16. Therapeutic Politics
Let's suppose that you want to learn how to change the world, so you go to college to study people.
You could take Psychology, which studies individuals and how their heads work, and how well adapted (or maladapted) they are to society. If you did, you would probably find that the behavior and learning studies are detached from people's feelings and what they think they are learning from them, and that the studies of individuals' interface with society takes society for granted.
Or you could take Sociology, which studies society and how its structures work, and how people fit into those structures. If you did that, you might again find that people's feelings and concerns are ignored, that their experiences are boiled down to statistical figures for analysis, and that once again the analysis takes society for granted as it examines "social problems".
If you wanted to seek out a field that is less inclined to take society for granted, you could take Anthropology, and now you would be studying both individual people and their personal experiences in their societies, and also the societies themselves, from a cross-cultural perspective, comparing structure to function and learning from inside rather than outside what society is all about...but you would probably find that Anthropology is unconcerned with planning or implementing changes. It only studies; it keeps its hands off.
Since your goal is to learn how to change the world, you could opt for Political Science, and if you found a sufficiently radical department, you could learn about socialism and communism and revolution, and learn how people's problems are caused by bad social systems, which must be changed by spreading the word and organizing everyone to insist on structural change. But you would probably find that the concepts of what makes people tick, and how they think and feel, are oversimplistic and treat individual experiences as solely by-products of the state they live in.
If you wanted to explore world-changing from a different angle, you could study Religion from a Judeo- Christian perspective and learn all about how the evils of the world, with its systems and governments, are the expression of the world's individuals, with their low average moral-spiritual development which need attending to in order to bring things upward. But you would probably find that the concepts of environmental and social factors, and the ways in which they have a major role in who a person is and turns out to be, are thinly developed if not lacking altogether.
You might notice that in all of these cases, human emotions are given scant attention, and decide that there is where there needs to be more of a focus. So you could re-examine more specialized areas of Psychology and Religion, and take up Social Work and Psychiatry and become well-versed in the study of personal feelings and what they are all about...but if you did, you would undoubtedly find that even here feelings are not taken seriously as sensory input, but are instead studied as isolated phenomena with no connection to the outlying world, and in the case of unpleasant feelings, as problems that might need cures.
Such has been the case with my own pursuit of my interests. There's a missing field of study that would take individual feelings seriously as political-social forces and indicators. I think the notion that the individual experience and the political system can be studied as separate things is wrong, and I don't think they can be addressed (or changed) separately.
In the case of feminism as a movement against patriarchy, there has long been a stronger sense of the connectedness there: Carol Hanisch once wrote a well-circulated article stressing that feminist consciousness-raising groups, which compare women's personal experiences, were political entities, not merely therapy for women 1. The phrase "the personal is political" sums up this understanding. When it comes to men, though, feminists sometimes tend to view us and our relationship to patriarchy only in political terms as the dominant ones, the oppressors, the perpetrators of this mess.
Patriarchy is, of course, a political entity for men, and above and beyond the truth of our dominant position over women and its centrality to the picture, it is also true that our hierarchical powerlessness and economic slavery to one another is part of that political reality. But far more to the point, I think, is the understanding that patriarchy is the effect as well as the cause of the masculine psychology, and that to alter this system, to dismantle it and go beyond it to a different form of organized social interaction, means that the psychology of men must change. The emotional blindness and deadness of men, the talismanic association of power over others with personal triumph, reside in male heads, and as long as this condition dominates males, men will continue to seek to dominate others, especially women, and patriarhcy is well-grounded and will be difficult, probably impossible, to really eliminate. This indicates an expansion of the therapeutic senses of what this movement is all about: once again, it is summed up by saying that the personal is political, but this time the emphasis is on the revolutionary "realness" and importance of contending with masculinity as a head problem.
