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Altruism or Autism? A Brief and Somewhat Anecdotal Venture Into the Group-Psychodynamics of the Left

1: Freud, Hobbes, and Liberalism in Groups - 2: Group Psychology Vignettes - 3: Left Ideology, Disconnection, and Negative Rhetoric - 4: Ideological Feedback 

Left ideology, itself an ossified reaction compromise to the unconscious childhood Oedipal dilemma ‘if it’s be King or be dead, and I can’t be King, I might as well share,’ secretly incentives disconnection in the guise of connection the outcome of which is an arrested development in or return to a primal and basic autistic state which the organism was intended to naturally, but with the help of social scaffolds, grow out of.

1: Freud, Hobbes, and Liberalism in Groups

For Freud (Preface to Aichorn's Wayword Youth), primary narcissism is the healthy and necessary basic energy devoted to the self for survival, in other words liking yourself to the extent that the outside world is secondary (infantile autism). Primary narcissism becomes secondary narcissism and eventually the narcissism of minor differences through the adaption of self-focused narcissistic ‘energy’ to the navigation of social, group situations (the object field) where some sort of contract or social occurrence has been employed or experienced (alterity). The "narcissism of minor differences," another one of Freud's concept, could be thought of as the derivative of the original energy focused on survival sublimated into the new demands of the social sphere which were absent in the pre-societal times, demands which necessitate a certain renunciation of individual drive satisfaction (the general thrust of Frued’s texts Group Psychology... and  Civilization and It’s Discontents). Hobbes, the founder of modern liberal theory, many years prior to Freud, developed a similar theory: in the state of nature prior to the formation of society or the social contract, the individual’s only aim or ‘liberty’ is that of self-preservation.  Once society is formed, or a 'social contract' is made, one moves from the primary liberty, self-preservation, to the collective social liberty, what we think of in contemporary terms as a ‘right,’ where one respects the other’s actions as long as they do not restrict or terminate one’s own actions or thoughts. This necessarily entails the forgoing of some desires, instincts mainly, to respect the desires of others, or what is referred to as negative rights. The two thinkers, Hobbes and Freud, essentially make the same claim. Both start by speculating a primitive state followed by a change in the state based on the emergence of alterity or society whereupon personal gains are curtailed or sacrificed for a safe place within a group. This similarity provides for us important tools to understand our current cultural milieu populated as it is with strange liberal/leftist discourse, something we are all familiar with, which is quick to set forth certain rigid restrictions regarding what people are permitted to feel, think, and express in the presence of others, that is, in groups.

2: Group Psychology Vignettes

I am a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in training with extensive experience running group therapy at schools and mental health clinics. What I see in my therapeutic groups or analytic classes is but a snapshot of the outside world but I do believe it scales to larger populations easily.  To do some groundwork on the general phenomenon of group psychology and liberalism, I present three vignettes which show three related aspects of group psychology. I will introduce each vignette, with a brief analysis and explanation, and then synthesis all three before moving onto liberal dynamics.

Vignette 1:As a supervisor at a clinic sitting in on supervisee running a group: The group leader asked a group member who had just entered the room five minutes late about her frequent lateness. A few other group members quickly expressed concerns that the group leader was being sadistic. Whether the claim of sadism is true or false, the fact remains that there was a clear pattern of lateness which the group leader had not addressed for most the history of the group. Thus, the leap to sadistic intent on the professor’s part was not a logical, or cognitive moment, but an unconscious moment of transference – he was just another sadistic leader abusing his power. One member said “I know if that were me I wouldn’t want that to happen to me, being called out like that” to which many agreed. Here it was clear the members protecting the tardy member were setting up a precedent that if they themselves were to act the same way that they would not like to be questioned on their own resistance, and furthermore that the questioning of such a resistance was a moral fault of the leader, mainly sadism. The idea is that what we claim to do for the other in a group is also putting into the group discourse a certain precedent or wish for a certain structure to be reflected back at the self. This is the golden rule ‘treat others as you’d like to be treated' (in politics, the idea that 'if we all agree not to run negative campaign ads against each other, we can all come out of this thing OK).We will expand on this more later.

