How Psychology Sanctions the Cult of the SELF
Wallach, Michael, Lise
How Psychology Sanctions the Cult of the SELF by Michael Wallach and Lise Wallach Psychologists won't really understand human nature until they come to grips with altruism. One great...
...Or take the social psychology text by Albert A. Harrison, which enlightens college students on the important subject of dating and marriage...
...But they did romanticize the self, seeing it as Rousseau's noble savage, and did not sufficiently appreciate that darkness comes not only from without—in the form of a Hitler—but from within as well...
...These neo-Freudians were therapists working with individual patients rather than social problems—patients who, for the most part, had strong internal values to begin with...
...Those barely over a year old will bring their mother to help a friend in distress and offer that friend their teddy bear and security blanket...
...Time to pack the bags and check out...
...Things had to be done, that's all, and we happened to be there to do them" was one typically matter-of-fact explanation...
...A devout Quaker, she firmly believed that the resources and strength of which she gave so generously came to her directly from God...
...But the humanists seemed to forget the desert experience, the temptations, the inner wrestlings and worse, that it took to realize that state...
...Those who choose to live together without it "simply believe that a partnership has significance only if it is a mutually enhancing, growing relationship...
...But there's also a cynicism— something like altruism can't exist...
...But they seem to have confused freedom and autonomy with a preoccupation with oneself...
...McClelland attributes this remarkable woman's character—with no slight intended—to a "need for power": it is nothing but "the most advanced stage of expressing the power drive...
...What proved helpful was not getting "in touch" with their true feelings, but regaining a sense of connection with something larger than themselves...
...Where the neo-Freudians had attacked external restraints and prescriptions, the humanists attacked all forms of influence or determination outside the self...
...It was fantastic," Whitehouse said...
...to the contrary, they said that truly loving yourself did not mean striving for pleasure, material gains or success...
...That may well be true in some cases...
...This article is based upon their book, Psychology's Sanction for Selfishness, published by W.H...
...They generally don't even look for anything else...
...Through books and college courses, this image of humanity—of what we are and ought to be—is spread broadly through the culture at large, giving sanction and impetus to the more popular varieties of the narcissistic gospel...
...Our values do not exist in a vacuum...
...Take, for example, the writers on "interpersonal relations!' Were you to plow through these voluminous writings, you would learn that the model for human behavior is the penurious merchant of Adam Smith's England, whose singleminded aim was to get as much as he could and to give as little...
...they are grounded in the most respectable psychological theory of this day...
...Behavior like that just described, generous in the root sense of the word, is thus totally consistent with Darwin's theories...
...Even in her eighties, she wrote that teenagers "just keep calling me up and telling me they want to come over and talk...
...What's more, they neglected the need for social norms and props while we are in that wrestling stage— if not for our own sakes, then at least for the sake of others...
...There is a part of me that needs to believe that altruism is alive and well, especially in me," said another...
...No money to spare...
...Since we can hold such concerns outside ourselves, the neo-Freudians might have seen the potential of both external restrictions and internal standards of conduct in furthering those ends...
...Frankl helped deter fellow prisoners from suicide by stressing such commitments...
...I. wouldn't be a good mother if I didn't keep myself happy," was how Meryl Streep, the actress, explained her decision to return to work several weeks after the birth of her first child...
...Tracing back all motivation to "needs," whether biological or otherwise, they acknowledged nothing but narrow self-interest from which behavior might arise...
...Autonomy was the absolute...
...Darkness within Growing alongside academic psychology has been clinical practice, most notably psychoanalysis...
...Whenever the physical or social environment seemed to pull the organism to do things, needs for the self were always posited as being served...
...This therapeutic insight is a central part of Alcoholics Anonymous...
...If we were only freed of such restraints and left to get sufficiently in touch with ourselves, the result would be beneficial both for ourselves and others...
...She finds child care fulfilling, but painting even more so...
...Those noble sentiments of which the Victorians were so enamored—indeed, altruism itself—were, in Freud's view, indistinguishable at their roots from a good tumble in the hay...
