Philip Rieff "The Triumph of the Therapeutic" (Introduction and Last Chapter)
The
following is an excerpt from The
Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud
by Philip Rieff (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), $18.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
—W.
B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” 1920
Literature
and sociology have long supplied eloquent and knowing professional
mourners at the wake for Christian culture. After Matthew Arnold,
much of modern poetry constitutes an elegiac farewell (mixed with
powerful feelings of good riddance) to the religious culture of the
West. After Auguste Comte, much of modern sociology has struggled for
diagnostic ideas refined and yet wide enough to encompass the
spectacle of a death so great in magnitude and subtlety. Now the
dissolution of a unitary system of common belief, accompanied, as it
must be, by a certain disorganization of personality, may have run
its course. The long period of deconversion, which first broke the
surface of political history at the time of the French Revolution,
appears all but ended. The central symbolism of personal and
corporate experience seems to me well on its way to being differently
organized, with several systems of belief competing for primacy in
the task of organizing personality in the West. Beyond its concern
with the dynamics by which Christian culture has been displaced, the
present volume will concentrate upon a struggle within the camp of
one among these displacing systems of belief; I intend drawing
certain implications for the reorganization of Western culture and
personality from the divergence between Freud and those of his most
powerful successor-critics studied in this book—C. G. Jung, Wilhelm
Reich, and D. H. Lawrence. In Freud’s analytic attitude and in the
efforts exerted by his successor-critics to go beyond it, to
post-communal faiths, there are concentrated some aspects of a
theoretical problem that interests me greatly, well beyond the limits
of this book: the problem of explaining cultural change. These
preliminary studies in the psychohistorical process are not aimed
primarily at fellow theorists interested in the problem, but at those
troubled readers in whose minds and hearts one culture is dying while
no other gains enough power to be born.
As
cultures change, so do the modal types of personality that are their
bearers. The kind of man I see emerging, as our culture fades into
the next, resembles the kind once called “spiritual”—because
such a man desires to preserve the inherited morality freed from its
hard external crust of institutional discipline. Yet a culture
survives principally, I think, by the power of its institutions to
bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which
sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly
understood—with that understanding of which explicit belief and
precise knowledge of externals would show outwardly like the tip of
an iceberg. Spiritualizers of religion (and precisians of science)
failed to take into account the degree of intimacy with which this
comprehensive interior understanding was cognate with historic
institutions, binding even the ignorants of a culture to a great
chain of meaning. These institutions are responsible for conveying
the social conditions of their acceptance by men thus saved from
destructive illusions of uniqueness and separateness. Having broken
the outward forms, so as to liberate, allegedly, the inner meaning of
the good, the beautiful, and the true, the spiritualizers, who set
the pace of Western cultural life from just before the beginning to a
short time after the end of the nineteenth century, have given way
now to their logical and historical successors, the psychologizers,
inheritors of that dualist tradition which pits human nature against
social order.
Undeceived,
as they think, about the sources of all morally binding address, the
psychologizers, now fully established as the pacesetters of cultural
change, propose to help men avoid doing further damage to themselves
by preventing live deceptions from succeeding the dead ones. But, in
order to save themselves from falling apart with their culture, men
must engender another, different and yet powerful enough in its
reorganization of experience to make themselves capable again of
controlling the infinite variety of panic and emptiness to which they
are disposed. It is to control their dis-ease as individuals that men
have always acted culturally, in good faith. Books and parading,
prayers and the sciences, music and piety toward parents: these are a
few of the many instruments by which a culture may produce the saving
larger self, for the control of panic and the filling up of
emptiness. Superior to and encompassing the different modes in which
it appears, a culture must communicate ideals, setting as
internalities those distinctions between right actions and wrong that
unite men and permit them the fundamental pleasure of agreement.
Culture is another name for a design of motives directing the self
outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can
be realized and satisfied.
A
reorganization of those dialectical expressions of Yes and No the
interplay of which constitutes culture, transforming motive into
conduct, is occurring throughout the West, particularly in the United
States and in England. It is to be expected that some instruments
appropriate to our inherited organization of permissions and
restraints upon action will not survive the tension of fundamental
reorganization. But, suppose the tension is driven deeper—so deep
that all communications of ideals come under permanent and easy
suspicion? The question is no longer as Dostoevski put it: “Can
civilized men believe?” Rather: Can unbelieving men be civilized?
To
raise again the question of nihilism, as sociologists since Auguste
Comte have done, demonstrates a major change in tone: the note of
apprehension has gone out of the asking. We believe that we know
something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last,
enjoying all our senses—except the sense of the past—as
unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a
technological Eden. Comte would have substituted a religion of
humanity for its enfeebled predecessor; Max Weber proposed no
substitute religion. Matthew Arnold could still listen for distant
echoes of the sea of faith; Yeats knew there was a desert where once
that sea might have been. To raise up faith from its stony sleep
encourages the possibility of living through again the nightmare
history of the last half century. Yeats did not hope for either
restoration or parody of the established faiths. Rather, he prayed
for a very modern sort of Second Coming, in which men would recover
their innocence, chiefly by accepting the fact that it is
self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting—“and that its
own sweet will is Heaven’s will.” In our recovered innocence, to
be entertained would become the highest good and boredom the most
common evil.
The
best spirits of the twentieth century have thus expressed their
conviction that the original innocence, which to earlier periods was
a sinful conceit, the new center, which can be held even as
communities disintegrate, is the self. By this conviction a new and
dynamic acceptance of disorder, in love with life and destructive of
it, has been loosed upon the world. Here literature and sociology
converge; for the ultimate interest of sociology, like that of
psychiatry when it is not lost in a particular patient, turns on the
question whether our culture can be so reconstructed that faith—some
compelling symbolic of self-integrating communal purpose—need no
longer superintend the organization of personality.
So
long as a culture maintains its vitality, whatever must be renounced
disappears and is given back bettered; Freud called this process
sublimation. But, as that sage among psychiatrists Harry Stack
Sullivan once said, “if you tell people how they can sublimate,
they can’t sublimate.” The dynamics of culture are in “the
unwitting part of it.” Now our renunciations have failed us; less
and less is given back bettered. For this reason, chiefly, I think,
this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels
trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages. Modern men are
like Rilke’s panther, forever looking out from one cage into
another. Because the modern sense of identity seems outraged by
imprisonment in either old church or new cage, it is the obligation
of sociologists, so far as they remain interested in assessing the
quality of our corporate life, to analyze doctrinal as well as
organizational profiles of the rage to be free of the inherited
morality, the better to see how these differ from what is being raged
against. I shall attend to a few of the exemplarily enraged, and to
the sense in which it may be said that they express general
sentiments.
If
the question “How are we to be saved?” cannot be asked in
traditional ways, or need not be asked at all, then it is still the
professional obligation of sociologists, who are specially interested
in the behavior of collectivities, to investigate the ensuing honest
silence in which the communal gods have imitated the most cultivated
men. And, indeed, this is the sort of investigation that sociologists
have pursued ardently, from the time of Comte through that of Weber
to my contemporaries. Perhaps no other problem than that of the
changing moral configuration of modern culture has so engaged the
interest of sociological theorists.
During
the nineteenth century, when sociology helped in a major way to
construct the central experience of deconversion toward an
anti-creedal analytic attitude, that discipline suffered from a vast
overconfidence both about its own advance and about the progress of
the culture, which it understood as undergoing varieties of such
deconversions. “Progress,” wrote Spencer, “is not an accident,
but a necessity. Surely must evil and immorality disappear; surely
must men become perfect.” A basic transformation of culture
appeared both inevitable and desirable.
Running
parallel with and in the opposite direction from the process of
deconversion was that process of conversion to a superior system of
symbols—Science—which would supply the next predicate for the
cultural organization of personality. Comte, for example, understood
his own time as one of transition between two cultures. It was more
generally proposed by students of our collective condition not merely
that the old religious culture was dying but that the new scientific
one had quite enough power already to be born. Thus Comte concluded
that only because of the “coexistence” of these two cultures did
the “grand crisis now experienced by the most civilized nations”
persist. Freud was less sanguine. He believed that the crisis of
coexistence was probably a permanent mode of the relation between
personality and culture.
I
question whether the “grand crisis,” our deeper trouble, can be
attributed to “coexistence,” as major figures among the
nineteenth-century intellectuals, culminating in Freud, insisted. It
is less the lingering of the old culture than the emergence of the
new that needs diagnosis. In fact, evil and immorality are
disappearing, as Spencer assumed they would, mainly because our
culture is changing its definition of human perfection. No longer the
Saint, but the instinctual Everyman, twisting his neck uncomfortably
inside the starched collar of culture, is the communal ideal, to whom
men offer tacit prayers for deliverance from their inherited
renunciations. Freud sought only to soften the collar; others, using
bits and pieces of his genius, would like to take it off. There have
been forerunners of this movement—Rousseau, Boehme, Hamann, or
Blake. But never before has there been such a general shifting of
sides as now among intellectuals in the United States and England.
Many have gone over to the enemy without realizing that they,
self-considered the cultural elite, have actually become spokesmen
for what Freud called the instinctual “mass.” Much of modern
literature constitutes a symbolic act of going over to the side of
the latest, and most original, individualists. This represents the
complete democratization of our culture.
It
was in order to combat just such talented hostility to culture that
Freud emphasized coercion and the renunciation of instinct as
indispensable elements in all culture. Freud was neither an eroticist
nor a democrat. His theory of culture depended upon a crossing
between his idea of moral authority and an elitist inclination. “It
is just as impossible,” he writes, “to do without control of the
mass by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of
civilization.” By “mass” Freud means not merely the “lazy and
unintelligent,” but, more importantly, those who “have no love
for instinctual renunciation” and who cannot be “convinced by
argument of its inevitability.” That such large numbers of the
cultivated and intelligent have identified themselves deliberately
with those who are supposed to have no love for instinctual
renunciation, suggests to me the most elaborate act of suicide that
Western intellectuals have ever staged—those intellectuals, whether
of the left or right, whose historic function it has been to assert
the authority of a culture organized in terms of communal purpose,
through the agency of congregations of the faithful.
Of
course, this suicide is intended only as an exciting pose.
