Therapy as radical politics? On the "revolutionary" liberalism of Tikkun magazine

Social injustices, it is sometimes thought, including economic equality, are caused, or at least sustained, by mental illness. Thus, a radical left politics should based itself on ideas of psychotherapy.

Does this make good sense? This is the standpoint of Berkeley-based Tikkun magazine, which has long sought to be the liberal equivalent of Commentary magazine, which is neoconservative. Gloria Steinem of Ms. magazine, one of America’s most renowned feminists, praises Lerner’s new book, Revolutionary Love, for advocating ‘feminine’ values as a basis of a politics. Lerner is inspired, like many Jews, by the Prophetic teachings about social justice, but with this shift: injustice does not stem from an inadequate relationship to God, but to the psychological malaises that ultimately are caused by the traumatic character of inadequate parental love. Lerner therefore wants to build a new society based on compassion.

The problem with claims of this sort is less that they are wrong than inadequate. It is easy to see their sense from a religious point of view, as it typically is psychologizing. But it leaves something out. Modern industrial capitalist societies saw the introduction of forms of thinking that aim at understanding and changing the society, but in ways that, and this was an historical novelty, do not reduce to individual sin. (I think we can assume that in a psychological theory of the basis of injustice, sin ultimately does reduce to mental illness.). Not just sociology as a science, but social theory as a preoccupation of philosophy beginning with Hegel and Marx, and shifts in the worlds of literature and art towards the societal and political more than than the individual and ethical.

This is certainly germane when talking about race. The biggest problem that blacks and poor people face in our society today is, and here I know that Lerner et al. largely agree, is capitalism. But in the Marxist and other traditions that developed out of European (and often Jewish) philosophical thought, social institutions, and the practices and discourses that are part of them, have an autonomy vis-à-vis the psychological, reduction to which should be avoided as a matter of principle. If your boss or landlord exploits you, which they do if they are bosses and don’t want to go out of business, the reason is not that he or she or the people who run their company are unkind because of narcissistic wounds or unmastered past psychical trauma, any more than that do not sufficiently honor and love God. The reason is that they are capitalists acting in their own self-interest. Would-be striking workers and tenants often do not readily grasp this, thinking instead that they are only striking to get fairer treatment, and if the boss is their neighbor and they like him, thinking of him or her as a good person, which they might even be, then they are hesitant to go on strike, even though by doing so they act in their own best interests just as the capitalist almost always does. Moral criticisms therefore, as Marx clearly saw for the first time, don’t really work. It was in this that in Europe religion and politics most definitively separated, at the same time that a theatrical paradigm based on knowledge and politics modeled as representation was replaced by what Jacques Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of art and politics, which identified as its object forms of life manifest in the ‘distribution of the sensible’. I submit that modern society and its problems cannot be understood if one starts out by performing a psychological reduction. But Lerner and his colleagues apparently do not see things this way:

“As Tikkun editor-at-large Peter Gabel puts it, racism and other forms of “othering” allow people to develop a “false self” in which they imagine themselves as worthy and powerful through seeing themselves as members of an idealized “white race” that provides them with a substitute sense of worth and value covering over their inner emptiness and sense of valuelessness.”

This is to say that—since, as a premise, social injustice must be caused by individual morality— ‘structural racism’ is caused by the bad attitudes and prejudices of white people, most, all, or too many of whom are racist because they have attitudes that amount to and derive from — what ultimately must just be called — mental illness. In the instance, theorized through psychoanalytic theorist Donald Winnicott’s notion of a ‘false self’. Which perhaps helps explain some but not all psychological disturbances. At any event, racism reduces to mental illness among whites , mental illness is associated with sin and crime (injustice considered as an act perpetrated by individuals), since sin is reduced to mental illness, just as social injustice generally reduces to mental illness. (Though it must be added that, in the new medical system of governance that has replaced religion and as its secularized form, victims as well as perpetrators are ‘sick’, this is the key innovation vis-à-vis religion, which is an antinomy about moral responsibility.) So what is the cure?