...The only thing extraordinary about such occurrences is that the psychology profession doesn't take them more seriously...
...Yet it's just possible that practices like these are rooted in a psychological truth that today's healers—the clinical psychologists and psychiatrists—tend to overlook...
...An old tailor in his eighties once recalled what had given him the most satisfaction in his work: enabling the poor people in his neighborhood to buy well-constructed clothing that would keep them warm...
...Traci's parents don't really show a great deal of interest in her life...
...Freeman and Company, New York, 1983...
...Once the psychologic mind locked onto the egoistic assumption, it couldn't seem to let go...
...He regarded with favor the decline of conventional marriage as well...
...Perhaps you've silently lectured the editors of the checkout-line glossies on how they should give a little more thought to the millions on this earth who would love to have a "problem" like ample thighs...
...Sigmund Freud began his work towards the end of the nineteenth century, when the empirical sciences, in their high noon of promise, were going to unlock all the mysteries...
...We learn to act unselfishly by "weighing future gains against present ones" Maccoby acknowledges that a good family life requires more...
...Rather than developing this theme, the humanists came to oppose prescriptions, constraints and social institutions almost totally...
...Traditional psychologists cannot adequately account for why the people of the French Protestant village of Le Chambon risked annihilation by the Nazis in order to shelter Jews...
...The pilgrims pray for the sick and the sick for each other, not themselves...
...Generosity becomes a way to cut the best deal...
...Nor, it appears, can anybody else...
...Interred by the Nazis at Auschwitz and Dachau, Frankl found that what kept himself and other inmates going was a sense of purpose outside themselves...
...But they did regard these prescriptions as hostile, even more than Freud had...
...Previously, questions of human behavior had been the realm of religion and moral philosophy...
...Traci and Steve Freud, along with academic psychologists like these, erred on the side of cynicism...
...Viktor E. Frankl, a psychotherapist, is an example...
...But where each might have countered the emerging culture of selfishness, they both ended up giving even more legitimacy to this culture than Freud had...
...An indivi dual finds it self-actualizing to be a lobbyist for commodity speculators or polluters...
...They wanted the resurrection without the cross...
...In the healing rituals at Lourdes, one writer observed, "the emphasis is on self-forgetfulness and devotion to the welfare of others...
...Stein relates...
...Don't we need to think about such things as the wise use and fair distribution of the earth's resources, and the availability of socially constructive roles rather than ones that are useless or frivolous...
...Which is fine in theory...
...As members of the psychology profession, we view this tendency among our colleagues with great alarm...
...We read of kidney donors who explain their act as a triumph of good over bad in themselves...
...Social involvement was accounted for by needs for "security," "approval," and the like...
...The result, which they did not intend, was to give the culture of selfishness an even bigger boost than Freud himself had done...
...The authors later revised this "model" somewhat, but it remained essentially the same...
...They were taking turns in supporting him and when one got tired, another whale took over...
...Selfish altruists For different reasons, most current approaches in psychology give sanction to the idea that selfseeking is not merely an inclination, but the essence of our nature...
...I love my work...
...Conditioned to find a cynical basis for people helping one another, such researchers become incapable of seeing anything else...
...While most in the profession invite patients to dwell upon their problems, Frankl believes that patients probably do too much introspecting about their symptoms and feeling states already...
...Healing from without It is part of folk wisdom, and of the healing traditions of many cultures, that one path out of our own problems lies in dwelling upon them less...
...Take, for example, the 1969 experiment in the New York City subway in which a man would stagger and collapse to the floor of a car...
...Helping simply becomes part of the way people act...
...Maslow and Rogers imply that she should attend to her own maximum development and pursue artistic work regardless of whether equally attentive arrangements can be made for her children...
...Neo-Freudians like Fromm did not urge selfishness...
...or whether seeking personal happiness directly, as they tend to counsel, only makes that goal more elusive...
...Even the so-called "liberal" academics, who question both social learning theory and psychological dogma in general—along with the indvidualism that flows from it—can't seem to break away from the premise that self-interest must be the ground base of all human motivation...
