Moving against people: Donald Trump as a case study of Karen Horney’s aggressive neurotic type

There’s an urgent need right now to understand how the authoritarian mind works and how people can come to be driven by the authoritarian impulse, and I’ve been working for several months on a series of posts about authoritarian psychology and the specific case of Trumpism.

I’ll soon post a series about Erich Fromm’s work on the subject, which finds the roots of the authoritarian character in large-scale social changes, and particularly in the insecurity created by the rise of modern capitalism. Fromm and Karen Horney, who were colleagues and even romantic partners for a time, were both trained in Freudian psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century. Both developed original theories that retained some basic Freudian insights while rejecting others.¹

Fromm, trained as a social scientist, focused on how epochal political, religious, and religious transformations led to changes in human psychology. Horney, trained as a medical practitioner, retained the Freudian focus on the effects of the child’s immediate environment on psychological development. While she never quite succeeded in merging her work about neuroses into a larger sociological theory, her 1945 work Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis and others offered important observations about how neuroses originating in childhood interacted with a consumerist, capitalist, patriarchal society. Fromm and Horney have different emphases, but their perspectives on authoritarianism are compatible and complementary.

I’ve referred to Horney’s ideas here on a few occasions: when discussing misogynistic spree killer Elliot Rodger, disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, the book and film Revolutionary Road, and – probably most relevant right now – Joseph Stalin. A bit of background: Horney rejected arguments that people are born with a good or an evil nature or one in which these two opposing forces struggle for dominance. She believed that humans, like other living beings, have a natural tendency to develop in a healthy way.² This healthy development requires conditions and environments that foster it.

Of course, so many environments in which children grow up interfere with their healthy growth. Horney roots neurotic development in what she calls “basic anxiety,”

meaning by this the feeling a child has of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world. A wide range of adverse factors in the environment can produce this insecurity in a child: direct or indirect domination, indifference, erratic behavior, lack of respect for the child’s individual needs, lack of real guidance, disparaging attitudes, too much admiration or the absence of it, lack of reliable warmth, having to take sides in parental disagreements, too much or too little responsibility, overprotection, isolation from other children, injustice, discrimination, unkept promises, hostile atmosphere, and so on and so on. (41)

The basic anxiety that results from these problems in a child’s environment sets the stage for the development of neuroses. Children come to see the world as a fundamentally hostile place, against which they have to defend themselves. In response, they will, Horney argued, move against, towards, or away from the world and the people around them. These defensive mechanisms correspond to the three general neurotic types she analyzed: the aggressive, compliant, and detached types.³

What causes any given person to go down one of these three paths, she thought, depended on the nature of the environmental conditions, the possibilities open to them, and a variety of chance and idiosyncratic and individual factors. As neuroses, they share the same fundamental features: each type is characterized by an imagined “idealized self” (set against a despised actual self), self-alienation, a distorted understanding of reality, a set of neurotic claims, a neurotic moral vision, neurotic pride, neurotic ambition and a “search for glory,” a drive toward vindictive triumph, a set of neurotic inner dictates or “shoulds” accompanied by neurotic guilt, and serious problems in relationships and work. What differs in each type is the particular content of the idealized self, inner dictates, imagined triumph, etc.

Horney provides the most comprehensive description and analysis of the three neurotic types in Neurosis and Human Growth (1950), but the portrait she draws of the aggressive type in Our Inner Conflicts seems most immediately relevant and is also developed with reference to how its characteristics are received in US culture. I’m going to present a handful of quotations from this work that I believe are useful in understanding the psychology of Trump and some of his followers and the actions and reactions we can expect from them. (I purposefully don’t refer to policies or political ideology. Trump is driven overwhelmingly by his aggressive-authoritarian character – this, and not any political framework, dictates how he approaches politics and political relationships.)

The Need for External Affirmation

Many articles about Trump arrive at or begin from the erroneous conclusion that he’s a classic narcissist or egomaniac who holds a high opinion of himself and doesn’t care what others think of him. This common misunderstanding is surprising given all of the evidence to the contrary – Trump’s insecurity and neediness are transparent; at times their rawness is painful to witness.⁴ A key to understanding the aggressive neurotic type is seeing through the bragging and bombast to the basic anxiety and the profound lack of basic self-esteem below. As Horney describes:

[The aggressive type] needs to excel, to achieve success, prestige, or recognition in any form. Strivings in this direction are partly oriented toward power, inasmuch as success and prestige lend power in a competitive society. But they also make for a subjective feeling of strength through outside affirmation, outside acclaim, and the fact of supremacy. Here as in the compliant type the center of gravity lies outside the person himself; only the kind of affirmation wanted by others differs. Factually the one is as futile as the other. When people wonder why success has failed to make them any less insecure, they only show their psychological ignorance, but the fact that they do so indicates the extent to which success and prestige are commonly regarded as yardsticks. (65; emphasis added)

Here Horney recognizes the connection between the widespread misperceptions about people of this type and the culture of capitalism. The competitiveness and desire for wealth fostered by our culture lead to the deceptive normalization of neurotic compulsion. The aggressive type is propelled to seek out fame, power, and success - and can never get enough - not because of a simple excess of greed, but because the social recognition that accompanies them is their only source and gauge of self-worth.

The Moral Code of the Aggressive Type

The aggressive type views ethics, “human nature,” and relationships in a very particular way. They see other people in purely instrumental terms. Horney explains that

a strong need to exploit others, to outsmart them, to make them of use to himself, is part of the picture. Any situation or relationship is looked at from the standpoint of ‘What can I get out of it?’ – whether it has to do with money, prestige, contacts, or ideas. The person himself is consciously or unconsciously convinced that everyone acts this way, and so what counts is to do it more efficiently than the rest. (65)

As this suggests, the aggressive type’s instrumental view of relationships has to be understood in the context of their view of human nature. Their idealized self is characterized by (what they perceive as) toughness, hardness, dominance, selfishness, and a lack of sentimentality. They’re drawn to people they think embody these qualities – in Trump’s case, Roy Cohn, Erdoğan, Putin, Duterte, Arpaio, generals who commit war crimes, corporate heads who steal natural resources, “tough guys” in general… They’re similarly attracted to philosophies and ideologies that appear to confirm the naturalness and even justness of their neurotic inclinations, such as eugenics, Social Darwinism, fascism, and authoritarianism generally.

In turn, they’re contemptuous of (what they perceive as) weakness, softness, sentimentality, or selflessness. Their unpleasant treatment of people, from feigned respect and friendship to contemptuous callousness, rudeness, and even viciousness, is rooted in their entire view of human relations. The aggressive type

sees no reason to be considerate of others. ‘Why should I care - let others take care of themselves’. In terms of the old ethical problem of two persons on a raft only one of whom could survive, he would say that of course he’d try to save his own skin – not to would be stupid and hypocritical. He hates to admit fear of any kind and will find drastic ways of bringing it under control. (65-6)

Exploiting Virtue and Conciliation

Horney insightfully notes that “Actually, [the aggressive neurotic type’s] feelings on the score of ‘softness’ in others are mixed. He despises it in them, it is true, but he welcomes it as well, because it leaves him all the freer to pursue his own goals” (69). In fact, the aggressive type always stands ready to capitalize on kind or considerate gestures and use them to advantage. Those dealing with this type should never expect reciprocity for fairness or decency or even basic politeness. Indeed, amazingly, Trump has explicitly acknowledged that he exploits people’s desire to be (or at least to be seen as) unbiased, fair, and tolerant. “Working the refs,” as he freely admits,⁵ he accuses others of bias, unfairness, cheating, intolerance, aggression, or obstruction, and then waits to exploit their efforts to prove otherwise.

All conciliatory acts will be treated with the same deep contempt and exploited for gain. Compromises with aggressive types are also doomed to fail, as they’re seen as evidence of weakness in a battle of wills; it’s a fundamental mistake to believe that aggressive types like Trump can work toward shared public goals – the only stakes in their battles with the world are personal victory and defeat. (In Trump’s case, furthermore, his word can’t be trusted.) And of course none of their own seemingly compromising, kind, or fair actions are genuine. All are calculated to produce a desired effect in the ongoing contest – disarming opponents, breaking up alliances, impressing onlookers.

