Introduction
It’s a struggle and it’s been a struggle to write out a post which talks about how to apply the insights of relational analysts and Paul Wachtel in particular to interactions outside of therapy.
First let me say what I think the purpose of all this is. In an interview in 1970, Noam Chomsky and journalist Peter Jay had the following exchange about what it takes to create a libertarian socialist revolution (https://chomsky.info/19760725/):
"Jay: How far does the success of libertarian socialism or anarchism as a way of life really depend on a fundamental change in the nature of man, both in his motivation, his altruism, and also in his knowledge and sophistication?
Chomsky: “I think it not only depends on it, but in fact the whole purpose of libertarian socialism is that it will contribute to it. It will contribute to a spiritual transformation. Precisely that kind of great transformation in the way humans conceive of themselves—in their ability to act, to decide, to create, to produce, to inquire—precisely that spiritual transformation that social thinkers from the left-marxist tradition, from [Rosa] Luxembourg, say, on over through anarcho-syndicalists have always emphasized. So on the one hand it requires that spiritual transformation; on the other hand, it’s purpose is to create institutions which will contribute to that transformation.”
Achieving that spiritual transformation is what I’m trying to take a step towards by writing about democratizing psychotherapy on this Substack.
A few parts of Chomsky’s statement stand out to me: he talks about human beings changing the way they conceive of themselves; the way they conceive of themselves is intimately related to what they decide to do and their ability to do it; and all of this is further related to the creation of institutions which will contribute to this change. Whaat those institutions should look like I’m not entirely sure, but I do believe they should allow people to relate to one another freely without intimidation or coercion. That almost surely means they should not divide people into social classes.
Paul Wachtel’s work, which I’d like to democratize, helps people more confidently, compassionately, and energetically relate to one another. I think this is not necessarily an end in itself, though. My suspicion is that democratizing Wachtel’s work, if it happens, will not only serve the purpose of creating better social relations but also of cure people of their insecurities so that they can better do the things Chomsky mentions in the quote above—act, decide, create, produce, and inquire. Insecurities stand in the way of people being able to do those things consistently and conscientiously. In this regard, I think one way to use the information from Wachtel’s is to help each other through not just the insecurities which affect us in friendships and romantic relationships but also the insecurities which are created in us by oppressive institutions. Unlike therapists, we can use this information to help each other address these insecurities because we’re in the same class as each other. Therapists, being in an upper class, don’t have that opportunity.
I don’t think Wachtel’s work is revolutionary like a scientific discovery is. Much of what Wachtel explores and articulates are insights which we already intuitively know. The problem is that these insights are rarely if ever written down in a systematic way. This has led to us applying them haphazardly (if at all) and applying them alongside political action and rhetoric which have been quite destructive. My hope is that these insights can be at the forefront of our minds and therefore lead us to make more consistent and quicker progress in achieving our goal of creating a more just social order. [That's what I'm doing (I think) by prodding the MMT humanities people and the Superstructure trio. They're in my opinion searching around and trying to articulate what Wachtel spells out very clearly already--but in the context of psychotherapy instead of the context of political action.]
How to democratize Wachtel’s work has presented a bit of a quandry. Wachtel often divides his work between theory and practice, and it’s not clear to me at least if that’s necessary and if the division would remain if the information applied by free people outside of the therapy room. For now this division seems sensible and remains, so I’m going to continue employing it in this paper. [For what it’s worth, the distinction between theory and practice mirrors the, in my opinion, false distinction between researcher and clinician which has been part of psychotherapy since Freud began over 100 years ago (see Wachtel, Relational Theory and the Practice of Psychotherapy (RTPP), pp. 32-34).]
