Quote of the day: Freud

I had remembered Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (orig. pub. 1930; Norton paperback, 1961, trans. and ed. J. Strachey) mainly for its emphasis on humans' (supposedly) innate aggressiveness and for its well-known thesis that 'civilization' is in conflict with 'instinct' and requires significant control of and renunciation of 'instinctual' behavior.  A recent glance at the text, which I hadn't read in decades, suggests that these rather grim themes are occasionally handled with a bit of what at least might pass for humor, as shown by this excerpt from a long footnote in chap. 4, pp.52-3:

Sex is a biological fact which, although it is of extraordinary importance in mental life, is hard to grasp psychologically.... The theory of bisexuality is still surrounded by many obscurities and we cannot but feel it as a serious impediment in psychoanalysis that it has not yet found any link with the theory of the instincts.... Another difficulty arises from the circumstance that there is so often associated with the erotic relationship, over and above its own sadistic components, a quota of plain inclination to aggression.  The love-object will not always view these complications with the degree of understanding and tolerance shown by the peasant woman who complained that her husband did not love her any more, since he had not beaten her for a week.

The apparent mystery of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

If one glances through some of the reportage of the last week on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as I just did, one finds him described by people who knew him as, among other things, "laid back," "nice," "quite studious" and "a pot head." Among people his own age who knew him and among former teachers, there appears to be uniform astonishment and incredulity at his involvement in the Boston bombings. Is this the case of a "normal" 19-year-old who was "corrupted" by his older brother? Or of someone who concealed his views -- and an aspect of his personality -- from people who knew him? Or some of both? There are enough as-yet-unanswered questions here that one can anticipate a small crowd of journalists already gearing up to produce their very-long-articles-based-on-hundreds-of-interviews-shortly-thereafter-to-become-books. (I assume the genre is a familiar one to readers.)   

'Human nature' is back

Reader [hereafter R] : What do you mean, "human nature is back"? Has it been on vacation?

LFC: Yes and no. For a while, it was not cricket in parts of the social sciences to talk about human nature, and to some extent this is still true. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two evolutionary psychologists (who happen also to be married, to each other, I mean) got so perturbed about this some years ago that they began referring to the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), by which they meant, among other things, a model that neglected 'human nature'. E.O. Wilson picked up the cudgel, taking much of social science to task in his book Consilience and predicting that eventually social science would disappear, would be absorbed into the natural sciences, and we'd be left with only the natural sciences and the humanities.

R: I shudder to think how that would go down with all the political scientists who are tearing their hair out at The Monkey Cage about the possible cutoff in National Science Foundation support for political science.

LFC: Quite. But that doesn't mean Wilson was right. I think he went somewhat overboard in Consilience myself.

R: Back to the main topic, please, whatever it is.

LFC: Ah yes. Well, Cosmides & Tooby should take a peek at what's happening in some corners of International Relations (IR) theory. It's not for the most part evo psych, to be sure, but in recent years there's been a lot of work on emotions and IR. And the latest issue of Int'l Studies Review has an article by Ty Solomon, "Human Nature and the Limits of the Self: Hans Morgenthau on Love and Power," which harks back to a piece Morgenthau wrote for Commentary in the early '60s in which he argued that love and power are both efforts to escape "existential loneliness." Morgenthau's "underexplored thoughts on these issues," according to Solomon, "are crucial for more fully comprehending his seminal critique of the modern liberal, rational subject." (p.215)

R: But how does all that fit in with the Morgenthau of the later 1960s, the opponent of the Vietnam War, advocate of civil rights, and speaker of truth to power? Don't M's political writings from later in the decade presuppose that "the modern liberal, rational subject," despite its/his/her limits, is capable at least of responding to appeals to reason and acting to improve the world, in however partial a way?

LFC: Good questions. But I want to stay with the human nature point. Solomon mentions Robert Schuett's 2010 book on Freud and realism (Political Realism, Freud, and Human Nature in International Relations), which is also reviewed later in the same issue of the journal. The subtitle of Schuett's book is "The Resurrection of the Realist Man."