Vignette 2: In another case, certain students within a class co-taught by myself and a colleague would express extreme moralistic disdain for another student’s feelings on the premise that having negative or aggressive feelings in a class group was the same as acting on them, or in the very least that having these negative feelings would necessarily lead to harmful action. The disdaining students phrased their reproach in a sense that to have a feeling was immoral and wrong on the basis that it was a slipper slope to dangerous action and thus should be avoided to keep the class ‘safe.’ The use of the word ‘safe’ – and here one might be reminded of the cliché ‘safe space’ -  within the moralistic narrative set forth an almost political-propagandist approach to structuring group exchange. That is, the feeling was ‘what you are doing is not safe, and obviously if we are all thinking straight we would want to be safe,’ an implication which creates a false dichotomy, and erects the other’s position as an already predetermined strawman, thus putting the other in the place of either having to renounce their position or admit to something absurd like ‘I want an unsafe group so I can have my feelings.’ This is how propaganda works – it creates a false dichotomy, a double bind.

Vignette 3: The members of a psychoanalytic school based group I ran had difficulty getting along with one another. They were more interested in talking excessively about memories they had shared in the past than they were interested in talking to each other in the room in the here and now. The excessive talk was not real communicative talk, the members would talk over each other, rapidly associating to one another without really listening to each other. The stories did not interact with each other to form a connective narrative, but rather each story had the same basic content slightly rearranged to appear different. These stories were similar, but existed only in parallel, never intersecting with the other stories to create something or allow for emotional connection. On the surface it appeared that the students were interacting, but the truth was they were doing anything but.

Vignette 1-3 as Stages: In Vignette 1 (V1, V2, V3 from here on out), we see how a group member is used by other members as a reference point to establish a certain structure of discourse within the group – ‘there shall be no sadism’ -  and for the group sadism seems to be inquiring into resistance, in this case lateness.  Here the group members aid and abet the tardy member so that they themselves could receive the same treatment if they were ever to be late. In V2 we see a similar phenomenon with safety instead of sadism. In both V1 and V2, the moral phrase seems to be implicitly universalized as the way the group should be – 'you wouldn’t want an unsafe group! You wouldn’t want a sadistic leader!’ These are of course agreeable statements, (and that is just the point!) but these statements are, as previously mentioned, straw men fallacies. Both assume the interpretation of sadism and danger as irreproachable truths and prop the implication upon a ground that is difficult to argue against, unless one wishes to be seen as pro-sadism, and pro-danger of others.

Though the content of V1 and V2 is of some interest, the real importance is in the way the content is structured. This structure is implicit universalization: A traditional moral is chosen as a wish and inserted into group discourse in the form of a universal – ‘everyone should want this; everyone would want this if they were thinking clearly’ in order to shape the group exchange in a certain way [remember Zizek’s Hegelian universal category in Parallax View  section The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies is based on exception, that is, vulgarly put, negation or exclusion - big surprise...]. In V3 we see this structure, but without a clear moral. Instead of a moral precedent, each member is speaking but in a way that does not interact with the other. It acknowledges the other just quick enough to feign connection and pull away into disconnection. The universalization here is not the implicit suggestion of choosing a moral to dictate the discourse, but rather, the implicit universalization of acknowledging and then negating the other as to create a type of in-group talk that is precisely the avoidance of real talk, a sort of group disavowal. In this way, the group maintained the comfortable appearance of being on the same page, without the cost of actually connecting and having to take in an other’s presence, or be vulnerable in the presence of an other. This feigned connection, “alone together” as Sherry Turkle puts it in her book named by the same phrase, offers more safety. This is the primal disconnection reminiscent of early developmental autistic states posited at the heart of liberal negative discourse.

3: Left Ideology, Disconnection, and Negative Rhetoric

Liberalism, with its rhetoric of inclusivity, voice, debate, dialogue, connection, etc., at its theoretical heart posits the opposite radical exclusivity, solipsism, and disconnection. It is no secret that in the liberal framework, a right is just if it does not interfere with another’s right, what is commonly referred to negative rights. Strangely, this seems to unconsciously establish a precedent for avoiding interacting with others, or in the very least, interacting as minimally as possible, or to further push the case, interacting with others only in a way that will not disturb the status quo as to maintain the utilitarian approach of ‘the most amount of rights for the most amount of people.’ Thus, there seems to be more of a libidinal investment in disconnection or in the very least an absolute minimal connection to others. In layman terms, Left ideology incentives disconnection and autism. With this comes what I call negative rhetoric.