Renunciations of instinct, as Freud wrote, “necessarily must
remain.” For these renunciations, the individual must be
compensated by pleasures at once higher and more realizable than the
pleasure of instinctual gratification. In compensation, and in place
of where faith once was, men are offered Art and/or Science. It is
true that new religions are constantly being born. But modern culture
is unique in having given birth to such elaborately argued
anti-religions, all aiming to confirm us in our devastating illusions
of individuality and freedom. I suspect the children of Israel did
not spend much time elaborating a doctrine of the golden calf; they
naïvely danced around it, until Moses, their first intellectual, put
a stop to the plain fun and insisted on civilizing them, by
submerging their individualities within a communal purpose. Now,
although there is some dancing again, the intellectuals mainly sit
around and think in awe about the power and perversity of their
instincts, disguising their rancorous worship of self in the religion
of art. Confronted thus with a picture gallery as the new center of
self-worship, civilized men must become again anti-art, in the hope
of shifting attention toward modalities of worship wholly other than
that of self.
In
my chapters on Reich and Lawrence, I shall represent some ways in
which art and science have come to serve the contemporary aversion to
culture. This aversion has grown less naïve, more doctrinal, and
therefore more dangerous. For these are doctrines of psychological
man—the latest, and perhaps the supreme, individualist—opposed in
depth to earlier modes of self-salvation: through identification with
communal purpose. Jung is the most interesting case. As a cultural
conservative, his psychology is para-religious, striving as it does
to re-establish various corporate identities and communal purposes as
purely therapeutic devices. In contrast to the conservative Jung,
Reich and Lawrence are moral revolutionaries in a more
straightforward way: neither proposes to defend common purposes which
once persisted through the individualization of those energies called
“conscience,” generated for the saving of selves precisely by
means of a communal purpose.
The
debts incurred by conscience through warped and atrophied communal
purposes are now being paid off at a usurious rate of interest. The
lingering death of authoritarian love has left behind hatred and
violence, twin widows of dead love, free to stimulate in the
culturally impoverished or disenchanted energies emancipated from
conviction. It is not class or race war that we have to fear so much
as deadly violence between the culture classes. But the upper culture
classes have already lost this most fundamental of all class
struggles by their admiration for the “vitality” of the lower,
that vitality being a mirror image of their own earlier dynamism. A
social structure shakes with violence and shivers with fears of
violence not merely when that structure is callously unjust, but also
when its members must stimulate themselves to feverish activity in
order to demonstrate how alive they are. That there are colonies of
the violent among us, devoid of any stable sense of communal purpose,
best describes, I think, our present temporarily schizoid existence
in two cultures—vacillating between dead purposes and deadly
devices to escape boredom.
A
full transition to a post-communal culture may never be achieved. It
is a persuasive argument, still, that maintains there are safeguards,
built into both human nature and culture, limiting the freedom of men
to atomize themselves. Perhaps human nature will revolt, producing
yet another version of second nature with which to fend off and curb
the vitality of the present assault upon the moralizing functions of
our past. Every culture must establish itself as a system of
moralizing demands, images that mark the trail of each man’s
memory; thus to distinguish right actions from wrong the inner
ordinances are set, by which men are guided in their conduct so as to
assure a mutual security of contact. Culture is, indeed, the higher
learning. But, this higher learning is not acquired at universities;
rather, it is assimilated continuously from earliest infancy when
human beings first begin to trust in those familiar responses others
make to their overtures. In every culture, there stands a censor,
governing the opportunity of recognizing and responding to novel
stimuli. That governor, inclined always to be censorious about
novelty, we may call “faith.” Faith is the compulsive dynamic of
culture, channeling obedience to, trust in, and dependence upon
authority. With more or less considered passion, men submit to the
moral demand system—and, moreover, to its personifications, from
which they cannot detach themselves except at the terrible cost of
guilt that such figures of authority exact from those not yet so
indifferent that they have ceased troubling to deny them.
Now,
contradicting all faiths, a culture of the indifferent is being
attempted, lately using a rhetoric of “commitment” with which to
enlarge the scope of its dynamism. Such a credo of change amounts to
a new faith—more precisely, to a counter-faith. This counter-faith
intimates the next culture; for faith, or its negative, is always and
everywhere the generating and corrupting agent of culture. This is
not to say that contemporary culture is corrupt; what appears to some
as corruption indicates the generation of yet another culture, for
none is immortal. While disassociating itself from the high costs of
old doctrinal seriousness and lonely lives, the emergent culture
nevertheless produces books and music, art and science, an endless
ambiance of fun and boredom—everything in fact, including moral
passion and communal purpose, as varieties of an antitypal therapy of
self. To call corrupt a culture purchased at lower cost to our
nerves, and at larger magnitudes of self-fulfillment, would show a
lamentable lack of imagination. The look of the future need not be
blank and pitiless. Intelligence may work more efficiently, after
all, than compassionate solidarity. Counter-transference may succeed
where less calculated loves have failed. If the religious imagination
is purblind, and its obstinate visionaries take risks resulting in
such personifications of the Parousia as Yeats saw slouching toward
Bethlehem, then we will have to make our way to a more pleasant city,
using our secular vision of comforts that render all salvations
obsolete.
I,
too, aspire to see clearly, like a rifleman, with one eye shut; I,
too, aspire to think without assent. This is the ultimate violence to
which the modern intellectual is committed. Since things have become
as they are, I, too, share the modern desire not to be deceived. The
culture to which I was first habituated grows progressively different
in its symbolic nature and in its human product; that double
difference and how ordained augments our ambivalence as professional
mourners. There seems little likelihood of a great rebirth of the old
corporate ideals. The “proletariat” was the most recent notable
corporate identity, the latest failed god. By this time men may have
gone too far, beyond the old deception of good and evil, to
specialize at last, wittingly, in techniques that are to be called,
in the present volume, “therapeutic,” with nothing at stake
beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being. This is the unreligion of
the age, and its master science. What the ignorant have always felt,
the knowing now know, after millennial distractions by stratagems
that did not heighten the more immediate pleasures. The systematic
hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural
predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized, now not
in the West only but, more slowly, in the non-West. The Orient and
Africa are thus being acculturated in a dynamism that has already
grown substantial enough to torment its progenitors with nightmares
of revenge for having so unsettled the world. It is a terrible error
to see the West as conservative and the East as revolutionary. We are
the true revolutionaries. The East is swiftly learning to act as we
do, which is anti-conservative in a way non-Western peoples have only
recently begun fully to realize for themselves.
II.
In
the regular acting out of mandatory therapies of commitment built
into the charter of his society, man, as a creation of affectionate
and censorious authority, once organized for himself modes of willing
obedience, or faith, in which he found his sense of well-being and,
also, his freedom from that singular criterion. Culture without
cultus
appears, in almost all historical cases, a contradiction in terms.
Within the mechanisms of cult, culture was organized, consisting
mainly of ritual efforts to elicit and produce stable responses of
assurance to more or less fixed wants—fleshly and spiritual, as it
used to be said. There was, then, a standard range of expectations
from which reassurance was elicited, even though the responses of the
eliciting agencies, rendered “sacred” by their supreme function
of organizing a life worth living, might at any moment offer
admonitions rather than consolations to the seeker. Thus the sacred
socializing agencies composed a moral order.
One
main clue to the understanding of social organization is to be found
in its symbolic of communal purpose; this, in turn, operates through
a social system enacting that symbolic in a way at once admonitory
and consoling. Each culture is its own order of therapy—a system of
moralizing demands, including remissions that ease the pressures of
communal purposes. Therapeutic elites before our own were
predominately supportive rather than critical of culture as a moral
demand system. Admonitions were the expectable predicates of
consolations; that is what is meant, nowadays, by “guilt”
culture. Whenever therapeutic elites grow predominately critical then
a cultural revolution may be said to be in progress. Ours is such a
time. The Occident has long been such a place.
Until
the present culture rose to threaten its predecessor, our demand
system could be specified by the kind of creedal hedges it raised
around impulses of independence or autonomy from communal purpose. In
the culture preceding our own, the order of therapy was embedded in a
consensus of “shalt nots.” The best never lacked binding
convictions, for they were the most bound, mainly by what they should
not do—or even think, or dream. “Thou shalt” precipitated a
sequence of operative “shalt nots.” Cultic therapies of
commitment never mounted a search for some new opening into
experience; on the contrary, new experience was not wanted. Cultic
therapy domesticated the wildness of experience. By treating some
novel stimulus or ambiguity of experience in this manner, the
apparently new was integrated into a restrictive and collective
identity. Cultic therapies consisted, therefore, chiefly in
participation mystiques severely limiting deviant initiatives.
Individuals were trained, through ritual action, to express fixed
wants, although they could not count thereby upon commensurate
gratifications. The limitation of possibilities was the very design
of salvation.
To
the ironic question “And, being saved, how are we to behave?”
Western culture long returned a painfully simple answer: “Behave
like your Savior.” Christian culture, like other organizations of
moral demand, operated, however imperfectly, through the
internalization of a soteriological character ideal carrying
tremendous potentials for fresh intakes of communal energy; the
highest level of controls and remissions (which together organized
systems of moral demands) experienced an historical and
individualized incarnation. Such euhemerist processes may have been
indispensable to the vitality of the old culture. To adjust the
expression of impulses to the controlling paragon, or character
ideal, defines the primary process in the shaping of our inherited
culture; the arts and sciences define the secondary process, in which
exemplary modes of action are extended further, into a central
moralizing experience, thus transforming individual into
institutional action.
In
the classical Christian culture of commitment, one renunciatory mode
of control referred to the sexual opportunism of individuals.
Contemporary churchmen may twist and turn it while they try to make
themselves heard in a culture that renders preaching superfluous: the
fact remains that renunciatory controls of sexual opportunity were
placed in the Christian culture very near the center of the symbolic
that has not held. Current apologetic efforts by religious
professionals, in pretending that renunciation as the general mode of
control was never dominant in the system, reflect the strange mixture
of cowardice and courage with which they are participating in the
dissolution of their cultural functions. Older Christian scholarship
has known better than new Christian apologetics.
