Does Everyone Need Therapy?

An exploration of individual psychology, historical change, and the limits of reason.

In this essay, I’m going to take a break from my attempt to understand how we might transform the world capitalist system into world socialism and take a more personal turn. Specifically, I’m going to consider the question of personal freedom as it relates to personal trauma. Along the way I’ll be examining the persona of the late Charles Grodin, referring to Theodor Adorno’s 1950 study on the Authoritarian personality, and reading an excerpt from the late Mark Fisher’s book Ghosts of My Life. The essay will conclude with an excerpt from Christopher Lasch’s book “The Minimal Self” as I attempt to answer the question, why are we neurotic? Or, to be more honest, as I try to answer the questions “why am I so neurotic, and is it possible that I might reason my way out of my emotional problems?”

When the actor Charles Grodin died last month the obit in Variety began with the following line:

“Charles Grodin, best known for the neurotic comic wit he demonstrated in such films as “the Heartbreak Kid,” “Heaven Can Wait,” and “Midnight Run” and for his role in the “Beethoven” movies, died Tuesday at his home in Connecticut.” 

It’s worth noting that the description of Grodin’s talent includes an adjective that can be traced etymologically to what was once a term designating a psychological disorder. Further, in a tribute for Rogerebert.com, the critic Dan Callahan noted that Grodin had a manner that matched the neuroticism and self-obsession of the 70s, or the “Me” decade. What’s strange is that it’s Grodin’s dysfunction that is celebrated. Grodin’s persona points to a major change in how social norms have radically changed.

Charles Grodin on Late Night with David Letterman in 1989.

Writing for the American Sociological Review in 1946 Arnold W. Green outlined how and why the middle-class male child in America was particularly likely to suffer from a neurotic condition. Unlike a child born to immigrant factory workers or on a rural farm, the urban middle-class child was, according to Green, prone to have his personality absorbed by his parents given his total emotional and physical dependence on mom and dad. While the child of immigrants or the child raised on a farm would be disciplined by work, he would also have siblings and other family and community members through which to form an identity. The rural child could avoid his parents given how their work either in a factory or a field occupied them, and no matter how irrational and cruel their authority became, the child’s personality and sense of self were still his own. A culture of resistance, rebellion, and even judgment could arise amongst the siblings who were, in any case, free to determine who they were and who they wanted to be or become.

The middle-class child, by contrast, was born into a fragmented, urban, nuclear family defined by conflict and ambivalence. The father would inevitably be split between seeking to further his own individual success in his career and the responsibilities of family life and would find his family to be a drain on resources that could be put to more industrious use. The mother, on the other hand, would be left to herself to figure out how to run a household and raise a child, having been cut off from both the sort of rural domestic work that served the larger community and her own ambitions for individual success in the market. 

The child would run the risk of becoming a hypervigilant conformist, seeking to please these parents whose “love” for him always threatened to overwhelm him. Tasked with either pleasing them or withstanding the withdrawal of their emotional support, he could neither avoid getting into trouble as he responded to their ambivalence and his own anxiety nor fully express or develop independence. 

The development of the neurotic as a comedian celebrity parallels the expansion of this urban “middle class” life that became more and more culturally dominant as the 20th century rolled along, even amongst the working classes. 

We often think of the world as the product of the actions of individuals rather than thinking of the individuals as the product of the world.

For instance, in 1950 Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford published a study on the topic of the authoritarian personality. Collecting data from questionnaires and interviews, the study used a Freudian developmental model to evaluate participants and concluded that the authoritarian personality is the result of excessively harsh parents. 

However, many took issue with the methodology of the study, not least of which was Adorno himself. In a chapter entitled Remarks, a chapter meant for inclusion in the original publication but that was ultimately excluded, Adorno wrote that by analyzing the subjective experiences of individuals the study failed to consider the objective conditions in society that set up the participants subjective lives. He believed that the source of prejudice in individuals had to be sought in social factors because these were stronger, more powerful, than the psyches of the individual participants.

What I want to imagine is the predicament of the individual, of the psyche, once he or she realizes his or her weakness in relation to these social forces. 

In fact, what I am currently facing is the realization that my own emotional life is not only dictated by forces that are stronger than my individual personality or psyche but that these same forces set up the conditions necessary for a psyche or personality like mine, to begin with.