The cure must include:
1) Suspecting most individual ‘white’ people of racist attitudes, on which economic and other problems are blamed. (This is the theory of ‘white supremacy’).
2) We need (even) more mental health treatments, since so many people in our society must be mentally sick.

We might add that a radical politics would be based not or not only on changing institutions and social systems that work badly for many people (maybe ultimately for most or all of us), but primarily on a merely ethical principle, to love the neighbor as yourself. I think that when politics reduces to the psychological, it reduces to individual ethics. In social theory, this is the psychological reduction. An enduring problem in that field is how to link agency and systems, when both seem partly autonomous of the other.

But some major politicians are inclined to agree with Lerner. One of them is Joe Biden, who said in the first debate (emphasis mine):

“The fact is that there is racial insensitivity. People have to be made aware of what other people feel like, what insults them, what is demeaning to them. It’s important people know. Many people don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings, but it makes a big difference. It makes a gigantic difference in the way a child is able to grow up and have a sense of self-esteem. It’s a little bit like how this guy and his friends look down on so many people. They look down their nose on people like Irish Catholics, like me, who grow up in Scranton. They look down on people who don’t have money. They look down on people who are of a different faith. They looked down on people who are a different color.”

One way of looking at Tikkun’s perspective is to note that a normatively feminine ethics, which would be in part maternal, will think of the magazine’s eponymous referent, the famous Jewish concept of ‘tikkun olam’ as not or not only perfecting the world but healing it. And yet healing and health are conservative notions. They aim to restore a status quo ante. This reproach can be made of the older, humanistic psychotherapies associated with approaches to that field like Lerner’s.

The problem is: we already have this. Our society has seen the massive hypertrophy of both mental health treatments and ideologies associated with them.

Lerner’s view of ideology is rather simple, and rests on humanist assumptions shared by many Marxists before the 1960s. The idea is that ideology being false consciousness by definition, people believe in notions that are false for reasons that have to do with their unmet emotional need for empathy from others and the psychological defenses that result from denying this. In Lerner’s original sin is families that do not care for their children in good enough ways, with the consequence that the kids will be unhappy as adults and be at risk, such that they either do bad things or bad things happen to them (in the therapeutic regime, which is generally one of no-fault correctional treatments, whether inclusionary or exclusionary, or both, these are aspects of the same problem.).

Such people then feel ‘spiritually’ empty, as people are said to be who suffer from ‘narcsissistic wounds’, and false beliefs accrue to them because they give them something to hold onto. This is not authentic, and one can wonder what might be? Back in the 70s, when the kind of humanistic psychology that Lerner champions was big, there were many people wondering that. Some even thought you should “get in touch with your feelings” by just having a big scream. Humanistic psychology eventually went out of fashion. Freudian remnants flourished in France and among academics in the humanities influences, as I was, by developments there in the world of ideas. Therapists in America are outside European styles of thinking, which they would consider abstract and ‘intellectualizing’ (and so inauthentic), rather than evoking ‘emotional intelligence’ centered on affect. In this country, Freudian psychoanalysis was reduced to the ‘cognitive therapy’ that amounts to controlling negative thoughts so that. you don’t feel too discontented; the watchword is catastrophe, and the governing idea is that nothing is ever really that bad. Most relatively young Americans now seem to understand that they have some ‘problems in living’ and other difficulties, and the solution is some combination of medications and talking to an expert who tells you what your experience means and coaches you in how to think properly according the corporate business-based norms assigned people in their practice. What no one is asked to do, unless they are an artist, is to think about and respond to the world they live in, not merely, and maybe not at all, adjusting themselves to it.

One way of looking at Tikkun’s perspective is to note that a normatively feminine ethics, which would be in part maternal, will think of the magazine’s eponymous referent, the famous Jewish concept of ‘tikkun olam’ as not or not only perfecting the world but healing it. And yet healing and health are conservative notions. They aim to restore a status quo ante. This reproach can be made of the older, humanistic psychotherapies associated with approaches to that field like Lerner’s.

