Psychoanalytic Insights into Fundamentalism and Conviction

The Certainty Principle

Lesley Murdin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138362178
• eBook ISBN: 9780429778438
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Psychoanalytic Insights into Fundamentalism and Conviction: The Certainty Principle examines the role of, and need for, certainty in mental life, addressing questions raised by fundamentalism and extremism and exploring its relation to human nature. Murdin proposes a new synthesis in which certainty itself can be a cause of suffering and part of a defensive manoeuvre, and considers how the need for certainty can be managed in a positive way, rather than creating fear and extreme emotional responses.

Illustrated throughout with examples from psychotherapy practice, literature and international politics, this book considers how the quest for certainty dominates much of human thinking. Murdin examines personal relationships, including politics and religion, where assumptions are taken for granted but function to hide fears and doubts, and argues that fundamentalist elements can generate harm in anyone but can be mitigated with understanding and work in therapy.

Psychoanalytic Insights into Fundamentalism and Conviction helps to identify the underlying convictions that are causing mental harm. It is essential reading for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and counsellors in practice and in training, and will be of interest to readers interested in fundamentalist states of mind.

Chapter 1

Certainty

Who needs it?

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, 1919

The Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote ‘The Second Coming’ in the aftermath of the First World War and in the context of the Irish War of Independence. He pointed out the disjunction that we find between those whose certainty is supporting destructive positions and those whose doubt is part of their ability to see the complexity of life’s choices. Much of the distress in living arises from a failure to find the middle ground.

Marianne commutes to a job in London through the major UK train station Kings Cross. She tells me that she enjoys commuting. Mostly. It gives her time to think and often she reads a novel on the train. ‘But’, she says, ‘I dread the bit in the station. I look round all the time for the man with the gun but I’m also expecting a new kind of attack, maybe gas or a bomb’.

Perhaps Marianne will get used to the fear and become less anxious. Perhaps her anxiety will shift to something closer to her and to what she is doing or is about to do. Ellie on the other hand tells me that she never thinks about danger. She has decided just to get on with her life. She will not allow herself to think about what might happen. ‘Well’, she says, ‘you can’t live like that. You have to think it won’t happen to you’. Without meaning to, she shows that she is well aware of her fear but she can usually chase it away from her mind, replacing it with certainty that she will be all right.

Both of these women have been affected by the damaging certainties of others that we might group under the heading of ‘fundamentalism’. Whether or not there is a high risk of terrorism in a given place at a given time, there is a tension in the human mind between doubt and certainty. Both are needed but both can be problematic. This book is an attempt to consider some of the areas in which these states of mind show themselves and to look at how and why people are able to change their minds. Fundamentalism is not limited to religion or politics but is part of every person’s mind-set. I will also consider the need for therapists to be able to see that there are different ways of approaching a person seeking help and that there may be wrong ways but there is very unlikely to be a right way that provides certainty.

People want to feel safe and secure. There are dangers both in people’s own minds and in the outside world. Of course, terrorism is a special case and this book will be much more concerned with the internal fears and anxieties of each individual. Yet it is also true that our environment presents us with physical and emotional dangers every day.

As a psychotherapist, I hear about people’s hopes and also about their fears. I know that everyone has their own versions of both but I am aware of some social as well as psychological conditions that lead more to fear than hope. Some people are able to overcome fear about the dangers in the environment enough to shrug them off. Older people might look back with some nostalgia to days when the greatest danger in big cities was a mugging by criminals. Since 9/11 (the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York in 2001) and other terrorist attacks elsewhere in the world, the fears are more cataclysmic and are based on known history. This is one reason for spending some time thinking about the nature and development of fundamentalism in our environment. When we look at it closely, we can see that there is something fundamentalist in all of us. The psychotherapist needs to see the difficulties of that. Since convictions that defy the facts of experience are likely to be shored up with all kinds of defences, she will need to help people to look honestly at what they believe to be true.

What is fundamentalism?

In fact, fundamentalism is a solution to the problem raised by the doubt and uncertainty of ordinary life. Since fear is predominantly aroused by the unknown and the unpredictable, we try to establish certainties at two levels. At one level we have the convictions of each individual: ‘One thing I know is that I will never be able to speak Chinese fluently. It just isn’t me’.