Of central importance here is that an aggressive type like Trump sees himself in constant battle against an unremittingly hostile world and believes this is the human condition:

His set of values is built around the philosophy of the jungle. Might makes right. Away with humaneness and mercy. Homo homini lupus. Here we have values not very different from those with which the Nazis have made us so familiar. (68-9)⁶

It’s vitally important to recognize that Trump’s frequently appalling behavior doesn’t reflect a lack of values or a failure to live up to shared values. The characteristics Trump prizes are his positive values - this is the moral code of the aggressive type. Many aggressive people conceal or disguise their Hobbesian moral code in the recognition that it’s socially unacceptable in their culture, but Trump does not. He openly boasts about it, recommending it in public speeches, interviews, and books.

We see this in countless statements and reactions from Trump himself. He doesn’t want to be caught gaming the system if he fears legal or financial consequences, for example, but when he doesn’t foresee such consequences he’ll boast that it makes him “smart.” His value system becomes visible through his projection as well. His claim that Obama designed the ACA to implode shortly after he left office is absurdly false, but most telling is that Trump sees in Obama’s (projected) deviousness an admirable quality. Analyses of Trump as a would-be autocrat are undeniably true and important, but to the extent that they’re intended to make him see the error of his ways will have the opposite effect – Trump wants to be regarded as a strongman, and receives as compliments what are intended as criticisms.

It’s often claimed that Trump has the upper hand because it’s impossible to shame him. Not so. We just need to understand the sources of shame within his neurotic moral code. Specifically, he feels shame at being seen – or perceiving himself - as the opposite of his idealized self: as soft, weak, passive, impressionable, tender, emotional, manipulable, stupid, failing, unpopular, dominated, beaten. (The shame at feeling impressionable and manipulable is highly ironic in that it makes him all the more impressionable and manipulable. Members of his staff routinely describe to reporters the simple means by which they exploit his tendencies. Similarly, all anyone had to do when he lied about firing James Comey on the basis of Rod Rosenstein’s recommendation was to take the lie – which in his neurotic assessment made him look weak and passive – at face value. Trump was then compelled to insist to Lester Holt in a televised interview that he had already made the decision himself and that the Rosenstein memo was mere window dressing.)

Neurotic “Realism”

Trump believes the social and political world is a realm of thinly disguised warfare, and that the only appropriately prized qualities are those he espouses. This is what realism means to the aggressive type:

His feeling about himself is that he is strong, honest, and realistic, all of which is true if you look at things his way. According to his premises his estimate of himself is strictly logical, since to him ruthlessness is strength, lack of consideration for others, honesty, and a callous pursuit of one’s ends, realism. (68)

This view of social and political life, this neurotic “realism,” has already come, horrifyingly, to shape US foreign policy and its public rhetoric. An oped by National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster and chief economic advisor Gary Cohn following Trump’s first foreign tour presents US foreign relations from the viewpoint of his psychology. “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook,” they assert,

that the world is not a “global community” but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage. We bring to this forum unmatched military, political, economic, cultural and moral strength. Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.

This twisted vision is presented as the only clear-eyed, realistic understanding of how the world works - what politics is, its elemental nature. Moreover, it isn’t simply to be recognized but to be enthusiastically embraced as the cornerstone of US foreign policy.⁷

This paragraph encapsulates Trump’s rhetoric throughout the campaign and indeed going back decades. This view of the world is not a clear-eyed, empirically-based realism which recognizes the complexity of human political motivations but an expression of Trump’s psychology – his childhood experience of the world as a hostile place and his neurotic strategy of moving against people to in order to defend himself. That this distortion can be stated in the language of international politics and given the name of “realism” doesn’t make it any more realistic in actual fact.

Three aspects of Trump’s worldview – its consistency, its partiality, and its paranoia - help us to appreciate that his is not genuine political realism but neurotic “realism.” First, there’s a consistency to Trump’s views that spans wildly different circumstances and administrations – in his mind, the US and US presidents are always losing, always being outsmarted, always being disrespected, taken advantage of, laughed at. Of course, most recently he’s focused on Obama’s alleged weakness and how any agreements he negotiated were supposedly disastrous for the US, but he’s said similar things about every US president. The lack of grounding in specific arguments about concrete approaches or agreements is due to the fact that this is merely the political projection of Trump’s distorted neurotic reaction to the world.⁸

Second, and related to the first, Trump has a long history of extreme partiality in his choice not only of evidence but of associates, who in turn reinforce the bias of his worldview. People often suggest that Trump’s views reflect the influence of people like Roy Cohn. But in fact Trump was an adult when he became acquainted with Cohn, and actively sought out Cohn’s friendship and mentorship. He’s psychologically drawn to thugs, mobsters, con artists, autocrats, dirty tricksters, media manipulators, corporate raiders, war criminals, “vicious, horrible, miserable human beings” who “don’t sleep at night” – people who reflect back to him the “truth” of his distorted vision and confirm its realism.⁹

Finally, the irrational, neurotic nature of Trump’s so-called “realism” is evident in its marked element of paranoia. In his speech announcing the abandonment of the Paris Accord, for example – which also notably included ad-libbed comments about how the world would no longer be laughing at the US – he insinuated that the agreement, like so many others, was essentially a multinational conspiracy to take advantage of the US. This belief is so unconnected to reality as to shatter any claims of clear-eyed realism.

But in the mind of the aggressive type, the truth of this worldview is confirmed by success in its practical application:

His attitude on the score of his honesty comes partly from a shrewd debunking of current hypocrisies. Enthusiasm for a cause, philanthropic sentiments, and the like he sees as sheer pretense, and it is not hard for him to expose gestures of social consciousness or Christian virtue for what they often are. (68)

It is consistent with his attitude of having to fight against a malevolent world that he should develop a keen sense of realism – of its kind. He will never be so ‘naïve’ as to overlook in others any manifestation of ambition, greed, ignorance, or anything else that might obstruct his own goals. Since in a competitive civilization attributes like these are much more common than real decency, he feels justified in regarding himself as only realistic. Actually, of course, he is just as one-sided as the compliant type. (67)

In Trump’s view, his cynicism’s effectiveness proves its accuracy. While we’ve long had evidence of the Republican Party’s cravenness, Trump has exposed its depth and successfully mined it. He’s shown that, with few exceptions, Republicans and rightwing organizations will go to virtually any lengths to obtain and retain power and prosecute their class war. The rot at the heart of white evangelicalism in the US and the absolute hollowness of its moral claims have similarly been shamefully revealed.

What could be better evidence of the correctness of Trump’s ethics of ruthlessness and cynicism than his winning not only the votes of a substantial part of the US population (the rubes, marks, and losers, as he sees them) but the support of a “family values” political party and a large number of religious leaders? But of course this is, as Horney makes clear, a biased, one-sided interpretation. In order to sustain this claim, Trump has to ignore all of those he hasn’t been able to exploit, or alternatively rationalize their actions.

The Weakness of Neurotic Cynicism

Trump’s irrationally jaded outlook prevents him from understanding human motivations that don’t comport with his neurotic framework. Activists and protesters must be paid, criminals, or jealous and embittered losers. Sally Yates and Eric Schneiderman are partisan Democrats who always had it in for him. James Comey and John Brennan want power and attention. Career government officials are “Obama holdovers” who want to sabotage Trump and advance Obama’s agenda. Intelligence agencies are a “deep state” that wants to rule supreme. Federal judges have a liberal axe to grind. Investigative journalists want fame and money. Whistleblowers in the administration are out for personal advantage….

The point isn’t that everyone who poses an obstacle to Trump acts out of only the purest and noblest of motives, but that the aggressive type is simply incapable of understanding human motives that differ from their own. Because of this, Trump will continually try to reframe genuinely virtuous, principled, or professional behavior in terms he can grasp. (He’s helped in this when the media and political commentators construe the vast majority of interactions in which he’s hostile to a person or organization as “feuds,” giving him ammunition to portray his targets’ actions in his terms - they’re only investigating, opposing, or criticizing him out of personal hostility and a desire to beat or destroy him.)