...According to Freud, everything we do serves ultimately one of two biological functions: to rid ourselves of unpleasant external stimulation, such as cold, or to make use of what's outside us to satisfy an internal need, such as—he would say—hunger or sex...
...Further, we need to ask whether these teachings serve to heal, both individually and collectively...
...Members of A.A...
...Just so, we believe that modern psychologists have concocted their own epicycles to save their egocentric theory—that a narrow sense of self is at the center of all motivation and behavior...
...The value of such outward commitment appears to me to be just about nil...
...And suppose a partner becomes ill and needs our help so that the union demands more of us than it appears to give back...
...Since something like friendship is not important for its own sake, but for what it produces in return, we must always keep an eye on the balance sheet...
...To save this theory, astronomers devised more and more convoluted "epicycles" to account for the new evidence without giving up the geocentric assumption...
...Because she keeps self-interest as the basic psychological building block in social relations, she has nowhere to turn other than the contractual balancing of interests that she senses as missing the point...
...In one Japanese religious sect, participants in therapeutic sessions "stand facing each other and pray that one another's unhappiness will diminish...
...the crucial goal of therapy, as of life, was "to be that self which one truly is," as Kierkegaard had said— or, as Maslow and Rogers themselves put it, to "self-actualize...
...Rogers believes that "a relationship between a man and a woman is significant, and worth trying to preserve, only when it is an enhancing, growing experience for each person...
...Might not they serve a social function even if sometimes inconvenient...
...Selfishness, students learn, is what makes the world turn...
...Basing his theories totally upon biology, Freud pulled the rug out from under these, claiming their ground, so it was then thought, for empirical science...
...In this and other ways, the economy was connected to the idea of community as well as to individual striving...
...The early New England settlements were built around a "common"— Boston Common is a present-day reminder—on which everyone could graze their cows...
...On occasion, a culture such as this can rise to the heights of heroism, as when the people of the French Protestant village of Le Chambon risked annihilation by the Nazis during the Second World War in order to shelter Jews...
...but the selfishness will have been harnessed to some part of the collective judgment...
...Ultimately it may be true that the kingdom is within...
...Freed of his obsessive attention to his impotence, and attending instead to his wife, the patient may report sheepishly that he couldn't stop intercourse and had experienced an orgasm despite the doctor's instructions...
...A selfish desire to rid oneself of an unpleasant emotional state...
...A coat is not a piece of cloth only',' he explained...
...In the subway study, for example, the variable that the researchers tested was the "cost" to the bystander of providing help by making some of the victims appear drunk...
...So how does Maccoby explain this attachment...
...A couple "cannot hold to (the vows of commitment) unless the marriage is satisfying," Rogers writes...
...The neo-Freudians rejected social prescriptions not because we were so bad, as Freud had thought, but because we were so good...
...rather than wait for medical attention, he goes home to make sure the stray cats get their dinner...
...In humans and other species, the development of skills like perceiving, grasping, exploring, speaking, seem to some degree to have a life of their own, apart from bodily needs...
...To the extent we do act altruistically, it's for social approval...
...A person who has learned to accept some social values will be rewarded, or not punished, by serving them," they write...
...Take a mother who is an artist...
...Caryl E. Rusbult, in an article on "romantic associations," extends this analogy to investment strategy a step further...
...We should fight those that go against what we really value but embrace those that are conducive to what we seek to advance, such as truth, art, kinship, and community...
...Farley Mowat, the Canadian writer, tells of whales swimming abreast a wounded third, carrying it to safety—an observation made by many others, and recently by Steve Whitehouse, a New Zealand fisheries officer, as reported last March by Reuters...
...More important, sociability generally—getting along with others—seems to stand as a motive on its own...
...The basic model is of a psyche churning with "libidinous" drives, and the health of the organism lying in their release...
...An excess of restraints cause the energies to "turn inwards" producing neurosis...
...But interviews conducted by students in our classes show that students do absorb this cynicism...
...Psychology has legitimized a self-centered view of humanity that not only damages society but also leads people away from the very happiness they seek...
...By positing the parent as the "agent" who helps the infant master its environment...
