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The exploration of the various interfaces among schools of psychoanalysis and anthropology, and the interaction between psychoanalysis and anthropology, are important theoretical concerns for those who psychohistorically study people. "Psychohistory" can be said to combine, in its own fashion, elements from both fields, as well as from many other points of view. Every psychohistory is a composite, resulting in interdisciplinary interfaces of its own, and often to a degree not always well tolerated by more intellectually conservative organizations. The two disciplines in this book are basic to psychohistory and thus deserving of our attention.
The book recapitulates an actual scholarly conference, where anthropological papers were presented, followed by psychoanalytical response. If there is guiding spirit it is the work of George Devereaux. His concept of "decomplementarity" of research methods was adhered to for the most part, following the premise that in the study of its own subjectivity, anthropology must come to terms with psychoanalysis. Four of the anthropological papers with their psychoanalytical responses were based on his ideas.
A section was devoted to the waking behaviors and structure in one society in the light of dreams by subjects. Then the Lacanians took their turn, using his revolutionary linguistic form of psychoanalysis to attempt to construct an organic view of cultures and culture, an approach suffused with neo-analytical methods. Finally a study was made of three "working models" with closure by a psychoanalyst.
The variations of ritual, symbolic structures, expressions of levels of class and consciousness, behavior, gesture, and other aspects of the cultures studied, made this book diverse and fascinating. The studies ranged from the Oedipus myth in ancient Greece, to levels of restrained Islamic fundamentalism versus native expressive body movement in Kenya, to the relation of beer to circumcision rituals, to the establishment of a militant Jewish organization in Newfoundland.
As an example of the studies, the anthropologists found that the ritual which involved pouring beer on the penis of the pubescent male initiate is the rough analogy of a rebirth sequence as part of the rite de passage. The newly circumcised boy must crawl between the legs of all the males of the tribe, in a masculine birth ceremony, to become one of the men of the tribe.
The articles in this book are colorful and, though there is not always agreement, often positivistic in the sense that everything is not naively relative. Although this trend is given its due, one finishes this book with a sense that the world is at least partly knowable.
This book is a fascinating study of the relation between religion, hypnosis, and psychopathology. Schumaker observes that most non-Western societies involve hypnosis in their healing practices, and that all religion is founded upon an unmistakably hypnotic component. Hence, the connection between the hypnotic processes of religion and the capacity to heal. He concludes that religion, hypnosis, and psychopathology are "overlapping manifestations of a general human faculty" for dealing with emotional stress.
Because the human organism is beset by terror and anxiety, its increased intelligence and awareness require the evolutionary strategy of seeking sanctuary in illusion (i.e. shared group-fantasy) and self-deception to survive. Schumaker follows Otto Rank and Ernest Becker in asking the question "on what level of illusion were we meant to live?" Group-fantasy must obfuscate reality for everyone in a community, or else it will be susceptible to doubt. Hence these illusions are shared religious fantasies which relieve anxiety on a social scale. Religion is a means of psychological dissociation from pain and reality, a "strategic reality corruption designed to serve the individual and society."
Schumaker envisions reality as the essential source of human strife, and our capacity to transcend and regulate reality through illusion as man's central psychological dynamic. When our capacity to dissociate fails, we are beset by overwhelming anxiety and respond by creating our own self-deceptive shared fantasies. Psychopathology is a personal version of illusion erupting when social forms of dissociation and hypnosis fail. Thus religion, hypnosis, and psychopathology as different versions of the same project: the need to regulate reality.
The essence of normality is, as Becker asserts, the "refusal of reality." Schumaker defines health not in terms of the mind in touch with reality, but as the capacity not to perceive reality in certain ways. We tend to define health in terms of the capacity to perceive reality accurately, but in Schumaker's view, human beings must dissociate a portion of reality in order not to go insane. Indeed, a growing body of evidence suggests that many suffering from psychological symptoms are debilitated by their inability to block out certain aspects of reality from conscious awareness.