* * *
"Freudianism and feminism are made of the same stuff. Freud's achievement was the rediscovery of sexuality. Freud saw sexuality as the prime life force; the way in which this libido was organized in the child determined the psychology of the individual (which, moreover, recreated that of the historic species)...[he] found that in order to adjust to present civilization the sexuate being must undergo a repression process in childhood. While every individual undergoes this repression, some undergo it less successfully than others, producing greater (psychosis) or lesser (neurosis) maladjustment, often severe enough to cripple the individual altogether. Freud's proposed remedy...doesn't work. For Freud, in the tradition of 'pure' science, observed psychological structures without ever questioning their social context."
-- Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex 2
The only really nice thing about the notion of "mental illness" is the implication that when a person is upset or confused or depressed, someone ought to care, to see if she or he can help. In general, the psychiatric inmates' liberation movement's argument against psychiatry is not a rejection of the notion that emotional and mental problems exist, or that society should concern itself with how individuals feel; but rather concentrates on stating that psychiatry does not have the solution to these problems, since the real solution would invariably imply social changes, and the role of psychiatry is to police out and attend to these dangerous feelings of something needing fixing; that psychiatry in fact tends to do its patients irreversible physical damage and makes their original problems worse more often than better.
Despite the status of authenticity which psychiatry has established for itself, society at large is not exactly composed of people who trust psychiatrists and their voodoo, and you wouldn't really have to look far and wide to find people who don't assume that psychiatric hospitals are wonderfully nurturant caregiving places where upset, confused, and depressed people can recuperate. If they did, there might be a mass rush of ordinary, everyday folks trying to check in!
Still, people do voluntarily check in in a state of emotional exhaustion, in hopes that the environment will be an improvement on where they normally live. Even I was originally quite enthusiastic about having a "designated listener and understander", and I was in a buoyantly good mood at the time. When I was kicked out a month later, I was glad to have won the struggle for control of me, but I had this tinge of regret that I was still facing an immense communications task and had no one to talk to.
* * *
It would have been nice.
There I was, enthusiastically taking on the whole world, suddenly certain of a set of ideas that no one else had ever proposed -- even feminism was only a parallel line of thought coherent to my male's-eye view -- and bumping up against this reoccuring need to believe in myself and my unique thoughts without the verification of one single human being outside of my allegedly cracked-up self.
I knew I made sense to me, but if I couldn't eventually make sense to someone else I certainly would go crazy from frustration!
It would have been nice to find a cup of coffee, a comfortable chair and a conversationally cozy place, and someone to talk with and chat about what was keeping me awake and staring into space night after night.
Particularly if I had had access to a center expressly concerned with sexual identity and sex roles and sexist enculturation...whether I was speaking with one or two good listeners or participating in a group of similarly concerned people, I could have gotten enough feedback to begin to see where the things I was saying were making folks uneasy because I was making too much sense, and where I simply was losing folks as I spoke as a result of not expressing myself worth a damn. I wanted to find out if my side of the local confusion I had precipitated made sense to other people (especially others asking questions in the same vein) once I had a chance to explain in detail where my head had been spinning the last few weeks.
I don't see in any of that state of mind a sense that I was other than okay, that my excitement meant that something was wrong with me, nor did I think so at the time. I wasn't in the market for self-appointed experts to "fix" me, evaluate me, etc., and what I wanted more than anything else at that time was to meet with some people who were in the same state of mind over the same material, so that we could support each other. I felt I had answers as well as questions, and I wanted it mutual.
It certainly seems to be a predictable enough phenomenon, this stage of things. In this society, feminist drop-in validation counseling is needed to help people through that first quantum leap into feminist space, the one that happens with folks not so much when they first begin considering a feminist notion, putting a foot into feminist territory so to speak, but when they put their weight on that foot and dare to trust feminism to provide them with stability as they leave orthodoxy behind. I suppose there's a lot to be said for having the courage to abandon the strength-in-numbers source of security and the values of one's childhood all in one jump, but there's also a lot to be said for a psychological welcome mat and a cup of coffee.
Because when someone is able to say, "Yeah, I see what you mean, it makes sense", or "I feel that way, too", or "I think you're right, it could be important", it makes up for a lot of alienation.