This post is not going to be (I don’t think) what a final project which democratizes Wachtel’s work should look like. I simply don’t have the mental energy or resources at the moment to do the long, expansive work which would create a fun, vibrant, readable version of Wachtel’s ideas for everyone. Trimming Wachtel’s sometimes lengthy explanations so that they’re both more accessible and lose none of their meanings is no small challenge. In light of that, what I’m doing in this post is presenting the ideas from Wachtel which I think are most relevant to social movements; I’m leaving it up to an enterprising leader in the future to take what I’ve started and present it to a wider audience in a way which will be both approachable and gripping.
What psychological mechanisms were at play and how did Friedan exploit them in such a way that
A fair amount of what relational psychoanalysts, including Paul Wachtel, write is irrelevant to social movements because it consists of ideas and insights generated from the corrupted therapeutic context. What I’ll try to do here is separate the wheat from the chaff by quoting passages from their work and writing comments underneath which show how I think the information in them pertain to the better world we want to build. This post is necessarily not comprehensive and only suggestive. I’m sure other people who read Wachtel’s work will find valuable things I’ve left out. I recommend that those wishing to explore Wachtel’s work read these books in particular:
1. Relational Theory and the Practice of Psychotherapy—Ch. 1, 6, 8, 9, 10, and 12
2. Cyclical Psychodynamics—Ch. 2, 3, 4, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16) the later chapters (12-16) are about race and class
3. Therapeutic Communication—Ch. 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14; chapters 4, 5, and 6 though might be a repeat of information you read elsewhere
Wachtel's also written two books on social issues which are informed by his psychological approach (these probably have a lot of good framings for activists to use in conversations):
4. The Poverty of Affluence, which is on economic inequality and valuing things besides material gain
5. Race in the Mind of America, which is about the oppressive relationship between Black people and white people
Curing our insecurities to have a spiritual revolution
A couple quotes in particular make me think that a large part of the spiritual revolution leftist thinkers have referred to has to do, at least in part, with curing insecurities. In RTPP, Wachtel writes that “the heart of psychological disorder . . . is self-mistrust, the fearful sense that our innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires are dangerous and bad” (p. 179). Surely who have their solvable psychological disorders solved—as opposed to managed—are transformed. I think many people enter talk therapy hoping to undergo just such a transformation.
Wachtel’s view of what causes psychological disorder derives from Frued’s 1926 book Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety which launched a major revolution in psychoanalytic thought. Wachtel writes:
"Prior to 1926, Freud had viewed anxiety primarily as a discharge phenomenon. It was a consequence of repression and of the damming up of libidinal tension that repression brought about. In this regard, anxiety was understood not dissimilarly from neurotic symptoms . . . with the exception that the discharge occurring by way of anxiety was an essentially automatic, almost physical result rather than, as with symptoms, a meaningful and symbolic psychological event. . . . In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety , however, Freud reversed his understanding of the relation between anxiety and repression. Explicitly revising his earlier view, he stated that anxiety was not the result of repression as he had previously believed but rather the cause; it was to avoid the anxiety that would otherwise ensue that the individual repressed the forbidden impulse,” (p. 211-212).
This view of anxiety (or self-mistrust) being at the heart of people’s troubles is, I think, correct, and a big reason people don’t confront the oppression they endure is because they don’t trust themselves. To full explicate Freud’s new understanding of human beings, Wachtel writes:
”In reviewing this change a few years later in his New Introductory Lectures, Freud (1933) stated further that ‘the surprising result [of our further studies] was the opposite of what we expected. It was not the repression that created the anxiety; the anxiety was there earlier; it was the anxiety that made the repression.’ Perhaps the most important implication of this revised conceptualization was that (without this being clearly noticed in the psychoanalytic community, or even by Freud himself) it significantly modified the role of repression itself. In this new formulation, repression moved from being the absolutely central fulcrum of the psychoanalytic understanding of neurosis and of personality development to becoming a consequent phenomenon that depended on something else more fundamental—namely, anxiety,” (p. 213; italics added by Wachtel).
