Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry

The Unconscious on the World Scene

William R Meyers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349706983, 9781137524898
• eBook ISBN: 9781137524904
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book explains, with case examples, a variety of social science research methods suitable for studying the unconscious components of irrational social and political actions in world affairs, which can be defined as those that are intensely destructive, self-destructive, or extremely bizarre. The book argues that they are driven in part by feelings and fantasies that are outside of conscious awareness. Meyers explores the role of empathy in clinical understanding, as well as the value of exposing assertions to empirical disconfirmation. With a variety of research methods such as survey research, content analysis, and narrative analysis, and case examples such as studies of 'irreal' statements by authoritarian leaders, fabricated newspaper articles and climate change denial, this book sheds light on how to conduct research on psychodynamic matters in a scientifically valid and credible way.

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Introduction: Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry on the World Scene

Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

The Central Issue

The central issue I address in this book is how to conduct research on psychodynamic matters on the world scene in a scientifically valid and credible way. This is of utmost importance considering the chaotic, irrational, and menacing elements in world affairs currently.

What the Book Does

I present a variety of social science research methods and concepts that can place psychodynamic inquiry into world events on a more scientific basis. I want to further our understanding of the roots of dangerous irrationality, which I believe stems from feelings, beliefs and fantasies that are outside of conscious awareness. I consider “clinically sophisticated” and “psychodynamically oriented” to be synonyms. Five of my own research studies, presented in the book, serve as indications of what can be done by researchers in this area.

Value to the Reader

I hope this book will be useful to clinical and counseling psychologists, both students and practitioners. The methods presented extend the range of what they can do with clinical training, giving them the new tools they need to conduct psychodynamic inquiries on the larger world scene. These tools can also help students and practitioners qualify for a broader range of jobs. I say this as a teacher of methodology, and as a former business and organizational consultant.

I hope this book will also be useful to social scientists and social science students in their methodology coursework and in their professional practice. It shows how to apply the research tools they ordinarily already have (usually survey methods or experimentation), plus a number of additional ones I explain, to more psychodynamic matters on the world scene. That understanding would expand their range of professional opportunities.

I also hope that the lay reader will benefit by getting a better understanding of which research “findings” and assertions about these world events to believe, and which to reject as unsupported by good methodology.

Some Definitions

By “unconscious” I mean “well out of awareness and not easily brought into awareness.” This is a fairly standard usage. “Irrational”, however, means many things to many people. I propose that for our purposes we use only one specific meaning: irrational actions in our usage are behaviors on the world scene that are so highly destructive or self-destructive, or extremely bizarre, that they suggest the presence of motives and fantasies outside of conscious awareness.

Therefore, simple miscalculations, errors in logic or in estimating probabilities, or simple non-optimal decisions in general, would not ordinarily be irrational in my sense of the word. They could instead be the result of inherent cognitive and intellectual limitations, stress, social pressure, lack of general knowledge, or lack of specific required data.

How can we identify actions that do seem to be irrational according to our definition? Chapter 3 suggests some of the types of behavior that researchers could look at.

The Problem We Face: There is Rampant Irrationality

On 21 February 2006, a Sunni dissident group in Iraq bombed the beautiful Golden Dome Mosque, sacred to the Shiites of Iraq (Worth, 2006). This atrocity proved self-defeating: it elicited the retaliatory bombing of 27 Sunni mosques by Shiite groups. Episodes of blindly destructive, self-defeating behavior on the world scene, even in recent years—Bosnia, Kosovo, the Middle East, Darfur, Sudan, Myanmar—suggest to me that among the intense emotional forces involved are some that lay outside of conscious awareness: there is a deep inner irrationality on the political scene.

Even on a smaller scale, there is profound irrationality. On Good Friday, 22 April 2011, in San Fernando, a town north of Manila, 24 Filipinos had themselves crucified to atone for their sins. This ritual occurs there every year on Good Friday, and is now attended by thousands of tourists (MSNBC, 2007; Reuters, 2011).