After a decade of concentration on feminist political action committees and meaningful judicial decisions, I think perhaps it is time to reemphasize the community drop-in center and the consciousness-raising group...for a new generation of women with limited contact with radical feminism, and, if we can get the proverbial ball rolling, for men, too, as male understandings of patriarchy begin to expand.
* * *
Sometimes I forget to state what is obvious to me, forgetting that these things are not obvious to everyone else, so at the risk of sounding condescending, let me summarize what I confirmed about worshippers of normality when I was in the hospital: I'm okay, and they're not.
Those who are indoctrinated in orthodox definitions of "objective" social reality have usually made very few personal observations of reality, and are ill at ease with the inconsistencies between what they were taught to believe and what they see for themselves. They cling tightly and with terror to their secondhand beliefs in the absence of having their own personally developed picture of what the world and life is about, living out their resultant and often pathetic lives with nightmarish fears and subconscious knowledge that their beliefs aren't accurate, but lacking any other thing to call stable in the face of the chaos.
As we discovered in the psychiatric inmates' liberation movement, they could reverse the labeling and define us as the sick ones, but those are just symptoms of their defensiveness, and if we patiently and calmly explained our viewpoint (and the holes in theirs), their suspicions within would struggle with their orthodoxy. True, they would get irrational, red-facedly angry, even violent, but we often discovered that we were comparatively resilient and could tolerate our own emotional reactions to such counterattacks that so obviously were coming from a position of weakness ("so what else is new?"). As "The Patient People", we decided we must be patient with sick people who were putting us in a position of patients while they acted out in this fashion.
But at every opportunity, we learned, you communicate. Gently but insistently portray the truth as you perceive it. Then allow them to explain their perceptions; listen attentively and see if they make sense, admitting to them and yourself the possibility of error on your part, asking for clarification whenever their line of thought departs from reality as you perceive it (insist that they defend their ideas personally, rather than defining truth by consensus: "Never mind how many other people think so, how did you reach these conclusions?"). Ask questions politely. Don't be too annoyed when they resort to communication-disruptive tactics like interrupting, shouting, stalking away. Eventually, if you are in a position of being able to speak and be heard by others who are not ignoring you, they come back, seeking a clear "win" that will validate their views, some sign of recognition by you of their sanity and of your craziness. They have to convince you to convince themselves, whereas all you need to do is continue to act on the premise that your concepts are correct until you see otherwise even while admitting the possibility of error, listening but offering them no validation for invalid lines of thought.
Their defensive scramble for a logical "proof" to convince you often represents the first real look they've ever taken at their orthodoxy, and every time you demonstrate that no such thing exists, they're quite naturally going to panic and run off until they think they've found one.
And when they return, you patiently and calmly puncture that one, too.
The relationship of activist psychiatric ex-inmates to the patriarchal psychiatrized society is analogous to the position of feminism , since the attitude with which the patriarchal status quo greets feminism is a psychiatric one: feminists are not rational. They don't make sense. They are personally messed up. They want to be the opposite sex. They had an overprotective mother. They had an insufficiently nurturant mother. They were denied sexual expression by their mother. They were sexually abused by their mother. They aren't getting their rocks off enough, they're frustrated. They are promiscuous and lewd and sexually perverted. They're paranoid. They're hysterical. They must have had the hots for their close relatives. They have delusions. They are antisocial. They are scared of the opposite sex. They are scared of their own sex. They are confused. Above all else, you don't have to listen to them, you don't have to take them seriously, you can ignore their most desperate and heartfelt cries for understanding, because crazy people don't make sense. Feminists are weird, kinky, and sick, sick, sick...
* * *
The feminist movement is not unassertive about its own sanity and patriarchy's lack thereof. Far from it. In general, though, too many feminists I've known or observed in their dealings with people have fallen into the trap of doing no more than try to reverse the positions while retaining traditional notions about how to deal with people who "don't think right".