At bottom, only a single point was dealt with, abstinence from sexual relationships; everything else was secondary: for he who had renounced these found nothing hard. Renunciation of the servile yoke of sin (servile peccati iugum discutere) was the watchword of Christians, and an extraordinary unanimity prevailed as to the meaning of this watchword, whether we turn to the Coptic porter, or the learned Greek teacher, to the Bishop of Hippo, or Jerome the Roman presbyter, or the biographer of Saint Martin. Virginity was the specifically Christian virtue, and the essence of all virtues; in this conviction the meaning of the evangelical law was summed up.
Historically,
the rejection of sexual individualism (which divorces pleasure and
procreation) was the consensual matrix of Christian culture. It was
never the last line drawn. On the contrary, beyond that first
restriction there were drawn others, establishing the Christian
corporate identity within which the individual was to organize the
range of his experience. Individuality was hedged round by the
discipline of sexuality, challenging those rapidly fluctuating
imperatives established in Rome’s remissive culture, from which a
new order of deprivations was intended to release the faithful
Christian believer. Every controlling symbolic contains such
remissive functions. What is revolutionary in modern culture refers
to releases from inherited doctrines of therapeutic deprivation; from
a predicate of renunciatory control, enjoining releases from impulse
need, our culture has shifted toward a predicate of impulse release,
projecting controls unsteadily based upon an infinite variety of
wants raised to the status of needs. Difficult as the modern cultural
condition may be, I doubt that Western men can be persuaded again to
the Greek opinion that the secret of happiness is to have as few
needs as possible. The philosophers of therapeutic deprivation are
disposed to eat well when they are not preaching. It is hard to take
Schopenhauer at his ascetic word when we know what splendid dinners
he had put on, day after day, at the Hotel Schwan in Frankfort.
The
central Christian symbolic was not ascetic in a crude renunciatory
mode which would destroy any culture. Max Scheler described that
culture accurately, I think, when he concluded that “Christian
asceticism—at least so far as it was not influenced by decadent
Hellenistic philosophy—had as its purpose not the suppression or
even extirpation of natural drives, but rather their control and
complete spiritualization. It is positive, not negative,
asceticism—aimed fundamentally at a liberation of the highest
powers of personality from blockage by the automatism of the lower
drives.” That renunciatory mode, in which the highest powers of
personality are precisely those which subserve rather than subvert
culture, appears no longer systematically efficient. The
spiritualizers have had their day; nowadays, the best among them
appear engaged in a desperate strategy of acceptance, in the hope
that by embracing doctrinal expressions of therapeutic aims they will
be embraced by the therapeutics; a false hope—the therapeutics need
no doctrines, only opportunities. But the spiritualizers persist in
trying to maintain cultural contact with constituencies already
deconverted in all but name. Even the Roman Catholic clergy must now
confront their own constituencies, as their Protestant and Jewish
colleagues have had to do long before. Nevertheless, the religious
professionals have reason to hope for survival, precisely because
they have come to be aware of their situation and are seeking ways to
alter it, in the direction of a fresh access of communal purpose,
centered in the Negro protest movement, or in some other movement of
protest against the effects of that very dead culture which they
think, by protesting so belatedly, to survive.
The
death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to
communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of
all to the cultural elites themselves. Many spokesmen for our
established normative institutions are aware of their failure and yet
remain powerless to generate in themselves the necessary unwitting
part of their culture that merits the name of faith. “Is not the
very fact that so wretchedly little binding address is heard in the
church,” asked Karl Barth, rhetorically, in 1939, “accountable
for a goodly share of her misery—is it not perhaps the misery?”
The misery of this culture is acutely stated by the special misery of
its normative institutions. Our more general misery is that, having
broken with those institutionalized credibilities from which its
moral energy derived, new credibilities are not yet operationally
effective and, perhaps, cannot become so in a culture constantly
probing its own unwitting part.
It
may be argued against this position that Western culture was never
deeply believing—at least not in the Christian manner which, in a
number of its most persuasive varieties, encouraged the seeking after
individual salvations at the expense of a collective one. Even so,
Christian culture survived because it superintended the organization
of Western personality in ways that produced the necessary corporate
identities, serving a larger communal purpose institutionalized in
the churches themselves. Ernst Troeltsch was correct in his
institutional title for the moral demand system preceding the one now
emerging out of its complete ruin: a “church civilization,” an
“authoritarian and coercive culture.” What binding address now
describes our successor culture? In
what does the self now try to find salvation, if not in the breaking
of corporate identities and in an acute suspicion of all normative
institutions?
Western
culture has had a literary canon, through which its character ideals
were conveyed. What canons will replace the scriptural? None, I
suppose. We are probably witnessing the end of a cultural history
dominated by book religious and word-makers. The
elites of the emergent culture—if they do not destroy themselves
and all culture with a dynamism they appear unable to control—are
being trained in terminologies that have only the most tenuous
relation to any historic culture or its incorporative
self-interpretations.
It
needs to be noted that in particular on the geographic margins of our
moral demand system, and in the Orient, the rejection of religious
culture, even in principle, is far from complete. By contrast, the
Communist movement may be viewed as culturally conservative,
belonging to the classical tradition of moral demand systems. The
revolution in the West is profoundly cultural whereas that in the
East, withal its defensive doctrine of the cultural as a mere
superstructure of the techno-political class system, has been less
certainly so. Of the two, our revolution is, I think, the more
profound one. Communist culture, no less than the Christian, is in
trouble; it cannot stave off a revolution coming out of the West, in
part as a repercussion, in that it renounces the renunciatory mode of
Communism. The Russian cultural revolution is already being signaled
by the liberation, however grudgingly, of the intellectuals from
creedal constraints.
The
new religiosity is remissive. It represents no mere literary
challenge, as in the time of the Enlightenment.
The would-be instinctual Everyman and his girl friend are the
enlightened ones now; a Freud would be quite superfluous, specially
in view of the fact that he sought to find ways other than neurotic
of supporting renunciations.
Indeed,
Freud has already receded into history. His problems are not ours.
The psychoanalytic movement, no less than its rationalist
predecessors, has been ruined by the popular (and commercial)
pressure upon it to help produce a symbolic for the reorganization of
personality, after the central experience of deconversion, of which
Freud was the last great theorist, had been completed. Fixed as they
are at the historical stage of deconversion, responsible
psychotherapists continue to struggle confusedly to discover their
own proper attitude toward renunciatory moral demand systems even as
the normative character of their abandonment has altered both the
theoretical and working conditions of clinical practice. So confused,
psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, in their hospitals and
consulting rooms, stand almost as helpless as their functional
predecessors and sometime cultural opponents, the clergy. But other
therapeutic elites are not in a better condition, as I have tried to
bring out more elaborately in the final chapter.
III.
Our
cultural revolution does not aim, like its predecessors, at victory
for some rival commitment, but rather at a way of using all
commitments, which amounts to loyalty toward none. By psychologizing
about themselves interminably, Western men are learning to use their
internality against the primacy of any particular organization of
personality. If this re-structuring of the Western imagination
succeeds in establishing itself, complete with institutional
regimens, then human autonomy from the compulsions of culture may
follow the freedoms already won from the compulsions of nature. With
such a victory, culture, as previously understood, need suffer no
further defeats. It is conceivable that millennial distinctions
between inner and outer experience, private and public life, will
become trivial. The individual
heart need have no reasons of its own that the corporate head cannot
understand and exploit for some augmentation of the individual’s
sense of well-being. Thinking need not produce nausea or despair as
its final answer to the assessment of communal purpose because men
will have ceased to seek any salvation other than amplitude in living
itself. Faith can then grow respectable again, as one entertainable
and passing personal experience among others, to enhance the interest
of living freed from communal purpose. The significance Marx
attached to the division of labor for the organization of society may
have bearing in our emergent culture on the variety of
entertainments. To paraphrase Marx and Engels, all morality, be it
ascetic or hedonistic, loses its force with a therapeutic outlook.
Like
its predecessors, the emergent culture must formulate its own
controls, no less than the preceding one defined its own remissions;
it is in
the process of doing so already. We are, I fear, getting to know one
another. Reticence,
secrecy, concealment of self have been transformed into social
problems; once they were aspects of civility, when the great Western
formulary summed up in the creedal phrase “Know thyself”
encouraged obedience to communal purposes rather than suspicion of
them. Self-knowledge
again made social is the principle of control upon which the emergent
culture may yet be able to make itself stable. Indeed, with the arts
of psychiatric management enhanced and perfected, men will come to
know one another in ways that could facilitate total socialization
without a symbolic of communal purpose. Then
the brief historic fling of the individual, celebrating himself as a
being in himself, divine and therefore essentially unknowable, would
be truly ended—ending no less certainly than the preceding
personifications of various renunciatory disciplines.
Men already feel freer to live their lives with a minimum of pretense
to anything more grand than sweetening the time. Perhaps it is better
so; in cultures past, men sacrificed themselves to heroic and cruel
deceptions, and suffered for glories that once mirrored their
miseries. Not until psychological men overcome lives of squalor can
they truly test their assumption that the inherited ideals of glory
are no longer required. Affluence achieved, the creation of a knowing
rather than a believing person, able to enjoy life without erecting
high symbolic hedges around it, distinguishes the emergent culture
from its predecessor. The
new anti-culture aims merely at an eternal interim ethic of release
from the inherited controls.
Who
is to say that these controls are eternal? I do not think so; even
Christian theologians no longer say so with any confidence—and some
are saying, rather, that new releases are holier than old controls.
Yet even among churchmen there are those who understand anew that
their religion is nothing if not the organization of communal purpose
and the conservation of inherited culture; they therefore place
desperate hope in the movement of which Dr. Martin Luther King is
chief spokesman. Increasing numbers of churchmen have allied
themselves with the Negro religious leader in what they have
reluctantly understood must be a common struggle, for the rebirth of
their moral demand system, against vastly superior numbers of
nominally Christian (or Jewish) barbarians. This slowly reforming
Christian cultural elite, apparent fellow travelers of the movement
of Negro non-violent protest but in reality its critical aggregate,
may yet save the United States from
a barbarism long evident in the conduct of their own churches’
members, in ordinary American commercial activity, and in the
extraordinary incivilities of the American social manner. Yet
there may be little power of Christian renewal in the movement of
Negro protest. For the American Negro has been a focus for releasing
images in the dominant white culture. Affluent white society, as it
grows more affluent, may draw nearer their idea of the Negro as a
model enjoyer of the relaxed life, but that idea is profoundly
prejudicial to the renewal sought by the religious leadership, black
and white.