Wachtel notably makes the case that there is no real difference, except for the name, between the concepts of anxiety and fear (RTPP, p. 216, section titled “Should we distinguish between anxiety and fear?”). To cement Wachtel’s (and Freud’s) point about anxiety, let me add one more passage by Wachtel:
"Freud had earlier described repression as the very cornerstone of psychoanalysis. And, from that vantage point, it was clear that undoing repression, enabling the patient to become conscious of what had been repressed, was the cornerstone of the therapeutic method that derived from it. But if anxiety lies behind or underneath repression; if, as Freud put it, anxiety makes repression, then repression no longer lies at the very foundation. The cornerstone has been shifted. Repression remains important, to be sure, but anxiety becomes the new cornerstone,” (p. 213).
As I wrote above, anxiety seems to me to be the root of why people don’t confront the oppressive forces in their lives too. And therefore the same ideas which (theoretically) help people in therapy should help people in political life as well. As I’ll explain later, what people are often most afraid of is being angry, and if we can help people feel comfortable being angry, we can likely create incredible social change.
In a subsequent section titled “How is Anxiety Overcome?”, Wachtel writes that:
"it is evident that a key element in overcoming anxiety—perhaps the key element—is exposure. When the individual suffering from a phobia is repeatedly exposed to the source of his fear without the anticipated negative consequences, this experiential demonstration of the safety of encountering what was previously fearfully avoided is likely to be more powerful than any merely verbal or cognitive effort to persuade the person that there is no danger or than any effort to ‘interpret’ the meaning of the fear,” (p. 217).
The parallels between this and political praxis are, in my opinion, profound. Marxists and many others have often focused, to their detriment I believe, on intellectual theories of how human beings could or should relate to one another instead of experimenting to see what feels right. Experimenting is important because it leads people to be exposed to new experience.
A number of prominent leftists have noted that there has so far, though, been little or no convincing theory or program for how to create a leftist society in an industrialized, developed world. Mark Fisher spells out this despair in his aptly-named book, Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?. The first words of the book are: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” (p. 8). He goes on to say:
"[there is a] widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. . . . In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist. . . . public space is abandoned . . . Neoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space but there is no withering away of the state in Children of Men, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions. The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past . . . Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate,” (pp. 9-10).
Fisher’s vision and sense of hopelessness is exactly what I’m trying to combat not only because it’s defeatist but because I think it’s not based in reality. We are and always have been the masters of our own destiny. I think becoming familiar with many of the ideas psychotherapists have so finely articulated will help us understand that. Popularizing them will help us move forward.
Noam Chomsky’s own comments on this are probably helpful. During a debate in 1970 between himself and Michel Foucault, Chomsky spoke at length on the connection between human nature and creating a new world:
"I think that in the intellectual domain of political action, that is the domain of trying to construct a vision of a just and free society on the basis of some notion of human nature, we face the very same problem that we face in immediate political action, namely, that of being impelled to do something, because the problems are so great, and yet knowing that whatever we do is on the basis of a very partial understanding of the social realities, and the human realities in this case.
For example, to be quite concrete, a lot of my own activity really has to do with the Vietnam War, and some of my own energy goes into civil disobedience. Well, civil disobedience in the U.S. is an action undertaken in the face of considerable uncertainties about its effects. For example, it threatens the social order in ways which might, one might argue, bring about fascism; and that would be a very bad thing for America, for Vietnam, for Holland and for everyone else. You know, if a great Leviathan like the United States were really to become fascist, a lot of problems would result; so that is one danger in undertaking this concrete act.
On the other hand there is a great danger in not undertaking it, namely, if you don’t undertake it, the society of Indo-China will be torn to shreds by American power. In the face of these uncertainties one has to choose a course of action.
