Constructing the Self, Constructing America (excerpt)

Details: Last Updated: Sunday, 27 October 2013 20:37; Written by Philip Cushman

I hope that by studying the interpenetrating relationship between psychotherapy and Western-particularly American-society in eras past, we will be able to develop interpretations about their current relationship, and our current era.

Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy.

By Philip Cushman, Ph.D. Addison-Wesley Publishing, Reading MA. 1995.

Excerpt Pp. 17-33.

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM

The social constructionist argument can be simply stated through eight basic propositions. One, humans do not have a basic, fundamental, pure human nature that is transhistorical and transcultural. We are incomplete and therefore unable to adequately function unless we are embedded in a specific cultural matrix composed of language, symbols, moral understandings, rituals, rules, institutional arrangements of power and privilege, origin myths and explanatory stories, ritual songs, and costumes.

Two, the cultural matrix "completes" humans by explaining and interpreting the world, helping them to focus their attention on or ignore certain aspects or potential aspects of their environment, instructing and forbidding them to think and act in certain ways. Culture infuses individuals through the social practices of the everyday world, shaping and forming in the most fundamental ways how humans conceive of the world and their place within it, how they see others, how they engage in a moral framework of mutual obligations and responsibilities, where they are located in a hierarchical structure of local power relations, and how they use all of this to determine their own behavior and make choices.

Thus culture is not indigenous "clothing" that covers the universal human; rather it is an integral part of each individual's psychological flesh and bones. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty's famous phrase, culture, through everyday social practices, is "sedimented" in the body. This is what is meant by the social "construction" of the individual. For instance, an "accent" is an example of how a social practice, language, sediments a culture in the body of the speaker. Each language requires the production of certain sounds, while other sounds are never used; the Xhosa click, or the Hebrew letter chet are just two among a multitude of examples. Although the human speech apparatus is initially capable of performing all human sounds, after years of performing only certain sounds, a speaker experiences increasing difficulty making sounds particular to other languages, and in fact may find it impossible. It is as if the mouth has been trained in such a way that it loses its capacity to accomplish what it was once capable of. The physical body has thus been shaped by the language it performs: It has been constructed by social practices.

Three, the material objects we create, the ideas we hold, and the actions we take are shaped in a fundamental way by the social framework in which we have been raised. They have been created out of the particular perspective of a specific historical and cultural situation and therefore they express that perspective. They are cultural artifacts.

Four, these cultural artifacts, however, are not only the reflection or expression of an era. They are the immediate "stuff" of daily life, and as such they shape and mold the community's generalized reality orientation in subtle and unseen ways. One can see the quiet, everyday influence of artifacts in cultural differences pertaining to language (using the active or passive voice); clothing (wearing a two-piece swimsuit or a chador); the marking of time (using the seasons, the phases of the moon, or a wristwatch); the concept of the self (conceiving of the individual as simply part of the larger communal whole or as the isolated, autonomous self); religious rituals (speaking to the gods or feeding them through animal sacrifices, praying three times each day or once a week, singing communally or whispering in private); monetary exchange (reading a price tag, bartering, or public bargaining); and eating utensils (using chopsticks, fingers, or a knife and fork).

One of the most complex examples of the influence of the social realm is the social construction of gender. Feminist constructionists have developed a body of research studying issues such as the cultural definitions of gender, the development of gender identity, the varieties of sexual choice, the political meanings of psychopathology commonly attributed to females-such as hysteria, borderline personality disorder, depression, and eating disorders; and the influence of the power relatiorr of gender on therapeutic activities such as transference-counter transference dynamics, conceptualizations of "healthy" or "functional family systems, and statements pertaining to "universal" maleness c femaleness and "normal" child development.

Five, owing to the dual nature of cultural artifacts (that is, that the both reflect and reproduce their era), one task of human science is t develop understandings about the contextual meanings and functions c these artifacts. The researcher's job is not to describe an artifact as an en in itself, a reified "thing" that has an existence and meaning apart fror what is imputed to it by the culture, but rather to discuss the artifact i such a way as to interpret the particular social construction of the era an culture in which it was produced. Seen in this way, the research task is t interpret the multitudinous and conflicting ways in which various work are constructed and human meanings developed.

Six, because cultural artifacts express aspects of the society fror which they are created, they also reinforce and reproduce the constelli tions of power, wealth, and influence that dominate in that societ Artifacts are not benign, apolitical coincidences; they are part of vet subtle and effective social contrivances that keep human communitie functioning and surviving.

Seven, researchers should concentrate on describing and explainir. how the particular social constructions of a specific society are commun cated to the individuals who are born and raised within it, as well as (. how artifacts are produced by certain social constructions, and (b) ho) artifacts in turn reproduce current social constructions and reinforc current understandings of the good and concomitant arrangements e power and wealth. This means that the researcher's task is to define i each culture what constitutes the broad cultural framework, the institi tional structures, and finally the everyday artifacts that instruct, infli ence, and shape the individual's moment-by-moment perspective ar experiences. Having done that, it will be easier for the researcher I interpret (a) how the cultural framework is communicated to the con munity, (b) how the community's artifacts express, represent, or shift tl framework, and (c) how those artifacts in turn influence the communit slightly change the existing social construction of the era, or in gener continue the status quo.

