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Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)
[140] As long as authority was internalized in the form of conscience, people either complied with it because it appeared reasonable or resisted in the name of a higher authority. Today, however, authority appears as something altogether alien, sometimes contemptible, sometimes truly terrible, more often merely as an inconvenience, in the person of a nagging mother, teacher, or employer. It is not so mich arbitrary force—the traditional enemy of bourgeois liberalism—that arouses resistance today as the attempt to hold someone up to a given set of standards. The narcissist resents being judged more than he fears being punished. He submits to punishment even when he rejects its rightness, as an arbitrary exercise of superior force in an arbitrary world, but he does not like to be asked to live up to expectations. This is why the ideology of nonbinding commitments and open-ended relationships—an ideology that registers so faithfully the psychic needs of the late twentieth century—condemns all expectations, standards, and codes of conduct as "unrealistic." It condemns the attempt to live up to expectations on the grounds that "role-playing" subverts psychic stability and health. The therapeutic community insists that only equals can enter into
[141]
satisfactory interpersonal relations ("peer-bonding"); but equality in this connection means simply an absence of demands. Equals are "peers" not by virtue of common attainments but by generational default (hence the prominence of the generational theme in modern sociology, radical politics, advertising, propaganda, and promotion). Equals ask nothing, understand everything, forgive everything. The idealized comradeship of siblings, united not by undying passion or even mutual respect but merely by a common resentment of adult authority, becomes the model of the perfect marriage, the perfect affair, the perfect "one-to-one relationship," or for that matter the commune or extended family—the distinctions have become increasingly immaterial.
...
[185] In a study of the American high school, Edgar Z. Friedenberg found that high school students regard social control as "a technical problem, to be referred to the right expert for solution." In response to a series of hypothetical problems in social control, Friedenberg's subjects rejected both libertarian and openly authoritaran solutions, justifying their preference for social engineering on pragmatic rather than moral grounds. Thus if a teacher finds an unruly student smoking in the washroom, he should neither "beat him coolly and with emotional restraint" or publicly humiliate him, on the one hand, nor ignore the offense, on the other hand, as a minor infraction that should not add to the student's reputation as a troublemaker. Having rejected authoritarian solutions for reasons that were "cautiously bureaucratic rather than indignantly humane," the students voted overwhelmingly that the offender should be sent to the school psychiatrist. Beating him would make him more unmanageable than ever, whereas the psychiatric solution, in effect, would enlist his own cooperation in the school's attempt to control him.
...
[187] Friedenberg's students "believe that enforcement of regulations, rather than any internal stability or homeostasis, is what keeps society from breaking down into disorder." They regard law not as a body of authoritative commandments but as "an indispensible technique for controlling behavior." This distinction goes to the root of the contemporary situation; it explains the growing devotion to "law and order" in a permissive society. The demand for law and order, which at first sight appears to attempt a restoration of moral standards, actually acknowledges and acquiesces in their collapse. Law enforcement comes to be seen as the only effective deterrent in a society that no longer knows the difference between right and wrong. The campaign to empty law of moral content—to banish the ideas of right and wrong and to replace them with an ethic of human relations—has had an unintended consequence. Divorced from the concept of justice, the law becomes nothing more than an instrument by means of which authorities enforce obedience. In former times, men regarded law as the moral consensus of the community—a means of "setting up categories," in Friedenberg's words, "under which society could subsume and isolate those whom it defined as miscreant." Today they see law merely as a means for controlling behavior. "Neglect law enforcement and the social structure decays."
The prevalence of this view does not mean, however, that subjects and citizens regard authorities as "essentially benign" or hesistate "to discuss the possibility," in Friedenberg's words, "that a social institution . . . might be hostile or destructive in its purpose." On the contrary, official protestations of benevolence elicit contempt or cynical indifference. "Apathy," widely deplored by political scientists and other observers of the political scene, greets all public statements in a society saturated with public lies. The official pretense that officials only want to "help" is rightly regarded as the biggest lie of all. People submit to the rules of social life, then, because submission usually represents the line of least resistance, not because they believe in the justice of the rules or the good intentions of those who promulgate them. The public takes it for granted that power corrupts those who wield it, but it regards this fact not with indignation but with a resigned sense of its inevitability. Dis-
[188]
belief in official pretensions, which formerly might have aroused resistance to the state, becomes another form of obedience, another acknowledgement of the way things are. Men submit not to authority but to reality.