But outside of dictatorships, the inability to understand and need to distort people’s motivations in this way has serious practical consequences. The aggressive type is bound to run into problems when he’s facing people who won’t be bullied, bribed, or cajoled, who are driven by genuine selflessness, professionalism, or patriotism or a mission to get at the truth or inform the public; when Trump attempts to deal with people on the basis of his assumptions, he tends to make things far worse for himself. In addition to the fact that his efforts often fail to achieve their ends, they also tend to arouse the suspicions of more decent people. In turn, those he’s trying to manipulate, having come to appreciate that he and his crew aren’t, in James Comey’s (reported) words, honorable people, will alter their behavior accordingly – becoming hyperaware of his manipulation in other contexts, documenting their interactions and telling colleagues, etc. If they’re professional investigators or journalists, naturally this will work to his detriment.

Aggressive Inhibitions and Failed Appeals

Finally, Horney points out that the nature of our culture tends to blind us to the significant inhibitions of the aggressive type. “The aggressive type looks like an exquisitely uninhibited person,” she suggests.

He can assert his wishes, he can give orders, express anger, defend himself. But actually he has no fewer inhibitions than the compliant type. It is not greatly to the credit of our civilization that his particular inhibitions do not, offhand, strike us as such. They lie in the emotional area and concern his capacity for friendship, love, affection, sympathetic understanding, disinterested enjoyment. (68)

These extreme emotional inhibitions mean that appeals to liberal values, empathy, generosity, etc. – even framed as “American” values or in the national interest - will have no effect. (Indeed, Trump discovered at the time he bombed the runway in Syria that humanitarian rhetoric can be effective with the many people who don’t want to recognize that anyone, much less someone in a position of great power, can be so incapable of sympathy or human emotion. Since then he’s cynically seasoned his overwhelmingly authoritarian language and cruel legislation and executive actions with references to his “having a heart” and wanting bills to be less “mean.”¹⁰)

Trump’s success says a great deal about the state of our culture, and of the Republican Party in particular. But Horney makes clear that, while our culture often tragically tends to misinterpret aggressive neurotic behavior, especially in men, as strength, like all authoritarian tendencies it’s based in fundamental psychological weakness. Unable to overcome the basic anxiety developed in childhood, the aggressive type relies on fragile and pathetic neurotic “solutions.”

Trump desperately needs others’ attention, approval, and affirmation, to the point that he has to surround himself with fawning sycophants and a protective shell of delusions. His insecurity runs so deep that no amount of success can ever overcome it. His neurotic pride is the basis of his real self-loathing. Maintaining his neurotic “realist” worldview requires the constant distortion of reality, and his self-image is so brittle that it leaves him always on the defensive, projecting his self-hatred onto others. Unable to handle criticism, he needs to attack and silence critics. Feeling threatened from every direction, he’s constantly on guard for signs that he’s not perceived as his neurotic pride demands, which would bring his self-loathing once again to the surface. Utterly dependent on external validation, he’s easy prey for anyone – or any adept intelligence service - who knows how to manipulate him.

He lacks the capacity for love, empathy, and positive human relationships, which despite his neurotic cynicism he’s envious of. He’s also incapable of understanding honorable or unselfish motives, which creates endless practical, legal, and political difficulties. When our culture so frequently misinterprets the actions of the aggressive type as evidence of strength, egotism, and mastery, recognizing the weakness, insecurity, and haplessness behind them is central to resisting and combating them.

***

¹ Both wrote worthwhile critical works about Freud: Fromm’s Greatness and Limitation of Freud’s Thought and Horney’s New Ways in Psychoanalysis.

² This view was I think at the heart of Horney’s therapeutic and general optimism – when she spoke of the actualization of the “real self,” she didn’t mean that such a self existed, fully formed, inside of each person, simply needing to be released; she meant that all humans have a basic need for and natural tendency toward healthy development.

³ Horney discussed these as ideal types – a person was an aggressive type, for example, to the extent that they were characterized by the features of this particular neurosis. Also, she didn’t think of these types or neuroses in general as diagnostic classifications, for which it could be said that one person meets the definition of “a neurotic” as opposed to a psychologically healthy person.

⁴ This can be seen in the childlike way he speaks about Putin and other world leaders; his cringeworthy speech at the Al Smith dinner; his relationship with the media – both the absurdly unrealistic hope that media coverage after the election would be wholly positive and that everyone would now “bow down” to him and the vicious response when this didn’t happen; his creation of a fake persona to present a sympathetic image of himself to the media; his extreme response to Neera Tanden’s mildly critical comments about Hillary Clinton in the hacked emails; his demands that his staff obsequiously praise him in private and in public and lie to him about his popularity and prestige, as demonstrated most disturbingly in a recent cabinet meeting; and countless other episodes. Trump’s obsession with his Electoral College victory (including false claims about it) and the deceptive maps that show the counties he won are evidence not of narcissistic self-regard but of a vast need for concrete visual and numerical proof of admiration. Most revealing of Trump’s profound psychological dependence on public affirmation is his response to the pictures and video of his sparsely attended inauguration; his rage, his attempt to deny and destroy the evidence, and his continuing inability to accept the reality that the election didn’t guarantee him social acceptance show that his need for outside approval is so great that he has to enclose himself in a protective cocoon of delusions rather than face even the slightest blow to his idealized self-image. World leaders have of course recognized this bottomless need for affirmation and praise and used it to their advantage.

⁵ As with so many of Trump’s statements, it’s difficult to know whether this admission is an error rooted in stupidity or the result of appreciating how many of his followers share his psychological profile and respond favorably to this sort of manipulation and exploitation of virtue.

⁶ As I’ve said in the past, I reject as both false and harmful metaphors in which human selfishness and cruelty are presented as qualities of nonhuman animals and “uncivilized” humans.

⁷ Many people have recognized the extent to which this approach represents a break from the tradition of US foreign-policy rhetoric. Some naively or hypocritically hold to this traditional rhetoric as reflecting the reality of US actions. Others, particularly on the Left, point out that this rhetoric has for more than a century largely served to thinly conceal a project of capitalist expansion and the imperialist drive for natural resources, pipelines, bases, and power. I’ve made this argument for years. I don’t believe the appropriate response to the Trumpian approach is to naively or hypocritically cling to liberal pieties while turning a blind eye to real, aggressive policies or to dismiss the Trump doctrine as simply “removing the mask” from US imperialism and thus somehow making it better. Nazi imperialism built on British and French imperialism, but it would have been the height of stupidity and shortsightedness to welcome its arrival as a positive development in that it exposed the reality of democratic and humanitarian imperialism. No, the only positive response is to continue to fight to defend and advance real democracy, equality, freedom, and justice globally – immediately against their greatest threats (Trump, Putin, Erdoğan, and the like) and more broadly against anyone who would use these values as cover for predatory policies.

⁸ Some have noted that the timing of Trump’s remarks about Reagan’s “weak” posture toward the Soviet Union suspiciously followed his 1987 trip there, and similar comments – which are so out of step with the traditional views of the US Right - came on the heels of his hosting the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. I believe that it’s possible, and maybe even probable, that the notions Trump has advanced about the USSR/Russia and his recommendations for US policy have to some extent been seeded by agents of these regimes who rightly view Trump as a “useful idiot.” But the reality is that he wouldn’t have been such a reliable tool for them had they not found fertile soil for their propaganda in his neurotic psychology.

⁹ In the Netflix feature Get Me Roger Stone, the sleazy political operative explains his longtime friendship with Trump in these terms – Trump “understands” that this is how the real world works.

¹⁰ Some commentators have even gone so far as to express concern that he would act on the basis of raw emotion and humanitarian concern and that his purported humanitarian instincts that are out of step with the Republican Party, both ludicrous readings given the facts.