For instance, the character of U.S. society in the twentieth centu: reveals itself in part through the broad concept of the masterful bounded, isolated individual who has what has been called "a rich furnished interior." This broad concept is then translated into and e pressed by smaller and more easily transmittable cultural units such as psychological theories (developmental theories that describe "psychological separation" as inevitable and "individuation" as inherently desirable); architecture that emphasizes private, enclosed areas and ignores public, open spaces; pop culture that teaches the value of cosmetic beauty and individual competitiveness and acquisitiveness (T.V soap operas, game shows, commercial advertisements) that treat these values as "normal" and "good"; current language usage ("the real you," "your inner life"); psychotherapy practices (individual therapies that stress the development of the "true" as opposed to the "false" self; or massmarathon psychology training sessions that help participants get in touch with their "true," "inner" feelings). These cultural artifacts in turn have an impact on the era's character, which again is expressed in broad cultural concepts. And the cycle continues.

Eight, because the West's concept of the bounded, autonomous self is an expression of the current historical era, that concept of the self plays certain roles in the reinforcement and reproduction of that era, serving whatever forces may benefit from the current configuration of power and wealth. Because the dominant dynamic of our era is consumerism, the preeminence of the isolated, autonomous self is probably, somehow, both a consequence of that dynamic and a means of reinforcing and reproducing it. Following the constructionist perspective we could ask How is the current Western concept of the self communicated to individuals? and How does it fit the dominant moral themes of our era, thereby reinforcing the current political constellation of power and wealth? These questions would lead to an examination of how the current configuration of the self creates in individuals compliance with the rules related to the current vision of the good; the power relations of race, gender, and class; and the absences and desires that fuel the insatiable consumer wish for a continuing stream of new items, calories, experiences, role models, and identities.

PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS

Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that it is not possible to exist as a human being outside of a cultural context.³ People can exist only within a cultural framework that is carved out of the sensory bombardment of potential perceptions and possible ways of being. The carving out is done through the use of cultural artifacts during the exercise of social practices, especially that of language. The bombardment of perceptions and possibilities is like a forest, and the carved out space is like a "clearing" in the forest. The clearing of a particular culture is created

by the components of its conceptual systems and transmitted from one individual to the next and one generation to the next through their communal traditions of shared understandings and linguistic distinctions. It is only within the clearing that things and people "show up" in certain shapes and with certain characteristics. The paradox of the clearing is thought to be caused by its horizonal nature: Horizons are created by the culture's particular way of perceiving. The placement of the horizon determines what there is "room for" and what is precluded from view. That is, the clearing is both liberating, because it makes room for certain possibilities, and limiting, because it closes off others. Horizons are thought to be perspectival, and therefore moveable. For instance, what shows up as a chair in one culture might show up in another as firewood, or what shows up as a fork might in another culture show up as a weapon.

To use a more complicated example, the modern era in Western society, usually thought to have begun in the sixteenth century, slowly developed an intense belief in rationality and the scientific practices of quantification and objectification. As a result, many extraordinary things "show up" in this modern clearing, such as electricity, the internal combustion engine, modern medicine, and space travel. However, the West has been unable to develop room for a moral discourse that can keep pace with its scientific practices.⁴ As a result, the West continues to make marvelous scientific discoveries but has difficulty using them for the common good, because it cannot develop a consensus about what is the common good. So, although many wonderful tools show up in the clearing of the West, the moral understandings and authority that are needed to use these tools have little room to appear.

Thus there is good news and bad new about the clearing: The good news is that the cultural clearing is constructed by social practices, and therefore its horizons of understanding are somewhat moveable. The bad news is that the horizons of the clearing are difficult for any tradition to move quickly under any circumstances, and because horizons are tied to the moral vision, economic structures, and power relations of the society, certain individuals and groups will forcefully resist any attempt at change.

Heidegger and Gadamer are the two foremost proponents of philosophical hermeneutics. I resisted using the concepts of the clearing and the horizon in this chapter because they are unusual turns of the phrase, and as a result they sound like jargon. But I decided to bring them into the discussion because they are useful terms that can aid in developing other ideas that are essential to understanding the history of psychotherapy. Hermeneutics is itself a word that sounds strange to many of us. It is a philosophical term that refers to a tradition in the humanities that at first related to the careful textual analysis of sacred books. It was originally thought that God's precise ideas and intentions could be deciphered because they were concretely signified in the text. Thus the ancient rabbis poured over the Hebrew Bible, trying to find explanations for why a specific word in Genesis might be misspelled or incorrectly conjugated or pluralized. They viewed these anomalies as clues to God's opinions and used them as opportunities to interpret God's hidden messages.⁵ In the nineteenth century in Europe, certain philosophers, drawing from the earlier hermeneutic tradition, developed ways of analyzing texts and studying people that were in opposition to the physical science approach that up to that point was dominant in the humanities and social sciences. These thinkers claimed that social science had to be an interpretive science, that to understand people one had to use methods that were different from the objectivism and scientism of the modem age.