There is widespread and profound irrationality on the international political scene, and self-destructive outbursts that defy reason in many parts of the world. In Ireland there have been the waves of child rape and torture by clerics; the vicious exploitation of unmarried women in the Magdalene laundries; and the lethal neglect and starvation of children at the Tuam (Catholic) and Bethany (Protestant) orphanages. In Rotherham, England, there was recently uncovered the rape, beatings, and abuse of over 1400 children by Pakistani pedophile gangs over a 16-year period. I will analyze these in more detail below.

In the Middle East, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are crucifying and beheading captives. In Nigeria, Boko Haram has kidnapped and enslaved a large group of schoolgirls. In Paris, editors and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo have been assassinated, and in Hamburg the offices of the Morning Post have been fire-bombed for reprinting the cartoons. In Saudi Arabia, Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1000 lashes for his liberal writings. We are in deep waters here but it is evident that some of the ideation behind these vicious and ruthless acts is outside of conscious awareness, and the formulations of depth psychology are needed as part of the explanation for this violence. For example we need to investigate the likelihood that in these cases the individual’s sense of self has merged with the radical ideology, so that a perceived insult to Mohammed, or to Islam, is experienced as a direct threat to the integrity of the self, felt as an insulting and deeply threatening personal attack—not only by the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, but also by the videos and photos, widely circulated, of the humiliation and torture at Abu Ghraib—attacks that must be avenged with violence. And revenge motives usually contain intensely sadistic elements, which are clearly evident in the systematic murders of helpless people at the Charlie Hebdo offices, and in the public floggings for alleged infractions against Islam (The World Post, 2015). There are likely to be other elements too, for example a sense of exaltation at having been personally chosen to avenge the insult to the prophet Mohammed seems evident in the Charlie Hebdo murders. But all this needs systematic clinically informed psychodynamically oriented investigation.

Kim Jong-un

On 28 December 2011, Kim Jong-un, son of Kim Jong-il, ritualistically dubbed “The Great Successor,” became the ruler of North Korea. No one knows what an untested juvenile will do with absolute power and nuclear arms. Kim Jong-un continues to be a strange and worrisome force. The New York Times reported “a blunt and explicit threat on Thursday from North Korea that its weapons programs would ‘target’ the United States, and that it would proceed with a third and ‘higher-level’ nuclear test…An official statement said, ‘We do not hide that a variety of satellites and long-range rockets which will be launched by the D.P.R.K. one after another and a nuclear test of higher level will target against the U.S., the sworn enemy of the Korean people’” (Sanger and Sang-Hun, 2013). According to press reports citing announcements in the official press of North Korea (Choe, 2013; Fisher, 2013a), Kim Jong-un recently executed his uncle as an enemy of the people.

The Tsarnaev Brothers

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving brother, went on trial on 3 November 2014 for the Boston Marathon bombing. The press reports that teachers and fellow students at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School where he attended declare that he was in all respects a reasonable and sensible teenager who showed no signs of deviance or mental pathology. My own informants in Cambridge who know Tsarnaev’s teachers report that the teachers did experience him in this way.

But we now know that underneath “the mask of sanity” there was a person who made the bombs, carefully ensuring that the inner workings were surrounded by metal fragments, ball bearings, and nails, designed to become shrapnel, and who visualized with satisfaction the pain and destruction these bombs would inflict on his fellow human beings. It seems evident to me that pleasure in inflicting terror and devastation bespeaks unconscious forces that go far beyond rational ideological commitment, a motive for power, or insufficient cognitive complexity, although these may also be factors.

Climate Change Denial

Another example of profound irrationality concerns the nature of the denial of climate change. To counter the overwhelming scientific evidence for climate change caused by human activity, deniers of this change have proposed an extraordinary diversity of wild and mutually contradictory conspiracy theories. According to the popular press, the accused conspirators include climate scientists aiming to get funding, the United Nations seeking to take over the USA, communists and socialists trying to destroy capitalism, Margaret Thatcher and conservative leaders aiming to promote nuclear power, Jacques Chirac and the secret Bilderberg group trying to take over the world, and eugenics groups seeking to depopulate the world. Surely there are paranoid themes in play here, and underlying unconscious fantasies.

Zhirinovsky

The speeches and statements of Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 8, may furnish another example of ideation not fully under conscious control. Zhirinovsky’s threats have been called “absurd,” “histrionic,” and “the work of a buffoon,” but, like Hitler in Mein Kampf, they could imply the workings of powerful unconscious fantasies that may burst into action given the right circumstances.