...Writing was for Trollope a sideline profession, and so, he said, "I found it expedient to bind myself by certain self-imposed laws," such as being "at my table every morning at 5:30" and producing a definite number of words every week...
...Perhaps you've wanted to shake your fist in anger at the authors of the how-to-stomp-your-colleagues genre and ask them, "What about the other guy...
...Young lambs, for example, will form attachments to collies on the other side of a fence—the kind of attachment they would normally show towards the ewe—and become agitated if separated, even though there is no bodily contact, let alone "need reduction" involved...
...Brown and Herrnstein put quotes around the word "social" when explaining people's actions, the way Pravda might put quotes around the word "democracy" in reference to the U.S...
...Leaders and opinion-makers, along with others in our society, turn for guidance and counseling to proponents of this same basic mindset...
...The functionally optimal rules," they write, "are highly contingent...
...High investments and/or poor alternatives may sometimes serve to 'trap' the individual in an unhappy, unsatisfying relationship!' The governing idea, in short, is that we should do unto others as they have done unto us...
...What further concerns us is the way the message of mainstream psychology—in both its academic and clinical modes—often leads people away from the sources of happiness and satisfaction they so desperately seek...
...For healthy individuals, said Rogers, "doing what 'feels right' proves to be a competent and trustworthy guide to behavior which is truly satisfying...
...It is as if Freud supplied to us the sick half of psychology," Maslow said, "and we must now fill it out with the healthy half...
...But that world has responded a little the way the astronomers did long ago when confronted with evidence that the earth revolves around the sun...
...There's no reason beyond that for being considerate because values have no value apart from what they produce in return...
...Freud at least had seen the value of social prescriptions and constraints in enabling people to get along with one another...
...The child can't feel affection, in other words, unless it receives something in return...
...You are concerned about a suffering friend...
...Examine altruism closely enough, they say, and you'll always find the canker of self-interest...
...In almost every case in which the passengers didn't offer assistance, the victim had been made to appear drunk, but passengers helped in many of those cases anyway...
...That selflessness can come to seem ordinary and mundane is itself a telling point against those who persist in giving sanction to greater indulgence of the self...
...Governmental and other restraints are the problems, and if we just let everybody do their own thing, it will all work out in the end...
...They would say that the woman probably would be a bad mother if her personal development were jeopardized...
...Being considerate of other persons' needs and helping them attain their goals," Kelley and Thibaut write, "will often be found necessary in order to obtain the cooperation from them that the individual desires...
...It is crucial that we as a society come to realize this...
...Each man and woman is not a "piece of the continent," as Donne wrote, but "an island unto himself, in a very real sense," said Rogers, "and he can only build bridges to other islands if he is first of all willing to be himself and permitted to be himself...
...Horney, for example, disagreed strongly with Freud's view that "there is no liking or disliking of people, no sympathy, no generosity, no feeling of justice, no devotion to a cause, which is not in the last analysis determined by libidinal or destructive drives...
...The so-called "social learning" theorists like Albert Bandura write in a similar vein, arguing that all we care about in a given situation is what's in it for ourselves...
...They seemed to forget about the dark side completely...
...All instincts which do not find a vent without turn inwards," wrote Nietzsche, of whom Freud was an avid student...
...Where Freud saw all motivation arising from the organism, pressing outward like steam from a boiler, subsequent research showed that the process often works the other way around—that what we do is often a response to something outside us, without reference to bodily needs...
...Then too, there was research into what are called "cognitive" and "motor" processes...
...In one case, it was scientific work to be completed...
...It is well-demonstrated, for example, how young people can be influenced by the prevailing values in their families...
...A two-year-old girl will kiss and put a bandage on her mother's bruised finger...
...Homey castigated the "whip of inner dictates" and declared that she wanted the individual "to dispense with [them] altogether...
...This evidence challenged the geocentric theory which, in line with Church dogma, held that the earth was the center of the universe...
...Deprived of its grip on the patient as a central focus of concern, the insomnia may pass...
...Or take marriage, where the Maslow-Rogers prescription similarly is that self-actualization is the primary concern...
