Experiencing Identity

Experiencing Identity

Experiencing Identity

Ian Craib

SAGE Publications London

•

Thousand Oaks

•

New Delhi

© Ian Craib 1998 First published 1998 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd 32, M-Block Market Greater Kailash - I New Delhi 110 048

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 8039 7691 7 ISBN 0 8039 7692 5 (pbk)

Library of Congress catalog card number 98-060588 Typeset by Mayhew Typesetting, Rhayader, Powys Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgements 1 Part

vi viii

Introduction: Sociology and Identity

1

Identity, Experience and Politics

13

1:

2

Lukacs: Experience, Identity and Philosophy

13

3

The Politics of Experience

33

4

Psychoanalysis, Experience and Politics: The Problem of

49

Ambivalence

Part

2:

Identity, Experience and Sociology

62

5

Back to Utopia: Giddens and Modem Social Theory

62

6

Goffman: Frame Analysis

75

7

Masculinity and Male Dominance

85

8

The Sociology of the Emotions

9

105

Sociological Literature and Literary Sociology: Some Notes on John Berger's

G

Identity, Experience and Psychoanalysis

116

Part

3:

10

Freud and Philosophy

128

11

The Psychodynamics of Theory

138

12

What's Happening to Mourning?

157

13

Conclusion: Experiencing Identity

168

128

Bibliography

178

fu�

1�

PREFACE

The essays collected and revised here have been written over a period of twenty-five years and recount a journey from a radical Marxism to somewhere else. I cannot find a name for where I am now, which is perhaps appropriate given the arguments developed here. I have been occasionally embarrassed and occasionally surprised to find some of the continuities through these chapters. The emphasis is on something called

experience,

not only as something which is important in understanding

individual and social action, but as a value, something in theory to be protected against sociologistic explanations, and in the outside world to be protected against manipulative 'abstract systems' and the state. Sadly, sociology can easily become such an abstract system and I have grown increasingly aware of what might be called the 'sociological critique' of society as a sort of underground current in sociology - the view, or the paradox, found in Simmel, for example, that if sociology can supply powerful explanations of social life, then that fact is a criticism of the society with which these explanations are concerned. If these essays start with Marxism and travel through sociology, they end with psychoanalysis. This position offers no more comfort - it is more likely than sociology to act as an abstract system attempting to force lives into preconceived patterns, but like sociology psychoanalysis can offer subversive ideas which can point to an opening up of possi­ bilities, albeit uncomfortable and painful possibilities. The Introduction and Conclusion are new and they explore these themes. They could perhaps be read as the first and last sections of the same chapter. The middle section runs through the various chapters as codas and contemporary commentaries and self-criticisms through which I try organize the different subjects around the central themes of the book. The ideas developed here owe much to generations of colleagues and students in the Sociology Department at Essex and elsewhere, but I alone am responsible for the various eccentric forms that their ideas might take here. I am particularly grateful to Jessica Evans of the Open University for her comments on Chapter

2, and to Chris Rojek for the original

suggestion. I am also grateful to Marion Haberhauer for putting the earlier

PREFACE

Vll

chapters on disc and for coping with the pain caused by my convoluted style and to the Fuller Bequest Fund of the Sociology Department at Essex for financing the enterprise. Finally, I am grateful to my family in its

various

extensions

and

manifestations;

without

their

creative

disruptions none of this would have been possible. Ian Craib

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

2 appeared in Radical Philosophy 17, 1977. Parts of Chapter 3 appeared in Radical Philosophy 9, Winter 1974, Radical Philosophy 13, Spring 1976, and Sociology 26, 1975. Chapter 4 is based on debates originally appearing in Radical Philosophy 55, Spring 1990, and in W. Dryden and C. Feltham (eds) (1992) Psychotherapy and its Discontents, Open University Press. Chapter 5 appeared in Radical Philosophy 43, Summer 1986, and Chapter 6 in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 8, 1978. The original version of Chapter 7 appeared in Sociological Review 35, 1987, and the basis of Chapter 8 appeared in Sociology 29, 1995. Chapter 9 first appeared in Sociological Review 22, 1974. The first version of Chapter 10 appeared in Free Associations 4, 1985, and Chapter 11 first appeared in Free Associations 10, 1987. Chapter 12 appeared in British Journal of Psychotherapy 11, Spring 1995, and this in tum was based on Chapter 2 of my The Importance of Disappointment (1994), Routledge.

The original version of Chapter Summer

I am grateful to all the above publications for permission to reuse the material here.

1

INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGY AND IDENTITY

The fundamental identifying feature of [the normotic personality] is a dis­ inclination to entertain the subjective element in life, whether it exists inside himself or in the other. The introspective capacity has been rarely used. Such a person appears genuinely naive if asked to comment on issues that require either looking into oneself or the other in any depth. Instead, if the evolution towards becoming a normotic personality is successful, he lives contentedly among material objects and phenomena. By the subjective element, I mean the internal play of affects and ideas that generates and authorizes our private imaginations, creatively informs our work and gives continuing resource to our interpersonal relations. (Bollas 1987: 137) Sociology seems to have a lot to say about identity. At the moment gender and ethnic identity seem to be at the forefront of the discipline's concerns while thirty years ago it was class identity (perhaps then more often referred to as class consciousness). There is much about the 'social construction' of identity and there is a range of associated terms: 'the self' (which I prefer since it seems to incorporate many of the others, including identity) subjectivity, the subject, subjectivities, the agent, agency and action all have something to do with identity, as does the simplest term in this catalogue - the individual. Whenever I use the term 'identify' in this book, I will be thinking of it as one element or process within a self but I also want to add another term to the list, one which I would argue underlies them all:

experience.

Many of the chapters in this book point to the gap which is left in sociological understanding and explanation if we ignore experience. It seems to me, first, that any sociological account of our world must imply something about the way people experience the world. Second, it is useful to elaborate these implications as part of a process of examining the adequacy of that account. Further I think all too often our under­ standing assumes that we live in a world of people who do not 'have' experience, who, in Christopher Bollas' sense, are 'normotic'. A more readily understandable way of putting this is to say that we assume that cognition dominates people's lives, that we only have ideas and those ideas come to us from the outside, from the social world; we take them

2

EXPERIENCING IDENTITY

in and act on them. There are sometimes references to 'interpretive processes' but no real exploration of what they involve. As well as pointing to the gaps which indicate a need for a concept of experience, I want to try to indicate sociologically useful ways of thinking about it and the ways in which taking experience into account can disrupt our sociological understanding of the world. Here I should declare the axe that I want to grind: it seems to me that some aspects of psychoanalysis approach this area; but I also believe that some aspects of psychoanalysis prevent us from understanding experience and that perhaps there is something imponderable about experience which takes us towards poetics and the limits of my expertise. To begin with, how­ ever, I want to draw, in very broad strokes, the sociological background and plot my position in some of the debates it has generated.

Why now?

Whether we are looking at the more sociological approaches, post­ modem accounts of identity, modem psychotherapies, modem political movements or whatever, an interesting sociological question is why this concern with identity should be developing now. Anthony Giddens (1991) places it in the context of what he calls 'late modernity', a process which begins with the Enlightenment, taking away the traditional sanctions on behaviour, and instituting a constant questioning of the world through first the natural and then the social sciences. The central feature of the self in modem society is its reflexivity, a constant ques­ tioning and reconstruction of the self in a lifetime project. We are constantly constructing and revising our personal stories and so recon­ structing our selves. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Craib 1994), Giddens believes this is a 'real' process and that the individual has a real control over his or her self. I would prefer to see it as an ideology - a way of thinking about the self which hides a more troubling reality. In fact I would argue that the ideas of what I would call the 'powerful self' (Craib 1994) emerge just as the 'self', the individual, is becoming less powerful, less able to change his or her world while being subjected to changes, often radical changes, by forces well beyond his or her control or even understanding. There are various ways of approaching these changes. Giddens talks about the 'juggernaut' of late modernity without following through its implications, the psychological effects of being pushed in front of a juggernaut and having to cling to it for dear life as it careers into the future. In other words he pays no real attention to the experience of late modernity beyond the increased prominence of the cognitive feature of reflexivity. There are theories of globalization (Waters 1995) which might not be describing a total process, but certainly get hold of something important, and there are the processes described by David Harvey (1989)

INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGY AND IDENTITY

3

which are attributable less to late modernity than to late capitalism. These all affect our experience of the world and not just our ideas about it. Indeed, our ideas and our experience can be at variance with one another. It seems to me that the word 'capitalism' is important. Perhaps we can best understand the focus on identity and the self through the way in which the development of the market over the last thirty years has intensified a process of individualization which it began with the indus­ trial revolution. Over the last three decades the pace of technological change has increased, dramatically pushed forward by information and communications technology. This in tum has encouraged changes in the economic division of labour, a growing emphasis on short-term returns in a situation where finance capital can be moved around the world at short notice to its most profitable location. In the west, heavy industry has declined and the labour market changed; the institutions that comprise civil society have weakened. During the industrial revolu­ tion capitalism ate away at traditional communities and created new working-class communities which, with the most recent changes, are now in decline. The market, at least in its ideology, to a lesser extent in practice, reduces everybody to an abstract individual equality. As the possibilities of long-term employment decline, we each have to face the market as individuals selling ourselves (not only our labour), capable of surviving changes and constantly readjusting to new demands. Kant was the first to recognize the way in which the market intruded into personal rela­ tionships and it has been a recurrent theme in critical thought. Now it seems to intrude into the very self. This is perhaps the crucial insight of the sociology of emotions, and Arnie Hochschild's (1994) suggestion that much popular modem feminism implies a commercialization of rela­ tionships is quite appropriate. The self, identity, becomes a product to be revamped and relaunched at regular intervals. These themes will occur with some regularity throughout this book and one of my arguments will be that an understanding of experience as a relatively autonomous area of the self enables us to take a critical distance from this process and its accompanying ideology. For the moment, however, I want to look at various sociological approaches to the self and identity.

Sociology and identity: the conventional approach

First I want to explore the sociological notion of identity. In Richard Jenkins' introduction to Social Identity (1996: 5) he begins by privileging the social and, I would suggest, the normotic, by stating that he will use the terms 'identity' and 'social identity' interchangeably to mean the latter since 'all human identities are in some sense - and usually a

4

EXPERIENCING IDENTITY

stronger rather than a weaker sense social identities'. We all have a number of social identities which organize our relationships to other individuals and groups within our social world. He points out that the Oxford English Dictionary definition of identity involves two ideas: on the one hand absolute sameness and on the other a lasting distinctiveness. I 'am' a man and I 'am not' a woman. I classify the world into social groups and I associate myself with one rather than another. It would perhaps be true to say that whereas conventional sociology has concentrated on sameness, more recent and particularly post-modem sociology has con­ centrated on difference. Jenkins falls more into the former category than the latter and I want to pursue my argument with him first. He goes on to say that our identity is best seen as a process, criticizing, I think quite rightly, those who see identity as a 'thing'. The process is one of constant negotiation with those around us; identity is 'the product of agreement and dis­ agreement' and open to change. While I do not disagree with any of this, my criticism is that he leaves out half the picture, that half which goes on 'inside' the bearer of identity or identities, and the process of internal negotiation which this involves. It seems to me that 'identity' in Jenkins' sense does not account for all that we mean when we talk about our own individual identities. We certainly have social identities: I am a uni­ versity teacher, a father, a husband, a psychotherapist, a supporter of the English cricket team and so on. Some of these (especially the last one) could disappear without my experiencing any great loss. I would have lost an identity, not my identity. If I suffered a major tragedy in my family life, ceasing to be a husband and becoming a divorced man or widower, my identity would have changed in an excruciatingly painful way but I would still have an identity. Social identities can come and go but my identity goes on as something which unites all the social iden­ tities I ever had, have or will have. My identity always overflows, adds to, transforms the social identities that are attached to me. I am not trying to deny the profoundly social nature of human beings, nor the importance of our various social identities but part of the dialectic of identification and difference involves me in a constant separation from my various social identities. My identity is not the same as my social identities. This is something recognized implicitly by Jenkins later in the book when he is talking about Mead and Freud and the possibility that we might have not a number of social identities but a number of social 'selves': -

This is a problem because most of the time most people don't seem to experience themselves as an assembly of different bits and particularly not as a plurality of entities. Perhaps the most important source of this consistency . . . is . . . the embodiment of selfhood. Although over time and across situations we recognize conflicts and different possibilities within ourselves, these don't constitute a committee or cast of characters.

INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGY AND IDENTITY

5

Dividing the self up into bits thus risks losing sight of the fact that most humans most of the time live their lives as more or less unitary selves. (Jenkins 1996: 45)

This seems to me to be arguing problems away rather than elaborating or investigating them. We are left with a choice of being either a 'plurality' or 'assembly' of parts or a 'more or less unitary' self. The question I would ask here is why we cannot be both at the same time. If we take Mead's work seriously then we have to be - both at the same time - an T and a 'me'. If I were only an T then I would be involved in no social relationships whatsoever; if I were only a 'me' then I would be an inanimate object defined by others and in neither case would the problem arise. The difficulty is caused by our nature as reflective, symbol-using beings - there are always internal divisions and always, at least implicitly, a unity. Both are there whenever we say anything about ourselves. Jenkins cites in his support some comments by Giddens who cannot seem to follow through the implications of the reflexivity that he sees as so important to modem self-identity. The division in the self, and in identity, is there even in the Cartesian cogito so often held up by sociologists as typifying the unitary subject: I think therefore I am. If I think about myself, I am divided, experiencing and experienced at the same time. This combination or dialectic of unity and diversity is built into but by no means always acknowledged by sociological theories of the self. It has become increasingly central over the course of this century. If we think of it in interactionist terms the more complex a society, the greater the variety of roles that each individual has to play, the more complex the 'me' phase of the self, and the greater the call on the T phase for organization and reaction. Paradoxically it is perhaps Simmel, one of the founding thinkers of sociology, who offers the most acute critical awareness of this. He described the development of modernity in terms of the growth of what he called 'objective culture' as opposed to 'sub­ jective culture' or the life process. He was suspicious of the growing power of social forces and the way they can come to dominate our sense of ourselves, and for a sociologist he has a heightened sense of the psychological changes that this brings about. In Simmel's (1971) essay on 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' he describes how city life unceasingly bombards us with new stimuli that would drive us mad if we tried to react to and process them all. We are subjected as well to innumerable short-term and limited relationships and in response we build a sort of internal protective shell which enables us to deal with day-to-day life. It is no accident that psychoanalysis developed in one of the great European metropolitan centres and became the way to move below this protective shell and explore the nature of human relationships. With a few exceptions sociologists have not concerned themselves overmuch with what goes on within the shell.

6

EXPERIENCING IDENTITY

Following through with this metaphor, they have contented themselves with describing the pattern on the shell - the social identities and role expectations as if that were all there was.

Sociology and identity: postmodern conceptions

The approaches labelled 'postmodern' actually fall into two mutually exclusive camps. In one postmodern world I constantly recreate myself according to my desires and the situations into which I am placed, and in the other I am the product of the discourses in which I am situated. The theories seem to reproduce the dual nature of the self.

Endless self-creation For Kenneth Gergen there is an opening up of possibilities; the social world has been transformed and we ourselves have been transformed. Gergen seems to me to represent the most optimistic - if not manic version of the result. He argues that there is a battle in train between three different world views: the modernist view with its promise of progress and knowledge; the romantic view with its concern for the depths of the personality, and his own, postmodernist view: The social saturation brought about by the technologies of the twentieth century, and the accompanying immersion in multiple perspectives, have brought about a new consciousness: postmodemist. In its retrospective stance, it is sceptical, doubting the capacity of language to represent or inform us of what is the case. For if language is dominated by ideological investments, its usage governed by social convention, and its content guided by literary style, language does not reflect or mirror reality. And if language is not truth­ bearing, then the very concept of objective reporting is rendered suspect. If this is so, there are no objective grounds for saying that people possess passion, intentionality, reason, personality traits or any of the other ingredients of the romanticist or modem world views. All such concepts are socially and historically contingent, the products of political and ideological forces, self­ protective communities and literary and aesthetic fashion. With the spread of postmodern consciousness we see the demise of personal definition, reason, authority commitment, trust, the sense of authenticity, sincerity, belief in leadership, depth of feeling and faith in progress. In their stead, an open slate emerges on which persons may inscribe, erase and rewrite their identities as the ever-shifting, ever-expanding and incoherent network of relationships invites or permits. (Gergen 1991: 228)

The difficulty with this sort of writing is to pick out the odd kernels of truth from the hyperbole and refusals to think. If Gergen were to follow through his scepticism he could not make any claims, let alone those he is making - the point of arguing would vanish. And the fact that he feels it worthwhile to argue his point indicates an implicit acceptance of standards of rationality which transcend perspectives. Certainly, there

INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGY AND IDENTITY

7

have been changes in information technology, changes in our abilities to understand and embrace other perspectives. I cannot see that this says any more than conventional role theory when it talks about the multiplication of roles or the pluralization of life - worlds that come with modernity. And the insistence on a thoroughgoing scepticism is simply an inversion of the thoroughgoing objectivism that Gergen sees (wrongly) as part of the modernist perspective. The real problems of life are more or less problems: what is closer to or further from the truth, a better or worse representation of an external reality? In the context of this argument, however, it is important to consider under what conditions one might be able to prescribe, erase and rewrite one's identity. It is a way of thinking perfectly appropriate to short communication on the Internet. Once I am seen my ability to revise my identity is limited: I cannot become a blonde teenage girl or a man who is 120 years old; I cannot become a muscular giant or a dwarf. And contact must be shortlived. With regularity of contact comes a recog­ nition of the patterns in characteristics, language, ideas, etc. It is a way of being that is only possible within the imagination, can bear little contact with an external reality, and cannot outlast anything but the most cursory human contact. More mundanely we are back to the necessary division within the self and in our identity, the flux of sameness and difference. However many times I rewrite and erase my identities, it is I who does it, not you or my grandmother or anybody else. I am - at least - an identity with several identities. There is still the 'I' and the 'me' even if the former can constantly invent the latter in some sort of fantasy world. If we return to the metaphor of a protective shell, it is as if Gergen is suggesting that we can constantly change the pattern - we become self-creating chameleons.

The social construction of identity There is a second 'postmodern' conception of the self that is perhaps more depressive than manic and perhaps might more accurately be called post-structuralism. Rather than being seen as an endless process of self-creation, identity becomes something constructed through various disciplines and discourses. The interesting point here is that in the introduction to a collection of papers adopting this approach, Stuart Hall (1996) deploys this radically different conceptual framework. He identifies the very problem I have been discussing in connection with more traditional approaches, recog­ nizing that when it is a matter of agency and politics the concept of identity seems irreducible, it cannot be explained away. Yet he would still prefer to see identities as constructed 'within discourse', that is, cognitively and through difference rather than through a combination or play of association and difference:

8

EXPERIENCING IDENTITY Throughout their careers, identities can function as points of identification and attachment only because of their capacity to exclude, to leave out . . . The unity, the internal homogeneity, which the term identity treats as foundational, is not natural but a constructed form of closure. (Hall 1996: 5)

The problem with this is that the opposite is also true. Identities can only function to exclude and leave out because of their capacity to include and enclose. We lose something important by concentrating on one or the other side of this particular coin. I think the problem here is the assumption that language - where meaning is created through difference - provides us with a model for understanding social life where things other than language are at play. The tradition in which Hall is working, however, goes further than this: it views language not as a useful metaphor or analogy but as the creator of social life. In this context identities are created. A little later on the same page Hall defines his own position:

I use identity to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between, on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to 'interpellate', speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be 'spoken'. Identities are points of temporary attach­ ment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us. . . . They are the result of a successful articulation or 'chaining' of the subject into the flow of the discourse. (Hall 1996: 5-6) If we substitute 'role' and 'role expectations' for 'discourse' and 'prac­ tices' we are close to the determinist version of the traditional socio­ logical approach. The first part of the quotation describes the external definition of the 'me', and the remainder of the sentence after 'on the other hand' can be seen as a very ambiguous and ambivalent version of the T - but described in a passive sense which Hall then begins, tentatively, to deconstruct. He traces through the arguments from Althusser

(1971)

and Lacan

(1977),

together with Hirst's

(1979)

criticism

of the former, and he criticizes Foucault's notion that constructed subjects are 'docile' bodies. The strength of Hirst's criticism of Althusser is that any attempt to explain the construction of the subject by interpellation, by hailing, presupposes that the subject can actually recognize that he or she is being hailed - in other words it must presuppose that the one being hailed already has the properties of the subject. We cannot escape the T. Hall suggests that at the end of Foucault's development he was moving towards producing a phenomenology and he develops this through a discussion of Judith Butler

(1993)

who attempts to combine the tradition

more closely with psychoanalysis by relating 'the discursive' with the 'psychic'. But this edging towards the psychic, the mechanisms by means of which we identify or do not identify, is an edging back to notions of subjectivity, to what in more traditional sociology would be called

INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGY AND IDENTITY

9

interpretive processes and which always - and must always - pre­ suppose the T. There is, however, a peculiar instrumentality and an almost mystical quality in the way these arguments are pursued. There is talk about 'technologies of the self' and power seems to appear as a disembodied force which can have 'effects'. There is a sense of the social as a machine which grinds up and re-forms everything with which it comes into contact. There are a number of problems with this way of thinking about the world, not least in the denial of the subjectivity that is responsible for the argument (see Craib 1997b). We have here a peculiarly complex way of thinking of the normotic personality - it has an inner life, but that inner life is a product of the outer life and does not generate anything new. I shall be arguing later in this book that there is one sense in which sociologists - or anybody, come to that - cannot help but write about experience and that we write about it not only directly in the explicit content of an argument, but indirectly in our choice of rhythms and words. The feel of Hall's arguments, with constant references to 'rigorous argument', 'full and unambiguous recognition', the necessity of theor­ ization, etc. have a normotic feel to them. They make one feel what they explicitly argue: there is no internal space and logic controls all. For me the style carries an aura of persecution even though the explicit argu­ ment moves towards the opening up of the discourse. So far then, I have tried to show that sociological approaches to identity or the self tend to assume that the world is peopled by normotic personalities, by people who have no subjective or inner experience. I will argue later in this book (Chapter 8) that even where sociology attempts to grasp elements of subjective experience, as in the sociology of the emotions, the understanding remains limited and stereotyped, working primarily as if individuals were only cognitive beings. One might argue that this does not matter - sociology is the science of society so why should it concern itself with the inner worlds of individuals? This would be fair enough if sociologists are trying to explain the decline of feudalism, or changes in the contemporary class structure, the large-scale shifts in social structures. An understanding of experience in these cases would add a dimension of intelligibility and of colour but would not be essential. However, when sociologists lay claim to talking about identity, the self and emotions we need to know what we are talking about and experience, the subjective, the inner world, is a vital part of this discussion.

Experience and identity

So far I have used the 'I' as a shorthand for experience. What do I mean by experience and how are we to understand it? The second part of the question is perhaps more easily answered by the first but I will try. By

10

EXPERIENCING IDENTITY

experience I mean a wide range of affect which has both physical and ideational components, both of which may be conscious or unconscious or some combination of both. Christopher Bollas (1987) talks about a person's idiom, their particular smell and feel, often very difficult to put into words, and which - again consciously or unconsciously - is an expression of their experience of the world and a vital part of each person's experience of the other. Bollas also talks, in a lovely phrase, of the 'unthought known', the precognitive and extra-cognitive knowledge without which we would not be ourselves and would not be able to live in the social world. If such knowledge enters into consciousness, it often comes as a surprise. Our way into this must be as much through phenomenology as through psychoanalysis and indeed perhaps Bollas can best be placed on the phenomenological wing of psychoanalysis. But we need also to finish the journey that Hall attributes to Foucault and return to phenomen­ ology in its Hegelian, Husserlian and existential varieties. There is, however, a further dimension to experience which takes us towards psychoanalysis proper. When Jenkins talks about our experience of a unitary subject he seems to suggest that our embodiment - the fact that I inhabit only one body - is sufficient to explain this. But he offers no real explanation of what it means to have a body, and most socio­ logical work on the body, like that on identity, deals with the body from the outside. It is the end product of sociological processes. Yet my body is more important than I am; the pulsating organs which I inhabit are a constant part of my feeling and thinking; I have various physical needs which change throughout my life as my body changes. And the real scandal of being embodied, one which arguably is a governing feature of all our lives, is that our embodiment comes to an end. We die, and the sociology of death should be the sociology of our lives. This book explores three areas. Part 1 looks at identity, experience and politics. I have always thought of Georg Lukacs as a more complex and profound thinker than many commentators recognize. There is a dimen­ sion to his thought which links Hegel's phenomenology with the exis­ tential phenomenology of later thinkers, especially Sartre and Merleau­ Ponty, less central to the western Marxist tradition. I try to use Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness (1971a) to show the way in which an idea of a pre-reflective experience of the world is essential to his account of the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, the socialist revolution and the development of western philosophy. Chapter 3 shows how later and more elaborate existential ideas leave Lukacs' work looking distinctly utopian and show new dimensions of human experience and relation­ ships. Chapter 4 takes up these themes in the context of psychoanalysis and what it has to tell us about the necessary ambivalence of utopias and of experience itself. It should become clear in the course of these arguments that 'experience' is a much wider concept than 'identity' and

INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGY AND IDENTITY

11

that if the latter concept is central, whether i n politics o r in theory, it often involves a closing down of possibility and understanding. Part 2 looks at identity, experience and sociology. In Chapters 5 and 6 I take Anthony Giddens' attempt at a general social theory and Erving GoHman's micro-social theory and try to show in each case how the approach glosses or ignores the experience of the actor, or more accur­ ately the individual. In the case of Giddens my argument is that he employs an over-simple notion of the individual to provide a convenient foundation for structuration theory. In the case of GoHman my argument is that, despite appearances, his work strips away the meaning of the individual's experience. Chapter 7 was my first attempt to use psychoanalysis to understand a sociological problem, that of gender. In line with the implications of the previous two chapters I found myself trying to separate the individual personality structure from social processes, or perhaps more accurately argue that we cannot see identity and experience as only a social product. My experience as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist has led me to hold this view more firmly than ever and I end this chapter with a retrospective self-criticism. This leads directly into Chapter 8 which is a critique of the sociology of emotions, particularly the tendency to see emotions as only a social construct and the resulting tendency to see real people as if they were only stereotypes. Finally in Part 2, Chapter 9 returns to some of the ideas of existential phenomenology, comparing sociological and literary forms of language use and suggesting that, whether we like it or not, we convey our own or others' experience of the world in the language we use. This sets the scene for one of the arguments in Part 3. Part 3 looks at identity, experience and psychoanalysis. Chapter 10 is a discussion of a number of philosophical approaches to psychoanalysis and has two central arguments: the first involves a comparison between the philosophical treatments of psychoanalysis which close down the development of Freud's thought and those which open it up; the second links the creative interpretations of Freud with an acceptance of what he has to say about the contradictory and irrational aspects of human nature. Chapter 11 is concerned with the experiences unconsciously embedded in theoretical work and the way in which it can inhibit or encourage the development of understanding, while Chapter 12 is a critique of some contemporary developments in psychoanalysis. I argue that there is a danger in our society that psychotherapists can come to see themselves as constructing identities, forming and controlling subjectiv­ ities (for the best and most humane reasons, of course) in a way that implies as dismissive an attitude to our experience as that implied by the sociological approaches to identity discussed in this introduction. Finally, in a new essay which acts as a conclusion, I try to bring together some of the themes of the book as a whole into a discussion of what it is like to 'experience identity'.

PART 1

IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS 2

LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY

Georg Lukacs was a remarkable character; he was above all a philosopher in the German idealist tradition and to read his work is to read European philosophy from Kant through Hegel to Marx. The development of his philosophy produced what Lucien Goldmann (1977) called the first great work of twentieth-century existentialism, Soul and Form (Lukacs 1971b) and it has been said, with some justification, that he turned to revolu­ tionary socialism because it seemed to solve crucial philosophical prob­ lems. He was involved in the short-lived Hungarian revolution after WorId War I as a minister in the Communist government and there are possibly apocryphal stories of parliament discussing the nature of philosophy rather than organization of the civil war being fought outside, and of Lukacs walking up and down the trenches lecturing the troops on dialectical materialism. After the failure of the revolution he took refuge in Russia. His politics fell out of favour and there are debates about how far he compromised with Stalinism - he certainly stopped writing about politics and spent a good part of the rest of his life producing literary theory and criticism. He also spent some time in Stalin's prisons. Here I will be concerned with History and Class Consciousness (1971a) first published in 1923. It is Lukacs' major philosophical and political work, bringing together notions of experience, philosophy and politics. In the context of my argument here, his importance is that he offers an ideal, a vision in which everything comes together. The rest of Part 1 will be concerned with the modification, and sometimes degeneration, of the ideal.

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IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS At the centre of

History and Class Consciousness

is the problem of

relativism and the sociology of knowledge - an issue which has cropped up in modem feminist philosophy (see Harding

1986, 1991)

of which

more later. The basic question is that if all knowledge is dependent upon its social context, then how can we lay claim to one form of knowledge being superior to another? Is there not just simply a range of points of view all of equal validity? If the answer to this question is the relativist answer that we cannot choose between different points of view we end in absurdity. If the relativist answer is true, then it is false, since it would then be an absolute truth and not at all dependent upon its social context. It often seems to be the case that people think that the only alternative to this sort of relativism is some form of rigorous scientific absolutism and if that were the choice I guess

relativism

would

be

preferable.

However,

there

are other

alternatives and Lukacs offers a particularly interesting one.

Lukacs and relativism

History and Class Consciousness is not an easy

work and it is not made any

simpler by the intrinsic difficulties of Lukacs' dialectical form of argument; at times his arguments are confused and a great number of assumptions remain implicit. Superficially, he appears to reproduce the relativist con­ tradiction, insisting that all knowledge is rooted in its social context, but then arguing that it is possible to choose between different points of view,

implying the existence of trans-contextual criteria. Stedman-Jones

(1971)

puts forward what is perhaps the most common interpretation when he sums up Lukacs' 'startling but elegant' reply to relativism as: 'All truth is relative to the standpoint of individual classes; the proletariat is by its essence a universal class; its subjectivity is universal; but a universal subjectivity can only be objective' (Stedman-Jones

1971: 47).

I want to argue that this formulation perhaps possesses more elegance than accuracy and that Lukacs' position is in fact considerably more complex, often implicit in his practice rather than explicit in his argu­ ment. He suggests that there are a number of interrelated features which enable Marxism to avoid relativism and which ensure its superiority over other forms of knowledge, one of which is a by no means simple relation between Marxist theory and the proletariat. I will deal in tum with these features: first, Marxism's grasp of the totality; second, its ability to transcend the dualisms of bourgeois thought; finally, its rela­ tionship to the proletariat implied in the notion of praxis.

The totalizing movement of Marxism Lukacs describes the notion of 'totality' as the most fundamental distin­ guishing feature of Marxism. Whether or not he is correct is less important

LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY

15

for present purposes than what he means by 'totality', and what is involved in Marxism's grasp of the totality. There is (or was) no shortage of bourgeois theories of 'society as a whole', so, self-evidently, there is more to it than that. It becomes apparent later in the book that 'totality' in the framework of Lukacs' thought is related to a more familiar Marxist claim concerning its method of producing knowledge. This production involves a totalizing movement which, in relation to praxis, he calls an 'aspiration towards totality' (1971a: 198) the first step of which is the penetration by thought of immediate 'external' appearance - the penetra­ tion of reification and the revelation of the determinations behind what bourgeois thought takes to be the given 'facts'. To take an oversimplified example, bourgeois economics takes as given the 'facts' of price and attempts to explain their fluctuations in terms of supply and demand (equally 'given' as 'facts'). Marxism, on the other hand, is able to grasp the way in which these 'facts' came to be in the first place - to grasp the origins of commodity fetishism, the way in which human relationships manifest themselves as relationships between things ( price, precisely, expressing a relationship between things). This movement beyond the immediate leads to the revelation of hidden, 'internal' relationships - relationships unavailable to immediate perception. To continue the example (and the oversimplification): as it reveals the nature of the wages system and the origin of prices in labour, Marxism at the same time reveals the foundations of social classes and, beyond that, the way in which the mode of production reproduces itself. It reveals those relationships that are usually sub­ sumed by the terms 'base' and 'superstructure'. In this way, each immediately evident 'fact' is understood not in terms of its independent existence, or in terms of an external causal relationship; rather its existence is understood as the product of a number of relationships - a structure of relationships. In Lukacs' terms, its immediacy is mediated, and these relationships are in tum mediated by others. The 'totalizing movement' of Marxist thought is the steady exploration of these increasingly wider, more complex and more fundamental relations, and the discovery of these structural forms is the production of knowledge. There is clearly a variety of realist epistemology underlying Lukacs' understanding of the Marxist analysis of social formations, one which sees access to the underlying structures of the social world as a task of theoretical construction. Thus what appears to bourgeois thought as 'real', for example, price, is shown to be abstract, isolated from the totality of relationships that determine its existence. What appears to be abstract, for example, social classes (since we cannot point to an existing object which is a class) is shown to be real, a concrete determination of external appearances. This seems to follow closely Marx's own methodological statement in the introduction to The Grundrisse, frequently quoted in part by Lukacs, but worth quoting in full:

16

IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real recondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination, this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in tum are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest, e.g. wage labour, capital etc. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result not as a point of departure even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and conception. (Marx 1973: 100-101)

In other words, we start and finish with 'reality', the 'concrete' (or perhaps better, we start with 'reality' and finish with the 'concrete'), reconstructing it, in the process of theorizing, through the relationships into which we place the immediately appearing phenomena. For Lukacs the reconstruction of 'facts' in theory is fundamental and the differences between theories lie in the extent and method of the reconstruction of the 'facts'. The totalizing movement of Marxism, the ability to understand and penetrate reification and grasp the way in which the facts we are reconstructing are produced as facts in the totality of their determina­ tions, reveals that these facts are the product of human activity and that social classes are the subject of that activity. This places the 'facts' we study in the ongoing movement of history:

The function of these unmediated concepts that have been derived from the fetishistic forms of objectivity is to make the phenomena of capitalist society appear as supra-historical essences. The knowledge of the real, objective nature of a phenomenon, the knowledge of its historical character and the knowledge of its actual function in the totality of society form, therefore, a Single, undivided act of cognition. (Lukacs 1971a: 14) It is the mediation of history that enables us to grasp the concrete interpenetrations of the dualisms which have typified bourgeois thought. Thought is a reconstruction of reality and since that reconstruction leads us to history, we realize that thought is not the only activity involved in the reconstruction of reality, it is only one moment of what Marx called 'sensuous human activity'. It is this activity - and not thought alone - which gives us access to the objective world and here experience enters into the equation. The totalizing movement of Marxism thus leads us directly to the transcendence of the dualisms of bourgeois thought and to the concept of praxis.

The transcendence of dualisms The most significant dualism that Marxism transcends, according to Lukacs, is that of subject and object, although, as we shall see, a number

LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY

17

o f other dualisms i s left behind - i n particular those o f truth/falsity, relative/absolute, thought/reality. It is the subject/object dualism and the attempt to overcome it which provided the impetus behind the development of bourgeois philosophy. Although the solution remained unavailable, the problem was pursued to the point where it became possible for Marxism to realize the transcendence. Lukacs is primarily concerned with German idealist philosophy and, in particular, with the development of the contradictions of Kantian rationalism, but in the course of his argument he reveals the close relationship between the two ways of handling the dualism, the way in which an internal dynamic can lead to the transformation of one into the other. For Kant, the starting point is not that our knowledge must conform to objects but that objects must conform to our knowl­ edge. He returns to the familiar principle that we can only know what we create. The object 'in-itself' remains unknowable and the world that we know is the 'product' of the rational mind. But there is a 'necessary correlation' between the principles of rationality and irrationality according to Lukacs, and when rationalism claims to be the universal principle, the correlation becomes crucial and erodes the whole system. In Kant's case, the irrationality, the cause of the erosion, is the unknow­ able 'thing-in-itself'. There is a radical separation between content (the object) and form (the knowing subject), the overcoming of which would require the development of a concept of praxis. Failing that, all that can be produced from Kant's starting point is a structure of highly systematized formal laws which, because they are laws, exclude or absorb the creative subject. Knowledge thus becomes a matter of the passive contemplation of something outside the knower rather than an active production. This analysis is the basis of Lukacs' criticism of the way in which the natural sciences conceive of their activity. We start with rationalism and end with a form of empiricism (see in particular Part 11 of the essay 'Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat'). Lukacs does not try to step outside (suppress, conceal) the dualism, but attempts to transcend it through a grasp of the concrete unity of subject and object in the movement of history, reached in the totalizing movement of Marxist thought (1971a: 14, 142-9). Through history we can grasp the way in which the subject produces itself as object, the way in which humanity creates itself. Marxism further reveals that it is because of the internal expansionist dynamic of capitalism that a proper grasp of the totality becomes possible, and that for the first time the possibility exists that history may be made consciously. The proletariat, because of its position in the production process, is the first class in history capable of becoming conscious of itself as the subject and object of history at the same time. Conversely, because of its position in the production process, the bourgeoisie is unable to achieve a theoretical transcendence of the subject/object dualism (1971a: 134-6).

18

IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

The precise nature of this unity of subject and object requires further exploration, for it is here that we come up against the central difficulty of dialectical thought that Lukacs warns of: It is of the essence of dialectical method that concepts which are false in their abstract one-sidedness are later transcended. The process of transcendence makes it inevitable that we should operate with these one-sided, abstract and false concepts. These concepts acquire their true meaning less by definition than by their function as aspects that are then transcended in the totality. Moreover, it is even more difficult to establish fixed meanings for concepts in Marx's improved version of the dialectic than in the Hegelian original. For if concepts are only the intellectual forms of historical realities, then these forms - one-sided, abstract and false as they are, belong to the true unity as genuine aspects of it. (Lukacs 1971a: xiv)

In this context, there is the possibility of two non-dialectical misreadings of a dialectical text. The first restores in toto the dualisms transcended in the dialectic. Gareth Stedman-Jones takes this tendency to its extreme: where Lukacs is attempting to transform, in a new synthesis, previously antinomic tendencies of bourgeois thought into a dialectical under­ standing of social life, Stedman-Jones (1971) sees only an anti-scientific romantic coming into confused contact with Marxist science (and in the process he reduces Marxist science to the positivism that Lukacs is attacking). Where Lukacs tries to develop a political practice and a theory of organization from his philosophical position, as he does in the later essays in History and Class Consciousness and also - arguably - in Lenin (1972), Stedman-Jones can see only an unbridgeable gap. The second misreading involves the opposite tendency: to read the claim to have transcended the dualism as an assertion of the simple, immediate unity of opposites. In the case of the subject/object dualism, Lukacs can be read as asserting an a priori unity rather than a unity grasped in the concrete, in history. Matters are not helped by the fact that this is the way in which the older Lukacs came to read himself (1971a: xxxIii). Stedman-Jones again takes this misreading to its extreme, using, without understanding, Lukacs' argument that a change in the self-consciousness of the proletariat involves a change in the world that is known through that self-consciousness and transforming it into the crassest idealism. According to Stedman-Jones, Lukacs' argument is that: Once the proletariat fulfills its vocation as the identical subject-object of history by acquiring an adequate consciousness of capitalist society, it abolishes capitalism in a final interiorization of it. The exact analogy of this procedure with the movement of Hegel's Spirit needs no emphasis. All that it omits is the brute, material struggle for power. (1971: 53)

Lukacs holds no such bizarre position: For a class to be ripe for hegemony means that its interests and consciousness enable it to organize the whole of society in accordance with those interests.

LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY

19

The crucial question of every class struggle is this: which class possesses this capacity and this consciousness at the decisive moment? This does not preclude the use of force. It does not mean that the class interests destined to prevail and thus to uphold the interests of society as a whole can be guaranteed an automatic victory. On the contrary, such a transfer of power can often only be brought about by the most ruthless use of force (as e.g. the primitive accumulation of capital). But it often turns out that questions of class consciousness prove to be decisive in just those situations where force is unavoidable and where classes are locked in a life-and-death struggle. (Lukacs 1971a: 52-3)

But the problem still remains of exactly what the transcendence of the dualism means. There can be no doubt that Lukacs talks of the identical subject/ object, but it is apparent that it is meant in its peculiar Hegelian sense. Lucien Goldmann (1971) talks about the partial identity of subject and object, and although he makes no attempt to conceptualize the relationship, he offers a clue. Despite using the term 'identical' and his later self-criticism, Lukacs does not offer an a priori unity but insists that it be discovered in history; in other words, it is a mediated unity, the primary mediation being history itself. The proletariat becomes conscious of itself as both subject and object through the mediation of the devel­ oping social and economic structures of capitalist society, through the mediation of its own developing relationships with other classes. Its discovery of itself as an object produced in the past, and as the object of present production processes, is the precondition of its action as subject to produce itself as a new, future object through a transformation of those production processes and their accompanying social structures. The relationship of subject and object is in this sense one of identity and separation at the same time - a formulation which Lukacs approaches on several occasions (for example, 1971a: 142). The fact that the subject/ object identity is mediated - by economic and social structures and other classes - provides the 'space' for the 'brute material struggle for power'. It further makes necessary a comprehensive grasp of the mediating structures, there is no question of an immediate reading of 'essences' from history: The categories of dialectics must be applied to man as the measure of all things in a manner that also includes simultaneously a complete description of the economic structure of bourgeois society and a correct knowledge of the present. For otherwise, any description will inevitably succumb to the dilemma of empiricism and utopianism, of voluntarism and fatalism. (Lukacs 1971a: 190-1)

Thus the initial theoretical penetration of reification reveals that history is the product of a human praxis and at the same time it reveals the power of, and the need for, a precise analysis of those structures produced by praxis and underlying immediate appearances.

20

IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLmCS

Praxis It will be remembered that what makes this development possible, not, note, what causes it or makes it inevitable, is the experience of the proletariat, not the fact that it has a universal interest. Such an interest may be developed but Lukacs also spends some time looking at the class divisions that may inhibit it. What is important however, is the experi­ ence that makes the development possible. My interpretation of Lukacs is that this experience is of being both part of a collective subject and a collective object at the same time. As a factory worker I experience myself as joining with others in creating the world, but at the same time as I carry out that work, I am controlled and organized by my employer as one of the three factors of production: land, labour and capital. Of course everybody experiences themselves as both subject and object but not at the same time in this peculiar way. The employer first of all experiences him or herself as an individual subject in relation to organizing the enterprise, but then as an object controlled or pushed in this direction or that by the market forces which are perceived as natural forces. This is a very different experience to being pushed this way or that by another human being. The two experiences do not come together in the same way. The experienced coincidence of the subject/object provides the possibility of theoretical development and political, organ­ izational development. In Hegel's master/slave dialectic (1977) the slave comes out on top - he is the one who has contact with the real world and the master becomes helpless and dependent. For Lukacs, this dialectic, when transferred to the factory floor, provides the possibility for the creation of a free society. I argued earlier that the ability to penetrate reification led theory to become conscious of itself as one moment of 'sensuous human practice'. It is this practice as a whole, uniting various levels of 'thought' and 'action', that Lukacs seems to embrace in his concept of praxis. Praxis is what unites 'abstract thought' on the one hand and the 'concrete', the world of structures, appearances and experience, on the other, into a developing totality that transcends each. It is here that we find the relationship between Marxism and the proletariat, the nature of which Lukacs tends to gloss, even in the final essay in History and Class Consciousness, 'Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization'. However, it is made explicit in a striking way by Merleau-Ponty (1974a). Lukacs moves to and fro between the most abstract levels of philo­ sophy and an analysis of the class position and experience of the proletariat. The implication is not that the proletariat can immediately and spontaneously achieve a fully developed theoretical awareness of its position, otherwise there would be no point in Lukacs turning, in the later essays, to the problem of the nature of the revolutionary party. The relationship, as always, is mediated. The proletariat is a class which, in its immediate experience of acting in the world, achieves a practical

LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY

21

consciousness of itself as subject and object at the same time. Its very existence opens up the possibility of a theoretical transcendence (carried out by theorists) of the subject/ object dualism and - since the existence of the proletariat presupposes the existence of capitalism as a potential world system - the possibility of a theoretical grasp of the totality of social relationships as a coherent whole. The existence of the proletariat reveals the way forward for thought. In tum, thought reveals the way forward for the proletariat. It raises to a theoretical consciousness its potentiality as the revolutionary subject of history, and articulates the means by which that potentiality may be realized and the problems involved in that realization. In this sense, Marxism as a theoretical system is fully conscious of its social roots and its existence as one moment of a wider praxis. It gives a concrete articulation to this consciousness pre­ cisely in the revolutionary party, where theorist and proletariat come together, the former to theorize the experience of the latter, the latter to base its practice on the knowledge produced by the former. In this way Lukacs brings together the two sides of an argument which split the Communist movement after World War I: on the one side there was Rosa Luxemburg's argument that the proletariat could reach a revolutionary consciousness by itself, on the other there was Lenin's argument that it could not move beyond a 'trade union' consciousness and to go further it needed the organization and direction of a revolutionary party. If thought is one moment of a developing totality, its ability to grasp the concrete conditioned by the concrete, and its relationship to the concrete articulated in a praxis that changes the concrete, then there is a constant movement of thought from an adequate to an inadequate and from an inadequate to an adequate grasp of the concrete. In other words, thought moves from 'true' to 'false' and from 'false' to 'true', from 'absolute' to 'relative' and from 'relative' to 'absolute'. Knowledge is 'true' insofar as it claims to offer only an incomplete grasp of its object, 'false' insofar as it claims to offer a total knowledge; 'absolute' insofar as it has reached the limits placed upon knowledge by historical develop­ ment, 'relative' insofar as that development will continue and the limits placed upon knowledge change; 'true' insofar as it was once 'absolute', 'false' insofar as it is now 'relative'; 'absolute' insofar as it is 'true', 'relative' insofar as it is only partially 'true'. If Marxism is the possibility of the full self-consciousness of the proletariat, then it must be able to take account of its own relativity, its own developing falseness, and again it is through the revolutionary party that this is achieved. Through its relationship to the class's experi­ ence of the developing social totality, it is able to theorize that experience and development. It is here that we can understand the meaning of one of Lukacs' most obscure statements: Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research has disproved once and for all every one of Marx's individual theses. Even if this were to be

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IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLmCS proved, every serious 'orthodox' Marxist would still be able to accept all such modem findings without reservation, and hence dismiss all of Marx's theses in toto - without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment . . . Orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. (Lukacs 1971a: 1)

This is immediately dismissed as nonsense by Stedman-Jones: 'In fact, such a credo would simply be an intellectual suicide for Marxism: what scientific method in history has been able to survive the systematic disproof of every one of its findings? What possible charter could there be for it?' (Stedman-Jones 1971: 47). Allowing for Lukacs' deliberate exaggeration, the charter is this: as the totality of social relationships develops, so our knowledge of it will move from adequacy to inadequacy; through its relationship to the practices conditioned by, comprising and acting upon that totality (through praxis) Marxism is able to revise itself in a consistent rather than an arbitrary or piecemeal way. Thus the superiority of Marxism does not lie in its individual statements about the world, but in its ability to revise those statements as soon as they become inappropriate without creating destructive internal contradictions, without fragmenting its insights, uniting each through its totalizing movement which is not achieved once and for all but is rather a ceaseless movement of totalization and retotalization. One could say that a science that could not recognize its own inadequacies and revise itself would be lost. Thus there is a complex of reciprocal developing relationships between 'thought' and 'reality', the motor of which, identified at its most general level, is 'praxis'. We can see now how Lukacs avoids relativism. For the latter, there are two poles: 'thought' and 'reality', and problems can only concern the correspondence or lack of correspondence between them, the problem of 'truth' and 'falsity'. From Lukacs' position, truth and falsity are intertwined and the questions that enable a grasp of that intertwining concern the conceptual structure of knowledge, the extent to which it remains caught in or goes beyond immediate appearance, its awareness of its own multidimensional relationships with what it grasps as the 'concrete', its articulation with other moments of praxis.

