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This morning’s secular sermon

Whether it is in his frenzied tweeting (the grammar of which suggests he could not graduate high school) or “encounters” with the press, like yesterday on the South Lawn of the White House, where he spoke, among other things, to Mueller’s remarks on the Special Counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, symptoms of Trump’s narcissistic megalomania are on full and painful display. Trump rhetorically exemplifies the egregiously fallacious use of ad hominem “arguments” (yes, there are non-fallacious ad hominem arguments, as I hope to demonstrate!) which should not surprise, given that he absolutely must personalize everything, being constitutionally unable to view things without even a meager measure of—while lacking even the slightest pretense to—objectivity, impartiality, and thus realism, utterly bereft of any perspective that does not habitually orbit around his desires, wishes, and phantasies, that does not repetitiously and tirelessly refer back to something about him.

The President routinely regresses in public (one shudders to think what happens in his private life) to childlike temper tantrums, childlike emotional outbursts, to childlike language (in the worst sense). One is reminded, once again, of Jack Goldsmith’s observations in The Atlantic:  “We have never had a president so ill-informed about the nature of his office, so openly mendacious, so self-destructive, or so brazen in his abusive attacks on the courts, the press, Congress (including members of his own party), and even senior officials within his own administration.” Characterized in comparative terms, “Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of past presidents’ worst attributes: Andrew Jackson’s rage; Millard Fillmore’s bigotry; James Buchanan’s incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon’s paranoia, insecurity, and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton’s lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty.” Yet one feels that even this grim descriptive assessment does not adequately capture all that is wrong with the President’s tenure to date in office. Undoubtedly one reason for that feeling is the feckless and reckless, servile and sycophantic support provided President Trump by Republican members of Congress and his public enthusiasts. Conspicuous by their absence are a disposition to truth, a moral compass, and genuine and consistent concern for the common good, with its corresponding and complementary understanding of what it means to shape our national politics around the meaningful and pressing aims of generalized welfare and well-being, not only for our fellow human beings, but for members of the non-human natural world as well.   

The ubiquitous deception, illusion, concealment, and revelation of (‘provisional’) reality?

                                                        

The following passage is by the Brazilian economist, social scientist and writer Eduardo Giannetti [da Fonseca] (b. February 23, 1957) from the Preface to his book, Lies We Live By: The Art of Self-Deception (Bloomsbury, 2000):

“The analytic philosophy of self-deception is in a way the reverse of the exhortatory therapeutics of self-help [the therapeutic analogue, as it were, of instant gratification]. Nothing could be further from this book than the aim of ‘curing,’ converting or convincing anyone to change. I do not believe in the efficacy of homilies and ‘cures’ in the form of capsules of self-help [Americans have an apparent addiction to such ‘therapies,’ as evidenced in non-fiction best-seller lists], just as I am skeptical of the possibility of any form of ‘regeneration’ by means of moral persuasion. I do, however, believe in the strength of the desire [a desire the person may disavow, refuse to acknowledge, or be unaware of] of every human being to do the best he is capable of with his life [a belief axiomatic to the notion of ‘perfectibility’ in the works of Godwin and Condorcet]; and I believe in the Socratic principle that self-knowledge—a clear and critical vision of the values and beliefs which rule our existence—is an indispensable part of the better life within our reach [This principle, while in itself perhaps not controversial, raises all manner of questions when it comes to the possible means or paths to such self-knowledge.]”

Giannetti’s clear-eyed and sober assessment of the “homilies” and “cures” intrinsic to the “exhortatory therapeutics of self-help” (which rely on wishful thinking, illusions, or short-lived placebo effects?), may have been intimately influenced, at least in part, by the fact that his mother is the Brazilian psychoanalyst and poet, Yone Giannetti da Fonseca. I assume these “homilies and ‘cures’ in the form of capsules of self-help” are faux therapies in stark contrast to “philosophy as therapeia” or philosophical and religious therapies (some of which have significant psychological dimensions, assumptions, or premises), from Stoicism and Buddhism, to Pātañjala Yoga and perhaps even the rather different philosophies of Spinoza and Nietzsche,* as well as the variety of psychoanalytic and other psychological, cognitive or behavioral therapies proffered in today’s world for the relief of either the symptoms and/or causes of predominantly mental anguish or “problems in living” associated with unnecessary suffering of one kind or another. (I don’t believe these therapies are roughly equivalent in their powers of healing to each other, in other words, that it matters little which kind of therapy one chooses. But that is a topic for another day.) These religious, philosophical and psychological therapies are often understood to address that which interferes with or simply thwarts the achievement of moral psychological autonomy (i.e., the minimal conditions of human agency that allow for responsibility and blame, among other things), processes of individuation or self-realization, and the pursuit of self-fulfillment or eudaimonia, all of which might be thought essential to recognizing the intrinsic dignity of the human individual. Be that is it may, I had to smile when I learned from the book’s jacket cover that the publisher recommended—for marketing and retail purposes—cataloguing the book under “self-help/psychology!”

I’d like to further share some speculative reflections prompted by more material from Giannetti’s book, but first we need to introduce the concept of māyā in Hinduism generally and Advaita Vedānta in particular, for which we’ll rely on the entry for same from my study guide on Hinduism (designed for my students when I was teaching):

māyā: illusion; principle of appearance; power of creation; māyā is the power of concealing, misrepresenting, or distorting the truly and absolutely Real or nirguna Brahman in Advaita Vedānta. Māyā is at the same time the creative power of Īśvara until such time as one experiences the realization of the non-duality of Brahman. It is all that is ‘provisionally real,’ that is, the phenomenal or empirical world we normally use as a touchstone for ‘reality.’ Epistemologically speaking, māyā is equivalent to ignorance (avidyā). We lack the spiritual knowledge or insight necessary for exposing the power of māyā to conceal (āvarana śakti), distort or misrepresent (viksepa śakti) the truly real. Ignorance does not appear to admit of degrees, being rather an all-or-nothing affair: either we ‘know’ Brahman or we do not. Yet if there is progress on the spiritual quest, for example, if achieving identity with Īśvara is better (i.e., more spiritually desirable and thus closer to achieving awareness of Brahman) than being enchanted by phenomenal reality such that one does not admit there is such a thing as the non-empirical (e.g., the crude hedonist caught up in purely sensual pleasures), then it would seem individual ignorance does admit of degrees, albeit ‘relative’ degrees! Īśvara is the Great Magician, and we are seduced by his magical tricks. Provisional reality—the many—is mithyā, neither real (sat), nor unreal (asat) (cf. Parmenides’ doxa). The real is ‘one’ and it is called Brahman, the unreal is the square circle or the hare’s horn, or that which never appears as an objective datum of experience. While neither Abhinavagupta nor Rāmānuja accept Śankara’s conception of māyā, they both find a metaphysical and epistemological role for illusion. The ‘integral monism’ of Kashmir Śaivism criticizes the Advaita distinction between the ‘oneness’ of Brahman and the illusory nature of ‘the many’ as yet another kind of dualism, as all such forms of relative distinction fall within the rubric of māyā. For Abhinavagupta, the one, true reality is manifest as both unity and diversity! Rational discrimination, that is to say, ‘thought forms/constructs,’ ‘discursive representations,’ or ‘mental representations,’ (vikalpa) serve to obscure our capacity for intuitive, direct awareness of pure consciousness, and this, epistemologically speaking, is māyā. Vikalpa is nonetheless indicative of a degree of consciousness, a limited or ‘contracted’ form of consciousness, so that spiritual ignorance likewise admits of degrees: we can be more or less ignorant, just as our illusions are only relative and never absolute: ‘We are not absolutely ignorant of reality for if we were we would be totally unconscious. Spiritual ignorance is always linked with some degree of consciousness’ (Mark S.G. Dyczkowski).