Quote of the day – interests and truth

“There are always groups whose interest is furthered by truth, and their representatives have been the pioneers of human thought; there are other groups whose interests are furthered by concealing truth. Only in the latter case does interest prove harmful to the cause of truth. The problem, therefore, is not that there is an interest at stake, but which kind of interest is at stake.”

– Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 248

Historical quote of the day - the drive for life and the drive for destruction

“It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole of life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man’s [sic] sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities…. In other words: the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions which make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies – either against others or against oneself – are nourished.”

- Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 181-182

Historical quote of the day

“Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory.

Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of ‘mediation’ which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts.

Memory recalls the terror and the hope that passed. Both come to life again, but whereas in reality, the former recurs in ever new forms, the latter remains hope.” – Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man [sigh] (1964)

There’s much that annoys me about Herbert Marcuse: his vicious attack on the neo-Freudian “revisionists” [gasp!] Erich Fromm and Karen Horney (and Harry Stack Sullivan), wrong on so many levels; 90% of Eros and Civilization (the other 10% is splendid); his excessive fondness for the word “explosive”; and even some of the central arguments in One-Dimensional Man, including in the chapter from which these lines are taken, on “The Closing of the Universe of Discourse.” But there’s also a lot that’s worthwhile, and the section on “the subversive contents of memory” and their suppression in contemporary political language stands out.

Psychiatry-skepticism-social justice reading list: user-friendly edition

I thought it might be helpful to provide the list without the distractions of links or commentary. I’ve provided links only to those materials available free online.

• Lisa Cosgrove and Robert Whitaker, Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform (2015)

• Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (2002)

• James Davies, Cracked: The Unhappy Truth about Psychiatry (2013)

• Irving Kirsch, The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth (2009)

• Carol Tavris, The Mismeasure of Woman (1992) (see also “How Psychiatry Went Crazy” (2013) and “Psychiatry and Its Discontents” (2015))

• Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (2010)

• Brett J. Deacon, “The biomedical model of mental disorder: A critical analysis of its validity, utility, and effects on psychotherapy research” (2013), Clinical Psychology Review 33, 846-861

• Marcia Angell, “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?”, “The Illusions of Psychiatry,” and “‘The Illusions of Psychiatry’: An Exchange” (2011)

• Jeffrey R. Lacasse and Jonathan Leo, “Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature” (2005), PLoS Medicine 2(12): e392.

• Joanna Moncrieff, The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment (2008)

• Paula J. Caplan, When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans (2011)

• Stuart A. Kirk, Tomi Gomory, and David Cohen, Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs

• Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (2010)

• Christopher Lane, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (2007)

• Jonathan Leo and Jeffrey R. Lacasse, “The Media and the Chemical Imbalance Theory of Depression” (2008), Society 45(1): 35-45

• Glen I. Spielmans and Peter I. Parry, “From Evidence-based Medicine to Marketing-based Medicine: Evidence from Internal Industry Documents” (2010), Bioethical Inquiry 7: 13-29 (I don’t link to PDFs, but you can find it free online)

• Caroline Gage, “Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist” (play) (available for purchase here)

• Jeffrey Lacasse, “After DSM-5: A Critical Mental Health Research Agenda for the 21st Century” (2014), Research on Social Work Practice 24(1): 5-10

• The Behavior Therapist, special issue on the biomedical model, October 2015

• Will Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (2015)

• Jessica Grogan, Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self (2012)

• Pat Barker, Regeneration (novel, 1991)

• Sam Kriss, “Book of Lamentations” (2013), The New Inquiry, October 18

• Ben Goldacre, Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks (2008)

• Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients (2012)

• Paul Moloney, The Therapy Industry: The Irresistible Rise of the Talking Cure, and Why It Doesn’t Work (2013)

• Erich Fromm, various

• Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth and New Ways in Psychoanalysis

• Valentin Voloshinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (1926)

• Marcia Westkott, The Feminist Legacy of Karen Horney (1986)

• Bernard Paris, ed., The Unknown Karen Horney: Essays on Gender, Culture, and Psychoanalysis (2000)

• Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child, For Your Own Good, The Untouched Key

• Ignacio Martín-Baró, Writings for a Liberation Psychiatry

• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

• Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (1983/2009)

• Joy Damousi and Mariano Ben Plotkin, eds., Psychoanalysis and Politics: Histories of Psychoanalysis under Conditions of Restricted Political Freedom (2012) (except the chapter by Eli Zaretsky)


I’ve updated the list with one new item, and will probably just continue to update it over time. I’ve reviewed several of the books and provided supplementary materials on this blog, so if you’re interested you can find the link-annotated version of the list here. As I said there, “I’ll note that recommending these books doesn’t mean that I endorse each and every argument they contain, which would be impossible in any case as they often disagree amongst themselves.”

UPDATED: Psychiatry-skepticism-social justice reading list

Back in 2012, I wrote about why psychiatry is an important skeptical and social justice issue and created a short list of reading suggestions for approaching psychiatry from these perspectives. The impending release later this week of Psychiatry Under the Influence has nudged me to update it.

Much has changed since 2012, and all of the developments point to the urgency of critically examining and speaking out about psychiatry and psychopharmaceuticals. Just prior to the publication of the DSM-5 in 2013, the NIMH announced that it would no longer use psychiatric diagnoses, acknowledging that they’re not scientifically valid,* which was then publicly admitted (again) by the leaders of the APA. Studies completed over the past three years have provided more evidence of the ineffectiveness and harms of psychiatric drugs, and others have demonstrated the profound psychological effects of marginalization and socioeconomic trauma. Professional movements challenging biopsychiatry and its drugs have continued to grow.

Today, many continue desperately to try to sell the myths about brain diseases and disorders and chemical imbalances, at the same time as others have taken to claiming astonishingly that reputable psychiatrists never made such claims at all. Countless people, including children, have had their rights violated and been injured or killed by psychiatric drugs since 2012, while pharma has reaped the profits and its representatives in psychiatry continue to operate with impunity.** Tragically, the skeptical community continues to exclude and attempt to silence critical perspectives while promoting psychiatric myths. I have no doubt that they believe their arguments and recommendations to be compassionate and helpful, but genuinely helpful approaches should be based in reality and not pseudoscience.

So, because hope springs eternal, I’m adding a few more resources which might entice the curious or the concerned. The original list included:

• Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (2002)

• Irving Kirsch, The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth (2009)

• Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (2010)

• Marcia Angell, “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?”, “The Illusions of Psychiatry,” and “‘The Illusions of Psychiatry’: An Exchange” (2011)

• Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (2010)

• Christopher Lane, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (2007)

• Ben Goldacre, Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks (2008)

• Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients (2012)

• Erich Fromm, various

And here are the additions, several of which I’ve reviewed in the intervening years:

• Joanna Moncrieff, The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment (2008)

• James Davies, Cracked: The Unhappy Truth about Psychiatry (2013)

• Stuart A. Kirk, Tomi Gomory, and David Cohen, Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs (2013)

• Paul Moloney, The Therapy Industry: The Irresistible Rise of the Talking Cure, and Why It Doesn’t Work (2013) (I hope to critically review this in the not-too-distant future)

• Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth and New Ways in Psychoanalysis

• Marcia Westkott, The Feminist Legacy of Karen Horney (1986)

• Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child

• Ignacio Martín-Baró, Writings for a Liberation Psychiatry

• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) (don’t know how I neglected this the first time!)

Once again I’ll note that recommending these books doesn’t mean that I endorse each and every argument they contain, which would be impossible in any case as they often disagree amongst themselves.

In addition to Psychiatry Under the Influence, there’s a new book by sociologist Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine, that looks interesting (though the Kindle price is pretty high). This excerpt contains an interesting note about Thomas Insel:

A few months earlier, in a private conversation that he must have realized would become public, Insel had voiced an even more heretical thought. His psychiatric colleagues, he said dismissively, ‘actually believe [that the diseases they diagnose using the DSM] are real. But there’s no reality. These are just constructs. There is no reality to schizophrenia or depression...we might have to stop using terms like depression and schizophrenia, because they are getting in our way, confusing things[’].

