Hatred by Willard Gaylin (best autobiographies to read TXT) 📕

the passions. He insisted that the rationale we offer for our behavior is often only “rationalization” (a word to which he gave its modern meaning) after the fact, disguising the emotionally driven intent of the behavior.

2. We are not as free as we like to think. Many present-day actions are a product of our treatment in the past. This explains why seemingly like individuals will behave differently in the face of the same crisis. It explains why one person, when faced with an assailant, will run with fear, another attempt to appease or negotiate, and a third recklessly attack. This is a developmental point of view. When one says that we do “this” because of how we were treated by our parents in the past, there is the suggestion that “this” is not that freely selected an action. Such dynamic explanations have been labeled psychic determinism and have been viewed by many as a direct assault on free will. Most psychoanalysts “believe” in free will, but they are forced to struggle with a theory that drives one to conceding profound limits to human autonomy.

3. We are not as insightful or self-knowing as we pretend. Nothing we do is caused by a simple stimulus-response mechanism. We do not make a decision at the moment, even though we may perceive it as happening that way. All behavior is a complex result of a number of forces and counterforces operating on us at that moment. Some of these influences arise from the past, some emerge out of the immediate present; some of our motives are operating consciously, others unconsciously and without our knowledge. All of these forces and counterforces act in concert, and their balance determines the specific action: Do we stop to help the elderly woman who fell in the street or do we walk on? Will we go on a diet or simply rationalize about it? Will we uncomfortably tell the truth or will we tell the convenient white lie? Will we act courageously or cowardly in the face of a crisis? This balancing of forces and counterforces driving us one way or the other constitutes a dynamic view of behavior—hence the term “psychodynamics.” This conception also threatens the view of our own autonomy and rationality to which we cling so dearly.

4. We are less individual than we like to think. Actually, we are obligate social animals; we live in groups because we must. Other people are as essential to our survival as food, water, and oxygen. Therefore, exclusion from the group is a terrifying concept. The threat of ostracism becomes a potent means for forcing individuals to conform their behavior to the dictates of the community or its leaders.

5. We live in a world of our own perception, to which actuality, that is, the real world, takes a secondary role. Once we go beyond the struggle for food and shelter, the basic struggle for survival, we enter into the world of our own imagination. Pride and shame, joy and despair, security or terror, will be fixed by our perception of what is happening, which only accidentally in rare moments will correspond with what is actually going on. This locates Freud in the tradition of German philosophical idealism, which dominated his education and milieu.

The emphasis on the perceived world as the arena for human operations was not an original construct of Freud’s. It can be traced back to classic times. Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher, is quoted as saying: “What disturbs and alarms man are not the things, but his opinions and fancies about the things.” What Freud did was take ideas that were common currency in the philosophical world of the academy and apply them to the scientific study of human behavior then emerging from the psychological laboratories and the psychiatric clinics of Europe. But who could have predicted what followed from that? Freudian psychology, flowing out of its original clinical environs, saturated the entire intellectual community and, in the process, transformed our very view of ourselves.

There was no area of creative activity that was untouched by Freudian influence, from surrealist paintings to plays, biography, literary criticism, and poetry. Nothing was immune, not movies, not haute couture. Dream sequences became de rigeur even in Broadway musicals, the former venue of double takes, pratfalls, showgirls, and chorus lines.

People began to think and talk about their lives in terms of their unconscious desires, hidden motives, projections, idealizations, rationalizations, sublimations, repressions, self-delusions, and ego trips. And these were the most grounded and least fanciful concepts. Then there were the exotics: penis envy, castration anxiety, Oedipal and Electra complexes, Eros and Thanatos.

The Freudian insights launched a democratic assault on the ramparts of Victorian society: its morality, its scientific optimism, its class distinctions, its rationalism. Freud leveled old distinctions and upset the traditional standards for human conduct established during the Victorian age. He introduced a wild card into the deck. He proclaimed everything as either directly or indirectly sexual, which of course was idiotic, but in the process it legitimated libidinal drives and started the sexual revolution, which would continue through the twentieth century. Freudian theory openly proclaimed that sexual appetite was ubiquitous, universal, and respectable. Everyone did it or thought about doing it. This proved liberating. Sex was no longer vulgar but the repository of the life force. We all acted under the influence of our libidos: aristocrat and commoner, man and woman, the elderly and the infant. Perversity was not just for the perverted. We all carried such impulses deep within our ids. Freud ushered in an electrifying and creative era.

What was not so sanguine, however, was the unintended effect of what became known as the Freudian revolution on the basic principle of responsibility. The revolution made a tragic and profound contribution to the moral relativism that has fudged the concept of evil, leading to a substitution of understanding for justice.

Without a clear sense of responsibility, there is no morality. Without the same sense of responsibility, the law cannot function.