Before discussing intrapersonal deception (self-deception) and interpersonal deception, Giannetti introduces the reader to the role and value of deception and illusion in the natural world, in other words, the fact that “an organism’s use of morphological traits and patterns of behaviour capable of deluding and avoiding the attack and defence systems of other living beings—is a significant part of the arsenal of survival and reproduction in the animal world.” It so happens that deception and illusion—from our unavoidably anthropomorphic perspective— is found in the molecular world and everywhere else upward along the evolutionary scale up to and throughout the animal kingdom, including intelligent primates (thus humans as well). What struck me about this fact, not entirely unknown of course, was that it might be filled out so as to contribute ontological or metaphysical plausibility if not compelling reasons on behalf of the epistemic and metaphysical arguments associated with this principle of illusion (at once concealment and revelation, as it turns out) in Advaita Vedānta philosophy in Hinduism (by way of extending its consistency and coherence, for example). I don’t recall seeing this topic discussed with regard to Advaita philosophy, so I would be delighted to learn if anyone has ever come across such a treatment.

Philosophers from the West (and theists as well), to the extent that they know something about Hinduism and Indian/Indic philosophies, tend to be quite skeptical if not implicitly dismissive about the notion of illusion in Vedānta (not dissimilar to the general attitude toward or assessment of absolute idealism within Western history of philosophy, which is not to claim or imply any equivalence between the two metaphysical systems), and even sympathetic philosophers often avoid writing much about it, perhaps because it has entered, in a crude or degraded form, into everyday discourse, even though experience tells me few people have anything even approaching a grasp of its actual meaning and function within Advaita Vedānta philosophy (not infrequently the vulgar version is casually invoked as an excuse for irrational, irresponsible or simply ill-mannered behaviour, as when someone proclaims, ‘it’s all an illusion anyway’), which should not be surprising given that its technical and full meaning is constitutionally unavailable to us in an (at once) epistemic, existential, spiritual, or metaphysical sense until we have had a “Brahman-realization,” that is, an experiential awareness of the (absolutely) true nature of Reality (in this worldview, such omniscience, as one of the three properties—the others being omnipotence and omnibenevolence—most often attributed to the deity of Abrahamic theism, is not the prerogative of God alone and thus claimed to be available, in principle at least, to human beings!).

* Please see the essays collected in Jonardon Ganeri and Clare Carlisle, eds., Philosophy as Therapeia (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 66) (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Self-Deception and the Splitting of the Ego

Herbert Fingarette (20 January 1921 – 2 November 2018) on the “splitting of the ego” and self-deception

The following is but taste of the argument from Fingarette’s essay, yet it is intended to entice you into reading the original in its entirety. I’ve appended a short list of books on self-deception (not all of which are penned by philosophers) and there is a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry on same should anyone want to further explore this topic (the SEP entry’s bibliography contains the requisite journal articles as well). For those not used to a regular diet of philosophy or who are fairly new to philosophical writing by professional philosophers, a less intimidating but no less informative entry on self-deception is found at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) under “Self-Deception, Ethics and.”

• Freud’s “doctrine on defence and the unconscious constitutes the most elaborately worked out, the most extensively applied contemporary doctrine touching self-deception.”
• “The alteration of consciousness in defence should not be understood primarily in terms of knowledge and ignorance but, instead, by reference to the ‘dynamics’ of defence, that is, by reference to those feature of defence which we would in everyday language refer to in such terms as ‘purpose,’ ‘will,’ ‘motive,’ and finally ‘action.’” [This still might be characterized, in part, in terms of ‘self-knowledge,’ which is a peculiar form of knowing rather distinguishable from knowledge as such.]
• Defence indicates a kind of split in the psyche in which, “so to speak, the ego says, this is not-me.” The splitting is “something the ego does, a motivated strategy,” leading to the creation of what we might term a “counter-ego nucleus” (like the synthetic or integrated ego, this too involves the id and super-ego).
• “Psychoanalytic therapeutic technique is basically designed to offer to the counter-ego the possibility of some substantial gratification in altered form and harmoniously with the ego, and to offer to the ego the possibility of a bearable avowal of the counter-ego. The therapist thus makes possible avowal (removal of counter-cathexis and integration of the counter-ego into the ego).”
• In explicitly avowing what was disavowed, the patient becomes conscious of what was heretofore unconscious (and perniciously so), the avowal being a “distinctive and natural expression of ones’ having abandoned defence.”
• “As Freud said, the aim of psychoanalysis is not to tell the person what is good or bad or right or wrong in a specific context, but to ‘give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or the other.’ The medical aim is thus in substance a spiritual aim. It is to help the individual become an agent and cease being a patient; it is to liberate, not indoctrinate.”

— Herbert Fingarette, from his essay, “Self-deception and the ‘splitting of the ego,’” based on edited passages from the first edition of his book, Self-Deception (Routledge, 1969), in Richard Wollheim and James Hopkins, eds., Philosophical Essays on Freud (Cambridge University Press, 1982): 212-227.

A handful of books on (deception and) self-deception that I’ve found helpful (and, for the most part, enjoyed reading!):

• Ames, Roger T. and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry (State University of New York Press, 1996).
• Barnes, Annette. Seeing Through Self-Deception (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
• Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Polity Press, 2001).
• Elster, Jon. (§ IV) “Belief, Bias and Ideology,” in his book, Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
• Fingarette, Herbert. Self-Deception (University of California Press, 2nd ed., 2000).
• Giannetti, Eduardo (John Gledson, trans.) Lies We Live By: The Art of Self-Deception (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000).
• Marar, Ziyad. Deception (Acumen, 2008).
• Mele, Alfred R. Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton University Press, 2001). [Kent Bach’s excellent review of this book is available here].
• Miller, William Ian. Faking It (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Some titles I’ve yet to read (but come highly recommended):

• Haight, M.R. A Study of Self-Deception (Harvester Press, 1980).
• Martin, Mike W., ed. Self-Deception and Self-Understanding: New Essays in Philosophy and Psychology (University Press of Kansas, 1985).
• Pears, David. Motivated Irrationality (Clarendon Press, 1984).

Images: Jackson Pollock, Portrait and a Dream (1953) and Adolph Gottlieb, Phoenix Burst (1973) respectively.