Schumaker's analysis of religion and psychopathology in terms of illusion and self-deception is persuasive and elegant. His thesis that normalcy consists of pervasive avoidances of reality is highly compelling, and he uses the brilliant yet largely ignored innovations of Becker and Rank very well to make his case. We are given a tremendous amount of information on dissociation. His citation and elucidation of empirical research on the subject is very useful. His view that man's ability to function "normally" requires the ability to obscure portions of reality and create illusions/shared fantasies is supported by extensive literature.
But this book has very real faults. It is extremely repetitive. This is necessary at times, but much of it recapitulates the same ideas without improving upon the argument. Schumaker is innovative when he combines Freud and Becker with recent empirical data, but he also recycles their material unnecessarily.
A second key problem with Schumaker's argument is that it is pervaded by discussions of dissociation, without really explaining the qualities of shared fantasy that engender conception and corruption of reality. Dissociation tends to be an avoidance of a portion of reality, and Schumaker thoroughly explains how this works. However, psychological reality is not merely a narrowed-down reality, a diminished perceptual set, but consists of a dynamic fantasy life which actually corrupts and reshapes reality actively.
Unlike psychohistorians, Schumaker makes no real attempt to explain modes of fantasy construction, what kinds of fantasies people have, and by what dynamics they can replace reality. He assumes that fantasies are provided to a society rather than generated in shared fashion by members. The dynamic is interactive, and cannot be reduced to a merely passive situation where a society simply inherits belief systems. Groups also change and discard beliefs which no longer meet their needs, and they invent fantasies in reaction to their current problems. According to Schumaker, individuals only construct illusions when they have no socially cohesive fantasies to believe in. The process is much more complex than constructing shared illusions when social illusions are no longer satisfying. He also avoids the question of what fantasies appeal to individuals and societies.
He wrongly assumes individuals have no illusions or psychopathology when socially coherent fantasies are available. Avoiding these salient aspects of psychodynamics gives an impression that human beings exist in tune with reality to the extent that they merely avoid noticing what is painful. In fact this is only a small part of cognition, perception, and reality distortion. Psychopathology is not a lack of illusions. Trauma, developmental vicissitudes, and experiences determine psychological functioning well before the impact of religion on a community becomes psychologically salient for the individual. Unloving or abusive parents, the death of loved ones, excessive frustration and anxiety, can all engender pathology which will not be relieved by socially prescribed fantasies, though one might pursue such fantasies in hope for such relief. One might claim that if the parents were themselves faithfully religious, they would not inflict their own pathologies on their children, and hence their children would have no need to construct personal symptoms. But this is false. Faithful parenting is not a bulwark against trauma and debilitation. It obscures the underlying impact of parental/developmental destructiveness.
Indeed, it might be the very socially cohesive fantasy itself which is responsible for the parental abuse or developmental damage in the first place. A variety of religious, sacred, and socially sanctioned parenting practices are clearly destructive. Indeed, even without citing the countless examples of socially sanctioned physical mutilation, torture, and abuse around the world, one needs to look no further than into the heartland of the morally pure to observe debilitating abuses and traumatic repressions. Social sanction is a virtual guarantee that psychopathology will go unnoticed, rather than a panacea against anxiety.
Schumaker's view also makes it seem that people believe whatever social fantasy is provided to alleviate anxiety. In reality, communities have fantasies that reflect the needs and anxieties of their particular situations, even if they often have dynamics of fantasies in common. Not any fantasy will do. Thus, we must understand that the illusory aspects of religious and social belief are comprised not just of relief for anxiety, but specific shared fantasies generated by developmental issues and social experiences. The need for parental protection, to deny death, to control the environment ritually, to define the sacred, profane, pure and impure, may derive from similar dynamics; but their content varies according to the variations of the culture. These fantasies are not interchangeable.
A further problem is that Schumaker never allows for the possibility that development determines the extent to which people need illusions. He assumes that those who are not religious have either dissociated their anxiety to find another cohesive ideology to make it go away, they have dissociated their anxiety in service of forming neurotic symptoms, they have dissociated their anxiety to appear functional, or they are constitutionally (biologically) endowed with a greater capacity for pain. Schumaker never considers whether people need to evade reality to different degrees. Individuals vary intensely with regard to how they experience separation from their parents, how confidently they pursue their interests, how guilty they feel, how violent they are.