Apparently, this was from a conversation recorded in Gary Greenberg’s The Book of Woe, which I haven’t yet read and so couldn’t add to the list.

* Thomas Insel remains faithful to the idea that the biological roots of psychological problems will be found, even if it takes, as he expects, decades.

** I’ve discussed all of this in much more depth here over the years – posts on the subject can be found under my “health” tag.

Pairings: 24/7, The Forgotten Language, Solaris

It’s been a while since I recommended a pairing.* This one is actually a trebling (?), since it involves two books and a film.

“24/7 is a time of indifference,” Jonathan Crary suggests in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013),

against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within which sleep has no necessity or inevitability. In relation to labor, it renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits. It is aligned with what is inanimate, inert, or unageing. As an advertising exhortation it decrees the absoluteness of availability, and hence the ceaselessness of needs and their incitement, but also their perpetual nonfulfillment.

…In its profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity, with the incalculable losses it causes in production time, circulation, and consumption, sleep will always collide with the demands of a 24/7 universe. The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism.

…Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present.

…Sleep is an irrational and intolerable affirmation that there might be limits to the compatibility of living beings with the allegedly irresistible forces of modernization.

While the book is insightful, and its arguments are all interesting if not all entirely convincing,** it does tend to meander away from its central topic, which is kind of a shame in that the discussion of sleep and dreaming could have been taken further.

In particular, Crary’s discussion of Freud’s and others’ “devaluation of the dream” is true as far as it goes. The “psychoanalytic reduction” of dreams to infantile wish-fulfillment

refuses the possibility of dreaming as a ceaseless and turbulent convergence of the lived present with ghosts from a fugitive and still indiscernable future.*** …Dreams may well be the vehicles of wishes, but the wishes at stake are the insatiable human desires to exceed the isolating and privatizing confines of the self.

But this section completely ignores the work of humanistic neo-Freudians like Erich Fromm and Karen Horney. Their exclusion from the critical-theory “canon” is sad both for their legacy and for the tradition itself. Fromm’s work on dreams in The Forgotten Language, for all the book’s problems, is especially relevant to Crary’s thesis. Under contemporary conditions, Fromm argues,

the human mind, of both rulers and ruled, becomes deflected from its essential human purpose, which is to feel and think humanly, to use and to develop the powers of reason and love that are inherent in man and without the full development of which he is crippled.

In this process of deflection and distortion man’s character becomes distorted. Aims which are in contrast to the interests of his real human self become paramount. His powers of love are impoverished, and he is driven to want power over others. His inner security is lessened, and he is driven to seek compensation by passionate cravings for fame and prestige. He loses the sense of dignity and integrity and is forced to turn himself into a commodity, deriving his self-respect from his salability, from his success. All this makes for the fact that we learn not only what is true, but also what is false. That we hear not only what is good, but are constantly under the influence of ideas detrimental to life.

…We are exposed to rationalizing lies which masquerade as truths, to plain nonsense which masquerades as common sense or as the higher wisdom of the specialist, of double talk, intellectual laziness, or dishonesty which speaks in the name of ‘honor’ or ‘realism’, as the case may be. We feel superior to the superstitions of former generations and so-called primitive cultures, and we are constantly hammered at by the very same kind of superstitious beliefs that set themselves up as the latest discoveries of science. Is it surprising, then, that to be awake is not exclusively a blessing but also a curse? Is it surprising that in a state of sleep, when we are alone with ourselves, when we can look into ourselves without being bothered by the noise and nonsense that surround us in the daytime, we are better able to feel and to think our truest and most valuable feelings and thoughts?

Solaris is discussed in 24/7, but Crary refers to the 1972 film by Andrei Tarkovsky, while I suggest the 2002 Steven Soderbergh version (both are adaptations of the 1961 novel by Stanislaw Lem). An essential element of the film is Cliff Martinez’ music:



* The video has since been removed, but the film I’d paired with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided back then was The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

** For one, I don’t agree with his views on blogging!

*** I very much dislike this idea of sources of resistance found only in remembrances and imaginings, as I’ll discuss in more detail in an upcoming post. Crary’s basic point here is valid, though.

The necrophilous Ayn Rand, Part 2

In my previous post, I described Erich Fromm’s notion of the necrophilous character, as both an individual and a cultural pathology. I noted that, reading Adam Lee’s series about Atlas Shrugged, I started to see Ayn Rand as a clear embodiment – a word she would likely cringe to hear applied to herself - of this character. This surprised me because Lee’s posts, for the most part, didn’t primarily concern this aspect of Rand’s psychology. Nor did I have the book available to search for more examples, which undoubtedly exist. I didn’t need it, since even the small sample of quotations presented by Lee in these assorted contexts just scream “Necrophile!”*

Rand’s necrophilous tendencies are apparent from her physical descriptions of her characters, particularly in comparison to her paeans to nonliving substances and technical processes. They can also be seen in her disregard for the natural world and celebration of ecological destruction. At times, Rand’s descriptions of nonliving objects even reveal a fascination with violence toward living beings.

In showing that “in Randworld, moral worth is linked to physical attractiveness, and heroes and villains can be recognized and distinguished from each other by sight,” Lee offers Rand’s physical descriptions of her protagonists, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart:

The glare cut a moment’s wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice – then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair – then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them; this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five. [p.34]

A sweep of brown hair fell back, almost touching the line of her shoulders. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility, and unfeminine, as if she were unconscious of her own body and that it was a woman’s body. [p.20]

Most significant for my purposes is that what makes these characters attractive in Rand’s view is the extent to which they resemble nonliving things: icy eyes, sharp and angular features that know no age, precise and inflexible movements.** Taggart’s posture is explicitly contrasted with “womanly” or “feminine” embodiedness.

Even more telling, Lee provides, “[i]n the name of being fair to Rand” as a writer since he judges it “pretty good,” her vivid, breathless description of the pouring of molten steel at one of Rearden’s mills:

The narrow streak pouring through space had the pure white color of sunlight. Black coils of steam were boiling upward, streaked with violet red. Fountains of sparks shot in beating spasms, as from broken arteries. The air seemed torn to rags, reflecting a raging flame… But the liquid metal had no aspect of violence. It was a long white curve with the texture of satin and the friendly radiance of a smile. It flowed obediently through a spout of clay, with two brittle borders to restrain it, it fell through twenty feet of space, down into a ladle that held two hundred tons. [p.34]

While the human characters are praised for their resemblance to nonliving things, steel is imbued with the qualities of a living being, even the “friendly radiance of a smile”!

Rand’s disdain for the living world encompasses natural landscapes as well. Lee provides a quotation in which she describes a road trip taken by her heroes:

The earth went flowing under the hood of the car. Uncoiling from among the curves of Wisconsin’s hills, the highway was the only evidence of human labor, a precarious bridge stretched across a sea of brush, weeds and trees. The sea rolled softly, in sprays of yellow and orange, with a few red jets shooting up on the hillsides, with pools of remnant green in the hollows, under a pure blue sky.

…”What I’d like to see,” said Rearden, “is a billboard.” [p.262]

The presence of the natural world in human affairs is portrayed as illegitimate: “It was preposterous, he thought, this growing intrusion of the accidents of nature into the affairs of men…” In fact, the most tenderly described element of a vista turns out to be…a mass of coal smoke:

Mr. Mowen looked at the skyline, at the belts, the wheels, the smoke – the smoke that settled heavily, peacefully across the evening air, stretching in a long haze all the way to the city of New York somewhere beyond the sunset – and he felt reassured by the thought of New York in its ring of sacred fires, the ring of smokestacks, gas tanks, cranes and high tension lines. [p.255]

The passion “to destroy for the sake of destruction” and utter disregard for the natural consequences of destructive acts are evident in Rand’s apparent approval of a character’s setting fire to the oil wells he’s abandoning: “Later, when they told her that Ellis Wyatt had vanished, leaving nothing behind but a board he had nailed to a post at the foot of the hill, when she looked at his handwriting on the board, she felt as if she had almost known that these would be the words: ‘I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It’s yours’.” Lee points out that it’s doubtful Wyatt had found the wells on fire when he arrived, but the point is that “Rand sees this as a grand gesture of defiance, a metaphorical middle finger extended to the looters.”