Psychoanalysis & Women (ii)

                                   

In examining Freud’s writings “we find that his and other psychoanalytic references to ‘woman’ are in dialogue with an emphatically plural account of a multitude of ‘women.’ Freud’s description of women and his interactions with them comprise a large cast of characters, a pantheon of higher and lesser ideal-typical goddesses and mortals to complement an accompany Oedipus, Narcissus, Moses, and other in psychological glory ignominy. We also find actual, historically specific, late nineteenth- and twentieth-century named and nameless women in clinical cases and vignettes. [….]

Freud describes woman as subject of her own psyche, that is, as living experiences or self and conscious and unconscious mental processes, as subject to herself. Woman as subject expands into woman as subject-object, that his, object to her own subjectivity as she internally relates to and identifies with or against another internally experienced woman.

Woman as subject and subject-object contrasts with woman as object in the masculine psyche. Freud depicts for us clinically and theoretically how men experience women, and we can also, by examining his writings on women, find clues ourselves as to how they are characterized or imagined to be by men. Freud also expands his investigation of woman as psychological subject or object by considering woman’s location in social-historical time and woman as object of cultural attribution or categorization.

Finally, Freud demonstrates for us a range of possible locations with the psychology and social organization of gender and sexuality. In his writings on sexuality and development, his cases, and his social theories, women are young girls, mothers (of daughters and of sons), daughters of mothers, daughters of fathers; they are heterosexual, lesbian, sexually inhibited or frigid altogether; they are substitute mothers, as nursemaids, servants, or governesses; they are wives, mother-symbols, or whore-like sexual objects of desirous or fearful men. This diversity stands as some response to the critique of singularity. It suggests that, although claims about limited class and basis [hence bias?] may be accurate, we miss, by looking only to cultural and social categories outside the relations of gender, the very great complexity and multiplicity of identities and social locations within it. Freud on women is a good place to begin to delineate this complexity and multiplicity. [….]

Freud claimed that his understanding of women was ‘shadowy and incomplete,’ but he nevertheless developed a broad-sweeping theory about femininity and treated and discussed women clinically. For the most part, we admire his clinical accounts, his forthright defense of hysterical women, and his condemnation of the conditions leading to repression and hysteria in women. We admire also his toleration and understanding of variations in sexual-object choice and sexual subjectivity.”—Nancy Chodorow, from her essay, “Freud on women,” in Jerome Neu, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Freud (Cambridge University Press, 1992): 224-248.

*          *          *

Melanie Klein

Psychoanalysts who were women in the generative and formative years of—largely thus not exclusively Freudian—psychoanalytic philosophy (of mind), psychology, and therapy (in no particular order … and not an exhaustive list!):

• Emma Ekstein
• Sabina Spielrein
• Margarethe Hilferding
• Else Pappenheim
• Lou Andreas Salomé
• Marie Bonaparte
• Eva Rosenfeld
• Sylvia Payne
• Isidor Sadger
• Helen Schur
• Marianne Rie Kris
• Anny Angel-Katan
• Dorothy Burlingham
• Barbara Low
• Helene Deutsch
• Alice Bálint
• Anna Freud
• Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
• Melanie Klein
• Margaret Mahler
• Annie Reich
• Barbara Lantos
• Frances Deri
• Margit Dubovitz
• Käthe Misch
• Edith Buxbaum
• Flora Kraus
• Kate Friedländer
• Muriel Gardinger Buttinger (née Morris)
• Edith Gyömröi
• Berta Bornstein
• Edith Jacobson
• Clara Happel
• Karen Horney
• Hermine Hug-Hellmuth (b. Hermine Hug Edle von Hugenstein)
• Edith Jackson
• Marie “Mimí” Lisbeth Langer (née, Glas)
• Edith Sterba
• Greta Bibring (Lehner)
• Alix Strachey
• Joan Riviere
• Jenny Waelder-Hall
• Eugénie Sokolnicka

A democratic, one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

 

George Bisharat argues the case for a democratic, one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (a general argument I happen to agree with) in an op-ed today in the Los Angeles Times:

[….] “The two-state solution is dead, laid low by a thousand cuts – or, more precisely, by the hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, whose immovable presence ensures that no genuinely sovereign Palestinian state will ever emerge there. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both played a role in delivering the final blows: Trump with his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and Netanyahu by promising voters prior to his recent reelection to begin annexation of the West Bank. [….]

It is time to face some undeniable facts: First, despite Israel’s every effort to establish and maintain a Jewish majority, the two peoples living under Israeli rule hover at near parity, at approximately 6.5 million Jews and 6.5 million Palestinians. Second, Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs are destined to live together in Israel/Palestine in perpetuity. Neither people can or should be forced to leave the land in which they reside and to which they are passionately committed. Third, segregation, of which the two-state solution was a form, is not the answer. As Americans know from our own historical experience, separate is never equal. Finally, it is only equal rights and justice that can provide the foundation for a durable peace for Israelis and Palestinians.” [….]

The full article is here.

See too:

• Abunimah, Ali. One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. New York: Holt McDougal, 2007.
• Azoulay, Ariella and Adi Ophir (Tal Haran, trans.) The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
• Hilal, Jamil, ed. Where Now for Palestine? The Demise of the Two-State Solution. London: Zed Books, 2007.
• Kovel, Joel. Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine. London: Pluto Press, 2007.
• O’Malley, Padraig. The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine—A Tale of Two Narratives. New York: Penguins Books, 2015.

Israeli-Palestinian conflict bibliography

Image: Agence France-Presse (AFP, the world’s oldest news agency) [The United Nations and most of the international community view Israeli settlements in the West Bank (above) and in East Jerusalem as illegal under international law.]

Psychoanalysis & Women (i)

 

In my research on psychoanalytic philosophy (of mind), psychology, and therapy, I have come across, not surprisingly of course, critiques, analyses, and discussions of “psychoanalysis and women,” a topic that understandably and rightly overlaps with “psychoanalysis and feminism.” I am more or less a novice (in terms of systematic investigation) on this topic and, being a man, tread this intellectual territory with some trepidation. But apprehension or fear in such matters is usually overcome or diminishes with time and the corresponding increasing familiarity with the terrain. For now, these titles are providing me with the requisite sense of direction and bearings, serving as maps for further exploration. If you know of a book that you believe likewise indispensable in this regard, please share it with us in the comments.

• Appignanesi, Lisa and John Forrester. Freud’s Women. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
• Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
• Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999 (with new preface; first published in 1978).
• Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books, 2000 (first published by Allen Lane, 1974).
• Zanardi, Claudia, ed. Essential Papers on the Psychology of Women. New York: New York University Press, 1990.

political & cultural symptoms of a pathological moral psychology among the powers-that-be

Consider and compare these three recent news items:

(i) “Federal prosecutors are pursuing criminal charges against activist Scott Daniel Warren for doing nothing more than giving food, water and shelter to migrants trekking through the desert.” “[P]rosecutors charged Warren with several counts of one of those offenses, conspiracy to transport and harbor migrants. A federal felony that could land Warren in prison for 20 years.”