Yes, ideologies can kill, and often have. But are they reducible to psychical disturbances that call for treatments by doctors and therapists? Many have thought so, including the two leading thinkers in postwar American psychoanalysis, Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg, both of whom were refugees from Hitler’s Europe who thought psychoanalysis can prevent future holocausts. But what about Max Horkheimer’s observation: “Whoever will not speak of capitalism cannot speak of fascism.” Like colonialism, it did not result merely from greed and hubris. One reason history and social theory and science exist is to try to explain social realities, not entirely good, that are not explicable merely through sin. This is why Prophecy in Judaism only last about 200 years. Neither Torah and Prophets, nor the Gospels or any other “spiritual’ body of wisdom and divine truth or whatever, will suffice to give us a political theory and practice today that will help us humans move forward. It is commonplace that Hitler was a madman full of hate, but the Shoah had other causes besides just hatred, unfortunately. Bad things happen in history not only because good people do not act when they should, but also because good people act nobly but make mistakes, because their theories are inadequate to explain the current situation and what can be done to improve it.

As I have argued elsewhere, health and mental illness were great preoccupations of the Third Reich. This already should make it suspect, just as the many things our liberal parliamentary capitalist police state societies have in common with the classical fascist ones should. These include a massive prison system, and a health care system that makes a God of the propriety of a well-managed body that is ‘health’, and that, along with various neocolonial and other practices, sustains a world in which many millions of people, maybe most of us ultimately, enjoy and do a fraction of what we could, if the system were organized for people’s needs rather than technological productivity, military discipline, and profit. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and England, and America in our time are all forms of modern industrial societies based on technological productivity, authoritarian governance, and the pursuit and enjoyment of wealth and power. In this sense, they are forms of the same paradigm. Much, maybe most, of this, has criticizable individual forms that amount to illnesses or ‘disorders’ of the self or personality. But not all. Capitalism, colonialism, prisons and hospitals, schools as factories for producing docile workers, and other things, who is the responsible agent on whom they can be blamed, and who should be punished or engage in a work of moral auto-correction? Tell me who is the causal agent behind capitalism and slavery and let’s go and arraign that man or woman, or the several persons so identifiably guilty. The very thought of this reveals its absurdity. Politics in the modern world is not about the doings of princes and the moral criticism of them when they are foolish or tyrannical. Modern society is organized by large economic and social systems, and those are the proper objects of critique. There is nothing specific to individuals in a society that is not also part of it, and nothing about it than does not show up as, or cause or correspond with as commonly caused, characteristics of individuals. But they cannot be reduced to that either. So we have things like institutional forms, practices, and discourses, which are different from actions and statements or beliefs, in being systemic and not individual.

One of the dominant practices is that of medical psychology and its uses in the management of populations. It has grown in scope while criticisms of it, once common, have become rarer, as the common opinion is that most people in societies like ours, or many at any rate, and oneself quite probably, have moral, intellectual, affective, or psychological ailments that account for much or most of what might instead be called the social dysfunctions that show up also as individual disaffections. That many people are mentally ill, that this is the cause of great social problems, and they all need the best or right treatments, and this need not be voluntary — all of this is the commonly held opinion of the majority today. It is sustained by all kinds of ideological means including stories in daily newspapers.

The medical health and sickness industry—which in a sense produces both healthy and sick bodies and minds, and the idea that those who used to be called citizens are subjects of bodily and mental practices or involvements—is a gigantic part of the set of apparatuses that are used to govern more or less all of us, along with social media and the surveillances that are part of them. The Nazis cultivated health and hated illness. They called modernist art “degenerate”— unhealthy. They extolled physical culture and youth gymnastics. They sought to breed a pure race. A set of inclusions and exclusions were involved in doing this, and the war against the Jews was part of it. It also is part of the history of modern nationalist and ideological movements (and the figure of their identification, the Jew in Nazi thinking as such being both a moral or ideological destructive menace and foe, and at the same time a biological category that people were born as — just as the mentally ill or intellectually deficient were; for it was at more or less the same historical moment, in the second half of the 19th century, that Jews were defined for the first time as a race, Blacks were said to have quantifiable quotients of intelligence (the word had meant the ability to understand things) that were innate, homosexuality was made a category of persons and not of behaviors or practices, which meant it could be part of an identity, and in the manner of governments that count their population and seek to maximize its health or well-being), while mental illness and psychiatry, which had been invented earlier, began their hypertrophy up to the present, with psychiatry differing from psychoanalysis in generally considering mental illnesses to be innate biological diseases transmitted, like Jewishness and maybe queerness, in bad genes. Nazism was in a way a culmination of all of these things. It did give rise to and involve particular hatreds, but the ability to hate like that of love are broader and more universal than the kind of hate that a liberal humanist ideology will associate, along with mental illness itself generally, with the unscientific category of evil.

