Community and Confluence

Undoing the Clinch of Oppression

Philip Lichtenberg

• Publisher: Gestalt Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134895373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Bridging the gap between psychology and politics, Lichtenberg presents a powerful argument for applying the methods and insights of the Gestalt perspective to social and political problems. Focusing on the inner dynamics of power and abuse relationships, this thoughtful treatment of victim/oppressor fusion has stimulated new thinking about abuse, exploitation, and the processes and methods essential to personal and political change.

Chapter 1

A Beginning

 

 

 

 

This is an essay on becoming a subject of the realm in contemporary society. In the same way that the realm is no longer a kingdom in most places in the world today, so becoming a subject is no longer to be conceived as binding oneself to a superior by obliging oneself to pay allegiance, as putting oneself under the dominion of another or in the control of the other. To be a subject, in modern terms, is to be an aware agent, an architect of one's individual life and a conscious maker of social life. To be a subject is to be a citizen, one who impressively lives in his or her time. Becoming a subject of the realm in the most developed sense is becoming a participant in shaping strong democratic practices in all the groups and social systems in which one's life is played out. I shall be discussing what is involved in fostering conditions in which many people can and will become subjects in the contemporary sense.

That I plan to address the notion of becoming a subject of the realm means I have the idea that by and large most of us do not yet function as fully aware and confident citizens, that we are more like the old notion of subject of the realm, ready to hand over our responsibilities and choices to others. While I would not go so far as to describe most of us operating in modern society as serfs or servants, my work as a psychotherapist, a teacher, and a consultant to schools and social service agencies leads me to believe that we are most of us far from aware and effective citizens.

Our readiness to live as diminished individuals derives from a universal conflict: we all want things to stay the same while we also want things to change for the better. If things stay the same, they are at least predictable, and we have learned how to manage from what has gone on before. We generally find it easier to live from memory, to follow established habits or programs, than to create new ways in the here and now, to take our assessments of the present, our current perceptions, and set out to make more of what is presently before us. Yet the universal conflict is alive and well; although we seem to prefer to repeat the past, we find ourselves doing the novel despite ourselves.

Alice Miller¹ has presented the idea that we are not fully aware citizens in another form. She has argued, quite persuasively I believe, that child abuse is the norm of experience in the modern world and that we have all been victims of it. At the center of child rearing has been the enterprise of breaking the will of the child so that he or she will become socialized. Children are commonly viewed as egocentric and willful, and the force of parental teaching, sometimes violent, sometimes merely controlling, is seen as necessary so that children can be tamed and brought into the community of civilized human beings. Politicians are wont to pontificate that we must instill values in children, as if they were not naturally inclined toward cooperative bonding with their parents. This will-breaking activity is purely and simply child abuse when looked at closely and with a clinician's eye. Such tyrannical behavior is accepted by the community because parents, having themselves been victims, have in that very event been prepared to be victimizers and see nothing abnormal in it. Parents, who have loved their own parents and identified with them, have learned how to be dominant as well as submissive in victimizing relationships and, sometimes to their own surprise, find themselves acting like their mothers and fathers did.

Because we were all to some degree abused as children — think back to the discipline in your own life, remember the punishments, the threats, the fear — we have all experienced oppression. Whether we were forcibly toilet trained, kept from playing outside in the evening, punished for being lively in school, forced to do our homework when we didn't want to, ignored when we felt helpless, unexpectedly screamed at by our favorite aunt, or isolated by our parents’ marital problems, we have all been hurt by oppression. As a consequence, we have accustomed ourselves to relationships of unequal power and have become oppressors in some circumstances and oppressed in others. The obedient worker is the dominating parent, the dutiful teacher takes fluff from the administration and passes it along to students in the classroom. The kid in the neighborhood who resentfully submits to very controlling adults is the same youngster who lords it over his peers. Both in growing up and within the institutions where we now work and play, we have learned the lessons of domination and have made our individual accommodations to the facts of oppression.

If this judgment seems unduly harsh, it is because we are numbed to our own pain and seldom acknowledge it. We are protective of our parents who abused us, which itself is a mark of the abused, as I will show in the pages that follow. We want to be loved by our parents, all the more when they have mistreated us, an irony of the human species, so we overlook our anger with them and protect them from our hatred of them as abusers. So too with the institutional leaders we encounter. We do not identify ourselves as oppressed and our leaders as oppressors, because to do so would cause us to become aware of our pain and would also motivate us more clearly to change the systems in which we live, a scary proposition at best. Over the years we have frequently become disappointed with our leaders, as Lloyd deMause² has shown, but we find it difficult to hold on to our awareness of their indifference and cruelty toward us.