(ii) “President Trump has indicated that he is considering pardons for several American military members accused or convicted of war crimes, including high-profile cases of murder, attempted murder and desecration of a corpse, according to two United States officials.”

(iii) Jeff Koons’ stainless steel sculpture of a rabbit (‘Rabbit’) sold at auction for $91 million. “The buyer in the latest sale was Robert E. Mnuchin, a former executive at Goldman Sachs who currently plies his trade as an art dealer. He’s the father of Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin, which must stand as some sort of commentary on 21st century robber barons and their relationship with a plutocrat-loving administration in Washington.”

Delineating the contours of the art of psychoanalysis*

A handful of incisive passages—sundry-sized gems—gleaned from Anthony Storr’s book, The Art of Psychotherapy (Routledge, 2^nd ed., 1990):

• “Modern man tends to escape his problems by turning to drugs and drink, or by distracting himself with passive entertainment. The ease with which we can turn on the television set [or play with a smartphone], in some instances, prevent the realisation of creative capacities for solving conflict, just as it hampers children’s capacity for creative play.”
• “No psychotherapist, and no system or theory has the ‘key’ to understanding human beings.”
• “Today, psychotherapists are consulted by people whose symptoms are ill-defined and who are not ‘sick’ or ‘ill’ in any conventional, medical sense [he is not saying that those with symptoms of mental illness¹ do not see psychotherapists, only that the class of patients, clients, or analysands is now greater than that group of individuals]. They present what [Thomas] Szasz has quite properly called ‘problems in living;’ and what they are seeking is self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and better ways of managing their lives.”

• “Patients who have consulted doctors in the past usually expect them to take the lead, issue instructions, give advice, or ask more questions. Doctors who are not used to practising psychotherapy find it difficult to abandon their traditional authoritarian role. However, the fact that the patient, rather than the doctor, is expected to take the lead in psychotherapeutic interviews is not only the feature of such interviews which most clearly distinguishes them from conventional medical consultations, but also has many important psychological consequences.”
• “Some patients [in psychoanalysis] are reluctant to talk because using words to define and clarify problems is unfamiliar to them [I think this fact is frequently ignored or ill-understood by intellectuals and academics]. This may be because of lack of education; a difficulty which is usually surmountable if the psychotherapist is flexible enough to adapt his use of language to the patient’s range. Other patients have been brought up in such a way that they habitually have recourse to action when faced with difficulties, and do not include ‘putting things into words’ as action. If, throughout one’s life, one has been used to dispelling anger by digging the garden, to alleviating anxiety by taking alcohol, to avoid confrontation with authority by changing one’s job, to ‘doing something’ however futile or inappropriate, it takes time to learn that clarification through words can be of use. Some such people also believe that any form of self-examination is to be deplored; that introspection is unhealthy, that talking about one’s problems is self-indulgence, a notion which, in any case, tends to disappear when the patient discovers that he has to face things about himself which he may not find easy to accept.”
• Self-deception may involve “overestimation of our bad qualities as well as of our virtues.”
• “… [P]sychotherapists know their patients far better than they know their own friends or colleagues, and often better than they know their own spouses or children.” Indeed, if the therapist “is at all skilled at his profession, [he] is likely to acquire more intimate knowledge of his patient than anyone else ever has or will.”
• “The psychotherapist’s purpose is to increase the patient’s self-knowledge, both by acting as a reflecting mirror with which the patient may descry himself and also by gradually building up a coherent picture of the patient’s personality by making the interpretative connections [between events, symptoms and personality characteristics].”
• “Although one of the main objectives of psychotherapy is to enable the patient more effectively to care for himself, and thus obviate the need for parent figures by becoming his [as it were] own parent, the emotional situation which prevails in the early stages of therapy, when a therapist is faced with a person who may be acutely distressed, is bound to be analogous to a parent-child relationship.”

• “Psychotherapists deal predominantly, and most successfully, with people who have negative expectations; who believe that nobody wants them, or that nobody can understand them; or who are isolated because they have come to believe that intimacy with another person is a threat. If therapy goes well, the patient will come to feel that there is a least one person in the world of whom this is not true.”
• “Healing of psychological problems is partially, if not fully, a symbolic process in which words² and images play the major role. A great deal of the healing process is metaphorical; an ‘as if’ process in which the therapist comes to represent both a series of persons from the patient’s past, and also a series of possibilities for the future. Real improvement comes about through symbolic interaction [principally, transference and counter-transference³].”
• “The temporary idealisation of the therapist often includes an erotic component; especially when the patient is predominantly heterosexual and the therapist is of the opposite sex [….] It is, of course, only to be expected that the patient’s feelings toward the therapist should include sexual feelings in some instances, and many patients have dreams and phantasies in which the therapist plays the part of a lover. [….] Since the patient endows the therapist with attributes which are predominantly parental … it follows that, when erotic elements coincide, the patient is trying to make the therapist into a combination of parent and lover.”

• “While not denying that children have sexual wishes and exhibit the precursors of adult sexuality both in behaviour and in phantasy, it has long seemed to me a pity that Freud did not lay more emphasis upon the dependent component of the persistent tie with parental figures which undoubtedly afflicts the majority of neurotics.”
• “… [P]sychotherapy today is more concerned with understanding patients as whole persons than with the abolition of particular symptoms direct.”

1. In spite of considerable skepticism regarding the term’s utility, with some going so far as to forswear its use, I think the concept of “mental illness”(and the professional designation, ‘psychopathology’), even if ill-understood or misused in some quarters, is an important, indeed, indispensable normative psychological concept (well illustrating ‘fact/value’ entanglement or exemplifying at once ‘thick’ descriptive and normative or evaluative properties), provided we have at least a plausible corresponding conception of mental health and well-being (in reality, we often have only an intuitive or dim notion of what makes for mental health and well-being). Of course what it means to be “ill” in this case may partially overlap with bodily or physical illness (e.g., an organic brain problem or injury found to be causally linked to such illness) such as we find it defined in contemporary biomedicine, but it is often, at best, only analogous to its meaning and purpose in modern medicine, even if we grant mind/body interaction can and frequently does play a significant part in physical illness, at least outside of disease proper. Mental illness is, loosely and in part, a scalar concept, or perhaps better, admits of degrees. Perhaps our “problems in living,” motley anxieties and neuroses, might better be thought of as instances of mental illness in a metaphorical sense (closer to the meaning of being ‘ill-at-ease’ in existential or metaphysical terms). As Richard J. McNally writes in What Is Mental Illness? (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), “[t]he boundary between mental distress and mental illness will never be neat and clean.” There should be no stigma whatsoever attached to the concept and experience of mental illness, any more than one should be attached to physical illness. Susceptibility or vulnerability to either state or condition is part and parcel of human nature, and the refusal to name that state or condition will do nothing by way of alleviating the myriad kinds of suffering associated with such mental distress and illness.

2. On this particular use of words see, for example, Neville Symington’s A Healing Conversation: How Healing Happens (London: Karnac Books, 2006).