One of Lee’s recent posts is maybe the most interesting. The quotations he provides describe scenes in which Rearden has given Taggart various gifts. Lee uses these scenes to illustrate Rand’s attitude toward selfishness and giving, even in romantic relationships. She can’t allow Rearden to give a gift without driving home that no acts should ever be performed for the purpose of making another person happy. But the descriptions of the gifts are themselves interesting:

On the evening of a blizzard, she came home to find an enormous spread of tropical flowers standing in her living room against the dark glass of windows battered by snowflakes. They were stems of Hawaiian Torch Ginger, three feet tall; their large heads were cones of petals that had the sensual texture of soft leather and the color of blood.

She opened it and stared in incredulous bewilderment at a pendant made of a single pear-shaped ruby that spurted a violent fire on the white satin of the jeweler’s box….

She stood naked, the stone between her breasts, like a sparkling drop of blood.

Here, as in the description of molten steel above, a gem – a hard, nonliving substance - is granted life-like qualities. Even more suggestive of the linkage Fromm suggests between the two forms of necrophilism, living flowers call pleasingly to Rand’s mind injury (“the color of blood”) and eroticized death (“the sensual texture of leather”).

Described in Gary Weiss’s 2012 Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul, Rand’s personality was atrocious in many ways. In her life as in her art, she would probably provide an excellent case study for a Frommian (or Horneyan, for that matter) analysis, not just of Rand as an individual but of the culture that creates and sustains these pathological tendencies. As Fromm suggests, understanding the necrophilous character, especially in relation to capitalism, has important implications for psychological and ecological health.

* I believe Fromm was correct in his contention that such tendencies could be revealed in “marginal, unintended ‘insignificant’ actions, the ‘psychopathology of everyday life’” (Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 374). While he at times took this observation to silly hyper-Freudian extremes – a person’s necrophilousness could be detected in “a particular kind of lifelessness in his conversation” (377), “a predilection for dark, light-absorbing colors” (377), an “incapacity to laugh” (378), and “a special affinity for bad odors” which can give necrophiles “the appearance of being ‘sniffers’” (378) – I do think it’s fair to look for evidence in a person’s literary or artistic works.

** I’m not suggesting that people with similar physical features to Rand’s heroes look less “human” or natural in my view. My argument concerns Rand’s attribution of nonliving/nonhuman qualities to these features and her disgust at what she considered fleshy, human bodies, which reveals an open contempt for the living human form. More generally, as I discussed in the previous post, an interest in the nonliving and mechanical is not in itself indicative of necrophilous tendencies; it has to be analyzed in terms of a person’s (or a culture’s) attitude toward living beings and the connotations living beings and nonliving artifacts have for them.

The necrophilous Ayn Rand, Part 1

I’ve recently started following along with Adam Lee’s insightful and entertaining journey through Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. Reading several of the older posts in his series as I’ve caught up, I’ve been struck by how well Rand seems to personify Erich Fromm’s conception of the necrophilous character. In this post I’ll describe what Fromm meant by the necrophilous character, and in the next I’ll draw on several quotations from Rand featured in Lee’s series as evidence of her necrophilous tendencies.

While Fromm saw the necrophilous* character as loosely related to sexual necrophilia, it was primarily drawn from a critical analysis of Freud’s idea of the “death instinct” and his own understanding of the human tendency and potential for biophilia. Here’s how Fromm defined biophilia and the basic biophilic ethic:

Biophilia is the passionate love of life and of all that is alive. It is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group.** The biophilous person prefers to construct rather than to retain. He wants to be more rather than to have more. He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new rather than to find confirmation of the old. He loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty. He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations. He wants to mold and to influence by love, reason, and example; not by force, by cutting things apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things….

Biophilic ethics have their own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces. (Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 406; all further Fromm quotations are from the same volume)

Necrophilous tendencies, as this suggests, were the antithesis of biophilic ones:

Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures. (369; emphasis in original)

Fromm didn’t believe that we have a death instinct or that the necrophilous character was innate and unavoidable. Instead, he thought people naturally had a more biophilic orientation which served human health and growth, but that its development could be blocked or subverted by childhood experience or culture. “Destructiveness,” he argued,

is not parallel to, but the alternative to biophilia. Love of life or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts every human being. Necrophilia grows as the development of biophilia is stunted. Man is biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia, but psychologically he has the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution. (406-7; emphasis in original)

So necrophilous tendencies are likely to develop in certain cultural atmospheres that interfere with biophilic growth.

While the definition of the necrophilous character above might seem to have a fairly narrow range, Fromm saw necrophilous tendencies as encompassing much of modern Western culture. The love of the “nonliving” could be seen not only in the direct attraction to the “dead, decayed, putrid, sickly” but also in an undue affection for the technological and mechanical, one of “the simplest and most obvious characteristics of contemporary industrial man: the stifling of his focal interest in people, nature, and living structures, together with the increasing attraction of mechanical, nonalive artifacts” (381).

While one recent biographer has suggested that Fromm was anti-technology, and some of his statements superficially suggest a hostility to science, what he in fact seemed to oppose was a particular orientation toward and conception of science and technology: one that wasn’t centered on life and growth or based in love of humanity and the world, that was alienated and alienating. After describing some examples of technological necrophilousness involving cars, cameras, and – a great word – “gadgeteers,” for example, he clarifies:

…I do not imply that using an automobile, or taking pictures, or using gadgets is in itself a manifestation of necrophilous tendencies. But it assumes this quality when it becomes a substitute for interest in life and for exercising the rich functions with which the human being is endowed. I also do not imply that the engineer who is passionately interested in the construction of machines of all kinds shows, for this reason, a necrophilous tendency. He may be a very productive person with great love of life that he expresses in his attitude toward people, toward nature, toward art, and in his constructive technical ideas. I am referring, rather, to those individuals whose interest in artifacts has replaced their interest in what is alive and who deal with technical matters in a pedantic and unalive way. (382; emphasis in original)

Fromm’s go-to example of a techno-necrophilous culture (in contrast to the more traditionalist necrophilousness of the Spanish fascists) was F. T. Marinetti and the other Italian Futurists. Quoting from Marinetti’s 1909 “Futurist Manifesto”, he writes: “Here we see the essential elements of necrophilia: worship of speed and the machine; poetry as a means of attack; glorification of war; destruction of culture; hate against women; locomotives and airplanes as living forces” (383).

So as Fromm saw it necrophilous tendencies could be expressed through both the hatred of living things and the attraction to death, destruction, and decay and the rejection of the living world in favor of the mechanical, nonliving realm of techno-driven society. Importantly, though, in this age of ecological destruction, he recognized the latter as in some sense also an expression of the former:

The world of life has become a world of ‘no-life’; persons have become ‘nonpersons’, a world of death. Death is no longer symbolically expressed by unpleasant-smelling feces or corpses. Its symbols are now clean, shining machines; men are not attracted to smelly toilets, but to structures of aluminum and glass. But the reality behind this antiseptic façade becomes increasingly visible. Man, in the name of progress, is transforming the world into a stinking and poisonous place (and this is not symbolic).*** He pollutes the air, the water, the soil, the animals – and himself. He is doing this to a degree that has made it doubtful whether the earth will still be livable within a hundred years from now. He knows the facts, but in spite of many protesters, those in charge go on in the pursuit of technical ‘progress’ and are willing to sacrifice all life in the worship of their idol. (389; my emphasis)

…It makes little difference whether he does it intentionally or not. If he had no knowledge of the possible danger, he might be acquitted from responsibility. But it is the necrophilous element in his character that prevents him from making use of the knowledge he has.

