Human Nature and Suffering

Paul Gilbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138954755
• eBook ISBN: 9781317189596
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Human Nature and Suffering is a profound comment on the human condition, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Paul Gilbert explores the implications of humans as evolved social animals, suggesting that evolution has given rise to a varied set of social competencies, which form the basis of our personal knowledge and understanding.

Gilbert shows how our primitive competencies become modified by experience - both satisfactorily and unsatisfactorily. He highlights how cultural factors may modify and activate many of these primitive competencies, leading to pathology proneness and behaviours that are collectively survival threatening. These varied themes are brought together to indicate how the social construction of self arises from the organization of knowledge encoded within the competencies.

This Classic Edition features a new introduction from the author, bringing Gilbert's early work to a new audience. The book will be of interest to clinicians, researchers and historians in the field of psychology.

1 Introduction and overview

DOI: 10.4324/9781315564258-1

Despite a radically different view of human psychology than existed in Freud’s day, psychoanalytic theorising continues to exercise a powerful hold over western imagination. Why should this be? There appear to be many reasons, none of which necessarily tells us of the truth or falseness of psychoanalytic formulation. First, at least on the surface, it speaks to us in a familiar language; a language of description which resonates with the personal. We may experience symptoms and desires we cannot explain. We recognise the aggressive and vengeful in ourselves and also the desires to be approved of, loved and respected. Second, it places these personal propensities at its centre, to be explained systematically, and it attempts to provide answers to the contradictory and paradoxical. Third, while it speaks in terms of mental mechanisms as fragmented wishes, desires and fears, it nevertheless offers some possibility for coherence and union. Fourth, it offers a new principle of knowing, based on free association which requires the individual to suspend moral and logical reasoning.

Psychoanalytic theory in common with some philosophical forms of enquiry appeals to our sense of the mythic. We can analyse films and books in terms of archetypal relations; e.g. the journey and trials of the hero, the search for truth, the fight between good and evil, the lost anima (animus) object, treachery, deceit and war. These are repetitious human themes of interaction. In these we find mirrors to our own personal lives and those subjects and discourses revealed by the tellers of fiction and myths. Perhaps, as some suggest, it was his talent for mythic story telling and literary style that made Freud so popular.

And yet for all this, it is becoming increasingly clear that the cure of suffering most often requires action. The behavioural and social learning sciences have impressed on us the vital importance of behavioural confrontation with the feared; the need to strengthen the will to act rather than the power of understanding or insight alone. Indeed, the latter may at times depend on the former. Despite powerful arguments (Wachtel 1977; Erdelyi 1985), these two procedures, the introspective free associative, revelatory and the behavioural are not easily married. Nevertheless, psychotherapeutic practice and theory are becoming more eclectic, trying to pin down the crucial elements that facilitate change (Karasu 1986; Beitman 1987).

At the time when psychoanalysis was getting bogged down in increasingly jargonistic complexities of the human psyche, and the refining of technique (which gradually evolved into increasing distance between patient and therapist) the behaviourists offered new, simpler and more scientifically verifiable explanations for suffering. In this sense the operant approach offered (at least superficially) a rebuke to individualism and pointed the finger at external contingencies. Behavioural therapists suggested that previous contingencies of reward and punishment could result in neurosis. For example, Ferster (1973) argued that the suppression of anger arose from a child’s early conditioning of external punitive consequences to assertive and aggressive behaviour. In other words, the child came to fear the consequences of its own assertive and aggressive behaviour. For these theorists, neurosis was not a thwarting of instinctual drives, but the consequences (usually) of a punitive environment. For them, there was no necessity to consider how a punitive environment interacted with an evolved system of varied mental structures, the activity of which was (presumed) mostly unconscious. Neitzche’s will to power and the existentialists’ will to meaning were rendered the products of personal environmental history.

No theory can be fully understood without recourse to its historical culture of embeddeness (Ellenberger 1970). It is from this source that any direction of enquiry must commence. There would have been little medieval philosophy, no St Augustine or Thomas Aquinas were it not for a set of religious and ethical premises set up by Christianity. Whereas some religious healers saw suffering as the result of transgression (Zilboorg and Henry 1941) Freud saw neurosis as the fear of transgression, the result of a submissive will, fearful of knowing and acknowledging. Thus, for Freud suffering arose from too much adherence to authority, rather than too little. Hence, in his day, Freud became the focus for the loss of prohibition, the liberation of the sexual, the release from guilt and the preference for knowing over ignorance, prejudice and obedience. Up until the 1930s the BBC banned the broadcasting of talks on psychoanalysis and the establishment continued to see sexual desires as needing to be tamed by punishment or cold showers. Homosexual acts were sins against God and worthy of punishment. The institutions of power and the continuance of the culture of command were the way of correct order.