...Mainly, it seeks to diminish them into veiled expressions of selfconcern...
...It is not naive to suggest that we can do more to encourage altruism rather than accept selfishness as the inescapable core of our nature...
...Is it not possible, even likely, that evolution has equipped us to act cooperatively—generously—as well as in a self-centered fashion...
...For what appear to be the excesses of Self magazine and EST are not off-the-wall aberrations...
...Typical of this mindset is David C. McClelland's moving portrait of his mother-inlaw, a strong, warm, impressive woman, who was active in improving race relations, in the peace movement and in counseling, while giving emotional support to her large family...
...Laboratory animals (not to mention certain movie stars and politicians) will copulate to exhaustion with one partner, then show renewed interest when a new partner is made available...
...When I have moments of depression, I think of my sister...
...But while we fume over the perpetrators of pop psych self-absorption, we might ask whether the more authoritative psychology profession is not also to blame...
...Of the healthy individual, Rogers said, "He is unlikely to make any commitment for all of his life because he knows he cannot predict himself that well...
...I t is time to ask whether these teachings of the psychology profession are rooted in science— in empirical evidence—or whether they are based instead on ideology and pre dilection...
...Horney deplored the "tyranny of shoulds" which "impair the spontaneity of feelings, wishes, thoughts and beliefs...
...Michael A. Wallach is a professor of psychology and Lise Wallach is a lecturer in psychology, both at Duke University...
...What mattered here, apparently, was the need of the recipient, and not the driver's calculation of cost to him or her self...
...Having abandoned Freud's biological basis, they had no remaining reason to regard such prescriptions as fundamentally hostile...
...The choice of a partner," Harrison writes, "represents a trade-off in which both persons get the best they can with what they have to offer...
...Don't be selfish' becomes one of the most powerful ideological tools in suppressing spontaneity and the free development of personality," said Fromm, who was himself German...
...Freud became the classic iconoclast...
...Our actions can arise not just from bodily needs and urges, she maintained, but from concern for others, a desire for justice, and the like...
...The tailor's parable People do not feel any special virtue in such settings...
...M aslow and Rogers were primarily concerned, of course, with the welfare of the individual, not society at large, and for this they felt that freedom and autonomy in development were essential...
...A 63-year-old Guatemalan Indian woman suffering from depression is asked by the healer to make elaborate preparations for a large feast to occur during her curing session...
...Mothers-in-law just can't win...
...Rogers cited with approval the decline of institutionsovernment, the military, the church, the corporation, the school"—because these were sources of external determination that prevented us from being ourselves...
...But the humanistic psychologists did more than fill out the healthy half...
...in another, it was the prisoner's child waiting safely elsewhere...
...Similarly, in Maccoby's view, acquiring social skills means mastering bargaining ploys...
...Writer Benjamin Stein chronicled in The American Spectator one such relationship between Traci, 16, "a pretty little girl, with long black hair and a tiny button nose and big brown eyes,"and Steve, who is a hot property in his 150-lawyer law firm...
...Consider the latest fad among some fast-track professionals in Los Angeles— taking high school girls as girlfriends...
...But it is hardly always the case that we serve others best by serving ourselves first...
...All this to preserve the Freudian assumption of egoism even though the profession had abandoned the biological premise that made this assumption necessary...
...When students study psychology in college, views like these come across in their texts...
...Doing something for other people is gratifying needs in yourself, otherwise you wouldn't do it," said one of those interviewed who seems to have paid close attention to his texts...
...We-thinking can be nurtured just like me-thinking can—and if in families, why not in the culture at large...
...Young monkeys reared together in the absence of a mother form bonds of attachment to one another of the kind they would normally show towards a mother...
...What the researchers didn't do was put the shoe on the other foot and vary the cost to the victim of not receiving help...
...Given the level of civility that normally prevails in New York City's subways, such a study could be encouraging evidence that an innate capacity for altruism does exist...
...undertake a personal commitment to help fellow alcoholics through participation in weekly meetings, "Twelve Step Calls," and working with new members for whom they take responsibility...