 The function of this liberal discourse and its negative rhetoric, ‘don’t, won’t, shan’t’ seen through V1 and V2 is to construct a structure of interpersonal exchanges where disconnection established by the embellishment of minor differences is the prevailing law or social schema, what we saw in V3. The cleverness is that the liberal discourse maintains the illusion of interacting with others (Nick Land's "alterity in advance") while simultaneously positing the unconscious goal of avoiding others – the best of both worlds, like Glaucon and the Ring of Gyges (Plato), the common colloquial phrase ‘to each his own,’ or the prevailing cultural hedonistic malaise of ‘having your cake and eating it too.’ This liberal discourse masquerading as critical reproach and humanism couched in moral high ground (thou shall not be a sadist, unsafe, etc.) is transformed into a group enactment which has an inductive quality to it, what Melanie Klein refers to as projective identification. That is, speech-acts, and certain narratives tend to beget certain speech-acts and narratives in response. This unconsciously shapes the group exchange so that only certain avenues of feeling, thought and expression are considered acceptable (social cybernetic feedback circuit strengthening certain responses and discouraging others). Anything outside of the prescribed acceptable discourse become moralistically disdained and then reified as intrinsically irreproachable. This creates a subtle and sublime group resistance that detaches from the group members and imposes itself from pseudo-outside and on high (not unlike the way a psychotic projects back onto the outside, in a vague paranoiac figure, the punitive superego which originated in the feelings generated by the prohibitions of other), and in the process implies its own moral right as a given while simultaneously undoing the ground on which the other would critically approach the discourse from, all under the guise of critical reproach of structure, and liberal care of others. This kind of rhetoric on the one hand serves a vital psychological and social function of creating a sort of 'group mind,' while on the other hand restricts communication. That is, it creates a connection through disconnection.

The unconscious inversion of positive rights – ‘you can’ – to negations – ‘you can’t’ is more complex than it seems. That is, the mode of universally positing a positive liberty is retained while the value transmitted through the mode of universality is flipped from ‘everyone should do X’ to ‘no one should do Y,’ though X and Y retain the same referent, and difference becomes solely whether the referent is referred back to through the negative or positive. In this case, the focus is shifted from what we can do in social situations, and what we can talk about in groups, to almost exclusively what we can’t do. When this occurs, despite the left’s obsession with voice and dialogue, we arrive at the idea of avoiding talk altogether out of fear of transgression more often than we arrive at the process of engaging in forms of talk other than the talk that is transgressive. In other words, with the positive liberty we can talk about A, B, C, E and G, while with the inversion, the negation, we can’t talk about D and F. The structural approach, whether we start from positive or negative, effects the perception of potentialities. In both cases, A, B, C, D, E, F, and G are all potential options, but the negative or positive approach superficially creates a false-sequence of potentials. Just as asking a question a certain way may increase the likelihood of receiving a certain answer in return, here, the structure of interchange predetermines the avenues of interchange. And as we see, the negative approach drastically cuts out material.

This is how the negative inversion of liberties presents itself in groups: In scenarios where talk of touchy topics could arise, there is a great fear that one’s own defenses or ‘vices’ will become exposed, so one makes sure the other’s defense stays intact or hidden as to defend one's own defenses.  This has a tendency to express itself in a universal gesture. Whereas the abstract idea of liberty is to universally give everyone X, the negative liberal rhetoric is to totally remove from the discourse that which could threaten any defense (Y), for a threat to the defense of the other could also easily shift and become a threat to the defense of the self (if I make fun of someone else in a group, I draw attention to myself and open myself up to attack as well). The unconscious logic is that ‘If I put forth into the group a general rule, and then identify with this rule, then the other should reflect this rule back at me for it offers mutual gains, that is, the maintenance of defenses within the presence of another, and the feelings of safety that come with the alternative of which seems to be less favorable,’ or what Winnicott in regard to psychoanalytic therapeutic treatment refers to as ‘colluding with the patient's resistances.’ Furthermore, the rule is universalized not only for the aforementioned benefits, but also as to seem separate to the self, therefore lending to it both an exalted authority, as well as principle of selflessness which is generally a favorably perceived principle – ‘it is not I who wants this, but it is this which everyone would want if thinking clearly.’ This typically works as long as the majority of people are concerned with a noncreative and reductive feeling of safety (Nietzsche’s lastman) which they typically are due to the pressure exerted by like minded people investing in the defense, more than an ability to create something together.