Thus, in confrontations with individuals who think in sexist patterns, or oppose the movement, or who take a different side on social issues such as abortion & reproductive freedom, they point accusingly and begin thinking in terms of guilt, total right and total wrong, evil persons with bad thinking getting away with wicked things, and the need to "win" arguments, to "prove" that Our Side is Right. But these are patriarchal ways of trying to establish truth. If one is dealing with a genuinely psychologically healthy person, one should be able to separate the truth of another's various arguments from the truth of the conclusions they've reached, and locate the point at which the two of you differ, and compare values and lines of thought. As for when feminists speak with the less rational opposition, those who themselves think in patriarchal terms of truth and winning arguments, what is often forgotten is the idea that orthodox patriarchal psychosis can be viewed as a sickness: not only are we much saner, we're much healthier, and therefore they need our help. The Enemy is a way of thinking, a phenomenon which tries to enslave us all, and when we slip and act as if it were a class of people, we are manifesting that same thinking, enslaved by that same phenomenon. I do it embarrasingly often myself; perhaps we all do. But intellectually, at least, we should know better. Women of the movement still find it necessary to reach out to women beyond it, and, if there are to be men in the movement, we must concern ourselves with the rest of our gender (which is not and cannot be the concern of the women).
At the same time, we need to analyze and absorb the lesson female experience provides about humoring the crazy, letting them think we believe they're making sense, pretending to acknowledge their "wisdom", validating their behavior, and the rest of the coopted nurturer role of femininity.
A willingness to listen, yes; an awareness of our own fallibility and the possibility of our being wrong, certainly; these things are healthy, and they communicate that healthiness to those one deals with. But to lend people false verification for dehumanizing and dehumanized thinking systems, to give an unearned nod of agreement to sexist or patriarchal priorities and values, is a mistake that the women of the movement are rightly wary of, and any return to the nurturing and care of sick patriarchs (or Totalled Women, for that matter) will have to be an open-eyed, cautious, totally conscious invasion (however benign) of their psychological structures, a love tempered in the fire of determined commitment to what is right, and guided with the confident reality-tested wisdom with which we personally define that rightness.
And that is precisely what I'm advocating.
* * *
Feminists as a group have occasionally leveled a snipe or two at "feminized fembots" (Daly) 3 and "Daddy's girls" (Solanis) 4, Total Womanhood and Phyllis Schlaflyhood (there was this really wicked conference skit about "Southern Ladies Against Women" making the rounds), but by and large feminists have kept track of their own beginnings and know that feminism must appeal to new women by speaking to the familiar circumstances of their lives. If this were not the case, they know, feminism would lose its relevance.
Relevance in this case helps establish a safe foothold while challenges are posed to the orthodox concepts of the world, one that both feminists and the new initiate feel comfortable calling truth. Here is the something that the not-yet-a-feminist can trust as standing room while her consciousness-raising group knocks the props out from under what she came in thinking was reality.
But, because so few feminists can look back to days when they were still men in the grips of the status quo mentality, feminist theory fails to speak adequately to men about things familiar to the circumstances of their lives, and even the most liberal and enlightened of men start to worry about safe footing when the prop-knocking process begins.
And even when their audience is female, radical feminists can start off on the wrong foot, and send nervous women to antifeminist reactionary groups to defend their not-really-endangered rights to be a mother to their children, or to fall in love with some sweet fellow who happens to trip her trigger. Feminist awareness of stressably familiar overlaps comes in handy when trying to bridge gaps, contributing to the security of the challenged. Some can come up with a quick list of orthodox complaints and desires which are well addressed by feminist theory right off the tops of their heads, whereas others have a hard time seeing the potential feminist in any but those who most strongly resemble themselves.
The local feminist bookstore has a solution to that problem.
* * *
"They're not worth it", concluded one of my less quixotic companions, as we were talking about a hypothetical person making an effort towards change that would benefit all involved. That brought to mind all those concepts like "altruism" and "higher causes" that are all posited to argue that "they are too worth it". Realism versus idealism. And I realized that prior to his comment, I hadn't been thinking along those lines at all.