During the twentieth century, Heidegger and Gadamer, among others, have argued that there is no single truth to be found when studying humans-that there are many truths, depending, among other things, on the historical and cultural context of the observed and the observer. Because humans are always embedded in a particular historical and cultural frame of reference, Gadamer has argued that it is impossible to attain objectivity, and in fact the pursuit of objectivity will only lead to concealment of the clearing's inevitable political and moral framework. A research agenda, he argued, is always framed by the shared understandings and limits of the researcher's clearing: There is nowhere else to stand. As a result, researchers can only understand an object by attempting to place it within its larger context, and they can only understand the whole by studying its elements. Thus, research is unavoidably a process of tacking between the part and the whole, between the researcher's context and the object's context, between the familiar and the unknown. This is the hermeneutic circle, and it is basic to the research process. What is familiar is always, first and foremost, what has been given to the researcher by his or her culture-the possibilities and limitations of the understandings that constitute the clearing. Gadamer has called these understandings "prejudices." This idea is crucial to Gadamer's vision. Understandings or prejudices constitute the parameters of the clearingwithout them, there is no horizon, and without a horizon, there is no clearing. This is why Gadamer decried the "prejudice against prejudice" that is characteristic of the scientific worldview. He believed that prejudice has obscured the fundamental importance of the researcher's perspective. The study of any cultural artifact or any individual or group, Gadamer argued, is unavoidably the study of the source of its being, its cultural context.

HERMENEUTICS AND THE SELF

Currently one of the most discussed and yet most elusive of psychological concepts is "the self." Psychotherapy theories in particular often speak of the self, treating it as a transhistorical, universal human complex of qualities without ever adequately defining it. In this book, however, I will not use the concept of the self to imply some universal human experience of subjectivity. Instead I will use the interpretive hermeneutic definition of the self: the concept of the individual as described by the indigenous psychology of a particular cultural group and the shared moral understandings within a particular culture of what it means to be human.⁶ The self embodies what the culture believes is humankind's place in the cosmos-its limits, talents, expectations, and prohibitions. In this hermeneutic sense the self is an integral aspect of the horizon of shared understandings. There is no universal, transhistorical self, only local selves; there is no universal theory about the self, only local theories.

Studying the self of a particular era in this way allows us to put into play a basic tenet of interpretive hermeneutics: the process of studying humans is not the same as "reading" persons as "texts," 7 but more like standing behind them and reading over their shoulder the cultural text from which they themselves are reading.⁸ That is what I am suggesting we do when studying the configuration of the self: read over our subjects' shoulders. It is difficult to get a perspective on the concept of the self precisely because it is such a central aspect of the horizon. We have trouble imagining the self in any other way than the way we have configured it in our era, or to consider it a legitimate subject for study. Also, because a hermeneutic study of the self might expose various political and economic issues that would potentially threaten mainstream institutions and activities, such as the cultural dominance of consumerism, mainstream researchers are often hesitant to undertake such projects. But as difficult and risky as it is, studying the self is also a crucial element in interpreting an era. When it comes to a discussion of the psychotherapy of an era, the configuration of the self is an indispensable element of the puzzle.

THE SELF AND ITS ERA: A FOUR-PART PROPOSAL

Psychotherapists might not like thinking historically, but we must; and eventually, we will. The question is not so much a matter of i f With the pressures from the constructionist critique and the epistemological crisis within psychology, thinking historically is ultimately unavoidable. The question is more a matter of how. By what processes and through which philosophical frameworks are therapists to undertake a historical examination of the field? History is no more a giant camera or microscope than any other discipline. There is no single, true history waiting to be discovered by the objective, removed historian. The same issues and problems apply to the attempt to situate psychotherapy as to the attempt to study any human experience. If we seek to understand psychotherapy not as an objective, inert thing that exists apart from history and culture but as a reflection and shaper of the eras in which it is embedded, then we will be attempting to interpret psychotherapy's history, not find and reflect on the one pure truth about it. We will be seeking to develop contextual histories of psychotherapy, histories that attempt to articulate its historical antecedents, economic constituents, and political consequences.

The goal of a contextualized history of psychotherapy, as I imagine it, would be to develop understandings about the subtle interplay between the culture and its artifacts, between America and what it means to be an American, between what it means to be an American and what it means to be human, between the construction of the self and the construction of the country. Our goal would be to understand psychotherapy by understanding America, and vice versa. That is what I am trying to begin. If we do not situate psychotherapy in its historical context, I am concerned that we will not do justice to the brave and creative effort that it is, nor will we be able to see our way to new constructions of theory and practice that will extend the therapist's capacity to help others. Because we have not yet been able to develop that kind of a history, we have had difficulty realizing when our practices collude with, support, and even reproduce the institutions and social practices that cause the very psychological ills we try to heal. However, if we situate psychotherapy historically, we might be able to develop social practices that will shape a slightly new configuration of the self, one that will be composed of new moral understandings and be capable of developing new political and economic structures, structures that could lessen the country's capacity to injure and destroy its own citizens and those of other nations.