An epiphany Reading and revising this argument some twenty years after I wrote it, part of me has been asking constantly how could I ever have believed it - yet if it was believable not only to me and a number of others more intelligent than myself within the last fifty years, then how much more believable would it have been seventy or eighty years ago when the proletariat had moved to the centre of the world stage and promised to dominate the future. One major revolution had already been achieved and revolutionary situations were appearing and disappearing in the

LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY

23

turmoil that followed the end of World War I. It has always seemed to me that at this point in his career Lukacs produced the best available statement of the utopian vision inherent in Marxism and it is a vision which seems to be resurrected during periods of rebellion or upheaval it is no accident that Lukacs came to light again during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The religious overtones of 'epiphany' are conscious. What Lukacs envisages is a world where the human powers projected into and alienated in conceptions of a deity have been recaptured by humanity, and where the totality is here and now, no longer the province of a divine being. The free and rational world which had been envisaged by the Enlightenment and by the French Revolution would be here. Philosophy would be realized concretely and practically in the world as Marx had envisaged in his earlier writings (Marx 1974). It seems to me that this is not an unpleasant vision, a world where people are equal and free and aware of the dependence upon and need for each other, a world where we could go fishing, look after cattle and philosophize as we desired. It is, to put it mildly a pity that life has proved more compli­ cated. However, I am not sure that there is an alternative ideal. The vision of postmodernism, which I think is the contemporary form of the liberal vision, is one of fragmentation and hidden despair, and that only leaves a hankering after a rigid, established order. Returning to a more realistic level, if Lukacs' vision has fragmented, some of the fragments are well worth preserving. Here I want to look particularly at his critique of non-Marxist knowledge and how that might figure in our understanding of identity, and second I want to return to and elucidate the importance of the notion of experience.

The critique of knowledge

Lukacs presents a view of Marxism as a process of constant self-revision as it comes into contact with an ever-changing reality; this process of constant revision is also a process of absorption of other forms of knowledge and theory, not just that produced by Marxism itself. It is not a matter of measuring Marxism against other theories and knowledge claims and showing that it is better (or not). There are no independent or absolute criteria, but this does not mean that there are no criteria, as is so often assumed by contemporary theorists. The criteria that Lukacs suggests are internal to Marxism, and not simple targets, like the finishing tape in a race; in fact as the race develops so the finishing tape moves and nobody ever reaches it. The totalization process must be constantly renewed. But if these criteria are potentialities within one form of thought, then how can they provide the basis for establishing the superiority of that form over others? Since they must be defined by the form that contains them, what relevance can they have for

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IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

other forms? Lukacs offers, but does not elaborate (except implicitly in his own critical positions) an answer. Marxism does not reject bourgeois knowledge but accepts it and goes beyond it, including it as a moment within Marxism. Its starting point is the intellectual and artistic products of bourgeois society: 'The "falseness", the "one-sidedness" of the bour­ geois view of history must be seen as a necessary factor in the systematic acquisition of knowledge about society' (1971a: 164). Perhaps the best starting point is to dispute the idea that to situate a work in its social context, to reveal its social roots, is not by and in itself a criticism of that work, a proof of its lack of 'objectivity', any more than the psychological state of the thinker can invalidate his or her claims. The fact that Isaac Newton might have been obsessive or neurotic does not invalidate the laws of gravity, any more than the fact that John Maynard Keynes was, in Marxist terms, a bourgeois thinker invalidates his economic theory. In fact, from a Marxist point of view, the problem with Keynes might be that he was only too right. It is important to situate ideas in their social context in the immediate experience or practical consciousness of a particular class or group. An idea only becomes truly intelligible when we can grasp, through the project of the writer and the conditions in which it is pursued, why it should occupy this position within this discourse, why it is produced at this time by this individual, why it should have these peculiarities, features not directly necessitated by the underlying problematic. All this is an exercise in making ideas intelligible, not in criticizing ideas. What is unintelligible, what cannot be understood, cannot be coherently criticized. The next step is the conceptual criticism, which is a matter of identifying the partial and one-sided nature of what is being criticized, its 'unconscious' relativity and its internal contradictions, in tum rooted in its reliance on unreconciled dualisms. There are a number of different ways in which knowledge may present a partial and one-sided view of its object, each rooted in its failure to go beyond the immediate. Lukacs does not deal in a detailed or systematic way with the identification and transcendence of 'partial' knowledge, but an examination of his arguments in relation to the fragmentation and false separation of disciplines in the social sciences, combined with my earlier exposition, make it possible to follow up more rigorously some of its implications. The unification of the fragmented disciplines is not simply a matter of adding them together, rather they must be 'transformed inwardly' by an 'inwardly synthesizing philo­ sophical method' (1971a: 109). It might be inferred from such an argument that Marxism is a philosophical method and nothing else, and that knowledge produced by science is worthless until it has undergone a philosophical transformation. Lukacs' critique of scientific knowledge tends to support this interpretation: the subordination of philosophy to science is seen as a product of reification. To accept uncritically the results of science, at least of social science, is to accept the reified world.

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25

Science sees the world analytically, separating out elements and looking for external, causal relationships. In the social sciences this leaves society looking fixed and unalterable, a 'second nature', whereas Marxism seeks to unite elements in the internal relationships of a totality which is constantly changing in relation to human praxis. Marxism, however, simultaneously raises and reduces all specializations to the level of aspects in a dialectical process: this is not to deny that the process of abstraction and hence the isolation of the elements and concepts in the special disciplines and whole areas of study is of the very essence of science. But what is decisive is whether this process of isolation is a means towards understanding the whole and whether it is integrated within the context it presupposes and requires, or whether the abstract knowledge of an isolated fragment retains its 'autonomy' and becomes an end in itself. In the last analysis, Marxism does not acknowledge the existence of independent sciences of law, economics or history etc.: there is nothing but a Single, unified dialectical and historical - science of the evolution of society as a totality. (Lukacs 1971a: 28)

The implication is that the philosophical method is the 'highest' moment of totalization and that its object is precisely the knowledge produced by Marxist science. There are also implicit and explicit distinctions between Marxist and non-Marxist science, and this in tum implies that a pre­ liminary transformation of the knowledge produced by the bourgeois disciplines is necessary before the philosophical transformation may be operated. These different levels of 'science' - always in this context social science - the philosophy / science relationship, and the different levels of transformation are frequently blurred by Lukacs. For our present pur­ poses, sociology can be taken as 'bourgeois science' and I will try to offer an example of Lukacs' method first by borrowing from Arato's (1972) discussion of Lukacs' development of Weber's notion of formal ration­ ality. I will then tum to a Lukacsian critique of a sociological account of self and identity. For Weber, formal rationality is the 'reason' of science and industry, resting on quantifiability and calculability and excluding all 'values'. A rational economy requires the organization of all areas of life, law, politics, etc., according to the principles of formal rationality. This was the governing principle of modernity. Arato points out that Lukacs 'fuses the Marxist category of abstract labour with Weber's category of formal rationality' (1972: 35), enabling him to go beyond Marx in arguing that: Free labour in itself is not enough to allow the complete self-realization of capitalist production, or even the total rationalization of a single factory. The culmination of capitalist rationality is only possible when the 'fate of the worker becomes the fate of society as a whole', when the 'internal organization of the factory' becomes the microcosm of 'the whole structure of capitalist society. (Arato 1972: 35)

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IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

If Weber's category enables an extension, or at least a clarification, of Marx, then what has happened to the category itself? At one level it remains the same: it 'refers' to an analytic logic necessary to capitalist production and reproduced in every area of social life; at the same time it is modified, it becomes a concept 'required' in the totalizing frame­ work of Marxism, and the conceptual structure of which it becomes a part limits its meaning and fills it out. Limits, in the sense that it ceases to be the (eventually unintelligible) dominant feature of industrial society as such, but becomes a feature of capitalist society, a 'dependent' rather than a central, organizing concept - dependent upon the analysis of the development of capitalist relations of production, which it follows in Lukacs' exposition. It is 'filled out' in the sense that it takes its place in a structure of concepts appropriate to capitalist society which specify in more detail its Significance. Previously in Weber's work it was specified in relation to the principles of organization of all societies, as for instance in Weber's analytic classification of types of authority. Thus its 'unconscious relativism' is revealed - it loses its 'absolute' implications and becomes the grasp of an historically limited phenomenon. This should convey the general idea and we can now tum to a more simple example. For Lukacs bourgeois social science is analytic as opposed to dialectical; it breaks elements down and sees them as static rather than bringing them together and putting them into motion. Perhaps the best example in relation to the sociological conception of identity is the Twenty Question Test set up by Manford Kuhn of the Iowa school of symbolic interactionism (Kuhn and Partland 1972). People are asked to write down twenty answers to the question: 'Who am I?' The results can be easily quantified and compared and of course by themselves they tell us nothing about identity, except that if people are asked to describe themselves to a stranger they start with the most anonymous characteristics such as gender or religious denomination. However, this is not 'wrong' in any sense , it is only partial and we can easily push it into something more useful. We can ask, for example, whether people would describe themselves in the same way to potential friends or lovers. The answer is, of course, that at least the order of characteristics might be varied and the concept of identity is then put in motion - it is not a list of characteristics but a changing combination of characteristics that can vary from situation to situation. We can ask questions about the relationships between the individual and the different situations in which one finds oneself. Identity is not a fixed entity, part of a second nature. This is very general but it enables two important points to be made. The first is that it is clear that the 'originally given' object, the results of the test, remains at the same time as it is transformed, reconstructed. The 'facts' come to be seen as part of a process and take on a new meaning. They are no longer the reference point against which a theory must be judged. All this is fairly straightforward and not particularly Marxist at

LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY

27

all; in fact it is the starting point of the Chicago School of symbolic interactionism and here the notion of criticism moves up a level. Identity is seen as a process, a matter of external negotiation between oneself and the people around, and an internal negotiation or conversation between the T and the 'me' (Mead 1938). The next stage, from a Marxist point of view, would be the situating of these processes in an even wider social framework. Again it would not be a matter of demonstrating that Mead or the interactionist tradition were wrong, but of situating these particular ideas, these particular processes, in the context of wider processes. Symbolic interactionists have gone some of the way themselves: Simon and Gagnon (1986), for example, give an account of the historically changing forms in which we work out our sexual behaviour through a process of social scripting, then interpersonal scripting and then intra-personal scripting, a process of increasing complexities in sexual identity. This in tum can be understood as the result of an increasingly complex role structure, all of which can be described by symbolic interactionism. What cannot be understood within the interactionist framework, how­ ever, are the underlying structural relationships which produce more complex roles, and the ways these roles are arranged in power hier­ archies and connected to property or wealth. Nor, it seems, can inter­ actionism grasp the underlying historical processes in which an individual life and identity is formed. This needs something more, which can be supplied by Marxism or indeed by other macro-social theories that can be brought into the ongoing totalization. It is not just a matter of Marxism absorbing everything; Marxism itself is incomplete and will require other theories and approaches to fill gaps. Goff (1980), for example, argues that Mead can supply Marxism with a social psychology which it can generate out of its own conceptual framework. This is not the place to go into great detail about the battles between different forms of social theory during this century, but from the way I have framed this argument it is clear which side I 'support'. Yet the argument itself is undermining this facile notion of support and oppo­ sition. The original version of this paper was motivated by a reaction against what I felt to be Althusser's (1969) 'scientistic' Marxism. It now seems to me that it is best understood as an argument in favour of metanarratives and against postmodernism, against which I would also argue for the importance of the idea of social science and scientific practice. The notion of an ongoing totalization involves the necessity of debate between different positions, but the maintenance in some form or another of all positions, constantly modifying each other and in rela­ tionship to each other. These days I would prefer not to argue in favour of Marxism over other theoretical positions, but in favour of Reason, of which Marxism is one historically fruitful variant, and in contrast to unreason. The former is a totalizing thought which maintains what is left

28

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of the Marxist ideal, the latter is a one-sided or detotalizing process which cannot see its own partiality. I think that the important point in this argument, and one which takes us back to identity, is the unavoid­ ability of being involved in a totalizing process. Any statement of theoretical knowledge, interpretation of empirical findings, or of one's own experience has implications which go beyond that simple inter­ pretation. We always imply theoretical grand narratives, perhaps even especially when denying their existence. Such a denial is a grossly universal and grand statement. To understand what an 'identity' is, or a 'self' or 'person', involves seeing the individual in the context not just of the surrounding 'sig­ nificant others' at different times of his or her life, but also in terms of position in the wider social structure and of the wider historical processes which provide us with the stage on which we act out our lives. We are each of us given a starting point and we do something with it. Some aspect of our identity is given to us with our starting point and we have no choice about it. I did not choose to be white, male, or to be born into a South London working-class family, yet my identity, my self, has been framed by these facts, as it has been framed by my being conceived during World War II, and growing up during the Cold War to witness the Vietnam War and so on. These things do not determine in any strict sense the sort of person I am and what I do, but they limit and condition both of those things. I might not be carried along in the totalizing movement of history towards the socialist revolution but the thought which tries to under­ stand my life, or anybody's life must find my place in the totality. Just as the understanding of a society requires a metanarrative, so the under­ standing of an individual self, identity or life requires that it be inserted in that metanarrative. I need not be aware of that metanarrative, the social and historical processes which have such an effect on my life. I will be talking later about the internal unconscious, but we are all surrounded by an external unconscious which profoundly influences us. We might not be able to abolish this unconscious by seizing control of history, as Lukacs hoped, but we can become aware of it. Now I want to move in the other direction, away from the totality and towards individual experience and its significance. My starting point will be other attempts to deal with relativism suggesting that one or another social group is in a privileged position to grasp reality.

Experience, truth and knowledge It seems to me that Lukacs' very complex argument brings together two central elements: experience, and knowledge/ theory. Arguments which are often similar in form to his arguably tend to miss or underestimate the importance of one or the other. I want to argue here that if we pursue

LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY

29

experience we can arrive at another important idea, that of truth as something different from knowledge. I will begin with Karl Mannheim (1972), who in the 1930s produced an argument which came very close to Lukacs, with the role of the proletariat being taken over by intellectuals. He argues that the sociology of knowledge replaces relativism with 'relationism'. It appears when different points of view have invalidated each other by revealing each other's social roots and consequent ideological characteristics. It offers the only way out of the impasse by replacing the notion of absolute or eternal truth by one of a permanently developing truth: Relationism, as we use it, states that every assertion can only be relationally formulated. It becomes relativism only when it is linked with the older, static ideal of eternal, unperspectivistic truths independent of the subjective experi­ ence of the observer, and when it is judged by the alien idea of absolute truth. (Mannheim 1972: 270)

This sounds very Lukacsian, but Mannheim still approaches the problem of distinguishing between better and worse knowledge, more or less adequate knowledge. He suggests that more adequate knowledge is achieved by synthesizing different points of view into an ever-widening totality of knowledge and two ways in which this might be done. In the first place: What has been correctly but differentially perceived by the two perspectives must be understood in the light of differences in the structure of these varied modes of perception. An effort must be made to find a formula for translating the results of one into those of the other and to discover a common denomi­ nator for these varying perspectivistic insights. Once such a common denominator has been found, it is possible to separate the necessary differ­ ences from the arbitrarily conceived and mistaken elements which here too should be considered as errors. (Mannheim 1972: 270)

Alternatively, we might achieve a synthesis through recognizing the situational determinants in opposing or differing points of view and, as a consequence, neutralizing them. Each alternative implies some 'neutral' area (in the second case, apparently immediately visible) between or within different points of view - an implicit 'real world' against which 'situational' determinants can be identified, or a neutral language which enables the same result. This implication remains despite his attempt to situate 'superior knowl­ edge' in the perspective of intellectuals as a group: they are simply able to see more of the real world than others, or have easier access to the neutral language. In this way, 'truth' and 'error' creep back and, having gone this far, it is no surprise that Mannheim reaches the point of advocating 'a direct observation of the facts' (1972: 256) in order to choose between different points of view. This is in direct contradiction to the earlier assertion of the perspectivistic nature of all truth which, moreover, Mannheim has

30

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taken to its logical conclusion in asserting that in an important way 'facts' are constituted by conceptual structures (1972: 91). This would imply that the terms can have no absolute meaning apart from the perspectives in which they occur, and they will of course have different meanings in different perspectives. We end up back in a relativist position. It is indeed very difficult to avoid relativism if we think of the world as something 'out there' which we look at from different angles - people sitting in a room will see different parts of the room and it would be nonsense to say that one point of view is better then another. We could not get a complete picture by adding all the points of view together since a complete picture would involve being able to see through objects and other people to the hidden objects and parts of the room. Now what differentiates Lukacs from Mannheim is precisely the notion of seeing through or inside objects - the notion of there being underlying structures which are not available to any visual perspective but can be constructed in theory as explanations of what can be seen. This is a way of putting it which owes more to modem realism than it does to Lukacs (d. Bhaskar 1978, 1979) but it seems to me to capture Lukacs' claims for Marxism. The feature that enables Lukacs to make this claim, producing an alternative to relativism, is the notion of experience the experience of the world and of the self as subject and object which opens up the possibility of knowing the totality and of being able to understand underlying structures. This experience can work 'internally' in the sense that it pushes the class into thinking about its place in society, it can be grasped and its implications explored by the theorist and the philo­ sopher. It is developed through interaction between the two. In the original version of this paper I argued for the development of a Marxist phenomenology of experience. In fact such a phenomenology already existed and I will be discussing the basics of it in Chapter 3 where I shall suggest that it helps us to understand the failure of Lukacs' hopes. Here, however, I want to make another distinction based on a criticism of Harding's 'feminist standpoint epistemology'. My under­ standing of her argument is that the privileged place of women in establishing knowledge is that they are the group that is most excluded, the group at the bottom of the pile. A good critical discussion of the philosophical aspects of this argument can be found in Halberg (1989), but here I want to develop a different critique. The important point is that Lukacs does not base his argument on the fact that the proletariat is at the bottom of the pile. This is the mistaken position attributed to him by Stedman-Jones whom I quoted above. Lukacs' argument is based on the peculiar experience of the proletariat, the conjunction of being subject and object in the same activity. Arguably, it is only working-class women who are caught up in this experience as part of a wider class. I do not think that Harding makes her case on cornmon experience of this sort but what she does seem to do is to open up the possibility for -

LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY

31

other groups to demand priority within the women's movement working-class women, black women and so on. I will argue later that there are profound sociological reasons why this sort of identity politics will fragment. What the fragmentation does in this particular case is to open the door to a postmodemism which seems to undermine the possibility of a feminist politics at all. However, if we think of experience here in a different way I think it is possible to rescue something from Harding's position. While the sort of experience implied by Lukacs might be absent for women or other 'identity' groups, based on gender, ethnic origin or sexuality, this is not to deny that some form of experience might be shared by many members of such groups. It is quite clear, for example, and to continue with feminism, that women are almost consistently under­ represented in the higher levels of industry, the professions, academia, that they are subjected to forms of violence which are not necessarily punished or even recognized. These things can be experienced by women and some of this experience can be turned into knowledge, statistical knowledge, for example. But there is a level of experience - of 'feeling' the glass ceiling above one's head, of sensing the threat of violence in a man that is perhaps only available or primarily available to women; or perhaps it is a matter of such experiences playing a more fundamental part in women's lives than in those of most men. These experiences would be somewhere around the border of the reflective and pre-reflective. I would like to refer to this sort of experience which is both individual and social as a person's truth his or her way of feeling the world and others, which might enable a mutual recognition and a basis for collective action or might not. It is intensely felt and for periods will fill up a life. It is an experience we can identify with or 'become' and which, I shall argue later, stops us thinking, whereas the experience Lukacs is talking about is an experience that is contradictory and pushes us into thought. Now my truth is not knowledge and the gap between the two is often painful - especially since it pushes me into thinking again; as an example, a woman's truth that women are under threat on the street is different from the statistical knowledge that young men are most in danger. Of course the two can confirm each other: the experience of the glass ceiling, is usually confirmed by knowledge. When the two contra­ dict each other, it often feels that the experience is being invalidated, especially if it is a very intense experience. It is not 'invalid' - it is authentic, integral to the experiencing individual, but it is not knowledge of the world, it is an individual truth. Theory, knowledge, must make a space for that truth and attempt to understand it and its importance, but it would be wrong to take it as knowledge. My religious experiences and the beliefs I develop might be a vital part of my truth, but it does not follow that the beliefs are true. Theory has to place my truth in a wider totality and that will change its meaning. -

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It should be evident that even if Lukacs does work with a fairly limited conception of experience, experience is a complex reality. There can be contradictory experiences which push us into thought, there can be intense experiences that are vital to our sense of self and which prevent our thinking. In the next chapter I will tum to different phenomenologies of experience which make the picture ever more complicated.

3

THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE

The more recent concern with the politics of identity, which I have suggested elsewhere (Craib 1994) is narcissistic in various ways, is argu­ ably a narrowing down of a wider concern with the politics of experi­ ence. This wider concern can be traced back through the philosophy of Hegel, Marx's comments about alienation in the 1844 Manuscripts, Hegelian Marxism and Husserl's phenomenology, and French existenti­ alism, the latter being most immediately relevant to R.D. Laing's classic The Politics of Experience (1967). Here I want to look at the two major twentieth-century figures of French existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and at a central figure in the Hegelian Marxist tradition, T.W. Adorno. There are various ways of conceptualizing experience and one reason for starting with French existentialism is that experience in this tradition is by definition wider than and prior to cognition. The Cartesian cogito is inverted - not 'I think, therefore l am', but 'I am, therefore I think'. Of course, I can 'be' in different ways and these different ways can affect not only what I think but how I think, and how I know myself, how I understand my identity. From this starting point Sartre and Merleau­ Ponty take us in different directions.

Sartre's existentialism I find it difficult to understand why Sartre has not attracted more attention from English-speaking sociologists: he is a difficult thinker and requires careful reading but this is true for any number of French thinkers who have been embraced by British sociologists, from Althusser through to Baudrillard. It is true that Sartre's earlier work, the 'purer' existen­ tialism of Being and Nothingness (1957) is perhaps at the opposite end of the spectrum to sociology, but the later massive Critique of Dialectical Reason (1977) has at its centre an analysis of different forms of relation­ ships comprising different types of social group. His more accessible The Problem of Method (1963a) addresses an issue central to interactionist sociology and the increasingly popular concern with life histories and narratives (see, for example, Macadams 1993) - the relationship between

34

IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

the course of an individual life and the surrounding social networks and social structures. His Anti-Semite and Jew (1948) takes up the issue of otherness and the other some forty years before contemporary post­ modernists and Lacanians. Even if we do not concern ourselves with the detail of Sartre's earlier philosophy, his assertion of a pre-reflective level of consciousness at which we take decisions and adopt positions is important. By inverting the Cartesian cogito, Sartre shows that Descartes does not espouse the simple unitary subject that contemporary thinkers so often attribute to him. The notion of reflection, of thinking, presupposes a split in con­ sciousness between that which thinks and that which is thought about. The pre-reflective consciousness that is already committed in the world, whether we like it or not, splits when we think about our commitment. When I think about myself I am both subject and object - the person who does the thinking and the person who is thought about. In this sense identity can never be achieved, I can never become myself. There is another sense in which identity cannot be achieved: my consciousness is a separation from the world around me as well as from myself as an object and I am not part of any material chain of causation. It is here that we can find the meaning of what Sartre calls freedom and the necessity and unavoidability of freedom: I am always already in the world and I have to take an attitude to the world around me and to myself, but that attitude is not determined by anything. If I am clapped in irons and suspended upside down in a dungeon I still have to choose how I will suffer. In his earlier work Sartre is primarily concerned with the ethical implications of this division in consciousness between the reflective and the pre-reflective: do I take responsibility for my place in the world and what I do with it or do I claim to myself and to others that I have no choice in what I am or do? Sartre (1957) calls the latter 'bad faith' and one aspect of bad faith is the attempt to identify with a social role or status. If, for instance, I decide that my identity as a man is what is important and I spend my time trying to discover this identity through participating in various men's groups in the hope that I will find a security and solidity in such an identity, then I am engaging in an act of bad faith, for such a security and solidity is not possible. I can never be a man, I can only try to be whatever it is that I think a man is. This is perhaps the simplest reason why identity politics are never as satisfying as they promise to be. Sartre here is presenting an ethical version of Lacan's (1977) psycho­ analytic concept of the 'mirror stage'; the similarity should not be surprising since both were pupils of Alexander Kojeve and his interpretation of Hegel (Kojeve 1969) constantly emerges in their work. In Lacan's version, the infant, which at first experiences itself as a bundle of conflicting urges, comes to see itself reflected in a mirror (the eyes of its mother perhaps). What it sees in this reflection is a being apparently

35

THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE

in control of itself with clear boundaries and a physical and therefore emotional unity. The infant attempts to

become

this being, an imaginary

identification; to some degree we spend the rest of our lives chasing such an identity which is impossible to achieve. For Sartre what makes this identity impossible is a fissure in con­ sciousness. The pre-reflective consciousness is a

nothingness;

it has no

content but is simply a relationship to what is outside. For Lacan what underlies our consciousness of the world and prevents us becoming subjects identical to ourselves is a complex unconscious. It is, I think, arguable that at different levels of experience both are right; our consciousness breaks any causal chain that links our subjectivity to the outside world. Yet at the same time our subjectivity is caught up in the outside world in all sorts of ways, through our body and through the language and belief systems into which we are socialized, and the social structures in which we are situated. The moment of 'nothingness', of our separation from the world and the anguish and fear which that pro­ duces, is only part of it. Later in this chapter we shall see that Merleau­ Ponty adds another dimension and in the following chapter we shall examine how psychoanalysis extends our understanding of experience even further. Sartre developed his original existentialism through a long philoso­ phical and political confrontation with Marxism. The

Reason (1977)

Critique of Dialectical

is a massive attempt to found Marxist philosophy, not as a

philosophy of nature a la Engels

(1940),

but as a philosophy of the

relationship between conscious human beings and nature, in which a third area of ontological reality is created between the nothingness of conscious and the material world. This area - the 'practico-inert' combines certain properties of consciousness and the material world and acts back upon consciousness, confining and directing practice. It is in this context of what is an elaboration of Marx's theory of alienation that we find Sartre's analysis of different types of social relationships. This part of Sartre's philosophy is primarily one of praxis, of action rather than structures, and he aims at a philosophical foundation of Marxist concepts such as class, not at their refinement or employment which must take place on a different level of analysis. In this sense, he can be grouped with writers such as Lukacs, but he offers a more elaborate conception of social class and of social experience. In his exploration of the limits and potentialities of human praxis, the 'dialectic of freedom and necessity' that he finds in Marx, Sartre develops what can best be called a phenomenology of social groups, an analysis of the possible structures of relationships that may form between individuals and groups on the basis of their membership of a social class. Two of these are particularly important. The first is the 'series': a structure of interpersonal relationships conditioned by economic scarcity and dominated by social and economic structures that have become relatively independent of human activity. Each individual is assigned her

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place within and by these structures which separate her from others in the series: she grasps herself as 'other' than those others, isolated and dependent upon others' actions; to the extent that her action is limited and guided in this way from the outside, she is also 'other' than herself a profound double alienation that leaves her impotent and, as we shall see, open to manipulation. The second formation, the 'group-in-fusion', is the radical opposite: under an external threat that defines the series as a group, serialized individuals come to grasp themselves as the 'same' as each other through the actions, initially separate and individual, they take to protect themselves. Andre Gorz describes Sartre's notion with admirable clarity: 'The active unit of human praxis which then emerges . . . is the paradigm of all egalitarian concepts of what a liberated, fraternal community should be . . . . In the fused group alienation is - at least temporarily - abolished' (Gorz 1975: 258-9). Gorz is right to emphasize that, for Sartre, the triumph is shortlived; the necessity for the group to organize and maintain itself sets it on the path to institutionalization and re-serialization; nonetheless, it remains the means by which people collectively and freely make history. The sociology of consumption can gain a critical dimension from notion of a series. The creation of markets and needs in late capitalist societies involves a process of serialization where each is defined by external criteria - possessions - in relation to the others. I choose my 'self' from a range of styles and commodities offered to me, my choice being a response to the choice of others rather than something which comes from my life-project. Sartre sees this as involving a form of manipulative control that he calls 'extero-conditioning' in which a ruling group 'works' upon the series to push seriality to the limits and endow it with a false unity. Each individual, in her isolated importance, is kept separate from others and at the same time encouraged to become more like them through the adoption of various 'external' anonymous quali­ ties: ways of dressing, tastes, cliched political beliefs, etc. The alienation is cemented; in my serial isolation and impotence I am persuaded that I can find power, friendship and perhaps especially an identity by making myself more like other people I do not know, that - in the last analysis nobody knows. This provides a way into an analysis and critique of a host of cultural and political phenomena which play vital roles in maintaining the present system. The notion is useful not just on the level of fashion and popular culture, the most obvious examples, but it is also applicable to the mass media and parliamentary democracy. Extero­ conditioning gives rise to a whole 'rhetoric of anonymity' through which news is filtered and political questions posed: 'public opinion', 'the silent majority', 'the wishes of the people', 'the ordinary working man', become anonymous arbitrators, points of identification for those addressed as 'free independent individuals' by the media and politicians. These are, at least in Britain and the USA reinforced by the market ideology that sees the citizen as a consumer and it all serves to mask the possibility of

THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE

37

taking real collective decisions in cooperation with specific other people in concrete situations. The 'group in fusion' is in more conventional Marxist terms the 'class­ for-itself', the class which has achieved class-consciousness. But Sartre's way of conceiving this offers a more subtle tool than conventional Marxism. A 'group in fusion' can form on bases other than class, and within classes at different times and places. We can see the social world as a kaleidoscope of series, fused groups and institutions in a constant process of formation and dissolution, in Sartre's view given an overall unity by their relationship to the practico-inert: different classes possess different relationships to the material world. Compared with Lukacs, Sartre offers the hope of totality, rather than its promise. In epistemological terms the totality is still central to understanding and in political terms it is still the ideal, but a complex ideal and the development of class-consciousness is not a cognitive process, involving the theorization of experience, but an experiential process, the experience of a threat, and the experience of others experi­ encing that threat, brought together into a group by the actions of the ruling group. The fused group does not come together to achieve an identity - it is given an identity from the outside and internalizes it through the experiential rather than theoretical realization of a common threat. Sartre's philosophy carries on the tradition of humanist Marxism in a generally recognizable way, Merleau-Ponty carries it on at a different, less recognizable level.

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is rather less radical than Sartre's. He does not emphasize consciousness as a transcendental nothingness in relation to the world, nor does he see it as that which constitutes the world. He is concerned primarily with the life-world as the realm in which consciousness comes into contact with an already constituted, already existing material world. The introduction of the real material world into the life-world distinguishes him from the more orthodox phenomenological sociologists such as Alfred Schutz (1967) and opens an important possibility, that of taking account of 'material' social structures, those with a weight and permanence that goes beyond the meaning given to them by social actors. When we come to consider Merleau-Ponty's relation to structuralism and Marxism, we shall see to what extent this promise is fulfilled. If he eliminates the constituting transcendental consciousness this does not mean that he gives priority to the material world, nor does he simply juxtapose that world to consciousness (which is certainly a tendency in Sartre). The life-world is for Merleau-Ponty the interpenetration of

38

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subject and object, an area of mystery where meaning is generated in a real but meaningless world. It is an area revealed by the phenomenology of perception (Merleau-Ponty 1962). It is in the immediate 'primordial' perception of the world that everything else has its basis: perception involves the whole body as both subject and object, and it is in the immediate organization of the world in terms of figures and ground (as opposed to Schutz's typification) that we find the first generation of meaning, the first projection of human intentions into the world. Consciousness must always grasp its object from a specific perspective, perception is rooted in the same body as one object among others. We can never perceive an object from all perspectives at the same time, the world continually transcends our grasp as we continually transcend the world through organizing it from our specific perspective. In my perception of the world, I become part of it at the same time as I appropriate it at a distance as part of myself. My pre-reflective experi­ ence of the world is this ongoing 'dance' with the world around me. It is this fundamental interpenetration of subject and object, the fact that consciousness is always situated within the world and never completely transcendent to it, that enables phenomenology to become dialectical and opens the way for an accommodation with Marx, particularly through his earlier work. A central concern is with linguistics (Merleau-Ponty 1974b) which illustrates his vision as a whole and acts as a model for the other human sciences. He explores in particular the generation of meaning from within the life-world through language, which is both the ground of intersubjectivity and a structure. At times he manifests an almost religious sense of wonder and mystery at this pre-reflective relation to the world, but at the same time there is a coherent argument. He devel­ ops his own position through a critique of the idea of a 'pure' language, and of the attempt to study language as if it were a system of clear denotations in order to escape 'the confused and annoying situation of a being who is what he is talking about' (1974b: 3). A 'pure' language would be one with an absolutely clear meaning, with no room for doubt or misinterpretation; such a language would also make it unnecessary to speak, since nothing could be said that was not already known. The perfect clarity of meaning is the impossibility of new meaning, and therefore the impossibility of life: 'What we have to say is only the excess of what we live over what has already been said' (1974b: 112). To regard language as a system of clear denotations is to render its development a matter of historical accident; we know that language changes, but there would be no reason for the change. To make change intelligible we have to come back to the experience of speaking, the expression of new meaning. If we look at our experience of speaking, or reading, we find the opposite to what we would expect if language were a structure of clear meanings. The words themselves are a hindrance - to attend to the words as they are enunciated or as they appear on the page

THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE

39

is to lose the meaning of what is being said or read. The meaning always seems to lie beyond the words rather than in them. Merleau-Ponty offers a highly original interpretation of Saussure. Most structuralists read Saussure as showing that a scientific linguistics must eliminate the speaking subject and concentrate on the synchronic structure of language; for Merleau-Ponty, Saussure brings us back to the speaking subject and the inseparability of synchrony and diachrony. He argues that Saussure was the first to realize the peculiar nature of language as a structure that is gone beyond in each spoken sentence yet remains constant, the first to discover a structure of language that does not involve the assumption of clear denotation. This structure is, in fact, a structure of differences, the meaning of a sound or word is not a positive quality that adheres to it, but lies in its difference from other words and sounds. Its meaning depends on its relationship to other words and sounds in the chain. Meaning lies in-between words. This system of differentiation is the means of generating meaning within the 'life-world' of a society and to learn a language is to learn the rules of differentiation around which the structure is built. In this sense language pre-exists what can be said with it; but at this level the structure of a language only makes meaning possible - it is actualized in use, and here we are referred back to the speaking subject. The act of speaking must take an 'existential and ontological' priority over the structure that makes speech possible, that logically precedes it. It is speaking that generates the structure of language and it is to speech that we must refer to understand any development in that structure. Interaction with others, communication, is not, as many sociologists seem to assume, a matter of listening to words. Intersubjectivity is for Merleau-Ponty an immediate reality of pre-reflective experience. I grasp the existence of the other consciousnesses as soon as I see some objects in my world reacting to other objects to which I also react. But I do not grasp the other consciousness as existing over and against me: 'face-to­ face' interaction is a misnomer. Face to face I see only a twitching fleshy object which is not the other consciousness and which does not contain the other consciousness - I know that inside that object there are only other objects. The other's consciousness exists as it were not 'in' him but behind and around me. Insofar as language is an object in my world as in his, we are joined together through it: when I listen to the other speak or read what he has written, I enter into his consciousness, discover his meanings through my meanings. After reading, listening, it is possible to say - Merleau-Ponty quotes PauIhan - 'in this light at least I have been you' (1974b: 12). Given these views it is not surprising to find that as the deficiencies of post-structuralist and postrnodernist conceptions of subjectivity become apparent, theorists tum back to Merleau-Ponty to explore new possi­ bilities. Stavro-Pearce (1994), for example, uses his ideas to suggest an alternative view of postrnodern feminism. Donald McIntosh (1994) offers

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a critique of the more conventional sociological conceptions of subjec­ tivity presented by Mead and Habermas and he argues that we should recognize the existence of a pre-linguistic self and therefore non-socially constructed self. He suggests also that we need to distinguish between the person, whom I take to be the real individual with various levels of experience, and the self which is perhaps imaginary in the Lacanian sense, an attempt to avoid the complexity and multidimensionality of experience. The cognitive bias of sociology always seems to bring it to focusing on the self. When we tum to social structures in the wider sense we can use the linguistic model to offer interesting insights: societies are created pre­ cisely by human beings going beyond social structures, in the same way that meaning is created by going beyond the structures of language. To contemporary sociologists these ideas might sound similar to those of Anthony Giddens (1984) who talks of structures as rules and resources employed in social action, and on occasion refers to Merleau-Ponty, but again Giddens reveals the cognitive bias of much sociological analysis of action. Merleau-Ponty is concerned with the experiential overflow of rules, with the struggle with rules rather than the following of rules. One vital difference between Giddens and Merleau-Ponty is that the latter recognizes the limited use of language as a metaphor for social struc­ tures, which possess a different, material ontological status. It is this struggle with rules which should provide the basis of social analysis and politics, and I want to follow through the way in which Merleau-Ponty develops these ideas in a critique of Marxism with which he had always had an ambivalent relationship. After World War II he and Sartre formed a short-lived political party aiming at French neutrality in the cold war. In the following period Merleau-Ponty pro­ duced a book which was an apologia for Stalin's show trials and he was very close to the Communist Party, much closer than Sartre at the time. After the start of the Korean War he moved away from the Party as Sartre moved closer towards it. Adventures of the Dialectic (1974a) marks his break with Sartre which was never quite healed. Its interest here lies in his critique of the development of Marxism from Lukacs and his attempt to develop a different sort of left-wing politics. In what must be one of the best short discussions of the early Lukacs available, Merleau-Ponty argues that he achieved two things. First, he was able to relativize relativism, to grasp that relativism is a historical product that may be superseded. Second, although he placed the possibility of overcoming relativism in the proletariat, he avoided conceptualizing the latter as an object bearing the quality of absolute truth and at the same time avoided allowing it to be the 'idea' of a philosopher external to it. Rather, through his notion of praxis, he was able to argue that the proletariat was the creator of truth in the sense that knowledge was developed in and by the action of the class. For Lukacs, the field of the dialectic was that of man's activity in and on the world,

THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE

41

precisely that interworld between subject and object, the life-world, that was discussed earlier. The unity of thought and action is a recurrent theme in Merleau-Ponty and emerges in his discussion of the late Lukacs and Trotsky in Adventures of the Dialectic (1974a). Here we find the core of his critique of Marxism, the eventual failure of which, already contained in Marx's later works and in Lenin, lies in its projection of the dialectic into the material world, into the proletariat as an object and the Party as a bearer of absolute truth. When the future is already outlined in the objects around us, freedom disappears. When those objects prove not to be moving in the direction in which they ought to move, then the only recourse is to terrorism - the attempt to force the world in a particular direction, in other words, Stalinism. Thought and action become divorced, the former is reduced to reflection, the latter becomes arbitrary. In the epilogue to Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty argues for a non-communist left that will renounce revolution and work within the parliamentary system. Revolution involves forcing the world in a direc­ tion in which it does not want to go and must inevitably result in Stalinist terrorism. In the case of underdeveloped countries, where the choice is between Stalinism and starvation, then we must choose the former every time, but in the advanced industrial countries of the west the proletariat has nothing to gain from revolution. This is not a very original position, but an alternative development might be found from Merleau-Ponty's statement of the dialectic: Dialectic is not the idea of reciprocal action, nor that of the solidarity of opposites and their sublation. Dialectic is not a development that starts itself again, nor the cross-growth of a quality that establishes as a new order a change which until then has been quantitative - these are consequences or aspects of the dialectic. But taken in themselves or as properties of being, these relationships are marvels, curiosities or paradoxes. They enlighten only when one grasps them in our experience, at the junction of a subject, of being and of other subjects: between those opposites, in that reciprocal action, in that relationship between an inside and an outside, between the elements of that constellation, in that becoming, which not only becomes but becomes for itself, there is room, without contradiction and without magic, for relationships with double meanings, for reversals, for opposite and inseparable truths, for sublations, for a plurality of levels or orders, for a perpetual genesis. There is dialectic only in that type of being in which a junction of subjects occurs, being which is not only a spectacle that each subject presents to itself for its own benefit but which is rather their common residence, the place of their exchange and of their reciprocal interpretation. (1974a: 203-4)

Thomas Langan (1966) draws a parallel between Merleau-Ponty's conception of a social structure ripe for revolutionary change and his conception of the psychological complex in intersubjective life: both block or distort human relationship to the pre-reflective life-world, rendering people incapable of responding to the most fundamental

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demands of that world. In this context the notion of identity can also be seen as a freezing of the dialectic of the life-world, whether it is seen as a matter of personal identity or of class identity. At the same time it is not apparent that non-Marxist socialism, social democracy or any other form of contemporary politics actually expresses people's experience of the life-world. Indeed it is arguable that our ability to make contact with our life-world has become steadily undermined with the growth of late capitalism. This takes us on to the work of Adorno.

Adorno's tragic Marxism Here I will be primarily concerned with Adorno's

Minima Morali (1974).

The note on the inside cover describes it, rightly, as 'unlike any other book by [Adorno], or any other work in the Western Marxist tradition'. It is a collection of aphorisms written over the period lished in

1944-7 and pub­ 1951 in honour of Max Horkheimer. It is not a book that can be

read easily from beginning to end, but at the same time it is more than a 'commonplace book' that can be dipped into at random. It is united by an 'inner form' but more importantly for present purposes by an overriding moral critique of modem capitalist society. It is not the sort of book that easily lays itself open to summary. Adorno's style, even in translation, is tight and deliberate; subordinate clauses are built into the centre of each sentence, not strung out at the end as a series of reservations and qualifications, and each aphorism takes us smoothly through a series of contradictions and transformations in which each sentence plays its role. Each sentence, each aphorism is a specific manifestation of the dialectical method that informs the work as a whole: a unity of opposites. It is divided into three parts according to the periods in which the aphorisms were written, and a staggering variety of topics is covered, moving in each section from the most intimate personal experiences to the most general theoretical problems. The subtitle, 'Reflections from Damaged Life', indicates the roots of the work in Adorno's own experi­ ence, but even where this experience is most closely touched upon we learn little about Adorno himself. Each experience, each topic is lifted immediately

from

the

particular

to

the

general:

he

examines

his

childhood and finds the forewarnings of fascism; a sleepless night is the grounding for a discussion of time; a whole social system is revealed behind a landscape, a hotel, two lines in a newspaper obituary. The topics range from sexuality and love, generosity, kindness and tolerance to the role of the family, the position of women and of intellectuals, bourgeois manners, personal relationships, and the roots and nature of fascism; there are critiques of mass culture, film, literature and music and theoretical critiques of psychoanalysis and philosophy. A simple listing of the topics becomes pointless. What each aphorism expresses is a

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43

general critique of late bourgeois society, outlined in the introduction which moves, unlike the rest of the book, from the general to the individual and provides the justification for the book itself. The category 'subjectivity' appears as the principal topic for several of the aphorisms and is the hidden topic of them all. 'Individuality', 'the subject', 'subjectivity' is the product of the bourgeois economy: each individual is defined as such by his or her market relationships to other individuals; each is the product of a totality and as such to begin from individuality, to 'start with the individual' as does bourgeois thought, is to mask the real nature of the totality. This subordination of the individual to the totality has its origins in Hegel: 'The conception of a totality harmonious through all its antagonisms compels him to assign to individuation, however much he may designate it a driving moment in the process, an inferior status in the construction of the whole' (Adorno 1974: 1 7). Yet at the same time it is only through the individual that the totality realizes itself, and it is in the individual that the totality may be revealed. Having created the individual and realized itself through the indi­ vidual's subjectivity, bourgeois society in its later development sets about destroying the individual. The free play of the market has produced all-powerful monopolies; the division of labour that gave birth to the individual has now eradicated individual differences, has created a series of interchangeable elements, a homogeneous mass: In the period of his decay, the individual's experience of himself and what he encounters contributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the dominant category. In the face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere. If critical theory lingers there, it is not only with a bad conscience. (Adorno 1974: 18)

In other words, it is as the individual is destroyed that he or she becomes the source of truth or knowledge - not the serialized individual pursuing fashion and lifestyle or Giddens' reflexive individual constantly reconstructing him or herself according to some therapeutic programme, but the suffering individual hidden by such manic activity, unable to make contact with experience or life-world. There is a striking similarity between Adorno's vision in Minima Moralia and the tragic world view described by Lucien Goldmann (1964). Goldmann sees tragic thought as the most advanced forerunner of dialectical thought: like the latter, tragic thought takes the totality as its major category and, against bourgeois rationalism, stresses the contra­ dictory nature of truth. But tragic thought lacks a historical conscious­ ness, it cannot see the development and solution of contradictions that, for Marx and Hegel, came from history. The world is seen not as

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developing dialectically but as static totality of paradoxes, an 'unstruc­ tured totality' in the true sense of the word. There is no starting point and no end point for tragic thought, no infrastructure which provides the base of the totality, only a series of contradictions that may be related in any number of ways. Hence the fragmentary form of Pascal's Pensees which is reflected in Adorno's aphorisms. The latter have a more tangible order since Adorno comes after the discovery of history, but history no longer seems to entail the development of the contradictions of the totality to a higher level, rather it threatens to suppress them altogether, hiding itself from thought in the process, forbidding any rational grasp of its mechanisms. It is only through the fragmented experience of a subjectivity conscious of its own fragmentation and destruction that we can grasp the totality at all. The critical theorist, like the tragic thinker, is 'in the world but not of it': both pursue the realization of absolute values - the values of Christianity in the latter case, the value of an end to alienation, of reconciliation with self in the former - and neither will accept compromise. At the same time, both recognize the impossibility of achieving those values in the world and see that the slightest relaxation of their demands only strengthens the world they reject, and they also recognize that it is impossible to escape from the world. They are both caught in the same double bind: to retire from the world, to give up the struggle within it, is implicitly to approve it, yet to remain in the world whose values they reject is equally a compromise, a sign of approval. For the tragic thinker, salvation - God - is both always present and always absent, he is constantly watching but never reveals himself, there can be no proof, no rational certainty of his existence. For Pascal, Goldmann argues, all that was possible was a wager on God's existence, and it is the concept of the wager that is at the centre of his thought, the one possible organizing principle. For the critical theorist it is the proletariat that is always absent and always present: always present because it once offered the possibility of salvation, always absent because that possibility has now passed; the proletariat has been absorbed by the system, disappeared into a mass society. As Adorno was to write at a later date: 'Philosophy which once seemed outmoded is now alive because the moment of its realization has been missed' (Adorno 1973: 3). In Minima Moralia the ghost of the proletariat remains in the subjectivity of the critical theorist: it is this that plays the role of the wager as an organizing principle. There was a period during the late 1960s and early 1970s when the proletariat at least hinted that it might be just over the horizon again; at any rate many of us persuaded ourselves that this was a possibility. But whatever revolutionary force that there was in Europe at that time was soundly defeated and any realistic talk of socialism and revolution must seem at least as remote now as it did to Adorno in the late 1940s. It is also true that the moral urgency felt by Adorno is still relevant. Horror

THE POLmCS OF EXPERIENCE

45

has not abated since the Holocaust, although western Europeans and North Americans have managed to keep it at arm's length. If we allow the horrors back into our hearts then we are back in Adorno's position. Two consecutive aphorisms, 'How nice of you, Doctor' and 'Antithesis' (1974: 25-6) at the beginning of the first section discuss the possibility of morality in capitalist society, and the position of the intellectual. In the face of the horrors of fascism, the technological terror of the modem world, the 'little pleasures', the spontaneous expressions of joy in the face of beauty take on a sinister meaning, they become a callous escape from the world: 'Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror.' Even everyday sociability is a pretence, a compromise with evil, a hiding of the fact that the possibility of com­ munication between human beings is being systematically destroyed. For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity. All collaboration, all the human warmth of social mixing and participation, merely masks a tacit accept­ ance of inhumanity. It is the sufferings of men that should be shared: the smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of their pains. But this very isolation is an involvement: The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant; the only advantage to the former is insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such. His own distance from business at large is a luxury which only that business confers. This is why the very movement of withdrawal bears features of what it negates. It is forced to develop a coldness indistinguishable from that of the bourgeois. (Adorno 1974: 26)

The very fact that the intellectual thinks reveals his privileged status, his dependence upon the bourgeois system of production: There is no way out of entanglement. The only responsible course is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one's existence, and for the rest to conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and unpretentiously as is required, no longer by good upbringing but by shame of still having air to breathe in hell. (Adorno 1974: 27-8)

On the most immediate level, this is a radical critique of the possibility of moral action in contemporary society, the revelation of its impossibility. However, simply to accept Adorno's conclusion that moral action is impossible is to transform a valid insight into a gruesome symptom: the impossibility of moral action can only be known through the constant attempt to act morally - it is only in this way that the 'infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such' can be achieved. At another level there is a critique of radical action and organization itself. In the same way that moral action is transformed into an example of immorality, so can revolutionary action be transformed into a reproduction of bourgeois oppression. Implicit in Adorno's method is an attempt to grasp the way in which, for example, revolutionary violence

46

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may become the reproduction of bourgeois terror or - in some ways even worse - a reproduction of the random meaningless violence that characterizes bourgeois society in its more fully developed state, the way in which revolutionary discipline may reproduce the tyranny of capitalist organization, the way in which sexual liberation may become a dehumanization of the sexual act. Even Adorno's own method of argument is vulnerable: the dialectic is by no means the privilege of the revolutionary, its central category of the totality may become a tool of conservative, even reactionary thought. First, it can encourage, through its revelation of alienation, of the destruction of subjectivity, a naive bourgeois self-assertion; it becomes a tool in the interest of the society it criticizes. Second, it can fall back into simple debating procedure, where its origins are to be found; it becomes simply 'the serene demonstration of the fact that there are two sides to everything' (1974: 47). The danger of becoming or of being, what one is most opposed to would not be a strange one to many contemporary psychoanalysts. Adorno can see that in theoretical terms it is necessary to know the reified, alienated system and this knowledge requires a form of alienated thought. Adorno's brand of dialectical thought perhaps reaches its peak when it reveals its own inadequacy. The displacement of philosophy by science has led to the separation of the two elements which for Hegel comprised philosophy: reflection and speculation. Science takes over the realm of reflection and is degraded to the reproduction in thought of the world simply as it is; the basis for criticism disappears. On the other hand philosophy becomes the empty shell of former theories, mere private speculation: The intellectual, particularly when philosophically inclined, is cut off from practical life: revulsion from it has driven him to concern himself with so­ called things of the mind. But material practice is not only the pre-condition of his practice, it is basic to the world which he criticizes in his work. If he knows nothing of this basis, he shoots into thin air. He is confronted with the choice of informing himself or turning his back on what he hates. If he chooses the former he does violence to himself, thinks against his impulses and in addition runs the risk of sinking to the level of what he is dealing with, for economics is no joke, and merely to understand it one has to 'think economically'. If, however, he has no truck with it, he hypostatises as an absolute his intellect, which was only formed through contact with economic reality and abstract exchange relations, and which can become intellect solely by reflecting on its own conditions. The intellectual is thereby reduced into the vain and unrelated substitution of the reflection for the thing. (Adorno 1974: 132)

Conclusion This seems a good point to try and look back over this chapter, to see where we have got to in relation both to experience and identity. We

THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE

47

found in Lukacs' Marxism the notion of totality as an epistemological criterion: an object can only be known in relation to the totality. We find the same idea in Sartre, less so in Merleau-Ponty and with extreme reluctance in Adorno, where the totality has declined into the dualism which Lukacs hoped would be overcome through the socialist revolution. On the one hand we have an empty, speculative philosophy, which I would suggest reaches its peak in the way that what Giddens calls the 'linguistic tum' in twentieth-century thought seems to absorb everything into language or discourse. Theory then becomes a matter of trying to talk about the world in a way that transcends dualisms not, as Lukacs desired, by political action, but finding the right concepts, so when Giddens replaces 'dualism' with 'duality' it seems as if something has been achieved. On the other side there are increasing quantities of empirical knowledge in the human and the natural sciences which exist in a sort of vacuum; we seem to lack the conceptual tools to organize, understand and criticize knowledge. In Chapter 2 I suggested that an important aspect of Lukacs' work was his reliance, often implicit, on a conception of experience as a mediator between social structures and action, and between theory and practice. Moving on through Sartre to Merleau-Ponty, one thing that emerges is that experience is more complex than Lukacs' theory allows and recog­ nition of the complexity of human experience contributes to a decline in the power of the concept of totality. I have already suggested that totality as an epistemological criterion remains important, in the sense that one of the things that we have to do as we come to understand the social world is to relate propositions to each other; the gaining of knowledge is a constant totalizing process. However, totality as an achievable world, an end of history, is another matter. Adorno was able to recognize that a 'world system' or total system was more to the expansionary tastes of capitalism, that there is a link between 'total' and 'totalitarian', something which Popper had claimed from a very different tradition. The real totality in Lukacs' sense is neither a possible reality, nor necessarily a desirable aim. In a free world the totality will be in a process of constant change of, in Sartre's terms, detotalization and retotalization. These three philosophers leave us with increasingly complex forms of Marx's original dialectic based on the simple statement that people make history, but not in circumstances of their own making. On the one side we have our experience of the world, ourselves and other people, an experience which constantly seeks to articulate itself in thought and action and is more complex than we have yet discovered, and on the other side we have a social system, a set of social structures which increasingly distort and deny our subjectivity, our experience of the life­ world. The postmodemist emphasis on the technologies of the self, the construction of subjectivity, sees only a limited view of one side, whereas interactionist and action sociologies see only a limited view of the other.

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The limited view of the life-world comes through what I have called sociology's cognitive bias. In this context, the search for identity is an attempt to stem the flow of experience, what is left of the creative interchange with others and the world around us. The politics of experience in the sense in which I have tried to develop it here takes us away from notions of identity and towards our internal divisions, alienation and suffering. Moving on from phenomenology, psychoanalysis provides us with an understanding of further levels of experience and especially of the difficulties of articulating our immediate experience. This further understanding eventually points the way towards a different sort of ideal.

4

PSYCHOANALYSIS, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS: THE PROBLEM OF AMBIVALENCE

The

tum

to psychoanalysis

The growth of interest in psychoanalysis both as a theory and as a therapy seemed to come naturally out of the problems met by Marxist theory in the 1970s and early 1980s. There might be some truth in the cynical view that it is a move from one form of dogmatic totalizing explanation to another, but there are also deeper roots to the move. It was already the case that western European Marxism concerned itself at least as much with ideology as with structural analysis, and after the victory of National Socialism in Germany this concern became even more pronounced - how could a country with mass socialist and communist parties fall to a creed which in effect stood for everything socialism opposed? There had been a revolutionary trend in psychoanalysis prior to World War II, now probably remembered best through the work of Wilhelm Reich (1957), who identified sexual repression and social oppression in a fairly straightforward way. The postwar interest devel­ oped on two levels. One was a metatheoretical level best illustrated by Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1969), a difficult attempt to combine the two theories which kept a sense of totality and projected a utopian sexual and social world. The attempt at a theoretical combination continues, in a very different way, in the more recent work of Habermas (1987). A second strand also emerged from critical theory and the Frankfurt School, beginning with Adorno et al. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) which moved towards sociological analysis, particularly the role of family and family structure on the one hand and popular culture on the other. Changes in both were seen as involved in the growth of the totalitarianism already discussed in Chapter 3 and this strand has devel­ oped through the more recent work of Christopher Lasch (1977, 1980, 1984, 1995). The third strand developed from Althusser's theory of ideology and merged into discourse theory and post-structuralism and postmodernism generally. Althusser (1971) developed his theory through

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a borrowing from the French analyst Jacques Lacan (1968, 1977) who transformed psychoanalytic theory in the 1960s and 1970s. In this chapter I am concerned with the first strand, the problems of the metatheoretical synthesis and where a critique of that position can lead us.

The nature of repression and the necessity of ambivalence I do not want to pursue the detail of Marcuse's attempted synthesis of Freud and Marx. Put as simply as possible it involves the argument that Freud's view of society as necessarily involving repression can be modified if we look at it historically. Different types of society require different types of repression. Modem capitalist society does not need as much repression as the earlier stages of capitalism; consumption is replacing production as the centre of economic activity and consumption involves the search for pleasure. Less repression is necessary and thus there is a build-up of what Marcuse calls surplus repression. The economic system then releases this surplus repression in a process of 'repressive desublimation', a matter of associating sexual excitement with consumer goods. The ideal that he proposes is in Freudian terms a return to pre-oedipal sexuality, a form of polymorphous perversity, where the whole body becomes a site of sexual pleasure. We no longer focus exclusively on the genital areas and the link between sexuality and reproduction is finally broken. Such would be dependent upon the abolition of economic scarcity, something of which Marcuse thought developed capitalism might be capable. It is this last point which undermines the attempt to bring the two theories together on a metatheoretical level. Nancy Chodorow (1985) makes the point well: 'The argument against adult genitality and pro­ creative sexuality . . . amounts implicitly to an argument against relations with women, a rejection of women' (1985: 298). Marcuse's ideal is a narcissistic rejection of the reality principle, which I would argue is represented by the father as much as the mother in whom Chodorow locates it. The reality Marcuse denies is in fact a very mundane reality: the difficulties of interpersonal relationships, especially sexual relationships whether with members of the same sex or of the opposite sex, the difficulties presented by screaming infants and dirty nappies, and the difficulties of rebellious adolescents and ageing and or / senile parents. He avoids the difficulties of being human in a human body and the difficulties of living with other people. This is where we come up against the unavoidable opposition of Marx and Freud. For Marx the fundamental feature of human beings was their ability to labour and transform their environment and so transform themselves; it is this which enables the vision of human freedom, the possibility of taking collective control of society - the totalizing

PSYCHOANALYSIS, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

51

movement not as a necessary part of thinking but as part of the real world. Lukacs maintains the ideal, the realization of philosophy, but is not unaware of the difficulties of achieving it. I argued in relation to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre that an understanding of our experience in the world questioned, if not denied, the possibility of achieving such an ideal and Adorno shows both its necessity and its dangers. What we learn from Freud in this respect is the impossibility of achieving such an ideal in reality. What Freud has to teach is another version of Sartre's (1944) dictum that hell is other people, because living with other people means not only, as Sartre argues, that other people will inevitably not see us as we want them to see us, but because we have to adjust to a world in which we not only have to share the goodies, but the goodies are by no means readily available. For Freud (1985) civilization goes hand in hand with suffering. We maintain within us the infantile desire for immediate satisfaction and every step forward in social and cultural development requires some sacrifice of immediate satisfaction, a degree of suffering. Work which Marx regarded as primary in human beings is in fact a secondary achievement acquired through sacrifice. Freud paints a much grimmer view of the world than Marx, and this is reinforced in developments in psychoanalytic theory. Klein's (1975b) analysis of human envy and destructiveness adds a very different component to our understanding of humanity. It does not appear in people as a result of their social circumstances, although they might make it worse, but it is there by virtue of being human. It becomes important to recognize the existence of human destructiveness and to contain it, rather than imagine to ourselves that it can be eliminated. The very attempt to eliminate it makes it worse as it emerges in unexpected and unrecognized ways. What also becomes clear in psychoanalysis is the way in which each feeling is closely associated with its opposite; there is a profound and necessary emotional ambivalence in our lives.

The status of ideals Compared to the phenomenological conceptions of experience discussed earlier, Freud takes us directly to the emotional dimensions of our lives. Sartre's work on the emotions tended to concentrate on interpersonal dimensions of 'being-for-others' in Being and Nothingness (1957) and on their intentional nature in his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1963b). But he has little to say about the ongoing everyday emotional life which has a physical existence for most people, and which seems always to work in opposites - there is no love without hatred, no pleasure without misery, no gain without loss. There are Marxists who have taken this on board. The work of Joel Kovel (1988a, b, c, d; Kovel and Craib 1990) is noticeable for its sanity. He does not believe a synthesis between the two theories is possible: 'Nor, despite the many intriguing formal homologies

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between the two thinkers, could there be any kind of symmetry or balance between them. The difference between Marx and Freud is more than one between "outwardness" vs. "inwardness". It is also, and more basically, one of basic values' (Kovel and Craib 1990: 26). I find my attitude towards Marxism varying with political contexts. In the exchange from which I have just quoted I was suggesting that, in theoretical terms, the best reason to be a Marxist is that Marxism breaks down in especially interesting ways. In the present context I more often than not find myself defending basic Marxist insights against the easy and often ignorant dismissals that are now all too readily pronounced. Another way of putting this in terms of my argument is that it is necessary to hold on to both value choices at the same time - the impossible Marxist ideal and the realistic psychoanalytic commitment to understanding and containing the messy and contradictory nature of everyday experience. Using psychoanalytic ideas, the Marxist ideal can be seen in two ways. It can be seen in terms of a punitive super-ego, which in the individual can constantly emphasize the inadequacy of his or her actions and deny pleasure, but which constantly demands allegiance and energy, however impossible it might be to achieve. It can also be seen as an ego-ideal which is a more gentle animal, the best version of myself that I would like to aim at. There can be less intolerance attached to the ego-ideal, an ability to understand the conception of 'good enough' and not demand perfection. It recognizes that the self is not omnipotent but is constantly engaged in a game of give and take with the surrounding world. It seems to me that one of the difficulties of psychoanalytic clinical work is that the ego-ideal and the punitive super-ego can be very close together and can often be expressed in the same terms. Yet one is a desire for perfection and wholeness which cannot be achieved, leaving failure as a constant source of misery, while the other can offer a sense of at least partially achieved goodness, a reassurance. We can hold wholeness, the totality as an ideal, but if we believe it is really achievable we are in trouble. An individual who seeks to be perfect, seeks some form of omnipotence over his or her own unruly desires, tries to avoid, or remove moral chaos and uncertainty, does so at a cost to themselves and those around them. Similarly a society which aims to be perfect must get rid of its disruptive elements, its dissidents. The more perfect the society aims to be, the more it must repress. Yet we need a way of thinking about what might be possible. We need some direction in which to move and the vision offered by Marx and by socialism still seems to me the best available. There will be times when the world changes quickly and it seems that the ideal might be achieved. These experiences are, I believe, important, but so is the aftermath, the decline of hope and the disillusion which follows the revolutionary upsurge. To blindly cling on to hope in the face of reality and to give up hope in the face of reality leads to equivalent

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disasters. The experience of disillusion is important in politics, just as it is important in infancy, but so is the presence of the illusion, the oceanic feeling of oneness. I want to try to develop the psychoanalytic critique of the Marxist ideal that Joel Kovel (Kovel and Craib 1990) begins to outline. He con­ centrates on the argument that it is a regression to an infantile oceanic experience, and to infantile omnipotence. I would add that involved as well is a denial of a very real and strong rivalry that we experience in relationships, initially, to parents and siblings. This is a very conservative psychoanalytic critique and I think psychoanalysis can do better, offering a critique which can, in one sense, be seen as more radical, but less utopian, less revolutionary. In each case, the oceanic experience, infantile omnipotence, the denial of rivalry, we do not have to dismiss the experience or the defence because it is infantile. To do this is to deny a fundamental insight of psychoanalysis: that the infant remains within us, the unconscious is timeless, and must be catered for - it does not disappear with our access to maturity. Beyond this, I think the infant plays an essential role, in a modified form, in our adult life. Let us take the oceanic feeling to begin with. It is true that as adults we can surrender ourselves to it, or rather to the search for it. We can seek a permanent high: the only alcoholic I have known intimately was a slave to such a feeling. We can seek such a high through our political practice and ideas and, if we are lucky, we might find it occasionally. The more desperately we seek it, the less likely we are to find it. Yet such an oceanic feeling can be there without overwhelming us, we do not have to become addicted to it. Just as we can drink occasionally without becoming an alcoholic, so we can allow ourselves such an experience. A conservative analyst such as Erikson points towards religious institutions as the social organization to maintain and satisfy such a need, but we could also point to politics, the activity of working together to change the world, as a possible way of allowing such a feeling expression and a concrete realization. The important point is that it can inform our relationship with others without hiding the other, less pleasant or downright destruc­ tive aspects of our nature. Similarly infantile omnipotence has its place in adult life. It emerges clearly from Winnicott's work that out of this experience of omnipotence comes the infant's ability to learn, to do things and to withstand frustration. The Marxist ideal provides our politics with a sense of the possibility of change, of betterment. But again to believe the ideal can be realized is equivalent to the pathological continuation of omnipotence into adult life. It would be like believing that tomorrow I could retrain as a brain surgeon. Clearly I cannot, but I could learn something about the physiological structure of the brain. Everything I have been saying moves towards this idea: that we can find a psychoanalytic critique of Marxism that recognizes its value and modifies it. It says not that the Marxist project is infantile and

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pathological, only that it can be; it can also be a form of what, for want of a better word, I will call maturity, a desire and a vision of something better. It only becomes dangerous, pathological, if it involves the denial of everything that makes the vision impossible to achieve, if it becomes a sort of absolutist project. The history of Marxist politics is full of debates about the correct line; I think that this is associated with the belief that the ideal (even if it is denied) is possible. The radical nature of my argument comes from the implication that all sorts of other politics become relevant, useful and possible once we get rid of this absolutism. It leaves us saying something like Marxism gives us the direction in which to move. We will never get there, and there are all sorts of ways in which we can move in this direction which cannot be envisaged by Marxism. Modem feminism and the ecology movement are perhaps examples; but so are the traditional liberal and social democratic ideas of industrial capitalism. At times the ideal will have to be emphasized, and given its place. At other times, the impossibility of the ideal becomes important, and during these other times, emphasizing the impossibility can open up different, less totalizing paths to change. Joel Kovel mentions Sartre's point that Marxism is as far as we can go. The implication of my argument is that as the inadequacy of Marxism becomes apparent, we might have to return to a range of pre­ Marxist ideas as a way of going forward, or at least not losing too much.

The radical denial of ambivalence At the beginning of this chapter I talked about people moving from Marxism to psychoanalysis possibly seeking to replace one totalizing theory with another. The traffic has also been in the other direction, from a concern with psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and counselling to a concern with politicized sociological explanations. The above ideas were developed in a discussion with Joel Kovel, who had found psycho­ analysis, his first profession, too conservative. However, he had devel­ oped a sensitive way of thinking about the two approaches together. It is easy, when a long-term intellectual and emotional commitment is abandoned, to seek a new set of beliefs and ideas which one imagines solves all the problems of the old beliefs and ideas. If the abandoned beliefs and institutions have been idealized, then it is common to reject them with as much energy and vehemence as one once adhered to them. Both Marxism and psychoanalysis have had their share of apostates and the ideas which I am now going to try to develop were first in an exchange with David Pilgrim (Craib 1992), Pilgrim (1992). Pilgrim takes up some of the ideas of Jeffrey Masson, once apparently considered the man who would save American psychoanalysis and who later became one of its most famous critics (Malcolm 1984; Masson 1985, 1989).

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Reading through this debate some of the arguments strike me as rather sillier than they did at the time. They are arguments around compara­ tively mundane issues to those discussed on a theoretical level in the previous section. But the point I wanted to make then, and would make even more strongly now, would have to do with the acknowledgement of ambivalence - the way in which opposite qualities are inextricably entwined in all human behaviour. The fact that love and hate are closely connected has been a staple of literature but we can say the same about other human qualities - good and evil at one extreme down to casual generosity and petty selfishness on the other. There is, for example, always some sort of internal conflict when I pass a beggar on the street. This is perhaps a good example of what I have been arguing. My way of dealing with this conflict is in most situations to give something to alternate supplicants. This seems to balance two possible extreme reactions. On the one hand I could feel guilty about my good fortune and want to invite the beggar back home to live with me and eat my food, and on the other I could feel threatened and angry and want to have the beggar arrested and thrown into jail. Now each of the extreme reactions would deny an acknowledgement of an internal conflict; it would avoid a internally painful situation. I have already suggested that one of the most important features of psychoanalysis is that it recognizes ambivalence and of course it must then recognize the pain that we experience when we feel the internal conflict that follows on from the ambivalence. I have suggested else­ where (Craib 1994) that a failure to recognize such ambivalence is a defect in many modern forms of psychotherapy, and that it has become a central failing of contemporary political discourse, turning political argument into self-righteous accusations (Craib forthcoming). It also haunts the debate I had with Pilgrim. The central metaphor as far as I was concerned was the old saying about the baby and the bathwater and I suggested that Pilgrim was throwing out the former with the latter. Pilgrim in turn suggested that the metaphor 'is a common rhetorical device to imply that an opponent in a debate lacks sensitivity and clarity in their arguments'. I am afraid that that is precisely what I was implying. Now I would change the metaphor slightly. Then I argued that the bathwater in which we all had to live was unavoidably dirty. Now I think I would say that we our­ selves are the dirty bathwater. We are also of course the clean bathwater and it is our responsibility to keep some sort of balance. This should be borne in mind in the following discussion where I take up a number of Pilgrim's points.

Diagnostic reductionism Pilgrim accuses psychoanalysis of two different forms of reductionism which are worth distinguishing: a 'conceptual reductionism', to do with

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diagnostic categories, and an 'explanatory reductionism', to do with our understanding of the way the world is. He goes on to argue that this second reductionism at least inhibits psychoanalysts' political under­ standing, or leads to a politics of which he disapproves. I shall begin with 'diagnostic reductionism' which Pilgrim sees as reinforcing the medical model and juxtaposes to an idea of a properly human relationship, in which one partner is not seeking advantage over another, and the uniqueness and complexity of an individual is recognized. Diagnosis, he suggests, demeans the patient and reinforces the power of the therapist. Now a diagnostic category is a general category, covering a number of individual cases; we cannot actually think without such categories, nor can we have anything approaching working knowledge of any aspect of the world. In our process of understanding other people, such general categories act as signposts, a shorthand which can give us an idea of where we are. If I see a patient as 'clinically depressed' I immediately have a map which might or might not help me understand what is happening - that remains to be seen - but which enables me to attempt to understand what is happening. Without such categories, the person cannot be seen at all. We might prefer another set of categories to the ones that Pilgrim criticizes, but we cannot do without them. The work of Winnicott above all seems to me to show that we can think in diagnostic categories and leave plenty of space for individual complexity: it is not a matter of doing one or the other but of maintaining the tension between the two (see Little 1985; Winnicott 1987). I am not sure that, by itself, the use of such categories reinforces the medical model, it is more a matter of how they are used. I do not think of such terms as referring to an illness - they refer to different ways of psychological working in the world which, by the patient's definition, brings unhappiness. They are sometimes rough and ready tools that can help or get in the way. Like Pilgrim, I find myself thinking in diagnostic categories but not necessarily sharing them with my patients. Sometimes they help me to say something which is helpful to the patient; sometimes they help me to say things that are unhelpful; they help me to stay with the patient, which I think is the minimum condition of any therapeutic work. Pilgrim later claims that these categories are 'pejorative, demeaning and stigmatizing' (1992: 250). I think again that they are sometimes experienced as such and used as such, but I have also found patients wanting to be labelled by one of the categories because it brings a temporary relief. One can 'have' depression or schizophrenia like one 'has' measles and no further difficult exploration is necessary. Such categories can also be frightening. There seems, for example, to be an increasing association in the public mind between psychological diffi­ culties and criminal violence. This might be the best reason for keeping one's categories to oneself. Of course, I also find myself using diagnostic categories to reinforce a sense of my own competence; I do not think it is the best way to hold on

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to my sense of competence, but sometimes it seems necessary. Some­ times I use them to give myself a sense of superiority and rightness, but this tends to be in relation to colleagues and friends. My point is not that Pilgrim is wrong; he is right but shows only half the picture. Diagnostic categories are good things and bad things at the same time. If we can hold on to the idea that 'we are all ill', then we acknowledge that diagnostic categories also apply to the therapist, and we are less likely to use diagnoses in a damaging way. It is a pity that Pilgrim, in his argument, tries to deny us this aphorism.

Explanatory reductionism Pilgrim criticizes what I would call 'psychologism', the attempt to understand everything in psychological terms, quoting a distinctly dated comment by Guntrip about prostitution and homosexuality and suggesting that these might not be psychological symptoms but that they might be socially caused. He goes on to argue that such psycho­ logism is always conservative with the implication that psychoanalysis is concerned only with enabling people to acquiesce in existing social conditions. I would certainly agree that to see the world entirely in psycho­ dynamic terms is misleading; in fact I think it is absurd, and when psychoanalysts step beyond their appropriate object, they sometimes appear absurd. Psychoanalysis is concerned with the individual psyche and relationships between individuals. There are, quite clearly, other sources of misery in the world at the same time, but this does not mean that there are no psychological sources. Poverty might encourage prostitution and crime, but not every poor woman becomes a prostitute or a thief. We are looking at a combination of social and psychological forces. We are dealing with different causal processes related in complex ways and psychoanalysis is concerned with only one process (see Craib 1989). I am sure that psychoanalysts sometimes see success as involving social adjustment to, even acquiescence in, the surrounding society, but this is not necessarily the case nor is it always the case. However, in my experience patients often have a rather better grasp of the real com­ plexity than does Pilgrim. They can recognize that they are victims of social processes and situations, but they seek therapy because they are aware of something in themselves that contributes to or prohibits them from dealing with these problems. In these cases, the signs of therapeutic effectiveness are the opposite of what I should, according to Pilgrim, expect. It is not forbearance in the face of oppression, but the growing ability to change a relationship, change a pattern of victimhood, deal creatively with employers; the ability to move, at last, from the parents' home, or to change tactics in seeking employment - these are the external signs of therapeutic change.

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IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLmCS These are, of course, individual changes, with all the limitations of

individual change. I also think social change is desirable and within the limits of my personal energy I would seek that as a socialist or trade unionist, not as a psychotherapist. Behind Pilgrim's argument is the assumption that psychotherapy and psychoanalysis radical, and

should

should

be politically

be radical in a particular way. The fact that various

political positions can be associated with psychoanalysis seems to me the mark of an open system of thought. I think it can be radical, but in a way that I suspect would not be acceptable to Pilgrim. I find two aspects of psychoanalysis valuable in this respect. First, its emphasis on internal space and there being some degree of autonomy in interpersonal relationships; this counterbalances the impetus of sociologically reduc­ tionist explanations and the politics that stem from it. If we see every­ thing as a result of social processes, then we open the door to the sort of totalitarianism implicit in the slogan 'the personal is political' (Craib

1988). Our freedom, which is never absolute, lies not only in our ability to cooperate with other people in changing our world, but also in our ability to distance ourselves from others, make choices which separate ourselves from the collective, from the state: whether the state be capitalist, socialist, communist or whatever. Insofar as psychoanalytic therapy achieves the aim of leaving ego where id has been, then it contributes to this freedom. The ego might go off and make political judgements of which I disapprove, but that is as it should be. Second, I think it is right to say that psychoanalysis can add to the knowledge of other disciplines and sciences, but not replace it. My own view is that often this addition is not terribly significant. However, in relation to politics, it does, I believe, have something important to say about the motivation of some forms of political action. Politics is a dangerous game: it often, if not always, involves systematic dishonesty; often, but not always, corruption; sometimes it involves tyranny, murder and torture. It is important to recognize that however honourable a set of political ambitions, honour does not make us immune to any of these things. Pilgrim quotes Chasseguet-Smirgel and Gruneberger

(1986) to the

effect that revolutionaries are suffering from an omnipotent infantile fixation. I would suggest that they are saying something about the dangers of some sorts of political motivation, and the blindness that it produces, something of which we ought to be aware, even, perhaps especially, if we are political revolutionaries. It can of course be read as a demand for political passivity if one chooses; it could be read, if one chooses, as a plea for self-understanding and a considered politics.

ProJessionalization Pilgrim makes much of the issue of Professionalization, and my reactions are ambivalent in the extreme; but on the whole I am happy with my ambivalence and I shall simply describe it.

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He is particularly scathing about comments that Hannah Segal made about protecting the 'pure wine' of psychoanalysis from the supposed 'water' of psychotherapy'. He suggests that psychoanalytic claims to be a science are a way of establishing a professional power which is unjusti­ fied. I respond gratefully to Hannah Segal's desire to preserve the pure wine of psychoanalysis. I think the enterprise of knowing is an important and liberating enterprise, even if that knowledge is always provisional and incomplete, and even if it can be misused. I think there is much to be said for the psychoanalytic method as a method of research, inde­ pendently of its therapeutic value. However, I am happy to be called a psychotherapist and I think of my work as helping rather than research, although of course it is both at the same time. I have some specialist knowledge that my patients do not (always) have; I do not consider this makes me better at life, although some people seem to think it should. Like the diagnostic categories, sometimes it is helpful to me and to my patients, sometimes it gets in my way, but not in my patients' way, sometimes vice versa. My work is aimed at enabling the patient to find a way of living free of me; I find that the early struggles in psychotherapy have more to do with the patient's attribution of power and knowledge to me rather than any power or knowledge I might actually possess. The notion of helping is also problematic. Desiring to help a patient can get in the way of change (see Milner 1969) or it can involve the projection of one's own damage into a patient, keeping it there - keeping the patient damaged, in order to avoid one's own pain; and of course, helping someone can make one feel good, without doing much for the person being helped (see Segal 1964). Helping can also be the best of activities; it can involve all the activities of holding, understanding and interpretation that can enable the patient to understand him or herself. I do not understand how anyone remotely familiar with the Kleinian (or non-Kleinian) literature on counter-transference can argue that analysts have a 'cultivated indifference to both pain and personal change'. It is, of course, precisely through the experience of pain and many other things in the counter-transference, and the intelligent interpretation of that experience, that change can emerge (Casement 1985). I am well aware of the rhetorical uses to which the term 'science' is put, that it can become a tool of self-seeking sectional interest, that the nature of a science is hotly disputed with a number of different positions each of which lays claim to some credibility. But it seems to me that we can argue about and establish epistemological criteria which can distin­ guish better from worse knowledge, and the fact that this is possible perhaps indicates that we should aim to tolerate differences rather than reject the enterprise altogether. I have a similar ambivalence about the process of professionalization itself. Increasingly professions are seen as groups pursuing their own self-interest, and as the market and market's ideology spreads perhaps it is inevitable that professions will become primarily concerned with self-interest and the extension of their own

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power. But there is also an older and different view of professions, as groups of free independent individuals, trained in a particular skill and serving the community coming together to regulate their activities and enforce a code of ethics. A profession can take steps to ensure that its members are properly trained, regulated and supervised. A profession in this sense is not an institution of the free market but an organization in which people can combine to organize their lives. It is part of what used to be called 'civil society', providing a barrier between the individual and the state, and a vital part of democratic society. There are clearly degrees of truth in both ways of looking at a profession and perhaps one view might be true at one time and the other at another. But a profession is not one thing.

Patienthood A central issue in the argument with Pilgrim had to do with the nature of patienthood and by implication the nature of power itself. It often seems that among some radical theorists, power is a sort of dirty word. On the whole I would agree with Anthony Giddens' (1984) comment that power is an inherent feature of human action, and unless one is unconscious one has it. The questions one can then ask become more interesting. In this context they would be questions about the beneficial and harmful uses of power and how 'beneficial' and 'harmful' are defined and who defines them. These are not easy questions; there are often periods in the progress of psychotherapy where people feel worse, when they begin to look at what they have been avoiding in their lives, but this apparently harmful effect is often a step towards an eventual beneficial effect. But whether either of these effects is the result of the power of the psychotherapist is debatable. For Pilgrim, patienthood is related to power, which is of course quite true but, in the light of what I have just said, not necessarily a bad thing. There is however a more fundamental issue here which has to do with the instrumental values of the market economy; it is interesting that the most generally accepted alternative to patient is 'client' which empha­ sizes the cash connection. Part and parcel of all this is an emphasis on being independent as opposed to dependent, in control, a free agent and so on. None of these things is possible; we are all the time dependent on those around us for our psychological and physical existence; we can hide this need from ourselves but we cannot alter it. We start our lives completely dependent on others immediately around us, and as we get older most of us become more dependent on those around us. At certain times in our lives, during periods of physical illness or periods of unhappiness, or for some people who are profoundly unhappy most of the time, that dependence will recur in a pronounced way. It does not help to deny its existence.

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This leads on to much wider issues which cannot be explored here. Psychotherapy has become caught up in the individualist culture of what Anthony Giddens refers to as late modernity and Giddens himself has catalogued the therapies that promise self-control, self-expression, the construction of a new self, independence and so on. Psychoanalytic therapy seems less likely to get caught up in this and that is a point in its favour, but its concern with ambivalence and other complications of subjectivity tend to attract criticism from its therapeutic competitors and from various forms of political radicalism. Yet it is arguable that it is precisely this concern with ambivalence, with human failings as well as with human aspirations, that promises a contact with experiential reality which in tum can allow the development of a realist socialist politics. We are not of course looking just at the complexity of experience but also at the complexity of identity; the latter includes the many contra­ dictory experiences that we undergo, yet the very term 'identity' excludes ambivalence and contradiction. The question of the possibility of a conception of identity which allows for internal contradictions and conflicts is something I shall leave until the end.

PART 2

IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY 5

BACK TO UTOPIA: GIDDENS AND MODERN SOCIAL THEORY

Anthony Giddens is the only British sociologist of recent generations to attempt the ambitious project of integrating the classical traditions of social theory with modem theory and philosophy. The attempt deserves at least to be called impressive. Above all, he takes modem theory seriously and sociology has become more interesting as a result. In many ways his project must be regarded as equal in scope to that of Parsons, his frequent target. In the context of this book, he is important because structuration theory is best understood as a sophisticated form of action theory in the tradition of Max Weber (although I suspect Giddens would not like this characterization) and thus, by implication about the agent and identity. My main purpose is to demonstrate that this type of synthesizing glosses not only structural complexities and depths but also presents a flat and limited conception of the social actor and his or her experience of the world. Giddens' assessment of his own intentions has remained consistent: a revision of the main themes of nineteenth-century social thought in the light of the crisis of contemporary sociology. He does not claim to offer a new finalized synthesis, but rather to try to change the grounds of the debate, bridge gaps between traditions and identify the points at which differences may be transcended. Despite the reservations, we can identify the synthesizing intention of his work, leading him from classical social theory to problems of methodology, in the widest sense of the word, and a consideration of contemporary capitalism and socialism. Dominant concerns include the debate between naturalist and humanist approaches

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to social science, and the related debate between structuralist explana­ tions and accounts in tenns of social action. In relation to the former, he comes down firmly on the side of those who assert the specificity of the methods and objects of social science. To deal with the latter problem, he suggests a concept of 'structuration' and the 'duality of structures' which maintains the necessity for analysing both structural and interactional features of social life. He claims that this approach is neither a her­ meneutics nor a form of structuralism (Giddens 1984: xii). In the course of this he develops an apparently sophisticated conception of the agent and agency. My argument here will be that this conception is inadequate, and that in fact any conception of agency constructed to fit in with a synthesizing social theory is likely to be inadequate. I thought at first that this was because social theory had not developed to the stage where synthesis was possible, but more recently I have come to the conclusion that such a synthesis is impossible because sociology is concerned with different forms of being, different objects which cannot be understood in the same way: people, social groups, organizations, and social structures are all different types of object which call on different forms of under­ standing. Nevertheless we have to understand each of them in order to understand the others. This perhaps is the central paradox of social theory: it cannot be a totalizing theory but has to push towards total­ ization by going in different directions. Thus when Giddens tries to bring theories together, he loses vital dimensions of each of them and they cease to do the theoretical work of telling us something about the social world that, previously, we did not know. I believe that the end result of this is a significant incoherence in his central concepts of 'structuration' and the 'duality of structures' and an assumption of social order that is as utopian as Parsons'. My criticism of Giddens, then, is that he oversimplifies the social world and I will try to demonstrate this through a series of examples taken from various places in his work. First, I will try to show how he reduces the complexity of the social world and of the theories he employs to build structuration theory. Second, I will argue that this involves him in an over-simple idea of causality, and, despite his occasional statements to the contrary, an unjustified assertion of the interpretive nature of sociology and a limited conception of action and agency. This should be sufficient to demonstrate the incoherence of his central concepts and his utopian view of the nature of social order which, interestingly, rests on a utopian view of the agent and the psychology of the agent.

The elimination of complexity Giddens often talks about different levels of social organization as if the social world possessed a depth, and there are underlying social structures

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which bear a causal relationship to observable phenomena. However, in the course of his bridge-building he loses sight of this depth. Everything seems to be dealt with on the same analytic level with, on occasion, a consequent confusion in the priority he gives to one factor over another. My first example is an analysis of class structure, found in his theoretical discussion The Class Structure of Advanced Societies (1973). In the course of a lengthy and intelligent criticism of various approaches, he seems to define a crucial problem as that of moving between the multiplicity of relationships in advanced societies to the identification of structural forms. This is also the way the problem has come to be defined by many modem Marxists and Giddens seems to develop his own theory almost as an equivalent. He offers a modified version of Weber's definition of class as being based on property ownership, with the concept of property extended to include the rights and capacities it confers upon the owner (1973: Chap. 6). We could take this as referring to an underlying structural level which helps us to order and make sense of the multiplicity of relationships that we actually observe. Indeed, in what many might consider a rather odd comment on Marx, Giddens indicates that his intention is close to this: 'to focus upon the modes in which 'economic' relationships become translated into non-economic social structure' (1973: 105). This may be taken as a statement of the problem faced by every Marxist writer on the subject for the past century; however, such an interpretation cannot be sustained. It seems that we do not actually arrive at classes proper until after the operation of a number of 'proxi­ mate' and 'mediate' structuring factors which appear to be dealt with at the same analytic level as market capacities (1973: 107ff). The basic definition seems to refer to the level of underlying structure to begin with, but ends by referring to the multiplicity of relationships which need to be structured. Its apparent causal role, at least as laying the foundation of social class, is replaced by an implicit granting of causal priority to the structuring factors. There is a sliding of priorities and a flattening of levels. Now, one does not have to accept the 'correctness' of an orthodox Marxist base/superstructure analysis to recognize the usefulness of distinguishing between different levels of social organization and of attempting to identify causal relations between them. Giddens constantly recognizes the significance of the questions that it raises, not least in the above quotation. He begins with such a distinction but is unable to sustain it and I think it is arguable that this failure presages the incoherence of his concept of structuration. Here, he comes very close to saying that classes exist (in terms of market capacities) before they exist (as a result of structuring factors). My second example concerns Giddens' discussion of Heidegger (1962) in Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) and the first volume of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (1981). Here again we find

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a reduction in the complexity of the world. Heidegger's concern is with ontology, the nature of Being itself, and in particular the way in which time is constitutive of Being. One does not have to understand the subtleties of Heidegger to realize that Giddens' use of his theory in effect trivializes these concerns. In fact he demonstrates it himself: 'Measurable time-space is derived - that is imposed on time-space relations in Western culture - and should not therefore be confused with the nature of time-space itself' (1981: 33). In other words there is a social organization of time and space. One of Heidegger's existentialist concerns is the way in which the social organ­ ization of time and space enables us to hide from the reality of Being and Time, to slip into inauthenticity. Giddens' concern becomes simply the social organization of time and space in the constitution of different societies. It is as if Giddens builds a bridge between Heidegger's concerns and social theory and then destroys it, leaving Heidegger standing on the far side. In The Constitution of Society (1984) Giddens is much concerned with the social organization of time and space, but Heidegger receives only a handful of mentions. My third example is some comments which conclude a discussion of the work of Erik Erikson in The Constitution of Society, and I want to use them to demonstrate again Giddens' oversimplification of both theory and the real world. Erikson is a psychoanalyst who has particularly concerned himself with the nature of identity and its relation to social organization. Giddens is critical of his concept of ego-identity: -

Even Erikson admits that it has at least four connotations. Sometimes it refers to a 'conscious' sense of individual identity. It can also mean 'an unconscious striving for a continuity of personal character'. A third meaning is 'a criterion for the silent doing of ego synthesis'. A fourth sense is 'a maintenance of an inner-solidarity with a group's ideals and identity'. None of these single uses, it might be remarked, is particularly lucid, let alone the concept that embraces them all! (Giddens 1984: 60)

All in all, then, the term 'does too much conceptual work'. Now, I have no objection to striving for conceptual clarity, and it is certainly true that the concept of ego-identity does a lot of work. Nonetheless it seems to me that the concept is useful precisely because it embraces these meanings, a series of internal psychological processes which are interlinked and continuous with each other. The processes, moreover, are not lucid processes but often, in the reality of an individual's life, rather dark and mysterious. The meaning of the concept, in this case, is not lucid because the reality it tries to grasp is not lucid. Indeed my criticism of Erikson would be the opposite, that he oversimplifies the notion of ego-identity, stripping it of the dimensions of internal conflict present in Freud's idea of identity. However, as I will try to show later, it is important for Giddens to have a simple idea of identity, and my

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point at the moment is that conceptual clarity is not always desirable if we are trying to grasp a difficult reality. It serves only to avoid the problematic reality.

Causality Giddens often refers to himself as a realist, without elaborating on what he means by the term. Nevertheless the direction of his argument takes him towards hermeneutics. It is within this context that his discussion of causality must be understood. The most developed arguments are in New Rules of Sociological Method (1976) but there are some revealing comments in his discussion of Althusser in Studies in Social and Political Theory (1977). Here he expresses his desire to maintain a notion of 'transitive causality' which seems to be a commonsense Humean con­ ception that one thing affects another. Second, he criticizes Althusser on the grounds that he has no adequate conception of 'agency or causality', the context implying that they are the same thing. In New Rules of Sociological Method the implication becomes explicit (1976: Chap. 4). He distinguishes between what he calls 'event-causality' and 'agency-causality'. The former is seen as presupposing some invari­ ant connection between cause and effect, and as not really applicable to social science. The latter involves some idea of a necessary connection and of causal efficacy. There is however - a fact which Giddens acknowledges - no elaboration of what is meant by 'necessary connec­ tion' and we are left with a very limited notion of cause. All we can do is describe people's actions and their intended and unintended effects. This would be writing history in the simplest storytelling manner and removes any possibility of dealing with structural processes. I will try to illustrate this with an example from Central Problems in Social Theory. Here (Chap. 2) he redefines the Marxist idea of a contra­ diction between the forces and relations of production as a contradiction between the principles of socialized and privatized production. He argues that this is the primary contradiction of modem capitalism and that it produces secondary contradictions, the most important of which is between the hegemony of the nation-state and the internationalization of capital. Now given what Giddens has to say about causality we have to abandon structural explanations of the development of the secondary from the primary contradictions. Parsonian functionalism could provide such an explanation in terms of structural imbalance and boundary maintenance. Marxism could do so in terms of the contradictory devel­ opment of the relations between the terms of the primary contradiction. Both are suggestive and able to throw light on the process in question. With Giddens, however, we would be left with a history of individual choices and actions and their intended and unintended consequences. Since it is unlikely that anybody actually intended the contradictions in

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question, we would be left with an 'explanation' which says they are the unintended consequences of human action. In other words, they just happen to occur. This hardly seems a satisfactory form of social scientific explanation.

The interpretive nature of sociology The discussion of causality points to Giddens' tendency to reduce social structure to social action. Since he views social science in terms of a choice between positivism and hermeneutics, he also has to choose between seeing social structures as independent of human action, which they determine, or as simply constituted by human action. There is a third alternative which escapes him, despite his frequent claims to be presenting a 'third way'. Social structures may be seen as independent, to some degree, of human consciousness, and as having a problematic relation to human action, being neither simple product nor simple cause of action. Giddens, however, constantly asserts the identity of structure and action: 'Understanding is not merely a method of making sense of what others do, nor does it require an empathic grasp of their con­ sciousness in some mysterious or obscure fashion. It is the very ontological condition of human life in society as such' (1976: 19). And, more clearly: 'Social structures are both constituted by human agency and yet at the same time are the very medium of this constitution' (1976: 121). From this come the characteristic themes of his later work: the nature of action and language and the insistence that actors have considerable, if not always articulable, knowledge of their situation. In volume one of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism there is an acknowl­ edgement that social processes can operate behind people's backs, but such operations are seen entirely in terms of the unacknowledged conditions of actions or their unintended consequences. It is of course quite possible to acknowledge the truth of the first quotation. However, the fact that understanding is the 'ontological condition' of human life does not imply that it is the only ontological condition. There is no prior reason why another such condition might not be the existence of relatively independent social structures. This is no more than saying that individuals are capable of creative thought and at the same time our thought is limited by the physical structure of our body and mind. How we conceptualize such structures and their development is an open question, as is their relationship to our under­ standing and action. In some ways these are the questions of social science. Giddens, however, seems to rely primarily on a (not unworthy) humanist impulse to avoid these issues. The depth and complexity of social structure and its relationship to our lives is lost. Even more unfortunate, as I have already indicated in my comments on his use

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of Heidegger and Erikson, he seems to lose the depth of human action as well.

Agency and action Dissolving social structure into social action removes the object of social action: it can only now act upon itself, not upon social structures. In New Rules of Sociological Method Giddens emphasizes the reflexively consti­ tutive nature of action. He argues that the traditional debate about action in terms of reasons and causes wrongly divides action into what are taken to be neatly identifiable components: reasons, motives, intentions, purposes etc. He suggests, rightly I think, that only rarely if at all can we identify such clear-cut categories. Action is, rather, a continuous flow, involving a hierarchy of purposes and constant monitoring by an agent. He suggests it is better to speak of rationalizations rather than reasons (1976: Chap. 2). However, he goes no further than putting the traditional categories in motion: reasons become reasoning. On several occasions he presents a conception of the social actor as comprised of different levels. He distinguishes an unconscious, a taken for granted framework of meaning, commonsense, and ongoing reflexive rationalization. At one point (1979: Chap. 5) he seems to give the unconscious some priority. However, what is missing here in the way of theoretical work is an account of any relationship between these levels and there is little comment on their internal structures and workings. It is precisely these areas which are significant. If, as Giddens argues, the unconscious is the source of motivation, then we need to understand how it works and how it comes to appear in consciousness. If it is true that we rely on taken for granted and commonsense assumptions, then we need to know how these effect our conscious beliefs and rational­ izations. Simply pointing to the existence of these areas is not sufficient, and we find here a similar trivialization of theory to that I noted in relation to Heidegger. Ethnomethodology, for example, is a questionable approach which nonetheless raises questions which challenge the main body of sociological thought in a new way. Whatever one might think of its success, it has developed an intricate and detailed methodology for laying bare the rules which govern action. In the work of Cicourel (1973), for example, this is extended into a sophisticated theory of perception and conception and agency. Giddens manages to reduce all this to a series of generalized statements about the world: that action is rule governed, language is important and that context is important (1977: Chap. 1). The theoretical work of ethnomethodology is lost. The way in which Giddens slips the object of action back into action itself, together with the loss of depth in his view of agency, can be seen in his contradictory criticism of Habermas in Studies in Social and Political Theory (Giddens 1977). In an argument the beginning of which would

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gladden the heart of any orthodox Marxist, he points out that Habermas's distinction between labour and interaction loses the possibility of under­ standing domination as tied to material interests. Power becomes simply a matter of ideologically deformed communication. However, he goes on to argue: Instead of equating labour with instrumental action and separating these analytically from interaction . . . I think it is important to place in the forefront the concepts of production and reproduction of interaction, as contingent accomplishments of human actors. If, as I have outlined elsewhere, processes of production and reproduction are treated as involving the reflexive application of rules and resources in the service of the realization of interests (wants) power emerges, together with symbolic meanings and normative sanctions, as integral to interaction rather than analytically separate from it. (Giddens 1977: 153)

Thus, he begins by pointing to the importance of material interests which presuppose an external object for action, but in the quotation he absorbs material interests (labour, instrumental action) back into social interaction, and defines social interaction in terms of symbolic meanings, normative sanctions and the reflexive application of rules and resources, a simple list of the features of agency. From criticizing Habermas from the Marxist end of the spectrum, he moves to becoming more of a hermeneuticist than Habermas himself.

Structure and structuration The reduction of qualitatively different phenomena to the same level, and the consequent loss of depth, are responsible for what I referred to earlier as the incoherence of Giddens' central concepts. The difference between structure and action is both hinted at and blurred in his notion of the 'duality of structures'. Structures are seen as enabling action, as its medium, and as presupposed by and resulting from action. If there is structuration then there must, somewhere, somehow be structure. His most developed discussion of the issue, in Central Problems in Social Theory (1979), reveals some intriguing statements. How are we to con­ ceive of the structures that are 'structurated': I shall argue that 'structure' has a 'virtual' existence, as instantiations or moments, but this is not the same as identifying structure with models invented by sociological or anthropological observers. Although I shall not defend the claim, I regard the concepts below as compatible with a realist ontology. (Giddens 1979: 63)

If his concept is compatible with a realist ontology then we ought to be able to see a structure or its effects, but we shall have to be quick, since it has only an instantaneous or momentary existence. I am not sure what happens if it has a virtual existence. It might be that Giddens is a realist

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in the sense that for George Orwell some statements were true - they were essentially true even if demonstrably false. Then again: I shall not regard structure as referring to its most basic sense in the form of sets but rather to rules (and resources) that, in social reproduction, 'bind' time. Thus 'structure', as applied below, is first of all treated as a generic term; but structures can be identified as sets or matrices of rules, resources and properties. (1979: 63-4)

One wonders how a moment or an instantiation may bind time (not to mention the question of whether time can be bound at all - it has a tendency to move very quickly when chased). More important, if a structure is not a set, then how are we to identify it, since that would involve identifying interrelationships, that is, identifying a set? But then again, we discover that a structure is a set, even if it is not basically a set. Then: 'I shall argue that strictly speaking, there are no such things as rules of transformation; all social rules are transformational in the sense that structure is not manifested in empirical similarity of social items' (1979: 64). If we cannot find structure in the similarity of social items then how are we to recognize differences, since the two imply and depend upon each other? It would seem that we certainly cannot recognize the effects of structures in social items, so perhaps this makes Giddens a virtual realist. Despite himself, he would have to be a model-building realist; if we cannot observe structures or their effects, then how else can we identify them except through model-building? And a model, in some sense, is a set. So far we have seen that structures have an instantaneous, virtual, real existence. They are not models but it would seem that we have to build models of them, although it is not clear whether this is because of or despite their instantaneous existence. They are also rules, defined by their differences, which bind time (here, clearly despite their instan­ taneous existence); but since they cannot be defined by similarity, they cannot be defined by difference. They cannot be defined. Finally: As I shall employ it, 'structure' refers to 'structural property', or more exactly to 'structuring property', structuring properties providing the 'binding of time' and space in social systems. I argue that these properties can be understood as rules and resources, recursively integrated in the reproduction of social systems. Structures exist paradigmatically as an absent set of differences . . . (and this implies) . . . recognizing the existence of (a) knowledge - as memory traces of how things are to be done (said, written) on the part of social actors; (b) social practices organized through the recursive mobilization of that knowledge; (c) capabilities that the production of these practices presuppose. (Giddens 1979: 64)

Now we learn that they are properties, resources and rules; that they are somehow form and content at the same time. Since they are also struc­ turing properties, they are active and the question arises of how an

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absent set of differences can possess the quality of agency. We end by moving from an absent set of differences which does things, the realm of theology, to a partial and mundane list of human qualities that could be gleaned in rather more detail from a perusal of standard interactionist and ethnomethodological works. It seems after all that 'structure' and 'structuration' refer to the active features of human beings. There is no doubt that Giddens tackles vast and real problems of ontology, epistemology, theory building and many other things. What is disturbing is the way these are run together and discussed as if they were solved, the term 'structure' stretched to hide the problems that were there at the beginning. Giddens' eventual conclusion seems to be that we have to make a sort of gestalt switch, what he calls a 'methodological epoche' in our analysis. We can examine social systems as 'strategic conduct', that is, social action, or we can embark upon 'institutional analysis'. In other words we end with the old division between structure and action, seen as alternative ways of looking at the same world - that world being essentially seamless and with little internal complexity. Thus we come to Utopia.

Utopia Dahrendorf's (1964) famous critique of Parsons directed itself to the explicit assumptions and details of the latter's work, drawing parallels with literary utopias. I would accuse Giddens of a more mundane utopianism, something more like wishful thinking, but in the same context as Parsons: that of social order. Giddens' assumptions about the basis of social order are more difficult

to find than Parsons'. In New Rules of Sociological Method (1976: Chap. 3) he offers a Durkheimian account with a phenomenological slant: social order is based on a sort of conscience collective comprised of taken for granted assumptions and rules. However, I think there is a more pro­ found and at the same time more naive account. I have argued that Giddens reduces the depth of the social world in various ways and that he absorbs social structure into social action, which in tum is seen in terms of human qualities. There must, then, be something about the social actor that ensures we live in an ordered world rather than in chaos. The most explicit statement of what he assumes about the actor that I have found is in Central Problems in Social Theory: Ontological security can be taken to depend upon the implicit faith actors have in the conventions (codes of signification and forms of normative regulation) via which, in the duality of structure, the reproduction of social life is effected. In most circumstances of social life, the sense of ontological security is routinely grounded in mutual knowledge, employed such that interaction is 'unproblematic' or can be largely 'taken for granted'. (Giddens 1979: 219)

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This claim is repeated in The Constitution of Society (1984). What is happening here is a reversal of Parsons' ordering of priorities. Whereas Parsons sees the stable personality as a product of the social system, Giddens sees the social system, in terms of commonsense and the taken for granted, as a product of the ontologically secure individual. It seems that we have social order because people are creatures of habit, sustaining their sense of security in the social order. I do not want to dispute Giddens' argument here: we do find security in the routine and perhaps construct the routine because it gives us security. He is right insofar as he goes. My point rather is that this is only half the picture. If that were all there is to it, the world would probably be a nicer, but perhaps more boring, place and in this sense he is indulging in wishful thinking. If we look at theorists on whose ideas he builds this conception of agency and ontological security, we find again that he turns a profound idea into a shallow one. The notion of ontological security originally comes from the work of R.D. Laing (1960) and Willmott (1986) points out that ontological security is not a matter of feeling safe through routine, but of being able to cope with changes in routine. The more one immerses oneself in routine, the more likely one is to generate anxiety. The work of psychoanalysts such as Winnicott (1964), to whom Giddens also refers, on early childhood shows that what is important is not routine in itself but the ability to cope with upsets and disturbances. In this respect, routine without an emotional content can be profoundly destructive. That Giddens is only half right, engaging in wishful thinking, seems to be self-evident once we step outside sociology books. Most of us live lives that are in part routine; but they are also fraught with uncertainties, anxieties and puzzles that originate in the depths that Giddens has lost in his synthesizing. Our internal worlds also contain fear, self­ questioning, doubt and agonies which at times enhance the banality of our commonsense world. We are regularly thrown by external processes over which we have no control, processes that result in wars, unemploy­ ment, poverty. These disturbances, these absences of routine, have their origin in our unconscious or at least the darker reaches of our personalities, and in the social structure in which we are situated, but which we do not control, individually or collectively. These areas, the very parts of our lives which are not routine and secure, are the areas which have generated the theories to which Giddens does violence: Heidegger's existentialism, Marxism, even ethnomethodology. We can see too why he wants a simple conception of ego-identity. These are also the areas that require theoretical work: the development of concepts that make intelligible what is puzzling, painful or threatening. Giddens' tendency to gloss these areas and problems perhaps lies in the nature of his project. To criticize him for a utopian conception of social order is, despite my argument, just off target. To criticize him for

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resting such an assumption on a utopian conception of the personality is closer to the mark, but the real utopianism is rather in his conception of social theory: the idea that a synthesizing project is possible. Giddens' work emerges at a time not of convergence but of increasing frag­ mentation in social theory, with all the obscurities and dead ends and bitter debates that go with such a breaking up. My argument has been that Giddens avoids such difficulties and debates rather than solves them. What he leaves us with is a theory of simple complication. It is complicated because he identifies a lot that must be taken account of: the agent and the agent's unconscious, taken for granted interpretive schemes, commonsense knowledge, reflective monitoring, the process of structuration and the duality of structures, time-space constitution, reproduction and related ideas such as presence availability and so on. It is simple in that the result is a series of generalizing and descriptive concepts which are simply aligned with each other. It is difficult not to see the concepts of structuration and the duality of structures as a verbal solution to the rocky problems that have broken the major theoretical systems of sociology from structural functionalism to Marxism.

Conclusion This chapter has become increasingly polemical and it is now perhaps time to move back to what I said in the introduction is good about Giddens. It would be satisfying to offer a way forward that would provide as much promise as his project, but behind all the criticisms my underlying theme has been that this is not possible. To find the real value of Giddens' work involves not bridge building nor the destruction of bridges but rather an unwinding of what he tries to knit together. It means returning to the different traditions and nagging away at old problems, from the Marxist base-superstructure debates to the reasons­ causes arguments and many others. His contribution to these arguments is real and interesting, but neither he, nor to my knowledge anybody else, has yet produced satisfactory solutions. I am suggesting that theory and theoretical work are more mundane and slower than Giddens makes them appear: it is a matter of constantly finding new problems and disputing old solutions, and of trying to arrive at a reasonable assess­ ment of what a theory does and does not enable us to understand. In this context, Giddens' other major contribution is to take seriously a range of thinkers and issues which, strictly speaking, come from outside sociology. It is generally true that when they have been considered by sociologists it has been through an enthusiastic discipleship that Giddens manages to avoid. He is reasonable and reserved in his discussions of structuralism, post-structuralism, hermeneutic philosophers and others, and if he has persuaded people to think about Heidegger and Levi­ Strauss or Gadamer then his work has been worthwhile. I say this

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because I think that one of the implications of the fragmentation of social theory is that sociology as a discipline has been unable to generate, either from its conceptual framework or its empirical research, a real concep­ tion of its own possibilities and limits. Despite the obscurity and diffi­ culty of much modem philosophy, such work does begin to approach issues and choices that are presupposed by sociological theory, and of which sociological theory needs to be aware. Such philosophy provides a map on which sociology must place itself, whether it wants to or not. It is perhaps this area of work that is most important since it offers the possibility of new ways of looking at the old problems to which we must return. One of these directions has to be towards a deeper understanding of agency and the actor, of personality and the internal dynamic of the psyche. A social theory which moulds its conception of the actor around the demands of the more abstract levels of theory will always be inade­ quate and open to criticisms of irrelevance and/or ignoring significant dimensions of the social world. Such synthesizing systems only work by resting themselves on fictional models of human beings.

6

GOFFMAN: FRAME ANALYSIS

On the face of it, Erving Goffman appears to avoid the criticisms that I levelled at Giddens in the previous chapter. He is certainly no grand theorist, forcing a conception of the individual into an unsuitable slot to fit the rest of his theory. He often inspires delight and enthusiasm in students and in those colleagues whose senses have not been too dulled by age. He seems to be able to grasp important dimensions of how people really behave in their day-to-day interactions. We are, I suspect, all conscious of acting in public situations and with our nearest and dearest and this is what he settles on. The paradox is that Giddens (1984) tries to absorb Goffman's work into his structuration theory. Although on the surface it is difficult to see how such an apparently idiosyncratic thinker as Goffman could be fitted into a grand theoretical synthesis, an examination of his work, especially Frame Analysis (1974) will, I think, enable us to see how it could happen. Goffman does, of course, have a theoretical background, almost self­ evidently located in the work of G.H. Mead (1938) and although he might not fit neatly into any school, he is closest to symbolic interaction­ ism, which also has the reputation of getting to grips with everyday life and experience. For Mead the self was an ongoing conversation between two 'phases', the 'Me', the conception of myself that I receive from the outside world, from others, and the T, my response to others, the source of originality and creativity. It is clearly easier to talk about the 'Me' than the T and it is a commonplace now to say that the T became a residual category, brought in to explain what could not be explained in terms of social determination. The T became the ghost in the machine. It is what presents in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman 1971). So if we ask Goffman who it is that does the acting in his dramaturgical model, not what is acted, or the aim of the acting, we find, in Frame Analysis, references to a 'moral core' or an 'animal self'. There is no indication of what qualities these might possess or, in the former case, of how it comes into being. I will concentrate on Frame Analysis (1974) because I think it is particularly revealing. What I would like to do is offer an interpretation of what Goffman is 'really' talking about, distinguishing it from what he claims to be talking about. I will attempt this through an exploration of a number of

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interconnected features of his work, beginning with the apparent self­ evidence of his subject matter that perhaps accounts for the enthusiasm with which people greet it or the readiness with which they dismiss it. There is certainly a sense in which Goffman's work is difficult to grasp: not so much difficult to understand, but difficult to retain and to present in an organized summary. The systematic production and sub­ division of categories seem to require an effort of memory rather than comprehension. This makes it a difficult work to criticize. On the one hand, there seems to be no 'core' concept or conceptual framework on which to focus, in the way that, for example, the notion of the conscience collective can be said to be at the centre of Durkheim's work. There is, rather, a proliferation of concepts under the umbrella of a central analogy, namely, the theatre. But the analogy is not the source of the concepts: the notions of 'frame', 'key', etc. in Frame Analysis are applied to, as much as derived from, the theatre. On the other hand, it is difficult to go through the argument step by step, agreeing with it here, faulting it there and coming to some overall judgement. There is little in the way of a logical argument with each step leading necessarily to the next, and there is no apparent criterion by which we can judge what is said on any one issue. The most that seems possible is a series of discrete and unconnected comments pointing to equally discrete and unconnected problems thrown up in the course of the text. The problem of getting some critical grip on his work and the apparent absence of criteria by which to judge it provides an interesting starting point. It is a problem, and an absence, that does not seem to strike those who are immediately enthusiastic, and it hardly seems a problem or an absence for Goffman. His work, of course, is open to doubt and inadequate in various ways, however: 'Nonetheless, some of the things in this world seem to urge the analysis I am now attempting, and the compulsion is strong to try to outline the framework that will perform this job, even if this means some other tasks get handled badly' (1974: 13). There is an appeal to obviousness, self-evidence and reasonableness in his claims for his work: the world calls, everyone can hear it, it is reasonable that someone try to answer. Of course there are doubts about the obviousness of it all, but any reasonable person will recognize that concern with these doubts eventually prohibits one from saying anything at all, since people know what he is talking about: Thus, I will throughout use quotation marks to suggest a special sense of the word so marked and not concern myself systematically with the fact that this device is routinely used in a variety of quite different ways, that these seem to bear closely on the question of frame, and that I must assume that the context of use will automatically lead my readers and me to have the same under­ standing, although neither I nor they might be able to explicate the matter further. (Goffman 1974: 12-13)

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Thus he takes refuge in self-evidence and reasonableness. Yet, standing back from his claims, one finds immediately after the above quotation a further argument: This book is about the organization of experience - something that an indi­ vidual actor can take into his mind - and not the organization of society . . . I am not addressing the structure of social life but the structure of experience individuals have at any moment of their social lives. I personally hold society to be first in every way and any individual's current involvements to be second; this report deals only with matters that are second. This book will have weaknesses enough in the areas it claims to deal with; there is no need to find limitations in regard to what it does not set about to discover. (Coffman 1974: 13)

Here is an argument which carries the reasonable and self-evident tone of the earlier points, but one which is 'self-evidently' unreasonable and 'self-evidently' inadequate. If the 'structure of experience' under exami­ nation is that which individuals have of their social lives, then we need to know the structure of social life before we can examine the experience of it. But the structure of social life remains to be discovered. If it makes any sense at all to say that society comes first in every way, it must mean that society takes a logical and ontological priority over experience and in both cases it means that we cannot understand experience before looking at society. Yet these arguments are used to justify the ignoring of society and to point to the unreasonable nature of criticizing Goffman for ignoring society. No great insight or feat of logic is required to point to the contra­ diction in the above quotation; indeed, such a criticism is as self-evident and reasonable as the position it is criticizing. The same applies to a number of other inadequacies, and I will try to show this in connection with the two basic categories that Goffman introduces at the beginning, the notion of 'frame' itself and of 'key'. As we have seen, he sets out to study the organization of experience; 'frame' refers to the means with which that organization is achieved. To begin with, there are 'primary frameworks', or basic forms of organization that do not refer to any prior or original interpretation of the world, such as the organization that transforms the meaningless into the meaningful (p.21). This by itself raises doubts. 'Frame' must be a defining feature of experience for to identify an experience as 'meaningless' is possible only in relation to an experience which is already meaningful, otherwise it would simply remain unidentified. In other words, even 'unframed' experience must be framed by framed experience. The suspicion is that Goffman is using the term 'frame' to indicate nothing more than the fact that our experience is organized. This is confirmed in that interesting and, one would have thought for Goffman, important questions about the source of frame­ works are left open. Are they perceptual constructs, conceptual con­ structs, social constructs, or are they simply given in the world? Such

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questions are never asked or answered in a systematic way. It is also confirmed by the rather cursory discussion of the context of primary frameworks, to which I will return later. It is further confirmed in that within primary frameworks practically anything can be 'framed'. The term here obviously implies something different since it is possible to be out-of-frame and still identifiable. Exactly what it implies is, however, by no means obvious. The term seems applicable to a range of very different phenomena, and it seems that different frames can be differentiated in an endless number of ways. A casual search produces the following. In Chapter 3, frames are distinguished according to the types of 'keying' involved (and the implication of this will become apparent later); in Chapter 7, 'frame' refers both to the official view of what is happening in an event and to the principal focus of attention in interaction; in Chapter 8, frames are divided between mind and action and are 'anchored' in a 'real' social, biological and physical world (which presumably thus exists external to frames); later in the chapter it refers to the organization of involvement in activity; and in Chapter 13 'frame' refers to the organization of talk. There are also theatrical frames, radio frames, frames classified according to the intentions of their constructors and so on. It seems that anything which can be organized and differentiated can be framed, and it can be framed in as many ways as there are of organizing and differentiating. We find exactly the same problem with the notion of 'keying', or the transformation of an initially given framework into something else, with a resultant change in meaning. Coffman is primarily concerned with changes in 'reality meaning', that is, various types of play-acting. The consistency in the use of the term 'keying' is threatened and then destroyed by his insistence that 'keying' can refer to any change in meaning, including 'conceptual' meaning, so that at one point he suggests that translation from one language to another is a keying (p. 79). It becomes difficult to see what cannot be considered as a keying: a spoken sentence can be treated as a 'keyed' thought, as can an action, and a thought can be considered as a 'keyed' action. Insofar as all actions take place in a specific context from which they take their meaning, any one action can be considered as a 'keying' of any other or all actions of the same class. Thus 'frame' and 'key' tum out not to be concepts which provide new insights and explanation, but words that refer to the fact of organization and differentiation on the one hand, and to the existence of changing meanings on the other. They are similar in nature to the term 'interaction' which, as Goffman tells us, is unhelpful since it 'equally applies to everything one might want to distinguish' (p. 127). Now these conceptual inadequacies are not difficult to identify; it is a matter only of looking at the ways in which Goffman uses the notion of 'frame' and 'key'. Yet at the same time they are hidden, they seem both immediately apparent and not immediately apparent. It is my contention that this 'masking' is an effect of Goffman's style and the way in which he relates

COFFMAN: FRAME ANALYSIS

79

to his reader. This is worth investigating, for it reveals the way in which we can get 'around' the mask, discover the real object and limitations of his work and arrive at a coherent understanding of both its adequacies and its inadequacies. To read Coffman is to be seduced or to refuse seduction. It is not to enter into a critical dialogue, nor is it to understand another's view of the world. Initially one must lose oneself in his world or keep out of it altogether. The seduction fails or succeeds through a double strategy. In the first place, the reader is led into an 'identification-in-superiority' with Coffman. We become privileged observers in a special way: we see through tricks, acts, illusions of all sorts. With Coffman the reader is no fool. The reader becomes an 'insider', his or her status is confirmed by the systematic use of argot and suspicion. The alliance is confirmed when the suspicion is extended by Coffman to himself; it becomes a knowing alliance in which both Coffman and the reader admit to the possibility that Coffman might be fooling the reader. The systematic 'frame-breaking' of the introduction sets up a knowing conspiracy which achieves seduction through a revelation that seduction may be what is happening. It is not that we are taken in by Coffman's openness; rather we side with him because of his admitted trickiness. We ourselves become tricky, knowing and suspicious. All this would remain ephemeral and perhaps unimportant were it not for the second arm of the strategy. This is the structure of the exposition. As I pointed out earlier, there is, by and large, no necessary movement from one point to the next, but rather an indication, a gesture which reveals to us the world as it really is, as it obviously is. It is just that we have not seen it in that way before and all it needed was somebody to direct our gaze, somebody to show us: 'some apparent exceptions'; 'it is obvious that'; 'now consider'; 'it is apparent that'; 'the obvious possi­ bility'; 'is surely not'; 'clearly'; 'next examine'. A smattering of these terms can be expected in any work, but the above list from just over three pages (440-3) reveals the heart of Coffman's style. Rarely does he take the responsibility for what he is saying. The instruction at the beginning of a paragraph - a favourite technique - directs us to some­ thing whether we like it or not. In case we should forget, we are referred to the apparent, the clear and the obvious. In this context the more moderate suggestions ('seems to' is the only one occurring in the three pages mentioned above) take on the appearance of gentle consideration for the slower reader. The dominant mood is descriptive and affirmative: Coffman is telling what is happening, not what he thinks is happening. The alliance with the reader, then, is in the face of a world which is 'just like that'. All one can say immediately is, 'Yes, it is like that', or 'No, it is not.' In fact, neither response is adequate, or both are equally adequate: some aspects of the world are 'like that', others are not. To break free of Coffman's guiding gestures is to begin to distinguish what he is really talking about, and it is a matter of looking at the questions

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that come out of his descriptions, but which remain unanswered and often unasked. To take the example of primary frameworks again, I have already indicated one question concerning their origin. There are a number of others. After the initial definition of a primary framework, Goffman delineates ( pp. 21-8) two 'broad classes' of frameworks that he distinguishes in 'our society'. The first involves natural frameworks in which events are physically determined and unguided; the second involves social frameworks where events are seen to be guided by intelligent beings open to persuasion. These guided doings are open to two interpretations, one pertaining to the manipulation of the natural world, the other pertaining to activity within the social framework alone. All social frameworks involve rules and they are socially distributed and shared, not necessarily in an even way. To break free of Goffman in this case is a matter only of following his original intention, which is to study the structure of experience. There is the beginning of a description of the structure of our experience in the above but only a beginning. How are the two classes subdivided? Is the distinction between guided, undeter­ mined and unguided determined events the only distinction we can make? Is it the most important distinction? Are there areas in which the distinction does not apply at all? Since we can identify 'events' in both frameworks, there must be fundamental connections between them. What are they? Are these classes jointly or separately coherent or are there contradictions within and between them? Do they structure the whole of our experience, or most of it, or only parts? I would suggest that all these questions arise from the preliminary definition and need to be answered before we can claim to have investigated the 'structure of experience'. This sort of investigation would take us in the direction of Foucault's archaeology of knowledge (1970, 1972). Goffman, however, offers the cursory preliminary definition and then moves on after admitting its inadequacy. We then find out what he is really investigating: 'The notion of primary frameworks, unsatisfactory as it is, does allow one immediately to consider five distinctive matters and to appreciate something of their bearing on our overall under­ standing of the workings of the world' (1974: 28). These five matters are events that challenge a primary framework (the apparent intervention of the supernatural, for instance) and four types of event that cut across primary frameworks. Each type is considered in relation to strategies for handling the uncertainties that it produces and reasserting, if possible, the dominance of the distorted or blurred framework. Now, this is not an investigation of the structure of experience, but an investigation of the techniques by means of which we maintain the structure of experience. I am not claiming this as a surprising revelation of Goffman's real concern; like most things about his work, it is 'obvious'. What is not obvious, perhaps, is that it entails doing violence to what he describes. The 'what' of experience is reduced to the 'how'

GOFFMAN: FRAME ANALYSIS

81

and the 'how' is left to stand as the whole of experience. The 'what' of experience is precisely the meaning of experience, and the questions I asked about primary frameworks are questions about the meanings we give to the world and the relationships between them, questions about the structure of experience. For Goffman it is sufficient that experience is structured, and once this is granted, he is concerned with the nuts and bolts that keep it together. Here we can see what links his work on the presentation of self with Frame Analysis and enables him to be absorbed into Giddens' synthesis as part of its utopian base. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a study of how people get through situations without losing face, without the act being interrupted. In Frame Analysis he is concerned with how we maintain and reimpose frames when they are threatened, and Giddens is concerned with the taken for granted rules which reproduce social structures. The overall concern throughout is with social order, yet so often our experience is not orderly. The violence that the concern with order does to Goffman's subject matter, then, is to reduce its meaning. Unlike some forms of ethno­ methodology, it is not a near elimination of meaning, but the reduction of the meaning of experience to one dimension, that of its appearance as reality. This reduction of meaning allows the remarkable range of Goffman's examples. It is only if one is concerned with a very limited aspect of social reality that it is possible to employ a mechanical fault in an aircraft and a penis lost in a medical accident as examples in the same argument (1974: 100-101). The reduction of meaning throws light on the difficulty with the theatrical analogy I mentioned earlier. Ostensibly, Goffman takes the theatre (or some marginal or extraordinary aspects of social life) as a means of thinking about and throwing light on everyday activities. In fact, he is imposing on the theatre the same violence he imposes on the rest of the world: it is considered only in terms of its representation of reality, the techniques by which that representation is achieved and the means by which the audience is kept involved. The complex dialectics of Pirandello and Genet, not to mention Godard and other 'tricky film-makers' become, for Goffman, only examples that reveal techniques of frame maintenance and forms of frame breaking. In a peculiar misreading ( pp. 284-5) Sartre's attempt to draw out the meaning for Genet of a feature of The Maids becomes a revelation of a presupposition about the theatrical frame and nothing more. It is not surprising that at one point ( pp. 137 8) he is forced to deny that he sees all plays as whodunits: 'Even whodunits have to be more than that.' Luckily, he can refer to a critic who says that whodunits have something to say about human destiny. What Genet might be saying throughout The Maids or The Blacks, however, is of no significance to his argument. This reduction of meaning has its most profound effect in the matter of the self. Frame Analysis ends with a long quotation from Merleau-Ponty's The Prose of the World, followed by a short comment: -

82

IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOCY It is not sufficiently noted that the other is never present face to face. Even when, in the heat of discussion, I directly confront my adversary, it is not in that violent face with its grimace, or even in that voice traveling toward me, that the intention which reaches me is to be found. The adversary is never quite localized; his voice, his gesticulations, his twitches are only effects, a sort of stage effect, a ceremony. Their producer is so well masked that I am quite surprised when my own responses carry over. This marvellous megaphone becomes embarrassed, gives a few sighs, a few tremors, some signs of intelligence. One must believe that there was someone over there. But where? Not in that overstrained voice, not in that face lined like any well-worn object. Certainly not behind that set-up; I know quite well that back there is only 'darkness crammed with organs'. The other's body is in front of me - but as far as it is concerned, it leads a singular existence, between I who think and that body, or rather near me, by my side. The other's body is a kind of replica of myself, a wandering double which haunts my surroundings more than it appears in them. The other's body is the unexpected response I get from elsewhere, as if by a miracle things began to tell my thoughts, or as though they would be thinking and speaking always for me, since they are things, and I am myself. The other, in my eyes, is thus always on the margin of what I see and hear, he is this side of me, he is beside of me or behind me, but he is not in that place which my look flattens and empties of any 'interior'. (Merleau-Ponty 1974b: 133-4)

The trouble with this description, according to Goffman, lies in the failure 'to apply to these references to self the analysis they allow him to apply to other' (1974: 575-6). Let us look more closely at the quotation from Merleau-Ponty. He is describing the perception of another person, that much is straightfor­ ward. Now there are certain preconditions that must necessarily exist if such a description is possible. The most basic is that if somebody can be seen, then there must also be somebody who sees. There is thus a lack of symmetry in the perception of another person. To see is not the same as being seen despite the fact that one implies the other. The difference is found in the quotation. To be seen is to be reduced to a gesticulating body: to see is to inhabit a body, to be in possession of one's own movements and, more importantly, one's perceptions as a synthetic unity. I am my experience, and all the external gestures which for the other are signs of an invisible consciousness are for me the places and movements in which I live as their unity. Like Godard's camera (p. 404), I can never get behind myself: the dimension of 'subjectivity', of 'lived experience' is always there. Goffman recognizes the 'other's' existence but he refers to it only when it suits him and in the discussion of Godard, for example, it proves a useful tool which justifies disregarding the meaning of Godard's film. In the matter of the self, however, Goffman strips away this dimension, strips away not just dimensions of meaning that are superfluous to his argument, but the very source of the meaning of experience itself, the living of the experience. His phenom­ enological warrant is used to destroy the very object of phenomenology. Here is the most insidious result of Goffman's style. Borrowing a concept

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83

from Sartre (1977) it can be described as effecting a dramatic serialization of the reader. He or she is seduced into an alliance with Goffman and a separation from those with whom he is engaged in the flow of inter­ action. The reader becomes other than those with whom he is engaged and the others become a combination of techniques of 'reality' produc­ tion and maintenance. The reader is then separated even from this experience and thrust back into the world as just another combination of techniques, finally being sealed into an alienation as other than himself. Each of us is reduced only to someone who is seen. Gouldner (1970: 378-90) has seen Goffman as a symptom of bureau­ cratic consumer capitalism and the theoretical and moral dilemmas to which that system has led. I would not want to dispute this, but rather to point to the complexity of Goffman's 'ideological' tendencies and per­ haps reveal one or two further dimensions. At the beginning of Frame Analysis, Goffman writes: 'I can only suggest that he who would combat false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the way people snore' (1974: 14). The implication of my argument has been that Goffman has no way of telling the difference between sleeping and waking, that he strips experience precisely of that dimension in which it is awake. For Goffman there is no other state than sleep. In a sense he is right that he is not providing a lullaby: it is more of a lobotomy. In the development of his work, the way in which he relates to the reader and to the world he is describing, we can find laid bare one of those processes by means of which individuals are kept separate from each other, divorced from their own experience and bound into impotent observation, the impotence, if you like, of the consumer in the face of the bureaucrat. There is more than this, however. The stripping of the self of its dimension of lived experience leaves only a collection of fragments: 'A set of functions characteristically imposed in ordinary, literal doings but separated in all manner of ways in other realms of being' (1974: 575). The self becomes at most a machine for producing the appearance of reality. It is a collection of separate, observable parts that mesh together in an observable way to produce a 'reality'. To observe a person is not funda­ mentally different from observing the parts of a car engine mesh together to produce motion. At this levet Goffman's work becomes a near perfect example of a way of thinking about social life that began with the Enlightenment. It is, moreover, a way of thinking to which Goffman is usually regarded as an alternative. What is involved is the subsuming of the 'human' into the 'natural', where 'nature' is thought of as a realm to be dominated and the source and the object of instrumental manipu­ lation. Goffman does not reduce the 'human' to the 'natural' as such, as do the more rigorous forms of positivism, but he reduces the 'human' to a material instrumentality.

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If Coffman is to be criticized, it is in fact less because he operates this reduction, than because he claims to be doing something else. Once his 'real' concern is identified, this concern is precisely what becomes important and 'adequate' in his work. In his production of serial alienation and his reduction of the self he reproduces and, in a sense, lays bare an experience and a way of seeing ourselves and others which

is a fundamental feature of life in a social system apparently out of human control. Serialization and its results are not confined to one class or section of a class. Although its content, its meaning,

is different

between and within classes, serialization's basic form is common and it is this form that Coffman reveals. It is this fact that makes his implicit ideological assumptions so profoundly ambiguous, for it is no use asserting against Coffman the multidimensional meaningfulness of our lived experience and that of others when for ourselves that experience is usually

unrecognized

or

systematically

suppressed.

The final

and

perhaps conclusive reason for Coffman's 'obviousness' is that he articu­ lates a way of seeing the world that is our own:

To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewelry, and make people who are no more than component parts of machinery act as if they still had the capacity to act like subjects, and as if something depended on their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer. (Adorno 1974: 15) The difference between Coffman and Adorno is that the latter the possibility of life.

is aware of

7

MASCULINITY AND MALE DOMINANCE

In Chapters

5 and 6, I tried to show how both macro and micro social

theory glossed and hid the experience of the actor. The implication of this argument is that we need to think of the social actor having a life which is to some degree relatively autonomous from his or her social setting. We are not simply the product of role expectations, ideologies, taken for granted knowledge or discursive practices but we absorb them through a complex inner process for which I have been using the term 'experience' .

In this chapter I want to look at how we can begin to 'detach' the individual from the functioning of his or her society while still recog­ nizing that we all have to deal with social conditioning and other social pressures, whichever conceptual framework we use to describe them. The rise of modem feminism and the appearance of what used to be known as 'consciousness-raising' groups, the development of the slogan 'the personal is political' brought together 'grand theories' of society and attempts to understand day-to-day experience of the world around issues of sex and gender. Given the early feminist critiques of Freud (see, for example, De Beauvoir

1960;

Figes

1970;

Millett

1970)

it is perhaps

surprising that psychoanalysis now seems to have become an important and often unquestioned contributor to feminist ideas. The two central founding works of modem feminist interpretations of Freud take up different aspects of his work on women, sexuality and gender. The first to appear was Juliet Mitchell's

Feminism (1976).

Psychoanalysis and

Mitchell adopted a comparatively orthodox Freudian

standpoint, influenced by Lacan.

She suggested that there was a

distinctive feminine personality which was part of the patriarchal system analysed by Freud in his theory of sexual development. This gives the central role to man's possession of the penis. The woman is faced with three options. The 'normal solution' in western societies is to accept the lack of a penis, identify with the mother and seek to gain the absent penis, and then a male baby, first by transferring her love to her father and then to another man. The second option is to refuse to acknowledge the lack of the penis, identifying and competing with men. The third

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option is to remain identified with the mother and this is likely to develop into lesbianism. The normal woman is narcissistic - she is vain, jealous and has a limited sense of justice. The second classic is Nancy Chodorow's Reproduction of Mothering (1978). Chodorow draws on post-Freudian object-relations theory. In her view the crucial issue is mothering, which she suggests proceeds differ­ ently for little boys and girls. I will shortly be looking at this in some detail, but it ends in a different version of femininity: the woman is seen as primarily concerned with relationships and with care, making the needs of others her own and satisfying them by taking care of others. This lies at the root of women's oppression. The existence of these two alternatives should in themselves be sufficient to make one suspicious. Mitchell's woman fits an earlier stereotype: women are silly, conceited with little desire or ability to engage in the public sphere. Chodorow's fits a more contemporary stereotype: women are nurturing, caring beings who bring specific feminine values to the social world. It begins to seem too neat. When I originally wrote this chapter I was quite impressed with Chodorow's approach and was trying to follow through some of its implications for men and masculinity. As I did so I was already beginning to doubt its usefulness from a sociological point of view. There was an ominous familiarity about the argument that I came to realize was due to its similarity with the arguments of Talcott Parsons in the 1950s and 1960s. I began to think we should separate personality structures from social structures if we were to avoid a completely deterministic argument.

The problem of men This chapter developed from my experience of trying to persuade students to think and talk about images of masculinity in our society. It seemed much easier to talk about women and femininity; men, it seemed, could only be approached through and in contrast to women. There is a poetic justice in this, following as it does a long period during which the opposite seemed to be true. There is also an intuition of reality: in our society, masculinity is organized as 'not feminine', or, more bluntly, 'not effeminate'. However, this is only a starting point and does not lead directly to any conception of what masculinity is in terms of personality structure and dynamics. My first aim, then, is to construct an 'ideal type' of the masculine character structure. For this purpose I will use psycho­ analytic theory and, in particular, the object-relations theory deployed in recent feminist work (Chodorow 1978; Eichenbaum and Orbach 1983). I will argue that these writers have made mistaken or misleading assumptions about masculinity. Implicit in the feminist work mentioned above, in a much wider range of feminist work and in much existing work on masculinity is an

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87

assumption that the social world is a man's world, not just in the sense that men predominate to a remarkable extent in positions of power and privilege, but also in the sense that the social world is organized and proceeds along masculine lines. It is assumed or argued that, somehow, men are comfortable in the world outside the home: it is made by them, for them, in their own image. I certainly shared this assumption and imagined it would be easy to move from the structure of masculinity to the structure of institutions. It is perhaps too easy to do this: it ignores, on the one hand, the complexity of individual character structures, the recognition and understanding of which seems to me a central achievement of psychoanalysis and, on the other, the vast amount of work on the social-structural basis of institu­ tional forms which has little to do with personality structure. I will try later to suggest the usefulness of an ideal type of methodology for looking at the relationship between personality structure and social structure which can allow variations in the personality/society relation­ ship, and look at the possibilities for investigation that this opens up. These aims, and my method, need some further justification. Why, for example, should I start with a commonsense conception of masculinity and its problems drawn from teaching and other discussions? One answer is that such a conception is found throughout the research literature and its pervasiveness provides a reason for taking it seriously, as referring to something really existing and needing explanation. Further, why should I use object-relations theory and an ideal-type methodology when much work in this area, particularly modem feminist work, employs structuralist and post-structuralist ideas and, following on the seminal work of Juliet Mitchell

(1976), a more orthodox Freudian

theory, usually mediated by Lacan and post-Lacanian analysts? The answer to the second question is more difficult. To begin with I have a number of theoretical objections to structuralist and post­ structuralist approaches, but this is not the place for epistemological or philosophical argument. My more substantive difficulties with these approaches come under the general heading of a loss of or inability to cope with complexity (or at least any complexity outside that of their own conceptual structure). To begin with, there is a tendency to see men in classical Freudian terms as being owners of penises. It is true that the penis is replaced by its symbolic representative, the phallus, but the latter remains a blunt instrument. As far as I can see, it is only trans­ latable into social terms as power and it comes to stand for a series of important psychic processes and relationships which remain unexplored. A similar process of over-generalization occurs in Lacan's conception of the mirror stage - the process by which the infant identifies and identifies with an imaginary conception of itself. Here a series of physical and psychic relationships to the parent is absorbed into one process of looking. Lacan's account should be compared with, for example, the work of Winnicott

(1962), Davis and Wallbridge (1983) and, more

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IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

recently, Wright

(1991). This sort of over-simplification seems involved in

any approach which starts with a theoretical definition of masculinity. I will suggest later that it is also involved in my approach but, I believe, in a much less damaging way. Having given up the option of starting from an elaborate theoretical framework, we are left with a reality which, from the available research, seems easily describable. There is not much debate about what qualities are masculine as far as our type of society is concerned. On the other hand, when this reality is probed, all sorts of complexities emerge. Weber's ideal type methodology presents itself as a way of coping with this combination of complexity and obviousness primarily because of its ability to combine rational reconstructions of the world with a recog­ nition of the world's real irrational complexity (Weber

1949).

Modem feminism has not just directed itself at male domination but also at the nature of masculinity and in tum this has led some men to question and attack traditional assumptions about male roles and

1976; Easlea 1981, 1983; Farrell 1975; 1982; Hoch 1979; Pleck 1981; Solomon and Levy 1982; Tolson 1977; and more recently Connell 1995; Corrigan et a1. 1985).

identities (David and Brannon Friedmann and Sarah

Changing patterns of family organization and consequent rising divorce rates might have led to a concern with the nature of fathering and fatherhood (Beale and McGuire

1982; McKee and O'Brien 1983) but there

is still very little sociological work on fathers and fathering. Masculinity rather than fathering has been at the centre of attention. However, it is striking that this work shares a conception of masculinity with work that predates modem feminism (Corrigan et a1.

1985). The difference lies in the

evaluation. Whereas masculine qualities were once seen as normal and good, they are now seen as politically and morally wrong, as perhaps in crisis, and as damaging for all concerned. The qualities of masculinity, however,

seem invariable

and

are

associated

with the

male

as

breadwinner, provider, worker, the active and public half of the species: a man is strong, aggressive, rational, independent, task oriented, invul­ nerable and successful (O'Neill

1982}. Such qualities are listed whether the

work is based on attitude surveys or whether it is theoretically derived, whether it is concerned with identifying a cultural stereotype, a sex or gender role or the male identity - a man's sense of himself. My main concern here is with masculinity as identity and it seems to me that there are conceptual difficulties in analysing identity as a list of qualities. Such a difficulty emerges in the contradictory perceptions of masculinity that we can find within our culture. While on the whole the list quoted above can be taken as a combination of culturally valued qualities, there is plenty of evidence that their possession can be experienced in a very different way:

The power of men is first a metaphysical assertion of self, an I am that exists a priori, bedrock, absolute, no embellishment or apology required, indifferent to

MASCULINITY AND MALE DOMINANCE

89

denial or challenge. It expresses intrinsic authority. It never ceases to exist. (Dworkin 1981: 13) And, from a man:

A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies . . . A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. (Berger 1972b: 46) Similar observations can be found throughout the literature of modem feminism. On the other hand, men are experienced in terms of the traditional (women's) maxim as 'all babies at heart', an image to be found in some advertising and pervading British TV soap operas. The contrast is summed up by two friends who independently and separ­ ately offered the observations that men are either 'bullies or babies' or 'louts or cripples'. The conceptual problem here is how can such an apparently straight­ forward and agreed list of qualities be experienced in such different ways. Perhaps they should be taken as indicating the predominance of one quality over its opposite, or as an ideal-ego which can be seen as a focal point for conflict which in tum can generate the action experienced as bullying or babyish. At any rate, they should be seen as elements of a process that needs to be conceptualized. This leads on to an explanatory problem: presumably these qualities are not contingent, nor contingently acquired. We need some understanding of the ways in which they are generated and organized. Available attempts at explanation, in terms of

1982) or a fear of femininity (O'Neill 1982) do little more than redescribe the qualities under one heading. It

male inexpressiveness (Balswick

also seems reasonable to suggest that such an explanation should be sufficiently flexible to account for different social conceptions of mascu­ linity, which cannot be regarded as fixed, even for modem, industrial western society, which sets the limits of my present discussion. There are, for example, perceivable differences in what is meant by masculinity in northern and southern Europe, in Britain and the USA, and in different social classes and different generations in British society. At the very least, these differences can be seen in terms of the predominance of some generally masculine traits over others, for example, strength and aggressiveness dominating in some working-class cultures and ration­ ality in some middle-class cultures. This too implies that a dynamic process is at work. There are two ways of approaching such an explanation, each of which might claim to be complete in itself, although I think neither is adequate alone. The first is external, in terms of role theory, role conflict and strain and a cognitively based socialization theory. The 'process' element would be provided by an understanding of the dynamics of social change. Chodorow

(1978) has provided an argument showing the (1985). My own

limitations of this approach, as have Corrigan et al.

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IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

opinion is that the external approach cannot do credit to the centrality of gender identity to a person's sense of self, or to the complexity of the internal conflicts that surround gender identity. Both these features are witnessed in modem feminist writing, literature, psychoanalytic theory and the experience of most of us. It cannot account for these features because gender identity and its acquisition is seen in exactly the same terms as any other aspect of identity: I learn to be a man in the same way that I learn to be a teacher. It seems to me quite obvious that something more powerful is at work. The second approach, the 'internal explanation', is what I am con­ cerned with here. In this respect the effectiveness of object-relations theory in providing an 'internal' account of femininity seems most promising for an understanding of masculinity.

Object-relations theory full account of the development and nature of object-relations theory would be out of place here, but it is appropriate to indicate some of the basic reasons why it is a promising approach. First, male and female gender identities are intimately bound up with forms of social organiza­ tion and object-relations theory, more clearly than orthodox Freudian theory, presupposes a basic sociality: that we cannot actually become selves without incorporating others into our psyche in a fundamental way. This recognition was already there in Freud, but was secondary to his theory of drives. For Winnicott (1962) on the other hand, the relationship is more important than the drive. His famous dictum that 'there is no such thing as a baby' means precisely that there is always a relationship between baby and carer which must take priority. The process of growth is dealt with on three levels: the infant's conscious and unconscious fantasies of others; the infant's environment, the way the parents care for and relate to the child; and the internalization of these relationships to become part of the growing ego, or to be split off and repressed, forming problem areas in adult life. Guntrip puts it succinctly:

A

The inner and outer worlds have a two-way causal and reciprocal influence. The kind of relationships parents set up with the child, complicated by the child's own reactions to the situation, are internalized in the growing psychic structure and will later on be compulsively externalized again and reimposed on situations in the outer social world, or else they will be spontaneously rediscovered in outer situations which correspond in some way to inner ones. (Guntrip 1961: 360)

The emphasis shifts from a concern with sexuality per se to the infant's development, from a complete psychic and physical dependence on others to what Winnicot calls a 'relative independence' (Davis and

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Wallbridge 1983). This provides us with an overarching concept of a common development which men and women undertake in different ways, one aspect of which is the development of sexuality and gender identity. The common goal is relative independence, the common dangers are those internal and external experiences which cause the baby, infant or child to fear for its psychic or physical survival. What I will do now is suggest an ideal type of human development which enables us to construct ideal types of male and female development in terms of different variations from the common path. I am using the term 'ideal type' in Max Weber's (1949) sense of a rational reconstruction of an aspect of a complex and not necessarily rational reality. This has the advantage of allowing us to maintain a view of masculinity and femin­ inity as different emphases on a common theme - in other words, to maintain the idea of bisexuality. The psychic development from complete dependence on the primary caretaker, in our society usually the mother, is bound up with, but not governed by, physical development and it is a process by which the infant gains a sense of its own separateness and boundaries. At the beginning, she/he is unable to distinguish itself in any clear way from its environment. There is only the elementary basis of a sense of self and the mother is required as an 'external ego' which, together with other relationships in the environment, the infant introjects as part of its own ego. For present purposes, there are four important aspects to this process. The first and most important feature for the satisfactory introjection of the external ego is that the infant gains a sense of being loved which becomes a 'self-love', a sense of one's own worth, that one is as worth looking after as well as one's mother had once looked after one. For Winnicott, 'good enough mothering' involves the intuitive ability to sense and meet the infant's needs, and this is experienced by the infant as a sense of omnipotence - it seems to the infant that its very need has produced its own satisfaction. As the infant develops physically and the mother, again usually intuitively, becomes less responsive, she/he is able to test this omnipotence against the world and gain a sense of external reality and the limitations of her/his power. It can do this in the comparative safety provided by the introjected mother. The second aspect is that, initially through the physical contact of holding, the infant gains a sense of her /his own boundaries, an ability to distinguish its own self from other people. It is this which enables and is encouraged by the mother's return to the outside world. Third, through the continuity of care, the infant gains a sense of its own continuity over time, of the permanence of its own self. As it introjects the external ego, it is able to bear the absence of what was once necessary for its existence - the physical presence of the mother. The fear of disintegration once aroused by the departure of the mother becomes manageable.

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Finally, 'good enough mothering' should enable the infant to express and cope with its aggression in an environment which remains stable. Whether the aggression is innate or a product of environmental frus­ tration, the infant learns that its destructive phantasies need not have a real external effect and that reparation is possible. In other words, it learns that its aggression is controllable and can be used constructively. My next step is to look at the development of femininity in this context.

The development of femininity (1978) in (1983) in a

Recent work employing object-relations theory, by Chodorow an academic sociological context and Eichenbaum and Orbach

more clinical context, has suggested that there are more or less system­ atic differences in the context in which boys and girls develop towards relative independence. The following very brief summary is intended to bring out the main features of the development of femininity. There seems to be a general agreement that for the little girl the process is inhibited, that in some significant sense the early identification with the mother is not overcome and in adult life the woman does not achieve a full sense of herself: 'A girl does not simply identify with her mother or want to be like her mother. Rather mother and daughter maintain elements of their primary relationship which means that they will feel alike in fundamental ways' (Chodorow

1978: 108). This con­

tinuing identification comes not only from the fact of shared sex. For Eichenbaum and Orbach, the mother finds herself confronted by a 'needy little girl' who is completely dependent upon her and who reflects back to her the needy little girl in herself, the part of herself that she has had to repress as she grew into a woman (in our type of society). She must both meet the new child's needs and teach her to repress them, as she has repressed her own. In terms of the development outlined earlier, the little girl does not outgrow her dependency 'naturally', through contact with the outside world and the exploration of her abilities; rather, she must split off and repress the dependent part of herself. She learns that rather than have her own needs met, she must meet the needs of others, especially of adult men and children. The core sense of self is inhibited, and as various roads to independence are not reached, or found to be socially blocked, so her sense of separateness is inhibited. She comes to feel herself to be responsible for looking after others but not as worthy of being looked after herself. Eichenbaum and Orbach discuss the tendency of their clients to fluctuate between feeling themselves identical with their mothers and cutting themselves

off altogether;

this is

parallel

to

the mother's

ambivalence in meeting her daughter's needs and teaching her to repress them.

Chodorow

talks

about

women's

comparatively

weak

ego

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boundaries, which allow her to empathize too readily with the needs of others. This seems to point towards a difficulty in maintaining a con­ tinuity in her sense of self, and it seems reasonable to suggest that the process involves the turning inwards of the little girl's aggressive feelings. She experiences her own needs, and perhaps even her sense of her own self, as a fault, as something wrong within her, for which she must punish herself.

The development of masculinity I will build up my ideal type of the development of masculinity through a critique of what Chodorow, Eichenbaum and Orbach have to say about men. With poetic justice on their side, they invert Freud's line of reasoning and tend to derive masculinity from femininity; in so doing each approach grasps something of masculine development and misses something. Chodorow tends towards emphasizing the 'bully' side of masculinity, Eichenbaum and Orbach the 'baby' side. The core of Chodorow's argument is that the little boy is pushed into an early psychic separation from the mother. Paradoxically, she seems to adopt a more orthodox concern with the oedipal stage where the little boy is concerned. She argues that the process of separation becomes bound up with issues of gender identity:

Phallic-masculine issues become intertwined with supposedly non-gender differentiated object-relational and ego-issues concerning the creation of a separate sense of self. This happens precisely because of exclusive mothering by women, who, in the absence ( physical or emotional) of the father in the outside world of work, may confuse her relationship to (her son) with a sexualized relationship to him as a male. (Chodorow 1978: 107-8) The boy's sense of self thus becomes bound up with his sexual identity, and masculinity is constructed against femininity in a separa­ tion generated and sexualized by the mother. During the oedipal stage this becomes a general separation as the boy takes on those elements of masculinity that he fears will otherwise be used against him, without actually identifying with the father as a whole person. This happens because the father is, by and large, absent from caretaking and the boy is left to identify with a cultural stereotype. Chodorow argues that mascu­ linity has to be the result of a more conscious teaching process than femininity. Since men cannot actually become the cultural stereotype, the stereotype becomes idealized, something to be striven after. In doing so, men develop strong ego boundaries and find it difficult to risk them­ selves in relationships. This seems to me to make some sense of the close relationship between cultural stereotype, gender role and identity and begins to account for

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the 'driven' or 'bullying' side of masculinity, the urgent need to be what one is not and to have that being recognized by others. In terms of the ideal type development, it means that men too are not allowed, in our society, to outgrow their dependency 'naturally' but - unlike women are forced into an early psychic separation and independence. However, it does not tell us much about the internal structure and processes of the male psyche. Chodorow talks about men having strong ego boundaries and less complex inner-object worlds. There is, as far as I know, no basis for the latter assertion. The complexity of the inner-object world depends upon the complexity of the introjected relationships and the family provides the basic material for introjection for both sexes. The early thrust into separation would seem to have consequences not so much for the complexity as for the organization of the male inner-object world. Further,

'strong ego boundaries'

is

a

misleading term.

I

suspect

Chodorow means well-defined and rigid, as opposed to ego-strength which usually in psychoanalytic discourse has to do with the ability to cope with strong and ambivalent feelings. We can go further by looking at the work of Eichenbaum and Orbach. There, the 'baby' side of masculinity is more clearly in evidence. Their men are physically and emotionally dependent on women, but they cannot recognize their dependency and they take their women for granted. They cannot recognize or understand their partner's complaints. Yet there is a contradiction in their analysis. They argue that the mother­ son relation facilitates separation, but that men remain dependent on women and deny that dependency through fear of their own femininity: 'Being like daddy becomes translated into a denial of the ways in which he is like mother, and a denial of the fact that she is already party of him' (Eichenbaum and Orbach

1983: 58).

Thus, like women, men have to deny and repress their dependency needs but with men it involves a denial of their original unity with the mother, and a rejection of all things feminine. Yet at the same time - and this is really the core of their argument about masculinity - they see men as not having to give up their dependency needs, since they are catered for first by the mother and then by the wife. On the one hand they regard this as resonant with 'healthy developmental theory', but on the other hand they see the male ego as fragile and unintegrated. I suspect the contradiction arises from the tendency to see masculinity as the opposite of femininity: women have to repress their dependency needs therefore men do not. At the same time they have to account for all the defences that men erect against the recognition of their depend­ ency needs. It seems to me reasonable to say that men and women both have to repress these needs but in different ways at different times. To account for the 'baby' side of masculinity, we can draw a distinction between emotional and physical dependency. For the little boy the early psychic separation must precede full physical separation - he remains physically dependent on his mother and it seems reasonable to suggest

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that unconsciously, if not consciously, the satisfaction of physical needs is taken as a substitute for, or a sign of, the satisfaction of emotional needs which, on an emotional level, remain unrecognized. There seems to be a repeated pattern in Eichenbaum and Orbach's examples: if physical needs are catered for, then men are satisfied and cannot under­ stand what their partners find lacking in the relationship. Men, like women, have to repress their dependency needs, but in the context of an early psychic separation which can lead to the identification of emotional care with physical care, thus enabling the experience of emotional dependency to be avoided.

Physical care is simply the

woman's job, the way things are. However, there is always the danger that the original experience and needs of dependency can be reawak­ ened, together with the other feelings that go with it and this takes us again to the baby-bully dichotomy. An experience of empathy, of closeness to another person, can reawaken the feelings of dependency and, even if this is not exactly the infantile fear of merging with another person, it can be experienced by the man himself, and others, as the threatened dependency. The failure of the other to meet these needs they cannot be met as the adult male has not been through the process of learning and growth which enables him to come to terms with them - all this can produce a narcissistic, envious rage which is aimed, mistakenly, to secure the satisfaction of his needs. The woman appears as powerful as the mother had once seemed and must be destroyed. The avoidance of these feelings encourages identification with the cultural stereotype; when avoidance is not possible the baby-bully dichotomy becomes obvious. The slow and painful break-up of a marriage reveals the fluctuation from one to the other, sometimes by the hour. During routine adult life, however, these feelings are repressed and defended against. The implication of my earlier discussion of femininity was that for women the central defence mechanism is introjection. Others' needs are introjected as their own and the satisfaction of others' needs is experienced as the satisfaction of their own needs: anger is turned inwards and used against the self. For men, the central mech­ anisms are, arguably, projection and denial. Dependency needs and the associated feelings of rage and destructiveness are experienced as

existing in, and are perhaps even elicited from, others. In particular, it is

women who are seen as dependent and the vital emotional dimension of a man's relationship to a woman is only half-recognized. Time and again, Eichenbaum and Orbach's men seem surprised by their partners' feelings, even when the relationship is on the verge of collapse. I suspect most people have some experience of the way in which men (usually other men!) may experience their partner as vindictively destructive and then act in a way which encourages such behaviour. Routinely, however, I suspect that the angry and destructive feelings are projected on to the cruel outside world, the competitiveness of colleagues, the heartlessness of institutions, the dangerous attacks of political opponents.

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I have tried to construct three ideal types of personality development. The first might be called a 'healthy' human development in terms of a steady and growing separation and independence and taking over of the external ego. The second, feminine, development is a distorted form of the first, involving a close experience of identity between mother and daughter continued into adult life, with repression of the little girl's dependency needs. The third, masculine, development is also a distorted form of the first, involving the premature pushing of the little boy into psychic separation and the repression of dependency needs. I have suggested that the typically feminine defence against dependency needs is based on introjection, the typically male defence on projection and denial. The advantage of this approach is that it makes sense of those qualities that are universally regarded as masculine, and of their centrality. The masculine personality structure is based on the avoidance of feelings that for the infant mean the possibility of psychic and possibly physical annihilation: dependency on others for one's very existence and the rage which threatens to destroy those very others and therefore oneself. Further, it sees these male qualities in terms of a dynamic process in which defences are erected against the experience of infantile rage and dependence, in the pursuit of an ego-ideal! cultural stereotype. Adult masculinity can, perhaps, be seen in terms of a cycle in which the defences enable periods of adjustment punctuated by exaggerated attempts to identify with the ideal (the bully) and the failure of such attempts (the baby).

Problems and possibilities

The status of the ideal type There are a number of objections to the ideal types I have tried to construct. They amount to the criticism that they are gross oversimpli­ fications and overgeneralizations. In one sense this is certainly true, but this is the sense which would apply to all ideal types, insofar as they are rational reconstructions of a complex and perhaps contradictory reality. Nevertheless, further consideration of the objection will enable me to clarify what I am trying to do. The form of the criticism that would come from the professional psychoanalyst would be that in clinical work what we discover is the complexity of the individual personality, involving various cross-sex and cross-gender identifications which undermine any attempt to draw out neat contrasts between masculinity and femininity (Elshtein

1984). This

argument is reinforced by clinically based attempts to look at femininity, as opposed to attempts which draw on clinical material but are based primarily Temperley

on feminist theory

a la Eichenbaum and Orbach. Jane

(1984), for example, constructs models of femininity on the

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basis of her clinical work which lead to much more politically difficult questions. Basically I think this argument is right, and it means looking at the area or level of reality to which the ideal type is appropriate. I would draw a distinction between the consulting room and everyday life and it is really the manifestation of masculinity in the latter with which I am concerned. There is no reason to doubt that the same 'surface' masculine behaviour may be underpinned by a variety of cross-identifications as numerous in their individuality as there are family backgrounds from which people emerge. While this individuality is important for the prac­ tising psychoanalyst, the common features of masculinity are important for the sociologist, and the existence of these common features is attested to by the persistent recurrence of the same qualities in studies of masculinity. There is an everyday version of the same criticism which I often find among male students who contribute to producing the traditional list of qualities and then protest that they are not 'really' like that, they are more complex, more 'feminine'. In this, they are often supported by women students. This points to a further modification of the status of the ideal type, one already implied in the idea of bisexuality and the internal conflict which surrounds masculine qualities. We might conceive of the ideal types of masculinity and femininity as the ends of a continuum with everybody placed at some point between the two ends, perhaps most people just one side or the other of some imaginary centre point. The end points of the continuum exist within the individual personality as well, as terms of a permanent conflict in which for most of us one tends to dominate most of the time, with confusion and perhaps collapse resulting if the dominant pattern should be broken, and the underlying cross-identifications emerge not in the consulting room but in everyday life. The appropriate image for the development of masculinity and femininity is not a common river source which forms into two clear streams but a three-lane motorway in which one type of traffic (the heavy goods vehicles perhaps) is channelled into the outside lane, another (family saloons) into the other, both types mingling in the middle as they jockey for position, some getting trapped in the 'wrong' lane. The metaphor seems appropriate for relations between men and women and between the masculine and feminine parts of the individual personality. However, it cannot be taken any further, unless you are willing to imagine each truck joined to each saloon and the drivers firing machine guns at each other.

Masculinity and male dominance The idea that there is a connection between gender personality and the wider social division of labour is a common one. Its expressions range from the everyday, commonsense crude misogynist 'women are only

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good for one thing' through the paternalistic 'women's place is in the home', to the conservative theoretical systems of Parsons and the radical implications of the work of Chodorow, Eichenbaum and Orbach. The interesting question is not whether there is a connection but what sort of connection. It is easy, perhaps too easy, to assume that the connection is causal. This seems to be the implication behind Chodorow's essentially political programme of involving men in child-rearing to a much greater extent. The result would presumably be that over a number of generations personality structure would change on both sides of the divide, and this would erode male dominance in the wider society. The difficulty is that an increased involvement of men in child-rearing would already pre­ suppose a change in the wider society - a general recognition of men's nurturing possibilities and, in some cases, a radical reorganization of career structures and conditions of employment. In other words, the change is unlikely to occur before its supposed effect. The temptation then is to reverse the causal process to something like Parsons' functional system. Society requires a division of labour between home and work and the family adjusts, with the division of labour between male and female producing the personality structures appro­ priate to their different spheres of influence. There are two objections to this approach. The first is historical: it seems that family forms were changing prior to industrialization rather than as a result and, in any case, industrial society deployed in a new way the patriarchal system that preceded it. The second is epistemological: the well-worn arguments that show, to my mind conclusively, that arguments entailing 'functional causality' are not tenable. It does not follow from the fact that society requires something, that that something will appear. An alternative way of looking at the relationship has emerged from some of the critical literature around Chodorow's thesis (cf. Ferguson

1984; Young 1984). This involves seeing the relationship as one of a network of possibly causal relations, not as the central or only one. If there is something about the male personality structure which leads to male dominance (or vice versa) then it is not the only cause of male dominance. This seems to me a step forward, away from seeing the relationship in oversimple terms. The problem with any causal explana­ tion linking the two levels is suggested by the following quotation from a survey of psychoanalytic work on organizations. Robert De Board, talking about projection, argues:

This defence offers no permanent solution since the person continues to carry the danger around with him and nothing is resolved. In terms of mental energy, projection involves transferring a cathexis involving a perception of the self to one involving a perception of an external object. To the extent that this happens, contact with reality is lost. The feeling of anxiety is temporarily reduced, which is the object of the exercise, but the consequence is that energy, both mental and physical, is used to attack a 'straw man'. The source of

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anxiety still remains within the mental system, although psychic and physical resources have been depleted in the process. In other words, work has been done involving action, feelings and emotions, but nothing has changed as a result. (De Board 1978: 133) Thus the use of what I have claimed is a 'typical' male defence is responsible for 'the most frequent ways in which individuals and groups lose their effectiveness'. It is reasonable to conclude that whatever relationship there is, it is not a causal one. I will return to psychoanalytic studies of organizations later. For the moment, I want to pursue the nature of the relationship - if it is not causal, what is it? An answer is given by my use of ideal types: it is perhaps best seen as an 'elective affinity'. The 'normal' structure and operation of institutions, as they have developed in modem capitalist society, makes use of and perhaps routinely (though not necessarily) confirms the routine structure and processes of the male personality. The basis for such a claim can be found in Weber's own ideal type of bureaucracy: the separation of the office holder from the office, the hierarchy of office holders, and the systematic nature of the rules governing the activity of the office holder, all enable the denial of emotional life in the workplace and the projection of feelings of dependency and anger on to other levels in the hierarchy and on to outside organizations. Certainly, the workplace becomes ostensibly free from many emotions. The 'technological conception' of human life and feelings reinforces this (Berger et al.

1974): personalities

and personal relations are seen in increasingly anonymous terms and as made up of interchangeable and compartmentalized qualities. The real messiness and the dangerous feelings of human life are pushed elsewhere. But this 'elective affinity' can break down. The really interesting ques­ tions are why and how and when, and how might the ideal type of masculine personality help us to understand organizational behaviour?

Psychoanalysis and organizations: the 'man's world' Psychoanalytic studies of organizational behaviour do not really fit in with the ideas I have tried to develop here. They tend to fall into two groups: those concerned with 'normal' situations and those concerned with areas where anxiety is particularly high, settings which involve dealing with illness and death. The latter (for example, especially Menzies-Lyth

1988; Miller and Gwynne 1972) show how the work

situation may become identified with phantasies and feelings belonging to early childhood, rather than act as a symbolic means of containing such feelings. This can result in the development of rigid and counter­ productive social defence systems. Menzies-Lyth is concerned with a teaching hospital in which women predominate, as might be expected from the earlier argument about the feminine ability to empathize. It could be argued that the anxieties she describes come precisely from a too ready ability to identify with the sick and dying and the necessity to

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defend against that ability. Her arguments do suggest a way of looking at the variable connection between masculinity and bureaucratic organizations: that routinely these offer a symbolic way of containing, by denying, the frightening feelings against which men defend them­ selves. When, for whatever reasons, these routine symbolic ways come under pressure, the defences are strengthened to the point when they become counter-productive for the organization as a whole - involving the depletion of resources with no effective change. The studies of normal situations (for example, Trist and Bamforth 1951; Trist 1953), presuppose an open-systems theory which would fit fairly neatly with Parsons' functionalism. As a consequence, they concentrate on defences which prohibit communications within and between work­ groups and generally ignore the structured divisions of interest within organizations and settings for distorted communications - settings which are taken up and used by subjective defence systems rather than created by them. In other words, they do not take account of the structural determinants of organizations as opposed to the human inter- and intra­ personal determinants. Organizations are seen simply as the products of the people who work in them. My argument is that these structural constraints on the nature of bureaucratic organizations actually require distorted communication and it so happens that because of child-rearing methods men are more easily able than women to distort their rela­ tionships in the required way. One sign of the dominant role of such structural determinants can be seen in the failure of the psychoana­ lytically based approach to work relationships, based at the Tavistock Institute after WorId War II, to bring about any lasting or widespread changes. The sort of sociological/psychoanalytic research which seems to me to follow from what I have argued and would be needed to establish the validity of my argument, would involve several levels. Goffman (1968) talks about an 'institutional self', certain ways of being required by an organization, and it is possible to produce a psychoanalytic version of this idea in terms of the feelings and defences employed by the organ­ ization in its routine activities. It might then be possible to suggest a classification of 'masculine' and 'feminine' organizations. For example, it seems to me that universities require from their academic staff the deployment of intellectual abilities, involving an empathy with students only at an intellectual level, and the deployment of competitive and aggressive feelings focused in part on their research and in part projected around a finely graded hierarchy, both within institutions, and outside, around the hierarchy of universities and polytechnics. They are 'mascu­ line'. Infant schools, on the other hand, require a more encompassing ability to empathize with children, colleagues and parents. They are ,feminine'. The next set of questions concerns the existence and fate of women in masculine institutions and men in feminine institutions. I doubt that

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these comprise solely those whose place on the masculine/feminine continuum is not consistent with their sex, so the question is what adjustments, strains and conflicts do they experience and are these consistent with what might be predicted from the ideal types I have outlined? Finally, it would be a matter of looking at situations where a typically masculine structure of defences is counter-productive - this state of affairs being identified through the perceived unhappiness of people and a decline in the organization's ability to achieve its goals. Can the unhappiness and ineffectiveness be accounted for in part by the devel­ opment of typically male defences into rigid systems? Is there evidence that the situation is at least unconsciously perceived as being the 'same' as the phantasized or really dangerous situations of infancy? Do women in these institutions develop different and more effective ways of coping with the situation?

Political possibilities The current increasing focus on masculinity is of course a political issue. It has to do with changing structured inequalities of power between men and women, and with changing people, extending the possible life chances of women in the world outside the home and of men in the world of interpersonal care and nurturing. The analysis I have suggested here indicates that these are actually two different tasks. Most modem, bureaucratic, technologically based organizations require 'masculine' behaviour, not because they are peopled by men but simply because that is the way in which they work. The elimination of structured gender inequality in these organizations will not change men: it might make them more anxious and, over a period, the reality of women's perform­ ance might make it more difficult to project on to them the qualities at the root of male anxiety. On the other hand, it will require that women accommodate to and learn some aspects of masculinity. It seems to me that this would have no necessary implications for the way men behave in the home, the nursery or the bedroom; it would, however, intensify the pressures on couples. Similarly, it is conceivable that men might engage more in child­ rearing, using the 'feminine' side of their personality. I have already indicated that if this were to take place in a systematic way, it would entail considerable changes in career structures and necessarily lead to any greater structural equality between the sexes. However, it is still conceivable that in such a situation, women would still largely be con­ fined to the 'feminine' occupations and the reserve army of labour. Interpersonal relationships between the sexes might change in desirable ways without any wider effects. Although the two tasks are inter­ connected, they are not mutually dependent upon each other.

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The concern of this chapter has been with personality structure and dynamics: what sorts of changes does it enable us to envisage? First, it seems to me to offer no vision of androgyny, an idea often suggested in the more radical literature on masculinity. Psychoanalytic theory suggests that there can be compromises but no final resolution of many internal conflicts, and those between dependence and indepen­ dence, identity and separation are basic to our make-up as human beings. The conflict between masculinity and femininity is likely to remain a fundamental internal conflict for everybody, whatever happens in the outside world. They will not come together into some gentle meld. Insofar as it is possible to use my arguments to construct an ideal, it would be a situation in which people are no longer placed on one or the other side of the masculine-feminine continuum according to their sex, and one in which the internal combination of what Freud called the active and passive drives could vary considerably more than it does according to individual history, circumstances and inclination. This would enable a range of relationships between men and women varying from those following a very traditional pattern to those inverting the traditional pattern. Equality in this context would be the equality of opportunity to be masculine or feminine in different situations at differ­ ent times, and some ability to choose those situations and times. I am not sure that my argument actually points to any new ways of achieving this situation as far as men are concerned. Generally, a well­ established system of defences will break down and require reorganiza­ tion only when it makes it impossible for a person to operate in routine ways with normal unhappiness. Men are unlikely to change spon­ taneously. The change might be stimulated by structural changes perhaps for a few men long-term unemployment might have such an effect - or more likely by individual and collective challenges by women influenced by or part of the feminist movement. But psychoanalytic theory suggests that the first reaction of men to such a challenge is for the defence system to reassert itself all the more strongly. My argument does suggest that the process of change will involve a degree of agony. But for many men, this will not be news.

Ten years after This chapter was originally written in 1985 when I was in the second year of my training as a group psychoanalytic therapist and I was very enthusiastic about the power of some of these ideas. After more than a decade of my own practice I have come to see the force of the psycho­ analytic criticisms that I tried to deal with in the chapter. On a technical level Elshtein's (1984) comments about cross-identifications point to the complexity of contradictions that can be found in any one individual character, and I have been unable to observe any consistent gender or

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sexual differences in the use of defensive projection or introjection. The ideal that I suggested already exists on a psychological leveL What I have observed is the immense variety of individual reactions depending on varying situations: women can behave in 'masculine' or 'feminine' ways, as can men, and they do so in different situations. The 'gender' of their behaviour is rarely predictable. This is certainly the case with patient psychotherapy groups and I do not think that sociologists can avoid this by claiming that therapy patients or therapeutic situations are in some way special - the same observations can be made in any reasonably open social group if we are not too blinkered by our sociology. To excuse myself I should add that it is understandable that people can be blinkered by sociology, especially if they are sociologists. The association of certain qualities with masculinity pervades all the research and arguments that I have been able to discover; it looks as close to social fact as we are likely to find and it seems to strike a chord in most settings. I think in the argument I constructed around these ideas, my mistake was, so to speak, to confuse a stereotype or an ideology with an ideal type.

I would continue to argue that we need carefully to distin­ I have no doubt that what ten years ago I called

guish levels of analysis.

ideal types and I would now call ideologies actually exist and in some situations will be a powerful influence over people's behaviour and the way they see the world. Stereotypes exist primarily at a level of cultural analysis. The best explanation I have seen of their existence is that put forward by Gayle Rubin

(1975), based on Freud's conception of the infant as bisexual, if not

polymorphously perverse. This presents any society with a serious practical problem: how can the members of that society ensure that enough people are sufficiently heterosexual to guarantee the reproduc­ tion of that SOciety. This entails in tum ensuring that there is, or people believe that there is, a difference between men and women. Rubin argues that the difference is not a natural one:

fact, from the standpoint of nature, men and women are closer to each other than to anything else - for instance, mountains, kangaroos or coconut palms. The idea that men and women are more different from one another than either is from anything else must come from somewhere other than nature. Furthermore, though there is an average difference between males and females in a variety of traits, the range of variation of those traits shows considerable overlap. There will always be some women who are taller than some men, even though men are on average taller than women. But the idea that men and women are mutually exclusive categories must arise out of something other than a non­ existent 'natural' opposition. Far from being an expression of natural differ­ ences, exclusive gender identity is the expression of natural similarities. It requires repression: in men in whatever is the local version of 'feminine' traits; in women, of the local definition of masculine traits. (Rubin 1975: 179-80) In

I would take this further than Rubin and suggest that different situations seem to require not the repression but something more like the

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suppression of traits that are socially attributed to the other gender. Rubin's argument explains the existence of stereotypes, and our need to think that men and women are different from each other, in such a way that the need might govern our perception, and we do not see the remarkably similar interpersonal strategies that men and women pursue. Each individual will be aware of and use the stereotype in different ways and to a different extent at different times and in different situations. And each person will have a different internal relationship to the stereo­ typical part of their personality: it may be experienced as an internal enemy, an intrusion opposed from outside, an ideal to be aimed at, a tool to be used to one's advantage in certain situations, something against which one tries to identify one's own personality and behaviour. Or it could be all of these things at different times. We shall see in the next chapter that this becomes very important when sociology turns its attentions to the emotions.

8

THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS

In Kemper's (1990) introduction to a collection of papers on the sociology of the emotions presented to the 1987 conference of the American Socio­ logical Association, he laments the long-term cognitive bias in sociology and sees this as coming to an end with development of the sociology of the emotions. He rightly dates this development from the publication of Hochschild's work in 1975 and comments on the way in which interest in the emotions seemed to emerge in that year among several thinkers in different places. He speculates that the origin of this develop­ ment might lie in the 1960s Zeitgeist and in a limited sense I think that he might be right. My concerns in this book with experience, pre-reflective experience and issues raised by psychoanalysis perhaps have the same origin, but there is more to it than that.

A sociology of the sociology of the emotions My purpose here is to try to sound a number of warnings in relation to the sociology of the emotions, not least that a sociological interest in emotions can still subordinate them to cognition. On the one hand the development of the sociology of the emotions is to be welcomed: it is an area of intrinsic interest and increasing importance. The development of various forms of counselling and therapy, the ideas of talking through and talking out which seem to keep so many soap operas going, together with ideas of personal satisfaction, happiness and the process of personal reconstruction, which Giddens (1990, 1991, 1992) has identified in his recent work, all of these things are directly or indirectly about feeling. On the other hand we need to be careful. It is easy for sociologists to get caught up in changes in popular culture in a possibly unquestioning way, for the discipline to become a symptom of what it claims to be studying. This is particularly the case when the study of the emotions seems to be self-evidently a 'good thing', tied up with the development of

a

kminitjt tjociulo15Y and carryin15

us

directly into the v.ray that people

experience the world in their everyday lives. To start with I think we

need a sociology of the sociology of the emotions, a reflexive sociology in

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IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

Gouldner's (1970) rather than Giddens' (1991) sense, a sociology that can take a critical sociological attitude to itself. In the case of the sociology of the emotions this needs to work on two levels - the level of contemporary western society as a whole and that of the discipline itself. There are a number of attempts to locate emotions in the overall evolution of human beings and human societies (Elias 1991; Turner 1996) and with the workings of social structure (Collins 1 975; Gordon 1990; Hammond 1990) all of which are interesting and useful enterprises. But I am not sure that any of them provides a critical purchase that would be useful. Hochschild (1983, 1994) begins to get there with her theme of commercialization and Wouters (1991), developing ideas from Elias, gets closer. Wouters suggests that it is becoming increasingly difficult to express status superiority in an acceptable way, at least in western society. It would be generally unacceptable for me to claim superiority on the basis of the colour of my skin or my strength; the first claim might be accepted by bigots and the second is patently false. To claim superiority on grounds of my sex or gender would, one hopes, produce a well-deserved lynch mob. Money or aristocratic descent might hold water in limited circles; to claim superiority on grounds of intelligence would, in liberal academic circles, be bad taste. However, I can talk about my emotions I can show myself to be a sensitive, caring person. Now why should all this be happening now? We can get some idea from Lasch (1980) when he talks about the development of a narcissistic culture. The narcissist is always seeking immediate emotional gratifica­ tion and lacks a degree of internal control. In psychoanalytic terms the super-ego and ego are underdeveloped. Lasch puts this down in part to the increasing role of the state in child-rearing. The standard psycho­ analytic maxim in this area is the stronger the state, the weaker the super-ego. Social control comes not from a more or less rational super­ ego and ego making comparatively free and relatively independent moral decisions but from a strong external source. This in tum is related to the modem history of the family. It is a truism to say that it has become an increasingly specialized institution since the industrial revolution, concentrating on early socialization, and I would add that this social function creates the family relationships that Freud analyses. For Freud, the control function of the psyche - the super-ego develops primarily through the father and primarily through the father's prohibition during the oedipal period. The father says no to the child's desire for the mother and comes between the two, turning the child around to face the outside world. At the same time as the early socialization role of the family has become more important, so the father has been moved from centre stage. It is now common to find contemporary journalists claiming that men have no clear role and what this means is that there is no clear paternal role - in fact the very word 'paternal' and its derivatives 'paternalist' or

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107

'paternalism' have become terms of criticism if not of abuse. The notion of accepted authority, the possibility that power may be used for the benefit of the person over whom it is exercised, seems to have weakened and faces a notion of power and its exercise as somehow always being wrong or bad. In Britain and North America we can find multiple conflicts between these positions where each tends to be forced into stereotypically extreme versions. The point for my argument here, however, is that the force of internal control has been weakened, leaving, as Lasch (1980) points out, the irrational punitive super-ego as described by Klein greater range within the individual psyche. That enters into conflict with the desires for immediate physical, emotional and mental satisfaction which are rooted in the instinctual aspects of psyche. Demands for emotional satisfaction appear in all sorts of areas - the punishment of criminals to satisfy victims, the drawing of boundaries and exclusion of others (or should it be Others?) to retain a satisfying sense of identity, the demands for control over one's own life, illusions of self-construction, difficulties in tolerating the possi­ bility that things might go wrong and so on. This occurs as the institutions which engage individuals in the public arena and enable the development of a realistic sense of possibilities, not just the family but local communities, trades unions, professional associations, 'civil society' itself, have all been weakened by the thrust of the free market. On the one hand the process of 'globalization' seems to produce a distant, powerful system which cannot be controlled; on the other the individual seems increasingly isolated and experiences his or her social world as fragmenting. I have suggested elsewhere (Craib 1994) that all this comes together to produce what might be called a paradoxical ideology. As individuals become increasingly powerless, we develop an ideology of self-control and self-creation, as if we really could control ourselves and our lives. Giddens seems to swallow this whole and this is where sociology gets caught up in a social process it does not properly understand. There are more moderate forms of this phenomenon in the implicit valuation of ways of dealing with emotions, and of certain emotions over others which emerge in papers I will discuss below. I think that the root problem with Giddens' work and with the work I will discuss later is that they do not present any conception of emotions, or of the psyche, as something which has a degree of autonomy from the social and from society itself. Emotions 'happen' in a social context and as an important part of microsocial processes, but they are not 'produced' by society. I will suggest shortly that they are best seen as having a life of their own which is framed and deployed by the social. The situation which I have described earlier is one where psychotherapy (or rather some forms of psychotherapy) takes on importance as a means of social control, either to inhibit emotions (behaviourism and cognitive therapy) or to manage emotions (humanistic and some forms of psychoanalytic therapy).

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This creates a situation where sociology is especially likely to be duped into believing that emotions are simply socially constructed (Harre 1986) and leads on, at the disciplinary level, to the sociology of the emotions. I have suggested elsewhere (Craib 1997b) that social constructionism is not very convincing. It is embraced so readily because it avoids difficult issues about the object of sociology and its relationship to other discip­ lines and enables us to persuade ourselves that we can talk about any subject without considering our limitations. I do not want to rehearse those arguments here but simply suggest that there is little tradition among sociologists of searching through other approaches to their sub­ ject matter and the temptation is to believe that sociological dimensions of understanding deal with everything. This gives sociology an imperial­ ist dimension which Strong (1979) describes clearly in relation to the sociology of medicine. I want now to present a critique of two papers that appeared together in Sociology which display the inadequacies of this tendency towards sociological imperialism and the lack of any real understanding of what emotions might be. The background to this critique is of course psycho­ analytic psychology but I will try to make my points where possible simply by pointing to what I suspect are normal everyday experiences.

The limits of the sociology of the emotions The papers I am going to criticize here (Duncombe and Marsden 1993; Jackson 1993) threaten to blur a range of conceptual distinctions and they seem to rule out of court knowledge from outside sociology. This threatens to restrict rather than extend our understanding of emotional life by reducing it to its sociological aspects, either by seeing the emo­ tions only as a social construction - the tendency in Jackson's case - or by adopting the dominant ideology of emotions current at a particular time, which is what I think happens in the case of Duncombe and Marsden.

The constructionist view Sociology certainly has something to say about the emotions, but Jackson aims to show that sociology has everything to say. She sets up a straw target - that sociology has nothing to say - and seems to think that we are faced with a choice of saying everything or nothing. Thus she writes: 'Love cannot be treated as if it has an existence independent of the social and cultural context within which it is experienced. The idea that emo­ tions are somehow pre-social and therefore outside the sociologist's field of vision, is beginning to be challenged' (Jackson 1993: 203). Now I am not sure that anybody has argued that sociologists should not look at emotions because their origins are pre-social (no references

THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS

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are given at this point) but if they did, it would be a very silly argument. The planet Earth was here well before any human society and if a pre­ social origin means that we cannot study the way in which a phenom­ enon has been absorbed into social life, then sociologists could say nothing about environmental issues. Since human beings are emotional beings, sociology clearly has something to say about emotions - but so does biology, psychology, social psychology and other disciplines. However, Jackson is not interested in identifying what sociologists might contribute to a study of the emotions. Against her straw target she goes on to cite work about the social management of the emotions, the cultural specificity of emotions, and the social and linguistic precondi­ tions for experiencing and/or expressing emotions. All of this is fair enough and such work contributes useful insights; but it does not entail the notion that emotions are socially constructed, only that they have social implications, or are socially conditioned, or that they are part of social life. In the next paragraph, Jackson makes a leap to a particular variant of social constructionism elaborated a few pages later in a quotation from Alison Jagger: We have no access either to our own emotions or to those of others, inde­ pendent or unmediated by the discourse of our culture. (Jagger 1989: 148)

which Jackson then goes on to gloss as follows: There is thus no way of exploring love except through the ways in which it is talked and written about. (Jackson 1993: 207)

Now this is true, so true that it is a truism: we cannot talk about anything without language. It does not follow, as Jackson wishes to think, that language or culture constitutes what it talks about. I cannot talk about my liver without language, but it does not make any sense to say that my liver is constructed by language or culture. It is worth pursuing this: different societies might have different conceptions of the liver and its function and one might surmise that modem medical science has a very sophisticated conception of the liver - much more sophisticated, for example, than classical Greek society. However, it does not follow that my liver is more sophisticated than was Plato's liver. Nor does it follow that people who live in cultures that have no conception of internal organs are people without livers (or hearts, or kidneys, or whatever). Now it seems to me that we should at least entertain the idea that there is a range of emotions common to all humans, perhaps rooted in our biological make-up, but that the available register of emotions, forms of emotional experiencing and expression, as well as the wider meanings of emotions, vary culturally and historically. I suspect that Jackson would call this essentialism, but I do not consider it any more essentialist than saying that nearly all human beings have had two arms, but what

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they do with those arms varies culturally and historically. Nor, inci­ dentally, am I sure what would be wrong with such a position even if it were essentialist, but that is another argument. There is, I think, a prima facie case for my view. We can read Homer's

Odyssey

and make some

sense of Ulysses' terror in the face of (or rather between) Scylla and Charybdis, just as we can make some sense of Penelope's feelings for him and his for her, and the feelings of both for their son Telemachus (Knox

1993). We can find the power of the love poetry of The Song of

Solomon;

we can understand something of what is going on between

Benedict and Beatrice; and the love stories of

Middlemarch

and

Jane Eyre

also seem familiar, as do the stories of James Baldwin and Edmund White. In other words we can find ourselves emotionally in the stories of different cultures and different times - even if our understanding is not perfect, even if sometimes it might be a misunderstanding. This is an ongoing struggle of understanding which Alexis (in Jackson's story of Alexis and Lucy, p.

215) is just beginning. The necessary precondition for

such understanding, which certainly exists however groping it might be at times, is a world of shared human emotions, the experience and expression of which changes historically. If this were not the case, then such texts would be alien beyond our understanding. In my clinical practice, ideas such as Jackson's are frequently employed in a defensive fashion, as a way of defusing what is, in reality, a very powerful emotion. Phrases such as, 'Well, our society tells us to feel such­ and-such' are attempts to bring relief from what is often, in effect, experienced as torture: sexual jealousy, the agonies of loss, the pain of

betrayal. Of course, such statements do not alleviate the suffering, any more than a sociological analysis of the discourses of love will stop people falling in love. Jackson seems to find it a problem that cognition does not govern feeling, and her argument implies that it should. However, it seems at least as plausible to suggest that a change in feeling will lead to a change in cognition, and even more reasonable to suggest that it is a two-way process. The social constructionist conception of emotions proffered by Jackson gives priority to cognition. However, if we think of emotions as having a life of their own, which might be in contradiction to, or expressed fully or partially through our cognition to different degrees at different times, we can think through all sorts of situations with which most people must be familiar: experiencing feelings we cannot express to our satisfaction; having feelings that we can express but that others find difficult to understand; and, most important perhaps, the regular experiencing of contradictions between our thoughts and our feelings. The paradox of Jackson's argument and the danger of the sociology of the emotions is that emotions will be reduced to ideas: they will have no autonomy from the rational world with which they co-exist. The other problem that I find with Jackson's approach is that we are likely to be left without any problem - apart from the endless description

THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS

111

o f cultural discourse which eventually takes us to a description o f every­ thing. Descriptions do not solve problems such as why people who believe that falling in love is an ideology manage themselves to fall in love. The description of a discourse also hides problems. Jackson points out ( p.207) that our culture separates falling in love from matemal love for the child, which by and large it does. However, in psychoanalytic literature (for example, Clulow and Mattinson 1989; Klein and Riviere 1937) there is a strong argument that the two experiences are closely connected. I would further suggest that the reason that our culture tends to suppress that link is that if falling in love does involve regressing to primitive infantile feelings, it could mean that the strong feelings that exist between real parents and infants have a dangerous sexual com­ ponent. I am not sure that Jackson's approach allows us to think through, or even about, such possibilities. When I was interviewed as a potential sociology undergraduate I was told very firmly that sociology was not about people, it was about societies. It is possible to understand societies with very little knowledge of people and it is possible to study the social rules around emotional experience and emotional expression with little or no knowledge of the emotional life of the people who have to work within these rules - and then to mistake the social scaffolding of emotions for emotional life itself. Jackson assumes that discourse describes real emotions; Duncombe and Marsden seem to me to mistake a well-established stereotype for reality.

The dangers of empirical research What strikes me most about the Duncombe and Marsden (1993) paper is that it reproduces a stereotype of the emotional life of men and women that predates my birth and probably that of most other living people, yet it is still going strong: women are responsible for emotional work in relationships, are more aware of relationships and emotional connected­ ness and so on. Men cannot deal with emotions. There is no doubt that such stereotypes exist and perhaps at some levels of analysis they have an explanatory value. If there is a stereotype, then there will be human beings who will in some, most or even all situations behave in a stereotypical way; my own interest would be in the situational logics that make it more likely that the stereotype behaviour is adopted. I think the stereotypes would be most useful on a fairly abstract or general level where the story of what really goes on in people's emotional lives is comparatively unimportant. In the previous chapter I tried to set out an account of the development of such stereotypes. They are socially necessary but not necessarily individually effective. Men and women do not always behave in stereotypically masculine and feminine ways simply because they are men and women - any more than the fact that I am a university lecturer, perhaps even a

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stereotypical one, means that I am always and only a university lecturer, behaving as a university lecturer is supposed to behave. One does not have to be a postmodernist to recognize that most of us inhabit multiple roles involving different sorts of behaviour and a constant process of negotiation. The self that fulfils these roles and negotiates between them is not a simple entity. When I first started work as a group psychotherapist, I expected to find a difference between men and women along the lines discussed by Duncombe and Marsden; the version which I then held was Nancy Chodorow's (1978). It was with some surprise that I realized after two or three years that neither the colleagues with whom I trained nor my patients fitted these stereotypes. Sometimes they did behave in the stereotypical way, but the men who could be stereotypically masculine could also talk with sensitivity and insight about their own feelings, engage in comforting and supporting others and take part in all the routine emotional interchanges of the group's life. Women who could be stereotypically female could also be hurtful, emotionally obtuse and abusive, defensive and blind and unable to engage in nurturing. To coin a phrase, it all depended. Sociologists are likely to overlook these complexities, not least because they are using sociological concepts which mask them. Jackson's discourse analysis is about the highest level of abstraction one can reach. Other sociological concepts such as work, power or equality might be extremely useful for talking about the economy, or political and social structures, but it still has to be established that they are appropriate for

talking about emotional life - any more appropriate than the concepts such as denial, introjection, projection, rationalization, etc. would be appropriate for talking about social, economic and political structures. Approaching the sociological dimensions of emotional life wearing my psychodynamic hat, I would want to offer a set of rough and ready conceptions of emotional dynamics which should be borne in mind when thinking about the discourses of emotions, the stereotyping and the ideologies of emotional life, and which act as theoretical and methodo­ logical warnings: the sociological aspects of emotional life should not be mistaken for the whole of emotional life. To begin with what seems evident about emotions in terms of their own - as opposed to social dynamics is that they are necessarily contradictory. In the same way that we have to think of adult life in terms of relative independence or dependence, so our emotional needs are both for intimacy and for separation, a contradiction which can at times absorb all our energies (Bowlby 1971, 1975, 1981, 1988; Winnicott 1958, 1962, 1964). Related to this is the proximity and mutual entailment of helplessness and destructive rage, love and hatred, a profound ambivalence that haunts all aspects of human being (Hinshelwood 1991; Klein 1975b). Some feelings, some desires and some ways of handling feelings will be - for one reason or another - dangerous, damaging or socially disapproved of.

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It is this last aspect of emotional life that concerns sociology. A number of points follow. Individuals, people - men and women - are by definition engaged in at least two interlocking forms of emotional work: the 'internal' work of coping with contradiction, conflict and ambivalence and the 'external' work of reconciling what goes on inside with what one is 'supposed' or 'allowed' to feel. There are of course as many ways of dealing with all this as there are individuals, and some will conform more with the social stereotypes with which they are presented and others less, but it is important to realize that whatever stereotype an individual might appear to meet - whether the unemotional, frigid male or the warm caring female - he or she will be engaged in intense emotional work. We are not talking about society allocating emotional labour to women; rather men and women might engage in different forms of emotional labour or might be assigned different ways of displaying their emotional labour. In this context apparently 'unemotional' behaviour is very emotional. The only truly unemotional behaviour I know of is being dead, and it would be difficult to describe that as behaviour. I might, in ethnomethodolo­ gical terms, 'do dying' but I will not 'do death'. The next point is that of course there is no simple relation between the experience and the expression of emotion, and it becomes even more complex when one moves on to talking about one's emotions rather than expressing them. Indeed, talking about emotions, part of the emotional labour that is supposedly assigned to women, can often be a very effective way of avoiding the experience of emotions, and/or of hiding emotions that are experienced from oneself and / or of hiding them from others. On the other hand, actions including the action of not talking, can be very effective expressions of emotion. Third, relationships - whether dyads or larger groups - are always more complex than the individuals who make them up. People can divide emotions between themselves in varying ways. Couples can swap feelings that the respective partners find difficult, one saying, in affect but not in words, for example, 'I'll have the anger if you'll have the vulnerability'. If partners divide the feelings up in such a way, one can then say, 'I'm angry because you're vulnerable', to which the other can respond, 'Your anger makes me vulnerable', and each can avoid having the feeling that frightens them most. In any case this trading and circu­ lation of emotion is an extraordinarily subtle process and couples tend to produce an often precarious and extremely important balance - a sort of emotional equilibrium in the partnership. In this context the standard stereotypical behaviour of men and women can be a means of fighting a battle - 'You never talk to me', 'You're always on at me' - which is actually a defence of the relationship. The unspoken communication would be something like, 'As long as you don't love me properly, I can stay in the relationship and fight to make you love me properly. If I didn't have that fight on my hands, I wouldn't know what to do.' This

1 14

IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

produces a situation of mutual 'bleating': a moaning about each other that allows the situation to remain the same. The relationship really comes under threat if one partner begins to behave in the way that the other wishes - if the bargain is broken. It sounds to me as if some of the couples to whom Duncombe and Marsden talked were caught up in such relationships. Overall, behind Duncombe and Marsden's comments and analyses there seems to be an 'ideal' of a relationship which they find does not match reality. The stereotypes they are dealing with have been around for a long time, but over recent decades - at least among the sociology writing classes, but I think on a wider basis as well - the value rating of each side has changed. Whereas the culturally valued qualities were once associated with the masculine, they are now associated with the feminine. Talking about feelings has changed from an irrelevant feminine pastime to a sign of social status. It is easy to be taken in by this change, and I do think it is a change for the good, but I do not consider that it brings us any closer to the truth about the way individuals experience emotions, in or out of relation­ ships. It seems to involve identifying emotion with what we normally associate with the female: caring, nurturing, vulnerability, commitment, etc. There is next to no mention of emotions such as envy, hatred, rage, jealousy, sadness, desperation or of the ability to transcend emotion, all of which have to be dealt with within a relationship. Behind Duncombe and Marsden I think there is also an assumption of features of what Giddens (1991) calls the 'pure relationship', the relationship that can only be justified on the basis of the satisfactions that it produces, its own intrinsic qualities. Such a notion haunts the remarks of the respondents quoted in the paper and the authors' own comments. I argue elsewhere (Craib 1994) that such a view of relationships is best understood as an ideology of late modernity and that in fact human beings are beings for whom such relationships are not possible. A relationship will bring emotional satisfactions and dissatisfactions in more or less equal meas­ ure. What is interesting on a sociological level is why such ideals should develop; on a psychological level, what is interesting is the way in which individuals cope with the reality. But if we see emotional life only from the sociological point of view we run the danger of getting caught up in the ideology. There is clearly a methodological problem in all this: how do socio­ logists talk to people about their feelings in a way that can perhaps take them to the reality beneath the ideology. My experience in therapeutic contexts is that men and women tend to resort to the social stereotypes of each other when feeling under threat and when mutual hatred is closest to the surface. My experience is that people need at least a year before they can find a level of confidence that enables them to talk about their feelings in a comparatively uninhibited way. Beyond this it is easy to make mistakes about feelings; a psychotherapeutic training lasts a

THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS

115

minimum of three years, often twice that time or longer. One of the few things we end up certain of is the extraordinary difficulty in distin­ guishing between one's own emotions and those of others and how readily people tell you what you want to hear. This is especially apparent in group therapy where the demand is constantly for the group leader to tell members what to feel and where there is always evidence that what the therapist wants is picked up and returned by the group, but it is also clear in individual therapy. All of this is documented in the literature on transference and counter-transference (see esp. Casement 1985, 1990). Now it would be unreasonable to expect sociologists to train as psychotherapists or even to spend a year or more getting to know their respondents and to identify when they are simply getting people to say what they (the investigators) want them to say. What is important is that they be aware of the depth of what they are studying and the comparatively abstract level at which they are studying it. One of the more interesting implications of my argument here emerges when we try to think about the relationship between emotion and identity. If we follow the logic of the Duncombe and Marsden position, we get the impression that emotions are neatly lined up behind gender identities - perhaps this is a good definition of a gender stereotype. The implication of what I have been saying about emotions is that they are always in a contradictory flux. In this sense they will always work to disrupt identities and there will be an internal battle to maintain an identity against a disruptive emotion. There are any number of different ways in which that battle may be fought and it can be either won or lost. I would suggest that a victory in such a battle is not a good thing, but in any case, people's replies to sociologists' questions are likely as much to be indices of these internal conflicts and/ or defences against their discovery as they are to honest, considered answers. Perhaps, in fact, they could not be anything else.

9

SOCIOLOGICAL LITERATURE AND LITERARY SOCIOLOGY: SOME NOTES ON JOHN BERGER'S G

If social theory on the grand level does not allow for the comprehension of experience and as a result finds itself undermined and if micro­ sociological theory also pushes experience into frames which hide significant dimensions, then how is sociology to approach experience? One course might be through looking at the way in which sociology uses language and this may be achieved by comparing it with a literary use of language - especially when literary language is being used to describe material that might very well be looked at by a sociologist. Starting with the assumption that the 'object' of both literature and sociology is to some extent the same, that is, the description and/ or understanding of human activities, and given the perhaps rather less obvious assumption that an incomplete description is inadequate both as a description and as an attempt to understand, it seems reasonable to suggest that the relationship between literature and sociology needs to be investigated on a different level to that established by the sociology of literature or by the straightforward use of literature as a source for sociology. It will be argued here that there is a fundamental complementarity between sociology and literature, but one that is by no means simple; they cannot just be added to each other. The point of connection and the differences between them lie principally in the way in which they use words to 'contain' meaning and this in tum depends upon the appar­ ently dual, but basically unitary nature of what both attempt to describe. Using John Berger's

G

-

a Booker Prize winner from

1972 - as an

example of a novel which is intimately concerned with the problems that occupy many sociologists and social theorists and in some ways handles those problems more adequately than do the social sciences, I will attempt to examine the relationship between sociology and literature and thus the nature of their complementarity. To begin with, we may look at

G

as a description of a number of

individuals who belong to certain social classes, and of a society which is comprised of the relationships between those individuals and classes.

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Berger shows us in particular an ascendant industrial bourgeoisie and a declining aristocracy; it is the former who are dominant in the novel as in the world. The latter appear as bemused and degenerate - like Jocelyn and Beatrice, incestuously impotent in the face of the outside world. Other classes, or rather the individuals belonging to them, appear as pawns, either acquiescing in (Leonie) or furiously battling against (Bojan, Nusa) a destiny constructed for them and which they are incapable of changing. It is not, however, the dominant class that has constructed their destiny. Berger's bourgeoisie are not exceptionally brilliant or exception­ ally powerful men: they are concerned with making money in their chosen way, with maintaining their status in the circles within which they move, with preventing the too obvious adultery of their wives, with producing offspring to inherit their wealth, and with getting a minimum of excitement out of their lives without endangering their position. In all this, they are portrayed as good-naturedly stupid (Umberto), plainly ridiculous (M. Hennequin), or plainly hypocritical (von Hartmann significantly a diplomat and perhaps the most immediately powerful). But we are left in no doubt that they are the dominant class: G's whole existence is engaged in a running battle with them. They dominate, however, not by their decisions - they do not wield power; they adjust to, rather than control, events. They dominate rather by their presence, their way of life and their morality, the houses they live in. Over and above them, dominating everybody, is an impersonal History, pro­ gressing along an apparently determined course, aided by human blunders, joining together, creating and destroying the contingent lives of the characters, intervening in everything that happens to them. G, then, deals with the relationships between individuals, the classes and societies to which they belong and History. What interests us at the moment, however, is the way in which these problems are dealt with, the techniques that Berger uses. To begin with we can look at the central character, 'G' himself, as a technique, in some way as the technique of the novel. He does not possess a 'character' in the normal sense of the word: he has few 'traits'; he follows no particular project in the world beyond that of 'life' itself; he produces nothing and appears to consume little more than he needs; he has no name, just an initial. He is a sort of walking phenomenological reduction: the world is revealed to him and, through him, to us 'as it is'; but initially, at least, it is only revealed. His impersonality is built into his biography: no father (and, by implication, no super-ego) and a mother who simply gave up her attempt to possess him. He was brought up in the face of nature rather than society; his attainment of manhood is attested to by his ability to defeat nature, or be defeated by it and survive, rather than by the formation of particular types of relationships with other people. Of course, nature and adulthood are still mediated by humans - specifically Jocelyn - but before this mediation is operated, G

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appears as detached enough to choose and accept it in advance. At this stage, G may be seen as equivalent to the sociologist's 'objectivity', an unworldly way of seeing the world; but he is more than this and at this point we move from a descriptive to a critical sociology. The basis for the critical point of view presented to us through G is nature, or more specifically, a sexuality which is natural but which transcends the nature through which he first reached his adulthood. Berger's use of sexuality and nature is the direct opposite to that of Lawrence. For Lawrence, sexuality and nature make up a mystical stasis, an ideal to be aimed at, and they provide the basis for a conservative critique, a justification of feudal relationships. G's sexuality, on the other hand, is a driving force towards orgasm and nothing else; it goes beyond the simple conquering of, or adjustment to, or fusion with, nature. It is an explosive rather than an harmonious life force. Simple triumph over nature - Chavez's first airborne crossing of the Alps - fades in the face of G's liaison with Leonie. Nature becomes a setting in which his sexuality may achieve its end, and nothing else, except perhaps a simple 'being thereness' against which human complicity and hypocrisy is measured. It is against this straightforward and urgent sexual drive that bour­ geois morality and life-styles are criticized. It is the attempt of the latter to capture and tame his sexuality that is at the root of the bitterness and desire for revenge which become increasingly apparent in G towards the end. To the extent that an asocial, if not an antisocial drive is thus transformed into an instrument of social retribution and revenge, a means of subordinating what was originally seen as its end (that is, woman), G loses his own asocial nature and is taken up into the workings of society; the critical instrument becomes a tool of what was criticized. G, then, is more than a simple revelation of the world. By identifying his consciousness with his sexuality (the former articulating the latter in the realization that it is 'only life that matters'), the author presents us with a critical revelation of the world. But over and above all this is History. Sometimes it simply runs as a parallel to the activities of the characters, subordinating the latter in our esteem while not telling us anything about them, in no way intervening directly: von Hartmann watches his wife sleep beside him as a crazy slaughter continues on the Western Front. At another time, it appears as a crowd of workers resisting troops who hopelessly outmanoeuvre them; but it appears simply as a background against which G realizes that it is 'only life' that is worthwhile, it is no more than the trigger of that realization. Sometimes it lifts people up and puts them down elsewhere, leaving them struggling blindly but ferociously to control it, as with Bojan. At other times it hovers in the background, sometimes approach­ ing and threatening, but then drawing back (for example, the shortlived fright received by the guests in the Milan hotel where G stays with his father after their first meeting), sometimes approaching inexorably (the

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approaching end of routine life in Trieste). Sometimes it reaches down through its own incarnations of class and war to fix the limits within which people move and the terms in which they describe themselves. There is a striking description of Beatrice: Politics, so far as Beatrice was concerned, was one of the careers open to men; no more and no less . . . Precisely because she lacked the pretension of ready made generalizations and judgments, because she allowed her thoughts to wander aimlessly, because she lacked what all administrators and troops oppressing another nation must always maintain - a sense of duty without end, she began to feel, between the interstices of formal social convention, the violence of the hatred, the violence of what would be avenged . . . Sometimes in the way an African ran she saw the defiance of all his race. She could not explain her feelings to herself. There is an historical equivalent to the psychological process of repression into the unconscious. Certain experiences cannot be formulated because they have occurred too soon. This happens when an inherited world-view is unable to contain or resolve certain emotions or intuitions which have been provoked by a new situation or an extremity of experience unforeseen by that world-view. Medieval witchcraft, for example, may be seen in this light. A moment's introspection shows that a large part of our own experience cannot be adequately formulated: it awaits further understanding of the total human situation. In certain respects we are likely to be better understood by those who follow us than by ourselves. Nevertheless their understanding will be expressed in terms which would now be alien to us. They will change our unformulated experience beyond our recognition. As we have changed Beatrice's. She is aware that there is another way of seeing her and all that is around her, which can only be defined as the way she can never see. She is being seen in that way now. Her mouth goes dry. Her corsets constrain her more tightly. Everything tilts. She sees everything clearly and normally. She can discern no tilt. But she is convinced, she is utterly certain that everything has been tilted. (Berger 1972a: 103-5)

We will look at this description in detail later: it appears in the midst of some general descriptions and observations on South African history and on Beatrice's relationship to her husband (a sadist who suffers from premature ejaculation), which in tum appear in the course of a descrip­ tion of her seduction of (or by?) G. But History's final intervention, in more senses than one, is its destruction of G himself, suspected of being an Austrian spy when in fact he had undertaken a minor assignment from the British as a means of getting himself out of a country in which he was bored. His attempt to use History - to use the war as a means to life - is turned against him. His death is meaningless in terms of History, a contingent and unimportant event, yet completely determined by the historical events that went before it. It is a logical conclusion to G's own exhaustion, his failure to achieve or maintain the 'life' he was seeking, the constant distortion of his sexuality that we discussed earlier. He lets himself be carried along by the random crowds that form and disappear at

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History's behest without affecting it; but beyond this, it is a meaningless death. What it does do, however, is place him firmly back into a world on which he at first appeared to be only a window, albeit a critical window. The moment of 'objectivity' and of criticism - that is, G himself - is taken back into the world that was its object and is destroyed by it. What are the differences between the way in which Berger deals with these topics and the way in which they would be dealt with in sociology or a work of social theory or social philosophy? How, for example, does G differ from Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1969)? They both have the same 'object' - the relationship of sexuality and society; they both attempt to convey to the reader a particular critical point of view (although not necessarily the same one) about that relationship, a particular understanding of its workings, using language as a means. It would be easy to decide that the differences lie in the fact that one talks about the general and the other about the particular. Marcuse's work dissolves individual sexuality into the general category of sexuality and individual members of each class into the general category of class. Berger, on the other hand, talks about an individual bourgeois, indi­ vidual consciousness and individual sexuality. All this is straightforward and self-evident, but very inadequate. Apart from anything else, it is also self-evident that Marcuse can talk about individual consciousness in the course of his argument and that Berger can make sweeping general­ izations. Another self-evident difference which can take us further lies in the fact that a summary or an exposition of Marcuse's arguments, on the lines of the summary of G that we have just attempted, would be pre­ cisely a summary: a direct restatement of what Marcuse says, in form, and perhaps even in some ways in content; it would be similar to the first section of this chapter minus its references to the novel. It would be an explicit argument involving the manipulation of categories such as 'sexuality', 'class', 'society', etc. and it would talk about its 'object' directly. This is not to say that Marcuse is not open to all sorts of interpretations; that his words do not overflow with meanings other than those they explicitly constitute, or even that the meanings that they do explicitly constitute are not dubious in some vital way. It simply means that there is 'a degree of explicitness' found in Eros and Civilization that is not found in G. The first section of this chapter involved an act of interpretation of the original text which is different in structure from the interpretation of Marcuse that would be needed to produce a summary. The latter would require a negation of the original text which is only partial, and consequently only a partial reconstitution. Indeed the same words, the same categories, the same sentence structures may be used in the summary as were found in the original text; quotations may be used as an integral part of the summary to replace sentences or paragraphs of summary. Our discussion of G, however, involved a total negation of the original text and a reconstitution in a different terminology, 'saying

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something different' to the original text insofar as explicit meaning is concerned. Where the original text was used, it was as an example, in a position of subordination to the new text. A way of rephrasing this difference is suggested by Sartre's comments on the use of language in literature, philosophy and poetry (1967). It involves a variation of a fairly conventional distinction between 'sign' and 'symbol' and essentially refers to the way in which the word points to its referent. A word used as a 'sign' points directly to its object, in the way that a signpost points towards a town: it is a means of access to something else and is inessential in comparison to its object. A word used as a 'symbol' on the other hand is always, to a greater or lesser extent, a substitute for its object. It still refers to something outside of itself, but it does so obliquely; it is as if it were attempting to carry the weight of its meaning by itself. It should be apparent even from this brief outline that phenomenology can offer a more subtle and inclusive conception of language than the structural linguistics that became so popular in the 1970s and 1980s and its maintenance of the idea of a referent is arguably more faithful to Saussure than the linguistics that was developed in his name (see Merleau-Ponty 1974a). The central point is that Marcuse, sociology and social theory in general tend to use words as if they were simple signs. Of course, at the level of conceptual argument, words such as 'sexuality', 'class' and so on are simple signs, but it is their use as if they were that enables sum­ maries and expositions to be produced in a comparatively straightfor­ ward way (although such a production is never simple). Our exposition of G also used words as if they were simple signs, but they were signs which we had to draw out from behind the text itself. The meaning we gave to the original text was there, but not there in a direct way. Words in the novel are used as 'symbols' and to produce an interpretation in the categories of social science we had to penetrate the symbols. This, however, cannot explain by itself the difference between sociology and literature. If it could, then it would be easier to grasp the meaning of, say, Capital than it would be to grasp the meaning of Gulliver's Travels, simply because the former was more explicit, more direct. The use of words in literature is, as it were, multidimensional. A word may not only replace its referent, but it may replace several 'referents'; it can point in many directions at the same time, and point in no particular direction clearly. It is in one of these 'other directions' that we can discover the root difference between and complementarity of sociology and literature. If we return to the description of Beatrice quoted above, we can see that the words point in a number of directions. The quotation begins by telling us about Beatrice's intellectual equipment: her inability to think of her particular relationship to the rest of the world in the terms in which those around her think of it. Her lack of the necessary categories of thought is also a lack of protection. All this could be part of a psychological or even

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sociological study. What marks it off from such a study is what Beatrice is not protected against - fear, fear of violence, but not fear of present violence, the violence of white against black, but fear of a future violence, of black against white. The future erupts into the present in a way in which it never does in the social sciences. In sociology, for example, the future might appear in terms of means and ends (Weber) or as a state of balance towards which social systems tend (functionalism), or as an implicit ideal (a suggestion put to me by Alan Dawe) but it nowhere appears with such urgency and immediacy as it does in Berger's description. And it is not a generalized fear of an 'unreal' future - it is not a neurosis - it is a fear of a specific and real future. There follows a paragraph which would not be out of place in the sociology of knowledge; what distinguishes it is what surrounds it. It is in no way a conclusion or insight derived from a study of witchcraft or any other 'mystery' in its historical and social setting. It is the paragraph that follows it that dramatically tears it away from the social sciences: the reader is directly challenged to find the ground for the insight in his or her own experience and not in some study. We are directed not out­ wards to the world around us, but inwards to our own consciousness. It is in the last paragraph that we find the crucial 'direction' of the words. It tells us something about Beatrice's relationship to the world, something which is contained in the previous paragraphs, first as a description of Beatrice and then as a feature of the relationship between 'ideas' and 'history', but something that is more than these. But what are we to make of it? Her mouth goes dry and her corsets get tighter, but she is obviously neither simply thirsty, nor pregnant, nor swelling up in some way. Worse than that, the world is tilting, her world is tilting, but she cannot see the tilt and neither can anybody around her. She, how­ ever, is convinced of it; more convinced, apparently, than the man who created her, who leaves us clutching at the meanings of his sentences. The description builds up to the tilt, through this strange fear of the future which only we, fifty years later and more, can recognize, through the mysteries of our own consciousness to which we are referred on the way. Yet nowhere are we told what the tilt is: it is indicated by the words, but the words point towards nothing, or to more unsatisfactory words. The area in which we have to look is limited: its inner boundaries by the short, sharp sentences describing Beatrice, its outer limits by the longer, more complicated sentences that could belong to the sociology of knowledge. But that is all. It is here that we reach the limits of words. What Berger points towards is essentially 'what cannot be said'; a pre-reflective relationship to the world that reflection continually tries to grasp and pin down, but fails because it always finds itself in the way. Insofar as consciousness is always an open movement towards the future and I never reach pure coincidence with myself, insofar as I never am but always becoming, then my pre-reflective relationship to the world can never be grasped in

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a satisfactory way. My reflective consciousness, or the consciousness of others, can hypostatize aspects of the relationship, even if it is necessary, as Berger suggests, to wait fifty years sometimes before that is possible; but it can never be grasped in its entirety and in its full flight towards the future. This 'pre-reflective relationship' can perhaps be described as a way of living in the world, or, better, a way of living towards the world. The words in which we attempt to describe it are the tools of the reflective consciousness, used to encapsulate the impossible and best used as an attempt to convey meaning through their own combination of structure and content (direct meaning) as oblique symbols rather than as signs. 'Tilt' does not tell us what was Beatrice's relationship to the world; rather it includes, within its exterior function as a sign, a sense that is amplified by the preceding paragraphs. In this way it takes on a substantive being, more solid than signs which tend always to give way in front of what they indicate. It possesses, together with the words around it, a 'thick­ ness' which keeps us within the words rather than referring us outside of them; the movement outside is left to the last moment when we finally discover that the words have let us down and the outside is left unspecified. The only clue is the earlier direct reference to our own consciousness. If we are referred anywhere, it is to ourselves to find our own 'tilt' in order that we may find Beatrice's. 'What cannot be said' is quite simply this relationship and nothing more. Beatrice's 'tilt' is a way of living her lack of intellectual tools, her world, in a way that is not determined by that world; it is the empty space towards which Berger's words finally and obliquely point. Yet because these words contain her way of living her world, living towards her world, they must also point towards that world. They point to each other, to the reader, to nothing and to the world; the words of sociology point primarily to the outside world alone. It is in the fact that both sociology and literature point to the world in different ways that we discover their complementarity. The lived relationship to the world is constantly recurring throughout G and at each stage it is indicated but not stated: we find it within the words and at the same time beyond them. Berger's grasp of the sexual act is through the reasons that forbid its description, through drawings, through the rhythm and structure of his sentences, and through reference again to the reader's own consciousness. He talks about what cannot be talked about by talking about why it cannot be talked about. Alan Dawe (1973), adopting some of Richard Hoggart's comments about literature, has argued that sociology, like literature, must in its own way capture what it is like to be alive at a particular place and a particular time. It must reflect lived experience in a way that is mean­ ingful to the reader. Our examination of G has revealed that Berger does not convey to us directly what it was like to live in Europe at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. Apart from brief moments

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- the demonstration in Milan, the description of the Western Front, the appearances of Nusa and Leonie - he tells us very little about the everyday lives of the mass of the people. What he tells us about are unique and in many ways extraordinary incidents - incest, seduction, political intrigue - and insofar as general experiences are dealt with at all, they are illuminated critically through these extraordinary incidents. The experience of the masses plays for Berger the role of an historical background and a subject and basis for criticism, but it is not an end in itself. The lived experience portrayed in G is not that described in terms of psychological categories, or even in terms of emotion. It is essentially experience that is indescribable, which exists prior to and which over­ flows any description we can attempt. It is the pre-reflective experience revealed by (but not necessarily known by) the phenomenological reduction. The world and one's lived relationship to it comprise a unity, but we can and sociology usually does attempt to deal simply with the former. To the extent that literature deals with the latter, the two are complementary. But this is not to say that they should remain independent; they do have things to learn from one another. We can, to begin with, learn from G the way in which Berger acts as a social theorist. We can start with the commonplace observation that the author is God to his characters. He or she may reveal his characters to us as puppets, tell us in asides what they are 'really like', pass compact moral judge­ ments on them, make them dance to the 'message' of the novel. He can also let them show us the world, reveal the world to us through their eyes, use them as a lens through which to look at the world. Hemingway is the obvious example here. Somewhere in between, an author can let us see the world through his characters, but through developing, choosing characters. He can let the characters have their freedom as a means of showing the reader his own freedom; they are both symbols for a 'message' and views on to the world at the same time. Sartre's early theory of literature avowed a combination of these last two approaches. Berger adopts the first two approaches and not the third - history is dominant and here the novel is politically pessimistic. As we have seen, the world is revealed to us through G; but at the same time Berger makes explicit his role as an all-powerful God. The description of Beatrice that we have discussed at length is a God's eye view, from the future, from a greater knowledge; a view which would, as he explicitly states, have been completely unavailable to Beatrice herself. What Berger does is to reverse the way in which these two approaches are traditionally used, at the same time combining them. His moral criticisms do not come from his all-powerful position as God, but through the way in which his characters reveal the world to us. Our view of what the world is like 'out there' does not come to us only through the eyes of his characters, but directly from the author as an informed, Marxist God.

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At this point, we come back to the sociologist. His or her point of view is God-like - and this seems true of all sociology - insofar as the sociologist seeks to formulate the experience of those he studies in terms not available to those he studies. He or she is not God-like in the moralistic way, but in the way in which Berger is God-like. He tells us about the world to some extent in the same way that Berger tells us about Beatrice, from a position of different - if not greater - knowledge. What makes Berger different from the 'traditional' (if that is the right word) novelist, makes him similar to the sociologist. What makes Berger different from the sociologist is the way in which he refers to lived experience and it is this that makes his work more immediately mean­ ingful to the reader, in the sense that it says things about the world that the sociologist might say, but in a way that directly and indirectly challenges the reader and forces him or her to make an effort at understanding which is different to that of straightforward intellection. We are, for example, forced to look at our own sexuality in a way that Eros and Civilization can never manage. The description of Beatrice forces us to recognize our own historical relativity, to realize our own social determinations in order to understand hers, and to understand the extent and limits of social determination in general. If sociology is to learn from literature, then it does not necessarily involve the adoption of Berger's techniques. It does not mean that the sociologist should transform him or herself into a novelist or a poet, any more than the novelist and the poet should transform themselves into sociologists. The novelist attempting to grasp a lived experience cannot fail to use his words to indicate the world at the same time as they indicate lived experience. So far we have argued as if the socio­ logist could use his words to point only at the world, but this is not the case. We saw that no word used as a 'symbol' is only a symbol; that eventually it must indicate something beyond itself. In the same way, no word used as a simple sign is ever only a sign; it must always carry its multidimensional references even if these are hidden or ignored. Even the most technical, conceptual language can imply behind itself a form of lived experience. Although the sociologist might not be attempting the same task as the novelist, he is using the same tools and the novelist's 'object' is essentially inseparable from the 'object' of sociology. In some ways language is far too subtle a tool to be used for simply saying things. There are at least three 'forms' of lived experience that must enter into a sociologist'S work: that of those he studies, the relationship between himself and those he studies as it is lived by both, and his own relationship to his ideas. The way in which he lives what he is saying, and his use of language, if sensitive and conscious, is capable of conveying something of all three. In addition he is trying to com­ municate with whoever might read him, and communication entails not only clarity - in fact, it might not entail clarity at all - but an attempt to

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reach the reader and to create a minimum of shared experience. Again it is only the sensitive use of language that can achieve this. It must be emphasized that we are not talking about experience in substantive terms but about a pre-reflective lived experience. The difference is that between the description of Beatrice's tilt and saying that she was anxious, worried or whatever. It is a matter of the 'flavour' of a life, of a relationship rather than its description. It is the existence and structure of this lived experience that is revealed by phenomenology. Although most of what has gone before has been based on the work of Sartre (especially Sartre 1963a, 1967) there is no a priori reason why the insights of other writers should not be used as well. It is perhaps in this way, rather than as a method or as a collection of substantive ideas to be used when convenient, that phenomenology offers most to the sociologist.

Coda Viewing this chapter from twenty years on I am struck by the similarity of the phenomenological approach I used here to an interpretive psychoanalytic approach and the way in which psychoanalysis opens up further possibilities. On the surface they are directly opposed - Sartre's critique of Freud in Being and Nothingness (1957) argues that conscious­ ness is a pure nothingness. It has no content. It is a only a relationship to the world, whereas Freud endows consciousness with a content. How­ ever the unconscious itself can become an object of consciousness. I argued in Part 1, when talking about Sartre and Merleau-Ponty that they describe different moments of our consciousness of the world and there is what could be called a phenomenological tradition in psycho­ analysis. Especially in the more therapeutically oriented forms of object relations theory, in the work of, for example, D.W. Winnicott (see any collection of Winnicott's papers, 1971a, b, 1975; also Wright 1991) there are distinct phenomenological concerns, and the two approaches sit together rather uneasily in the work of R.D. Laing (1960). I think it is probably Merleau-Ponty's 'moment' of consciousness, particularly of our consciousness of the body, which would fit most easily with these psychoanalytic approaches. However, I think the theoretical compatabilities are less important than the dimensions of experience which language can both capture and transform. The 'tilt' of Beatrice's world, for example, represents some­ thing well beyond any language available to her and her contemporaries, rather as the heroine of D.M. Thomas's White Hotel (1981) experiences pains from injuries she is yet to receive at the hands of Gestapo death squads. This is an extreme example of what I would call the level of 'pre­ reflective' and/or 'existential' experience and its more familiar forms include the sudden and inexplicable experiences of fear and anxiety,

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intimations of death, human vulnerability and the insoluble contra­ dictions of life, the movements of history which affect all those around us but of which we are barely aware - Auden's cracked teacup which opens the path to the land of the dead. The level of experience that is grasped by psychoanalysis is rather different; it is pre-reflective and/or unconscious experience of the body an experience which can be articulated through metaphors of various types. One way of thinking about psychoanalytic treatment is that it is a process of generating the metaphors which we need in order to live with a degree of coherence. What is interesting about it is that not any metaphor will do. Although people often come into psychoanalysis looking for causal explanations of their condition, this usually disappears in the creation of metaphor. Now returning to different ways of using language, the psychoanalytic hermeneutic directs us towards looking at sociological texts as psychic texts, guiding us less to the experience of the author than to the experi­ ence of relationships in the discipline itself. In Part 3 I try to do this in a discussion of books that explore the social implications of psycho­ analysis.

PART 3

IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

10

FREUD AND PHILOSOPHY

Psychoanalysis has always been sort of happy hunting ground for philosophers, more often than not hostile and frequently, I suspect, trying to cut their teeth on an easy target. When philosophers seem to offer psychoanalysis an admission to respectability it seems to have a price. The so-called 'underlabourer' conception of philosophy for which science delivers the goods (knowledge) while philosophy carries out repair jobs on the tools (concepts) has a sinister aspect. It carries a sense of philosophical superiority, the schoolteacher philosopher examining the schoolboy Freud for inky fingers and dirt behind the ears. At its worst, the philosopher becomes the chief witness and judge for what Irving Thalberg (1982) unselfconsciously calls the 'philosophical prosecution', checking conceptual credentials and banishing ideas to the wilderness. It seems invariably that what is banished is Freud's awareness of the complexity, ambiguity and contradictoriness of the world and human beings, and, above all, his awareness of their inevitable irrationality and nastiness. Here I want to look at three philosophical approaches to Freud and at three corresponding ways in which philosophy and psychoanalysis might learn from each other. Many of my examples will be taken from an excellent collection of essays (Wollheim and Hopkins 1982) which adopts a comparatively open-minded philosophical attitude to Freud, but I also want to look at some wider issues, moving away from the philosophy of science and linguistic philosophy towards hermeneutics and philosophical anthropology. I want to present what might be called a multi-philosophical conception of psychoanalysis, maintaining that it

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employs differing forms of argument, which can be judged by different criteria, but which nonetheless are related to each other and require each other for a full understanding. I have argued elsewhere (Craib 1997a) that sociology has a number of mutually dependent objects of different ontological status and therefore it cannot be a unified discipline, but must develop in multiple interconnected directions. I believe the same is true for all social sciences, including psychoanalysis, and all too often philosophical approaches to the discipline try to narrow it.

Psychoanalysis as a science The status of psychoanalysis as a science, or rather the lack of such status, is the usual ground for the philosophical dismissal of Freud. The dismissal has been based on positivist/empiricist assumptions about the nature of a science. In its stricter versions, there are two types of mean­ ingful statement: a proposition about the world which may be verified or falsified; or a statement which is true by definition, such as all bachelors are unmarried men (Ayer 1971). All other statements are metaphysical and meaningless; science deals only with testable propositions. To be properly testable the theory must be translated into a prediction of a correlation between two variables which are able to be defined inde­ pendently of the theory itself. In this way general laws are established which serve to explain individual instances. Thus in the case of psycho­ analysis one would look through Freud's work for a possible correlation, say, between the existence of a neurosis and the repression of the memory of childhood sexual impulses. Provided that these could be identified in non-psychoanalytic terms, one would set about the empirical discovery of whether such a correlation exists. The dismissal of Freud found in the writings of Frank Cioffi (1970) and Karl Popper (1969) rests on the argument that no such testable propositions can be found in Freud's work, since he bets on every horse. Thus, as well as the proposition that the repression of the memory of childhood sexual impulses leads to neurosis, we find the proposition that some neurotics remember their childhood sexual impulses. This leaves Freud some­ where between a fraud and a speculative metaphysician and I suspect Popper and Cioffi would not bother to distinguish between the two. One way in which psychoanalysis may be defended is through the attempt to show that the clinical evidence on which most analysts base their work can be considered as 'scientific' in a broad positivist sense. Perhaps the best known and most thorough attempt at this is by Alfred Grunbaum (1984) and his conclusions can only be described, at the best, as highly sceptical. Clark Glymour (1982) attempts to set up a model for the acceptable employment of clinical evidence, drawing on an analogy with astronomy and focusing on Freud's study of the Rat Man. This exercise is largely compatible with a positivist/empiricist view of science

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and can be used to establish at least that Freud was not a fraud. Glymour, for example, is concerned to show that Freud was able to revise his hypothesis and theories in the light of the clinical evidence, something which Popper would deny. On the whole my own view is that seeking this sort of evidence for psychoanalysis is not likely to be very productive, although some (for example, Fonagy 1996; Smith 1996) still seek it and Hopkins (1996) makes a good case that Freud's argu­ ments are compatible with what we regard as scientific reasoning. Cosin et al. (1982) show in a systematic way not only the lack of sympathy, but also the misunderstandings and misreadings of Freud present in the critiques of Cioffi and Popper. They also show the unreasonable nature of the demands made by the latter on psychoanalytic theory. It is certainly my own view that if such demands were made on the sciences generally, very little of modem science would qualify as such. Some of these demands have relaxed with the opening up of the philosophy of science since the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970). Kuhn was able to demonstrate the impossibility of theory-free observations and the puzzle-solving nature of scientific experiments; we do not have access to some inde­ pendent real world against which theories may be tested. Rather, what we see in the real world depends in part upon the theories we have of it. The effect has been to relativize theories of science. Taking this position to its extreme, Paul Feyerabend (1975) advocates an anarchist theory under the slogan 'anything goes'; in its milder form, the effect seems to have been to admit Freud into respectable discussion, even if suspicion still remains. Perhaps the view now is best summed up as benevolent scepticism. However, this does not take us very far. It could be seen as a manifestation of repressive tolerance. Once admitted into the fold of the respectable, Freud can be submerged beneath the respectable arguments. For Cosin et al. (1982), for example, he becomes a weapon in the attempt to establish that the explanation of an action in terms of the actor's reasons for acting is not a causal explanation. Alternatively he may sink altogether beneath respectable methodology: Suppes and Warren (1982) develop a mathematical model to classify defence mechanisms. The model and the classification somehow become ends in themselves, as though the credibility of psychoanalysis were demonstrated by their use, at the expense of their meaning. Grunbaum's (1984) conclusion is that the central problem with clinical evidence is that it must always assume what it is based upon - there is no independent measure for clinical claims and this is why psycho­ analysis must depend on experimental or epidemiological evidence. It is difficult to see how reliable experimental evidence can be obtained and Smith (1996) shows the problem with outcome studies: even if all psychoanalytic treatments were successful it would not establish that the theory underlying those treatments was right - there are plenty of examples from medicine where treatments work, but for reasons

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unknown to doctors. The absence of experimental evidence is not, how­ ever, fatal; otherwise we would have to abandon evolutionary theories in biology. The sort of empirical evidence that one can adduce for psychoanalysis does not, to my mind, establish Freud's hermeneutic, the validity of interpretations or of the theories employed by psychoanalysts in making interpretations. But it does support a proposition that an area exists in which such interpretations might be of value. I am talking here of the immense range of evidence assembled by Bowlby (1971, 1975, 1981) and those working with his theories, and perhaps too the work of Stem (1985) on early infancy. Once we move away from this sort of discussion we seem to get further. Donald Davidson (1982) argues that certain aspects of Freud's theory are essential if we are going to be able to explain irrational behaviour. Particularly important is the insight that the mind might consist of a structure of different parts and that non-logical relations may exist between these different parts. This is important because it moves away from the idea of the actor as a single unit, a unitary subject. It is only a short step from Davidson's argument to a philosophical realist reading of Freud. Realism (Bhaskar 1978, 1979; Collier 1981) sees science as involved in identifying (by means of theory) the unobservable underlying structures and mechanisms which are responsible for observable phenomena. The relationship between theory and the observable is thus redefined, so that the former does not depend entirely upon the latter and we can allow for the theory-laden nature of observations. It also leaves behind the either / or focus involved in more traditional notions of evidence - either evidence supports a theory or it does not. In addition to experiments, other forms of evidence (including clinical) would be permissible and other criteria enter into assessing the theory, including in particular the rational coherence of the argument and the elegance and economy of the explanation. For a philosophical realist, psychoanalysis can seem an almost ideal model for a science of the mind. Freud identifies a structure or series of structures and the relationships between the elements may be seen as the causal mechanisms which generate if not the thoughts, fantasies and actions themselves, then the narrative which helps us understand the thoughts, fantasies and actions. We can move away from the notion of a simple, rational agent which limits so many philosophical accounts of Freud.

Reasons, causes and hermeneutics The first central concern of analytic philosophy is with the scientific status of psychoanalysis. The second has to do with whether an expla­ nation of a person's action in terms of that person's reasons for acting is

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or is not a causal explanation. Most contributors to Wollheim and Hopkins (1982) seem to agree that the causal explanation of action in terms of reasons is possible, although it is different from causal expla­ nation in the natural sciences which, at least for positivists, involves looking for regularities and establishing general laws. An alternative to such a view is to argue that human action can be understood only in terms of logical or conceptual connections and that these are quali­ tatively different from causal explanations. Thus Peter Winch (1958) would see human action in terms of rule following, and since there are at least two ways of following a rule - a right way and a wrong way notions of cause and of prediction are inappropriate. Those who believe that causal explanation is possible still see the cause/effect relation in terms of a juxtaposition of events: the combi­ nation of desire and belief (event A) causes a particular action (event B). In this context, taking psychoanalysis seriously is a matter of translating Freud's explanations into causal explanations corresponding to the above model, often with the explicit aim of removing paradoxes, contradictions and ambiguities and with a strong suspicion of ideas about the unconscious and fantasy. At its best, this amounts to a clear presentation of Freud's arguments, not adding anything to them, but perhaps making them intelligible to those who might be sceptical. At its worst, it is a translation which loses a vital part of Freud and colludes in a denial: the psyche is not allowed to be complex or contradictory or full of para­ doxes. It can only be the simple point of origin of a more or less rationally explicable action, part of a rationally coherent scheme or process. A hermeneutic reading of Freud on the other hand opens up all sorts of possibilities. Whether we take Ricoeur (1970) or Habermas (1971) we find an example of a philosopher learning from Freud rather than trying to teach him. The tradition of philosophical hermeneutics in which Ricoeur places himself, and which Habermas wishes to take up critically, deals with the play of meanings and the problem of interpretation. It has one central problem: that it cannot recognize, let alone comprehend, what Marxists would call ideology. If the world is described as it is perceived and conceived by consciousness, then both perception and conception must stand unquestioned. The only issue is their internal structure or their 'nature'. There is no way in which people might be systematically mistaken about the world or about their own motives, unless it is by the reification of concepts or simple pre-reflective dishonesty . Habermas embraces psychoanalytic theory as a way of maintaining a hermeneutic approach while at the same time allowing for the systematic distortion of and inequality in communication (for an excellent discussion, see Keat 1981; see also How 1995). The psychoanalytic pro­ cess provides him with his model of an 'emancipatory science', enabling the individual to become conscious of the forces which affect his or her

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behaviour, to achieve higher levels of understanding and ability in communication, and to attain liberation from the analyst through achieving equality in knowledge and understanding. Ricoeur's explora­ tion of Freud is more complex and moves in a different direction. He subjects to a thorough critique Freud's 'energetics' - his attempt to explain psychic life in terms of an energy flow and the accumulation and release of tension - and then builds up an interpretation of psycho­ analysis which combines Freud's insight into the unconscious distortion of meanings with the traditional hermeneutic concern with conscious meanings and interpretations. He employs this reading to situate Freud among religious and other 'metaphysical' attempts by humanity to make sense of its condition. I have spent some time discussing Habermas and Ricoeur because they offer creative philosophical readings of Freud and they both take us beyond the bounds of analytic philosophy to the field of philosophical anthropology, which is where I want to go next. They do not destroy psychoanalysis, but take it beyond itself.

Freud and human nature I am using the term 'philosophical anthropology' to cover a range of issues that can best be summed up under the heading of 'human nature'. What is it that distinguishes human beings from other animals? What is common to human beings, qua human beings, independently of histori­ cal and social context? It is an area not very popular among sociologists, its unpopularity being the other side of the tendency to sociological determinism that I have mentioned before. Sociology tends to see human beings only as bearers of social and economic relations or as social constructs. Ronald De Souza's (1982) 'Norms and the Normal' divides what he calls 'theories of man' (meaning humanity) into two broad categories: the biological and the theological. The latter start from an ideal model which is seen as to be achieved. For the Christian, Christ is the model. The former derive normative conclusions from what are taken as innate human properties. In this respect, Freud is interesting because he does not fit easily into either of these categories. The 'normal' or 'mature' human being is not naturally so, he or she is the product of a long developmental process. At the same time no ideal is posited outside of that process: 'In the developmental vision of the normal human, we should find both a source of therapeutic values - whether or not these coincide with conventional values - and a relative measure of worth, in relation to happiness, of different levels of experience and activity' (De Souza 1982: 139). De Souza then goes on very carefully to elaborate what he sees as Freud's conception of the valued norm. Such a norm is necessary, as it is

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in biology, for any sort of classification to take place, but since Freud is dealing with humans this inevitability takes on a value component. De Souza's argument is intricate and I am not sure that I am doing it full justice, but he seems to argue that we can draw out a rationalist/ utilitarian 'norm' or 'ideal'. The mature human is not driven by irrational and obscure forces, but is one who has become able to make rational judgements about him or herself, the world and his or her relationships. Thus rationality is a criterion by means of which we can distinguish the neurotic from the non-neurotic; the value is utilitarian in that such rational judgements enable us to maximize pleasure and/or happiness. The neurotic, as well as being irrationat determines his or her own misery. However, De Souza sees in Freud's work a number of limitations on such an ideal. The problem of satisfying internal and external needs, for example, creates complexities and/ or contradictions, as do the relativi­ ties to which Freud's notion of reality is subject. Further limitations are created by the difficulty of balancing the claims, on the one hand, of the different elements in the structure of the individual psyche and, on the other, of the individual and society. Beyond this, De Souza argues that Freud conflates two forms of teleology - the evolutionary teleology of the instincts, and the teleology of aims - without providing an adequate way of translating the one into the other: '[the instincts] psychological nature demands to be identified in terms of aims. And the specifications of these aims are either too narrow to provide the far-reaching explanations demanded of them or are too vague and abstract to show their organic origins' (1982: 160). Presumably, an example of the former would be the sex instinct and of the latter the death instinct. The question of norms and values, of an ideal, is intimately bound up with the questions considered by philosophical anthropology: they are implicit in the idea of there being something common to humanity as a whole. The sort of argument De Souza draws out of Freud can very easily be drawn out of the early Marx and often has been. It underlies, explicitly, much Marxist theory and implicitly provides the vision behind much Marxist political practice. Marx too falls between the theological and the biological, and the value is derived from a developmental pro­ cess. The defining features of human beings are that they work collec­ tively to transform their environment and thus to transform themselves. If these features were realized we would live in a free, cooperative, rational society, which could be called 'natural' for humankind. Yet it is the end of a very long developmental process through different forms of social organization. The vision of the rational and free society is present in early and later Marxist writings. It is explicit in most 'western Marxism' and arguably implicit even in the work of somebody like Althusser, often I think implicit in his style despite his explicit rejection of the ideas. However, that is another argument. Marxist political practice certainly carries the ideal of rationality: it is a matter of teaching

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as well as action, of making people's experience intelligible to them in such a way that they are able to change their lives. So there is a parallel between De Souza's Freud and a dominant interpretation of Marx. I think both the Marxist and the Freudian versions fail. First of all, De Souza exemplifies in sharp relief the inadequacies of the analytic philosopher's interpretations of Freud. These limitations are revealed in his apparent conclusion that the difficulties he identifies in Freud's work are deficiencies in Freud's theory. There is a more subtle epistemological policing going on here, but still a policing. There is no consideration of the possibility that the deficiencies are a product not of theory, but of the nature of the world. Yet if we look at the deficiencies or limitations he discusses, it can clearly be argued that these are features of the real world, and that Freud's achievement lay in identifying them. There are, as far as I can see, no a priori reasons why internal and external needs should be reconcilable, particularly if, at one level, the internal needs are demanding immediate gratification. Nor is there any a priori reason why 'reality' should be unproblematic, or why the claims of the individual and society should be reconcilable. Part of Freud's argument shows the necessity of a conflict within the psyche, and part of his achievement is to show the place of the biological and at the same time the extent of the plasticity of its psychological represen­ tations. As Wollheim (1982) demonstrates in a different connection, the bodily functions become metaphors employed by the psyche. Once this process starts, the metaphysical chain - the chain of displacement - is endless. De Souza is constantly disturbed by Freud's recognition of the irrational: witness his comments on the central idea of transference, which cannot be a guide of the 'norm' because of its irrationality. The failure of the Marxist version is more apparent. The intractability of the world has been the driving force behind Marxist theory for the past thirty years. Usually it has been seen in terms of the external structure of late capitalism being somehow responsible for the continued failure of left-wing politics. Much work has concentrated on the issue of ideology and this has taken various theorists towards Freud. But, interestingly, those Marxists who have taken Freud seriously have either policed Freud in exactly the same way as the analytic philosophers or they seem to have lost any political vision. Herbert Marcuse's (1969) Eros and Civilization, a truly impressive effort in speculative theorizing, sys­ tematically sets out to reduce the significance of repression as a feature of human life and tends to underemphasize or omit those elements in Freud's work which point to ambiguity. Even if we accept Marcuse's conception of a 'surplus repression' - a repression over and above what is necessary to keep a society in existence - the 'necessary' repression still involves the conflicts and compromises that are implicit in Freud's work. In fact there seems to be no real basis for positing a surplus repression as a social phenomenon. Certainly all that could be gained from clinical evidence would be something which might be called

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surplus repression in an individual, but is most usefully thought of in other ways as the workings of the defence mechanisms, and inadequate rather than surplus repression. Beyond this, if we take Freud's argument that the unconscious does not develop with time, then the unconscious desires with which we have to grapple - including the death instinct - will always be with us. While there might be more or less satisfactory compromises, there is no reason to suppose that a solution of the sort envisaged by Marcuse, the vision of a libidinally free society in which the death instinct has been mastered, is actually possible. His interpretation of Freud, one suspects, comes less from a respect for Freud's theory than from a desire to maintain a vision of a rationalist utopia. This is the case even more clearly with Habermas, who uses psychoanalysis and linguistics to give a more concrete grounding to the traditional notion of Reason. In contrast, Juliet Mitchell's (1976) reading of Freud - in many ways a very orthodox reading, employing psychoanalysis to explain the oppression of women - leaves very little idea of how the situation might change or what it might change towards. The equally interesting other side of the coin is that there are Marxists who take seriously what we can call the irrational or pessimistic impli­ cations of Freud. These are precisely the Marxists who dismiss psycho­ analysis, often on the simple grounds that Freud is pessimistic (see, for example, Brown 1974). It is reasonable to suggest that there is some significance in the fact that what philosophy feels it has to edit out of Freud, or reject him for, is the same, whether it be analytic or Marxist philosophy - and they are not exactly compatible bedfellows. If so many philosophers do not want it, then it must be important. The question is, what are we to do with it? From the treatment of Freud in the past it seems that we must either reject it in favour of a radical utopianism or accept it, together with a pessimistic conservatism not dissimilar to Freud's own. I do not believe that this choice is necessary, but there are implications for accepting this darker and more difficult side of Freud. We can keep the goal of a rational society but there needs to be a recognition that rationality is a constant achievement, tenuously maintained. It is always underlain by an irrationality, as healing in the analytic process is always underlain by the irrationality of the transference that can perhaps never fully be worked through. It means, for example, accepting that there is always some part of us that will shun work like the plague at the first opportunity, that there are destructive or simply irrational elements which are ours by virtue of being human and are not the simple product of social arrangements. What enables a radicalism - a socialism - to be maintained is the fact that in principle we should be capable of dis­ tinguishing between forms of social organization which contribute towards the possibility of effective compromises between the different forces and those that do not. This in tum means reconceptualizing social

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organizations in terms other than, or rather in addition to, those of ownership of the means of production and democratic control. I do not think philosophy can take us any further than this, but that in itself would be an achievement since, if I am right, most philosophy, of whatever tradition, takes us in the opposite direction. I am not sure whether psychoanalysis can take us any further. It would follow from what I am suggesting that socialists need to think seriously about the forms of authority and social control which must circumscribe demo­ cratic control, as well as the forms of democratic control which encour­ age the development of our more rational capacities. It might be that in post-Freudian psychoanalysis we can find metaphors which are useful for such thinking. Klein's concept of reparation might be one such example, but that presupposes a society which is no longer divided significantly along lines of sex, social class and race. Such structural divisions prohibit any possibility of metaphorically restoring the destroyed object. The lesson here, if there is one, is about ways of handling conflict in a socialist society. It might be that Winnicott's notion of 'good enough mothering' - or parenting - could be rethought in institutional terms, as could his suggestion that maturity involves the ability to play with our insanity. However far we proceed in such an argument, the raw material of irrational experience will still be there and, as I try to show in Chapters 12 and 13, it will erupt into our theorizing and space must be created for it in psychoanalytic practice.

11

THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF THEORY

When I began this chapter it was going to be a discussion of the way in which Freud's work has, over recent years, been incorporated into the social sciences. Not only was the idea interesting; it seemed to fit neatly into a wider project. As I was starting work on it, however, it became caught up with an unexpected bout of self-questioning: what on earth was I doing reading all this? Did I think it was important or even interesting? What, anyway, could I possibly have to say about it? I had spent most of my adult intellectual life in the world of theory, from my schoolboy conversion to Marxism onwards. For a long time I was com­ paratively happy, but for some years I had been slowly moving away from it, trying to develop other research interests and moving out of teaching theory and philosophy. As I worked in what was still, despite the cutbacks, a comparatively large sociology department, such a shift seemed possible without causing too much disruption. Events then seemed to be take me in the opposite direction. I discovered that most of a particularly heavy teaching load, requiring a great deal of time and commitment of intellectual energy, would involve theory. The strength of my reaction surprised me: it was as if, as I was walking through the prison gates, the judge had arbitrarily added another year to my sen­ tence. The fact that I was reading two books by Christopher Badcock served to emphasize my reaction. He taught me theory in the third year of my degree course. Despite the fact that I was at my most radical (it was 1969) and he was clearly a long, long way to the right, I found him immensely stimulating. I can remember his classes now where others have faded. The contrast between my early enthusiasm for theory and my present distaste was marked. It soon became apparent to me that these extremes were a particularly clear example of a much more con­ sistent ambivalence. I distrust theory and yet I still think it is important and I still enjoy it; and when it came to planning my teaching, I found that I was looking forward to it. My movement away from theory began when I entered psychotherapy as a patient, and continued when I later started training as a group psychotherapist. It was indirect: theory was rarely, if ever, the material of a therapy session, yet as I grew closer to my own life, theory became less important. Looking back on my life as a student and then as a lecturer, it

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now seemed that theory provided me with a way of living that I did not have to own and an arena for some fairly basic desires and feelings to be acted out, but not recognized. In contrast to the more satisfying life found through therapy, the world of theory now seemed rather barren and in some ways very much like a prison. I came to read theory listening for the unspoken human desires and defences that I knew were there in my own work and suspected must be in everybody else's. Even when I was at my most disillusioned with theory I found traces of enjoyment. I still thought theory was important. To begin with, the arguments that point to the unavoidability of theory seemed conclusive. We never have a direct access to the world outside ourselves; it is always mediated by our language, which contains implicit and explicit theories of what the world is like and how it works. Simply by calling this thing in front of me a table, I bring into play a whole series of assumptions about social organization which together would make up a social theory. Think, for example, about why I call it a table rather than a workbench or a desk or a barricade; and then think about the complexity of a society which provides me with these options. On the whole, I tend to think it is better to know what we are doing or talking about and both useful and satisfying to draw out and explore the theory we are using, rather like the use and satisfaction of a good interpretation, which connects and goes some way to explaining different experiences. I also thought and still think that rational thought - theory - is a way to freedom. It is not all powerful but can give us some control over the things that happen to us, whether a happening is outside or inside. At the same time, it implies and depends upon the existence, at least the possible existence, of a community in which everybody has equal access to information and the tools of argument, ideas, necessary for debate to take place. Rational thought which is not open to question from those it concerns, and the theory I am talking about concerns everybody, ceases to be rational. For the excluded groups it is a matter of assertion, and the excluded groups themselves become a source of irrationality. Here, then, was my ambivalence: theory can be a false world where life can be lived blindly, and at the same time it can be an essential part of the real world. Perhaps to some extent it has to be both at the same time. I find that this still appears in contradictions in what I think and argue. I find that I can shift from defending theory and its place in a teaching programme to an hostility worthy of the most dyed-in-the-wool English pragmatist. I can sometimes find myself taking opposite sides in the same argument. Against some arguments I will defend, for example, crude Marxism; against others I will attack it. To some classes I will insist on the importance and necessity of theory and the rewards of the efforts required to understand it; to others I will insist on its emptiness. I eventually decided to turn this piece into a review of four books: Ilrnan Oilman's Freud and Human Nature (1983) and Freud and the Mind (1984) and c.R. Badcock's The Psychoanalysis of Culture (1980) and Madness

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and Modernity (1983). I kept my ambivalence in mind as I read them, as well as the requirements of teaching and the needs of students. I thought about the books in the context of theory itself: what sort of theory did they present? Was it 'good' or 'bad' theorizing, rather than right or wrong theory? Did I like it, rather than agree with it? I came to think about what could be called 'rules of theorizing', a fairly simple list of dos and don'ts, ways of approaching and using theory for those 99.9 per cent of us who are not original thinkers. Eventually, they reduced down to five: 1 2 3 4 S

Avoid wishful thinking. Avoid monistic assumptions and explanations. Try to argue intelligibly. Avoid logical hatchet work. Maintain a respect for available evidence.

These five rules are not commandments. There are occasions when they ought to be broken. In other words, I am trying to find some rational justification for my own contradictions. All in all they add up to a message that is, to say the least, uninspiring: when it comes to theory, sit on every available fence. Get off the fence only to come down on the opposite side to everybody else. There is, I think, a unifying theme. The rational enterprise is harmed if theory is used to avoid things or to present solutions to problems, contradictions and complexities which, in the outside world, are unavoidable and - for the moment at any rate insoluble. It is also harmed if theory becomes a site for the disguised rather than the sublimated exercise of destructive emotions. I will come back to these rules later; for the moment I want to restate some of what I have already said and elaborate on it.

Theory as psychodynamics Theory is important; it is one of the ways in which we come to terms with reality and extend our practical options. This is as true for social theory as it is for psychoanalytic theory. Rational thought is in its very nature a democratic process entailing the possibility of a free and open society. It is also an aspect of personal activity with a psychological meaning: it can be interpreted in psychodynamic terms. When I engage in theory, I am deploying a range of defences and projections; I am not only acting rationally but bringing into play or even acting out a range of phantasies and displaced early experiences. The same is as true in the consulting room as it is in the university and the psychoanalytic insti­ tution, although these issues only become a focus of attention in the consulting room. Finally, theory is part of a social process: the forms of theoretical activity people engage in and the theories they construct say

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something about the sort of society in which they live. Problems occur when theoretical work becomes primarily an expression of individual psyches and social processes rather than an attempt to grasp the nature of the world. I want to argue that there is, in the academic world and outside, a theoretical culture that is best understood as part of what Christopher Lasch (1980) refers to as a 'narcissistic culture', and to criticize the sort of theory that loses contact with the world - that becomes 'unreal'. It does so by representing the world's complexity as mere complication, or else it tries to impose a one- or two-dimensional order that is not there. Within this abstracted theoretical world there is a sort of 'acting out', an indulgence of the irrational under the guise of the rational. Now what strikes me about this is that there is a lot of it around, enough to warrant looking at it as a 'social fact' - a product of the sort of society we live in more than a matter of individual pathologies. It is possible to argue that over the course of this century European theory has become increasingly 'idealistic' in the sense of attributing not only the meaning of the world, but the world itself, to human consciousness and/ or its artifacts. The first of these seems to me to be clearly appro­ priate: human beings do endow both the physical and social world with meaning. The second is inappropriate: to endow something with meaning is not to create it or to rob it of its independent existence - I might treat my wife as if she were my mother, but this does not alter the fact that she is not. European philosophy, however, has travelled this course from Husserl's phenomenology, which was concerned with the way we construct meaning, to the theorists of structuralism and post­ structuralism, who write as if the world itself were created by language or discourse. The Dilman and Badcock books that I will discuss later rest about halfway along this line of development. Over the last twenty years, there has also been a quantitative growth in those working in theory. This is certainly true in British and American universities, and it cannot be attributed simply to the expansion of higher education in Britain - the physical growth of the education system does not determine which ideas become more popular. Whereas once this type or level of theory was largely confined to philosophy departments, it is now present in strength in sociology and literature departments and can be found among psychologists, psychoanalysts (since Lacan), political theorists and historians. I think it is also true to say that particularly in Britain, and to a marginally lesser extent in America, the growth of theory has been at the secondary level of exposition and elaboration. The Badcock and Dilman books all fall into this category. This philosophical development in western thought has often been noticed by Marxist thinkers, who usually attribute it to the dynamics of modem capitalism. The concentration of capital and increasingly bureau­ cratic and large-scale organization serve to restrict individual autonomy.

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People become isolated and see themselves alone as the source of meaning. As the process continues they lose direct contact with reality and see the world as imposed on them and out of their control, the magical product of mysterious forces such as language. I have con­ siderable sympathy with this approach, but I think a more sophisticated analysis is possible. I was struck by a comment Christopher Lasch (1980) makes in The Culture of Narcissism. He draws on the same social pro­ cesses to argue that the dominant personality structure and the principle behind many aspects of culture in late capitalism is narcissism. Modem bureaucratic society prevents the growth of independent characters able to make moral judgements of their own. This, too, is a familiar theme in the modem sociology of culture, but Lasch is able, by using psycho­ analytic theory, to make more coherent links than usual between the wider social structure, family structure and dynamics, and personality structure. The comment that drew my attention was this: 'Lacking any real intellectual engagement in the world - notwithstanding a frequently inflated estimate of his own intellectual ability - he [the narcissist] has little capacity for sublimation' (Lasch 1980: 85). It seems to me that this applies not necessarily to the theorists, about whom I know next to nothing, but to the theory I want to criticize. It is expansive and com­ prehensive. Even in the comparatively moderate exercises of Oilman and Badcock we have a systematic definition of maturity and human nature, presumably universally applicable, from the former, and a world history from the latter. I will suggest that under the guise of rational thought much of it implies a narcissistic omnipotence; and in the forms of argument, a destructive rage. It combines this with another feature of narcissism commented on by Lasch: a parasitic dependence on master thinkers. These thinkers are embraced and rejected with a consistency similar to promiscuous sexual relations. In sociology during the last ten years, for example, each generation of postgraduates has produced its own new master. The first I remember from my own postgraduate days were Harold Garfinkel, the American founder of ethnomethodology, and Claude Levi-Strauss, the French structuralist. The most recent is Foucault. In between, many others have put in an appearance. In the background, Marx and Freud stand firm and there are regular returns to 'close readings' of their work. If I am criticizing narcissistic theory, then perhaps the 'rules' I found myself formulating could, in a very elementary way, be seen as an attempt to strengthen the theoretical ego, on the one hand against a theoretical id demanding the immediate gratification of a totalizing theory which has all the answers and excludes opposition; and on the other against a punishing theoretical super-ego which stipulates that if the answer is not there, then nothing is. I do not, of course, imagine that theory can be separated from the psychodynamics of the theorist or from the social processes in which he or she might be involved. The problem

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seems, rather, to be one of distinguishing between a theory which subli­ mates unconscious processes in the attempt to understand the world, and theory which simply acts out those processes. Each 'rule' identifies an aspect of theoretical work which can be seen as a 'symptom': the use of a particular defence or the expression of a particular phantasy which avoids contact with the world that theory is trying to understand. I shall look at each in tum, using examples from the Oilman and Badcock books and sometimes going beyond these to look at other popular theoretical approaches. I shall conclude by specu­ lating a little about the more immediate institutional settings which perhaps reinforce narcissistic theory, and some implications for psycho­ analytic theory and practice. Before I move on to this, however, a summary of the books themselves is appropriate.

The books Since I shall be very critical of all four books, perhaps I should say at the outset that I enjoyed them all and learnt from them. They are stimu­ lating, interesting and clear - in fact it was Oilman's admirable clarity that led me to think about the significance of unintelligible theory. Freud and Human Nature (Oilman 1983) consists of a critique of Freud's conception of sexuality and his theory of the oedipal stage and goes on to look at his conception of morality and human nature, developing in the process an alternative theory. Freud and the Mind (Oilman 1984) is an extended philosophical discussion and critique of Freud's conception of the unconscious, tackling many of the familiar philosophical problems surrounding the idea. He is arguing against what might be called 'crude Freudianism' and in favour of what he regards as a more adequate psychoanalytic conception of human nature and the human mind. Freud's crudeness is seen in his attribution of a simple causal role to the sexual instinct, in the primacy he gave to the sexual instinct, his mech­ anical explanations in terms of energy flow, the determinism implicit in Freud's use of the idea of the unconscious and his conception of morality as forced on individuals from the outside under pain of social punishment. Oespite a criticism I shall be making later, Freud and the Mind contains one particularly good discussion of the free willi determinism issue. Oilman argues in both books for a conception of the human which allows for free will and does not involve simple causal explanations, and for a conception of human nature in which there is a place for a natural or innate morality. He bases many of his arguments on the work of Melanie Klein and the British object-relations theorists, and it is evident from the nature of his argument that he is eventually concerned with morality and free will. At the end of Freud and Human Nature there is a model of a 'mature personality' in which the destructive side of human existence has been overcome by the moral side; the life

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instinct has conquered the death instinct. For the mature person, infantile conflicts have been resolved; there is a preponderance of good feelings, a freedom from destructive and self-centred emotions, a lack of concern with defences, no fear of feelings, an inner security, deep convictions, genuine interests, and self-discipline. Turning to Christopher Badcock's books, the first, The Psychoanalysis of Culture (1980), takes literally the identity of ontogeny and phylogeny posited by Freud and argues that we can quite simply psychoanalyse a culture in the same way as we can psychoanalyse an individual. Badcock elaborates Freud's notion of the murder of the primeval father and the building of civilization on the resultant guilt, using modem evidence from anthropology to reinforce his case. Culture is identified with the institution of the super-ego, preferably in the individual rather than the state, and he traces the development of the institution through different cultures, concentrating, as did Freud, on the interpretation of religious beliefs. Thus animism corresponds to primal narcissism and the pre-oedipal phase, totemism to the oedipal period, polytheism and monotheism to the latency period, Catholicism and Protestantism to adolescence and psychoanalysis to maturity. Each modem stage rep­ resents a further 'return of the repressed', a coming to terms with primitive fears and phantasies. He does not shrink from the implications of this: It is my belief that if psychoanalysis ceased to be merely a department of modem medicine and became instead a system of education and the basis of culture, the universal neurosis which we call 'civilization' would have been largely resolved and the psychoanalysis of man would have been brought to a provisional, but successful conclusion. (Badcock 1980: 253)

In the second book, Madness and Modernity (1983), the crisis of modem culture is seen in terms of a failure of the individual super-ego, a sort of cultural regression. In some ways - at least in his analysis of the cause of the crisis - he is not far from Christopher Lasch, but he is at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Modem society is seen as a sort of cultural regression: the individual super-ego has been weakened and there is a tendency for the functions of the super-ego to be taken over by a strong state. Socialism tries to carry this to the extreme, producing dependent individuals with no sense of morality. The democratic state contributes towards this development in its welfare functions; on the other hand, left opposition to the state is seen as a refusal to accept the authority of the father, a refusal to develop through the oedipal stage. Rather strangely, I think, he attacks the dated bete rouge of student revolutionaries, and I had the rather odd experience of being dragged back to a persona of nearly twenty years ago. Both pairs of books are integral parts of a wider project of inter­ pretation and analysis; these have been rather brief summaries because I am less interested in the content than in the form of theorizing, the

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methods of argument each author uses. This takes us back to my rules. As I suggested earlier, each rule can be seen as referring to a theoretical 'symptom', a suggestion that something is being acted out rather than sublimated in the theory. I will now look at each of these symptoms.

The rules

Wishful thinking By 'wishful thinking' I mean the tendency to construct a theoretical world according to a usually implicit idea of what the world should be like. Since theory offers a way of ordering the world, a way out of confusion, it also offers a way of avoiding confusion where confusion, or at least complexity, actually exists. I think there is a tendency to wishful thinking in Oilman's work, in both theoretical and moral terms. While I agree with many of his arguments, I find myself suspicious of what he is doing. He uses the language of philosophical correctness, arguing that he is correcting Freud's errors and confusions. In other words, he is separating the wheat from the chaff and, of course, dis­ posing of the chaff; it is the familiar practice of trying to get rid of part of a theory which, for me, hints of wishful thinking. I think that there certainly is a determinist aspect to Freud's work and I agree that the arguments against any thoroughly determinist conception of human action are convincing. Nevertheless, in his 'crude' aspects Freud was not simply confused or mistaken but trying to grasp something that is as real as that dealt with in his non-determinist work, and I find his determinist or crude side helpful. For example, it makes intuitive sense to me to see depression in terms of energy flow: the withdrawal of energy from an external object and its refocusing on internal work and, in the case of a depression which is blocked, in terms of wasted energy. Similarly, it seems to me that the classical Freudian understanding of some neuroses, which does give priority to the sexual instinct and its moulding through the oedipal stage, is useful. If nothing else it grasps the 'drivenness' of a symptom which is experienced as determined and beyond one's control, and is a useful way of decoding its meaning. My own inclination would be to argue that these aspects of Freud's work are useful but not the whole of Freud - to dethrone them without executing them. Oilman tries to execute them and thus risks losing a vital aspect of experience and a useful means of understanding it. The removal of undesirable theoretical features of Freud's work is paralleled by the proposition that we can get rid of the undesirable moral aspects of human life. Outside the arguments our destructiveness remains, as do those aspects of our behaviour which can be understood through Freud's determinism. Perhaps we could see Oilman's attempt to

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remove these aspects as a rationalizing defence against depression, the depression which comes with recognizing that our omnipotence is a fantasy and that in fact we do have the capacity and the desire to destroy. At the same time Oilman's argument is edging on something positive, something which is a necessary part of all theory. In the same way, perhaps, that a good interpretation should draw on the 'healthy' or 'mature' or 'pro-change' aspects of the patient, so a good theory indicates some way forward; this is built into the very idea of theory entailing human freedom. There is a narrow line between constructing a utopian vision which can become a source of intimidation (I certainly found Oilman's model of maturity intimidating, perfect food for a punishing super-ego), and holding on to a necessary utopianism as a 'rough guide' and constructing realistic possibilities of change. 1 suspect that as individuals and as a society we need our utopianism, but perhaps we should not take it over-seriously. The important point here is that we do not need a utopian morality or the theoretical asser­ tion of freedom to find a way forward: hope surely lies rather in our ability to contain our destructiveness, to live with our conflicts and with that which seems determined within us. I ought to make it clear, as well, that I would not for one minute dismiss Oilman's work for this reason. In many ways it is admirable and, as I have already indicated, there is a very clear and careful discussion of the free willi determinism issue in Freud and the Mind. All I am saying is that there is this tendency towards wishful thinking, towards breaking the necessary connection between theory and the world, a break which in other thinkers can seal off theory into a self-contained world of its own. Wishful thinking in theory, then, can be seen as the unrestrained indulgence of infantile omnipotence - as important to theory as infantile omnipotence is to a reasonably successful individual development, but something which has to be modified considerably, if not left behind altogether.

Monistic assumptions and explanations By monistic assumptions I mean assumptions that the world is somehow composed of one type of phenomenon. Classically, variants of material­ ism and idealism tend to make such assumptions: in the one case that human beings and human action are not significantly different from the natural world; in the other that the world of humanity and nature is in effect a product of ideas. The history of philosophy is full of difficult dualisms which constantly reappear: mind and body, humanity and nature, subject and object, word and thing. Sociology, for reasons I am unclear about, has always had a tendency to produce thinkers who claim to have solved these problems; the more modest present their solution at book length, although I have occasionally seen it done in a paragraph.

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The most recent variant of this is post-structuralism, perhaps less among the original thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, but certainly among those who have taken up the ideas in English - those whom E.P. Thompson (1978) rather unkindly referred to as the 'lumpen­ intelligentsia'. What seems to have happened is that what was originally a methodological ploy in linguistics has been turned into a universal truth. The original ploy was fruitful: by 'bracketing off' the relationship between a word and its external referent and treating language as a system of conventional signs, considerable advances were made. It became possible to understand the meaning of a term from its rela­ tionship to surrounding terms. There is, of course, no entailment in this idea that the word does not have a referent, that it does not point to some external object, and certainly no implication that we cannot know an external object more or less adequately. However, these implications are all now taken as established and we are left with language alone, which is seen as actually producing whatever world we live in. The monistic assumption here cuts off a good part of reality in the same way as, for example, crude econ­ omistic Marxism cuts off the world of experience and ideas. In post­ structuralism, this tendency has recently been clearly documented and criticized (Crews 1986) and I do not want to spend much time on it here. A monistic assumption about the world usually implies a monistic explanation which, in the case of some forms of Marxism, for example, is quite explicit: everything is seen as determined by the economic level of organization. Such monocausal arguments are equally restrictive. Christopher Badcock manages to produce a psychoanalytic version of monistic explanation in both his books. His monism appears clearly in the following: We have seen that the decisive adaptive advantage in big-game hunting was in large part economic, that hunting was so much more effective a way of getting food compared with foraging. But it would be quite wrong to imagine that material forces operate in some occult way, as proposed by Marx, and that economic systems and the technology that go with them have any other origin than the mind of man. When the Wright brothers invented the airplane, they did not do so because of any crudely materialistic determinism, they did so because flight provided these two notably celibate young men with one of the most obvious of . . . all sexual sublimations. And if Marxists will rejoin that they could only have secured the technological and material wherewithal to undertake such a sublimation in the context of capitalism, I will reply that such is undoubtedly the case, but that capitalism, as we shall see in a later chapter, is itself just such a product of psychology and of a religious ethic which is based on it. And what is true of the Wright brothers is equally true of the origins of stone technology and of all other inventions and discoveries in the economic sphere. (Badcock 1980: 67-8)

This, of course, is pure assertion. If economic considerations were deci­ sive in the development of big-game hunting, then they were decisive

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and material forces have their effect. Even allowing for the fact that the Wright brothers never got their end away, one wonders about all the others involved in the development of powered flight; and it does seem a possibility that the development of aviation after the Wright brothers had to do with its military potential, its ability to get people from A to B quite quickly and transport goods to their markets. I would not dispute the fact that we imprint our minds on the surrounding world, but it does not follow, as Badcock would have it, that the external world is formed and governed by our minds, conscious or unconscious. Much of the time, I suspect, we are investing a largely independent outside world with meaning. This sort of monocausal explanation acts like blinkers, leaving unseen all the other things that go on. It leads straight away to a particularly obsessive form of wishful thinking, striking me as equivalent to the unconscious refusal of the Rat Man (Freud 1979) to recognize that his father was dead. Theoretical work becomes a matter of demonstrating that the single beloved cause is behind all phenomena, however unlikely that seems and however strongly the evidence points in the other direction. Marxism is particularly prone to this. There is the familiar crude economic determinism and a more sophisticated form where it is not a single cause which is defended but the theory as a whole which is at stake. Any theoretical approach which adopts a monocausal position takes on the air of an evangelical religious belief; there are attempts to convert the heathen and innumerable ad hoc hypotheses are formed, some coming close to excuses. There is this tendency in psychoanalysis too, and when Marxists or psychoanalysts get caught in this position they become subject to the Popperian criticism: the theory cannot be proved wrong, it does not respond to evidence, and it is akin to religion. Yet I actually enjoyed The Psychoanalysis of Culture; I found it interest­ ing, instructive and useful. I learnt more about Freud's theory of culture than I have from any other source and I gained an insight into cultures of which I am largely ignorant. It reminded me of my first contact with Marxism, which was via the more mechanical of Engels' expositions. Despite the simplicity and dogmatism of the arguments, it opened up a new world. In Badcock's case, I had had contact with that world beforehand, but a number of things fell into place. It could be that from the viewpoint of learning and teaching the simple, monocausal models of the world do open up areas of understanding; the problems occur when these are not developed and abandoned, rather as individuals might run into problems if they do not abandon childhood conceptions of sexuality. The holding on to total, monocausal explanations and assumptions seems to me to manifest something like infantile omnipotence. This, however, should not be allowed to hide the fact that good, simple causal explanations are available. Any insistence on multi­ causality can become a defence against knowledge, the sort of defence which, as a patient in the consulting-room, I might begin, 'Yes, but . . . '

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and go on to point out all sorts of situational factors affecting my difficulties. I am inclined to think that imperialist competition was a sufficient cause of World War I and that the other contributory factors worked largely on the result of the first. Yet I know people who would dispute this as a matter of principle, making, as it were, a religion out of multi-causality just as there are people who make a religion out of agnosticism or atheism.

Intelligibility I feel ambivalent about this. Theory often is difficult, attempting to adapt an established language to say something new, something which goes beyond what in any particular case is the 'given', and trying to grasp something ambiguous. It frequently involves stylistic experimentation: the attempt to grasp something through form as much as content. In addition to all this, I am often haunted by the thought that I live in a glasshouse. As I said earlier, neither Oilman nor Badcock is unintel­ ligible. However, if there is a tendency for theory to pull away from the outside world and become blind to it, then a complicated language and style can seal it into its own hermetic universe. Theory is difficult precisely because it goes beyond a description of what is available to us through perception and everyday commonsense and tries to grasp processes and relationships that are neither simple nor one-way. A theoretical concept is not a simple word. 'The unconscious' in Freud's work, for example, is more than the simple collective noun which Oilman defines it as. When Freud uses the term he is certainly referring to one or more of a range of phenomena, but the word is also implying the properties that he assigns to the unconscious (its timeless­ ness, freedom from the laws of logic, etc.) and its processes and rela­ tionships to the other elements of the psyche. This is a different and more meaningful use of the word, which we do not encounter in everyday speech; it therefore often puzzles people at first. There are indeed some very difficult conceptual languages in existence, not least in the natural sciences. I think there is a point where a difficult conceptual language can turn into merely a complicated redescription of what we already know. The history of sociology is full of such complicated descriptions: Parsons' structural-functionalism, Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and, again, much recent post-structuralist work. Often, very complicated pieces of jargon can be translated back into clearer language which actually adds to the sense: The concept of 'discursive practices' is part of a theoretical position which seeks, from a materialist perspective, to forge the conceptual tools which will allow the analysis of specific practices, their inter-relations and their effec­ tivities within contemporary social formations. The concept signals the importance of examining the relations which obtain between discourses and

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the practices in which they are always inscribed. It points to questions such as: what are the conditions of production of discourses within social fonnations? What are their effectivities? How do discourses interrelate to produce specific systems of meaning and practice? How are the contradictions produced through the intersections of different discourses articulated, minimized or extended? (Adlam et al. 1978: 123-4)

Which, in translation, means: we are Marxists interested in the various relations between ideas, actions and social structure. Why do such complicated languages appear? In part, I think it is the desire for recognition that in our society often appears as a desire for status, the same desire that can tum my local odd-job man into a buildings repair specialist. Sociology, as the youngest of human sciences, is perhaps especially prone to this tendency and the mastery of such a language marks one out, whether the result is respect or hostility. I have a sense, however, that there is more to it: that it has to do with making the world safe and bringing it under control, a phantasized omnipotence. The dangerous complication of reality is elevated into the comparatively safe complication of language (indeed, for post-structuralism, reality is language). Once the language is mastered it becomes possible to do what you like in this world; the language becomes a screen behind which all sorts of things may be acted out and omnipotence and narcissism are 'satisfied'.

Logical hatchet work The last thirty years have seen a remarkable increase in the philosophical sophistication of theory, particularly radical theory, coming initially with the translation of Althusser's work. A number of logical razors are now deployed and the assumption, usually, is that if a logical fault can be found in an argument then that argument can have no relation to reality. Behind this is an assumption that reality itself is logical - an assumption which we must make in a loose form in order to seek knowledge at all, but which, if it becomes an iron law, simply avoids the complexity of the world. There is a strong case to be made that we can know some things about the world; there is little evidence that we can know everything. The strong assumption of rationality presupposes that we can know everything, and this involves oversimplifying the world. My favourite example of the misplaced use of the logical hatchet comes from structuralist Marxist theory. Althusser (1969) developed a concept of 'relative autonomy', intended to carry the idea that political and ideological processes are neither epiphenomenal to nor completely independent of the economic structure of a society. Rather, the economic structure sets limits to what is possible in terms of politics and ideas, but within these limits both may develop independently. I have always found this idea useful: a comparatively sophisticated formulation which

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manages to get rid of simple economic determinism and the equally simplistic idea that politics and ideas are independent of economics, and which also avoids using the empty term 'dialectical' to describe the relationship. The logical removal of the concept runs as follows. The concepts of determination and autonomy are contradictory and mutually exclusive; therefore the concept of 'relative autonomy' is nonsensical; it is usually replaced with an assertion of complete autonomy based on 'discourse theory'. There is probably a way round this criticism by specifying aspects which are determined and other aspects which are autonomous. How­ ever, I am criticizing the idea that even if the argument were correct, it would provide a reason for abandoning the concept of relative autonomy. What happens is that we lose a concept which, however contradictory, goes some way towards indicating a complex and possibly contradictory reality and replaces it with a fairly simple idea that is clearly inadequate. This sort of argument is frequently used by philo­ sophers against Freud: if something is unconscious, then we cannot know it; therefore Freud is talking nonsense when he claims to describe the unconscious. Dilman verges on the use of logic alone to dispose of the elements of Freud's work that he does not like, often claiming to be 'correcting' Freud's philosophical errors and 'clearing up' his confusions. This is the theoretical equivalent of the patient who insists on seeing things in black and white and has immense difficulty with ambiguity and ambivalence. There is a clear connection between this sort of argument and the theme of omnipotence, and in my experience there is something destruc­ tive in this use of logic. It is a destructiveness often projected on to the opponent who is being logically destroyed: the 'wrong idea' is seen as the source of destruction and must therefore itself be destroyed. Perhaps there are castration associations: the logical knife must be wielded against the opponent to protect my own vital parts, and I often find an odd connection between my dislike (fear?) of this type of argument and my desire to employ it. In any case, it certainly seems to imply the unconscious statement: 'either I am everything or I am nothing'. There is, I think, a psychoanalytic variant of the logical argument. The connection lies in the feeling behind it and the desire to exclude, rather than in the form of the argument itself. It involves ruling an idea out of court through interpreting the opponent's motives rather than replying to the argument. Badcock employs this in Madness and Modernity. Criticism of Freud by thinkers such as Adler, Jung and Tausk as well as modem critics is discounted as purely destructive, as symptoms of unconscious anger, envy, jealousy and so on. Such criticisms are seen by Badcock simply as attempts to discredit Freud's integrity. The end result is similar to the result of logical hatchet work: an idea is ruled out of court and the possibility of further rational argument disappears. Here again destructiveness is projected on to the destroyer and then destroyed.

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One of the advantages of theory, then, seems to be that destructiveness can be acted out under the guise of rational argument or psychoanalytic interpretation. Sublimation would involve the deployment of logic in a different way: the attempt not to rule an idea out of court, but rather to bring ideas into play. Such logical arguments can, for example, be used to good effect against monistic positions. There seems to me to be a fairly straightforward argument against the assumption I used as an example earlier - that language creates its objects. If this were so, it would seem to rule out the possibility of being mistaken, yet the autonomous world is constantly forcing its presence upon us in the form of mistakes. Our regular experience of knowing the world better and avoiding mistakes would not be possible, yet it evidently happens. This does not imply that the assumption should be dropped. There is certainly a sense (or several senses) in which language creates its world; it is also the case that through language we can gain some knowledge of the outside world. Similarly, the psychoanalytic interpretation of ideas can deepen our understanding of those ideas, not eliminate them from discussion. For example, if perhaps we see the conflict between Freud and Jung in terms of a conflict between father and adolescent son, we can deepen our understanding both of the interpersonal dynamics of the conflict and, through the contextual understanding thus provided, of the ideas themselves. Erikson's work on psychohistory (for example, 1973b) seems to me to do this very well. To understand the psychodynamic context of an idea or theory does not make the idea or theory wrong.

A respect for the available evidence In some ways, this sums up everything that has gone before. The unavoidability of theory makes it a nonsense to try to chain it down to empirical data; yet, at the same time, some form of empirical data must always be the focus of theory. If we can know only part of the world, and the world is changing, there is always counter-evidence to any theoretical proposition. Assuming that it is noticed, there will also be some manipulating since a theoretical framework, because of its necessity, cannot just be abandoned. However, we need to be conscious of our manipulation and alert to what we do not know. This, of course, becomes impossible when a theory blinkers itself to significant areas of the outside world and attempts to establish an exclusive superiority. Some theorists behave like the comedian, furiously packing too much into a small suitcase; as soon as one side is locked, the other bursts open; or the bottom falls out and remains unnoticed while more and more is pushed into the top. Others are illusionists who produce a larger suitcase and maintain that it is really the same one. In many ways modem Marxism strikes me as the larger suitcase, despite many claims that it is the same one (the claim taking the form of a close reading of Capital ).

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Dilman comes close to producing a larger suitcase. There is always a danger in writing about psychoanalysis without first-hand clinical evidence (although I do not think this should act as a disqualification). In the absence of analysands and their resistances and their ability to show, in various ways, that we have made mistakes, it becomes possible to construct idealistic goals in direct contrast with Freud's pessimism, and claim an adherence to Freud. Badcock, on the other hand, tries to push everything into the same small suitcase. In The Psychoanalysis of Culture he manages to produce something like a world history in a couple of hundred pages. Looking through his bibliography, I wondered whether this was made easier by a comparatively heavy reliance on psychoanalytic resources - vast numbers of relevant anthropological and historical works must be excluded, and an awful lot hinges on the habits of Gelada baboons. Insofar as I was only scantily aware of this way of looking at history, I again found it useful. Vast panoramic sweeps, ignoring all the messy detail, are helpful ways into a field of knowledge, as are monocausal arguments. However, I am not sure that such works should pretend to be anything more; they are rather like the courses in some American universities with one semester on the history of civilization. When he deals with modem society in Madness and Modernity, however, the inadequacies of his monism and his treatment of empirical data become evident. He produces a political analysis which, in range and subtlety, is rivalled only by the Conservative Party Chairman, Norman Tebbit. My point is simply that the complexity of modem society and politics cannot be grasped on the simple model of the oedipal stage.

Conclusion I have tried to look at a number of aspects of theorizing as ways in which unconscious phantasies are 'acted out', and where possible to juxtapose these to uses of theory where perhaps the same phantasies can be sublimated in useful ways. Thus all the 'rules' I listed at the beginning ought to be broken at some stage. The common theme in the discussions so far is that the theory provides a means for establishing, at least in phantasy, an infantile omnipotence which protects itself by a destructive rage and a denial of real complexities, ambiguities and contradictions. I suggested that there has been a quantitative increase in this type of theory over the past decades and that this can be seen as a symptom of a cultural malaise, along the lines embodied in Lasch's work. By way of conclusion I want to look at some more immediate institutional bulwarks of narcissistic theory and indicate some of the implications for psychoanalytic organizations and practice. Perhaps my first point should be that I think theory does actually lend itself particularly well to a narcissistic use. Simply because it goes

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beyond what can be seen and experienced empirically, it offers a way of denying undesirable aspects of the empirical, and that is something we must all enjoy doing. In a culture which facilitates and encourages such a tendency, it is no surprise to see theory flourishing. However, it seems arguable that certain institutional arrangements promote and reinforce theoretical narcissism. I began this chapter by thinking about life in an academic institution, and there is perhaps something especially suitable to narcissistic theory in the nature of our universities. Outsiders have commented to me on the peculiar viciousness of academic life suffi­ ciently often for me to think that it really might be particularly extreme, although anyone who has read Janet Malcolm's work (1981, 1984) on the psychoanalytic establishment must realize that it is not unique to universities. Entering an academic career (at least when there are such careers available) is a matter of choice, but a choice initially taken during ado­ lescence, often, I suspect, an adolescence delayed in Britain by the intensity of pressures on school students. If adolescence is a time of reworking and rechoosing options available in the first years of our lives, then theoretical academic pursuits can be a way of avoiding an unpleasant reality. This avoidance is particularly easy in the exclusive atmosphere of student life. While for many this might be a vital time of growth before entering the outside world, there are those who can choose not to re-enter that world, and there is very little about university life which forces the outside world on to people. Even in the present situation of external threats the solution has seemed, for most, to be a matter of going in the same direction as they were before, only faster and more intensely, building up the publications and reputations that might protect their jobs. This enables the growth of isolated subcultures that support the sort of largely empty conceptual languages that I discussed earlier. Such a subculture could work to protect learning, knowledge and culture. I do not know how narrow a line stands between this function and an empty self-gratification, but there are signs that the ideal combination of the two functions is becoming more difficult to achieve; that the tendency to self-gratification in theory is outweighing the tendency to produce and establish knowledge and culture; that an organic link with a wider reality is being severed. One would expect this to be less the case with psychoanalytic insti­ tutions. They at least have a workface in their connection with those who tum to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to seek help. However, there seem to me to be at least three factors which encourage theoretical narcissism in psychoanalytic institutions, and the incidence of splits and the bitterness of internal arguments stand as witnesses to the existence of the tendency. The first is that, given the nature of theory, it is easy to see how it can be taken up and used blindly as a weapon in the normal rivalry and competitiveness of institutional life; it is always easier to feel

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one is defending knowledge rather than one's own interests. This can be reinforced by the simple desire to be good at one's job and the security which that brings. In an excellent short article arguing for an eclectic approach in psychotherapy, David Zigmund (1986) describes well how this can operate in a speculation about a doctor who, he suggests, unnecessarily and unwittingly deterred a patient from a therapy which could have been useful: It is likely that he was a therapist of precise and rigorous training and strong conviction who 'knew' what her psychopathology was and the only effective therapeutic stratagem to be employed; all else would be an avoidance or dilution of these central truths . . . His training had made him skillful and dexterous and many of his colleagues admired and reinforced his articulate commitment. (Zigmund 1986: 304)

Second, psychoanalysis, in Freud's writing and since, had always had a tendency to grand theory, to claiming to explain not just a limited area of individual and group psychodynamics but the nature of society and history. Freud described sociology as psychology writ large, and while I would not want to claim that psychoanalysis cannot throw an interesting light on many areas of social life, to claim it as the basis of sociology or history, which is clearly what Christopher Badcock is doing, is over the top. Yet there has been a tum to psychoanalysis in several disciplines, particularly among radicals, which seems to carry with it the hope that all problems will be solved. The present writer has been involved in that tum, and perhaps this chapter is part of it. There is what one acquaint­ ance has called a 'psychoanalysis and culture industry', to which the four books discussed here very much belong, that has arisen as part of the proliferation of narcissistic theory. Third, and finally, there is the tendency in psychoanalytic institutions to exclusivity and a degree of dogmatism. One may speculate that perhaps unconsciously Freud and not Bion was the first psychoanalyst to discover the 'flight-fight' group and to deploy the processes involved to ensure the survival of psychoanalysis. The tendency of modem analysts to tum their backs on the rest of the intellectual community and con­ centrate solely on the accumulated body of clinical evidence provides the basis for narcissistic theory to flourish. The grain of truth in the work of virulent critics like Gellner (1985) comes in their identification of the parallels between psychoanalysts' organizational behaviour and theore­ tical debates and the Church and theological debates. So psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic organization too can encourage narcissistic theory. Largely, I suspect, we are dealing with processes beyond an easy conscious control; it is nonetheless important to be conscious of the dangers and of what we might be doing. It is perhaps also important to try to draw out the strands of my argument and construct at least a sketch of a non-narcissistic use of theory. The infantile impulses remain the same; the difference is that they are put to the

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service of a project other than their own immediate satisfaction. The original omnipotence can be modified. The desire to know everything can be coupled with a realization that such knowledge is impossible, and it follows that the broad theoretical frameworks we produce can be no more than working maps, to be changed and abandoned as we develop them. A sense of modesty is appropriate to any theoretical enterprise, together with the realization that we will never be defending an absolute truth. It is important to argue about theory; but the narcissistic rage which often lies behind such argument can also be modified. It can be directed, as I tried to show when I discussed logical hatchet work, to opening up possibilities rather than closing them off. While we need some intellectual security - we cannot simply surrender all ideas and somehow give ourselves up to the contradictions and complexities of the world - we can afford to recognize gaps and difficulties without collapsing into confusion. It is safe to think in a language which is intelligible to others and to hold open the possibility that we might be wrong. Given this, it is a fairly straightforward matter to justify the breaking of the rules I listed at the beginning . Wishful thinking can suggest or even open up courses of action, ideas for social change, as long as we remain able to recognize their failure and the impossibility of utopia. Monistic assumptions and explanations can open up and develop new ways of looking at the world, as long as we realize that once we have established a way of looking at the world it will have to be modified to take account of all sorts of other things. It can be important to develop new theoretical languages, as long as we remain aware of the necessity to talk to other people. Logical argument is vital, as long as it opens up theoretical possibilities; and it might even be permissible to ignore evidence to develop a coherent theory, as long as we realize that we have eventually to take account of the evidence and modify the theory accordingly. The important point is that it is possible to think openly, without being a failure and without being destroyed. Returning to the main themes of this book, I have tried to show how theory 'contains' and expresses different emotional and experiential rela­ tionships to the world and these relationships may be seen as opening up or closing down our ability to understand the world. As I have suggested before, psychoanalysis can attempt to close down the experi­ ence of experiencing and thinking and that is what I will be looking at in the next chapter.

12

WHAT 'S HAPPENING TO MOURNING?

What I want to do in this chapter is to look at the way in which the meaning of psychoanalytic ideas changes when they are considered outside the consulting room. Something that appears in day-to-day therapeutic work in the consulting room to be a benign and helpful activity can appear in the context of the wider culture in a rather different way. We can think we are doing one thing, and we can actually be doing that thing, but we can also be doing something else, which we do not know about. This should be no problem for those familiar with the unconscious, but what I am suggesting is that there is also a dimen­ sion of the unknown contained in the wider network of social relation­ ships, the sort of society in which we work and out of which we develop. My suggestion is that we should at least be aware of how this wider society might transform the meaning of what we do. I want to try to make my point through looking at what has happened to the way in which we have thought about and dealt with death and mourning over the last century or so. My suggestion is that there has been a change in what I would call the social organization of mourning, an attempt to organize the process of mourning, and perhaps even of dying itself, in such a way that the real pain and loss is denied, that they can even be seen as 'good things' . At its extreme this becomes a mapping in advance of the mourning process as something through which people should be taken; notions of originality, of each grief and mourning as being unique, individual and unpleasant seem to disappear. A number of social processes are at work in this change. At an everyday level, I can see its effects among my undergraduate students and in experiential groups that I lead. Much of the literature on death talks about a twentieth-century taboo, even the 'last great taboo', the subject about which nobody talks. Socially approved mourning rituals have all but disappeared; the bereaved are ignored, or expected to be back in a normal life as soon as possible. I am sure that this is true for some people, but I have noticed that it is certainly not true for others. When I lecture on death and mourning to social science undergraduates, there is a rush to write essays on the subject; it is one of the most popular topics, more popular than sexuality. In the experiential groups, members often enthusiastically embrace death as a metaphor for the ending of the

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group, sometimes, I think, too enthusiastically, as if they have never felt the fear of death. When I check the library catalogue, the number of books about death, grief or mourning seems to increase monthly. We can add to this the growth of bereavement counselling, of Cruse and of the hospice movement, none of which points to a reluctance to talk about death. So perhaps something else is going on. One method of thinking about it is in the way that Foucault (1984) discusses sexuality. We tend to see the Victorian period as one in which nobody talked about sex, but Foucault points out that it was a period in which talk about sex exploded. More was written than ever before, by doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, biologists, etc. It was a period when sexuality was catalogued, classified and brought under the control of professionals, and Freud was part of this. It was also the time when sexuality became what the sociologist Anthony Giddens calls 'seques­ tered' - split off from the rest of social life and given its own specialized space governed by experts. Perhaps the same thing is happening to death and mourning. I will be looking shortly at the way in which the psychiatric profession and then the therapy and counselling professions have attempted to establish control over mourning. My argument is that this has been at the cost of an understanding of the real complexity of grief and mourning at a theoretical level, if not in everybody'S practice. Further, unless we are careful, our insights become caught up in a process of social control in which our work is geared, without our knowing it, less to healing, to the integration of the whole individual, or to freeing the individual to take his or her own decisions than to producing the sort of personality that is most suitable to contemporary society.