3. For two dictionary definitions of transference and counter-transference, see the respective entries in Jean Laplanche and Jean-Betrand Pontalis (Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans.), The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 2004; first published in 1973 by Hogarth Press), and Elizabeth Bott Spillius, et al., The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought [Based on A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (1991) by R.D. Hinshelwood] (London: Routledge, 2011). Finally, see too Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, eds., Psychoanalysis: The Major Concepts (Yale University Press, 1995).

* I happen to believe psychoanalysis is both an art and science of healing (in the latter sense: a unique ‘science of subjectivity’).

“Please, come in, make yourself comfortable” (said while gesturing to the couch and chair) [Updated]

Along with the psychological climate of psychotherapy, the physical setting represents a standard medium for therapist expression in general and for the expression of power in particular [we’ll have to set aside here several definition of power or the various conceptions and types of power, in both negative and positive terms]. ‘Physical setting’ refers to the arrangement and contents of the office space as well as the visible aspects of the person (therapist) and his or her accoutrements.

Characteristics of the setting often have important symbolic meanings for both client and therapist. In the eyes of the participants, characteristics of the setting typically express power, nurturance, or other salient phenomena related to therapeutic behavior.

Physical setting characteristics probably exert greatest influence early in psychotherapy, prior to the development of a deeper and more thoroughly articulated therapeutic relationship. Once power communications are finding more direct if not verbal avenues for expression, these background concerns tend to be less pervasive in the minds of the participants.

The physical setting in psychotherapy tends to intersperse power symbols with more unintentional and less influential setting aspects. Particularly in reference to personal items, distinguishing between attempts at power and less willful interest is rarely clear or facile. [….]

One of the most glaring manifestations of power in a therapist’s office is the seating arrangement; one of the most power-laden of these is the psychoanalytic couch, which serves as a famous illustration. The couch is an expression of power to the analytic patient in several ways. With a gentle persuasiveness, the presence of the couch may communicate that all of a patient’s body, posturing, and movements, or the lack of them, are open to the interpretations of the analyst. Similarly, the couch may serve as muscle relaxer or pain reliever, and thus become a manifestation of an analyst’s love along with his or her power. In other words, it reflects unspoken and inherent power to comfort.

Yet, perhaps what is even more apparent is the relative positioning of the patient and the therapist. The ‘upper-lower’ seating arrangement between vertical therapist and supine patient conveys a hierarchical and uneven relationship [the first adjective strikes me as overstated if not false]. With the use of the psychoanalytic couch, the patient falls under the doctor’s examining influence and resembles the reclining infant dependent on the mother’s care. In fact, the couch may render the patient more pliant to the therapist’s suggestion or intimation [interpretation?]. Other authors, less predisposed toward the couch, have also observed that it may encourage a sedentary manner, passivity and atrophy as well as relaxation. These warring perspectives exemplify the embittered controversy that continues to surround discussion of the psychoanalytic couch. [….] – From Chapter 6, “Structural Manifestations: The Symbols of Power,” in David Heller’s Power in Psychotherapeutic Practice (Human Sciences Press, 1985): 109-121.      

*     *     *

It is often after I’m well into a book that something is discovered deemed worth sharing; today’s case is an exception. The material in question is from the first pages of The Art of Psychotherapy (1^st ed., 1979, 2^nd ed., 1990) by the late Anthony Storr* (18 May 1920 – 17 March 2001), English psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and author of over a dozen books. The chapter is titled, appropriately enough, “The Setting,” and it illustrates but one of a “what appear to be inessential details” in psychotherapeutic practice that “are in fact important.”

“… [T]he room in which the therapist sees patients, and the way that room is arranged are factors which ought to be taken into consideration. In private practice, one is free to arrange and furnish one’s consulting room in any way one likes. In hospital practice, junior doctors are lucky if they have any choice in either the location of the room in which they see patients or in its furnishing or appearance. In spite of this, I shall describe how I think a room in which one is to practice psychotherapy should be; and I would urge all psychotherapists in hospitals and outpatient clinics to insist that these basic requirements are met by the authorities, and to express dissatisfaction when they are not. At present [i.e. in 1979], it is often easier to get money for expensive electrical devices, video-tape recorders, computers and the like than to see that a number of rooms in a psychiatric hospital are properly furnished and sufficiently comfortable for psychotherapy to be carried out.

Ideally, a room in which psychotherapy is to be undertaken should be furnished as follows. First, there should be a comfortable chair in which the patients can relax. Many patients will be so tense at first that they will be unable to make proper use of such a chair, but one hopes that as the therapy progresses they will increasingly be able to do so. Being perched on the edge of a hard chair of the kind too often provided for outpatients is not conducive to personal revelation [or even simply convivial or ‘healing’ conversation], and may put the patient at a disadvantage compared with the doctor, who will almost certainly be more comfortably seated.

Second, there should be a couch on which the patient can lie down. This should not be an examination couch of the kind which physicians use for physical examinations, but something far more comfortable. When I was in private practice I used a divan bed which proved satisfactory. If suitably covered, this does not look like a bed, to which some patients might object and which others might welcome with misplaced enthusiasm. It should have at its foot end an extra piece of the same material in which it is covered, which can easily be removed for cleaning. This enables the patient to lie down without having to take off his shoes, which might otherwise dirty the cover. At the other end of the couch should be a number of covered cushions which the patient can arrange in any way that he finds comfortable.

The couch should be so placed that the therapist can sit at the head of it, out of sight of the patient, without having to rearrange the furniture every time the couch is used.

Many psychotherapists never follow the psychoanalytical practice using such a couch …. But I have found it useful with some patients; and I prefer to have it as an available alternative which the patient can use if he finds it easier to relax when lying down, or easier to talk if he is not face-to-face with the therapist.

In most clinic rooms, the doctor will be provided with a desk, and with a more or less comfortable chair in which he will sit behind it. This arrangement has the disadvantage that it immediately puts the doctor in a ‘superior’ position vis-à-vis the patient; but does enable the doctor easily to take notes if he wishes to do so. When one has had the opportunity of getting to know a patient really well over a period of time, taking notes may be superfluous: but most doctors will want to do so initially, though they should not do so if the patient objects. Note-taking should be as unobtrusive as possible, in order not to interrupt the patient’s discourse.

It is important that, if the doctor is sitting behind a desk, the furniture be so arranged that the patient is not immediately opposite him, with the desk intervening like an impassible barrier. Business tycoons use their desks as a means of intimidating their juniors, which is why they often insist upon having unnecessarily large expanses of mahogany between them and their ‘inferiors.’ It is generally possible so to arrange the furniture that, if a desk is used, the patient’s chair is placed to one side of it, so that there is little feeling of a barrier. Which side is chosen depends on whether the therapist writes with his left hand or his right. I happen to write with the right hand, and therefore place the patient on my left. This enables me to scribble notes if I wish to do so, whilst at the same time facing the patient and being able to say things directly to him without turning away or looking down. [….]