It doesn't end here. Each group member harbors the unconscious or pre-conscious perception of the secret instincts of the other and props upon it an artifice of social cooperation, ultimately positing the secret instincts as intrinsically toxic as to regulate the whole group’s avoidance of them. To this point, on the topic of group psychology, Freud writes in his text on Group Psychology:

We have only to think of the troop of women and girls, all of them in love in an enthusiastically sentimental way, who crowd round a singer or pianist after his performance. It would certainly be easy for each of them to be jealous of the rest; but, in the face of their numbers and the consequent impossibility of their reaching the aim of their love, they renounce it, and, instead of pulling out one another's hair, they act as a united group, do homage to the hero of the occasion with their common actions, and would probably be glad to have a share of his flowing locks. Originally rivals, they have succeeded in identifying themselves with one another by means of a similar love for the same object. When, as is usual, an instinctual situation is capable of various outcomes, we shall not be surprised that the actual outcome is one which brings with it the possibility of a certain amount of satisfaction, whereas some other outcome, in itself more obvious, is passed over because the circumstances of life prevent its leading to any such satisfaction”
The idea is that in a group, people who would otherwise compete for what they want tend to opt out of a possible conflict by identifying with each other even if it means sacrificing their actual desire. It is the inversion of the positive liberty - one of us can have the pianist - to the negative - none of us should have the pianist. Desire of the object is flipped into desire of restraining one’s self from the object and further transformed into a desire to protect each other’s defense as the other’s defense is a reflection of one’s own. 

The group would rather stay together and receive merely a portion of the pie (seeing the pianist, or sharing a lock of hair) rather than fight one another at the gamble of being killed, or worse, surviving without any pie at all (thought the irony is that if some people took a risk, something much greater than the pianist could be created and had)!  Thus, there seems to be an unconscious understanding and agreement among group members to forgo the ideal object, to keep it unattainable, so that the relative peace can be attained instead. This preserves their actual lives through primary narcissism (violence does not break out), and social lives though the narcissism of minor differences (identity, and subjective perspectives retain their ‘uniqueness’ within each other’s presences) manifested via liberal rhetoric.

If this sounds familiar it’s because, again, Hobbes had a similar idea: as the banality goes, the state of nature is “nasty brutish and short” which thus requires a social contract. In this nasty, brutish, short nature, anxiety was excessive, and paranoia was the rule. One may pursue his or her desire, and take what he or she wants, but one would also have to sleep with one eye open, always wondering if someone stronger would come and take it from him as he himself had done to others. Thus, as the myth goes, humans entered into the social contract where they sacrificed some aspects of life, mainly instinctual desire, the possibility of having everything they could acquire by their own power at the risk of death, for the feeling of safety and the reduction of tension. This is, of course, the main thrust of Freud’s (1930) Civilization and its Discontents, that it would be better to have a civilization with some rules where we must renounce some of our personal wishes and share with others than to have a state of nature where we are constantly at war with one another, and constantly in a state of tension.

Freud ‘discovers’ this in the family group, which we shall remember is the Rousseauian and Marxist germinal unit of the society, where he shows that some patients recall repressed memories or dreams in which they felt secretly relieved to watch their brother or sister be beaten by their father. The relief is usually associated to the fact that they were spared the beating at the expense of their sibling.  The finding here is that the desire to preserve the self, or avoid conflict in a group setting seems to trump any moral imperative but is repressed and sublimated to save the moral sense. Thus, liberalism is a reaction compromise to the unconscious childhood Oedipal conflict  – ‘if its be King or be dead, and I can’t be King, I might as well share.' Prior to the formalized social situation, narcissism was the law of self-preservation often manifested in brutish, nasty, violent, or primal instinctual life, mainly killing, or destroying to get needs met, or killing and destroying out of paranoiac anxiety that needs will go unmet. In this time period, a Nietzschean “will to power” state, being a ‘self’ meant surviving the battle or aligning yourself with the one who survives or is likely to surive the battle. Your enemies were slaughtered, and your allies were an extension of your own ego, or you were slaughtered, or made a move to identify yourself with the slaughterer to preserve yourself. You were either Genghis Kahn, one of Genghis Kahn’s gang, or a head on one of Kahn’s pikes.