Well, similarly in the intellectual domain, one is faced with the uncertainties that you correctly pose. Our concept of human nature is certainly limited; it’s partially socially conditioned, constrained by our own character defects and the limitations of the intellectual culture in which we exist. Yet at the same time it is of critical importance that we know what impossible goals we’re trying to achieve, if we hope to achieve some of the possible goals. And that means that we have to be bold enough to speculate and create social theories on the basis of partial knowledge, while remaining very open to the strong possibility, and in fact overwhelming probability, that at least in some respects we’re very far off the mark,” (https://chomsky.info/1971xxxx/).
Elsewhere, though, Chomsky shows that he has not come up with much of a theory. When he’s given talks to audiences, and they ask him what to do, he usually just says what he said in a 2016 interview with C.J. Polychroniou:
"JP: In your view, what would constitute a decent society and what form of a world order would be needed to eliminate completely questions about who rules the world?
NC: We can construct visions of “perpetual peace,” carrying forward the Kantian project, and of a society of free and creative individuals not subjected to hierarchy, domination, arbitrary rule and decision. In my own view — respected friends and comrades in struggle disagree — we do not know enough to spell out details with much confidence, and can anticipate that considerable experimentation will be necessary along the way,” (https://chomsky.info/constructing-visions-of-perpetual-peace/).
That answer hardly gives any guidance understandably frustrates and upsets people. It’s also, I believe, often led them to despair—the common reaction in fact by audience members at talks by Noam Chomsky.
MMT, though, provides a welcome and necessary corrective to the formless revolution Chomsky and others have been advocating. As Max Siejo says in the first episode of the MMT-inspired podcast Superstructure, “We demand a space for all people, for all life to flourish . . . as a matter not just of a sort of intellectual fancy, or ‘we would like it to be this way’ but as a matter of the technical facts [and] operations themselves,” (@ 53:42). I suspect this fact is why there is so much energy around the MMT movement and why unlike other left groups and movements it doesn’t, to so many people, feel like a lost cause.
We do need exposure to new experiences, and that will be an important part of any worthwhile leftist revolution. In my opinion, though, it is too formless and not enough to get people to act. In order to buy in to a revolution, people need a theory of how society can be transformed, and MMT has developed much of that theory—giving us a skeleton which our personal thoughts, feelings, and desires can put flesh on.
[Interested readers might be interested to know that the topic of Chomsky and Foucault’s debate was: “Is there such a thing as 'innate’ human nature independent of our experiences and external influences?” In a passage that may be relevant to this question, Wachtel writes in RTPP that in terms of whether or not there are enduring psychological structures which make up people’s personalities, “I comfortably assume that there is a ‘there’ there—that however constrained our perceptions may be by our personal biases or by our relation to what is being observed (whether in the realm of perceiving the physical world or the psychological), there is something there to perceive,” (p. 39). I urge curious readers to become acquainted with Wachtel’s work in order to understand this important answer better.]
Understanding people to in a way which gets them to act
Much of Wachtel’s work focuses on giving clients permission to accept repressed thoughts, feelings, and desires in the belief that doing so will lead people to trust themselves and take action to change their lives for the better. In TC, Wachtel writes that people experience comments from others as either permissions or rebukes. [Develop this further: Wachtel focuses mostly on giving clients permission because he’s acting as a therapist. In the context of a social movement, activists and revolutionaries will want to be just as familiar with how to rebuke other people constructively as with how to give them permission. Outside of the therapy room, in the real world where the fullness of life can come in, there is no reason to privilege permissions over rebukes.]
Nonetheless, many people want to create a better world and activists on the left can help those people take action to create that world by making comments which give them permission to do so. It’s probably helpful to first give some theoretical understanding. Wachtel has several ways of understanding people will allow them the space and freedom to act on their best values and impulses. Most importantly is this paragraph from RTPP:
"In my own work, I do a lot of probing, and I do assume, quite regularly, that what the patient is saying is unlikely to tell the whole story. But my aim in this is to expand the story, to help the patient to see that there is more to him than he has assumed, that there are further potentials not yet realized, further feelings not yet given their fair due. It is not to show him that his perceptions of himself are “illusory” or that what he shows the world is a “false self.” The assumption that the patient’s perceptions are illusory, that he is hiding something, that his consciousness is a false consciousness—rather than an incomplete or partial consciousness—can create a mindset for the therapist and an experience for the patient that is invalidating, that dismisses the patient’s experience rather than expanding upon it. It implies that he wants something else instead of (rather than in addition to) what he thinks he wants, and thus that his understanding of himself is wrong rather than incomplete,” (p. 193; emphasis in original).