In hospital, it is probable that the therapist, especially when he is beginning, will have little choice in how the room is decorated or in what other furniture may be there. Hospital rooms are often drab, suggesting impersonal officialdom and the ‘Welfare’ State. I do not believe that it is necessarily more expensive to decorate a room in such a way that it gives the impression of warmth and friendliness. Where the therapist is in a position to exercise his own personal choice, he may well like to hang some pictures on the walls, and fill the bookshelves (if there are any) with his own books. This is entirely reasonable; but I think it important, for reasons which will emerge later, that the room should not contain anything which too stridently asserts the therapist’s tastes or which is likely to reveal a great deal of his personal life. [….]

Many professional people like to bring reminders of home into their offices by displaying photographs of their wives [or husbands or lovers] and children [and pets!]. I think it is undesirable for psychotherapists to do this. When patients become deeply involved in the therapeutic process, they are likely to experience powerful feelings of love, hate, envy, jealously and the like toward the therapist [as in ‘transference’]. Explicit reminders of the therapist’s life outside the consulting room of the kind provided by family photographs may inhibit the expression of these feelings. Moreover, the patient will have phantasies about the therapist’s personal life; and the content of these phantasies may be important in understanding the patient. [….]

It is important, if possible, the room should be quiet. Extraneous noise is not only disturbing in itself, but also gives rise to anxiety on the part of the patient. For if noise from without can come into the room, it is likely that sounds from within can be heard outside it. Nothing is more inimical to frank disclosure [let alone, ‘free association’] than the belief that one may be overheard. Most hospital rooms will contain a telephone. It is important that, during the time of the therapeutic session, the therapist does not make or take telephone calls [it is quite remarkable that there is seen the need—likely for sufficient reason—to make this particular proscription explicit; although in the time of the smartphone, it may be that much more urgent]. This is usually possible to arrange, except when the doctor is on call for emergency duties within the hospital. In my view, the doctor practicing psychotherapy should do so only on those days on which he is not on call for emergencies, or else ensure that a colleague covers for him during the time during which he is practicing psychotherapy. [….]

It is often hard to convince telephone operators and secretaries that one really must not be disturbed during psychotherapy sessions. ‘But Dr. X said it was urgent,’ they will protest. Calls are very seldom so urgent that they cannot be postponed for fifty minutes (to put it at its worst), or transferred to someone else. When I was in practice in London, I was so insistent upon not being disturbed what when a call came through from a doctor in Australia, my receptionist told him to ring back later. I congratulated her upon her firmness [I immediately thought here of Deborah Fiderer (Lily Tomlin), President Josiah Bartlet’s second private secretary on The West Wing]. It is important so to arrange the times of psychotherapeutic sessions that there is a gap of ten minutes or longer between patients. This enables the therapist to deal with telephone calls or other matters which may have arisen during the session with the last patient.

All these things are much more easily arranged in private practice than in hospital practice. My view is that, whether the patient is paying for treatment directly [through] private fees, or indirectly by the taxation which finances the Health Service, he is entitled to feel that the time he spends with the therapist is his time; and that this should not be diminished by interruptions.”

* From his Obituary notice in The Guardian: “Anthony Storr … was Britain’s most literate psychiatrist. A prolific author, journalist and radio and television commentator, he was widely respected as a fount of wisdom and good sense in a profession not particularly noted for such qualities [?!]. Like other kind and compassionate men, he was no stranger to suffering at formative stages of his life.

Born in London, Storr was a solitary, friendless child, plagued by frequent illness, including severe asthma and septicaemia, from which he nearly died. He was the youngest of four children, separated by 10 years from his closest sibling. His father, Vernon Faithfull Storr, sub-dean of Westminster Abbey, was 51 when Anthony was born, and his mother, Katherine Cecilia Storr, was 44. They were first cousins, and their consanguinity probably accounted for his asthma, from which he, like two of his siblings, suffered for most of his life. He also seems to have inherited from his mother a tendency to occasional episodes of depression.

Growing up in the privileged seclusion of Dean’s Yard, Westminster, as virtually an only child, Storr was particularly affected by the trauma, shared by most boys of his class and time, of being sent away to a boarding prep school at the age of eight. There, and later at Winchester College, he was bitterly unhappy. Having been deprived of a childhood peer group in which to learn the skills of comradeship, he was ill-prepared for the rigours of boarding-school life. Extremely slow to make friends, and showing little proficiency for games, he was bullied, and made only average academic progress. Though utterly miserable, it never occurred to him to complain to his parents, or attempt to run away, because boarding school was then a fact of life. But the sense of being a loner never left him, and was to affect the course of his career, as well as the content of his books.”

(Dr. Sidney Theodore Freedman, played by Allan Arbus in the television series M*A*S*H, is a psychiatrist frequently summoned in cases of mental health problems.’ Sidney represents conditions for psychotherapeutic practice well outside the scope of Storr’s suggested considerations and instructions for the spatial setting of psychoanalytic therapy.)

Aggressive Oversight, House Legislation, Censuring Trump and McConnell, and Media Responsibility

Many are criticizing the Democrats for their aggressive barrage of subpoenas and upcoming contempt citations. Saturday, Peggy Noonan joined those who find the tactics of the Democrats to be disturbing. Her argument is that Trump supporters will not be moved. “It will not move any needle.” Moreover, she argues that “to take all of Congress’s time attacking the President, or impeaching him, will be experienced as [a]n insult by half the country …. It will keep good keep things, such as an infrastructure bill from happening.

Some of this rings true. Trump supporters seem to cast blind eyes on all sorts of corruption. In addition, it is unlikely that Trump will support an infrastructure bill, so long as Congress insists on exercising its constitutional duty of oversight. To my mind, however, oversight is not only a constitutional duty, but also a moral duty. We know the Trump administration is corrupt, but the depth of that corruption has not been fully exposed. Noonan’s claim that the needle will not be moved ignores the fact that Democratic turnout depends upon a belief that Congress has met its constitutional and moral duty.

Finally, it is preposterous to suppose that oversight “would take all of Congress’s time.” Just this last week the House passed a bill designed to override the Administration’s efforts to permit citizens to be disadvantaged in medical insurance on the basis of pre-existing conditions. Six more progressive health bills are scheduled to be passed in the House. Of course, Mitch McConnell will not permit the most important of these bills to get to the floor of the Senate. Cable news has done a good job of covering the Trump investigation and some of the differences between Democratic candidates, but it needs to do more to discuss the differences between House Democrats and Senate Republicans on issues such as health, climate, women’s equality, and voter suppression.  

Many leading Democrats believe impeachment is morally required. I will leave that issue to the side. At the very least, House Democrats need to censure Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the other Senate Republicans who enable the corruption of the Trump administration and the undermining of our American form of democracy.

Any such censure should include the fact that Trump has committed numerous impeachable offenses and detail them. The public also needs to understand that House oversight has not gotten in the way of passing bills to help the American people, and if the media needs a news hook to do a better job, a House censure focusing on the many bills blocked by McConnell will focus attention.

The Counterintelligence "Mystery"

Much of the discussion of the Mueller Report, including commentary by Rachel Madow could lead one to the conclusion that what Mueller did on the counterintelligence front is a mystery. The report certainly contains much information relevant to a counterintelligence investigation insofar as it is relevant to decisions to prosecute or not.