I'd been rambling on about how I would set aside my routine life and go forth to change such-and-such overall picture for the better without realizing how noble it all sounded...and why should it? Hell, I wasn't concerned (or imagining myself to be concerned) with them, I was concerned about me! Changing the overall picture was (in the scenario we were discussing) necessary to end a cycle of frustration I'd said I would experience if blah blah blah, and I visualized myself going forth in exasperated determination to stop the mess simply because I could and because I have a low tolerance for unnecessary frustration.
I recalled that I had heard feminists describing the artificiality and wrongness of the patriarchal separation of the personal from the political, and now I saw another aspect of what they were talking about; I had been thinking like a feminist, and the patriarchal evaluation of things sounded weird for a minute. It wasn't belief in the worthiness of them or the lack thereof that set us apart, it was the "them-ness" of them as opposed to the "ushood" of us who
would be trapped in such a group situation, and as part of that ushood, I decided I, by God, was worth it!
Apparently he also assumed my martyrdom or my total failure, whereas I took my success for granted: it would benefit all involved, right? I'm the cynical one who called the world psychotic, and here I find myself the one to expect eventual understanding and rational behavior from people. Fascinating!
I sat around and thought about that for awhile, and I remembered the way psychiatrists assume that you can only change yourself, and I considered the way I thought of society. Finally, I saw two important aspects of the difference in our ways of thinking:
First, I saw me, my private self, irritated with the interface between me and the surrounding social world, not me at odds with a world somewhere "out there" beyone my reach (if it was, I would be beyond its reach, too);
Second, I saw the "ushood" as an extended sense of self, a first-person-plural identity: society as something I partly am, not something I am in.
The collective self, the ushood, the plural answer to the question "Who are you?", is what we refer to as "society" or "the world". It is something which each of us are, in part, while not invalidating the real distinction between individual self and plural self. I, for example, may be a radical feminist, but we the species have only entertained a few thoughts along that line, illustrating the difference between individual and collective self-image. And society, perceived in this fashion as entity rather than institution, must obey the same natural laws dealing with self-perception, self-love, and acceptance of whatever gremlins may lie within.
Being a patriarchy, or suffering from "patriarchosis", if you will, society represses impulses out of fear of its id, thinking that wild, unrestrained urges toward self-fulfillment can only lead to chaos and anarchy, wanton destructiveness, and undisciplined hell-raising, whereas keeping a proper control on one's self will keep all those terribly greedy impulses from leaking out. Individuals, who seek freedom and instigate changes, are of course the impulses that must be repressed (oppressed).
In the grips of such a self-fearing mental condition, patriarchy has some terrible ego problems and gloomy concepts of self. "We are unworthy", says our plural self. "We are greedy, destructive, unnatural, and guilty, deserving of punishment, not forgiveness." There are obvious signs of suicidal depression setting in.
You and I, meanwhile, are part of that whole, and, however repressed (oppressed), we are bursting free in many ways even as things seem to be getting worse, much as repressed emotions and desires often do when an uptight person's self-control collapses. Furthermore, each of us is in a state of interface with the ushood, coming into communication with other individual human components and segments and having an effect on them, partly in controlled and conscious ways, partly in less governed forms.
Mood, obviously, is part of what is constantly created and recreated, the basic optimism and hope and trust in our collective goodness and ability to deal with whatever we must, our confidence; yet we also create and recreate the process of thought within the entity society. We are as brain cells in the collective mind, and though the superorganism may occasionally seem so unresponsive as to indicate brain death, it is actually only undergoing severe denial and retreat, like an emotionally traumatized person crouching in a corner and shutting it all out. It is still possible to get an impulse to flow across those neuronic pathways whenever the electrical resistance is low.
And brain cells don't vote. And they don't obey orders. They sit peacefully together, shooting sparks. And they collaborate.
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