I would like to suggest that we use four signposts to interpret particular eras and cultures-according to historical and cultural judgments indigenous to each era or culture: (1) the predominant configuration of the self of a particular cultural or historical "clearing"; (2) the illnesses with which that self was characteristically afflicted; (3) the institutions or officials most responsible for healing those illnesses; and (4) the technologies that the particular institutions or practitioners have used in order to heal that self's characteristic illnesses.

When undertaking such a task, it is important to remember that the predominant configuration of the self of our current era is not universal and transhistorical. The self has been configured in order to conform to the requirements of a particular time and place. Just as the Athenian playwright healed the communal self of classical Greece, and just as the hand-to-hand combat of a holy crusade healed the self by solidifying the Christian knight's relationship with his feudal lord and with God, so in our world it is psychotherapy that is one of the institutions responsible for healing the illnesses of the masterful, bounded twentieth-century self.

The central idea about this four-part proposal for the study of the self is that eras or cultures form a unit. There are not universal illnesses any more than there is a universal self. The self of a specific era is constructed by the clearing of that era and thus develops certain particular characteristics. It is, for instance, strong in certain areas and weak in others, unaffected by certain emotional problems, and quite vulnerable to others. A particular, local self will thus develop certain illnesses and likewise be welcoming and hopeful about a particular healer, the person or institution who "shows up" in the clearing as a gifted, powerful doctor. This local healer will, of course, be trained in the healing arts of the local community, and the healing technology will fit with the local frame of reference. It would make little sense if the healer "saw" a different illness than the patient thought he suffered from, or if the healer performed a medical or religious practice, or prescribed a medicine, that the patient thought was dangerous, repugnant, humiliating, ridiculous, or immoral. These things appear as packages; each element is part of the unit.

Cultural packages like selves, illnesses, healers, technologies can tell us a good deal about a culture if we can remember that they are local and not universal. To unquestioningly or glibly equate the self-package of one culture with that of another, or to analyze the self-package of one culture solely through the distinctions and understandings of another is to show disrespect toward or to commit a kind of psychological imperialism against a local community. However, let us also remember that philosophical hermeneutics suggests that it is not possible to be objective and neutral while trying to understand a different culture. Researchers do not "see" or "discover" the one, reified truth of a culture; they construct a truth through the process of collecting, studying, and analyzing. What researchers construct is always, in part, a product of their cultural frame of reference, and therefore the moral and political agenda they are trying to prove or justify. Since prejudices are unavoidable, and in fact, indispensable to our ability to "see" and analyze anything, we have to become comfortable with a central paradox of the constructionist, interpretive enterprise: we should not impose the notions or prejudices of our cultural clearing, and yet we cannot help but do so. The trick, I suppose, is to be aware of what we are doing. As Gadamer, Martin Packer and Richard Addison, and Anthony Stigliano have suggested, the tacking between the detail and the unit, and the other and the familiar, is the essence of the hermeneutic circle.⁹ The two are in a comparative or dialectical relationship: you can't know one without the other. Somehow if we are going to be curious and inquisitive in the world, we will have to learn how to tolerate the paradoxes inherent in being culturally and historically embedded beings. We will have to learn how to develop a sense of humor about the impossible position of being human, about being apart from and a part of, uninitiated and knower, stranger and landsman.

THE SELF IN CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

For those of us educated in the social sciences, or the "great books" perspective in the humanities, a hermeneutic study of the self across time and culture can be something of a shock. We in the West are accustomed to thinking that humans are all basically the same underneath our different cultural clothing, that the concerns the middle class struggles with in contemporary society are at bottom the same concerns with which all other classes, societies, and cultures struggle. To glimpse the possibility that that is not so comes as an unwelcome surprise. The idea that we are not all identical "under the skin" strikes at the heart of the liberal heritage in the West that began with the modern era. It rightly causes us to question some fundamental ideas we have held regarding humankind's place in the universe, our responsibilities to others, the fragility of life as we know it. In short, it causes us to question anew what it means to be human.

Information from non-Western cultures and earlier eras in the West regarding their particular configurations of the self, the illnesses that plague those selves, the identities of those responsible for healing those ills, and the healing technologies they use to heal offers an array of evidence that seems to support the constructionist, hermeneutic argument. Space does not permit a detailed discussion of such evidence,¹⁰ but I would like to briefly mention two examples of non-Western configurations of the self. The first is the Maori concept of what Jean Smith calls the "organs of experience."¹¹ When Smith studied the Maori, an indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, in the early 1970s, they believed that, no matter what one's status or station in life, one is only someone within a kinship group; the Maori believed that one would lose the status of being human once separated from kin. The Maori's first responsibility was to the group, not to themselves.

The Maori did not believe that feelings were caused by psychological conflicts or problems that could be rationally understood and then modified or controlled. Organs were thought to generate a certain way of being that unfolded over time. The Maori believed that various organs were responsible for certain feelings. When an organ was invaded by an outside force, the force stimulated the organ to release the emotions with which that organ was identified; when the intrusion stopped, the emotion subsided.