Schumaker's central thesis, that reality is terrifying to everyone and that we all engage in self-deceptions and corruptions of reality, must be granted. But his view of religion and dissociation ignores that individuals vary not only in terms of the kinds of reality which are satisfying or terrifying, but that some are far more terrified than others. And this is not on the basis of having socially coherent illusions alone, but because of vast differences in development which render them more or less suggestible (psychologically, not biologically), more or less inclined to deceive themselves, more or less in need of illusions, more or less capable of perceiving and enduring reality.
Finally, Schumaker claims that the solution for modern neurotic misery is to restore religion to a central place in both society and therapy. Lack of spiritual communication in therapy has been noted by many. Individuals need to come to terms with life, death, questions of meaning, loss, and anguish. Such issues can often get too little attention, especially in an age of increasing use of medication. Effort toward a more spiritual psychotherapy are reflected in the work of existential psychologists, like Ludwig Binswanger and Rollo May.
But the search for a spiritual connection is not the same as suggesting or inculcating illusions, especially religious ones. The transition from the spiritual to the religious can be a fine line which must not be crossed by therapists if it means implanting illusions. Schumaker advocates a spiritual journey, but what he actually prescribes is something far more questionable. The use of deception in the clinic can be a serious abuse of power. Is the therapist a Grand Inquisitor, who decides to fool the patient with miracle, mystery and authority, because that is what the patient truly needs to survive? Which illusions are acceptable? Who is to decide? Does the therapist determine what illusions are necessary, just how much reality the patient must escape? Knowing that human beings need some shared illusion to survive is not the same as deciding for someone what illusions they need.
Schumaker says that therapists should explicitly attempt to provide a coherent and religious world view which ameliorates the anxiety of social doubt and the difficulty of faith in a society of contrasting belief and opinion. If we suffer from a lack of socially coherent shared illusions, then we need to therapeutically reinforce such illusions in order to form a convincing, totalized illusion system impervious to doubt, threat, skepticism, and loss of faith.
This is wrong, because implementing such a solution could only be accomplished by fascistic means. A society would have to brainwashed and purged of disbelief (or disbelievers) to truly eradicate any traces of contrary ideology or skepticism which might interfere with a ubiquitous illusion. All contrary opinion, questions, and creative thought must be censored to achieve a faith immune from doubt. Scientific thinking and inquiry must also be censored because they may lead to the collapse of belief. This tyranny is also furthered by the necessity of deciding which fantasy system is going to be the apposite and holy choice. The establishment of such a universal faith is morally reprehensible and socially debilitating.
Even if faith were somehow bestowable by a therapist without doubt or fascistic means, this still begs the question of whether faith is psychologically healthy, and whether the inculcation of faith has any place in the clinic. Even though we may to some extent need shared illusions to survive, does this make them helpful in therapy?
Schumaker's conclusions seem to ignore such important therapeutic discoveries that people function better when they are helped to confront their conflicts and become aware of their problems. Ignorance of one's psychopathology only allows conflict to flourish and supports a dysfunctional ignorance of problems. Shared illusions offer some measure of immediate gratification, but they also allow problems to persist without any awareness of the genuine suffering conflicts usually cause.
The author claims that if we were truly religious, symptoms might not occur. But this is fallacious. To claim that symptoms can erupt when faith diminishes may be true, but this does not automatically make faith healthy. Psychopathology can and does exist in religious individuals and religious societies. Pathological symptoms, including mass hysteria, paranoia, psychotic delusion, and mass violence, permeate the history of most religions. Just because individuals in a society display traits in common, or are relieved of certain forms of anxiety by a shared belief, does not in any way indicate the health or morality of such illusions.
Schumaker's view defines successful treatment in terms of whatever reduces pain, regardless of the consequences for the individual, or those he or she interacts with. Shall we tell paranoiacs that their delusions are correct? They will feel happy for the moment. Or is there perhaps another aim in treatment?
The question of what illusions can actually be healthy is far more complicated than Schumaker believes, and he does not recognize that illusions can not only obfuscate genuine problems, but often create more suffering than they supposedly alleviate. It is surprising that he does not realize this, since he quotes Becker to the effect that "religion confers upon people a social license to act out madness." To state that pathology appears in times of doubt and loss of faith is obvious. To state that pathology is simply the opposite of illusion is patently false. Certainly the solution is not mass avoidance of reality. We've had quite enough of that already.