Self-destructive Behavior by Political and Cultural Figures

The bizarre and self-destructive behavior of political and cultural figures provides many sad examples of political figures being driven by unconscious forces. The repeated sending of lewd photos over the Internet by Congressman Anthony Weiner; the alleged sexual aggression of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund), which ruined his chances of becoming President of France; the patronization of escort services by Eliot Spitzer, which cost him the Governorship of New York, were not rational acts. The memories, motivations, and fantasies prompting these actions must lie outside of conscious awareness. Is there evidence, for example, that unconsciously they wanted to be caught? Or instead is there evidence of unconscious fantasies of invincibility? These are empirical questions. We don’t know until we look, and in this book I suggest how to look.

Tuam, Bethany, Magdalene

Without psychodynamic understanding questions involving motives and ideation outside of conscious awareness cannot be addressed and researched. An example is provided by current revelations about the starvation and lethal neglect of babies at the Tuam (Catholic) and Bethany (Protestant) orphanages in Ireland. This was followed by tossing the dead babies into unmarked graves.

There are also current revelations of the cruel treatment of women, almost captives and slaves, in the secretive Magdalene laundries in Ireland, where an estimated 30,000 unwed mothers, seduced women, homeless women, and prostitutes were consigned to work in miserable conditions, usually for life, and for no wages. In 1993 a mass grave of 155 women was discovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries, triggering a public protest.

We know from clinical experience that the part of the personality that makes moral judgments is largely unconscious and is the most sadistic part of the personality. As a result, there may be evidence for the characterization of the infants as “children of Satan,” and of the unwed mothers in the laundries as “whores.” From a methodological point of view, the researcher would look for discussions and documents using terms like these, or any terms indicating that, at the unconscious level, these babies born out of wedlock, and these unwed mothers, were despised by their captors, who, as nuns, had foregone sexuality and motherhood. Or could unconscious envy of the unwed mothers have affected their treatment? Content analyses seeking relevant words and phases in documents and interviews could shed light on this question. These documents could be internal memos, diaries, formal rules and regulations, subsequent exculpatory statements, and the like. To avoid researcher bias, multiple observers would be needed to rate these documents and carry out the interviews. Computerized content analysis could be used to look for certain terms in the documents and interview records, and to measure their frequency. Comparison studies could be made with documents from facilities where the residents were treated kindly. Burial certificates could be examined. The death rates of the babies could be compared with the death rates of babies in the general population. Any assertions that emerged from the research could be exposed to Popperian disconfirmation based on predictions to as yet unexamined data, as described in Chapter 4. These would be grim studies that will deeply move the researcher, so co-researchers, or colleagues, would be needed to lessen the impact a solo researcher might feel and help compensate for emotionally driven distortions in the study findings.

So in many instances we think we know what kinds of data to look for. But we don’t know until we look. Perhaps the Tuam and Bethany and Magdalene inquiries do not disclose unconscious processes like the ones I have hypothesized. Writings, memos, letters, and conversations could be studied. And perhaps Anthony Weiner, or Eliot Spitzer, or Dominique Strauss-Kahn did not unconsciously want ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry on the World Scene
• 2 Exploring the Empathic Method
• 3 What to Look for in Psychodynamic Inquiry
• 4 Explorations in the Disconfirmation of Psychodynamic Assertions on the World Scene
• 5 Integrating Social Science Concepts and Findings into Psychodynamic Inquiry
• 6 A Panoply of Social Science Methods to Illuminate the Phenomena, Reduce Researcher Bias, and Permit Disconfirmation
• 7 An Adventure in Narrative Analysis: “A Regular Terrible Story”
• 8 A Systematic Study of Irreality
• 9 The Munich Crisis Examined: An Experiment in Collaboration in Data Interpretation
• 10 Methods for Studying Irrationality in Organizations, Institutions, and Social Movements: Overview and a Case Study: Urban Design
• 11 Methods for Studying Irrationality in Organizations, Institutions, and Social Movements: Overview and Two Case Studies: Climate Change Denial and Corporate Acquisitiveness
• Appendix
• References
• Index