…We must conclude that the lifeless world of total technicalization is only another form of the world of death and decay. This fact is not conscious to most, but to use an expression of Freud’s, the repressed often returns, and the fascination with death and decay becomes as visible as in the malignant anal character. (390; my emphasis)

Though Fromm wrote in individual terms, he saw the necrophilous tendency as a cultural product (driven by capitalism and Cold War politics; he paid less attention to patriarchy). He didn’t claim that people could be neatly sorted into “necrophilous” and “biophilous” boxes, but that most people exhibited both tendencies to some degree and that their relative strength was influenced by experience within a given culture and age. Very few people, he argued, could be described as fully one or the other. But he did mention, notably, several individual scientists (391) whom he considered representative of biophilia, and contended that there existed “a small minority…in whom there is no trace of necrophilia, who are pure biophiles motivated by the most intense and pure love for all that is alive. Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, and Pope John XXIII are among the well-known recent examples of this minority” (408).

I imagine many would question at least one person on this particular list - Fromm had an annoying tendency to idolize certain living or historical men (always men, as far as I can recall) as representatives of biophilia and as borderline messianic figures. In my next post, I’ll suggest some ways in which Ayn Rand fascinatingly illustrates the necrophilous character – in a manner that illuminates particular features of capitalism, patriarchy, and contemporary attitudes toward science, technology, and ecology.

* Fromm took the term from an angry response from Spanish writer-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno to a speech by the Francoist general José Millán Astray in 1936 which he quoted frequently (368).

** Although today the term “biophilia” connotes a relationship with the whole of the living world, Fromm’s formulation was often very human-centered. As his ideas developed, they did become more ecological (as can be seen in Anatomy and also in To Have or To Be?), but they never really came to include nonhuman animals in any meaningful way; in fact, nonhuman animals were often presented as objects or oppositional forces in Fromm’s work. This is somewhat surprising since Fromm repeatedly lists Albert Schweitzer as among those most representative of biophilia – “one of the great representatives of the love of life – both in his writings and in his person” (406). (I suppose this shouldn’t be so surprising: Jean-Paul Sartre was Schweitzer’s second cousin and he still managed to become one of the most speciesist of humanistic thinkers.)

*** The best example of the overlap between these two forms of necrophilousness, in which the attraction to the “antiseptic façade” barely conceals the desire for the “stinking and poisonous place” is in contemporary factory farming. As it grows bigger and more wrapped in mechanical rhetoric and “clean,” scientific practice, the ecological destruction becomes more and more visible – the toxic lagoons that surround CAFOs, the pollution of the surrounding water, the emissions of methane, the stench,…

Karen Horney and Stalin’s institutionalized neurosis

Karen Horney’s Neurosis and Human Growth



is one of those rare books capable of fundamentally transforming your understanding of the world. Horney’s work is also sadly underappreciated today,* even more so than Erich Fromm’s – added to the reflexive dismissal of anyone or anything connected to Freud (even of those like Horney who themselves came out against the most problematic aspects of Freud’s arguments, at a time when it was professionally difficult to do so) there’s the fact that she was a woman.

But the undeniable light her work can shed not just on individual psychology but on culture and politics has been appreciated by some. Recently, I ran across “Memoir of a Stalin Biographer” by Robert C. Tucker, published in 1982. As the essay’s title suggests, Tucker is best known for his three-volume biography of Stalin, of which two volumes were completed before his death in 2010. In this piece, he describes how reading Neurosis and Human Growth while living and working in Stalinist Russia led him to conceive the hypothesis that Stalin was an example of a neurotic personality, institutionalized in the political system. He offers a nice summary of Horney’s arguments (which, of course, doesn’t begin to do justice to the richness and nuance of the book):

Horney's subject was the ‘neurotic character structure’. To summarize the core of her argument, a person who experiences ‘basic anxiety’ resulting from adverse emotional circumstances in early life may seek and find a rock of inner security by forming an idealized self-image. Its content will depend upon the direction the child takes in relations with others -- moving against, toward, or away from them. For example, one whose tendency is to move against others may idealize himself as a great warrior, while one whose tendency is to move toward others may imagine himself as saintlike.

Gradually and unconsciously, if the anxiety-causing conditions do not change, the child moves from self-idealizing to adopting the idealized image as his real identity. Then the energies available for growth toward self-realization are invested in the quest to prove the idealized self in action. Horney calls this the ‘search for glory’.

Because the idealized self is absolute -- free of the faults, blemishes, and limitations that go with being human -- it can't be actualized. Hence, the individual begins to feel estranged from, and to accuse, hate, and condemn, the fallible, merely human ‘empirical self’ that he proves to be in practice. The drive to enact the idealized self is, however, compulsive, with extreme pain of anxiety and self-condemnation as the price of failure.

Consequently, the by now inwardly conflicted individual develops a system of unconscious defenses against the experience of failure. These include repression of the disparity between the idealized and empirical selves; various forms of rationalization; the seeking of affirmation of the idealized self by significant others; and the projection upon still others -- who can realistically be condemned and combated -- of both the repressed faults and the self- hatred that they arouse.

Repressed self-hatred is then experienced as hatred of others. The particular others on whom it is projected are likely to be those who have incurred the neurotic person's vindictive animosity by somehow failing to affirm him as the idealized self that he mistakenly takes himself to be. A ‘need for vindictive triumph’ is, therefore, a regular ingredient, according to Horney, of the search for glory, especially in those who have a tendency to move against others in a drive toward mastery.

Tucker continues:

When I was reading and rereading this book, my work consisted in directing a translation bureau operated cooperatively by the British, American, and Canadian embassies. It produced a daily bulletin of complete or condensed translations into English of articles selected by me from eight Soviet daily papers, and separate translations of articles selected from periodicals ranging from the Central Committee's monthly Kommunist to Soviet journals on history, law, philosophy and the arts. Because my Russian wife, Eugenia, whom I had married in 1946, was not given an exit visa to enable her to accompany me back home, I was, so to speak, serving an indefinite sentence in Moscow.

What would one day be called the ‘cult of personality’, with Stalin as the centerpiece, was at its zenith. Unlike Orwell's Big Brother, Stalin really existed. But he was a recluse and hardly ever appeared in public save for the parades in Red Square twice a year, May Day and November 7. Nevertheless, a heroic portrait of him, usually in generalissimo's uniform, appeared almost daily on the front pages of Soviet newspapers, and in a myriad other ways he symbolically figured in Soviet public life as an object of reverential tribute.

Two years earlier, in 1949, the cult of Stalin had reached a climax in the celebration of his 70th birthday. This amounted to what can only be described as his virtual deification….

One Saturday afternoon in 1951 I had been browsing in the Academy of Sciences bookstore and was walking down Gorky Street toward the U.S. Embassy on Mokhovaya. In full view below was Red Square and, off to its right, the Kremlin. It may have crossed my mind that Stalin was at work there. Suddenly the thought occurred to me: What if the idealized image of Stalin appearing day by day in the party-controlled, party-supervised Soviet press was an idealized self in Horney's sense?

If so, Stalin must be a neurotic personality as portrayed in her book, except that he possessed an unprecedented plenitude of political power. In that case, his personality cult must reflect his own monstrously inflated vision of himself as the greatest genius of Russian and world history. It must be an institutionalization of his neurotic character structure.

So this Kremlin recluse, this ruler who was so reticent about himself, must be spilling out his innermost thoughts about himself in millions of newspapers and journals published in Russia. He must be the most self-revealed disturbed person of all time. To find out what was most important about him there would be no need to get him onto a couch; one could do it by reading Pravda, while rereading Horney! I began to do just that, and in the process grew more convinced of my hypothesis….

As Tucker goes on to describe, he tried to be conscientious about respecting the uniqueness of the subject rather than simply trying to illustrate a conceptual framework: “Instead of dealing in such abstract categories from a book of psychology,…I was now using that book as guidance in a biographer's effort to portray his subject as an individual.”** (I haven’t yet read the biography, so I can’t attest to how successful he was.) This is perfectly in keeping with Horney’s own views; she regarded her categories and types as useful heuristics that shouldn’t be imposed on individuals but used to guide the understanding of their psychology as it came to appear from the evidence in each case.