The
present releases, in growing more dominant, must achieve
institutional affirmations of the prevalent feeling. Critically to
elaborate such affirmations has been the historic function of Western
intellectuals. But, not yet able to produce imagery that would mark a
trail for many memories, contemporary writers and artists, all those
intellectuals slightly ahead of their time, mainly produce moods of
solicitude about themselves, as if they could not bear the weight of
the freedom from their inherited role upon which they themselves
insist. This temper against moralizing has its justifications. The
Germans recently manipulated all corporate identities and communal
purposes with a thoroughness against which the analytic attitude may
be our surest protection.
Under
such protection, it may not be possible to organize our culture again
as an unwitting dynamic of moral demands claiming the prerogatives of
truth, exercised through creedally authoritative institutions. Where
family and nation once stood, or Church and Party, there will be
hospital and theater too, the normative institutions of the next
culture. Trained to be incapable of sustaining sectarian
satisfactions, psychological man cannot be susceptible to sectarian
control. Religious man was born to
be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased. The
difference was established long ago, when “I believe,” the cry of
the ascetic, lost precedence to “one feels,” the caveat of the
therapeutic. And if the therapeutic is to win out, then surely the
psychotherapist will be his secular spiritual guide.
IV.
However
one may judge the validity of the multiple truths at which science
and history arrive, my interest is in their social viability. The
next culture may be viable without being valid; on the other hand,
the old faiths could be judged valid even by those who consider them
now no longer viable. In order to attend fairly to the competing
beliefs and unbeliefs, one must struggle to use neutral terms. A
sociological vocabulary keeps a certain distance from both new
permissions and old inhibitions. This distance is the only possible
justification for such jargon as I have used in the present volume;
except as a device for gaining perspective, sociological jargon is a
curse, first of all upon the intellectual lives of sociologists.
Sociological writing itself is ineluctably part of the
psychohistorical process, engaged as it is in persuasive
redefinitions of action that alter the action.
Can
the present releases become the predicates of new controls? Viewed
traditionally, the continuing shift from a controlling to a releasing
symbolic may appear as the dissolution of culture. Viewed
sociologically, the dominance of releasing motifs, in which the
releasers themselves evolve as new modes of control, with patterns of
consumption as our popular discipline, implies a movement of Western
culture away from its former configuration, toward one in which old
ideological contents are preserved mainly for their therapeutic
potential, as interesting deposits of past motifs of moralizing. No
imperative can then develop a monopoly on sentiment, because none
will be backed by a deeply ingrained system of inner ordinances.
I
do not refer to a “sensualist” culture but to one that prepares
for adaptability in matters of the “spirit.” There is no special
affection reserved in this volume for the superiority usually claimed
for “spiritual” over “sensual” concerns. In the emergent
culture, a wider range of people will have “spiritual” concerns
and engage in “spiritual” pursuits. There will be more singing
and more listening. People will continue to genuflect and read the
Bible, which has long achieved the status of great literature; but no
prophet will denounce the rich attire or stop the dancing. There will
be more theater, not less, and no Puritan will denounce the stage and
draw its curtains. On the contrary, I expect that modern society will
mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted
miracle plays, with patient-analysts acting out their inner lives,
after which they could extemporize the final act as interpretation.
We shall even institutionalize in the hospital-theater the
Verfremdungseffekt,
with the therapeutic triumphantly enacting his own discovered will.
The
wisdom of the next social order, as I imagine it, would not reside in
right doctrine, administered by the right men, who must be found, but
rather in doctrines amounting to permission for each man to live an
experimental life. Thus, once
again, culture will give back what it has taken away. All
governments will be just, so long as they secure that consoling
plenitude of option in which modern satisfaction really consists. In
this way the emergent culture could drive the value problem clean out
of the social system and, limiting it to a form of philosophical
entertainment in lieu of edifying preachment, could
successfully conclude the exercise for which politics is the name.
Problems of democracy need no longer prove so difficult as they have
been. Psychological man is likely to be indifferent to the ancient
question of legitimate authority, of sharing in government, so long
as the powers that be preserve social order and manage an economy of
abundance. The danger of politics lies more in the ancient straining
to create those symbols or support those institutions that narrow the
range of virtues or too narrowly define the sense of well-being; for
the latter seems to be the real beatitude toward which men have
always strained. Psychological man, in his independence from all
gods, can feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a
hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends itself to
therapeutic use.
Culture
as therapy becomes realizable in part because of the increasing
automaticity of the productive system. But without the discipline of
work, a vast re-ritualization of social life will probably occur, to
contain aggression in a steady state and maintain necessary levels of
attention to activity. The rules of health indicate activity;
psychological man can exploit older cultural precepts, ritual
struggle no less than play therapy, in order to maintain the dynamism
of his culture. Of course, the newest Adam cannot be expected to
limit himself to the use of old constraints. If “immoral”
materials, rejected under earlier cultural criteria, are
therapeutically effective, enhancing somebody’s sense of
well-being, then they are useful. The “end” or “goal” is to
keep going. Americans, as F. Scott Fitzgerald concluded, believe in
the green light.
I
am aware that these speculations may be thought to contain some
parodies of an apocalypse. But what apocalypse has ever been so
kindly? What culture has ever attempted to see to it that no ego is
hurt? Perhaps the elimination of
the tragic sense—which is tantamount to the elimination of
irreconcilable moral principles—is no tragedy. Civilization
could be, for the first time in history, the expression of human
contents rather than the consolatory control of discontents. Then and
only then would the religious question receive a markedly different
answer from those dominant until recently in our cultural history.
Chapter
8: The Triumph of the Therapeutic
Philip
Rieff 1966
There
is a whole civilization to be remade. - Camus, Notebooks1
Lawrence,
Reich, and Jung made representative efforts to go beyond the analytic
attitude. They exhibit in their writings, various uses of faith in a
culture populated increasingly by pyschological men. Each attacked
the connection between morality and a culture about which they
expressed strong disapprovals.
To
speak of a moral culture
would be redundant. Every culture has two main functions: 1) to
organise the moral demands men make upon themselves into a system of
symbols that make men intelligible and trustworthy to each other,
thus rendering also the world intelligible and trustworthy; 2) to
organise the expressive remissions by which men release themselves,
in some degree, from the strain of conforming to the controlling
symbolic, internalised variant readings of culture that constitute
individual character. The process by which a culture changes at its
profoundest level may be traced in the shifting balance of controls
and releases which constitute a system of moral demands.
Those
who transmit the moral demand system are a cultural elite,
exemplifying those demands in their character and behaviour. But an
elite cannot merely teach or write of the moral demand system without
acting out some part of it. However the labour of exemplary enactment
is divided, no culture survives long without its elite, those cadres
which demonstrate the particular balance of control and remission in
culture itself.
No
culture of which we are aware has yet escaped the tension between the
modalities of control and release by which every culture constitutes
itself. Cultures achieve their measure of duration in the degree that
they build releasing devices into the major controls. These are the
devices that modern psychotherapy seeks to develop; it is this
development which gives psychotherapy its present importance in the
history of our culture.
There
remains a tension between controls and releases, even when the
releases are devised cleverly (or dialectically) enough to allot to
the controls their superordinate function. A cultural revolution
occurs when the releasing or remissive symbolic grows more compelling
than the controlling one; then it is that the inherent tensions reach
a breaking point. Roman culture may have been moving toward such a
breaking point when Christianity appeared, as a new symbolic order of
controls and remissions.
At
the breaking point, a culture can no longer maintain itself as an
established span of moral demands. Its jurisdiction contracts; it
demands less and permits more. Bread and circuses become confused
with right and duty. Spectacle becomes a functional substitute for
sacrament. Massive regressions occur, with large sections of the
population returning to levels of destructive aggression historically
accessible to it. At times of impending transition to a new moral
order, symbolic forms and their institutional objectifications change
their relative weights in that order. Competing symbolisms gather
support in competing elites; they jostle each other for priority of
place as the organisers of the next phase in the psychohistorical
process.
In
all cultures before our own, the competing symbols took the form of
languages of faith. A language of faith is always revelatory,
communicating through some mouthpiece of the god-term a system of
interdicts – a pattern of “thou shalt nots,” or taboos. The
language of science is not revelatory but analytic; for this reason,
the scientist can never claim that his own terms have a prophetic
function. His work is non-moral, that is, without interdictory
purpose. So far as the therapist casts himself in the role of a
social scientist (e.g. Freud), he seeks to analyse interdictory
symbolisms, not assert them. Yet, as we have seen, modern therapists
must use a language of faith. So far as their languages are
“scientific” and yet moralising, they depend upon
counter-interdictory symbolism, “heretical” or negative
conceptions of the interdictory symbolism itself, releasing rather
than controlling. Jung was a prophet of the “subterranean God”,
as opposed to the “Heavenly Father.” Reich's energic “Orgone”
opposes all “spiritual” principles. A language of faith may be,
therefore, controlling or releasing, interdictory or
counter-interdictory. It contributes vitally to what Manheim called
“collective definitions,” not mere hypotheses or replaceable
theories but rather a “source of
collective habits and actions.”
A
language of hypothesis is culturally neutral. Commitment to
hypothesis is made to be abandonable. The scientific psychologist, as
clinician, aspires to be neither interdictory nor
counter-interdictory. Because the clinical attitude aspires to moral
neutrality, its therapeutic effect is culturally dubious. Clinicians
continue to vacillate between interdictory and counter-interdictory
symbolisms, depending upon a diagnosis of the individual patient's
own conditional relation to these symbolisms. No culture has yet
produced a third type of symbolic – one that would embrace that
historic contradiction in terms: a “scientific culture.” If, and
only if, a neutralist symbolic becomes operative, may we speak of a
scientific culture. For the present, clinical psychologists often try
to produce an interdictory effect with counter-interdictory analytic
symbols, an ambivalence Freud himself did not have the genius to
overcome, except at the expense of an already weakened interdictory
symbolic. Neither Jung nor even more conservative therapists have
known how to resolve this ambivalence except by tempering their
radical attitude toward culture with an obdurate conservatism toward
social order.