The first thing that jumps out at me about this is how Wachtel dismisses a prominent phrase used by Marxists—"false consciousness”. It’s more productive and accurate, Wachtel says, to assume that people who don’t see what you’re seeing have “an incomplete or partial consciousness”. In RTPP and TC, Wachtel makes a number of recommendations for how to frame and convey what other people already seem to see back to them so that it’ll give them permission to accept it and act. That is the value of both the passage above and Wachtel’s work in general.
There’s also a physical element to giving people permission [or rebuking?] them. When we give feedback, some might contend that our phrasing doesn’t pack the same punch as it used to. I would argue with that, that first, those of us who are interested in social change don’t want phrasing which packs a punch, if “packs a punch” means saying things which create tension in people’s bodies. We want to use phrasing which bypasses people’s defensiveness or, more accurately, gives them permission to accept our ideas.
Crucially, these ideas relate to understanding other people and the contexts they live in. It is not a recipe for choosing for what to think or do. What to do is everyone’s choice alone. It’s also not possible to make someone’s mind up for them. What leftist can do, though, is give people permission to do what they already want to do but are too scared to. If our interests really are shared by most of the population—even 99% as the Occupy Movement claims—it should be possible to use these tactics to foster a revolution. [I explain some of this in the other essay “Media Castigation of Bernie Sanders and the work of Paul Wachtel”.]
A caveat is that in any conversation, it’s of course possible for a potential convert to the activist trying to convert them. No one should be too sure that they see everything or have The Truth.
A couple other general principles seem right to me when thinking about working with others to build a new social order. Wachtel quotes Phillip Bromberg’s statement emphasizing the importance of therapists “allowing [themselves] to become immersed in the here-and-now intersubjective field as it exists at that moment.” I think that is exactly the right approach for activists to take when working with each other and especially when working with people they’re trying to bring in to the movement.
One other general principle of working with people is the importance of being vivid to them. In a passage in which Wachtel quotes Nancy McWilliams’ 2004 book Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Wachtel, at first quoting McWilliams on the topic of therapist neutrality, writes:
“‘If one tries to be virtually invisible, the result will be either to behave so stiffly that the patient’s comfort will suffer, or to lie to ourselves about what is possible, or both…. It may help to remind oneself that what we know empirically about therapeutic effectiveness is that outcome is much more highly correlated with an attachment to a vivid individual person than with the application of any specific techniques” (p. 182). (The word vivid here is especially noteworthy.)” (RTPP, p. 184; italics in original).
Building a new social order isn’t a quick process but it becomes quicker when people are able to attach to a vivid individual. Think in this regard to how much energy has been created by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even though many other people have advocated similar policies over the years. Vivid, remember, can mean “producing powerful feelings or strong, clear images in the mind.” That is exactly what Ocasio-Cortez did when as a Congresswoman-elect she protested Nancy Pelosi in Pelosi’s own office to demand that Pelosi support a heretofore unknown policy—the Green New Deal.
Two years later we haven’t passed the Green New Deal but two years ago it wasn’t even something people could conceive of. That’s incredible if insufficient progress. Getting that idea in people’s minds required a vivid incoming Congresswoman take a risk which according to an interview on 60 Minutes was so scary that it nauseated her:
”Oh my goodness, I could have thrown up that morning. I was so nervous. But— I kept kind of just coming back to the idea that what they're fighting for wasn't wrong,” (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-the-rookie-congresswoman-challenging-the-democratic-establishment-60-minutes-interview-full-transcript-2019-01-06/).