Beyond that, the Report is quite clear about where to look for the information it developed on the counterintelligence front. On page 13 of volume 1, the Report states:

"From its inception, the Office recognized that its investigation could identify foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information relevant to the FBI’s broader national security mission. FBI personnel who assisted the Office established procedures to identify and convey such information to the FBI. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Division met with the Office regularly for that purpose for most of the Office’s tenure. For more than the past year, the FBI also embedded personnel at the Office who did not work on the Special Counsel’s investigation, but whose purpose was to review the results of the investigation and to send — in writing — summaries of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information to FBIHQ and FBI Field Offices. Those communications and other correspondence between the Office and the FBI contain information derived from the investigation, not all of which is contained in this Volume."

The Report is a summary, so Congress needs the evidence underlying the Report, but it also needs evidence held by the FBI that is wholly outside the Report.

 

The “rectification of names”

If there’s any field in which the Trump administration excels, it’s in coming up with more ways to disadvantage the already disadvantaged in American society. Undermining the healthcare system, tormenting immigrants, throwing people off Medicaid — the list is almost endless. — From Michael Hiltzik’s article today in the Los Angeles Times, “Trump proposes to use a sham inflation rate to throw millions off poverty rolls”

The political policies and legal effects of the President and his bootlicking lackeys and sycophants within the Administration and the Republican Party (and to an increasing extent, the judicial system), by design (i.e., deliberately thus intentionally) and occasionally by default, are systematically harming the most economically disadvantaged and vulnerable in our society, although this vulnerability may on the whole be a bit more complex insofar as it could be related to race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, disability, religious identity, what have you; in other words, there can be multiple points of vulnerability or plural disadvantages, be they embodied in the life of one individual or shared by groups. This is, at the same time, an utterly shameless dismissal of any meaningful conception of the public and common good in our society and both a de jure and de facto suppression and repression of genuine democratic will-formation or voice, let alone representation. More broadly, and whatever the source of motivation, it amounts to a denial of values and principles intrinsic to the generalized (because generalizable) praxes of welfare, well-being, and human flourishing irrespective of geo-political or nation-state borders.

At some point, the sheer scope of these blatantly systematic and sometimes insidious social and cultural causes and effects should prompt us to properly describe their true character, nature, or essence: evil. I don’t doubt that this particular desire or attempt to call things by their true name will be vociferously dismissed in some quarters as exemplifying the vice of moralism (recalling that the pejorative sense of ‘moralism’ appears rather late in our dictionaries, which is not to deny there may be perfectly appropriate meanings along these lines), in which case we find ourselves on the rocky terrain of moral psychology, raising the possibility if not probability of widespread denial, self-deception, and willful ignorance on the part of those who have succumbed to the politics and policies now firmly entrenched in the Republican Party’s feckless and immoral will-to-power, a politics clumsily and even comically but no less successfully crafted by a kleptocratic and would-be autocratic President who daily exhibits the symptoms of narcissistic megalomania.

What if Trump Refuses to Accept the Results of the 2020 Election

Recently, prominent leaders have worried that Trump will not respect the 2020 election results if he loses. Under these circumstances, if Trump claims that he is nonetheless the President, he will in a timely fashion be ousted from the Presidency. The Secret Service and the Military will forcibly escort him from the White House. And, in the absence of a deal, the FBI will arrest him for his well-known crimes.  

An imminent global environmental apocalypse

“Shocking New Report on Loss of Nature Paints a Terrifying Picture for the Future of Humanity”

Up to 1 million species are at risk of extinction.

John Vidal for HuffPost, 05/06/2019

“Planet Earth has been put on red alert by hundreds of leading scientists who have warned that humanity faces an existential threat within decades if the steep decline of nature is not reversed.

The conclusions of the greatest-ever stock-taking of the living world, published on Monday, show that ecosystems and wild populations are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing completely, and up to 1 million species of land and marine life could be made extinct by humans’ actions if present trends continue.

Food, pollination, clean water and a stable climate all depend on a thriving plant and animal population. But forests and wetlands are being erased worldwide and oceans are under growing stress, says the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the United Nations’ expert nature panel, in the landmark global assessment report. The three-year study, compiled by nearly 500 scientists, analyzed around 15,000 academic studies that focused on everything from plankton and fish to bees, coral, forests, frogs and insects, as well as drawing on indigenous knowledge.

If we continue to pollute the planet and waste natural resources as we have been doing, it won’t just affect people’s quality of life but will lead to a further deterioration of earth’s planetary systems, said the IPBES scientists. ‘The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed. This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world,’ said professor Josef Settele, a research ecologist and co-chair of the 1,800 page report, the summary of which was agreed to by 132 governments meeting in Paris this weekend, including the U.S.

The scale and rapid speed of this decline of nature is unprecedented in human history and is likely to continue for at least 50 years, say the authors of the global study, but can still largely be turned around if governments, businesses and individuals urgently commit to working together to conserve and restore nature, and to use fewer natural resources better.It will require a concerted worldwide effort to change the way we live, said IPBES chair Sir Robert Watson, a former chief scientist at NASA who is now with the U.K. government. ‘The whole world is focused on climate change but loss of biodiversity is just as important,’ said Watson. ‘You can’t deal with one without the other. There is a recognition now that biodiversity is an environmental issue, but it’s also about economics and development, too. We have to reform the economic system.’

The global assessment report, which will not be published in full until later this year (only the conclusions have been released), is unique among governmental biodiversity studies because it identifies both the direct drivers of nature’s losses ― such as climate change, agricultural expansion, pollution and the exploitation of oceans and forests ― and the underlying causes.

These indirect drivers are more controversial and include world population, which has doubled since 1970 (from 3.7 billion to 7.6 billion people), the tenfold increase in global trade over the last five decades, the sheer amount of goods that people now buy in rich countries, as well as supply chains, the endless pursuit of economic growth, damaging subsidies and the sharp growth of new technologies, all of which put demands on natural resources.

Unless both direct and indirect drivers are addressed simultaneously, there is little hope of the transformational change needed to avert a planetary crisis, said global assessment lead author Kai Chan, professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.

‘The present system [of environmental protection] has not worked well enough. Governments must get serious about reining in the power of business to regulate itself. We must also focus on supply chains. At present, nature is undermined every time we buy something through the raw materials used or the way goods are produced,’ he said. ‘Few governments fully understand the magnitude of the problems we face. Most deny the reality of the existential threat we face,’ Chan added.

The global assessment report also shows:

• Urban areas have more than doubled in size since 1992, and 100 million hectares of tropical forest were lost from 1980 to 2000.
• Around 25% of animal and plant species are threatened, and around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades if no action is taken.
• The current rate of species extinction is at least tens to hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years.
• Nearly half the live coral cover on coral reefs has been lost since the 1870s, with losses in recent decades accelerating due to climate change.
• Two-thirds of the oceans are under stress, and over 85% of wetlands area has been lost.
• The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events have increased in the past 50 years, while the global average sea level has risen by between 6 and 8 inches since 1900.
• Climate change is projected to become increasingly important as a direct driver of changes in nature and its contributions to humanity in the next decades.
• There are around 2,500 conflicts over fossil fuels, water, food and land currently occurring worldwide.” [….]