But liberating or not, resonating or not and freeing or not, the psychoanalytic method of understanding the psyche has always been in doubt, and its treatment of suffering even more suspect. Maybe it was not free association and dream analysis or even “the knowing” that cured, but rather the relationship between therapist and patient. Maybe it was the recapture of a certain form of empathic intimacy that made the difference as Rogers, and later Kohut, were to argue. Maybe the Oedipus complex was rare or even irrelevant, as both Jung and Horney argued; and maybe we do not need to have much insight into the structures of mentality in order to work as therapists, as the behaviourists argued. What emerged was a schism between the observed, the pulse that psychoanalysis had put its finger on, and the theoretical monuments erected to explain it.

More recently through the work of Neisser (1967, 1976) the behaviourist hold over academic psychology has loosened. The result of this was called a cognitive revolution (Mahoney 1974, 1984). At the same time, new movements in psychotherapeutic endeavour have grown out of the post-behavioural and post-egoanalytic period and are marked especially by the works of Beck and Ellis. The post-cognitive revolution has now given rise to a new theoretical paradigm called “cognitive constructionism”, and a recognition that cognition is a biological issue (Maturana 1983; Dell 1985: Mahoney and Gabriel 1987).

However we wish to plot the history of the last fifty years, there seems to be an increasing wish to return to the grappling with the ageless questions of understanding human beings as coming into the world in states of preparation. What is born after nine months gestation is not a tabula rasa, but a potential human being that, like any other species, be it plant or animal, will, given a genetic and structural sufficiency, proceed to grow in a species-typical way. What we see in maturation is as much an unfolding as it is a moulding. When we begin to see this unfolding from an evolved perspective and are able to liken and distinguish ourselves from our animal relatives then the full impact of what it is we need in order to grow and flourish, both as individuals and as a species, is more easily recognised.

Increasingly, we are beginning also to understand that the brain is constituted of a number of special-purpose units. These may be called small minds (Ornstein 1986), modules (Fodor 1985) or special intelligences (Gardner 1985). These individual, special functional units exert various effects on and through consciousness. They are most easily revealed by experimental research and also examination of the functioning of brain-damaged subjects. The human power of reason is now seen as a special faculty which can operate relatively untainted by personal needs (e.g. mathematical reasoning) or, alternatively can be recruited to fill in the gaps of an already crudely formulated reality thrown up by smaller functioning units for the interpretation of experience. Hence, the reasoning of the successful is different from the reasoning of the defeated; the reasoning of the loved is different from the reasoning of the abandoned; the reasoning of the neurotic is different from the reasoning of the psychotic, and the therapist needs to be schooled in these various ways reasoning is put to work. Additionally, the state of the physiological relations pertaining within the brain at any point in time profoundly affects our personal and social logics. This must be true otherwise no psychotropic medication would work, not to mention the power of drugs like LSD or alcohol.

Behaviourism is beginning to grapple with the problem of our innate capabilities for knowing and behaving (Rescorla 1988). The study of facial expressions (Tomkins 1981), innate sensory motor patterns (Leventhal 1984) and the study of the prepared basis for phobia (McNally 1987; Trower and Gilbert 1989) are also examples. It is no longer possible to regard humans as a tabula rasa without a developmental process (Kegan 1982; Goldstein 1985; Mahoney and Gabriel 1987). Watson’s behavioural triumph over MacDougall’s instinct theories, won in the 1920s, is coming to an end (Eysenck 1979; Goldstein 1985). We stand at one of those moments in history where it is possible to integrate what scattered details of knowledge of the human psyche we now possess. Sociobiology, ethology, biology, philosophy and of course, psychology are all enticing us with new ideas that demand an increasingly flexible theoretical structure capable of dealing with both the evolved prepared basis of human mentality and its medium of modification via the culture in which it comes to express itself. Hence, the complexities of human psychic life stretch out in wondrous diversity as perhaps at no other time in history.

This book is a personal journey through these complexities. It is an attempt to articulate the basic strands of human nature that can both resonate with the personal and yet be objective. In this I try to explain the basis of human suffering as arising from maladaptive deviations in the expression of our individual humanness. Such a grandiose scheme can never fully achieve its aim and this book must denounce any claims to be fully comprehensive. In casting such a wide net, it is sadly the case but inevitable, that there are parts of the net where the mesh is extremely fine and loosely woven. However, I hope this will not detract from the overall sketch that is given.

Outline

Chapter 2 begins our journey by examining some of the general issues pertaining to sociobiology and the implications some of these have for our understanding of our evolved mental structures and capabilities. It is argued that there are four main classes of biosocial competencies (called biosocial goals) which account for much of our susceptibility to suffering. These are labelled as care eliciting, care giving, co-operating and competing. In Chapter 3 different approaches to the study of human nature are taken up. These include archetype theory, ethology, interpersonal psychology and cognitive psychology. In exploring these themes, we will note how the issue of dominance (captured by Neitzche’s concept of the will to power) and also the role of affiliation versus hostility appear to be prominent mental capabilities co-ordinating the personality. Chapter 3 also provides the basis for the theoretical rationale for analysing systems of defence and systems of safety (although in our discussion of defence systems, we are talking in ethological rather than psychoanalytic terms).

In Chapter 4 we examine various subdivisions and psychobiological mechanisms of the defence and safety systems, which have special-purpose capabilities for dealing with different contexts. We will argue that there are different kinds of threats that social animals have to deal with such as predators and conspecific threats. We will also note how conspecifics can confer safety as well as threat. We will try to illuminate the role of psychobiological factors, showing that the mental and biological must be integrated to avoid our study of psychopathology becoming either a brainless or mindless science (L. Eisenberg 1986). Chapter 5 examines peripheral physiological systems and shows that the pre-existing physiological state of an animal has a major impact on the response it emits to excitatory stimuli. Towards the end of this chapter I also present a view called the defensive drift hypothesis which suggests how various symptoms tend to become locked together. In Chapters 6 to 13, each biosocial goal is considered in turn. This offers a detailed look at the biosocial goals of care eliciting, care giving, co-operating and competing. These chapters are in pairs, the first looking at the biosocial goal and the second examining the kinds of sufferings and disorders that can relate to distortions in that goal. In our final chapters I will try to bring these various threads together and use a systems analysis for the construction of the self based upon the activity of these various aspects within the human psyche.

This then is the brief sketch of the book. At various times in the writing I have been confronted with a profound sense of ignorance which has been so strong as to make me wish I had never started the journey. However, in the end I have taken the view that a sketch must only be a sketch and hopefully a focus by which others may come to modify and also to appreciate the concepts and theories being developed in other areas apart from their own. This book is, above all, an attempt to illuminate Mind as an expression of evolution.

We put much too narrow a definition on personality! Our personality, we tend to believe, is only that part of ourselves which we regard as individual, as deviating from the norm but we, each and all of us, contain within us the entire history of the world, and just as our body records Man’s genealogy as far back as the fish and then some, so our soul encompasses everything that has ever lived in human souls. All gods and devils that have ever existed are within us as possibilities, as desires, as solutions. If mankind were to die out except for one halfway gifted child, who had been taught nothing, the child would rediscover all history; it would create gods, demons, paradises, commandments and prohibitions, the old and new testaments.

Hermann Hesse: Reflections, 1979 p.86

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to the Classic Edition
• 1 Introduction and overview
• Outline
• 2 A legacy from the past: the role of human nature
• Historical background
• Evolution in the social context
• Evolution of biosocial goals and social strategies
• Biosocial goals
• A rough classification
• Models for the interaction of cognition, behaviour and affect
• Concluding comments
• 3 The mapping of human nature
• Jung’s theory of archetypes
• Ethological approaches to human nature
• The evolution of social roles
• Interpersonal approaches to human nature
• The cognitive approach
• Concluding comments
• 4 The psychobiology of some basic mechanisms
• Defence
• Safety
• The neurobiology of go–stop processes
• Neuropsychological aspects of defence and safety
• Concluding comments
• 5 The psychobiology of peripheral systems
• The endocrinology of defensive go states
• Defensive stop states
• The psychobiology of changing states
• Concluding comments and the defensive drift hypothesis
• 6 Care eliciting and attachment strategies
• Attachment theory
• The importance of the infant’s experience of mediators
• The psychobiology of separation
• Conflict in early relationships
• Concluding comments
• 7 Care eliciting and theories of psychopathology
• Early interactions with mediators
• Theories of vulnerability
• Care eliciting and psychopathology
• Developmental issues revisited
• The relationship of personality disorder to depression and anxiety
• Concluding comments
• 8 Care giving and nurturance
• Dimensions of care giving
• Evolution
• Affects related to care giving
• Psychotherapeutic points
• Concluding comments
• 9 Disorders of care giving
• Child–adult interactions
• Adult–adult relationships
• Concluding comments
• 10 Co-operation
• The importance of human co-operativeness
• Evolution
• Issues in co-operative relationships
• Transaction in interpersonal relationships
• Concluding comments: co-operating versus competing
• 11 Co-operation: some blocks and pathologies
• Deception
• Guilt
• The relationship of guilt to shame
• Belief systems derived from co-operation and reciprocal altruism
• Concluding comments
• 12 Competition: status, power and dominance
• Status
• Power and dominance
• Submission
• The psychobiology of status, power and dominance
• Gender: status, dominance and power
• Competition and sibling rivalry
• Concluding comments
• 13 Some psychopathologies of status, power and dominance
• Theories of psychopathology
• Type A personality
• Narcissistic personality disorder
• Concluding comments
• 14 Beyond the power of reason
• Social mentalities
• The self
• The mind as a system
• Psychotherapy implications
• Concluding comments
• 15 Conclusions and reflections
• An overview
• Personal reflections
• References
• Appendix 1
• The monoamine system
• The distribution of monoamine pathways
• Early neurochemical insights
• Current ideas on neurobiological mechanisms
• Appendix 2
• Homeostasis and beyond
• Oscillating systems within the central nervous system
• The psychobiology of ecological and climatic variation
• Internal oscillators
• Author index
• Subject index