...But he led psychology astray in portraying all motivation as derived from bodily needs, with the implication that in the core of our being we are self-serving beyond redemption, and only gamesmanship and external restraints can hold us in check...
...There is a social basis to behavior...
...The goal of all the great historic religions can be summarized as being the overcoming of one's selflove," he observed...
...There is also evidence of such inclinations in very young children...
...It was not Michael Korda who wrote, "The only question which matters is, 'Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?' " It was Carl Rogers, the clinical psychologist and widely published author, who, according to one recent survey, "heads by far the list of those who have the greatest influence on counseling and psychotherapy...
...internal standards of conduct—such as not killing people—are simply ways to ward off trouble with the authorities...
...Sometimes, for example, we subject ourselves—freely—to the influence of others, such as a music teacher or a track coach, or undertake the obligations implicit in a team, a work-setting, or a personal relationship...
...The kidney and blood donors were acting from a similar motive, or perhaps to feel holier-than-thou...
...If the neo-Freudians romanticized human nature, then the humanistic psychologists like Carl Rogers and...
...Respectable opinion today tends to denigrate such practices as the quaint vestiges of religion and superstition...
...The prevailing culture encourages the good in us or the bad...
...This is so even in the Freudian heartland of sex, the urge for which can arise less from "somatic" tension than from the presence of a suitable partner...
...Babies show sheer delight in learning to use their voices, in grasping and rearranging objects...
...These psychologists even take evidence that seems to point in the opposite direction and use it to confirm their case...
...Plenty of blood to spare," noted one who had given blood 19 times...
...But isn't unconditional commitment—a determination to go the last mile—a part of making the marriage satisfying in the first place...
...D espite the prevailing culture of selfseeking and the sanction this culture receives from the psychology profession at large, we still encounter daily acts of generosity and kindness that, like the sapling growing from the crack in the rock, ought to give us hope...
...The outlook on life to which the profession is giving sanction—expressed in both individual therapy and the culture at large—may be making our psychological problems worse...
...Eleanor Maccoby, for example, rejects the view that infants become attached to their caretaker merely because that person relieves their personal distresses such as hunger...
...The neo-Freudians like Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm thought that Freud had been much too pessimistic in his assessment of human nature...
...Actualizing the individual "may sound as though it were a selfish or unsocial criterion," Rogers wrote, "but it does not prove to be so, since deep and helpful relationships as experienced is actualizing...
...Two main streams of clinical theory have challenged Freud's theory in fundamental respects...
...The neoFreudians and humanists might talk about the importance of "spontaneity" and doing what "feels right," but real development is usually gained more through sweat...
...As Protestants in a Catholic country, their ancestors had endured centuries of persecution, and almost instinctively the Chambonnais came to the aid of others who suffered this fate...
...Our world should be "primarily a means to the person's selfactualizing ends," Maslow says...
...When monkeys reared in isolation were put together with a group of younger monkeys, they huddled in corners, at which point the younger monkeys went and clung to the isolated ones...
...Soon the isolates were hugging back, and before too long they became a normal part of the group...
...Here is a student who wants to believe in his own capacity for generosity, yet the teachers and their textbooks discourage him from doing so...
...Anthony Trollope recounts in his autobiography his life rules...
...Certainly there are times when we cannot be genuinely useful to others until we attend to our own needs—for instance, the mother who grinds her emotional axes on self-sacrifice and suffocates her children with attention in the process...
...Fellow passengers came spontaneously to the victim's aid 80 percent of the time...
...Knowing I mite be saving somebody life," wrote another...
...Or take the blood donors surveyed in Britain, nearly 80 percent of whom cited concern for others as the motive for their deed...
...There is much evidence that these may depend in large measure on assuming responsibility for one another and seeking goals outside ourselves— the very things which the pop-psych tracts and their scholarly sources are discouraging...
...It does sound a bit like boxing promoter Don King negotiating with CBS Sports...
...But such restraints were fundamentally at odds with our nature—not with just part of our nature, but with all of it...
