The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, part 5 of 8
I'm okay and you're okay, except neither of us is okay if we can't pay the rent
A person is struggling to pay their rent, and the struggle wears them down to the point of depression so they seek help from a therapist. The therapist wants to know about their childhood, did they get on well with the mother, were they friendly with their father, did they have close bonds with their siblings? The person struggles to explain themselves to the therapist, but the effort brings no relief. The therapist suggests that the roots of the depression are because of a bad incident when the person was 6 years old, and perhaps anti-depressants are called for. Around this time the person is lucky enough to get a better paying job, and suddenly they don't have to worry about paying the rent anymore, in fact, they have so much money they can pay all their bills and go out and have some fun. And, like a miracle, they are cured of depression!
Therapy fails us, as individuals, when it refuses to consider the real life practical aspects of life, such as paying the rent, but therapy fails all of society when it refuses to engage with the truth that life has a political component.
Without opposing forces, our system tends to concentrate power. Government will grab more power over the individual whenever it can do so. Likewise, large corporations tend to consolidate to the point of monopoly, save when there are processes in place to ensure the renewal of competition.
Consider the early and mid 20th Century, when labor unions were strong, and so wages rose rapidly for workers. For most of the period from 1890 to 1970 productivity gains were split 50/50 between labor and capital. Let's not whitewash history: there were many labor battles in which the police killed union organizers, and there were a few battles where the labor activists killed a few police. These were brutal battles, which enabled a century when even working class families could have nice homes, good food, an abundant choice of clothes, vacations, and time and money for such hobbies as fishing, hunting, bowling, photography, travel, and a thousand other fun indulgences.
The point is, fun is political. Or rather, to get to those moments where we can have fun takes a battle. Merely growing up in a free society, and keeping it free, is an endless struggle. Every generation needs to fight against corruption, propaganda, and those who would limit their civil rights in the name of security or stability.
Thanks to the strong labor unions of the early and mid 20th Century the USA enjoyed much of a century with a broad middle class. But when labor unions were destroyed at the end of the 20th Century, the middle class began to shrink, with a few people getting richer and many more people getting poorer. Wages for the average male hit their peak in 1973, after that they fell for 25 years, after that they grew slightly, such that the average male is now almost back to where they were in 1973. But this amounts to 50 years of stagnation while the rich got richer, and even this doesn't fully account for the changes that have happened; for instance, certain costs such as health care which have increased much faster than the average rate of inflation.
Therapy is useless when it runs away from the every day realities that people are forced to deal with. Therapy is actively harmful when it tries to convince people that their anxiety disorder is because of something that happened during their childhood when in fact their anxiety disorder is caused by an inability to pay this month’s rent.
If therapy is ever to live up to its potential as a tool for human liberation it needs to undergo two changes:
1. therapy needs to be better at seeing the difference between the depression caused by long-term issues going back to childhood and depression caused by short term issues, such as economic difficulties.
2. therapy needs to recognize that human life is inherently political, and if people are not fighting for their rights, then they are losing their rights.
An apolitical therapy fails to develop a full picture of what human liberation looks like. Which isn't to say that all of life is political, but rather, no life is truly apolitical.
The Hearts of Men
American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Copyright © 1983
Page 93-95
Gestalt Therapy carried the new psychology to the verge of politics: If it was human nature to creatively experience the world through growth, then the social order should be changed. Anticipating the European “anti-psychiatry” movement of the sixties and seventies, they wrote, “adaptation to ‘reality’ is precisely neurosis: it is deliberate interference with organismic-self-regulation and the turning of spontaneous discharges into symptoms. Civilization so conceived is a disease.”
They excused Freud for favoring repression over spontaneity because he could not imagine a civilization that did not depend on repression. Frederick S. Perls and his co-authors (Paul Goodman, Ralph Hefferline) could. Sounding like the Paul Goodman of the sixties, who endorsed (and to some extent inspired) the anarchic politics of the counterculture, Gestalt Therapy argued for a society that would “more nearly conform to a [continuing] child-heart’s desire, for instance the possibility of a little more disorder, dirt, affection, absence of government, and so forth.”
In his later years, as he moved closer to center stage in the burgeoning Human Potential Movement, Perls himself had little to say about the radical social possibility briefly glimpsed in Gestalt Therapy. If you could not change a society that demanded such a high price in individual conformity, you could still, as an individual, simply ignore the more annoying and restrictive conventions. This is what Perls had done in his own life, and this was the message of his most memorable directive: “Do your own thing.” Coming at a time of national prosperity, and coming from a man who had escaped from Hitler as well as the bondage of marriage and a conventional career, Perls’s prescription sounded not only appealing, but almost feasible.
But if it sanctioned nonconformity, the new psychology at the same time lost interest in conformity as an issue. Even Maslow’s tempered criticisms of “adjustment” were lost in a psychology that could equally well endorse revolution or a lifetime of acquiescence, depending on which was your own, authentic “thing.” In this sense the Human Potential Movement was, on the face of it, more neutral and more “scientific” than the adjustment-oriented psychology it replaced. It did not insist that the social order was worth conforming to, nor did it suggest that overthrowing the social order would be a worthwhile project for the seeker of growth. (Of course, the assumption that it is possible for everyone to accomplish their own thing without endangering their livelihood or nutritional status implies a fairly benevolent view of the status quo, as radical critics of the Human Potential Movement have often pointed out.)
The critique of “conformity” implied, however vaguely, that there were institutional constraints to personal expression, actualization or growth; the new psychology resolved these constraints into individual obligations (“should feelings”) such as might arise between two people sharing a room during a marathon encounter weekend. Marriage as an institution was not a problem, but one’s particular spouse might be. Work in the service of corporate profit was not an inherently questionable use of time (as Paul Goodman saw it), but any particular person might have the wrong job. Such mismatches were bound to arise as each person followed his or her growth impulses, and that was O.K., because, as Perls explained in a poetic summary, that could be found, briefly, on everything from coffee mugs to needlepoint wall hangings:
I do my thing, and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.
Needless to say, the one institution that the new psychology did threaten - at first only implicitly and more openly over time - was marriage. The male rebels of the fifties had found marriage financially burdensome and sexually repressive; the new psychologists found it, from a scientific point of view, improbable. If each person was following his or her own growth curves, the probability that two people’s trajectories would overlap or run in parallel was about as remote as the chance of two meteors coming into orbital alignment. “In the path to emotional growth,” wrote human potential psychologists George Bach and Herb Goldberg, “...each individual becomes a lonely hunter, making his way through uncharted territory.”