The Maori experienced emotions-such as fear before battle, grief and mourning, or personal confusion, insecurity, and indecision-as intrusions from the outside, attacks upon the various organs responsible for the specific emotion or mental state. The organs of experience were thought to become invaded for various reasons, usually related to external causes such as the anger of the ancestral gods (often on account of an unacceptable performance of a ritual) or an attack by one's enemies from another village. Healing rituals also used powers external to the inflicted individual, such as rituals to appease the gods, or the activity of passing close by the organs of another member of the village, especially the vagina, which were considered to possess a powerful curative force. Interestingly, the Maori believed that functions of the mind such as memory, cognition, volition, which the West locates in the brain, resided in the intestines.

The Maori did not take responsibility for their feelings; feelings were thought to happen to them. According to the Maori, the self, then, possessed a much more fluid or porous personal boundary than does the Western self. Feelings were conceptualized as being "in" individuals, but not "of" them.¹²

The second example is from the Lohorung Rai, a Mongol hill tribe in East Nepal studied extensively by Charlotte Hardman in the years 197679.¹³ The Lohorung Rai lived a life that revolved around their community and especially their felt obligations to ancestors and traditions. They believed that humans are related not only to their immediate social group but also to a wider physical and spiritual world. Their relationship to spirits of the dead, their community's ancestors, and primeval beings determined their mental and physical states. The Lohorung Rai believed that the body was intimately involved with the ancestors through three spiritual but physical substances: viva (mind), located primarily in the stomach and secondarily in the head; saya (ancestral substance), also located in the head; and niwa (the soul or essence of life), located throughout the body. Saya, the ancestral substance, was the direct connection with the forebears. When the connection between individuals and the tradition was strong, that is, when individuals acted properly (were cooperative and emotionally sensitive to others) and were respectful and attentive to the traditions, it was said that their saya was "high." Then they manifested the qualities of strength, courage, and vitality, and they prospered physically and financially. When they were not properly attentive to the traditions, their saya became depleted; they became weak, apathetic, nervous, physically ill, depressed, socially withdrawn, and financially poor. It was said that one's saya could be imagined as a flower in the world of the ancestors. If saya was high, the flower bloomed; if saya was low, the flower wilted and drooped. Saya was in constant need of attention, revitalization, lifting.¹⁴

Again, as in the Maori, we can see how the Lohorung Rai self was much more a communal self than the individualistic self of the West. It was a self much less boundaried and much more influenced by others and particularly by the vitality of its connection with the ancestors. This idea is movingly captured by the image of the saya flower that lives in the world of the ancestors. Interestingly, the soul (niwa) was thought to be built, or constructed, during the time the child was educated and initiated into the traditional stories and moral understandings of the culture. In this way, we might say that an adult niwa, the soul, was communally built.

In the West, there have been many pre-twentieth century configurations of the self. I have included in the appendix a summary of various historical eras in Western society, giving particular attention to the selves, illnesses, healers, and healing technology framework described above. Our contemporary idea of what it means to be human, of what is the proper and natural way of being, was probably not shared by our ancestors, and it certainly is not shared by peoples of other cultures. This might help us better understand why the current configuration of the self, the masterful, bounded self of the twentieth century, is considered an aberration by many other cultures and would have been considered unthinkable (literally) by Westerners in earlier times, say six hundred, a thousand, or two thousand years ago. In reading the appendix one can see how several configurations of the self, as Shakespeare wrote, strutted and fretted their "hour upon the stage" and then were heard no more. There was the "nondeep" self of the ancient Greeks; the self of the Hebrews that was a communal, equal partner with God; the empty, self-loathing Augustinian self; the crusading Christian self of the Middle Ages, container for the immortal soul, which lived in a circular, enchanted world, and which healed through obedience to warrior vows and by delivering death and destruction to the infidel; the Renaissance self with a foot in both the feudal and the about-to-dawn modern era; the rational, logical self of the Enlightenment era, intent on separating from the Church and local folkways; the romantic self that valorized the autonomous, all-powerful artist-genius who naturally contained the pure truth of the universe interiorly; and the Victorian self, the culmination of the Enlightenment agenda of linearity, deferred gratification, and bourgeois calculation. Each of these selves are part of the heritage of the West. Each of these selves, all sure that they were the one, proper way of being human, all sure that their way of arranging the power relations of gender, race, community, and age was the one natural arrangement, all sure that their God was the only true God, are the antecedents of our current self. It is a humbling, disorienting vision.