Classic theories of mourning It is tempting to think of changes in theory as developments in theory that somehow we are getting closer to the truth as time goes on. Sometimes such a view is right, but not necessarily so. The deeper we go into the social sciences, the more likely that the changes in our theory might be the result of the changing social conditions in which we work rather than a growth in knowledge. Indeed, in psychoanalytic theories of mourning I think it is possible to identify a reduction in knowledge content in favour of the 'positive' view of mourning that we can find so often today - a view which underemphasizes the straightforward strength of the pain that is involved and glosses over the depth of guilt and our inherent ambivalence. This is summed up in a quotation from the review by Social Work Today of Colin Murray Parkes' Bereavement (1987), cited on the back cover of the book: 'He has helped us all to accept our share in the creative use of suffering.' It seems we should always look on the bright side! Others have noted the same process in

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relation to dying itself. Anna Witham (1985) talks about the idealization of dying in health professional training and the difficulties that students have when they come up against the real thing; Robert Kastenbaum (1982) has made much the same point. The earlier psychoanalytic theories of mourning - of Freud, Abraham and Klein - all contain a distinction between normal and pathological mourning and in this sense can be seen in Foucault's terms as illustrating a process of a profession carving out an area of power for itself. But part of my case is that their distinction is qualitatively different from that in the work of more recent writers. Mourning for Freud (1984) involves a withdrawal from the outside world and a concentration of energy on the one who has been lost. This is accompanied by painful feelings of dejection and an inability to find a new love object. We work through mourning, with great expense of energy, by repeated reality testing and finding that the loved one really has gone. We withdraw - de-cathect our feelings from the lost one until we are ready to find a new love object. The basic model is an energy-flow system. Energy is invested in the loved one, who dies or vanishes. The energy is then withdrawn into the mourner where it stays for a shorter or longer time until the loss is accepted, when it is reinvested in a new love object. Freud argues that we are familiar with this experience, we know that it will pass and therefore we take it as normal. He went on to identify an abnormal or pathological mourning - melancholia - in which the mourner identifies with the lost loved one and directs the criticism and anger which belongs to the lost one to the mourner. Melancholia, then, is a state in which we have taken the lost loved one inside and kept him or her there, attacking ourselves rather than the person who is lost. In later developments of the theory, we can see the tenuousness of this distinction in such a way as to suggest that the attempt to maintain it is a result less of understanding what is happening than of establishing the mourning process as an area of professional expertise and control. Abraham (1927), for example, makes the point that the process of internalization of the loved one is a normal part of mourning and in fact the 'successful' mourner is able to internalize the lost one as a good object. The melancholic is unable to achieve this because hostility to the loved one was so great. This moves us closer to the internal world and its complexities and the normal/pathological now hangs on the degree of hostility in the relationship - or perhaps more accurately in the mourner. These ideas are developed and rendered more sophisticated in Klein's work (1986) and the idea of pathological mourning changes again. To begin with I will take her example of bereavement (a Mrs A after the sudden death of her son) and examine in particular her first reactions. Mrs A begins by sorting out letters, keeping her son's and throwing away the others - disposing of the indifferent and hostile, the bad feelings. This is seen as an attempt at restoring her son, to keep him safe

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inside her, an obsessional mechanism used as a defence against the depressive position; the obsessive action wards off the bad feelings. For the first week there was an (incomplete) withdrawal, a numbness and an absence of dreaming - Mrs A usually dreamt every night. Her first dream brought associations with an occasion when she had recognized that her brother was not as wonderful as she had thought, an event that was experienced as an 'irreparable misfortune'. The event was also associated with guilt, as if it were the result of her own harmful wishes against her brother. Behind these harmful wishes and 'very deeply repressed' was a desire to punish her mother through causing her to lose her son; she was jealous of her mother for possessing such a son. This led her to a death wish against her brother: one of the deeper dream wishes was 'my mother's son has died and not my own'. This was followed by sympathy for her mother and sorrow for herself. Her brother had, in fact, died and besides her earlier sorrow at this event she had, unconsciously, experienced a sense of triumph. Klein argues that some degree of Mrs A's ambivalence to her brother, 'though modified by her strong motherly feelings', had been transferred on to her son and entered into the present grief. The first defences, then, were the manic defences against grief: denial and triumph. In Mrs A's internal world the grief was transferred to her mother, with the denial that they were one and the same person. Klein goes on to describe the process of movement into sorrow and recon­ nection with the world, and then the retreat into manic triumphalism and denial. The whole to-and-fro movement is seen as involving the re­ establishment of the good internal objects with which the mourner can identify. I have set out this example at some length because of its focus on the complexity of the psychological processes of mourning, involving feel­ ings with which it is not normally associated: jealousy, triumphalism and a desire to punish. Again it also blurs the line between normal and pathological mourning, rooting the latter in a deeper pathology, which in tum is rooted in the earliest stages of life and cannot be 'known in advance'. It seems to me that Klein moves away from thinking about pathological mourning to the pathological personality. In fact Klein is the theorist who least fits into my argument and the interesting thing is that the most recent developments have steadily stripped away the emphasis on the complexity of the internal world, the less acceptable feelings, at the same time as they have established mourning as a subject for professional intervention and control.

The development of contemporary theory The most recent and dramatic changes in the theory have taken place over the past three decades, beginning with two papers by Bowlby in the

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early 1960s (1960, 1961) and followed by Parkes (1972). This decade saw the appearance of a number of other books on death and mourning (see, for example, Gorer 1965; Hinton 1967) and the beginning of the con­ temporary discourse on the subject. The work of both Bowlby and Parkes emphasizes the aetiology of mourning and focuses on 'environ­ mental failure', rather than the dynamics of the internal world. Parkes' book marks the claim of psychiatry over this realm, arguing now that all mourning is pathological and should be regarded as a mental illness. Rather than put forward arguments in favour of such a position, he deals with arguments against it. The first is the 'labelling' argument: if we call mourning a mental illness, we stigmatize those to whom the label is attached. Parkes' argument is that if we do not call the bereaved mentally ill for this reason, we are reinforcing the stigmatizing connotations of the term. This is fair enough if we accept that mourning is a mental illness. Much more depends on his second argument. He says that people object on the grounds of the normality of mourning, but measles is normal and nobody would suggest that it is not an illness. Grief, he argues, like physical illness, brings discomfort and disturbance of function: On the whole, grief resembles a physical injury more closely than any other type of illness. The loss may be spoken of as a 'blow'. As in the case of physical injury, the 'wound' gradually heals; at least it usually does. But occasionally complications set in, healing is delayed or a further injury reopens a healing wound. In such cases, abnormal forms arise, which may even be complicated by the onset of other types of illness. Sometimes it seems that the outcome may be fatal . . . I know of only one functional psychiatric disorder whose cause is known, whose features are distinctive, and whose course is usually predictable, and that is grief, the reaction to loss. Yet this condition has been so neglected by psychiatrists that until recently it was not even men­ tioned in the indexes of most of the best known general textbooks of psychiatry. (Parkes 1972: 25-6)

In trying to define grief in terms of presenting symptoms, Parkes settles for the pining or yearning that he immediately relates to separation anxiety and Bowlby's theory of attachment needs. Parkes identifies three stages of grief (the presenting symptoms changing with each one): first a numbness; then pining, then disorganization and despair; recovery only beginning after this last experience. In the world of the health professional, progress can easily become a matter of having more illnesses added to the list. On the face of it, Parkes' argument is plausible and humane - in fact it is plausible and humane. It also attempts to extend the power of the psychiatric pro­ fession in a way instantly recognizable to readers of Foucault and it changes the way we think about mourning in a fairly radical way. One question that emerges is where do we draw the line - should we regard the divorced, the redundant, or anybody suffering from an

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upheaval in their lives as mentally ill? I would suggest that this problem has been solved by the growth of psychotherapy, which brings almost any human state within the range of treatment without having to medicalize it. Now what happens in Parkes' account of mourning is that it is seen as less of an internal psychological process of conflicts and reorganization in the internal world and the emphasis is more on the emotions, the external presenting symptoms. By placing it in Bowlby's framework we are moved closer to a quasi-behaviourism. I do not think that what Parkes says is wrong - it is less complete than either the Freudian or Kleinian accounts of mourning, seeing it in terms of cause and effect rather than as an internal processing of experience. In more recent psychoanalytic accounts of mourning two tendencies sit side by side. On the one hand there is an implicit or even an explicit recognition of the implacability of death, the normality of grief and the never-endingness of mourning. On the other there is the desire to iron all this out, tum it into a positive experience and avoid any depth investi­ gation of the internal world. A set of three papers in a recent issue of Group Analysis is a good illustration, containing accounts of the work of a group of therapists from a hospital in Edmonton, Canada, who have developed a pro­ gramme of short-term psychotherapy for loss (Lakoff and Azim 1991; Piper and McCallum 1991; McCallum et al. 1991). In the first paper Lakoff and Azim (1991) talk about the contemporary denial of death and the absence of a recognized place for mourning. They also point to the difficulties in understanding what successful or unsuccessful, normal or pathological mourning might be. Quoting a study by Osterweis et al. (1987: 16), they maintain that length of time is no indicator of patho­ logical mourning, but rather the quality and quantity of reactions over time. They also suggest that a change that seems to indicate a 'healthy' recovery in one person could mean the opposite for another. For one person, throwing him or herself into work may be avoidance; for another it may indicate a new flow of creativity. In the second paper, Piper and McCallum (1991) survey the studies of group interventions in mourning. They begin by lamenting the lack of involvement of health professionals in providing group services for the bereaved. They suggest a classificatory schema involving two dimen­ sions, initial and transitional, and two types, normal and pathological. Help is usually sought in the transitional stage and if the mourning is normal it is mainly a matter of support and practical intervention. Pathological mourning may occur at either stage and may take the form of too much or too little grief - in terms of intensity or duration. However, although they recognize that duration can mean from two months to never and individual differences influence progress through mourning, they then argue that such complication 'may be partially resolved by considering the debilitating impact of the loss in terms of

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symptomatology and impaired functioning when determining the type of mourning process occurring' (Piper and McCallum 1991: 365). The third paper is an account of a study of the effectiveness of twelve­ week groups for those caught in pathological mourning according to a standard diagnosis which, presumably, is not derived from the previous discussion: Most patients received a DSM-11 1 Axis 1 diagnosis (usually affective adjust­ ment or anxiety disorder) and about one quarter received an Axis 1 1 diagnosis (usually dependent personality). (McCallum et al. 1991: 377)

The groups were tightly controlled: Two experienced therapists each led four of the eight groups. They followed a technical manual and attended a weekly seminar where conceptual and tech­ nical issues were discussed and audiotapes of sessions were played. The theoretical orientation of the twelve-week, time-limited groups was psycho­ analytic, and this was checked by conducting a process analysis of seven sessions from each group using the Psychodynamic Work and Object Rating System (Piper and McCallum 1991) which confirmed that the therapists were active, interpretive and group-focused, as intended. (McCallum et al. 1991: 377)

In these papers, we seem to have reached the point where it is simply assumed that professionals should be concerned with the mourning process and their absence is to be remarked upon. Despite all the reser­ vations, a standard diagnostic tool is used to distinguish pathological grief and there are manuals by which to guide a closely regulated therapeutic process. It is clear from the account that while the therapist is listening closely to the group, he or she knows in advance what sort of interpretation he or she will make. It is mapped out according to a view of the appropriate emotions and their expression, rather than on an intimate understanding of the different inner worlds of the group members. We find here a continued degradation of our understanding of mourning: pathology is defined by a standard measure and 'correct' feelings are laid out in the discussion of the groups. Anger seems OK but not hatred; guilt might be appropriate, but triumph is not mentioned. There is, if you like, a taming of grief and we know what the patient should be doing. There is, further, a move beyond the identification of emotion as a sign of pathology to 'functional impairment' which hands over the definition of 'pathology' to a society which, as many have pointed out, allows no recognized space for mourning. It is a not very large step to the attempt at control and limitation of mourning set out in a recent handbook for healthcare professionals as the aims of a therapeutic assessment of bereavement:

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1 2

To facilitate and consolidate a satisfactorily resolving of bereavement. To provide a framework for specific preventive intervention with bereaved who are at high risk of malresolution. 3 To provide a framework for specific intervention with pathological bereavements so that these may possibly be diverted to a more adaptive course. (Raphael 1984: 347)

The job becomes getting the machine back on the road.

Psychotherapy as social control My argument concerns the way in which our conception of mourning has changed, especially over the last thirty years. We have lost the depth that can be found in the work of Freud and Klein, whose papers on mourning have been seminal sources for psychoanalytic thought. The development has been away from the dynamics of the inner world towards classifications based on surface criteria and the development of schemata, programmes for mourning, stages that people have to be moved through. These changes have gone along with the growth of bereavement counselling and division of death and mourning into a separate area of life - its 'sequestration'. I want now to think about the reasons why this has happened. Put as simply as possible, my argument is that as psychoanalytic ideas enter the wider culture they get taken up and transformed - some aspects get lost and others emphasized. Thus the creative dimensions of mourning are emphasized and we are led to think in terms of resolution. It seems to me that this is not a normal human resistance to the horror of death - other societies and our society at other historical periods have thought differently - it has more to do with the sorts of changes we are living through. As these ideas get reinterpreted in this way, so they come to fill a social function which is different from the apparently straightforward activity of helping people with which, at first sight, they are associated. My argument here is that the ideas and the practices they generate become a form of social control, the therapy becoming a play of false selves of which the practitioners are unconscious. We can see the forms of thinking in the wider culture at work, for example, in the attempt to produce programmed treatments for patho­ logical mourning. One way of looking at it is the development of a therapeutic programming of people to deal with new and different situations. Giddens (1991) argues that the modern forms of self-therapy and popular self-help books are precisely providing formulae for dealing with life in what he calls 'late modernity'. It is possible to push this a bit further. Over the last decade or so the computer has provided new metaphors for talking about human beings. Whereas in the 1 960s psychology departments might have been full of rats and pigeons and

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mazes, they are now full of computers and their object of study is thought of as a computer. The move from behaviourism to cognitive psychology has not been a movement towards intellectual depth. In this context, if some of the insights from psychotherapy can be simplified and standardized, they can be seen as programmes for the human computer. The growth, in the USA, of twelve-step programmes for practically everything is an extreme example. This is of course reinforced by con­ temporary concerns with the economics of healthcare, the need to be seen to have a product to sell and a product that is successful. There might not be much demand for a therapy that promises only a return to 'normal human misery'. The place of the market in healthcare systems is a symptom of a much wider and deeper change that sociologists refer to as 'late modernity' or sometimes 'postmodernity' (see Giddens

1990; Harvey 1989). Harvey

argues that the economic basis is the development of factory production which has moved to the third world, and the rapid transferability of money capital, which has meant a radical reorganization of the labour market in the west and intensified competition. Large-scale systematic production has declined, with rapid growth in part-time or short-term contract labour. 'Careers', while not disappearing, are rarer and more difficult to hold on to and the emphasis in production and supplying services is on high turnover and short-term processing. In this context goods and services that are used up as soon as they are supplied are ideal (and of course psychotherapy can be seen as such a service). If we think of this in terms of the individual and individual experience, we can see that it can generate a great deal of anxiety. These changes have speeded up a process that began with the growth of large, urban complexes, a process of external isolation and internal fragmentation. In Kohut's

(1971) work on narcissism, he comments on

the change in family structures since Freud was working - from a situation where there was too much contact between parents and children to one where there is too little. This has been accompanied through this century by the steady loosening of community ties, increased geographical and social mobility (the latter both up and down) and the decline of what we might call 'holding organizations'. I have already mentioned the family and the local community but we can add to those, in this latest rush of fragmentation, business and service organizations (such as British Rail and the NHS), trade unions and professional associations as self-governing bodies - all the collective entities which could stand between the individual and some much wider, anonymous entity we call society. Giddens talks about the devel­ opment of abstract systems, the anonymous juggernaut of modernity, at least as it appears from the point of view of the individual. What happens in such a situation, it seems to me, is first the process of mourning becomes not just a model for major life changes, as it was with the classical theorists, but also a model for everyday life. The modem

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therapies that Giddens discusses discourage people from trying to make lasting attachments and urge a living for the moment only. Psycho­ analysis does not go as far as this, and I doubt that it ever could, but its contribution to the contemporary denial of pain and complexity lies in its approach to grief and mourning. We can tum loss into 'growth' or 'creativity', and perhaps we do not need to think about the loss. In a society which is increasingly frightening, we can think of change as always positive, when in fact it is arguable that it is increasingly destructive - of relationships and lives. It is arguable that psychotherapy in contemporary society runs the danger of becoming an abstract system, an institution providing formulae for living as psychotherapists try to proselytize in newspaper columns and popular books. The difficulty, of course, is that as psycho­ therapists we share the same anxiety as everybody else. We have the same threats to our livelihood; our relationships fail; friends and colleagues move away, or we move away from them; our jobs are threatened or our private practice comes under strain. We seek our own formulae for living - in fact I suspect that many of us undertake training to try to find such formulae. Perhaps it is a sign of good training that the students completing it are more anxious about their lives than they were at the beginning, but - going by public pronouncements - there seems to be a large number of therapists and counsellors in possession of some sort of truth. Returning to grief and mourning, it seems to me that we need comparatively little experience to realize its individuality and the sometimes astonishing way in which a person finds his or her way through it, to a different life or to their own death - or the equally surprising way in which they might decide not to move on from mourning. I suspect that an 'authentic' therapy should respect decisions which, according to an abstract framework, are pathological and perhaps drop the distinction altogether. This means taking risks, recognizing that we do not possess formulae for living - or for dying - and that we are as isolated and threatened as everybody else. The alternative is that psychotherapy becomes an encounter not between therapist and patient in a joint search for meaning but between two false selves, the therapist hiding behind his or her formulae or programmes which emphasize only one side of our lives, the patient adopting that false self in an attempt to please and reassure the therapist. If mourning is the discovery of the meaning of what has been lost, in all its ambiguity, ambivalence and complexity, then this discovery is prejudged and fenced in if we set out already knowing what should be happening. The more anxious we are, the more we will need to cling on to such formulae; the more our patients will become like the anxious infant trying to protect a more anxious parent by being what the parent wants. In such a situation, our work can seem very successful. On the other hand, we can help the patient to suffer. If we see success as therapists only in enabling creativity and happiness or in being effective

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in some tangible and possibly measurable way, if, in short, we see ourselves as selling goods on a market to attract customers or to please management, we are developing a false world which will collapse only too easily in the face of our critics.

13

CONCLUSION: EXPERIENCING IDENTITY

By way of conclusion, I want to tum again explicitly to the issue of identity and bring together some of the heterogeneous themes of the chapters in this book around suggestions about how we might begin to understand our experience of identity. Many of the ideas I try to develop here originate in psychoanalysis but I am not trying to develop a 'psychoanalysis of identity'. Even less am I trying to develop a sociology of identity - various versions of such a sociology already exist and I devoted Chapter 1 to criticizing them. Rather I want to try to elaborate a number of ideas which might be able to sensitize sociologists to the experience of those they study, not only when they are talking about identity but when they have anything to say that impinges upon indi­ vidual human being and acting. At the very least they should act as a warning against simple sociological determinism and assumptions of rational action based on cognition.

The experience of psychic space One accompaniment of the development of object-relations theory in psychoanalysis has been an implicit and often explicit view of an inner life which has it own 'space'. Indeed the psyche is often referred to as a container and the emotional function of the parent and of the therapist is seen as a matter of 'containing'. It is this inner space that the 'normotic' character denies and to begin I want to try to explore how we might conceive of 'inner space'. Freud left us with a notion of a psyche within which three structures engage in a necessary conflict with each other. This by itself is sufficient reason to prefer the more contemporary term 'psychodynamic' to 'psychoanalytic'. When we try to understand a person's experience of the world, we do not discover what is happening through analysis, through breaking experience down into its component parts, we understand it as a dynamic process in which external and internal stimuli are in constant interaction with each other. We find in this internal space not only the drives and their conscious and uncon­ scious representation, but also our internal objects, those immediate family members or caretakers whom we have 'taken in' during the

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process of our psychological development, integrating or failing to inte­ grate them with the other structures. Our emotions arise in the interplay between our experience of the outside world, and the unconscious phantasies we construct out of the contents of our internal world, and our conscious, more rational attempts to make sense of what we do and how we are in the world. We are inevitably engaged in some sort of relation to this internal world. The 'normotic' character denies its existence and tries to limit its contact only with the rational and conscious elements of experience, those related more or less directly to the external world. One could perhaps make a crude contrast with the narcissistic character who sees the external world only in terms of inner fantasies and needs which are felt to be of overriding importance. Although these are opposite ways of dealing with the internal world they are both reactions to the anxiety generated by its existence. On the one hand we can be afraid of the depth, complexity and ambivalence of our desires, afraid of what we will find within ourselves if we look too hard. On the other hand we can be afraid of finding that our experience of the outside world is mistaken, that the world is not as we would like it to be. Both reactions, the normotic and the narcissistic, are ways of closing down the complexity of our inner world and the difficulty of dealing with its relationship to the outer world. Psychodynamic therapy works with an implicit set of values around the notion of the inner world and inner space. I think it is worth drawing out some of these because they can provide a useful standard for a critical approach to social identity and a standard for social criticism. Elsewhere (Craib 1994) I have attempted to define these values in terms of ambiguity and difficulty, contradiction and negativity. Trying to think about the same issues in terms of psychic space, they all point to the importance not only of recognizing an inner world but of allowing its complexity and recognizing the value of the way in which it frustrates our desires. One way of looking at psychotherapy is as a way of 'enlarging' psychic space and at the same time recognizing its limits, a modification of both the normotic and narcissistic sides of the personality. On the one hand, the patient learns that he or she has aspects of personality of which he or she has been unaware, and that are on initial discovery disturbing or frightening. The 'enlargement' of inner space is a matter of becoming more conscious of these parts of oneself. On the other hand the patient becomes aware that he or she is not responsible for the actions of other people or the state of the world around them. This releases energy which can be devoted to more practically effective action and understanding of the world. In Chapter 2, I contrasted Lukacs' notion of experience with that implied in contemporary 'identity politics'. In terms of psychic space, the distinction is between a contradictory experience which pushes people into a deeper exploration of their world and their relationships and what

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might be called a unitary experience of self which closes down internal psychic space and can be seen as an attempt to avoid the difficulties implicit in complex and contradictory experiences of oneself and the world. Simmel

(1971) talked about the complexity of our experience of

the modem world and of the necessity to defend ourselves from it nearly a century ago, but it seems to be an insight which has been lost many times since then. One of the ways in which we try to protect ourselves from the anxiety of living is by trying to identify ourselves with something, by trying to make our social identity into our identity. If, for example, I take my gender as a basis for my identity and join one of the various men's groups which promise to enable me to discover my 'real' masculine self, or alternatively to rid myself of my more traditional, macho or chauvinist elements, then I am being offered a 'new' self which will carry all sorts of satisfactions. I will be relieved of those parts of myself of which I do not approve, which I find uncomfortable, and I will receive the praise and support of those who are embarked upon the same course. I will not be plagued with self-doubt or, if I am trying to tum myself into a 'new man', I might find myself plagued with the delicious self-doubt which I will take as a sign not of internal trouble but of my salvation. This search is for narcissistic satisfaction and involves a different form of politics to that based on alliances and conflicts between different interest groups. The latter is always a matter of negotiation and com­ promise around ideas and policies. Identity politics seems to be largely a matter of being recognized and political argument is a matter of making a case to be recognized: I am a victim of traditional sex-role stereotyping; I am bravely struggling against such stereotyping; I am searching for a real self which is beyond question or doubt. From this perspective perhaps the sociologically interesting questions are not about social identity at all and especially not about the social construction of identity, but about the nature of the social conditions which encourage individuals to 'close down' their psychic space around one or another social identity and the social conditions which encourage an opening up of psychic space in an attempt to explore oneself and one's relationships. I would suggest that the more socially isolated individuals become and the more their world is subjected to change, the more they are to seek reassurance and relief through a social identity experienced in such a narcissistic way. The paradox of such a search is that it is inherently unstable on both an intrapersonal and an interpersonal level. The only reason I seek to identify with my social identity (rather than, for example, use it for my own purposes) is because I am aware of internal complexities and contradictions to such an extent that I find it difficult to tolerate the anxiety they provoke. In order to try to suppress an awareness of the complexities, I have first to be aware of them; in other words I can only try to achieve an identity in this sense if I am already aware that I cannot

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achieve it. The question then becomes one of for how long I can fool myself, and the harder I try the clearer the signs that I have failed. This psychological relation to oneself is what Sartre

(1957) called 'bad faith'

and can be understood in either psychoanalytic or existential terms - in both cases it is a matter of trying to be what one is not and cannot be. The failure on an interpersonal level comes through the parasitic nature of narcissistic attachment. If a particular and limited experience of the world (my truth as a man) is at the basis of my identity, then it must be confirmed and shared at all times, yet no two people have the same experience of the world. The more I get to know my new comrades, the more I realize how I differ from them and the more I see in them the things that worry me about myself which I am trying to avoid. The temptation is always to find a new and purer group where I hope to avoid these difficulties. Such fragmentary narcissistic tendencies have always been present in conventional politics, usually at the far right or left of the political spectrum, but they seem to be at the centre of identity politics.

Identity and the self as container In interactionist terms I have been talking about a situation in which the

'1' attempts to become the 'me', to close down internal space. There is however another sense in which one can be said to have an identity and this lies in the ability to say '1' - the ability that Jenkins seems to put down to simple physical continuity. When I use the word '1', I am doing more than simply asserting my habitation of a body: I am adopting an attitude to the world and to myself. I can talk about myself as a complex object, as containing (in interactionist terms) several or many 'mes' or (in psychoanalytic terms) a number of levels and objects. I am constantly trying to reorganize these contents in conscious and unconscious narra­ tives, in which I both control and am controlled by different elements. It seems to me that it might be useful to think of identity, this '1', as what organizes the contents of the containing psyche. A part of this 'I' is the rational, thinking self: I am aware of different aspects of myself, different desires, perhaps even contradictory desires, and I am constantly trying to organize myself to take or avoid decisions in the world. In this sense, the more I become aware of myself, the greater my internal psychic space, the more free I become in my dealings with the world. However, the rational capacity alone does not allow me to take decisions; they arise in the peculiar conjunctions of rational thought and the flow of feelings and unconscious processes. My ability to be aware of myself, my conflicting and possibly unpleasant desires, the various complexities and contradictions of my real identity as opposed to my social identity, will vary from time to time and place to place. The 'I' here is fulfilling the role that Freud gave to the ego. Again it seems

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reasonable to suggest that the greater the external anxieties and the external demands placed upon me, the less able will I be to tolerate and think about internal pressures and demands. Even at the best of times, however, such demands and pressures are difficult to deal with. In this sense of identity, a threat occurs when the contents of the psyche seem likely to break free of the organizing 'I' - when I am being flooded by my emotions, when my ideas seem to take on a life of their own that I cannot control, when I feel pulled in different directions or immobilized by mysterious forces. I might describe this as a feeling of losing control, falling to pieces. There might be a point where I am unable to contain the experience at all and I resort to violence against myself or against others. The paradox of many suicide attempts, and perhaps of many suicides, is that they are attempts to preserve one's identity. In more traditional psychoanalytic terms, 'ego-strength' is important here, but that strength consists in the ability to tolerate strong and distressing emotions. The sociological questions in this context must include not only the present wider social environment but also family structures and child-rearing practices which enable the development of ego-strength. At times of pressure a normal process of emotional intersubjectivity can become apparent. It is common for psychoanalysts to talk about projection as a defence mechanism and Kleinians will talk about a process of projective identification. Projection is a psychological operation by which I fail to see some threatening or unpleasant part of my own make-up but recognize it readily in other people. Such a mechanism can be seen as the basis of homophobia. If I am anxious and threatened by my own homosexual desires, then I can deal with them by projecting them into other people and dealing with them there by persecuting and attempting to suppress them. Projective identification is a more profound form of projection. Instead of just seeing the feared quality or emotion in another person, I behave in such away as to lead the other person to experience that quality in themselves.

Linguistic and emotional intersubjectivity The dominant sociological understanding of intersubjectivity seems to be that it is a matter of shared ideas or shared language. The latter has been most recently taken up by Habermas (1992) who sees the linguistic tum in twentieth-century philosophy as solving the traditional problems of the philosophy of consciousness. The traditional problem is that of solipsism - how can the analysis of my consciousness move to the understanding of the existence of other consciousnesses, or how can an analysis that starts with my consciousness even establish that other consciousnesses exist. To begin with a shared language into which we are all socialized but in terms of which we can individuate ourselves and

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find separate identities overcomes this problem and Habermas is par­ ticularly enamoured of G.H. Mead in this respect. Much of what he says is important but he accepts unquestioningly Mead's cognitive bias. I would suggest that psychoanalysis offers a basis for understanding intersubjectivity as primarily an emotional phenom­ enon which actually determines, in the sense of limits or enables, our ability to communicate with a shared language. Psychoanalysts would argue that we can see in the relationship between the baby and its carers the earliest and most primitive way in which we communicate our ideas to other people. It is the way in which the infant sends and the adult receives messages about its being in the world. When a baby cries, gurgles, screams, squeaks, moves in a certain way, it produces a feeling in the caretaker. The baby clearly cannot say what it needs, the caretaker often cannot put his or her own responses into words but through combinations of intuition and trial and error responds in a more or less adequate way. Throughout our lives we are giving and receiving such emotional messages; it is the basis of the transference and countertransference on which the process of psychodynamic therapy centres (Casement 1985, 1990) and most psychoanalysts would regard it as a process of uncon­ scious communication. It is something that we come into contact with in our everyday lives - we must all have emotional reactions to each other. Sometimes we are more aware of them than others - perhaps when we meet somebody with whom we find a mutual sexual attraction or when we meet somebody to whom we take an immediate dislike - and at other times we are aware of them as a sort of background noise to our encounters, perhaps a barely noticed feeling of comfort or discomfort. Sociology has little conception of these emotional interchanges. The closest I have found is Goffman's (1971 ) discussion of signs 'given off' in interaction, over which the self has no control. Now as integral to this emotional communication, I would argue that there is an element of projective identification. There is a sense in which the baby communicates its needs by putting its feelings into the carer. As an extreme example, a baby that is panicking for whatever reason, screaming, throwing itself around, tensing, arching and stiffening its spine will induce a fear - a panic - in the carer to which the carer has to respond more or less adequately. This would be a matter of trying to contain one's own panic while trying to continue to hold the baby and comfort it as steadily as possible. My ability to comfort the baby would depend on my ability to contain my own panic. Much more is involved in these early relationships (see Klein 1987) but in the context of my present argument this is the most important. If this sort of communication is possible, then it seems to presuppose that by virtue of being human we share a range of emotions with which we not only communicate to each other but which we share with each other. I 'hold' the baby's panic so that it can restore its own calm. It is a

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common experience in group psychotherapy that feelings are passed around and divided up between group members - one member will be particularly sensitive to anger, another to depression and so on. The group will try to establish an emotional division of labour which enables each member to avoid the feelings that he or she feels most difficult. I have come across situations where one person carries nearly all the strong feelings in the group and then becomes the group's patient in whom the other members try to 'cure' the feelings that they find difficult. It is common to find a similar sharing out between partners or family members. In everyday interactions, this mutual interpenetration of identities might remain hidden and at a comparatively low level of intensity. The greater my internal space and the stronger my ego, the less need I will have to lodge a difficult part of my identity in another person. However, no one person can contain the whole of human experience and some level of interpenetration of identities is necessary for individual survival and mutual understanding. To talk about identity as a category for organizing relations misses entirely this sense in which each of us is actually part of the other, whether we like it or not. Identity politics implicitly breaks this fundamental human relation and is perhaps the appropriate politics in a market dominated society where dependence is feared and despised and independence a valued aim. There is a further paradox in this argument, in that the more pressure I come under, the more I try to hold on to my identity by putting parts of it into other people - the parts I find most difficult - but keeping that relationship profoundly unconscious.

On a more abstract level its seems to me that linguistic intersub­ jectivity is dependent on this more fundamental emotional intersubjec­ tivity which enables the identification necessary for language to be learnt. First we feel, and then later we learn to speak about our feelings. The recognition of emotional intersubjectivity takes us to the life world explored by Merleau-Ponty. The sociological questions here are again about what social conditions can enable the exploration of this inter­ subjectivity and its institutional development.

The emergence of the unthought So far I have talked about the experience of identity in terms of psychic space; how the attempt to 'become' an externally given identity closes down psychic space and inhibits processes of thinking and feeling. I have talked about the self as a container and identity as the ego-structure that is consciously or unconsciously engaged in trying to cope with the internal life that takes place in our psychic space, and I have talked about identity as being implicated and depending upon a profound emotional intersubjectivity. All of these aspects are implicated by the use of the

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pronoun '1', and 'I' can be aware of and talk about some of things that are going on within my psychic space and between myself and the people around me. But there is also much there of which I am not aware and this appears not just in Coffman's sense of something unintention­ ally 'given off' but as a colouring, an aura (in a metaphorical rather than a metaphysical sense), a feel. If I listen to somebody talking I can hear things which are not said or which are the opposite of what is said. If the person opposite me says, and believes, 'I am not angry', but I see the tension in the facial muscles, the white knuckles on clenched hands and hear the rasping force of the voice, then I sense something else. It is not so obvious when the other person is writing but as I pointed out in the introduction, when one comes across terms such as 'tech­ nologies of the self' something is implied which is not being said directly. It could imply a critical attitude, but when it is used in con­ junction with terms such as 'rigorous theorization' this becomes less certain. A rigorous theorization does not allow for a critical distance, it does not offer psychic space as an important value. 'Technologies of the self' would only offer a critical metaphor if it were acknowledged that the self were not actually accessible to technological metaphors. I think that this is what Virginia Woolf meant when she wrote in her diary: And as for the soul: why did I say I would leave it out? I forget. And the truth is, one can't write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes: but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle [her dog], at the cheaper beasts in the zoo which are exposed to walkers in Regents Park, & the soul slips in. It slipped in this afternoon. I will write that I said, staring at the bison: answering L. absent­ mindedly; but what was I going to write? (Quoted in Lee 1996: 529)

The soul is what cannot be conceptualized, the internal processes, the tilt experienced by Beatrice in G. It is not part of the world around me but it is immediately I look at something and react to it. We can conceptualize in very general terms what goes on here but that is all. It is perhaps best seen in terms of Winnicott's (1964, 1971a) notion of transitional objects and a transitional area. A transitional object is the object adopted by the infant from which he or she will be inseparable, possibly for a period of years. It could be a cuddly toy or a dirty old piece of blanket, the attempt to wash it proving traumatic. It is as if it is essential to the child's being, let alone his or her identity. Winnicott suggests that it makes no sense to ask whether this object is part of the child's outside world or internal world. It is part of both - a material object which is not a figment of the child's imagination, yet which has a meaning for the child way beyond any utilitarian or aesthetic value it might have. This is the area of everyday creativity and perhaps also the area at the root of artistic and scientific creativity. It is also the most deeply personal area of my being where the uniqueness of my personal identity is to be found. The interesting sociological questions here are again about what

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sociological conditions enable people to develop and explore this area and to use it creatively. I am less sure that it is an area that contributes much to sociological analysis - rather it marks the limits. A lot of sociological analysis can in fact ignore its existence, but it accounts for all the things that sociological explanations do not predict or find them­ selves unable to explain.

Conclusion I have argued explicitly and implicitly through this book that identity needs to be understood in the wider context of something called the self and that both self and identity have important psychological and social dimensions. Neither the self nor identity are simple social products, rather in the end they are areas of individual and collective freedom which are constantly threatened by the structures and ideologies of the wider society. The very theory and practice which enables us to begin to understand this area of freedom - psychoanalysis - is a theory and practice which can easily threaten it through the ease with which it can try to produce formulae for living. The practice which should be opening up psychic space ends by closing it down. It seems to me, sadly, that a sociology which does not know its limits, which tries to produce sociological explanations of the self, or of identity, can do nothing to enhance human experience of the world or human freedom in the world. In fact it does just the opposite - it closes down possibilities of understanding and action by denying or ignoring the existence of experience. We are left either with the socially constructed individual or, in Anthony Giddens' variation, the reflexive, cognitive self of late modernity which is constantly able to reconstruct itself. The areas of experience and identity that I have been talking about in this chapter are areas which can enable us to keep a distance between ourselves and the 'technologies of the self', the 'discursive practices', the ideological and structural positionings or whatever we want to call the social forces which press down on us to restrict or eliminate this distance. What I have called the important sociological questions are those about how this distance can be extended. This is not an easy matter for two reasons. The first is specific to sociologists, where the dominant tradition has been to ignore or deny the existence of this area of experience, and Simmel's radical insights have only occasionally resurfaced. We need to reverse the way we think about the relationship between identity and the social and to limit the dominant explanatory thrust of sociology. The second reason is universal: because such an extension means extending the areas of life in which we experience conflict, discomfort and pain. The opening up of psychic space involves recognizing parts of ourselves that we do not like or even find abhorrent and disgusting. The

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strengthening of the ego entails tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty and insoluble conflicts. The recognition of the fundamental nature of emotional intersubjectivity involves recognizing our dependence on others, even (and perhaps especially) on those we despise. Finally, the recognition of what I have called the transitional area of creativity involves the recognition of our freedom and responsibility for what we do, and the risks of failure and loss that go with human action. The discovery of freedom is the discovery of multiple forms of suffering and perhaps the most meaningful personal sense in which we can talk about having an identity is that our identity is the result of the quality of our suffering.

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INDEX

Abraham, K. 159 action and structure in social theory 67-71 Adlam, D. 150 Adorno, T.D. 33, 42-6, 50, 51, 84 agency 63, 66, 68-9, 71 Althusser, L. 8, 27, 33, 49, 66, 134, 150 ambivalence 54-61 Arato, A 25 Ayer, AJ. 129 Azirn, H.F.A. 162 Badcock, C. Chap. 11 passim Balswick, J. 89 Bamforth, K.W. 100 Baudrillard, J. 33 Beale, N. 88 Berger, J. 89 Chap. 9 passim Berger, P. 99 Bhaskar, R. 30, 131 Bollas, C. 1, 10 Bowlby, J. 1 12, 131, 160, 161 Brannon, R. 88 Brown, P. 136 Butler, J. 8 Casement, P. 59, 1 15, 173 causality 66-7, 143, 147-9; functional causality 98 Chasseguet-Srnirgel, J. 58 Chodorow, N. 50, 86, 89, 92, 93, 94, 98, 112 Cicourel, A 68 Cioffi, F. 129 class, social class, class consciousness Chap. 2 passim, 35, 37, 64, 117, 120 Clulow, C. 111 Collier, A 131

Collins, R. 106. Connell, R. 98 consumption, sociology of 36 Corrigan, P. 86, 89 Crews, F. 147 Dahrendorf, R. 71 David, D.S. 88 Davis, M. 87, 90 Dawe, A 122, 123 De Beauvoir, S. 85 De Board, R. 98 defence mechanisms 95-109, 140, 160, 172 Derrida, J. 147 De Saussure, F. 39, 121 Descartes, R. 34 De Souza, R. 133-5 dialectics, the dialectic Chaps. 2, 3 passim

Dilman, I. Chap. 1 1 passim Duncombe, J. 108, 1 1 1-15 Durkheim, E. 71, 76 Dworkin, A 89 Easlea, B. 88 ego ideal see super-ego ego identity see Erikson, E. Eichenbaum, L. 86, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98 Elias, N. 106 Elshtein, J.B. 96, 102 emotions, sociology of 11, 51, Chap. 8 passim; emotional intersubjectivity 173-4 Engels, F. 35, 148 epistemology 71; see also science Erikson, E. 53, 65, 69, 152 ethnomethodology 68, 72, 81, 149

188

INDEX

existentialism 10, 35, 65, 72; see also Sartre, J.-P. Farrell, W. 88 fathers, fathering 88 femininity Chap. 7 passim feminism 3, 14, 54, 85, 105; feminist standpoint epistemology 30 Ferguson, A. 98 Feyerabend, P. 130 Figes, E. 85 Fonagy, P. 130 Foucault, M. 8, 76, 158, 159 Freud, S. 4, 11, 85, 90, 93, 102, 103, 106, 126, Chap. 10 passim, Chap. 1 1 passim, 158, 159, 164, 165, 168, 171; and Marx Chap. 4 passim Friedmann, A. 88 functionalism, structural functionalism 66, 122; see also Parsons, T. Gadamer, H-G. 73 Gagnon, J.H. 27 Garfinkel, H 149 Gellner, E. 155 gender, gender stereotypes 103-4, 1 1 1-15 Gergen, K. 6-7 Giddens, A. 2, 10, 40, 43, 60, 61, Chap. 5 passim, 75, 81, 105, 106, 107, 1 14, 158, 164, 176 globalization, 2 Glymour, C. 129, 130 Goff, T. 27 Goffman, E. 11, Chap. 6 passim, 100, 173, 175 Goldmann, L. 14, 19, 43, 44 Gordon, S.L. 106 Gorer, G. 161 Gorz, A. 36 Gouldner, A. 83, 106 group-in-fusion 36, 37; see also series, serialization Grunbaum, A. 129, 130 Gruneberger, B. 58 Guntrip, H. 90 Gwynne, G.V. 99 Habermas, J. 40, 49, 68, 69, 132, 133, 136, 1 72, 173

Halberg, M. 30 Hall, S. 7-9 Hammond, M. 106 Harding, S. 14, 30 Harvey, D. 2, 165 Hegel, G.W.F. 10, 20, 32, 43, 46 Heidegger, M. 64, 65, 72, 73 hermeneutics 63, 66, 67, 128, 131-3 Hinshelwood, R 1 12 Hinton, J. 161 Hirst, P. 8 Hochschild, A. 3, 105, 106 Hoggart, R 123 Hopkins, J. 128, 130 Horkheimer, M. 42 How, A. 132 Husser!, E. 34, 141; see also phenomenology ideal types (gender development) 86, 87, 88, 91, 94, 96-7, 99 identity politics 31, 34, 170 internal space 58, Chap. 13 passim Jackson, S. 108-11, 112 Jagger, A. 109 Jenkins, R 3-6, 10 Jung, C. 152 Kant, I. 17 Kastenbaum, R 159 Keat, R 132 Kemper, T. 106 Klein, M. 51, 107, 111, 137, 143, 159-60, 164, 173 knowledge, sociology of 14 Knox, B. 110 Kohut, H. 165 Kojeve, A. 34 Kove!, J. 51-4 Kuhn, M. 26 Kuhn, T.S. 130 Lacan, J. 8, 34, 35, 85, 87, 141 Laing, RD. 33, 72, 126 Lakoff, RS. 162 Langan, T. 41 Lasch, C. 106, 107, 141, 142, 153 Lee, H 175 Lenin, V.I. 21

INDEX Levi-Strauss, C 73 Levy, N.P. 88 Little, M. 56 Lukacs, G. 10, Chap. 2 passim 37, 40, 47, 51, 169 Luxembourg, R. 21 Macadams, D.P. 33 McCallum, M. 162, 163 McGuire, J. 88 McIntosh, D. 39 McKee, L. 88 Malcolm, J. 54, 154 Mannheim, K. 29-30 Marcuse, H. 50, 120, 121, 135, 136 Marsden, D. 108, 1 1 1 -15 Marx, K., Marxism Chap. 2 passim, 33, 37, 38, 40, 42, 64, 72, 73, 134, 135, 141, 147, 150; and Freud Chap. 4 passim

masculinity Chap. 7 passim Masson, J. 54 Mattinson, A. 1 1 1 Mead, G.H. 4, 5 , 27, 40, 75, 173 melancholia 150 Menzies-Lyth, 1. 99 Merleau-Ponty, M. 10, 20, 33, 35, 37-42, 47, 81, 82, 121, 126, 174 Miller, E.J. 99 Millett, K. 85 Milner, M. 59 Mitchell, J. 85, 86, 87, 136 modernity, late modernity, late capitalism 2, 3, 61 mothering Chap. 7 passim; of daughters, 92-3, of sons 93-6

189

Orbach, S. 86, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98 Osterweis, M. 162 Parkes, CM. 158, 161-2 Parsons, T. 61, 71, 72, 86, 98, 100; see also functionalism Partland, T. 26 Pascal, B. 44 phenomenology 10, 34, 35, 37-42, 71, 82, 117, 126, 141 Pilgrim, D. 54-61 Piper, M. 162, 163 Pleck, J.H. 88 Popper, K. 47, 129, 148 positivism 67, 129 postmodemism, postmodemity 6, 31, 39, 47, 49 post-structuralism 7, 39, 49, 87, 141, 147, 149, 150 power 66 praxis 15, 16, 20-2, 35 professions, professionalization 58-60; professionalization of bereavement counselling Chap. 12 passim projective identification 172 psychotherapy and inner space 169 realism, critical realism 15, 66, 69 Reich, W. 49 relativism 14, 29-30, 40 Ricoeur, P. 132, 133 Riviere, J. 111 Rubin, G. 103-4

narcissism 106, 141, 142, 153, 154, 165, 169, 170, 171 normotic personality, the 1, 168-9

Sarah, E. 88 Sartre, J.-P. 33-7, 40, 47, 51, 54, 81, 83, 121, 124, 126, 171 Schutz, A. 37 science, social science, Chap. 2 passim, 46, 59, 63, 66, Chap. 10

object-relations theory 87, 90-2, 143, 169 O'Brien, M. 88 omnipotence, infantile omnipotence 146, 150, 151, 153 O'Neill, J.M. 88, 89 ontology 65, 67, 69, 71, 129; ontological security, 72

script, scripting 27 Segal, H. 59 self, the 75, 84 series, serialization 35-6, 43, 83, 84 sex, sexuality 27, 50, 90, 91, 93, 1 18, 120, 123, 143, 157, 158 signs, symbols 121-7 147

passim

190

INDEX

Simmel, G. 5, 170, 176 Simon, W. 27 Smith, D.L. 130 Solomon, K. 88 Stavro-Pearce, E. 39 Stedman-Jones, G. 14, 18, 22, 30 Stem, D. 131 Strong, N. 108 structuralism 37, 63, 73, 87, 141 structuration theory Chap. 5 passim, 75 super-ego 107, 1 17, 142, 144, 146; and ego-ideal 52 Suppes, P. 130 symbolic interactionism 27, 75, 171; see also Coffman, E., Mead, G.H Temperly, J. 96 Thalberg, 1. 129 Thompson, E.P. 147 Tolson, J. 88 Trist, E.L. 100

Trotsky, L. 41 Turner, J.H. 106 unconscious, the 68 Wallbridge, M. 87, 90 Warren, H. 130 Waters, M. 2 Weber, M. 25, 62, 64, 88, 91, 99, 122 Willmott, He. 72 Winch, P. 132 Winnicott, DW. 53, 56, 72, 87, 90, 91, 1 12, 126, 137, 175 Witham, A. 159 Wollheim, R. 128, 132, 135 Woolf, V. 175 Wouters, e. 106 Wright, K. 106 Young, 1.M. 98 Zigmund, D. 155