...When we give unconditionally without any returns," warns Ervin Staub in Positive Social Behavior and Morality, "what we give loses value...
...Are people who act that way the ones we most admire...
...All the emotional relationships of sympathy, friendship, trust, and the like, which can be turned to good account in our lives," he wrote, "are genetically linked with sexuality and have developed from purely sexual desires...
...The old man, psychologists might say, was really trying to assuage his own feelings of guilt—a form of self-indulgence...
...When she takes up with Steve she tells them, as a cover, that she has gotten a part-time job at his law firm...
...One great benefit our commercial culture will provide to posterity is an abundance of clues as to the focus of our concerns...
...But should we not at least be open to the possibility that providing for our children's "actualization"at a crucial time in their lives might take priority over our own— might, in fact, be what we ourselves most deeply want...
...Rescuing man from the Freudian doldrums, in which life and culture were at best an uneasy truce with the bottom-line libidinous drives, they sensed the heights to which humanity might rise...
...Though Maslow didn't intend it, can you see how short the distance can be between such an attitude and the pages of Self magazine...
...When a sense of mutual sharing exists," she writes, "bargaining or dominance of one member's objectives over another's becomes less important" But she can offer nothing from the realm of psychology to help families move in that direction...
...The neo-Freudians approached the individual psyche a little the way free market conservatives view the economy...
...In this context there seemed compelling reason to focus on the self as the bulwark of human freedom...
...But what happens when what is "truly satisfying,"for you is in conflict with what is satisfying for—or needed by—someone else...
...Should any display racks from supermarket checkout lines survive, these future anthropologists will know more about the dread afflictions of cellulite and heavy thighs than we know of the early Christian church...
...The goal then is not to be free of all prescriptions and restraints...
...The tailor is connected to the one who wears it and he should not forget it:' Our colleagues in the psychology profession should not forget it either...
...It was not hard to do: just replace biological needs with psychological ones...
...The best life preparation would seem to be a course in contract law...
...Those who recall holding a baby brother or sister just brought home from the hospital have perhaps experienced similar feelings themselves...
...A typical introductory text by Roger Brown and Richard J. Herrnstein, Psychology, counsels that values are not really values at all...
...Subway civility Observations of this sort have not gone unnoticed in the world of psychological theory...
...Anthropologists of future centuries will have a seemingly inexhaustable vein of books with titles such as Looking Out for Number One and The Art of Being Selfish to brood over, along with a torrent of magazine articles on ways to outmaneuver your colleagues and even your spouse...
...More tyrannical shoulds...
...Maccoby rejects one form of self-centeredness only to exchange it for another...
...One day he is beaten about the head by a psychotic woman...
...To Victorians who wouldn't even mention bodily functions—let alone sex—in polite society, Freud declared that their lives were governed by these very things, the most unmentionable in particular...
...Harold H. Kelley and John W. Thibaut, leading authors in the field, tell us that we should always condition our commitment to the welfare of others, and to values such as justice, upon the likely returns to ourselves...
...One team of researchers conducted just such a study, and discovered that drivers in a campus parking lot were more likely to give a stranger a ride to a town five miles away if the situation seemed to be an emergency (64 percent helped) than if it did not (45 percent helped...
...In the background, moreover, was Stalin's Russia and the rise of Nazi Germany, in which Goebbels was calling upon the German nation to "submit the I to the thou" and the "individual to the whole...
...The neo-Freudians and the humanistic psychologists, by contrast, saw the potential side of human nature...
...The difference between a musical composition and noise, between a game and random activity, between a dance form and flailing about, implies a sensitivity and adherence to rules...
...For a husband with a problem of impotence, for example, Frankl may reduce his self-preoccupation by the benign ruse of ordering him and his wife for the sake of treatment to have no intercourse but to fondle each other naked in bed...
...We read, for example, of the retired man who takes it upon himself to make sure the stray cats in the neighborhood are fed...
...Where he erred was in seeing these as essentially hostile to people, rather than as a form of training wheels by which their better instincts might be supported and flourish...
...It's challenging and broadening, and involves lots of free travel and opportunities for professional "contacts!' End of question...