It is difficult for us to grasp the medieval experience of life, to experience ourselves and our world as being held in the hand of God, to be more identified with the corporate feudal community, the group self, than with a separate, unique self; to regard a person's sociocommunal position as more important than the person who occupies it. The modern era, of course, began to shift that perspective. In the appendix, I use historian Natalie Zemon Davis' The Return o f Martin Guerre¹⁵ to illustrate the modem lurch into a more individualistic, competitive, potentially "false" world. But what is so compelling about the story is how it describes individuals who live with one foot in each world. In the story, taken from an event in the early sixteenth century in the Basque region of France, a man claims to be Martin Guerre, who long before had abandoned the rural village of his youth, his wife, and his children. The village, shocked but joyous, welcomes him back, and life goes on, in fact much better than before. However, after several years, the man is thought to be an impostor, two trials take place, and the impostor Arnaud finally confesses and is killed. Bertrande, the wife, is spared. I argue in the appendix that without the medieval concept of the self as placeholder and without the legal reality of male privilege, the imposture would not have been needed (Bertrande could have inherited and managed Martin's estate, been free to remarry, and so on); but also, without the Renaissance concept of self-fashioning and imposture, the deed could never have been conceived of and carried through. I also argue that without the growing popularization of the experience of romantic love, Bertrande and Arnaud would never have been able to carry the deceit through to its final conclusion. It is a story conceived of, enacted, and concluded in the paradoxes characteristic of the two eras it straddles.

By the time of the Enlightenment, a concept of the self as an entity independent of the corporate entanglements of Church, communal identity, and feudal vow had become a distinct possibility. But then new problems arose. The Enlightenment era philosophers, ancestors of the social scientist, grappled with questions pertaining to the meaning of truth, the attainment of certainty, and the determination of the good in a world increasingly distanced from God's presence, His all-protecting hand, and the authoritative guidance of His embodiment on earth, the Church. These questions emerged in the early modern era owing in part to the vast socioeconomic changes brought on by the growth of individualism and capitalism, which in turn caused the fall of the feudal structure and increasing urbanization, the Reformation, and (slowly) a secularization of the population. These political changes then increased the population's readiness to accept the new philosophy. Much later, of course, the continuing advances of the new empirical sciences brought about the industrialization of Europe and the New World, which increased and multiplied the aforementioned trends.

However, the philosophers not only answered questions; they also created questions. They were not simply dispassionate, "objective" truthseekers; they were directly involved in the political struggles of their era. Central to the struggle was the configuration of the self. If the feudal institutions of Church and community had weakened, then who would come forward to help configure and guide the new self that was emerging? Why, the philosophers, of course. And they did, indeed, grapple with questions related to the meaning and attainment of truth, the definition of personal and political freedom, and the exercise of rationality, logic, and individual choice.

But the philosophers did more than that. They exercised power by establishing the frame of reference for the era. They not only filled the vacuum created by the fall of the Church; they helped cause the vacuum. Descartes based all knowledge on universal doubt. He put forth a radical idea: The material world, far from the enchanted world of the Middle Ages, was in fact devoid of God. It was made by God, of course, but then abandoned by Him. The spiritual, on the other hand, was graced by the spirit of God, but it was a realm separated from the material realm by an unbridgeable gulf. In the natural scheme of things, human abilities situated in the immaterial or spiritual realm-such as logic and reasonwere capable of understanding, manipulating, and then ultimately dominating the material realm. Descartes's formulation of two distinct and separate worlds was eagerly embraced and extended by Locke, Hume, and a horde of empiricists. If the material world was devoid of God, then centuries of accumulated Church knowledge had lost its unquestioned authority, and the Monarchy its divine warrant. Knowledge about the material world could only be discovered through the exercise of objective scientific processes, which were not influenced by ecclesiastical authority, military might, or folk traditions. Knowledge, in turn, was the fulcrum by which the material realm was moved. Interpreted in this way, the Enlightenment era philosophers had used intellectual discourse to exercise political power. By setting the frame of reference in this way, they raised doubts about the authority of the Church, the power of the Monarchy, and the salience of communal folkways. Under the guise of objective, apolitical science, they initiated, reflected, promoted, and carried out a revolution in thinking and authority. They became the sole owners of the scientific process, the only true path to knowledge.

Who then could determine what was right and wrong, good and bad, what ways of being were proper and improper-in other words, the correct configuration of the self? Why, those trained in the new empiricism and the exercise of logic, answered the philosophers. Indeed, empiricists such as Locke and Hume argued that the self was not created fully formed by God. It had to be fashioned and formed-not by the Church, or the traditional folkways of the medieval community, but by the careful formulations of logic and the empirical "truth" determined by the sciences. The self ceased to be the container of the God-given soul, the material world ceased to be the territory that God created and over which He actively presided, and the Church ceased to be the owner of certainty and truth. Instead, the self became constituted by rationality and the scientific empirical process, the material world became the realm properly controlled and dominated by humankind, and the new empirical science became the vehicle of domination and the measure of all things. In future chapters I often refer to the theories of the philosophers as the "power agenda" of the Enlightenment, because their ideas advanced the political shift in power from the Church to secular institutions.¹⁶