The full article is here.

Relevant Bibliographies

• Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness
• Ecological and Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
• Marxism

Or, given the urgency of the matter at hand:

• Angus, Ian. Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016.
• Bahro, Rudolf. Socialism and Survival. London: Heretic Books, 1982.
• Bahro, Rudolf. From Red to Green: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso, 1984.
• Bahro, Rodolf. Building the Green Movement. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1986.
• Benton, Ted. Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice. London: Verso, 1993.
• Benton, Ted, ed. The Greening of Marxism. New York: Guilford Press, 1996.
• Bernstein, Henry. Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 2010.
• Bernstein, Henry, et al., eds. The Food Question: Profits Versus People. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990.
• Borgnäs, Kajsa, et al., eds. The Politics of Ecosocialism: Transforming Welfare. New York: Routledge, 2017.
• Burkett, Paul. Marxism and Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2009.
• Burkett, Paul. Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2014.
• Carter, Alan. A Radical Green Political Theory. London: Routledge, 1999.
• Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
• Foster, John Bellamy. Ecology against Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002.
• Foster, John Bellamy. The Ecological Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009.
• Foster, John Bellamy. “Marxism and Ecology: Common Fonts of a Great Transition,” Monthly Review, 2015 (Vol. 67, No. 7).
• Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.
• Ghosh, B.N. Beyond Gandhian Economics: Towards a Creative Deconstruction. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2012. [I have included this title because I think both Marxists and environmentalists (and by implication, ecologists), can benefit from examining Gandhi’s principles of moral and spiritual political economy.]
• Gorz, André. Ecology as Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1980.
• Gorz, André. Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology. London: Verso, 1994.
• Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
• Kovel, Joel. The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? London: Zed Books, 2nd ed., 2007.
• Löwy, Michael. Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015.
• Magdoff, Fred. “A Rational Agriculture is Incompatible with Capitalism,” Monthly Review, March 15, 2015 (Vol. 66, No. 10).
• Magdoff, Fred and Chris Williams. Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017.
• Magdoff, Fred, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds. Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
• Magdoff, Fred and Brian Tokar, eds. Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.
• Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso, 2015.
• O’Connor, James. Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford, 1998.
• Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2007.
• Pepper, David. Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice. London: Routledge, 1993.
• Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Ross, Eric B. The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development. London: Zed Books, 1998.
• Ryle, Martin. Ecology and Socialism. London: Radius/Century Hutchinson, 1988.
• Saito, Kohei. Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017.
• Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 3rd ed., 2008.
• Tokar, Brian. Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change. Porsgrunn, Norway: New Compass Press, 2nd ed., 2014.
• Williams, Chris. Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2010.

Psychology and the Understanding of Good & Evil

The existence of the experimental method [in psychology] makes us think we have the means of getting rid of the problems which trouble us; but the problem and method pass one another by.—Wittgenstein

The following is from the Preface to Ilham Dilman’s Raskolnikov’s Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding of Good and Evil (Open Court, 2000). In my estimation, Dilman remains one of the foremost philosophical analysts of psychoanalytic psychology (alongside the likes of Richard Wollheim, Sebastian Gardner, and Jonathan Lear): he is at once incisively critical and deeply appreciative of psychoanalysis, exhibiting the virtues of a philosopher while writing in a style that extends a philosophical temperament and insight well beyond the boundaries of professional philosophy. As I’ve said elsewhere: “Occasionally one comes across a philosopher who, one believes quite strongly, was unduly neglected when alive, and thus virtually forgotten or ignored after his or her death. Ilham Dilman perfectly illustrates such a case.”

For what it’s worth, I am in full agreement with Dilman’s remarks below about “scientific psychology” (which are bit stronger than but in the spirit of kindred comments made by Jon Elster when discussing various approaches to the study of the emotions¹):

“Raskolnikov’s Rebirth is concerned with the contribution psychology, the discipline, can make to an understanding of good and evil and of a person’s relation to morality. It argues that experimental, scientific psychology can make no contribution to such an understanding. In a sense analogous to the one in which we may describe a person as having no soul, such a psychology has no soul. It is blind to the kind of life in which human beings have a soul.

This book contrasts experimental psychology² with what it calls a ‘thoughtful’ psychology which gives place to reflection on human life—a life which offers the possibility of autonomy to human beings, a life in which human beings find their individuality. I am interested in psychoanalysis because it has the potential of being a thoughtful psychology. Jung called Freud’s psychology ‘a psychology without a soul.’ This book tries to show how Freud’s perception, which were [at least in the early years] clouded by his scientism and his concentration on psycho-pathology,’ could nevertheless inspire a move towards a more thoughtful psychology. To this end I critically examine the contribution of a few later psychoanalysts [especially thus not only, Melanie Klein and Michael Balint] to an understanding of a person’s relation to good and evil and also to an understanding of religious belief. The book closes with a chapter on Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov because in Crime and Punishment we have a profound appreciation of the relation of a person, a character in the novel, to good and evil, what it means to be alienated from goodness, and of the radical change he undergoes in his mode of being as he is reintegrated with goodness. In such reintegration Raskolnikov finds his soul, the soul he has lost in his alienation from goodness, Dostoevsky describes this as ‘Raskolnikov’s rebirth.’

For psychology, as a discipline, likewise to find its soul it has to turn from experimentation to reflection, from the general to the individual. Dostoevsky, in his novels, shows himself to be such a thoughtful psychologist.”

1. “… [W]ith respect to an important subset of the emotions we can learn more from moralists, novelists, and playwrights than from the cumulative findings of scientific psychology. These emotions include regret, relief, hope, disappointment, shame, guilt, pridefulness, pride, hybris, envy, jealousy, malice, pity, indignation, wrath, hatred, contempt, joy, grief, and romantic love. By contrast, the scientific study of the emotions can teach us a great deal about anger, fear, disgust, parental love, and sexual desire (if we count the last two as emotions). [….] I believe … that prescientific insights into the emotion are not simply superseded by modern psychology in the way that natural philosophy has been superseded by physics. Some men and women in the past have been superb students of human nature, with more wide-ranging personal experience, better powers of observation, and deeper intuitions than almost any psychologist I can think of. This is only what we should expect: There is no reason why one century out of twenty-five should have a privilege in wisdom and understanding. In the case of physics, this argument does not apply.”—Jon Elster, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999)

2. Dilman grants that “... there are questions that fall within the purview of [academic or scientific] psychology, in a broad sense, that are amenable to experimental study. They concern, as Charles Taylor puts it, ‘the infrastructural conditions for the exercise’ of these capacities which are necessary to human conduct—such as attention, perception, memory, voluntary movements and the functioning of the neurological systems that come into play in the exercise of those capacities. They are concerned with the constraints behind individual behaviour in its variations.”

Relevant Bibliographies

• The Emotions
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy