|
|
THE DIALECTIC OF LOVE AND AUTHORITY
by
GEORGE SCIALABBA
_________________________________________________________________________
George
Scialabba, a contributing editor of The Baffler, is the
author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and the forthcoming
Low Dishonest Decades. His writing is archived at www.georgescialabba.net.
If
irony alerts had been invented before 1977, they might have
saved Christopher Lasch a lot of grief. The title of his controversial
book Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged
misled many of his critics. Lasch was widely taken to mean that
a haven is what the family used to be before it was besieged
by feminism and sexual liberation. Feminists retorted that this
was a nostalgic fiction: the traditional family had never been
any such idyll, especially for women. Lasch could only be an
apologist for patriarchy, misappropriating psychoanalytic theory
in a reactionary effort to restore male authority. Reviewing
Lasch’s final, posthumous collection, Women and the
Common Life, the usually astute Ellen Willis took him to
task for his “fail[ure] to take patriarchy seriously”
and his “adamant denial of any redeeming social value
in modern liberalism.” No doubt this had the long-suffering
Lasch growling in his grave.
Haven
in a Heartless World is a densely argued book, and Lasch
himself was not certain what his arguments implied, practically.
(He died in his prime, at sixty-one, before he could spell out
the programmatic implications of his far-reaching critique of
modernity). But far from idealizing the nuclear family, Lasch
portrayed it as a doomed adaptation to industrial development.
The transition from household production to mass production
inaugurated a new world—a heartless world, to which the
ideology of the family as a domestic sanctuary, a haven, was
one response. The premodern, preindustrial family was besieged
(and vanquished) by market forces; the modern family is besieged
by the ‘helping’ (which has turned out to mean ‘controlling’)
professions. The latter development—the subordination
of the family to the authority of a therapeutic ideology and
an impersonal bureaucracy—is the story told in Haven
in a Heartless World and its successors, the very well-known
Culture of Narcissism and the not very well-known The
Minimal Self.
Lasch
makes extensive use of psychoanalytic theory, whose intellectual
reputation stands pretty low nowadays. But it’s not necessary
to enroll in the church of High Freudianism in order to find
Lasch’s account plausible. Belief in ego, superego, and
id is optional; the essential thing is to recognize that our
minds have a deep structure—an unconscious—formed
very early and subsequently difficult to access. The unconscious
is the mold of our character, which is our usual pattern of
action and reaction. In Lasch’s formulation:
As
the chief agency of “socialization,” the family
reproduces cultural patterns in the individual. It not only
imparts ethical norms, providing the child with his first instruction
in the prevailing social rules, it profoundly shapes his character,
in ways of which he is not even aware. . . . The union of love
and discipline in the same persons, the mother and father, creates
a highly charged environment in which the child learns lessons
he will never get over—not necessarily the explicit lessons
his parents wish him to master. He develops an unconscious predisposition
to act in certain ways and to re-create in later life, in his
relations with lovers and authorities, his earliest experiences.
Parents first embody love and power, and each of their actions
conveys to the child, quite independently of their overt intentions,
the injunctions and constraints by means of which society attempts
to organize experience. If reproducing culture were simply a
matter of formal instruction and discipline, it could be left
to the schools. But it also requires that culture be embedded
in personality. Socialization makes the individual want to do
what he has to do; and the family is the agency to which society
entrusts this complex and delicate task.
Different
personalities are adaptive in different societies; what one
has to do varies according to the prevailing relations of authority.
And since families are the means by which societies form personalities,
the family’s structure and dynamics alter in response
to social change. Changes in economic and political life, like
the rise of capitalism and the nation-state, “reverberate
in the individual’s inner being.”
ON
GOOD AUTHORITY
For
better and worse, modern parents are far more sensitive to outside
influences than their premodern predecessors. Arranged marriages
are now all but unknown in developed societies, corporal punishment
is virtually obsolete, and the sexual double standard is under
heavy fire. Meanwhile, each child’s respect for diversity
and, of course, self-esteem is diligently cultivated. And all
these changes are enforced or encouraged by an array of professionals
and agencies. All good; but this anxious, busy solicitude comes
at a price: authority is no longer localized in a self-sufficient
household that controls its own subsistence and work rhythms.
According to Lasch, this displacement of authority from the
child’s immediate environment to far-removed, abstract
entities—the state, the corporation, the medical and educational
bureaucracies—makes it harder for the child to achieve
emotional independence. Love is necessary but not sufficient;
“love without authority,” Lasch wrote, “does
not make a conscience.”
Why?
Psychoanalytic theory offers a speculative but intricate and
coherent explanation. Because the human brain is more complex
and slower to mature than any other mammal’s, the human
infant is uniquely helpless at birth, unable to distinguish
between itself and the rest of the world. It cannot distinguish
between the source of its needs (its own body) and the source
of their satisfaction (mainly its mother), which gives rise
to a feeling of omnipotence. When some of those needs eventually
go unmet, the infant becomes aware of its separation from the
rest of the world, and in particular from its parents, which
gives rise to helplessness and rage. Gradually it dawns on the
infant that the source of its gratifications and the source
of its frustrations are the same: the parents. This recognition
is bewildering and intolerable; it cannot be coped with, only
repressed.
The
return of the repressed, either as symptom or as fantasy, is
inescapable: this is the psychoanalytic equivalent of the law
of gravity or the conservation of energy. And precisely because
the infant is so helpless, its fantasies—of undifferentiated
union with its parents, of annihilating them, or of being annihilated
by them—are, by way of compensation, outsized. If the
infant is to live with these conflicting impulses and the ambivalence
they generate, it must scale them down, reduce them to life-sized,
manageable proportions.
Throughout
human history until industrialization—that is, until seven
or eight generations ago—children had the everyday experience
of watching their parents at work, where they were seen to make
mistakes and also to possess useful skills that they were willing
to teach. This reduced the idealized or demonized parents of
the child’s fantasies to life size. Even more important,
the regular experience of love and punishment from the same
source taught a vital lesson: that those with the ultimate authority
over the child could be trusted, and that their disapproval
did not threaten the child’s very existence. This fundamental,
gradually accumulating emotional security enabled the child
to slough off archaic fantasies and grow up. When the ultimate
authority in a child’s life is no longer localized in
a pair of adult humans but rather is invested in abstractions
like a company or a social-welfare bureaucracy, those fantasies
persist. The child’s ambivalence toward authority has
no focus and so can’t be put to rest. Later in life, still
plagued by these unconscious specters, the adult develops what
Lasch identified as the neurotic personality trait of our time:
narcissism.
Narcissism
has an everyday and a psychoanalytic meaning. A story in the
September 4 New York Times illustrates the everyday
meaning: “The political rise of Donald J. Trump has drawn
attention to one personality trait in particular: narcissism.
Although narcissism does not lend itself to a precise definition,
most psychologists agree that it comprises self-centeredness,
boastfulness, feelings of entitlement and a need for admiration.”
Trump is certainly a narcissist in this sense, but the psychoanalytic
sense is different: a weak, beleaguered self rather than an
overbearing, assertive one. A disciple of Lasch’s (i.e.,
me) has described the narcissistic personality in these terms:
wary
of intimate, permanent relationships, which entail dependence
and thus may trigger infantile rage; beset by feelings of inner
emptiness and unease . . . ; preoccupied with personal ‘growth’
and the consumption of novel sensations; prone to alternating
self-images of grandiosity and abjection; liable to feel toward
everyone in authority the same combination of rage and terror
that the infant feels for whoever it depends on; unable to identify
emotionally with past and future generations and therefore unable
to accept the prospect of aging, decay, and death.
At
least in Lasch’s time, the clinical literature was rife
with descriptions of symptoms like these, replacing the obsessional
and hysterical neuroses of Freud’s time as the most common
forms of psychological distress.
HUMAN
SCALE
The
discerning reader will have noticed that the foregoing account
of emotional development is almost entirely sex-neutral. Roles
and functions are not assigned by gender. There is no sexual
division of laboUr, no Oedipus complex, no penis envy. “The
emotional underpinnings of the formation of conscience are universal,”
Lasch emphasized. “The crucial experiences are those of
fear of separation, of dependence and helplessness—the
infant’s discovery that he lives in a world that is not
completely secure and dependable.”
This
is not a single-mindedly Freudian account. For all his reliance
on psychoanalytic categories, Lasch said clearly that “what
is crucial in my view . . . is not the division of sex roles
inside the family, in terms of which parent provides authority
or love, but the division of labor in society, which has relieved
the family of all [economic, educational and authoritative]
functions.” Lasch may or may not have been a feminist,
depending on whether one’s standard is John Stuart Mill
or Andrea Dworkin. But he fully acknowledged the justice of
women’s claims for economic and sexual equality. He was
unruffled by the (then distant) prospect of gay marriage. His
only consistent policy proposal was that the contemporary notion
of career be redefined to make parenting and professional success
fully compatible—to “make it possible for both men
and women to work more flexible hours, shorter hours and, when
possible—through technological advances like personal
computers and fax machines—to work at home.” This
is not an antifeminist agenda.
It
was not feminism but mass production, political centralization,
and the ideology of endless growth and ever-increasing consumption
that had placed impossible strains on the family and made psychological
maturity so difficult, Lasch argued. Every organism can flourish
only within limits, at a certain scale. We have, in our social
relations of authority and production, abandoned human scale,
and the psychic costs are great.
The
main developments of the last few decades, the information revolution
and the triumph of neoliberalism, have only intensified the
pressures besieging the family. Increased economic insecurity
and the robotization of work—the central strategies of
neoliberalism—have undermined the authority and self-confidence
of parents still further and confronted adolescents with the
prospect of adulthood as a war of all against all. Inside and
outside the classroom, a tidal wave of advertising-saturated
media aims to enlist children as fledgling consumers. The internet
and social media diminish interaction among family members,
especially across generations, while face-to-face encounters,
with their greater emotional immediacy, are less and less the
default mode of communication among adolescents. The hyperconnected
life, for all its allure, is a centrifugal force.
The
family, in whatever form, can only thrive within a healthy psychic
ecology. It has gradually dawned on everyone who does not have
a financial interest in denying it that massively tinkering
with our physical environment is bound to have drastic effects
on public health. It’s taking even longer to recognize
that the same is true of our mental environment. The unending
flood of commercial messaging, utterly empty of information
or art, resembles the miasma of toxic particulates that infect
the air of even the most developed countries. The continual
stream of social messaging is analogous, in its lack of nourishing
substance, to the ubiquitously available junk food that none
of us can help succumbing to occasionally. The automation of
work and the financialization of the economy leave most of us
as bewildered and vulnerable as the progress of science and
technology leave all but the intellectual elite, who can actually
understand the seemingly magical forces that make our more sophisticated
machines run.
It
is just as the environmentalists (and, come to think of it,
the Marxists and the Freudians) say: Everything is connected.
Pull on one thread and the whole fabric unravels. To strengthen
the family, we must rethink the division of labour, which means
reevaluating productivity, efficiency and growth, which means
challenging the distribution of economic power and wealth. We
may even need new conceptions of rights, individuality and freedom.
An
equal share for men and women or whites and blacks in administering
a toxic society is hardly a worthwhile goal, and certainly not
a radical one. Answering Lasch’s criticism of contemporary
feminism, Ellen Willis wrote in 1997: “Since the ’60s
. . . a major current of feminist thinking has criticized careerism
and called for a restructuring of work.” If that current
is still alive, and if it hopes to get beyond leaning in, it
will need to incorporate Lasch’s critique of progress
as expanded consumption and his insistence on limits and human
scale.
|
|
|