Every
system of moral demands must operate within some social order. No
less its predecessors, the neutralist symbolic would have to create
institutions appropriate to its expression, and even enter into
shifting class alliances. As in the history of the Christian culture,
a symbolic may be carried to power by a class very differently
positioned in the social structure from that class in which it
originated.
The
next culture, with its component symbols, and with institutions
embodying these symbols arranged in a normative working order,
probably will require, in order to establish itself, (1) a new
institutionalised inequality of demand and remission, (2) an ideal
character type designated in these studies as the “therapeutic”.
Under foreseeable ideological and technological conditions, this
emerging moral ideal is unlikely to be a workingman; on the contrary,
the therapeutic will be a man of leisure, released by technology from
the regimental discipline of work so as to secure his sense of
well-being in highly refined alloplastic ways.
The
term “inequality” of demand and remission is used advisedly.
Every culture has hitherto required that the modalities of control
dominate, that expressions of the “unwitting part of it” be
disciplined and rendered institutional. Whenever a releasing symbolic
increases its jurisdiction to the point where it no longer serves to
support the incumbent moral demands, but rather contradicts them,
that culture is in jeopardy. Such freedoms were signatures on the
death warrant of previous cultures.
At
the close of a culture, the releasing modalities themselves begin to
look and sound like controls. They are harbingers of the next
culture. Some fresh imbalance is required before the succeeding
system of culture can be born, bringing into being a new symbolic of
expectations, and, moreover, institutions appropriately organised to
enact those expectations, translating the high symbolic into rules of
social conduct. In the realm of culture, equality of controlling and
remissive functions, rather than inequality, is the mother of
revolution. When the cross becomes a symbol of power or beauty,
suppressing the historical reminder of a particularly brutal
instrument of humiliation and death, then its own moral authority,
under the Christian rubric of “cross-bearing,” is threatened.
Remissive components within some psychohistorical moral demand system
may be underdeveloped, or overdeveloped. All symbolic and
institutional devices balancing remission and control must be
examined within multiple perspectives of historical change before the
examiner can arrive at any judgment about the fixed moralities of a
culture. But precisely those fixed moralities cannot remain
permanently fixed.
There
are particular historical moments of imbalance in a dialectical order
of controls and releases. The imbalances are subject to “correction”
in the very process of maintaining themselves. Thus even the most
stable moral demand systems are inherently liable to change. The
primary process of cultural change refers to shifting jurisdictions
over categories of social action by controlling and remissive
symbolisms of communal and individual purposes.
One
distinctive characteristic of modern remissive symbolisms, such as
have been examined in the preceding three chapters, is that none has
yet had the power to organise the erotic illusions that hold together
aggregates of men for communal purposes. Doctrines of release in a
culture cannot, of themselves, develop into new modalities of purpose
unless they are subtly transformed and institutionally elaborated, as
for example in the case, now all but closed, of Christianity.
In
modern culture, there is a major question about the motor by which
new purposive energies might be generated. Only with respect to
nature does physical science produce transformative control devices.
With respect to culture, it is still unclear whether the social
sciences will produce control devices, as Comte hoped, or in what
sense they may help create and install fresh convictions of communal
purpose. Scientific psychotherapies often consist in attacks upon
control-release systems which have failed as motors of communal
purpose, according to criteria set up by patient, profession, or
society. A judgment by psychotherapy upon itself as a remissive
device itself in modern culture depends on how it conceives a
preferable control-release system. Yet this is precisely the level of
conceptualisation with respect to its functions within a culture
which psychotherapy tries, when understood as a science, to avoid.
We
have some clues about the functional imperatives of psychoanalysis –
desired and realised – in modern culture. Freud considered that his
symbols were exempt from the cultural process by which remissive
modalities become controlling, although rationally ordered ego
controls are intended to operate remissively. Being analytic rather
than remissive, the Freudian doctrine was never to be put in systemic
service to either interdiction or release, under pain of ceasing to
be analytic. Because Freud's doctrine was anti-communal, it could be
used as a theoretical basis for elaborating a strategy of
self-realisation for the therapeutic. Americans, in particular, have
managed to use the Freudian doctrine in ways more remissive than he
intended, as a counter-authority against any fresh access of communal
purpose.
By
mid-century, the controls and the remissions from those controls have
grown so nearly equal that the one works no better than the other.
More precisely, the old established controls are enunciated so
vacuously, and in such hollow voices, that they sound like
remissions,' and the remissions have become so elaborately stated, by
some of the most charming voices in our culture, that they seem
rather like controls. Such are the contrarieties of a revolutionary
epoch. No one knows the internal voice, or external look, of the new
devices of control and release that will succeed our failing ones.
That even Freud expected them indicates the hold of the inherited
configuration of culture over even the most radically enquiring
minds.
On
the other hand, a heavily remissive psychotherapy may become a
permanent institutional fixture of modern culture – a kind of
secular methodism for those who remain obstinately uncomfortable in
their pleasures. Structurally induced conditions, such as the decline
of an ethic of work, may, like individual neuroses, seek their own
pathological resolution. The new saving symbolic may never arrive,
although from time to time, in various places, its arrival has been
announced and new remissions experimentally tried. What appears now
fairly certain is that the control-release system inherited from an
older, mainly agrarian, culture into our technologically advanced,
urban one cannot renew itself. Whether or not an innovation will
occur is likely to be determined by the requirements of affluence
accumulating in the hands of the therapeutic himself. With their
secondary needs automatically satisfied, men may no longer need to
have something in common, as an end, to love. The organisation of
indifference may well succeed the organisation of love, producing a
culture at lower cost to individual energies. Indeed, by this
reorganisation the interior life would cease to press its sickening
claim to superiority.
The
strange new lesson we have begun to learn in our time is how not to
pay the high personal cost of social organisation. The revolution
continues in a remissive direction, beyond that rationalism Max Weber
called “disenchantment,” toward the dissolution of old systems or
moral demand, with their requirements of almost total social
co-operation in order to survive hard reality in a world
characterised by scarcity. The present swing in the direction of
release may not be orbital but more extended and historically more
permanent, based on the automaticity and ease with which an infinity
of created needs can now be satisfied.
Remissive
motifs other than sexual have dominated earlier phases of the
psychohistorical process, expressing the ideological breakup of great
communities, but always at the same time preparing the ground for
fresh internalisations of control. But the modern cultural revolution
has built into itself a unique prophylaxis: it is deliberately not in
the name of any new order of communal purpose that it is taking
place. On the contrary, this revolution is being fought for a
permanent disestablishment of any deeply internalised moral demands,
in a world which can guarantee a plenitude produced without reference
to the rigid maintenance of any particular interdictory (and
counter-interdictory) system. This autonomy has been achieved by
Western man from common and compelling mobilisations of motive.
Stabilising the present polytheism of values, there is the historic
deconversion experience of the therapeutic, proposing an infinity of
means transformed into their own ends.
Interdictory
systems are still deeply rooted within us, of course. A cultural
revolution does not occur as a discernible event, or as a plurality
of events, nor does it occur swiftly within a few years, as does a
political revolution; only afterwards, when the revolution itself has
been incorporated into the new system of controls, do such mythic
condensations of cultural change occur. Moreover, in significant
ways, a cultural revolution may run with or against the indicated
direction of political change. For example, the first Christian
culture revolution accommodated itself from the beginning to the
ruling classes of its time. Christian doctrine began by
distinguishing between culture and politics, concentrating its
efforts at change upon the former, thus preparing a theoretical way
for the Constantinean accommodation.
Cultural
revolution is usually distinguishable from political revolution,
which may assault the social order and leave the moral demand system
fundamentally unaltered. Our
cultural revolution has been made from the top, rather than the
bottom. It is anti-political, a revolution of the rich by which they
have lowered the pressure of inherited communal purpose on
themselves. Seen in this way, the Negro protest
movement in the United States will have to become more profoundly
cultural if it is to succeed politically. Yet the American Negro is
himself limited in his demands by the successful revolution of the
rich. Being an American, the poor Negro believes that he too can live
by bread alone. What the Negro asks, essentially, is a place at the
American trough. But to gain that place, he is constrained to ask for
something more than his share of places. His moralisings become an
embarrassment, for they hint at the acquisition of something greater
than a place in a vaster suburbia.
Indeed,
cultural revolutions before our own have asserted some limit on the
race for status and satisfaction, and have promoted interdicts to
limit and displace the dynamics of acquisitive appetite. Western
culture has been dominated by an ascetic modal personality. Even the
Calvinist bourgeois was to have his capital as if he had it not. Ours
is the first cultural revolution fought to no other purpose than
greater amplitude and richness of living itself. Is this not what is
meant by the “revolution of rising expectations”?
Our
revolution is more Freudian than Marxist, more analytic than polemic,
more cultural than social. There is no reason why, as the reluctant
leader of moral revolutionaries, Freud should have threatened the
social order. Of course, he knew that a revolution, to be thorough,
must transform the property relations in society. Nevertheless, his
diagnosis of our “communal neurosis” takes no account of property
relations. Culture, not the social order, takes the point of Freud's
analytic attack, as it does of Jung's reconstructions in terms of
religious psychology. Attacking the culture, such insights as the
subjects of this volume propose could be adapted as safeguards
against all inherited therapies of commitment. For the culturally
conservative image of the ascetic, enemy of his own needs, there has
been substituted the image of the needy person, permanently engaged
in the task of achieving a gorgeous variety of satisfactions.
What
is the logic of choice by which one symbolic begins to displace
another? How do god-terms change? The present volume is not
meant to be a history of our cultural revolution. That work will have
to be done in monographic bits and pieces. We are too close to the
subject. Moreover, a theory of the psychohistorical process has not
yet been worked out. What has been atttempted here, rather, is a
tentative prospect of the revolution, drawing first some implications
from various attacks on the failing cultural super-ego. Nor is this
meant to be a defence of that inherited culture. Under the
circumstances of a shifting balance of controls and releases, the
classical internalisations of social authority, as an unconscious
conscience, may be indefensible anyway. That is has been so ardently
defended indicates not the ternal necessity of an unconscious
conscience but rather that the initial cost of the modern cultural
revolution has been a feeling of symbolic impoverishment.