And so, along with the physically handicapped, Gypsies, gays, Communists and other political dissidents, the ‘mentally ill’ largely shared the fate of the Jews. The consequent implication in social practices all too similar to those they were victimized by can place many Jews in an ironic position. Alas, it is so much easier to criticize the existing order of things somehow than to come up with solutions that do not owe too much to it.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has pointed out that many social and governmental practices that were central to Nazism and Fascism are still with us, as they were not overturned after the war. One of them is our mental health system practices, and that they are continuous with the worst uses in Nazism and Stalinism, which routinely treated all political dissidents as mad, calling them anti-social, which means they were removed from society by way of declarations that they had performed this operation on themselves. All of this is still with us.

To be sure, Lerner is on the ‘nurture’ rather than ‘nature’ side of his pursuit of a final solution to the human problem, which obviously is imperfect parenting, or more specifically, lack of perfect mothering. If there is no such thing (quite: obviously, some parents are better than others), then there is a problem. It will manifest itself surely not only in the pursuit of better techniques for treating the emotional damage that some people repeat and reproduce and that is caused by bad parenting, but also in the need for some morals and ethics perhaps, no less than some politics, that must at some point leave therapy behind. This is because the American liberal humanist position in psychotherapy is to offer people with bad childhood families a better one in the accepting and loving therapist — or society.

What I wonder is not whether the objects described as they are within such a theory really exist—in most scientific thinking the objects of the discourse that are part of the paradigm really do exist; the trouble lies elsewhere. It is the question of what is the best way to think of a society with us much unhappiness and injustice as ours. We ought eventually to wonder if we have, most of us, accepted the wrong paradigm of ethics. Ethics is the science or study of forms of life and, normatively, the good life— what it is, and how we can live it. Health as a norm, and sickness as its absence, provides one kind of paradigm in ethics of what it is to live an life, as individuals and/or a community or society. It may not be the best one. To me it too much lacks a future orientation through concepts like invention and creativity. Consider: bodies do have a health or sickness, when in some of their parts they are functioning less optimally than they might. In this respect, organic metaphors differ little from mechanistic ones. But what is the norm of art? It used to be the beautiful; today it is the interesting, and things are interesting or not in light of our concerns and (future-oriented) projects. Medical science will always be improving its maps of the well-functioning body. But there is no medicine or morality for working to change the social world in the direction of possibilities that are expected to be better but cannot be fully brought into view, because they don’t yet exist and so must be created. Art and politics, and philosophy, science, and thinking, no less than love in either the divine or individual couple senses of the term, are practices that offer us things that medicine cannot. In fact, medicine and therapy cannot deliver the good life. And that is why liberal humanists like Lerner are ultimately conservative, their own desires for radical change notwithstanding.

The mental health state is not democratic; it is very authoritarian. Yes, we could envision or talk about alternative medical health or even ‘spiritual’ or ethical practices, that do not share as much of the logic of the current system. That is surely a set of arguments well worth having. But there are good reasons to think that a society whose government is patronizingly watchful of the health of all its citizens, and the propriety of their attitudes, will too much resemble fascisms and Stalinisms for comfort. I say this not as a neoconservative liberal who just wants to protect individual liberties based on older or better forms of socialization, though I do, but as a man of the left who suspects that an anti-racism that bases itself on theories of mental illness leading in their turn to great sin will wind up usefully serving a social order that desperately needs to manage workers, and punish disaffected individuals by making them responsible for social problems that people are not allowed to much talk about or work to change.