If submission rests not on loyalty to a moral consensus but simply on a belief in the need for law enforcement, it rests on a shaky foundation. Men break the rules whenever the opportunity presents itself, not only because infractions of the rules so often go undetected, but also because authorities themselves conspire with offenders to overlook such violations. The contmept for authority, which leads to rising rates of crime and to the "legitimation of the ripoff," originates in part in the ease with which authorities can be corrupted. Yet the corruptibility of authority serves in a curious way to strengthen the hand of those who wield power. The official who winks at an offense puts the offender in his debt. Moreover, he exposes the offender to blackmail. He keeps people in line precisely by overlooking their transgressions, a technique of control that closely resembles the "flattery of the lie," by means of which industrial supervisors assert power over subordinates by tolerating falsehood and inefficiency. Lawbreaking contributes to law enforcement. The complicity between the criminal and the crime fighter, the subordinate and the superior, the violators of rules and the enforcers of rules, contributes to the maintenance of order by keeping troublemakers in a state of chronic uneasiness.
Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)
[74] By centering her criticism of the American family on Momism and adolescence, Mead singled out familiar features of domestic life that were already passing from the scene. The mother's influence in the middle-class American family has increased only in relation to that of the father. The decline of paternal authority has weakened the influence of both parents and undermined the affective identification of the younger generation with the older. Recent evidence suggests that American children, far from becoming overly dependent on their mothers, form strong attachments to neither parent, acquiring instead, at an early stage in their lives, a cool, detached, and realistic outlook on the world.
That's just...terrible?
There is a type of young person whose sudden spurt in intellectual development is no less noticeable and surprising than his rapid development in other directions. We know how often the whole interest of boys during the latency period is concentrated on things with have an actual, objective existence. Some boys love to read about discoveries and adventures or to study numbers and proportions or to devour descriptions of strange animals and objects, while others confine their attention to machinery, from the simplest to the most complicated form. The point which these two types usually have in common is that the object in which they are interested must be a concrete one, not the product of fantasy like the fairy tales and fables enjoyed in early childhood, but something which has an actual, physical existence. When the prepubertal period begins, a tendency for the concrete interests of the latency period to give place to abstractions becomes more and more marked. In particular, adolescents of the type which Bernfeld describes as characterized by "prolonged puberty" have an insatiable desire to think about abstract subjects, to turn them over in their minds, and to talk about them. Many of the friendships of youth are based on and maintained by this desire to meditate upon and discuss such subjects together. The range of these abstract interests and of the problems which these young people try to solve is very wide. They will argue the case for free love or marriage and family life, a free-lance existence or the adoption of a profession, roving or settling down, or discuss philosophical problems such as religion or free thought, or different political theories, such as revolution versus submission to authority, or friendship itself in all its forms. If, as sometimes happens in analysis, we receive a faithful report of the conversations of young people or if–as has been done by many of those who make a study of puberty–we examine the diaries and jottings of adolescents, we are not only amazed at the wide and unfettered sweep of their thought but impressed by the degree of empathy and understanding manifested, by their apparent superiority to more mature thinkers, and sometimes even by the wisdom which they display in their handling of the most difficult problems.
We revise our opinion when we turn from the examination of the adolescent's intellectual processes themselves to consider how they fit into the general picture of his life. We are surprised to discover that his fine intellectual performance makes little or no difference to his actual behavior. His empathy into the mental processes of other people does not prevent him from displaying the most outrageous lack of consideration toward those nearest him. His lofty view of love and the obligations of a lover does not mitigate the infidelity and callousness of which he is repeatedly guilty in his various love affairs. The fact that his understanding of and interest in the structure of society often far exceed those of later years does not assist him in the least to find his true place in social life, nor does the many-sidedness of his interests deter him from concentrating upon a single point–his preoccupation with his own personality.
