “average expectable environment” (ibid., p. 7). More recently, psychodynamic psychologist Tamara McClintock Greenberg noted, “within mainstream psychoanalysis, there has been relatively little emphasis on ‘real events,’ including the effects of adult-onset trauma,” such as illness in old age (2016, p. 43). Indeed, a recent definition of reality reinforces my claim that not much has changed in how psychoanalysis reckons with the notion of reality since Wallerstein made his observation: “By ‘reality,’ psychoanalysis means what is actually out there, can be objectively perceived and consensually agreed upon” (Akhtar, 2009, p. 240, italics added). For example, Freud described a particular kind of psychosis called “hallucinatory confusion” wherein the “ego breaks away from the incompatible idea” (an idea that is overpoweringly painful or distressing) so that it has “detached itself wholly or in part from reality” (1962, p. 59). Social psychology questions this foundational assumption by suggesting that reality is perception, not fixed. Kurt Lewin, “the founding father of experimental social psychology” (Aronson et al., 2014, p. 16), emphasized this point when he wrote,

If an individual sits in a room trusting that the ceiling will not come down, should only the ‘subjective probability’ be taken into account for predicting behavior or should we also consider the ‘objective probability’ of the ceiling’s coming down as determined by engineers? To my mind, only the first has to be taken into account.

(ibid., p. 18)

The counter-intuitive claim of my book is that experimental/scientific social psychology (henceforth, social psychology), especially the classic experiments like Asch’s line judgment studies (highlighting the moral conflict of “conformity versus independence”), Latané and Darley’s bystander studies (highlighting the moral conflict of “helping versus indifference”), and Milgram’s obedience studies (highlighting the moral conflict of “obedience versus resistance”), have experimentally demonstrated that what is “actually out there,” how it “hangs” together, what we expect of it and how we behave, is not entirely obvious. As John Lennon allegedly said, “Reality takes a lot of imagination” (Frank, 2013, p. 79). Indeed, in significant instances these experimental findings challenge many presumed psychoanalytic ideas and explanations regarding issues pertinent to psychoanalytic moral psychology and the analysand’s efforts to help fashion a moral life (what might be called clinical ethics). Even more importantly, these experiments suggest what is psychologically necessary for people to develop to resist these potentially dangerous social dynamics: by acting in ways that are humane, life-affirming and life-promoting. Other examples of classic experiments include: Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, which highlights the way social influences, like assigned roles, can contribute to “normal” people engaging in brutal tyranny while other assigned roles can contribute to “normal” people engaging in behaviors associated with extreme victimization (Haney et al., 1973); Festinger’s cognitive dissonance studies, in which individuals aim for consistency between attitudes and behaviors, and may not use rational or moral methods to achieve it (Festinger et al., 1956); and the Rosenhan experiment, which highlights the lack of validity and reliability of psychiatric diagnosis about what is “normal” versus “abnormal,” and the disempowering and demeaning nature of patient care experienced by the study participants (Rosenhan, 1973). This path-breaking experiment is particularly pertinent to psychoanalysis because it raises intriguing questions, such as whether madness is the inability to fake sanity, or as sociologist Erving Goffman implied, whether society is an insane asylum run by the inmates. In other words, I will consider how these divisions of sane and insane operate, often negatively, for the clinician and analysand, patient or client.

This book can be described as a social psychology of “witness” in that it has an overarching goal of increasing the individual’s capacity to act in an autonomous, integrated and humane manner amidst the moral challenges one faces in the attempt to fashion a flourishing moral life that includes an understanding of the visible and invisible external social forces that influence behavior. As Foucault noted, the role of philosophy, and I would add the role of social psychology and psychoanalysis, is not so much “to discover what is hidden, but to render visible what precisely is visible, which is to say, to make appear what is so close, so immediate, so intimately linked to ourselves that, as a consequence, we do not perceive it” (Cavell, 2004, p. 33). In this way one can “think differently” about one’s situation: “Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem” (Foucault, 1984a, p. 388). For instance, there were individuals in Asch’s line drawing studies (1951) who did not cave in to group pressure and told the truth as they perceived it, there were people in Latané and Darley’s bystander study (1968) who intervened in an emergency situation, and there were individuals who refused to shock an innocent victim in Milgram’s study (1974). In this book, I use these classic social psychology studies, which together can be called the “sacred cannon,” as analogous to compelling, modern “morality plays”: to delineate the important insights about the conditions of possibility for potentiating the “worst” and “best” about human behavior, what psychoanalysis needs to integrate into its understanding of the human condition,⁷ and how these social-psychological findings can be pragmatically integrated into clinical practice. For example, helping the analysand develop better “situational awareness,” defined as increased awareness of one’s surroundings (e.g., of time and space) and identifying potential threats and dangerous situations, is a mind-set and an ego-strength that has enormous benefit in helping an analysand maintain personal and collective security. This increased awareness goes against denial and complacency in a world that feels—and often is—menacing. Such skillful situational awareness is in sync with how sociologist Anthony Giddens describes the modern self: “as a reflexive project, for which the individual is responsible” (1991, p. 75). Rather than taking for granted or passively inheriting who we are, as in traditional culture, we actively shape, reflect on and monitor our selves, fashioning our biographical narratives as we move through life. We view our identities as a project, something that we actively construct and are alone responsible for. Any psychoanalytic social psychology worth its salt includes responsibility as a core valuative attachment of its intellectual and practical activities.⁸ Indeed, throughout this book, in part drawing from social psychologist Milton Rokeach, I suggest that the person who fashions a self-identity that includes strongly felt, flexibly and creatively applied, transcendent-pointing moral beliefs and values that are primarily other-directed, other-regarding and other-serving, tends to behave in morally praiseworthy, life-affirming and life-promoting ways.

Many eminent psychoanalytic personality and social theorists have investigated the role of culture on the individual, such as the way that one socially constructs a self within the context of family and the broadly conceived environment (e.g., the role of gender, patriarchy, race, economics, etc.). While these theorists have tried to delineate the ways that individuals are shaped by social circumstances, including acknowledging social context as being a primary determinant of behavior, intra-psychic properties (e.g., desire and fantasy) tend to dominate the analysis of why people behave the way they do. For example, one psychoanalytically influenced sociologist, Anthony Elliott, points out that the analyst and analysand attempt to understand how social and cultural forms are given shape internally, involving critically reflecting on how the self is constituted culturally as a manifestation of “internal depth”: “[T]he self is a work of active construction and reconstruction, built on inner workings of fantasy and its unconscious contortions—anxieties about difference, about otherness and strangeness, about intimacy and proximity—in the wider frame of culture, society and politics” (2015, p. 187). Elliott fu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Psychoanalysis and social psychology: Let the conversation begin
• 2. Conformity versus independence: Asch’s line judgement studies (1951)
• 3. Harmony versus disharmony between beliefs and behavior: Festinger’s cognitive dissonance (1954)
• 4. Intergroup conflict versus cooperation: Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment (1954)
• 5. Obedience versus resistance: Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments (1961)
• 6. Helping versus indifference in emergencies: Latané and Darley’s bystander studies (1968)
• 7. Self-control versus lack of self-control: The Marshmallow Experiment of Mischel (1970)
• 8. Tyranny versus Autonomy: Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (1971)
• 9. Stereotypes and underperformance: Steele and Aronson’s stereotype threat studies (1995)
• 10. Sane versus insane: The Rosenhan or Thud experiment (1973)
• Index