As with many great works, The Corruption of Reality provides a highly rich, compelling, and innovative set of findings, but it falls apart when advocating social solutions to human misery. The book's central thesis concerning the pervasive human need for shared illusion/fantasy and the normalcy of reality avoidance is well argued and of use for psychohistorians, but only if we are clear about its problems.
The remarkable accomplishment of the authors is that they have succeeded in making the truth about the perversity of civil incest litigation believable. This alone has relevance for psychohistorians perennially challenged by the all-too-human tendency to dismiss reports of aberrant behavior that does fit a known pattern of cause and effect.
As one who has sought to protest the legal system's betrayal of juvenile victims of incest (I am also a colleague and friend of the authors), I can attest to the difficulty of puncturing the denial. Good-hearted members of the public simply don't have the stomach or imagination to accept the prevalence of incest or question the legal system's penchant for pouncing on victims. And of course those implicated as abusers, or agents for abusers, have a vested interest in compromising the flow of information.
While Rosen and Etlin might have anticipated that their book would be received with approximately the same warmth as the Athenians greeted the runner bearing the news of the rout at Marathon, that has not been the case. Reviewers were quite positive; the first printing was quickly sold out, a tribute in part to the extraordinary skill and restraint with which the authors have presented the five case histories that introduce the subject.
The first case describes the legal persecution of Mary H, a mother who went underground with her five-year-old daughter in February, l992, when a Maryland judge was on the brink of awarding custody of the child to the father. This was Mary's second husband, who had previously confessed in criminal court to frequent molesting of her eight-year-old daughter from her first marriage. Molesting a step-daughter did not set off alarms in the mind of the court for the safety of a biological daughter. The presiding judge remained deaf to testimony that the five-year-old was returning from visitation with the father manifesting vaginal wounds that physicians attributed to sexual contact and penetration.
As fugitives, Mary H and her little girl lived in ramshackle shelter, constant poverty, and fear of arrest. Fortunately, Mary had the help of a loyal circle of supporters. Her advocates were vocal enough to attract the media to monitor her case and to continue attending court hearings even after she had fled. Also in her network were friends from her home state of Kentucky and author Etlin, who played no small part in the eventual rescue of mother and daughter by child protection authorities in Kentucky. Mary herself lived only to see her daughter safe in the friendly embrace of Kentucky social services. While on the run, she had developed breast cancer which went untreated for lack of money and fear that a visit to a doctor would lead to a police report. Following Mary's death, custody passed to her oldest daughter from her first marriage, a young woman technically emancipated and prematurely aged by the family's ordeal.
It is very hard not to feel rage when one compares the calamitous consequences of incest for Mary and her children, and the other families discussed in this book, against what could have been a short-lived crisis if the courts, agencies, and professionals had fulfilled their duty to protect children.
Here is how the judge in Mary's case justified his dereliction.
(If) there is only one objective and that was going through life without being sexually abused, then (the answer would be to put) the child in a locked cage and have several people open the door and feed them and what have you...and then there would be no sexual abuse.
According to this demented logic, a parent who tries to stop incest may be more suspect than a molester. The judge viewed the father's admission of pedophilia as a mark in his favor, compared to the mother who brought charges she could not absolutely prove thus tainting her as a possible "secret abuser, the closet abuser." (One has to wonder about a projection there.)
Coming too late to undo the damage, the Maryland appellate court handed down a decision that spoke to the reality of this mother's predicament and every other similarly disempowered parent. The court said that where the evidence is such that a parent is justified in believing that the other parent is sexually abusing the child, it is inconceivable that the parent will surrender the child to the abusing parent without stringent safeguards.
This might seem like a rudimentary insight; yet the guiding principle of the industry that has arisen to process allegations of child sex abuse is that no matter how legitimate their fears, parents must suppress their protective instincts and encourage the child's visitation with suspected and convicted abusers in strict accordance with court orders. One has to wonder what could afflict the minds and emotions of this vast bureaucracy to inure them to the suffering of children. Why in another case, for example, would a series of judges in three southern states and Canada all issue rulings that delivered a child into the custody of a father known to be a molester?