Many have noted that Freud’s theories of the unconscious, of drives, of the id, ego, and superego, far from referring to some innate characteristics of the human mind are themselves products of historical change, and specifically changes to the family and the community that surrounds it. 

Fixed stages of childhood, of development, can’t easily be defended once one considered how variable childhood has been in history. 

For example, the idea that toys and games and play have always been the stuff of childhood, the notion that youth and imagination are conjoined, is discredited by the historical record. The history of balloons, for instance, demonstrates how expressions and objects of whimsy shifted from the adult world into the hands of children. 

In the 18th century, Europe was awash with balloon mania after the invention of the hot air balloon. People wanted model hot air balloons, women bought hats that were also balloons, and embroidered depictions of balloons appeared on belts and dresses. 

The history of toys traces the history of the invention of the neurotic middle-class child and of childhood as a separate domain or an autonomous realm. The emphasis on generations, the idea that each generation is distinct from the one that came before, was reinforced by toys and games that were not lessons in adulthood, that were not educational, but rather were reflections of the fantasies and dreams that made up each successive generation of neurotic youths and their youth culture. 

But, stepping back from my life, seeing H.R. Pufnstuf, the Animaniacs, or Blues Clues as repetitions of the same manufactured fantasy of separation, rebellion, and the promise of endless youth doesn’t do much to help me escape from my own nostalgic impulses. Just as stepping back from the conception of my fundamental self and recognizing how the models of the psyche I use to understand it are historically determined doesn’t help me overcome the natural feelings that my personality or self-conception is natural and fixed.
And none of this has helped me solve the crisis of my marriage cracking up.  

In his book Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher quoted Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx in order to justify choosing melancholia over mourning. That is, in order to justify holding onto a lost object or loved one indefinitely while refusing to reinvest in a life without him or her. Fisher embraces depression as a way to hold onto revolutionary ambition.  

‘Capitalist societies,’ Derrida writes, ‘can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost. They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself: a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come back.’

Fisher explains the quote this way: Haunting, then, can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or – and this can sometimes amount to the same thing – the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The specter will not allow us to settle into/ for the mediocre satisfaction one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism.

But, if we understand our neurosis, our melancholia, as a reaction to the conditions of our upbringing,if we see our very conception of ourselves as a product of historical changes brought on by a system of exploitation that we long to overcome, we must doubt this depressing move, this propensity to hold onto ghosts. Instead, the task is to mourn the passing ghost and invest in the fractured self, the conflicted ego, that still defines us. 

After the passing of Charles Grodin, I feel the urge to celebrate the invention of modern neurosis, or at least the neurosis that arose from urban modernity, despite the fact that the pervasiveness of neurosis is symptomatic of an unresolved problem, or a partial answer to a fundamental conflict. 

In previous videos, I’ve claimed that the left needs to separate politics from psychology. I’ve claimed that self-care, self-esteem, and overcoming trauma should not be the basis of our political work, but expanding the realm of freedom should be.

But, as I go through a personal trauma myself I realize that freedom is difficult to accept, especially when freedom becomes the process wherein you trade in your mostly operative neurotic defense mechanisms for pure anxiety and dread. 

Marx wrote that men make their own history, but they do not do it under self-selected circumstances. The same applies to our personalities, to our self-conceptions. The rest of that quote describes how, during a revolutionary crisis, people conjure up images from the past, names, and slogans from previous battles, in order to assuage their anxiety as they attempt to make something new.

In previous videos, I’ve argued that the culture war is a dead-end, because before we can change the material basis of that culture. But, as I face down my own personal problems I realize that to say this is to fail to understand how our culture, our identities, are both epiphenomenal to our material life and the basis by which we address changing it. 

Christopher Lasch’s book the Minimal Self concludes with the following paragraph:

In the history of civilization, the emergence of conscience can be linked among other things to changing attitudes toward the dead. The idea that the dead call for revenge, that their avenging spirits haunt the living, and that the living know no peace until they placate these ancestral ghosts gives way to an attitude of genuine mourning. At the same time, vindictive gods give way to gods who show mercy as well and uphold the morality of loving your enemy. Such a morality has never achieved anything like general popularity, but it lives on, even in our own enlightened age, as a reminder both of our fallen state and of our surprising capacity for gratitude, remorse, and forgiveness, by means of which we now and then transcend it.

These lines remind me of how some interpreters of Hegel claim that at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirt Hegel’s description of the Absolute is actually a description of forgiveness. Of acceptance.