Not all the philosophers, of course, were entirely pleased with the implications of the empirical line of reasoning. Kant, for instance, was concerned by the absence of morality in the empiricists' formulations. He argued that if one takes the empiricist argument to its extreme conclusions, as did Hume, one can know very little except that which one discovers in each moment of observation. Ultimately, Kant argued, this tells one nothing about developing a personal identity, understanding causal relationships, anticipating the future, or making moral choices. That was intolerable to Kant. In response he decided that inherent in each individual were certain mental structures that allowed one to "see" life in a certain way. These structures worked like the lenses in a pair of spectacles or, better yet, a pair of sunglasses: They "colored" one's perceptions, provided an invisible framework within which perceptions and mental categories could emerge and take form. In this way, Kant believed, humans could develop an ongoing identity, perceive categories such as causality, and use logic to determine how to live a moral life. Given the discoveries of modern science and the arguments of the radical empiricists, and unable (or unwilling) to discuss the social realm as an adequately powerful shaper of the frame of reference, Kant had to invent inherent or a priori mental categories in order to attend to and explain what the empiricists thought unimportant or unexplainable. In this way, the philosophical movement known as structuralism was born. Several current psychotherapy theoriesmost notably Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, Melanie Klein's object relations theory, and forms of cognitive therapy-are indebted to structuralist notions of the mind.

Later in the modern era, especially with the romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some philosophers and literary figures rebelled against the Enlightenment emphasis on science, rationality, objectivity, and logic. The romantics instead sought truth in the artistic, the subjective, and the emotional. But the Enlightenment era frame of reference was so well established that even the romantics never challenged modern individualism. In fact, in some ways the romantics valued a kind of hyperindividualism even more than did the empiricists. Whereas the Enlightenment thinkers made a god out of science, the romantics deified the subjectivity and beauty of nature and the heroic, artistic self. The self, they believed, had an inherent, perfect nature that would grow, organically, if simply left alone by Church, state, and society.

The Victorian era was in many ways the culmination of the Enlightenment philosophers' power agenda. Victorians believed that the material world could be quantified, objectively measured, and logically manipulated and dominated for personal gain by a masterful, bounded individualism. For instance, laissez-faire capitalism, justified by Adam Smith's belief that unrestricted selfishness would ultimately lead to the perfection of society and be to the benefit of all, reached its prominence at this time.¹⁷ Some historians have argued that once the external world was thought to be entirely quantifiable, controllable, and thus understandable, it was a short step to locating the unknowable within the interior of the self-contained individual.¹⁸ Thus the Freudian unconscious was "discovered" during this era. The struggles and conflicts Freud located within the unconscious were, in retrospect, not unlike the fierce political conflicts, such as the imperialist wars, anti-Semitism, and gender _oppression that showed up in Europe throughout this era. The political _oppression of women, which they were unable to express directly in words, often took the form of psychosomatic symptoms, which the medical profession attributed to the inherent nature of the untameable female body, especially its reproductive organs. The Victorian self was _conceptualized as containing secret, mysterious, and dangerous urges for sex and aggression. These urges were controllable by various defense mechanisms such as repression; but too much repression, Freud argued, caused neurosis. Rational self-domination, brought to consciousness through introspection, was one aspect of Freud's solution. Too little rational self-domination, however, would mean the destruction of civilization. The European Victorian self was caught, to paraphrase novelist Edgar Allan Poe, between the pit and the pendulum.

This is merely a brief exploration of Western history. The appendix, however, contains an expanded discussion of these eras and configurations of self. Even this brief look at Western history brings up many troubling questions regarding the configuration of the self. How are we to decide how to live, if we cannot think that our current configuration of the self is the one, true, universal self? How can we decide how to live when we are not embedded in the kind of enfolding, all-encompassing indigenous tradition that many Western eras were informed by? This is indeed a troubling-no terrifying-dilemma. This dilemma is our fate, but perhaps it is also our opportunity, if we can embrace it.

Excerpt Pp 248-254

PSYCHOTHERAPY THEORY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE EMPTY SELF

Probably many psychotherapists believe that their practices are an effective means of resisting consumerism's complete sociopolitical triumph. However, during the course of my struggles with the philosophical ideas and the historical perspective discussed in this book, I have come to a disquieting conclusion: psychotherapists have been slow to recognize the discipline's role in sustaining the empty self and contributing to the shape of the overarching twentieth-century frame of reference it serves. Several therapists have publically opposed various aspects of the status quo. Heinz Kohut, for instance, spoke to this issue when he disagreed with the positive emphasis ego psychology placed on adapting to one's social milieu.⁴⁰ But as a profession therapy seems uncomfortable with grappling with how therapy practices are unintentionally political and how they unknowingly reinforce the status quo. Therapists think that because they guard against valuing adaptation at all costs, or because they believe that the patient's mental "health" will automatically translate into a correct political position, they are not contributing to the status quo. But if they think these kinds of answers satisfy the above concerns, they are wrong.

Most therapists have not been trained in the kind of philosophical and political analysis that is required to understand the more subtle and complex ways that social practices inevitably reproduce the status quo. I'm sure there are exceptions to this statement, but these momentary shifts to a historical and cultural perspective are probably too confusing and threatening for most of us to maintain, and are soon avoided and then forgotten. Just because we "forget" these issues, however, doesn't mean that they disappear.