The
religiously inclinded therapists are themselves engaged in the absurd
task of trying to teach contented people how discontented they really
are. Many would-be patients are recovering, it seems, from a
pervasive feeling of impoverishment, so emphatically stated in the
literature of the nineteenth century and of the first half of the
twentieth. One main lesson is being more and more widely learned:
that all compelling symbols are dangerous, threatening the combined
comfort of things as they are. Even the religiously inclined grow
more diffuse in their self-demand, praising “faith in life.” And
those without even this general faith – as, for example Samuel
Beckett, with his effort to be an artist working ultimately with a
silent mankind, because the “silent God” has been used up – are
hailed as most religious because they can find nothing to obey or
await. All binding engagements to communal purpose may be considered,
in the wisdom of therapeutic doctrines, too extreme. Precisely this
and no other extreme position is stigmatised as a neurotic approach
to paroxysms of demand for a more fundamental revolutionary dogma. It
is in this sense that the contemporary moral revolution is
anti-political; more precisely, it serves the purposes of the present
anti-politics, representing a calm and profoundly reasonable revolt
of the private man against all doctrinal traditions urging the
salvation of self through identification with the purposes of
community.
In
its reasonableness, the triumph of the therapeutic cannot be viewed
simply as a break with the established order of moral demand, but
rather as a profound effort to end the tyranny of primary group moral
passion (operating first through the family) as the inner dynamic of
social order. Crowded more and more together, we are learning to live
more distantly from one another, in strategically varied and numerous
contacts, rather than in the oppressive warmth of family and a few
friends.
A
culture of contacts is, at last, an historically accomplishable fact.
Everything conceivable can be made universally available. Variety has
become a term of control as well as remission. Confronted with the
irrelevance of ascetic standards of conduct, the social reformer has
retreated from nebulous doctrines attempting to state the desired
quality of life to more substantial doctrines of quantity. The
reformer asks only for more of everything – more goods, more
housing, more leisure; in short, more life. This translation of
quantity into quality states the algebra of our cultural revolution.
Who will be stupid enough to lead a counter-revolution? Surely, even
the rich are now emancipated enough from ascetic symbol systems to
concede more of everything to everyone, without serious loss to
themselves. They cannot be threatened by a doctrine that merely asks
for more, for this presupposes that quantity determines the quality
of life – and this very assumption expresses the religion of the
rich.
To
ever-diminishing restrictive effect, lip service is still being paid
to the ascetic principle that “more” does not translate into
“better”. Nevertheless, our suspicions fade that the quality of
life may not be a synonym for the standard of living, after all. At
least, a high standard of living, in our post-ascetic culture, is
considered the permitting condition for attaining a higher quality of
life. That “more” equals “better” has been an idea supported
by the failure of the Russian revolution to say anything more
original. Carried though it was by the Marxist-Leninist doctrine,
that most recently ascendent variety of the Western commitment
therapy, the Russian revolutionary movement attracted many of the
religious by its promise to change fundamentally the self-serving
character of modern social relations. Militant socialism developed in
its most powerful variety as a secular version of militant
asceticism. Viewed in terms of its
place in the history of culture, the Russian revolution carried a
conservative bias, even in its apparently releasing initial
phase, preaching the ethic of self-salvation through identification
with communal ends in secular terms. The present course of the
Russian Communists appears set toward an ironic convergence of a
culture growing less conservative and politics growing less radical.
An understanding of the dynamics of
such a convergence would illuminate at once the study of both culture
and politics.
Cultural
revolutions may be viewed more as a typical recurrences rather than
as unique occurences. Like a planet, a culture may move around in an
elliptical course, slowly changing its moral direction. In this
classical view, all revolutions are repetitions; certainly, there is
nothing surprising in the advent of a revolution. It is to be
expected, like a change of seasons. But there is another view: that a
culture may reach a definite close. This may well be the closing time
of ascetic culture in the West; releasing modalities have enlarged
their jurisdiction, demobilising moral motivation, opening up
possibilities suppressed during the long tutelary struggle of that
culture against nature. In fact,
Western culture may now be so divorced from nature that revolution
has lost its earlier cyclical implication. A truly unique revolution
would be one that would not generate any compelling therapies of
commitment. In our urban technological culture, it seems both archaic
and dispensable already to organise men into compassionate
communities by what Freud called “erotic illusions.”
Instead, the therapeutic is more adapted to organisation into
administrative units, with what used to be called “indifferentism,”
or, more recently, “nihilism,” as the general rubric describing
social emotion. Not trained in a symbolic of obedience – indeed,
entertaining the category merely as a convenience – Western man
could be free at last from an authority depending upon his sense of
sin. Even now, sin is all but incomprehensible to him inasmuch as the
moral demand system no longer generates powerful inclinations toward
obedience or faith, nor feelings of guilt when those inclinations are
over-ridden by others for which sin is its ancient name.
Compassionate
communities, as distinct from welfare states, exist only where there
is a rich symbolic life, shared, and demanding of the self a hard
line limiting the range of desires. The symbolic impoverishment of
the Western communities cannot be corrected by analysis, nor by
analyses of other analysts. Rather,
the present correction of this impoverishment amounts to an effort to
change the criteria of impoverishment. Perhaps the issue thus
formulated can help us judge more accurately the continuing changes
in the character of our culture.
The
history of a culture – and of its social organisation – may be
written as a dialectic of the shift from evaluative to expressive
symbolisms. Ethical despair becomes, in such a history, a
transitional feeling. Earlier transitions have been felt as painful.
In the degree that an ethos of
control (that is, an evaluative symbolic) loses force, just so does a
pathos of release (that is, an expressive symbolic) revenge itself in
social analogues of individual symptoms. But from the
classical sublimative organisation of motive, our culture has veered
toward an expressive-impulsive organisation. The way in which the
inherited culture was structured by internalised love and
externalised hatred describes the ambivalence in its therapies of
commitment. Opposing commitments depend upon the same dual
therapeutic modes.
Parelleling
those commitments that are the symbolic structure of community is the
social structure. No therapy before the analytic has produced
salvations or cures except through a social system penetrated by
organisational commitments – these commitments legitimising the
order of vocation and personal relation from which the sense of
community is derived. We are privileged to be partipant observers of
another great experiment by Western humanity upon itself: an atttempt
to build upon the obsolescence of both love and hatred as organising
modes of personality.
In
every vital community there has been a cultural elite, sometimes
distinct from political or social elites, carrying doctrines of
communal purpose as its motivating characteristic. The test
for the cultural elite has been its capacity to express, in a
symptomatic language of faith, the self-effacing moral demands.
Western society nowadays scarcely even pretends to produce a cultural
elite in the sense indicated; it boasts many highly educated and
gifted people, but none are therapists of commitment.11 No
successor therapists to the religious professionals have emerged. It
is conceivable that therapists of commitment grow less and less
necessary to the imaginations modern men have of each other.
A
cultural elite may have either a critical or supporting relation to
the upper classes, politically or economically defined; historically,
that relation has been supporting in the main. By “cultural elite”
are not meant intellectuals, necessarily; rather, such an elite may
be either anti-intellectual or fiercely intellectual, aesthetically
sophisticated or hostile to the arts. The significance of these or
other characteristics can only be established when the contents of
the moral demands shaping the elite's general plan of life and its
impress upon the social class structure have been studied. That
intimate connections develop between social classes (that is,
aggregates defined in terms of property and status), on the one hand,
and culture classes (that is, aggregates defined in terms of moral
demand), on the other, has been a proposition accepted in general by
liberals and conservatives alike, as well as by democratic and
aristocratic theorists. It is characteristic of power to be
associated with culture. To rule is to become exemplary or, at least,
to sponsor cadres practicing the praise of rulers as far as decorum,
in that culture, would allow.
Yet,
there have been periods in history when a cultural elite, opposing
refinement with aesthetically coarse moral demands, has risen in
critical passion from both the lower social orders and from
disaffected members of the higher.12 Culture in its
primary sense, a moral demand system, is not the equivalent of a
technical education or of aesthetic refinement. To take yet another
step in the development of this historical perspective: Culture
classes have been ambivalently related to social classes throughout
history. The upper social classes
rarely preserve a strict moral demand system. Associated with
them, an elite culture class grows less distinct. Moral reform, no
less than social, must push up from below. Even in Nietzsche's
pejorative variation on this theory, the dialectic holds: the
cultivated, with their high arts and literature, are too comfortable
to deploy righteous indignation; and the lowly are sunk too far into
their peculiar resorts of comfort. Moralising belongs to the
ambitious middle range of the Western social structure, if it may be
properly located anywhere at all. But the proper locus is more
ideological than structural, it seems. Not class position but creedal
preoccupation, as an alternative to refinement and aesthetic
perception, is the driving force of moralising movements. In all the
writings of Calvin there is scarcely a reference to the beauty of the
landscape surrounding Geneva. He was far too busy regulating the
manners of Genevans, including the exact length of the ladies'
skirts.
That
social and culture classes may be ambivalently related is, of course,
an empirical generalisation, and thus subject to a run through the
gauntlet of historical objections. But, until practically our own
time, this generalisation can be substantiated over and over again.
Some evidence of sustained opposition between social classes and
culture classes may be sited.
In
the seventeenth century, some artisans and sections of the lower
middle social classes in Western Europe developed powerful motifs of
control, complete with normative institutional modes for exercising
those controls, as in the case of the English Puritans or the Dutch
bibliolaters. The leadership of these movements entertained the
ambition of a cultural elite, offering their resolutions of ambiguous
moralities as fresh options for the organising of consensus. On the
other hand, at times a group or movement competing for elite status
would withdraw from the struggle to alter the culture system, so as
to maintain the purity of the moral demand for itself alone. This
describes the basic difference between sects of withdrawal and sects
of militancy in Western cultural history. Yet even sects of
withdrawal may preserve a certain militancy and aspirations of
catholicity. By maintaining their community as a whole as an
exemplary institutional embodiment of their proclaimed moral demand
system, the withdrawn sect would preach a prescriptive remedial
lesson to the society external to it; this society is treated
pejoratively as “the World”, an immoral system of remisssions, as
opposed to the correct conduct of life.
So
far as it offers counter-interdicts, aiming first at release from (or
radical reform of) the established moral demands, a challenging
elite13 appears deviant or even downright immoral to the
cultural establishment which is carrying out the maintenance
functions of the dominant demand system incorporating the official
scientific wisdom of the period. Yet, by offering modes of release, a
challenging cultural elite may become the spiritual preceptor of the
moral demand system that is thus being born. There is a hint of this
ambition in Freud, when he proffered, as a successor to both the
established psychiatrists and to the pastors of the older
dispensation, the psychoanalyst in the role of “secular spiritual
guide”.