In America, neurosis is out of fashion, and being called ‘mentally ill’ is both a stigma used to exclude people from fuller participation in the society, and a catch-all notion that, through its exclusions, passes off all social disaffection as a matter for doctors. Who, like fathers in a patriarchal society, know best and should be obeyed. Oh, I know that Lerner and those who think like him believe in more ‘humanistic’ treatments. But actually, humanism is part of the problem. Indeed, humanism is an ideology, and is part of the larger set of ideologies that sustain capitalism in the era of the neoliberal police state.

Humanism says that oppression and injustice can be reduced to alienation. Alienation, in turn, is lack of recognition or the neighborly love of others. At least that is its cause.

Is it? Was that Madame Bovary’s problem? Is it that of Kafka’s hapless protagonists? Is it Bartleby’s in the Melville tale? Is it that of Chaplin’s tramp? (Is it that of the antiheroes in French New Wave and American New Hollywood cinemas of the 60s and 70s? How interesting would it be to call Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver mentally ill? There is a recent film that performs a revisionist correction of Scorsese and Schrader’s dark vision in that film; it is “Joker,” a film that says little to us in making the antihero a case, since that is obvious on the surface; but in this way the film avoids dealing with any interestingly difficult social problems, problems that may affects ‘us’ more than just ‘them’. I don’t think so.

Perhaps I should conclude by noting that I would be as out of place in Lerner’s profession of therapist as he would be in mine, of film critic. But I think my disenchantment is preferable to his cure, for, to misquote Marx, in a broken world and dark times, the preachers and therapists have comforted the afflicted who suffer from living in a world where, indeed, happiness is scarce. The point is to understand that world well enough to change it.

The therapeutic industry and the idea of mental illness are of Christian origin. They seek to help individuals live in a world that, in Christianity, was itself essentially beyond criticism, just as the world was created perfect. In Judaism, this is ultimately nonsensical. The better part of our efforts should be spent on risky efforts to change the social world in a direction we can only hope will be better. Nice as it sounds, especially for preschoolers and their teachers, we need to more than just make America happy again.

Revolutions need more than love. They need thought welded to both love and anger. Which can go nicely together, as we have known since Moses. Religion and politics must sometimes diverge. When you are angry about injustice (what else is anger about? You could be wrong, you could be right), you may be right to do things (like strikes) that don’t easily qualify as acts of sainthood. We may need Machiavelli more than St. Francis. But it is not just a matter of methods. I doubt I would be happy in Lerner’s America, but then again, I may know that because we already do.

Psychotherapies and the other resources of the mental health care system and its attendant ideological discourses, which include many popular forms of ‘spirituality’, including sometimes within Judaism, are forms of the managerial state. It serves capitalism. It is a world of docile bodies who are expected to not think. Now that basically, by the logic of the system, everyone is mentally ill, we may as well dispense with the concept.

I imagine that at the crossroads of a good life, God announces that the two paths forward are to adjust oneself to be more contented, or to make use of what Godard once called ‘la rage de l’expression’, to try to change things somehow. The mistake of Lerner and many left-liberals may ultimately be the same one made by Martin Luther King, who reduced politics to ethics while making the argument that such a ‘pure’ politics will be more successful politically. That is undoubtedly true most of the time. King is right about nonviolence, not because it makes politics acceptable by grounding it in morality, but because when faced with a massively armed government (and not just lots of reactionary individual citizen sympathizers), only a nonviolent tactics has much chance of success. That is true, but the reason he gives is not: It is not true that politics is a department of ethics. This was the lesson of Machiavelli, and which is not in the Biblical Prophets. It is also the lesson of Marx. The lessons of Machiavelli and Marx bear greatly on a tradition that drew so much from Jewish literature and traditions, of wanting to make the world a happier and more just place, and believing that that is possible.

Remember the famous line in the Torah, “Be healthy, for I am healthy, and my ways are always happy.” If you cannot find this passage, keep looking; if you do, you will. find it not there, certainly, but very likely among some contemporary advice-dispensing psychologists. With the largest sales volume in publishing of any genre except erotica, we could say that this is a big industry. Like most forms of knowledge said to be both salutary and universal, it is, alas, neither.

William HeidbrederOctober 25, 2020Comment