In both the individual conversations and strategizing which happen daily, achieving the big things we want to achieve will require us to say and do things which make us vivid. It’s true in moments which are big because they’re the culmination of a lot of work and they punctuate the national news. But it’s true that to succeed we need to be vivid in our daily interactions as well. Let’s keep that foremost in our minds.
The truth
The point of Wachtel’s work in Therapeutic Communication is to help give us tools to address things we find uncomfortable so that we can address them. It is not full of ways to artificially build people up.
”Substituting different terminology for the pathocentric terms so pervasive in clinical theory and discourse is not a mere translation, simply another way of saying ‘the same thing.’ Nor is it a euphemistic cleaning up of messy truths. Different ways of saying things yield different ways of seeing things. The way our brains are wired, every word or image or concept, represented by a pattern of neuronal firings, has a somewhat different set of links to other neuronal networks, tripping off a different set of further associations, actions, and affects, which in turn set off still further associational networks. Subtle differences can thus, at times, lead to large effects. By framing things differently we actually make things different,” (RTPP, p. 299).
I think this is true for political discourse as well. While using pathocentric terms may be very appropriate to describe those in the ruling class and people dedicated to oppressing us, I think their use is quite inappropriate when trying to recruit people to be part of our movements.
Notes on anger
In RTPP, Wachtel shares a number of important insights about the way handle anger and how that effects them. I think these insights can easily and productively be applied to social movements. In this section I’ll quote a few of these comments and then show how I think they apply to the revolution we want to create.
”Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture,” (Thomas Merton, Seven Storey Mountain, p. 117).
The importance of implicit relational knowing
Implicit relational knowing is exactly what can rarely be conveyed in therapy, and it is the reason therapy is a failure.
The way to overcome anxiety, Wachtel notes, is through exposure to new experiences.
As Wachtel states in Therapeutic Communication (TC), the purpose of his work is not to build people up in a way that avoids the truth but to give people tools to productively address things which they’re otherwise too conflicted to address.
Intentionality, Irony, and Self-Blame
Perhaps the most important part of Paul Wachtel’s writings is the important he places on irony and unintended consequences which, on a personal note, has liberated me to not blame myself for making so many of the relational mistakes I’ve made. The following is a very long extended quote; I’m quoting the whole thing because I’m don’t know how to condense it without diminishing his point:
"The ends we regularly bring about are not necessarily the ends we seek. A common feature of the life patterns that bring people to a psychotherapist is irony. Sometimes, to be sure, the repetitive nature of the pattern does reflect a direct intention, even if an unconscious one; the person may not be aware of what he is seeking, may not be aware of the hidden intentionality, but it is difficult to make sense of the patterns that may be observed clinically without assuming that precisely such an intention is operating beneath the surface. But viewed through the lens of cyclical psychodynamic theory, a different configuration often becomes evident, one in which unconscious thoughts, meanings, and intentions are no less a matter of concern, but in which irony rather than straightforward intention takes center stage.
As is almost always the case, the ironic consequences in the case just discussed were intermixed with consequences that were indeed intended, even if not conscious. Although Richard craved intimacy he also feared it, and a good part of the pattern of his life seemed to reflect unconscious efforts to ensure that the danger that intimacy represented would be averted. In that sense, the absence of intimacy in his life, though genuinely painful, was also unconsciously sought by him in the pursuit of safety. At the same time, though, many of the ways that Richard attempted to prevent rejection and the accompanying feelings of inadequacy and undesirability ended up making more likely. In that sense, ironic (and unintended) consequences were also central to his dynamics.