I will refer to child abuse often in the following discussion for the simple reason that it is a marvelous exemplar of the general problem of oppression. There is clear disparity of power between adult abuser and child abused, the psychological processes of both victim and victimizer parallel what is seen in general social oppression, and much of child abuse, as much of oppression at large, has a sexual component to it. The dynamics of the abused and the abuser will be key to the argument of this essay.

If the bad news is that we have all been victimized and have adapted to that experience and made believe that it is the normal human condition, the good news is that the great majority of us live our daily lives in a relatively adequate manner. Many of us may be drug-addicted, others depressed, others bewildered, and some may be lying and cheating in many domains of their lives, yet we carry on as best we can and we appear to do all right while carrying on. It is the rare mother who murders her young child, though if we allow ourselves, we can remember our temptations to do comparable deeds. We are friendly with our neighbors most of the time, and we work in a rather adjusted fashion. Victims we are, and we are also more than that, also somewhat healthy in our social and emotional activities, also attuned closely to reality and successful in mastering the tasks of ordinary life.

But it is important to attend to the bad as well as the good news because the processes of transformation of individuals and society rely upon awareness of both the unhealthy and the healthy ways of functioning as individuals, and similarly, upon recognition of social practices that promote deadly as well as enlivening group experiences. To bring about the transformations I am referring to involves undoing negative personal and social habits and routines sometimes and simply fostering or enabling positive ones at other times.

I have come to believe that too often persons and social move-ments intending to change the existing systems have acted as if individuals were already subjects of the realm in the modern sense, as if they functioned only maturely, as if a call to reason or a presentation of reasonable argument could mobilize citizens in the service of overturning a social order built mostly on forms of domination. In the past, agents of social change have acted as if a system of exploitation were merely clothing on the body politic such that our psyches were unaffected, as if domination had not distorted our personalities, as if we could shed at a moment's notice the outer garments, or personas, we have adopted to fend off the worst aspects of the oppression we have known. Such persons and movements have not spoken to us as whole individuals, as being both healthy and unhealthy, committed to being exploited as well as opposed to it, but only to those parts of us that were reasonable and rational. And that approach has nut been enough.

I am mindful of Andras Angyal's³ “theory of universal ambiguity” here. Angyal, a holistically oriented psychiatrist, noted, as did Alice Miller, that every child has experienced both healthy and traumatic environmental conditions, and that as a consequence, every child's personality forms two distinct patterns. One of these patterns, obviously derived from the child's traumatic experiences, is founded on isolation, with accompanying feelings of helplessness, unlovableness, and doubt. The other pattern comes with a confidence that one's basic strivings are likely to be realized directly and fruitfully. Accordingly, says Angyal, we all live in two worlds, the world with the unhealthy principle as guiding factor, and the world with the healthy principle in command of our being. These general ways of being, which he calls the Gestalt of health and the Gestalt of neurosis, control our experience, and we shift back and forth from one to the other principle as most in command of our lives at any given time. The aim of psychotherapy, as of social change, is to enhance the degree to which the healthy Gestalt is in the driver's seat.

Angyal has asserted further that the dual organization of human life which he articulates promotes ambiguity: every item of human behavior and experience has two meanings, one set by the feeling of isolation and the other by the overarching feeling of confidence. The sense of dependence, for example, which is major among oppressed peoples, can become intolerable in the context of the neurotic Gestalt of helplessness; it can be a feared feeling, as in the neediness of the person feeling alone and unsupported, or in the profoundly experienced dread of weakness. But the sense of dependence can also arise in a healthy framework and be a positive force in community formation, a welcomed feeling, as in reliance upon a trusted friend or a judicious leader. The meaning of dependence is a function of whichever of the two Gestalts guides the individual at the time.

Agents of social change who have attended only to the healthy functioning of individuals — who, for example, have assumed only the rationality of all potential partners — have denied the full experience of those of us they have hoped to mobilize, and sooner or later, one way or another, they have forfeited the allegiance they have worked so hard to create. We human beings need to be seen as we are, accepted in our best behavior but also in our worst, supported in our complexity, recognized in our ambiguity, encouraged in our efforts to become complete. Unsuccessful social reformers and revolutionaries are typically purists. While those who move more satisfactorily toward achieving their goals demonstrate the patience necessary for dealing with the unhealthy parts of human functioning in an oppressive world. For us to become contemporary subjects of the realm, we need both support in our limitations and challenge of our strengths.