Who
are those who now are spiritual preceptors? The affluent and powerful
often have not been the morally supportive class. What happens if an
entire society grows rich, technologically loaded with bribes, and is
dominated by preoccupations that may be best defined as anti-creedal?
What cadres offer a powerful rationale of abandonment of the
disintegrating cultural super-ego?
Certainly,
Freud hoped the psychoanalyst would be the one to have some
legitimate claim to spiritual preception. Yet Freud was reluctant to
tamper radically with the cultural super-ego. As we have seen,14
his orthodox successors have become even more strictly
client-centred.
In
the sequence of Western spiritual preceptors, the psychotherapist
came before the professional revolutionary. Committed Communists
claimed they possessed a spiritual perception that was in fact the
propaedeutic necessary to the creation of a new moral order. And
before the Communists, there were, of course, the Christians. Indeed,
the entire effort of Christian socialism can be best explained as an
attempt to renew the spiritual perceptions of the Christian doctrine
by tranfusions from outside – from a competing and hostile therapy
of commitment. The tragicomic fate of Christian socialism was that it
became more aesthetic than ascetic. In another respect, the failure
of Christianity resembles that of Communism: both have been wrecked
by success; neither could resist incorporation into social orders
that were partly their own creation. In the doctrine of the Church,
however, Christianity still preserved its capacity for spiritual
perception. That the Church is, supposedly, in but
not wholly of this world supplied a critical principle of renewal
which is basic to all Christian therapies of commitment. The Church,
as an institution, is vital only inasmuch as its symbolic is detached
from the established social order, thus preserving its capacity for
being the guardian critic of our inherited moral demand system.
The
Leninist doctrine of the Party maintained no doctrinal reserve about
the social order, over which it developed a stewardship in theory and
practice more complete than that ever claimed or practiced by the
churches. No director of the faith has proved less perceptive
spiritually than the professional revolutionary turned Party
functionary. Having lost the nimbus of resistance to the precedent
social order, he
operates more in terms of bureaucratic self-interest than in those of
communal purpose. More
precisely, Party interest becomes identical with communal purpose.
The Gletkins have no gods, and usually cannot be driven therefore to
personal despair by a Party which devours its own members. For those
in search of new gods, after 1914-1919, the attractive pull of the
professional revolutionary was accounted for, probably, by a residue
of his earlier charisma as a spiritual preceptor proposing, in his
political acts and thought, a new moral order. Nowadays, that
charisma is rarely to be found, because the Communist moral order
appears anything but new. As a Party functionary, the Western or
Russian Communist no longer represents a cultural elite.
Nevertheless, the Marxist political functionary remains culturally
conservative – he is a
“Hebraist”, as compared with the “Hellenes” that dominate the
national politics of the West.
There
persists a revolutionary impulse throughout the West; but it is
cultural rather than political, and therefore more difficult to
describe than the political revolutions of the East. That
revolutionary impulse is in evidence not only in the writings of
those specimen therapeutics examined in preceding chapters but in the
writings and conversations of significant numbers of the educated.
One British technologist has enunciated the doctrine of the
therapeutic in a language so simple and clear that it is well worth
while to quote him at length, to stand for countless other utterances
heard and read: “Any religious exercise is justified only by being
something men do for themselves, that is, for the enrichment of their
own experience.” Attached as he is to the word “Christian,” the
writer even seeks to make Jesus out to be a therapeutic, as Lawrence
and Reich did before him. “Jesus,” we learn, “used the word
'God' to . . . refer to the vital energy of personal life itself,
the energy of love.” Living in a culture no longer religious,
“people who centre their lives on ritual, sacrament, and constant
reference to some supposed plan underlying experience are just as cut
off from vital personal contact with others . . . as is the
individual neurotic.” The technical psychological term, this writer
concludes, following Freud, for “such a way of living,” carried
over from the previous culture, is “paranoid fantasy-obsession.”
What,
then, should churchmen do? The answer returns clearly: become,
avowedly, therapists, administering a therapeutic institution –
under the justificatory mandate that Jesus himself was the first
therapeutic. For the
next culture needs therapeutic institutions. “Society as a whole
needs patterns of community life which will help ordinary people to
fulfill themselves in much the same sort of way that psychiatrists
help those who are specially troubled. Building up such community
life would surely be a directly Christian activity, in my sense; but
the training for those who are needed for it would be rather
different from any sort of training clergy at present receive.” The
writer understands that churchmen will be able to become professional
therapeutics “only if they break away radically from almost all, if
not all, of their traditional religious pursuits.” Here speaks the
therapeutic, calmly confident that community life no longer needs
“some supposed plan underlying experience,” that is, no longer
needs doctrinal integrations of self into communal purposes,
elaborated, heretofore, precisely through such “supposed plans.”
It is in “traditional religious puruits” that such plans are
reinforced and the self integrated into a saving corporate purpose.
Without such incorporating plans, the self has found fulfillment in
an even more elusive condition.
Both
East and West are now committed, culturally as well as economically,
to the gospel of self-fulfillment. Yet
neither the American nor the Russian translations of the gospel can
be transformed into a spiritual perception. Both the United
States and the Soviet Union are cultures of the new-rich – the
United States, perhaps, even more so that the Soviet Union. Though it
has begun to catch up culturally, the Soviet Union remains the more
conservative system, with the Party, directly descended from the
Church, striving to maintain a doctrine which asserts, at once, its
social viability and truth. The Communist therapy of commitment must
contend precisely with the new-rich of its own creation. In the
United States, the rich have already adopted, it appears, the
character structure of the therapeutic. No exemplary social stratum,
above, restrains its elaborate and infinite sense of personal need.
On the contrary, the Soviet Union and the United States are engaged
in a common race to appeal to, and increase, the new-rich.
The
leisured, or non-working, classes are the main resource from which
the therapeutic, as a character type, is drawn. Emancipated
from an ethic of hard work, Americans have grown morally less
self-demanding. They have been released from the old system of
self-demands by a convergence of doctrines that do not resort to new
restrictions but rather propose jointly the superiority of all that
money can buy, technology can make, and science can conceive.
Certain
naïve ascetic doctrines, which once did contain spiritual
perceptions of great depth, such as that of holy poverty, now
embarrass the churches, competing as they do for pride of place in a
culture of affluence. Such perceptions are practically taboo
subjects, specially among Americans, except negatively, when
clergymen complain that they do not receive salaries commensurate
with their status as professional men. Nor does the present ferment
in the Roman Catholic Church seem so much like a renewal of spiritual
perception as a move toward more sophisticated accommodations with
the negative communities of the therapeutics. Grudgingly, the Roman
churchmen must give way to their Western laity and translate their
sacramental rituals into comprehensible terms as therapeutic devices,
retaining just enough archaism to satisfy at once the romantic
interest of women and the sophisticated interest of those historical
pietists for whom the antique alone carries that lovely dark patina
they call faith.
The
religious psychologies of release and the social technologies of
affluence do not go beyond release and affluence to a fresh
imposition of restrictive demands. This describes, in a sentence, the
cultural revolution of our time. The old culture of denial has become
irrelevant as a manipulable experience to a world of infinite
abundance and reality. Carrying along inapplicable residues of
“mystery” culture into the present scientific one, the ascetic
labors in vain before the triumphant therapeutic to define a positive
spiritual perception – except rejection of the therapeutic ethos.
On the other hand, the therapeutic has arisen out of a rejection of
all therapies of commitment, precisely by persuading halfway the
recalcitrant among those who submitted to the old commitment
therapies that hey have acted out denials of knowledge and pleasure
that not longer contribute to their spiritual health but, rather, to
their mental dis-ease. So
recently deconverted, the once-committed is unlikely to preach
seriously against himself, except in terms of a historical drama, so
that the therapeutic may enjoy his triumph. The
obsolescent old-model man, representing a dying culture of scarce
goods and absent gods, is losing popularity, even as a subject of
didactic art. Ingmar Bergman's tormented souls are a bore, even more
so that Antonini's; at least the movie-Italians have progressed
beyond the fantasy-obsessions of a disintegrating moral demand system
for which Bergman has developed his image of the “spider-God.”
The anxieties of the ascetic were fit subjects for the art of, say,
William Hale White, or George Eliot. The boredom of the therapeutic
fascinates Antonini, Fellini, and the nouvelle vague –
because they cannot escape the dying clutch of the old culture.
American novels still agonise about pleasure as a way of life – but
it is the agonising, not the pleasure, which seems fraudulent.
In
summary, each major contending cadre requires analysis in terms of
its relation to contemporary character ideals. The deconverted is
affected as much as the recalcitrant by the withdrawal of motive from
economic and political life as the permitting condition of any
spiritual perception that may develop to alter, toward a more
operable imbalance, the present balance of controls and remissions.
Thus far, no fresh carriers of a renunciatory symbolic have appeared
able to establish themselves as serious claimants to a cultural elite
status in Western society. Such a claimant may appear tomorrow, to
capture the public modes of obedience; the dynamics of modern
culture, however, militate against this possibility. There can
develop no new (or renewed) system of interdicts from the therapeutic
parody of a moral demand system; in consequence , all attempts at
connecting the doctrines of psychotherapy with the old faiths are
patently misconceived. At its most innocuous, these psychotherapeutic
religiosities represent a failure of nerve by both psychotherapists
and clergymen.17
Finally, the
professionally religious custodians of the old moral demands are no
longer authoritative; although they still use languages of faith,
that mode of moral communication has lost its ties with either the
controls or the remissions valid among their adherents; preaching,
which once communicated revelatory messages, is a dead art, wrapping
empty packages in elaborate solecisms. The preachers have little of
either controlling or releasing functions and retain therefore little
power seriously to affect or alter the emergent control system. It is
in this sense that the Christian and Jewish professionals have lost
their spiritual preceptorships. Any
functional equivalents to the old internal interdicts, whatever they
may be, struggling to stabilise themselves and as yet without
institutional conveyances, take on meaning insofar as they prove
capable of providing a trained prudence to the therapeutic, anxious
to increase his psychological capital without incurring dangerous
risks. 18
After
the clergy, the political revolutionaries, and the psychoanalysts –
there remain the artists and the scientists, as serious aspirants to
the title of secular pastoral guide.