In many other cases, the role of irony is even more evident and more central. In these cases, the primary consequences of the problematic patterns in the patient’s life are not really intended, even unconsciously. They are ironic consequences, the result of efforts to prevent the very thing that ends up happening. Consider, for example, the case of a patient I will call Edward. Edward was plagued by a painful feeling of insubstantiality, a sense of being ‘a straw in the wind.’ Here again, as in most cases, the factors that contributed to this troubling experience of himself included a complex web of conscious and unconscious representations and of repeated experiences that began fairly early in childhood. But in order to understand how this troublingly fragile sense of self was perpetuated over time. it is necessary to understand how Edward responded to this disturbing feeling and what the consequences for him were.
Whatever the origins of this experience of insubstantiality, much of what the experience reflected and symbolized—and what contributed to perpetuating it—was Edward’s inclination, over and over, to accommodate or accede to others, to fit in in a way that led him to lose touch with his own views and desires and his own vital center. Whether it be what restaurant to go to, what movie to see, what political opinion to express, or, more profoundly and significantly, what emotions to experience and express, Edward found himself under the sway of other people’s wishes and feelings. This would usually begin as an almost automatic response, not initially noticed or experienced by Edward as ignoring his own inclination. But usually, before very long, Edward would begin to sense that something felt vaguely uncomfortable, not quite right. This experience was often associated with a feeling of ‘hollowness’ that would emerge for him in a conversation in which he realized he had been feigning enthusiasm. Whether this was about the food, the movie, the direction of the conversation, what have you, there would be a discernable subjective experience of falseness and lack of vitality, the result of his taking on others’ views, and so having little to support what he was saying from within his own vital experience.
Some of the origins of this kind of self-experience have been insightfully discussed by Winnicott in his classic discussions of the ‘false self.’ But understanding the perpetuation of the experience for Edward requires attention to the ironic processes whereby the very efforts he makes to deal with this distressing experience end up recreating it over and over again. Once established, the sense of weakness and emptiness that plagued Edward made it difficult for him to feel safe or justified in asserting his own views. Not feeling whole or ‘real,’ not feeling an inner sense of integrity, he felt little sense that he even knew or could count on what his own views were. Thus, feeling lost and without grounding, he looked to others for direction as to what he should do or even feel. Moreover, as a consequence of feeling like a straw in the wind, maintaining his own boundaries was a task for which he did not feel he had the requisite strength. Thus, feeling unable to reach or to value or trust his own views or preferences, he would once more conform to the preferences and expectations of others, and, as a consequence, once more feel like a straw in the wind, once more feel he lacked an internal compass. Not very much of this process was articulated or conscious for Edward at the time he began therapy, and what was was limited to fragments that provided little if any illumination of the sequence of events and experiences or its repetitive nature. Nonetheless, Edward repeated the pattern in one form or another over and over. Feeling weak and uncertain of his own real desires and perceptions, he would look to others for direction; looking constantly to others, he would feel ungenuine and insubstantial, ‘like a straw in the wind’; feeling like an insubstantial straw in the wind, he felt compelled to look to others for direction. The circle turned again and again, with each turn justifying the next,” (pp. 130-132).
I think if a vocal minority of people in our country understood this, it would create ripple effects which would make the world substantially more humane.
And as Wachtel notes, these same ironic tendencies happen not just with individuals, but with classes of people. Wachtel’s book about race relations—Race in the Mind of America—is largely about how such a dynamic happens between many Black people and white people.
The value of attributional comments
Chapter
”You’re a revolutionary”
Asking questions
Playing “gotcha”
I’m not quite sure how to apply the following idea to politics, but I think it’s important for us to understand, and it’s important for us to understand at least for our personal lives if it doesn’t apply well to political life.
In Inside the Session, Wachtel includes transcripts of his sessions with some of his clients. In one session, with a woman named Louise, we find out that Louise is married to Ken, and Louise's father died five months ago. Ken's side of the family either waited a long time to express their condolences to Louise or they didn't express condolences at all. Louise is upset about this, and at one point Ken's mom—who didn’t express condolences—requested that Louise reach out to her. And Louise did but reached Ken's mom's voicemail. A week later, Ken's mom still hadn't called back. You can imagine how upset this made Louise. Well, Ken was upset too, and he called his mom and berated her. This made Louise even more upset.