In this essay, which centers upon psychological insights relevant to processes of social change, I describe both the unhealthy and the healthy psychological phenomena. The early descriptions of the workings of the psyche look closely at the negative side, the installation of those personal styles and practices that are associated with the establishment and maintenance of oppressive social relations. These unhealthy psychological factors described in the early chapters of the essay are best seen as emergency safeguards, appropriate to the scene in which they were initiated but maintained beyond that situation, institutionalized, and ultimately limiting rather than protective devices for the individual. Recovery from these structuralized emergency measures leads back to the spontaneity of behavior characteristic of well-functioning persons. In subsequent chapters I look at the personal practices that are more healthy. Wherever I attend to a negative factor, I have committed myself to rendering what the healthy version is likely to be.

This essay is predicated upon the belief that psychological issues and concerns are important to the process of social change. This is hardly a new idea. The names of Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, Alfred Adler, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Harold Lasswell, Kenneth Burke, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, and Frantz Fanon come readily to mind as persons who have directed attention to the psychological in social struggle, and such entities as the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the International Society of Political Psychology, and the Association for Psy chohistory, Inc., exist with this perspective in the forefront of their purposes. Acknowledging this heritage, I want also to indicate the niche this present essay fits in, as follows:

As consciousness is to action, so the psychological is to social and political activity. Human beings are primarily actors, and consciousness is a secondary, guiding function in the service of making actions more satisfying and more effective. “I do” is prior to “I think,” as John Macmurray⁴ has told us so well, and thinking is oriented toward regulating the doing of which it is a part. Psychological insights are most useful to social and political movements, therefore, when seen as accompaniments to effort, as supportive measures, sometimes to the fore but more often also present and available for use. Too much attention to the psychological detracts from the thrust of social or political action, while too little leaves out the vital subjective side of creating subjects of the realm who are capable of social struggle.

Central here is the following insight from psychotherapy. Its truth is well known in self-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, and is demonstrated over and over again in psychotherapy, especially therapy with a holistic perspective. We cannot in fact make other people change. Agents of social transformation who try too hard to change the people they work with or those they hope to mobilize invariably alienate them. Trying to change others brings resistance. Alternatively, agents of change can try to foster the awarenesses that enable others to choose to change themselves. In their social-change efforts as elsewhere, persons need to take responsibility for themselves in relations with others, and need respectfully to allow others to be responsible for themselves, even when they wish to avoid it and to place themselves in the hands of leaders, authorities, experts, or anyone else who will take them on. Agents of change can join with others, share themselves, and offer to others insights that may be helpful to them as they go about making their lives, but the agents of change must also recognize that it is the others who make their own lives and who choose how they will do that. As I hope to show, this willingness not to insist that others change is especially relevant in the context of oppres sion, because basic adaptations to relations of dominance, on the side of the oppressor as well as the oppressed, are active avoid-ances of responsibility. In any application of the ideas in this essay, accordingly, my emphasis is upon increasing awareness and then letting go, permitting the other to become aware of what was unawares and use it as he or she sees fit. I know that this noncontrol-ling form of relationship is hard to implement when one is engaged in tense and difficult struggle, but this is the only way to proceed that stands a chance of working in the long run.

Keeping to the position that one cannot take responsibility for the choices others make is especially exacting in relations of dominance because those who are on the oppressed side of the relationship seem to plead for others to assume responsibility, while those on the dominating side try to appear responsible without standing fully behind that decisive appearance. In relations of dominance, I will argue, we come upon the fusion of part-persons, whereas in democratically grounded interactions we find cooperation between autonomous individuals. There is a great difference between these types of interdependences. The very nature of the psychology of oppressive relationships limits the ways in which agents of change can operate, and this reality makes contributions from the psy-chotherapeutic world necessary to the world of social and political change. In this work I have taken from the clinical arena ideas that connect with social activity. I start with ideas on the very commonly recognized phenomenon identification with the aggressor, a pattern of functioning found in children who have been abused and in oppressed people generally. After discussing its development and laying out what I consider to be the other processes for the installation and maintenance of relations of dominance, I turn to some general characteristics of such relations. I then direct attention to ideas established in psychotherapeutic work that may stimulate the undoing of these intrinsically harmful and unhealthful patterns of functioning.

First, then, is identification with the aggressor.

Chapter 2

Identification with the Aggressor:
A Clinical Formulation

The psychoanalytic concept of identification with the aggressor describes a predictable response to extreme stress in interpersonal relationships, a response well known to clinicians and somewhat known to sophisticated lay intellectuals, but strange and cause for wonder to most citizens and social activists. The idea as presented below was formulated first by Sandor Ferenczi, a major figure in the early years of psychoanalysis, indeed one of Freud's earliest and closest collaborators. His conception appeared in print in the early 1930s, the same period that saw the rise of Hitler and Nazism. While Ferenczi developed the concept in respect to children who were sexually abused by adults, later observers, having the experiences of concentration camps available to them and knowing how common identification with an aggressor could be in the world at large, have applied the c...