First and foremost, psychotherapists have not been able to develop a historically situated perspective on our discourse and practices. Our failure to think about our practices as part of our culture and history is owing in part to the intellectual traditions in which the field is rooted and to which the field is indebted. Each of the previous chapters has been an attempt to illustrate this. Our failure to think historically is also a result of our wish to earn a living, do well financially, be accepted in the social world in which we live. To take the intellectual plunge and situate our work historically would jeopardize that. We would have to face the fact that we treat local selves plagued by local illnesses, not the one universal self that suffers from a few timeless illnesses. If we admit that, we could not claim that these illnesses can be treated with a universal healing technology that we have scientifically proven to be the one, true healing technique.

In other words, if we begin down that slippery slope of history, we lose our grip on the powerful social status that is granted to scientific practices and theories. If we lose that, then we will be seen as philosophers, sociologists, humanists-not medical scientists. The position of privilege we enjoy, albeit tenuously, in our scientific, hierarchical society today would be challenged. This would reverse the intellectual battles the social sciences have waged for the last four hundred years, long before there was thought to be such a thing as social science, to carve out a place within the intellectual academy and the capitalist marketplace. It would reverse the discipline's hard-fought gains and reduce its practices to a kind of moral and literary discourse, a fate worse than death in a world that values "hard" science over "softheaded" philosophy.

Furthermore, there is another problem in store for psychotherapists if they were to start thinking about their work sociohistorically. Developing a historical perspective about the discipline's practices would lead therapists to notice how some of the foundational philosophical elements of modern Western thought, such as the Cartesian split between matter and spirit, or the correspondence theory of objective truth, have led to the kind of political structures and moral dilemmas that the discipline faces today. In other words, if we were to undertake a serious study of how psychotherapy contributes to the construction of the empty self and consumerism, we would see that revolutionary changes would have to come about for there to be a shift out of the frame of reference of our current world. We would have to face great despair, continuingly fighting frustration and hopelessness. Who among us would voluntarily submit to that? We would, if we decided to go ahead with the project, have to rework the philosophical way we think and especially the way we speak. We would have to start trying to weed out the Cartesian concepts from our vocabulary, and we might start sounding like some of those abstruse philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan.

However, there is an even worse fate awaiting us if we start situating psychotherapy historically. We would come to see that even the most sophisticated and humane psychotherapy theorists, those who seem concerned with social interaction, the examined inner life, and loving, intimate relationships-like Winnicott and Kohut-even these, perhaps especially these, significantly although unknowingly, have contributed to the consumerism of the postwar era. This is a disturbing prospect because it reveals our personal confusion and inadequacy, and those of our leaders as well.

Why Winnicott and Kohut?

I do not feature Donald Winnicott and Heinz Kohut because I believe them to be the malevolent perpetrators of the consumerism of the postwar era, or of incompetent, exploitive, or abusive psychotherapy. They aren't responsible for any of the above. They were both highly ethical individuals who were dedicated to ameliorating the suffering of others. I feature them because they are exemplars of our time. Their theories and the commentaries of their followers wrestle with many of the major issues of our society. They have captured something central about our era's way of being human; they speak to us, in our joy and misery. They describe us, and because of that they have achieved respect in our society and among their peers.

Because their theories have been so popular of late, and have been translated into the social practices of psychotherapy, developmental theory, advice books, and parenting programs, it stands to reason that they have influenced and shaped the era more than most. However, when I suggest that Winnicott and Kohut have influenced the era, I mean something specific. I mean that object relations theory and self psychology have shaped the era the way all social practices shape an eraunknowingly, subtly, by contributing to setting the cultural frame of reference.

Social practices are not consciously planned, deceptive, or coercive; They further the status quo by, at first, reflecting the cultural landscape of an era. By reflecting the overall framework, by using a certain language and implicitly expecting certain behaviors and actions, social practices reinforce and then perpetuate the rules of the game. Rules are set by the thousands of unconscious microbehaviors that are the warp and woof, the Sullivan's web, of everyday life: the warm welcome of a hello, the contracting of joyful wrinkles around the eyes, a tilt of the head, the quick raising of the eyebrow, the quiet sound of surprise, the murmur e dissent, the step backward, the rapid loss of facial expression, the sen tence that ends with a low, cold note, the body held in quiet disdair Social practices set the frame not by forcing, abusing, and torturing, bu by treating the established, implicit, unspoken rules of the game as th only proper way of human being.

All of this is done as subtext, between the lines of social dialogue Social practices, especially intellectual discourse like psychotherapy, ir, fluence by being not the hammer that pounds, but the brush that paint: Scenes are brought into view through language, cultural metaphors, an habitual activities that set the parameters of what is possible; within particular scene, certain things can then "show up," and others cannot We could say that Winnicott and Kohut were, and in fact we all are trapped by our language and rituals, but that would be inaccurate. Cul ture does not trap, it insinuates, it constitutes, it constructs. It is "sedi mented" in the body. Just as culture frames life in such a way as to perm: certain things to "show up" in a specific clearing, so too, inevitably, doe it exclude other things from appearing. That is a type of power.

Winnicott and Kohut were attempting to offer constructive alterna tives to certain elements of the status quo. I do not believe they were th evil twins of late twentieth-century capitalism. But they lived within certain frame, were thus constituted by it, and in various ways perpetuated it.

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