At this point in the story, Wachtel comments in a footnote that:
"One might easily see a contradiction between, on the one hand, Louise's understandable anger and bewilderment at being told the family wanted her to reach out to them and then receiving no response to her phone call for a week and, on the other hand, her upset with Ken for what seems like coming to her defense around just this issue. It is important to find the right way to address this issue because one of the biggest mistakes therapists make, I believe, is to point out "contradictions" to patients, to try to show them how they are being illogical, inconsistent, defensive, what you have you. This may be very effective in an argument or in a game of "gotcha," but it is positively harmful in the context of therapy,” (p. 82).
This is an intricate topic, but I think that comment has a lot of consequences for those of us on the left and our ability to craft meta-messages. The left pointing out inconsistencies in right-wingers likely does nothing for us. My guess is we spin our wheels every time we do that.
Noticing and pointing out variation
Helping the young man at the hospital by pointing out that he wanted to engagge in EMDR, not electro-convulsive therapy. It changed his life I think. This is an example of helping people who are in the same class as you because you’re facing the same oppression.
“The pull of the patient’s dominant pattern is likely to be very strong. If it were not, he would be unlikely to be in the therapist’s office in the first place. But understanding that even when an identified pattern is pervasive, there are subthemes and variations that are also part of who the patient is, and examining the circumstances that enable that aspect of the person to be expressed and brought to the fore can be a powerful contributor to the therapeutic process and to the prospects for change,” (RTPP, p. 306).
I don’t see why people in leftist movements can’t be aware of patterns like the one Wachtel spells out here as well as understand how to help each other out of them like Wachtel helps out this hypothetical patient in the following example:
”I might also add—to further illustrate how the emphasis on attending to variations and building on the patient’s strengths go together—that with some patients, who are especially vulnerable and prone to self-criticism or discouragement at any sign they are ‘failing,’ I would be inclined, unless there was a very strong reason to proceed otherwise, to not call attention to the variability by noting when they are having more difficulty. Rather, I would wait until the patient is being at least a little bit more communicative than he ordinarily is (even if he is still being less communicative than most people are) and then say something like, ‘I notice that you are able to elaborate a little more than usual today on what your experience was like. I wonder what enabled you to do that this time.’ In so doing, I am avoiding ‘hitting him when he is down,’ while at the same time still calling attention to and exploring the pattern of relative uncommunicativeness. At a moment when his self-esteem is likely to be higher, I am attending implicitly to the fact that at other times he is less communicative; but I am doing so in a context in which the message also includes that he is capable of communicating more fully, that he does not simply have a ‘deficit.’
Such ways of communicating have the advantage of being dynamic formulations, in contrast to the static formulations that are all too common in our field. They imply that this is not simply “the way the patient is” but the way he sometimes can be, and they therefore make it clear that he also can be different,” (p. 304).
Univocal interpretations and Freud’s ability to hear multiple meanings (also include Shakespeare and multiple interpretations of the same works)
—No two people will speak a sentence the same way. (Quote Shakespeare’s Metrical Art on how a talented actor can color or phrase words in a different way . . . which does/gives what?)
—Give examples from George T. Wright’s work (“Do not, O do not!” . . . )
—Player King in Hamlet: “Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.” It seems to me that a big part of any worthwhile revolution is that it will improve social relations so that a substantial number of people become more comfortable with that fact. You can’t control what other people do with what you express to them, and that is ultimately energizing because it leads to surprises and to the question Mike Alfreds asks in the title of his book What Happens Next?
—Parallel between Wachtel’s comment at the end of RTPP and Rylance’s comment that directors have come up with many clever tricks but ultimately the energy comes (also, Rylance’s blurb on the back of Different Every Night).