R: Hmm. This sounds somewhat reactionary, doesn't it? Realist Man [sic]? Have we just tossed several decades of IR feminist theory out the window?

LFC: I had to read some Freud many years ago, and I tend to the view that Freud's work is weakest when it's most speculative and when he's most openly doing social theory. I remember a casual conversation in which, fresh from writing an intemperate undergraduate paper on Civilization and Its Discontents, I denounced it as a terrible book. My interlocutor, a grad student, said cuttingly "you wish you could have written it." Well, I would not make such a sophomoric (and I was in fact a sophomore at the time) remark today. Still, Civilization and Its Discontents is not high on my list of subtle, nuanced works.

R: I don't care what you said in a college dining hall in 1977. You haven't answered the question about Morgenthau. You haven't answered the question about feminist theory.

LFC: What am I, an answer machine? This is a blog, not a PhD seminar. Go figure out your own answers.

R: ***!***#!!

LFC: Well, at least I gave you the last word. Sort of.

Were the "trusters" right?

In an article published a year ago, Brian Rathbun looked at the views held by U.S. liberals and conservatives just after World War II about the institutional design of the UN and NATO.* Rathbun argued -- I'm simplifying for the sake of brevity -- that liberals (mostly though not exclusively Democrats) wanted a more co-operative, multilateral approach and strategy because they were more "trusting" of allies and less fearful that allies would take advantage of the U.S., whereas conservatives (mostly though not exclusively Republicans) were less "trusting." Thus on NATO, for example, the Truman administration, Rathbun writes, "was willing to provide a guarantee of European security before the Europeans could effectively contribute to the alliance because it expected future reciprocity." By contrast, conservative Republicans wanted a "unilateral declaration of American intent," a sort of Monroe Doctrine for western Europe, rather than NATO, "but even moderate Republicans wanted the Europeans to first demonstrate their commitment to continental defense before the conclusion of any pact...." The less "trusting" Republicans feared 'free-riding' (in the non-technical sense of that phrase), i.e. they feared that the European states in NATO would not contribute adequately to their own defense.

Rathbun is interested in making a theoretical argument about social psychology, trust, and dispositions to co-operate, so he doesn't, at least from what I gather based on a perusal of the article, ask which side turned out to be right. Were Republicans correct to fear that allies would take advantage of a U.S. commitment to their security and not contribute to their own defense? It depends, I suppose, on how strong a version of the argument one takes. NATO members certainly have maintained their own defense budgets and militaries, but the question of relative contributions has been a sore point in recent years and probably throughout much of the alliance's history. And when it comes to U.S. security commitments to allies in Asia, the situation is probably etched in sharper relief. Robert Kelly (who, like Rathbun, blogs at Duck of Minerva) has pointed out that the level of defense spending by South Korea is "irresponsibly low," i.e., South Korea is taking advantage of the U.S. security umbrella to avoid spending very much on its own defense. Trust is all well and good, but in these contexts it does seem to have led to what IR scholars loosely (because it's not really the technical definition) call free-riding. I never, ever thought I'd quote Reagan with approval about anything, but here one can't help recall the slogan -- admittedly taken out of context -- "trust but verify."
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*B. Rathbun, "The 'Magnificent Fraud': Trust, International Cooperation, and the Hidden Domestic Politics of American Multilateralism after World War II," Int'l Studies Quarterly v.55 (2011):1-21.

Quote of the day

Jacob Stein writes a regular column for the D.C. Bar's magazine. His pieces are anecdotal and reflective and often full of interesting quotations. In his column in the current issue Stein quotes a definition of "litigious paranoia" from the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It says among other things that the "basic emotion [involved in the condition] is vanity...."

