James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 10, 2019
Thanks to general beliefs, the men of
every age are enveloped in a network of traditions, opinions, and customs which
render them all alike, and from whose yoke they cannot extricate themselves.
Men are guided in their conduct above all by their beliefs and by the customs
that are the consequence of those beliefs. These beliefs and customs regulate
the smallest acts of existence, and the most independent spirit cannot escape
their influence. The tyranny exercised unconsciously on men’s minds is the only
real tyranny, because it cannot be fought against.
Gustave Le Bon (1841 –
1931), “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1896)
FREUDIANISM IN THE ERA OF
THE CROWD MENTALITY
For Corporate America to loosen the controls one turn, and allow a little individual freedom in, would be tantamount to a sacrilege. Yet, I know a man who has gone against the grain to establish his identity and a meaningful career. His name is Ken Shelton.
What did he do? He left
the crowd and embraced his freedom. That is not easy.
On assignment for an American
company, I know how difficult this can be. In 1968, I experienced the
draconian rule of South African apartheid. It left me a broken man, not sure
why, but knew I needed a “time out!” Once the assignment was completed, I
took it – for two years.
Never into confidants but a
natural loner, I read books, wrote one, played tennis regularly with a
professor whom I had met when asked to give a lecture on South Africa at his
college. Ironically, he would persuade me to go back to school to earn my Ph.D,
but that is another story.
The famous Haslam
Bookstore of St. Petersburg (Florida) became a second home.
There I was introduced to the Indian mystique, Krishnamurti, buying all his
books, devouring them like a starving man. The same happened with the
American longshoreman turned philosopher Eric Hoffer, the British don Isiah
Berlin, and a bevy of authors pursuing the historical Jesus and whimsical
Apostle Paul, along with several volumes on such perplexing personalities of
history as America's Andrew Jackson and Germany's Adolf Hitler. Reading
connected me with myself and became my therapy.
Without realizing it, I was
identifying with outsiders who had a rage in their bellies, individuals who
could not help themselves for taking on the crowd. I was still a long way from
writing “Work Without Managers” (1991) or "Devlin" (2018),
both of which were gestating in my soul. I believe these books will
survive my lifetime.
At the same time, I was on a
quest to understand Freud. BB cannot believe how many books
by or about Freud that I have read, but it was his interpreters who first
triggered my fancy in this climate of the crowd.
Freud made people think in a
new way. Psychoanalysis, his invention, was offered as a physiological science
in an age of hysteria, where the world of the Enlightenment was
collapsing, as science was replacing religion as the new dogma.
Psychoanalysis, known as "the talking cure," differs from a number of
rival psychologies, and is still widely disparaged, but persists as
psychotherapy.
Pragmatic psychiatrists took a
page from Alfred Adler (1870 – 1937), a former devotee of
Freud’s who contends, in opposition to Freud, that society exerts a shaping
influence of the mind. Adler, incidentally, has given us the terms “inferiority
complex,” and “introvert” and “extrovert.”
Adlerian psychology emphasizes
the human need and ability to create positive social change and impact. Adler's
work stressed the importance of nurturing feelings of belonging and striving for
superiority. He held to equality, civil rights, mutual respect, and the
advancement of democracy as core values in his "Individual
Psychology." Now for the Freudian pragmatists.
ERIC BERNE, M.D.
Eric Berne (1910 - 1970) created Transactional Analysis introducing the mechanism with his book, “Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relations” (1964) being faithful to Freud’s Superego (The Morality Principle); Ego (The Reality Principle); and Id (The Pleasure Principle).
To these, he assigns “The
Parent” to the Superego; “The Adult” to the Ego; and “The Child” to the
Id.
P – The Parent (Morality Principle)
A – The Adult (Reality Principle)
C – The Child (Pleasure Principle)
He insists all three of these
are active in all of us throughout our lives in various transactional
combinations depending on the situation and the status of our emotional health.
I see a lot of Parent and Child in
today’s society, but very little Adult. Berne also mentions “warm
fuzzies,” or the needed emotional compliments necessary for appropriate
validation.
A scientist or an accomplished
man of maturity may need only one a year from an esteemed colleague as opposed
to a needy person, or say an entertainer who cannot survive a day without the
accolades of a highly responsive audience.
[I witnessed this as a
student at the University of Iowa. Bob Hope and his entourage were scheduled to
perform at the Iowa Fieldhouse, capacity 15,000. When Hope was about to take
the stage only about 100 or so were seated. In anger, he left the stage and
took his crew to the VA Hospital nearby and performed for an obliging and
enthusiastic captive audience.]
THOMAS A. HARRIS, M.D.
Thomas A. Harris (1910 – 1995),
a close friend and colleague of Eric Berne, came up with a cliché to further
popularize Berne’s Transactional Analysis. Educators, religious
leaders and industrial trainers latched on to his simplistic model as if a
message from the Oracle of Delphi.
The Harris book, “I’m
OK -- You’re OK: A Practical Guide to Transactional Analysis” (1967)
is faithful to all attributes of Berne’s paradigm, but in colloquial slang:
The PARENT – You’re not Okay; I’m Okay!
The ADULT – You’re Okay; I’m Okay!
The CHILD – I’m Okay; you’re not Okay!
Like Berne’s model, all the
combinations were explored and identified. The book and its name has become
a cliché although
the Harris approach to psychotherapy is somewhat passé today.
JOHN M. DUSAY, M.D.