The
scientists are a curious case. By tradition and training they are
intractably modest. Claims to spiritual perception rarely occur
explicitly in their work. Profoundly as that work has affected modern
culture, the scientists have been non-combatants in the culture class
war. With rare exceptions, they still accept the Ritschlian
distinction between statements of fact and judgments of value. They
make fact statements; the task of making value judgments belongs to
other specialists, those elites that won exclusive custody over
culture even as they gave up pretending they had authoritative
knowledge of nature.
Notice
the context within which Albrecht Ritschl, following Kant, had made
his famous distinction. In Ritschlian theory, value judgments can
only be made in reference to a communal perspective. According to
Ritschl, Christian perceptions make sense only within the framework
of a historic Christian community. The modern scientist has had quite
another conception of himself; qua scientist,
he has tried to extricate himself from all moral demands except those
imposed upon him by the internal logic of his transformative endeavor
directed against the natural world, all designed to overcome those
gross miseries and necessities nature imposes upon mankind. The
scientific community aspires to be supra-cultural, and is not
qualified therefore to supply a creedal dynamic to that new laity,
the non-scientists. In this sense, the scientific endeavor in its
entirety, representing as it does the effort to create a non-moral
culture, embodies the moral revolution. With a commitment that is
strictly vocational, the scientist personifies the latest phase in
the Western psycho-historical process, one that refrains from laying
down guidelines of moral intervention for the society as a whole.
Whatever his professed intention, the scientist acts, therefore, as a
spiritual preceptor to modern man. The therapeutic has everything –
and nothing – to learn from the scientist, for in the established
sense of the word, the scientist, as such has no culture.19
The
modern artist, too, has had the role of a spiritual preceptor thrust
upon him. And, indeed, because modern artists move in the direction
of release, there is a religious pretension inherent in the work of
the moderns, reacting as they do to a situation in which nature has
been taken out of their purview by science and technology. They have
deliberately created alternative rea
lities
to those put in jeopardy by science. The inherent interest of modern
art is not chiefly in experimenting with the representation of some
microscopic reality, or in some correspondence with a presumed
macrocosm, but, more importantly, in the production of a picture that
would suggest, within its frame, the multiple and alternative
realities through which the modern may enliven an existence divorced
from both nature and faith. The artist represents what we are trying
to become, the shape we are trying to take in our effort to escape
the pressures of timeworn inwardness while also escaping the bondage
of new internalities. It is for his professional effort at unfixed
externalisations, valid first to his own psychological economy, that
the modern artist has been handed a spiritual preceptorship. By
exploring the range of presentable realities, quite apart from the
“natural” or the “socially acceptable,” the modern artist has
broken his vocational connection with moral demand systems, beginning
with that of the middle classes. In achieving an impersonality no
less impressive than that achieved by modern science, painting, in
particular, augured the emancipation from the classical moral demand
system, rejecting the person as
an object of aesthetic interest and concentrating on the
self-fulfilling function of the work of art itself. Thus the art work
has become, in a strict sense, a therapeutic mode.
To
this quality of impersonality in our future togetherness, reference
was made repeatedly, throughout the present volume, beginning with
the Introduction. Freud had proposed this rejection of attachment to
an inner experience no less than Lawrence. The latter wrongly accused
Freud of encouraging a new outbreak of that sickly modern religiosity
by which modern men turn further in upon themselves, either under the
cover of Christian psychologising or under that of humanism. This
further turning in is precisely the opposite of what the present
volume intends to convey by the therapeutic. His sense of well-being
operates under the aegis of a technology aimed ultimately at his own
emotions, so as to destroy the tension between the inner and outer
life.
If
yesterday's analytic thrust is to become part of tomorrow's cultural
super-ego, it must take on an institutional form, defend itself not
only as true but also as good and dig into personality as a demand
system. Yet it is precisely this that the new arts and social
sciences, in their very nature, cannot accomplish. They cannot create
the ardent imaginations necessary to the forming of new communities;
although they may prepare the way for a new public mode of existence,
for the present they make life all the more private. Like the old
cultural super-ego, the negative communities of the next culture, so
far as we can discern them in this respect, rarely utter hosannas;
therapeutics, not yet settled in their mode, speak to each other
mainly in harsh tones. Our spiritual preceptors practice their
unkindnesses upon each other. A spiritual perception must have built
into its releasing insight a vision of new stability, a promise of
some settling pattern or supposed plan, and not merely the energy to
reject the prevailing cultural super-ego; that latter sort of wisdom
comes more and more “naturally” in contemporary culture. The “id”
has always had the “energy”; the cultural “super-ego” has
aged into a fussy critic of the energetic. This moral revolution is
occurring by default, not so much under the leadership of id-energy
doctrines as under the bankruptcy of super-ego energies. It is the
importance of the cultural super-ego rather than the potency of the
id that is the crucial fact of our time. For this reason, however,
“nothing” can succeed the imperative mood – nothing except the
therapeutic mood itself.
Historically
the Christian spiritual perception, which had attacked the
established moral demands of its time, took on an institutional form,
and, moreover, had a revolutionary effect on some aspects of the
social system – for example, on the status of women. At the same
time, the Church was incorporated into the social system and
survived, powerful and yet defeated in its ideal intention by that
very incorporation. Something similar may happen to the present
revolutionary effort to transform the culture. Psychotherapy
may be arrested at its present stage by a reconciliation with
contemporary remissive religiosity, sanctioned mainly as a
post-religious science of moral management. This seems to be the
present state of psychotherapy in America.
There
is ambiguity in the very function of psychothereapy as the chief
among those arts interpreting the deconversion experience of Western
man to himself. To investigate all instances of failed mastery of
moral energy raises the possibility of controlling the moralising
process itself. Among those who followed Freud were some more willing
to entertain the possibility of such moral revolution. The range and
quality of these varying theories, Jung's included, cannot be easily
dismissed. Each constructed an explicit doctrine of release from the
failing old controls upon some aspect or other of their intellectual
encounter with Freud. None worked out the doctrine consequentially
enough to become founder of a new dispensation.
At
this time, cultural revolutionaries can be described mainly in terms
of their ideas about the culture against which they are reacting.
Revolutions have been known to press in either direction, toward
control or release. Most revolutions restore an imbalance of controls
and releases at a new point. It is a telling indication of Freud's
own ambivalence that the revolutionaries who most interested him were
the great protagonists of control, not of release. Freud's
revolutionary attack on the European Christian culture as a system of
moral demands makes more sense, however, when understood in the
context of his larger theory of the dynamics of culture as a system
of unwitting renunciations. Seen thus, his therapeutic interest is
revolutionary, a tremendous argument for expressive remissions from
failed controls, restabilising the moral demands that are culture at
a fresh locus of imbalance between controls and remissions. In this
aspect, Freud represents the climax of the nineteenth-century
tradition of scientific prophecy as a functional substitute for
religious prophecy. His was the subtle climax of a rationalism in
which a more modest moral demand system could use a prophylactic
analysis intended to prevent an oppressive elaboration of those
controls, which are always irrational precisely in their
destructively reactive production of counter-imbalancing (that is,
neurotic) remissions. Freud's analytic intricacies thrust the culture
toward an apparent simplicity of controls, while elaborating the
range of remissions., thus exactly reversing the normative order.
Proscriptive symbols give way to prudential ones' but the prudent man
cannot, as Freud thought, take his morality for granted – for that
security derives from the proscriptive dynamics upon which he had
trained his great analytic weaponry. What is moral is not
“self-evident”, as Freud declared in a letter to James
Putnam. What is moral becomes and remains self-evidently only within
a powerful and deeply compelling system of culture.
The
new releasing insights deserve only a little less respect than the
old controlling ones*. One may expect official clamour for a renewal
of the old demand system, which may well have no further plans of
self-integration, but function instead to disguise a terrifying
ignorance of the distinction between our present inwardness and
ancient faith. The therapeutics must be understood precisely in their
efforts to go beyond the analytic attitude, as the articulate
representatives of a sharp and probably irreparable break in the
continuity of the Western culture. None of their doctrines promises
an authentic therapy of commitment to communal purpose; rather, in
each the commitment is to the therapeutic effort itself. As Jung
insisted, the therapeutic cannot claim more than a private value for
his moral science. The therapy of all therapies is not to attach
oneself exclusively to any particular therapy, so that no illusion
may survive of some end beyond an intensely private sense of
well-being to be generated in the living of life itself. That a sense of well-being has become the end, rather than a by-product of striving
after some superior communal end, announces a fundamental change of
focus in the entire cast of our culture – toward a human condition
about which there will be nothing further to say in terms of the old
style of despair and hope.
Notes
1.
That he tried seriously and with high artistry to clarify a
post-Christian symbolic that could combat the emergent anti-culture,
measures the great contemporary importance of Albert Camus as a
writer. Camus accepted the possibility that spiritual preceptorship
in modern culture had fallen to the literary intellectual. Without a
language of faith, Camus wrote in a mood far more “conservative”
than that of many advanced and enlightened Christians, who have a
genius for accepting almost any position, so to say, that is grossly
anti-Christian or simply vulgar – especially in sex and art. On
sexual life, Camus wrote, in his Notebooks, that it “was
given to man, perhaps, to turn him aside from his true path. It is
his opium. In it everything goes to sleep. Outside it things take on
life again. At the same chastity puts an end to the species which is,
perhaps, the truth. Sexuality leads to nothing. It is not immoral,
but it is unproductive. One can give oneself to it for a time when
one does not wish to produce. But chastity alone is connected with
personal progress. There is a time when sexuality is a victory –
when it is released from moral imperatives. But it quickly becomes a
defeat afterwards – and the only victory is won over it in its
turn: that is chastity.” On poverty, Camus is nearer the classical
tradition than the modern therapeutic. “What can a man better
desire than poverty? I have not said misery nor the hopeless toil of
the modern proletariat. But I do not see what more can be desired
than poverty linked with an active leisure.” (See “A Writer's
Notebook,” Encounter, Vol. 24, No. 3, March, 1965, pp 28-29)
posted by martin at March 26, 2017
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home