After quoting the paragraph-length definition, Stein adds:

This was written before Freudian psychoanalysis.... If the entry were rewritten today, the only change would be to reframe the diagnosis of vanity into narcissism, the narcissist being the person thinking of no one but oneself. Or, as George Eliot (not Freud or Jung) said, "What we see exclusively, we see out of proportion to reality."

I suppose it is arguable that an aspect of George Eliot's genius was her ability to make a tautology sound like a profundity. In any case, it's a pretty good line.

Sciences of the mind -- and of society

One can still find Freudians in the ranks of American psychiatrists, but you wouldn't know it from reading Eli Zaretsky's review (in Perspectives on Politics, Sept. 2010, pp. 940-41) of Kurt Jacobsen's Freud's Foes: Psychoanalysis, Science and Resistance (2009).

Zaretsky, author of Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (2004), manages both to tell a story and to make an argument, which is quite a feat for a two-page book review. The story is this: Once upon a time, there was psychoanalysis, "an intervention in the long-standing modern project of understanding the human mind." It drew on nineteenth-century brain neurology, but also Enlightenment philosophy, literature, and Darwin, among other sources. Psychoanalysis, Zaretsky says, was "a genuinely new, unified, and brilliant theory":

This theory was scientific -- a new science -- but a science of a particular character, one that studied the mind not as one studies chemical or geological phenomena, that is from the outside, but rather from within, as part of a process of self-study.... [P]sychoanalysis was a critical theory, a Wissenschaft, and not a natural science per se, although it contained natural science elements.

Psychoanalysis lost "its critical dimensions" in the U.S. when it "became part of psychiatry, and in that way became part of an official system of power/knowledge...." Then came the assault on American psychoanalysis that began in the 1970s and was carried on by an odd alliance of big drug companies, feminists, and the gay rights movement. The "decimation of psychoanalysis" can be seen as "a vanguard maneuver, initiating a long period of corporate rationalization in every area of the economy." Needless to say, the result, according to Zaretsky, was not good:

The destruction of a supposedly malevolent past was accompanied by the creation of a set of new gods, new ways of thinking about the mind. These, however, lacked the element of self-reflection that had been critical to psychoanalysis. According to the new worldview, we can know the mind objectively by understanding the chemistry, neurology, and physiology of the brain.... If we have a disturbing thought or a strange dream, we could speculate that it's a wrinkle in the amygdala or a bit of protein imbalance in the hypothalamus, but we really don't have to because a doctor can adjust the chemical mix for us; self-reflection ("navel gazing") belongs to a previous epoch. What drops out of the new dispensation is not only self-reflection, but any general approach to the problem of human motivation, that is, to a dynamic theory of the psyche, the very quality that had distinguished psychoanalysis from the brain psychiatries that preceded it.

OK. Deep breath. What is my problem with this? It's not about Freud. I'm willing to stipulate that Freud was a brilliant thinker (he made some rather weird forays into speculative social theory, but that's another story). No, the problem is not Zaretsky's positive view of Freud; the problem is that he is determined to link the quarrel between psychoanalysis and its critics to the broader question of how to do 'science' and to "the need to restore the line...between the kinds of questions that can be answered in a causal and deterministic manner, and the kind that require self-reflection, democratic deliberation and cultural exploration." So intent is he on making this argument that Zaretsky neglects to mention that some people who suffer from serious mental illness actually have been helped by drugs (or pharmacological therapies, if you prefer). Has there been misuse and overuse of drugs? Undoubtedly, but that doesn't undermine the point.

Zaretsky's review poses, implicitly if not explicitly, a false choice: either pharmacology or psychoanalysis; and, by extension, either science from the outside or science from the inside. But we do not have to choose, and we should not choose. We can have both drug therapies and talking therapies; both a science of causal explanation and a science of interpretive understanding. (Max Weber's definition of sociology encompassed both.) Each approach has its place, whether we're talking about the sciences of the mind or the sciences of society. The trick (easier said than done!) is knowing what that place is, and what each is good for.