Defense lawyers are the visible advocates for perpetrators and have perfected their methods for discrediting incest allegations. Their instinct for identifying with a judge's hostility toward mothers seems to be unerring. A typical strategy is to portray the mother as a liar and miscreant, and the child as a pawn in the clutches of the diabolical mother. After making their first spontaneous disclosures, children are often intimidated into silence by hostile professionals who press them to recant.
The story of Joshua DeShaney (his real name) encapsulates the nightmare of custody litigation run amok. Joshua's mother lost custody upon reporting evidence of the father's physical abuse. Incredibly, two highly credible informants, the father's second wife and subsequent girlfriend, both reported Joshua's father to authorities for endangering the child, only to be ignored. Emergency room doctors swallowed flimsy explanations for Joshua's injuries until he was finally admitted in a comatose state. By the time Joshua's mother was allowed to reclaim her son, he had sustained irreversible brain damage.
Each horror story leaves the reader questioning why people on the public payroll would perform other than conscientiously toward children. There obviously seems to be some sort of intentionality in this ganging-up process that ends with molesters gaining control of children. What confuses the public is the reversal of expectations. Whereas it is plausible to picture child protective workers as lax or incompetent, it strains credulity to imagine them as child-hating monsters. Other than Lloyd deMause, few have attempted to plumb the depths of the fear and loathing toward children, so alien to us at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. (Court personnel have lectured me on the benefits of a strict [i.e. punitive] upbringing. They often seem to believe that the child needs to be toughened by harsh treatment.)
On the theory that the courts can never be relied on to protect children from incest, Rosen and Etlin propose transferring responsibility from the legal system to the U.S. Public Health Service, an agency that does exert itself to guard children's physical well-being. Certainly this idea merits serious consideration.
The Hostage Child is raw material for psychohistorians. It leaves no doubt that legal and psychological personnel, relied upon by the courts for advice on custody decisions, all too often make recommendations that will leave children open to harm over alternatives that promise safety. Psychohistorical insights are a helpful necessity to decode the motives for such counter-intuitive behavior.
Czander presents a comprehensive, smoothly written work which will stand as a classic in the field of organizational psychology. He centers on the exploration of psychic forces permeating the modern workplace in the form of relationships between leader and follower, individual and organization, and organization and environment. Czander draws deeply from works of classical and contemporary psychoanalysts, as well as consultants and managers, in the creation of a continuum from pure idea to working with and manipulating tangible organizational structures.
The author does not assume reader familiarity with either theory or in-depth experience. He leads the reader through complicated conceptual material in a professional, yet friendly manner. This book is a self-contained work which includes an excellent summary of three major psychoanalytic theories, along with sufficient case study material to demonstrate operational application of the concepts. The culmination of this work features an in-depth analysis of the consultation process as applied to the work environment.
This book enhances the study of psychohistory by offering a valuable structure of basic psychoanalytic ideas within a context of applied consultation in the world of work. Czander takes psychohistorical concepts out of the ethereal realm of philosophical discussion and uses them as levers for interventions in the most common of social environments: the hierarchical, task-centered organization. The author's imagery of powerful intra- and inter-psychic forces between people in an organization enables the reader to almost visualize the inner life of the organization. Czander's merging of psychoanalysis with a consultation model is analogous to a mariner studying charts of currents to smooth the path of a voyage.
The structure of organizations, be they business, social or administrative, inevitably flows from individual emotional and psychological factors, as well as interactions between the people who are part of the group. Czander elaborates how the leader's psychobiological makeup will influence the organizational culture and individual psyches of the employees in ways which give form to a reality embracing a collective, living organizational organism. Conflicts between different operational functions may be expected to mirror intra-psychic pathologies of key leaders. Resolution of such conflicts will determine if an organization can compete functionally in the business environment. Failure to compete may be seen as a limitation of the ability to be efficient and optimally successful in task accomplishment. The author offers us a workable model which facilitates diagnosis and treatment of organizational pathology.
I recommend this book as a work which allows the student of psychohistory to grasp the essential theoretical foundations upon which psychohistory is based, as well as being treated to a walk-through demonstration of application and intervention models.
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