We recognize, especially when we come to investigate these intellectual interests in analysis, that we have here something quite different from intellectuality in the ordinary sense of the term. We must not suppose that an adolescent ponders on the various situations in love or on the choice of a profession in order to think out the right line of behavior, as an adult might do or as a boy in the latency period studies a piece of machinery in order to be able to take it to pieces and put it together again. Adolescent intellectuality seems merely to minister the daydreams. Even the ambitious fantasies of the prepubertal period are not intended to be translated into reality. When a young lad fantasies that he is a great conqueror, he does not on that account feel any obligation to give proof of his courage or endurance in real life. Similarly, he evidently derives gratification from the mere process of thinking, speculating or discussing. His behavior is determined by other factors and is not necessarily influenced by the results of these intellectual gymnastics.
There is yet another point which strikes us when we analyze the intellectual process of adolescents. A closer examination shows that the subjects in which they are principally interested are the very same as have given rise to the conflicts between the different psychic institutions. Once more, the point at issue is how to relate the instinctual side of human nature to the rest of life, how to decide between putting sexual impulses into practice and renouncing them, between liberty and restraint, between revolt against and submission to authority. As we have seen, asceticism, with its flat prohibition of instinct, does not generally accomplish what the adolescent hopes. Since the danger is omnipresent, he has to devise many means of surmounting it. The thinking over of the instinctual conflict–its intellectualization–would seem to be a suitable means. Here the ascetic flight from instinct is exchanged for a turning toward it. But this merely takes place in thought; it is an intellectual process. The abstract intellectual discussions and speculations in which young people delight are not genuine attempts at solving the tasks set by reality. Their mental activity is rather an indication of a tense alertness for the instinctual processes and the translation into abstract thought of that which they perceive. The philosophy of life which they construct–it may be their demand for revolution in the outside world–is really their response to the perception of the new instinctual demands of their own id, which threaten to revolutionize their whole lives. Their ideals of friendship and undying loyalty are simply a reflection of the disquietude of the ego when it perceives the evanescence of all its new and passionate object relations. The longing for guidance and support in the often hopeless battle against their own powerful instincts may be transformed into ingenious arguments about man's inability to arrive at independent political decisions. We see then that instinctual processes are translated into terms of intellect. But the reason why attention is thus focused on the instincts is that an attempt is being made to lay hold and master them on a different psychic level.
We remember that in psychoanalytic metapsychology the association of affects and instinctual processes with word representations is stated to be the first and most important step in the direction of the mastery of instinct which has to be taken as the individual develops. Thinking is described in these writings as "an experimental kind of acting, accompanied by displacement of relatively small quantities of cathexis together with less expenditure (discharge) of them" (Freud, 1911, p. 221). ["Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning"] This intellectualization of instinctual life, the attempt to lay hold on the instinctual processes by connecting them with ideas which can be dealt with in consciousness, is one of the most general, earliest, and most necessary acquirements of the human ego. We regard it not as an activity of the ego but as one of its indispensable components.
Once more we have the impression that the phenomena here comprised in the notion of "intellectualization at puberty" simply represent the exaggeration, under the peculiar conditions of a sudden accession of libido, of a general ego attitude. It is merely the increase in the quantity of libido which attracts attention to a function of the ego performed by it at other times as a matter of course, silently, and, as it were, by the way. If this is so, it means that the intensification of intellectuality during adolescence–and perhaps, too, the very marked advance in intellectual understanding of psychic processes which is always characteristic of an access [sic] of psychotic disease–is simply part of the ego's customary endeavor to master the instincts by means of thought.
Anna Freud
trans. Cecil Baines
The Ego and the Mechanisms
of Defense (1966) [orig. 1936]
pp. 160-163