4: Ideological Feedback

When we leave this state of brutalism and action to enter into the social realm, we sublimate our aggressive actions into speech-acts and other activities. Instead of killing the competitor and gathering a following, or becoming a follower to the strong to spare the self from being killed, we engage into language games that reflect these activities in lesser degrees.  As Freud supposedly said, “The first man to hurl an insult rather than a spear was the founder of civilization” (Freud, 1895). These language games often take form of universal generalizations of worldviews. For the neurotic, one who has some contact with a shared reality, it is always easier to hold a belief if others too hold it and do not resist it, or in the case of resistance, if the resistances are easily projected, incorporated, or disavowed. That is, it is easier to hold a universal view of people and the world than it is to hold the idea that ‘I am this way, and others are not’ or ‘others are that way and I am not,’ as holding a universal view reduces the possibility of any sort of cognitive or emotional dissonance or tension and therefore avoids a narcissistic injury which further removes the need to defend the position of the worldview as it becomes assumed as natural or moral. This requires a process of projection.

The idea here is the simple and old one that people tend to project the qualities onto others and the world that they wish for themselves. The vulgar and naïve evolutionary psychologist or biologist espouses the boring narrative ‘we are animalistic, our behavior is determined by the traces of evolutionary traits.’ Here, there is a wish to be violent, aggressive, and demeaning and therefore the world is proposed as such. Likewise, the humanist – and there is no use in saying ‘vulgar or naïve humanist’ as they are all vulgar and naïve beyond repair – espouses the boring narrative ‘we are all good and the bad social world makes us bad.’ Here, there is a wish to disavow the true violence and aggression of the world, so the wish is universalized – ‘it is not I who simply needs to believe that human nature is good for my own benefit, it is how the world really is.’ The projecting of a state of being onto others and the world is a necessary step in creating a subtle, smooth-surfaced, implicit narcissism. It is important that the narcissism of minor differences be subtle and implicit because the ideas of narcissism itself has changed. Through the cybernetic feedback initiated by clinical and theoretical works becoming pop culture objects, narcissism has slipped from the hands of archaic theorists where it reserved a certain praxis and function within a particular discourse and made its way idly into the main avenues of colloquial consciousness whereupon it takes on different meanings. It is common to hear ‘you’re such a narcissist’ on popular television or media. The term is less of a diagnostic and more of a playful buzzword we may see in a magazine article about a celebrity.

In short, people are at least faintly semi-aware of narcissism and in order to protect the self from the obvious attack from the other ‘you’re a narcissist!’ he or she must find a way to make it seem as if everyone was just as narcissistic as his or herself.  He or she must assert that all people are this way. Hence, we may hear ‘it’s not me who is special, while others are un-special, we are all special!’ A blanket laid down, encompassing all.  The underlying idea here is that if I don’t attack the other, the other will not attack me, then we can be narcissistic together – it is the inviting of others to join the individual’s fantasy rather than the individual acknowledging that he or she has a fantasy that may intersect with another’s fantasy in a way that creates tension. It feels like ‘why burst my bubble when you can join it and be happy here too !?’  Or perhaps more accurately, we may all have our own bubbles separate of each other, or what Sherry Turkle calls being “alone together.” Why connect at the risk of tension when we could propose the avoidance of connection as the new representation of connection?

Here, we see that difference - or disconnection -  is safer than similarity, or the feeling of being connected. The minor differences allow us to be in the same room, but alone, connected through disconnection. This is a Glauconian idea of justice, seeming good, but really acting ‘bad;’ looking one way but being another! Soon, lulled into the warm, drunken safety of smooth narcissism, we begin to develop Stockholm syndrome to our own disavowal of self-interest. To preserve this, we will round the edges of all opinions, perspectives, and worldviews as to avoid getting bruises, bumps, or little cuts, wounds that would let the outside in.