...Similarly, Alfred Adler would get an insomniac to stop fighting his insomnia and spend the time constructively, planning what to do for others the next day...
...0 r take the broader realm of social commitment and concern...
...His aim is to move patients out of their self-involvement...
...Karl Menninger, for example, concluded from his clinical experience that therapy is beneficial to the extent it encourages people to reach out to others in ways commonly associated with religion...
...Whether the propagation of such views in the mantle of academic authority has nudged the divorce rate upwards, nobody can say for sure...
...And if a better deal comes along, why not trade upwards...
...Might this be one legacy of self-actualization...
...They should encourage more thinking about the people who will wear the coat—those affected by our daily thoughts and actions—and less about how we feel while making it, or about the personal rewards...
...The whole inner world burst apart when man's external outlet became obstructed ." Freud saw that we sometimes need to "sublimate" such energies into, say, work or the arts, or accept restraints upon them, for the good of society...
...Without these, the quest for "selfactualization " can become—as it often does— an excuse for self-absorption...
...Helping others stay off the bottle assists them in doing so themselves...
...And what about institutions—like governments and marriage—about which Maslow and Rogers have little to say except to lament the way they interfere with our self-actualization...
...I have been told that such appliances are beneath the notice of a man of genius," he wrote, but "nothing surely is so potent as a law that may not be disobeyed" If such prescriptions are necessary for individual achievement, might they not also be useful for social well-being...
...As children grow up they gain the skill "to tailor their actions for different audiences, depending on the nature of the social self that they wish to project...
...Yet on the whole, the psychology profession has framed its studies to give such possibilities short shrift...
...Cognitive and motor skills were explained by needs for "novelty" or "mastery...
...Trace all the wires back, he argues, and you will find that you really are concerned about what that friend's suffering might imply for yourself—that he might treat you less kindly, for example...
...He is still acting selfishly...
...Mom was at a meeting of wives who wanted to start a stock club, so she did not hear about it at all...
...We can autonomously aim at goals outside ourselves, or embrace Horney's tyrannical "shoulds" without losing our freedom in doing so...
...What is perhaps most impressive of all is the evidence of an innate capacity for we-thinking that seems to reside in both humans and other species, alongside whatever other tendencies may be found...
...A number of practitioners are convinced that encouraging ever more attention to the self, as psychiatrists and psychologists are doing, has become a part of the problem...
...Change partners Freud served an important role, stripping away the pretense and hypocrisy of the Victorian era and demonstrating that people need to come to grips with the beast in themselves...
...and if to sex, why not to other areas of life...
...It gives me inner satisfaction," one explained...
...Ethologist Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt presents a fair amount of evidence that even the way adults show affection for one another derived in evolution from the way they have cared for their young, rather than vice versa as Freud had maintained...
...I am happy...
...Studies of the most committed civil rights activists during the sixties found that they were more likely than their cohorts to have parents who had shown just such social commitment during their children's formative years...
...A number of therapists have noted the correspondence between effective healing therapies like these and traditional religious values...
...More recently we have seen the ethnic enclaves in America's older cities, where interconnected webs of churches, businesses and extended families assure that everyone is taken care of...
...But as we have seen, that view has no more basis in science than it does in everyday experience...
...Abraham Maslow were positively dewy-eyed...
...There are numerous examples in our own past of such values being fostered on a broader scale...
...How did the researchers interpret the responses of the subway-riders...
...Traci's Dad did not really have time to dwell on the subject for too long because he was just starting to take up 'heavy hands' jogging...
...Monkeys, for example, will learn to solve a mechanical puzzle for no reason other than the chance to look through a window...
...Freud was influenced by Darwin, but even in the great march of evolution, it is genes that survive, not individuals...
...to show, in other words, the victim in varying degrees of distress, to see whether our generosity can increase not in accordance with our own internal calculations of benefit, but in accordance with another's need...
...Rogers, like the neo-Freudians, simply took for granted that the "self-actualized" individual would do naturally what was benevolent and good...
Vol. 17 • February 1985 • No. 1