This doesn’t mean, though, that Horney’s concepts don’t have great applicability for understanding cultural and political dynamics and how individuals are formed in conditions of oppression. They’re potentially extremely useful for understanding political cultures and social movements as long as glib extrapolations and identifications aren’t made between individual psychology and cultures, institutions, and systems. Horney wasn’t a revolutionary, but her ideas have revolutionary possibilities.

* A telling illustration of how dismal the situation is: last year, the head of the Karen Horney Clinic, Henry Paul, published a book entitled When Kids Need Meds.

** It’s noteworthy that in his discussion of how his loathing for Stalin grew in proportion to his knowledge of the man and his actions, he emphasizes Stalin’s use of torture (called by the euphemism “physical pressure”):

Khrushchev testifies in the secret report that on January 20, 1939, Stalin dispatched a coded telegram to high party and police officials throughout the country saying that ‘physical pressure should still be used obligatorily as an exception applicable to known and obstinate enemies of the people, as a method both justifiable and appropriate’. This is amply documented by other sources. ‘Physical pressure’ meant torture. Stalin was determined that those labeled enemies must be tortured. If, as I believe, the worst of human vices is cruelty, this man may have been the most vicious individual ever to wield power. Certainly he was one of them.

Even while the US government installed, funded, trained, and supported governments who systematically tortured presumed “enemies,” Tucker could still assume the reference to torture would be seen by a US readership as an indication of extreme cruelty and viciousness naturally to be greeted with the utmost contempt.

Hope in Honduras

Adrienne Pine writes from Honduras of the atmosphere of hope in these days before the election:

Among all the black humor and terror, there is an incredible amount of hope right now in Tegucigalpa. It's palpable, in the central park, in cafés, on the streets, in my classrooms. It feels to me like there are equal amounts of hope and terror, with one gaining as the other loses ground, and then reversing direction. But my interlocutors tell me I'm wrong. They tell me it's all hope (though they then often fall back into talking about their perfectly legitimate fears). Whoever came up with the LIBRE party name after Andrés Pavon stole the previous one for himself really was a genius. Because when people I know come up to me to exclaim that on Sunday they are finally going to be LIBRE/libre (as several did today), they are talking about so much more than the party.

It reminded me of a quote from Erich Fromm I posted a while back, and which seems worthwhile to feature again here:

To believe in power that exists is identical with disbelief in the growth of potentialities which are as yet unrealized. It is a prediction of the future based solely on the manifest present; but it turns out to be a grave miscalculation, profoundly irrational in its oversight of the human potentialities and human growth. There is no rational faith in power. There is submission to it or, on the part of those who have it, the wish to keep it. While to many power seems to be the most real of all things, the history of man has proved it to be the most unstable of all human achievements.

Can religious people experience wonder at the universe?

I’m returning to this question since I’ve just read another post about Oprah Winfrey’s exchange with distance swimmer Diana Nyad in which Winfrey refused to accept Nyad’s atheism after Nyad had mentioned her sense of awe and wonder at the universe.

This tendency – and it’s a dishonest tendency, whether that’s intended or not – to equate an awestruck appreciation of and joy in the natural universe with “spirituality,” thus claiming it for religion, is a common problem. One sociological study that bothered me immensely when I read it and continues to raise my ire when I think of it today was Ecklund and Long’s 2011 “Scientists and Spirituality,”* and it was precisely because they played these sorts of games with “spirituality.” Having found that scientists are generally nonreligious, the authors set out to mine for “spirituality” amongst them. Instead of defining the variable they intended to measure (spirituality) at the outset, they argued that they were going to let the scientists define it for themselves. This doesn’t make sense in a study in which the prevalence of an attitude is being measured, of course, but in any case it isn’t what they did in practice. What they did was to lead scientists to characterize some of their attitudes as spiritual and, worse, label any positive orientation – a concern with ethics, a sense of responsibility to students, a curiosity about meanings and the world – as spiritual. This practice, which is not good science, is similar to what Oprah was doing when she refused to accept that Nyad’s wonder at and joy in the world could be nonreligious.

But the Ecklund and Long study and Oprah’s comments are tangential to the deeper problem, which is a failure to recognize the fundamental invalidity of religious experiences themselves. It’s not just that religious people try to monopolize awe, wonder, love, joy,... More fundamentally, the claim that these religious experiences are genuine is itself dubious. By its very nature, religious belief engages with the natural world, including ourselves, in a manner that’s distorted by false beliefs about it. Whether the god, gods, or spirits of religious people are believed to sit outside or form part of the natural world or the universe itself is seen as an embodiment of god or spirit, the natural world itself isn’t understood in terms of its real attributes.

If you feel awe at the universe as God’s creation or the embodiment of Spirit, then you don’t feel awe at the universe. If you love other animals, human or nonhuman, as God’s creatures, then you don’t love other animals. Because you’re not in awe of the universe, you’re not in awe of the universe. Because you don’t love other animals, you don’t love other animals. In other words, appreciation based on attributes external to the being or thing itself isn’t genuine appreciation of that being or thing. You can’t experience a genuine relationship with the entities of the world unless it’s a relationship with them, as they are.

That religious people feel an awe or a love or a connection that is not genuine – is mediated and distorted by false projection – is evident from their view of the world with these religious-spiritual elements removed. This is the vision they have of atheist materialism. The world without their gods or spirits is a bleak, empty, sterile place, defined by absence and devoid of everything beautiful and awe-inspiring.

I’ve quoted Bakunin from God and the State before:

Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and bourgeois, theologians and metaphysicians, politicians and moralists, religionists, philosophers, or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists - unbounded worshippers of the ideal, as we know - are much offended when told that man, with his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless aspirations, is, like all else existing in the world, nothing but matter, only a product of vile matter.

We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong to it - that this matter has nothing in common with the vile matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness. They have taken away intelligence, life, all its determining qualities, active relations or forces, motion itself, without which matter would not even have weight, leaving it nothing but impenetrability and absolute immobility in space; they have attributed all these natural forces, properties, and manifestations to the imaginary being created by their abstract fancy; then, interchanging rôles, they have called this product of their imagination, this phantom, this God who is nothing, "supreme Being" and, as a necessary consequence, have declared that the real being, matter, the world, is nothing. After which they gravely tell us that this matter is incapable of producing anything, not even of setting itself in motion, and consequently must have been created by their God.

The significance here of their having declared that “the real being, matter, the world, is nothing” is that the awe and wonder and curiosity and love religious people express toward the natural world are awe and wonder and curiosity and love toward the natural world only to the extent that the world is seen as the creation or manifestation of divinity or spirit. Therefore, they aren’t awe and wonder and curiosity and love toward the natural world. Removing the real attributes of the natural world and locating them outside that world renders authentic relations with the world as it is impossible.

It’s not that people who believe in gods and spirits are incapable of having these experiences. It’s that the religious impulse is fundamentally contrary to them and that the experiences are corrupted to the precise extent that the natural world is believed to be infused with divinity. (This corruption isn’t limited to religion, but is true generally: the genuine experience of relations to the world is corrupted to the precise extent that false beliefs are projected onto it.)

I call attention to this issue not only to reveal the irony of the religious attempts to monopolize the experiences of awe and relatedness and suggest the problem with the “Atheists experience that, too!” retort. Nor is my intent to argue that all atheists have these experiences. The important point is that projecting false beliefs onto the natural world – and thus onto ourselves – is alienating and contrary to the development of positive relations. Our capacity to genuinely relate to beings and entities in the world is directly tied to our knowledge and understanding of them as they are in reality. As Fromm argued, this understanding is necessarily founded on respect – in the form, here, of seeking to make our knowledge objective by working to avoid projecting our wishes and beliefs onto them and to see them as they are.

*Ecklund, Elaine Howard and Elizabeth Long. 2011. “Scientists and Spirituality.” Sociology of Religion 72 (3): 253-274.