We also create certainties for ourselves in terms of social threats. This might be one place where terrorism provides a contemporary illustration. By seeking out the perpetrators and removing them, political leaders seek to convince populations that they will be safe in the future. In addition to political persuasion there is some truth in the saying, ‘There is safety in numbers’. Watching a school of small fish or a flock of birds, you can see that a predator might be so confused that he catches nothing but, in any case, the chances of being the one caught are much less than for a solitary fish or bird. Human beings cling together with shared beliefs but for the bonding to hold, they must all be certain of their common beliefs.

One definition of fundamentalism is ‘strict adherence to traditional orthodox tenets’. In order to ‘adhere strictly’ to tenets of belief, it is necessary to be certain of what those tenets are. The ardent fundamentalist cannot allow any doubts to arise. He knows that it is only for as long as he believes that he can belong to the brotherhood of fellow believers. Needing to belong to a group nourishes fundamentalism but this book will also consider other reasons for the need for certainty.

Beginning with fundamentalism as a social phenomenon I will show that the need for certainty is at work in the reaction to the terrorist attacks on New York and London. This is not to say that all fundamentalism leads to terrorism but that the mind-set involved also appears in individuals and can lead them to damage themselves and others.

Fundamentalist action begets response in kind

One view of the terrorist attacks of 2001 and 2007 is that they were caused by religious extremism. Some of the preachers of Islam not only pointed out the decadence of Western society but also urged that it was morally virtuous to seek to destroy it. Young people seeking to assert their strength and their virtue were given a task which would excite and test them and would lead to rewards in heaven. Other views might consider the part played by envy and desire for a share in the wealth of Western societies. Mohsin Hamid shows these more hidden forces at work in his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), which I will consider in detail later.

Once these forces are released, the attacked can become the attacker and both in talion law, the principle that someone who has injured another person is to be penalised to a similar degree – ‘an eye for an eye’, believe that they are entitled to revenge and to inflict as much harm as they can. A cycle of violence builds up with more and more powerful conviction of being right on each side.

Since the attack on the Twin Towers, the phenomena of fundamentalism have been discussed in media of all sorts in the English-speaking world. Terrorist attacks elsewhere have sparked similar discussions in the world at large. To understand the processes at work we need to look at the particular rewards that are evidently gathered by those who are involved.

Why do people seek certainty? Dangerous external events echo dangers in the mind. Conviction will provide safety. Knowledge can be a gateway to this felt need but so can all sorts of dubious, unfounded beliefs. Factual information provides a sense of control. We are helpless while waiting to see whether the man on a train fiddling with his backpack is really about to set off a bomb. But there might be some information about the profile of recent attackers that would help to allay anxiety. There might still be some doubt but knowledge might change the weight of probability from conviction of danger to a shrug that says that this is probably not dangerous.

As a result of these sorts of experiences in the social consciousness, governments have begun to take an interest in the pattern of thought that can be considered to be a ‘passionate conviction’. One approach that writers have taken is to examine the nature of fundamentalism as the root of problems of violence and consequent fear. Overt violence is one manifestation of conviction but much that goes on in the individual is hate and anger, which also arise from some of the same sources. The social and the individual merge in this area and some of the same psychological patterns can be seen in each.

The attraction of fundamentalist mind-sets

There are difficulties in writing about fundamentalism because of the multiplicity of definitions available. There are dictionary definitions, common-sense definitions and, less commonly used, psychoanalytic definitions. Dictionary definitions like the one quoted above emphasise strict adherence to a set of beliefs, which are often religious or acquire a religious force. The term ‘fundamentalism’ originates from a set of books published in the early twentieth century called The Fundamentals, resisting the influence of modernism by advocating a return to the founding beliefs of Protestantism (Summers 2006: 329). These definitions often emphasise rigidity, and hostility to any challenge. Hostility is aroused in part by fear of those who might not share the same conviction. Like an animal encountering a stranger in its territory, a person in this position may turn, with violence, against those who are not members of the circle of believers.

Belonging is one of the main motivators of human beings. The extraordinary power of social media to involve people and fire up emotional responses is connected to the wish to be part of a group. The evolutionary value of this is clear. From primitive societies onwards it has been necessary to form groups, to hunt and eat and to be protected from predators and hostile human beings. At the macro level we need to belong to a group and at the individual level, the human infant must belong to a mother. She must accept him feed him and care for him so that he can survive.

While the story of human development shows us some reasons for a need for certainty, there are many other reasons at both social and individual levels.

In his examination of gullibility, Factfulness (2018), Hans Rosling considered the way in which beliefs are formed and maintained in the face of contrary evidence. He posed questions about matters of fact to many different audiences throughout the world and found that on a typical question about the prevalence of poverty, vaccination rates or literacy rates for girls and women, audiences gave wrong answers with staggering frequency. Rosling pointed out that if he brought along a pile of bananas to a group of chimpanzees, labelled the bananas and asked the chimpanzees to answer his questions by picking a banana labelled a, b, c or d ─ in other words, he generated completely random answers ─ he would get correct answers more frequently than from the most educated audiences in Europe. He then set out to explain this strangely inaccurate world view held stubbornly even in the face of evidence by so many people.

Rosling’s conclusion was that we like drama. Stories have fascinated people as far back as history can take us:

It is the overdramatic world-view that draws people to the most dramatic and negative answers to my fact questions. People constantly and intuitively refer to their worldview when thinking, guessing or learning about the world. So if your worldview is wrong then you will systematically make wrong guesses.

(2018: 13)

He sees this as evolutionarily valuable: ‘We are interested in gossip and dramatic stories which used to be the only source of news and useful information’ (2018: 14). Of course, our ancestors would pay attention to an alarm call. Mothers are all still alert for the snake that will catch their babies or the leopard that will grab the weakest. Rosling sets out to show how a desire for the dramatic story can blind all of us to the truth, which may be simple or even boring. If we are hard-wired to listen for the dangerous but exciting news, we will reject that message as untrue only after a struggle. People seeking therapy may have the same blindness to their own truth and we can help ourselves, and each other, by watching for the signs of misinterpreting.

Love of drama and excitement are not the only motivation that leads to baseless conviction. Belonging is also vital to a tribal animal. In order to belong to a circle of believers you must meet the requirement of being absolutely certain that you are right. The group itself will help to reinforce the belief. The knowledge that others share the conviction will help to maintain the belief. In considering this, we can see that certainty arises from a desire to belong to a group and that this causes trouble in many areas of human life.

This might be considered a view of motivation based on social psychology. Psychoanalysis offers much else for consideration when we ask why people cling to beliefs. One area of thought concerns the superego. Most of us very much like to be right and find it humbling to say ‘I was wrong’. The nature and structure of this agency in the mind was examined from different angles in Celia Harding’s wide-ranging collection of papers on the superego (2019). She points out that the child is inclined to overestimate her own strength and ability and unless this is modified in a loving and supportive environment, disillusionment will lead to a harsh and rigid view of the self. Aggression and hate are linked to the defence of the threatened part of the self. We see the effects in much of public life. Quite apart from risking law suits, most politicians hate to say that they are sorry about any past actions. In such a position there can be no satisfactory changing of one’s mind (2019: 80).

Warren Coleman, in the same book, points out the importance of the ego ideal: that view of the self that we all hold and often hide in order to link to the beauty and strength of those we admire (2019: 173). Therapists usually have trouble with their superego and their ego ideal which, as Coleman points out, can lead them into levels of conviction and self-attack that cannot usually be helpful to their patients. Recognition of the action of this part of the mind is vital both for the therapist’s own wellbeing and that of her patients. The problem that then arises is how can any of us be helped to modify the action of the superego so that it is not just looping between a set of fundamentalist beliefs and a sense of failure in not being able to live up to them.

Assessing belief

Being able to think about the past and the future enables the human mind to estimate the value of information and to assess its level of certainty. The scientific method of observation and experiment provides a template for assessing the accuracy of any statement or belief. What we then find is that there is a longing for certainty, which most aspects of life cannot supply. We see the level of psychotic functioning entering the demand for certainty. The wish that this would be true might be enough to convince that it is true. What might be the causes and the effects of this longing will form one of the questions to be investigated in this book. The investigation will then enable consideration of how the wish for certainty can be mitigated in a way that prevents harm from being done to the individual and to those around him.

A case study of damage from conviction

When the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York were destroyed in 2001, we can see that one of the main difficulties for Americans, as expressed by President George W. Bush, was that they had lost the certainty that the United States were invulnerable. From then on, the belief that no-one could attack Americans on their home soil was shattered and the new world that had to be faced demanded that everyone should recognise that they are vulnerable. Bush rushed into action as soon as he could. He wanted to be certain about who the enemy was. The principle of talion law allows revenge to take the same form as the original crime and therefore can involve violence a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Certainty: Who needs it?
• 2. Certainty in everyday life
• 3. Certainty in politics
• 4. Certainty in religion
• 5. Certainty in theory
• 6. Certainty in depression
• 7. Certainty on the autistic spectrum
• 8. Certainty and doubt in balance
• Index