John M. Dusay’s approach, consistent with the premises of Berne and Harris, focuses on the egostates with the book title, “Egograms: How I see You and How You See Me” (1977). Dusay claimed that anyone can become the person they want to be. He shows the reader how to chart his five primary egostates:
(1) Critical Parent,
the judgmental part of us;
(2) Nurturing Parent,
the part of us that wants people to feel better;
(3) Adult, the
logical rational part of us;
(4) Free Child, the
fun-loving part of us;
(5) Adapted Child,
the conforming repressive part of us.
BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
This egogram is from, “The Taboo
Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (1996):
Should you be familiar with either of
these books or the wave of self-conscious self-regard bordering on
self-indulgence of the American culture in the 1960s through the 1980s, you can
appreciate the innocence of the time. The “talking cure” to anxiety, lack of
self-esteem, paranoia, insecurity and depression had some legitimacy as
psycho-pharmaceuticals were then essentially limited to the treatment of
psychosis and similar disorders, not to social psychological complaints and
common accompanying neuroses.
To sum it up, the gestation of modernism
to post-modernism has gone through three phases:
(1) Post-World War Two, the United States
went from self-imposed rationing and sacrifice in support of the war to become
the manufacturing center of the world to put it back on its feet;
(2) A period of prosperity and affluence
to ordinary Americans never before realized, led to self-indulgence and a
displaced national sense of exceptionalism if not invincibility;
(3) Then Japan, Inc., South East Asia,
Singapore and Germany roared back with a vengeance. A counterfeit economy and
its concomitant leadership clung to the idea that nothing had changed.
Meanwhile, the crippled genius of the
American people was looking for a safety valve. Berne, Harris and Dusay
provided an innocuous one, which like Emerson’s Transcendentalism was
short lived but equally fascinating.
Psychiatry has become our
psycho-pharmacologist with the pharmaceutical industry now a major growth
industry. In this new century, the American constituency can either escape into
its drug culture or be preoccupied with its electronic "Toys of
the Mind."
How artificial is the experience of life
through Facebook and other social media; how narrow relational connections.
Yet, no one seems to mind.
Newspapers, now on life support, act on
the public conscience as an advertising vehicle to excite, tantalize, terrorize
and placate our collective conscience without any display of indignity.
Additionally, the social and electronic media, mainly through television and
the Internet, propel us as if automatons to predetermined destinations of purpose,
dogma, and political sanctuary, or they provide social psychological remedies
for all that ails us as if wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.
The overcrowding of the modern mind with
names, places, phrases, pictures, events, controversies and other haranguing
minutia, diverts the mind from its own purpose, fulfillment and happiness in
its own right.
IN THE MIDST OF THIS, FREEDOM CAN BE AN
INDIVIDUAL BLESSING
If you are able to get past these
aggravations and able to see that it doesn’t matter what others think or say or
do vis-à-vis your own motivation, you won’t own their problems nor will you
imitate them to ease their discomfiture. If they still have a problem with you
as you are, then move on, as they are no friend of yours. Parents can damage
you as much if not more than others. Keep that in mind. Your role in life is
not to validate your parents or anyone else, but to discover your own essence.
A friend of mine, a successful man in
every sense of the word has fought his way through this briar patch to come out
the man that he is and has become. He writes in his essay, “Field Colors”:
“When I gave a speech at BYU that won Best
Speech in a competition, I was told it was too “off-color”. When I launched a
weekly magazine at BYU that included colorful graphics, photos, reviews and
interviews, I won National Student Journalist of the Year and was kicked out of
school; and when I won National University Editor of the Year for publishing a
colorful and entertaining alumni magazine, I was fired. When I published a book
on Counterfeit Leadership as editor/publisher of Leadership
Excellence magazine, I was shunned by former colleagues and lost one-third of
our subscribers. It’s possible that no one in my community has experienced and
suffered more back-bite and knife-in-back for adding a little life and color to
a black-and-white culture and tradition.”
Elsewhere he writes, responding to my
missive, “When I cannot sleep, I ponder”:
“Thanks, Jim, I am accustomed to being
hated within and without my own community, church, culture, and country. Since
the vote appears to be universal and almost unanimous, I must be the designated
villain. Like you, I am "cursed" to have my own voice, independent of
all who seek to influence or incarcerate me. It comes from extensive cross
cultural reading, writing and publishing.”
Since I was a little boy, and as far
forward as a hospital corpsman on the flagship of the Sixth Fleet, I have been
harassed for reading such books as Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, the Bronte
sisters as well as Dostoyevsky, Chekov, Ibsen, Strindberg and others. “Why are
you reading that crap?” a shipmate said to me one day. I just shook my head. A
person who wants to be a writer, which I have always wanted to be, reads to get
a sense of his own style and composition.
When I was a sophomore at Iowa, my
literature professor approached me. He wanted to recommend me to the
“University of Iowa Honors Program in the Humanities,” which was an
international acclaimed program. When I mentioned this to my da, a passenger
brakeman on the railroad, he exploded. “I see these guys on my trains reading
these books, long hair, unkempt, lazy, acting like they don’t have a care in
the world.” I stayed in chemistry!
Berne, Harris and Dusay came out of a
quieter time advancing a formula that assumed that 80 to 90 percent of the
American public could manage their own relationships without a personal
trainer, licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, or without a retinue of
addictive mind numbing drugs.
But now we have the Baker Act here
in Florida where people considered a danger to themselves or others can be
committed to a clinic, hospital or sanatorium without their approval. Maverick
psychiatrist Thomas Szasz (1920 – 2012) insists madness is manufactured and a
convenient dodge for psychiatrists who still have their heads in the sand. It’s
nice to note that publisher and author Ken Shelton is not one of them.
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