The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness, by Rod Tweedy

Posted on January 3, 2017 by karnacology

How Society Shapes Who We Are

The Political Self explores how our social and economic

contexts profoundly affect our mental health and well-
being, and how modern neuroscientific and
psychodynamic research can both contribute to and
enrich our understanding of these wider discussions. It
therefore looks both inside and outside—indeed one of
the main themes of the book is that the conceptually
discrete categories of “inner” and “outer” in reality
constantly interact, shape, and inform each other. Severing these two worlds, it suggests, has led both
to a devitalized and dissociated form of politics, and to a disengaged and disempowering form of
therapy and analysis.

“An increasing awareness of the deeply

dysfunctional and divisive nature of many of our
traditional political and economic institutions”

Like Oedipus, we are standing at a crossroads, facing on the one hand remarkable new discoveries
about how our brains work and are shaped and sculpted by the world around us, and on the other
hand an increasing awareness of the deeply dysfunctional and divisive nature of many of our
traditional political and economic institutions. This convergence—a bringing together and alignment of
the inner and outer—is one of the defining characteristics of this age; and what makes this period of
history particularly exciting in terms of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy is the new receptivity and
willingness among many mental health practitioners and professionals to address and engage with
social reality as part of the necessary therapeutic process.
Social Disorders, Mental Disorders

As Andrew Samuels, one of the pioneers of this new integrated approach to psychotherapy, has
observed: “From a psychological point of view, the world is making people unwell; it follows that, for
people to feel better, the world’s situation needs to change. But perhaps this is too passive: perhaps
for people to feel better, they have to recognize that the human psyche is a political psyche and hence
consider doing something about the state the world is in” (Politics on the Couch).

This recognition requires seeing that the human psyche is not some abstracted entity operating in
splendid isolation from the world, but is on every level profoundly involved in the world: we are
embedded, embodied, and embrained, and the world—for better or worse—is hardwired and
mirrored within us. “For us to feel better” we therefore need to adjust not only ourselves but our
worlds, our surrounding contexts—the powerful matrix of forces, pressures, ideas, and interests
constantly acting upon us. And for this to happen, Samuels notes, we also need to adjust and update
our model of the human psyche from the crude seventeenth-century version—conceived as a
separate, atomized, rationalized unit (which unfortunately still drives mainstream political, and
indeed psychoanalytic, discourse)—to a more twenty-first-century dynamic model, based on a deeper
and more sophisticated understanding of the interdependent, interactive nature of our psyches: we
need to recognize, as Samuels puts it, that “the human psyche is a political psyche.”

“we need to
adjust and update
our model of the
human psyche
from the crude
seventeenth-
century version to
a more twenty-
first-century
dynamic model”

As the symbolic “father” of the psychoanalytic and therapeutic industries—as well as one of the most
influential and important of the early explorers of the modern psyche—the figure of Sigmund Freud is
particularly significant at this juncture. Freud’s pioneering work profoundly challenged the mechanistic,
rationalising, literalist world of nineteenth-century science—opening up the vast symbolic realms of the
human unconscious onto the unsuspecting materialism and respectability of Viennese and Victorian
bourgeois living rooms, and transforming our appreciation of the human mind in the process. Freud
drew powerful attention to the role of repression in concealing uncomfortable—unspoken—truths
about society. And the method he instigated to reveal and resolve these repressions and hidden
realities, which became the basis of “the talking cure”, heralded a new emancipatory role for analysis
in addressing and transforming them.

“It dawned on Freud very early, that letting

people say what they thought and felt was very
explosive—and would have unpredictable
consequences”

As Adam Phillips—one of the ablest proponents of

Freud’s thought today—has remarked, while
the aims of therapy (in helping people) are fairly
conventional, “the method is revolutionary”: “It
dawned on Freud very early, that what he was
opening up by letting people say what they thought
and felt, was really very explosive—and would
really have unpredictable consequences” (Phillips
interview, 2014). It is this aspect of Freud’s
discovery that the present book draws on in
suggesting a new multidisciplinary, integrated, and
contextualized model of therapeutic practice for
the twenty-first century. Letting people say what
they think and feel still has unpredictable
consequences.

A New Self, A New Politics

Rather than separating our understanding of economic and social practices from our understanding of
affective development and human development, we need to bring them together, to align them: we
need to realize that politics, the external world, is not a world without an “inner”. And for this to
happen, we need a new integrated model for mental health, and a new politics: we need a new dialogue
between the political and personal worlds, and recognition of how psychotherapeutic practice and the
psyche both shape and are powerfully shaped by existing structures and interests.

As Sue Gerhardt observes, “As a psychotherapist, I argue that we must bring a deeper understanding of
the role of emotional development into our political awareness, and recognize that political behaviour in
general is not something separate from other forms of human relationship and is influenced by the
same emotional dynamics” (The Selfish Society). That political behaviour is not something separate
from other forms of human relationship: this is what this integrative vision is all about. These wider
social and political contexts are after all made up of human beings, subjective presences, and are
constituted by familiar forms of relationships, desires, and behaviours. As Joel Bakan’s chapter in The
Political Self suggests, the psychological and the economic, the political and the personal, in reality
constantly interact and interweave: psychology may indeed “provide a better account of business
executives’ dual moral lives than either law or economics”.

“The political and the personal,

in reality constantly interact
and interweave”

If the psyche is necessarily

political, embedded in systems
of power and control—part of a
wider body of social interaction
and choice—then the political is
simultaneously psychological, is
psyche. The particular nature of
the current economic and
political “psyche” has been
suggested by a number of commentators. Anita Roddick, for example, notes that the language of
contemporary business is “a language of indifference; it’s a language of separation, of secrecy, of
hierarchy”—one that, she adds, “is fashioning a schizophrenia in many of us” (The Political Self ). It’s a
correlation we should not take lightly: Robert Hare, one of the world’s leading authorities into
psychopathy, has remarked that psychopathy is not simply a list of internal psychological behaviours
but also a set of economic practices. The difference, he notes, is that “serial killers ruin families”,
whereas “corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies”.

Applying a psychodynamically informed and neuroscientifically grounded approach to our

understanding of social and political behaviours and practices—to issues as various as education,
consumerism, sexual addiction, and militarisation (as the commentators in The Political Self show)—can
both significantly enrich our understanding and evaluation of these practices, and also reveal a deeper
dimension to their influence and impact. As Gerhardt observes, “The challenge now is to integrate the
scientific knowledge that psychology and neuroscience offer us, information about how people develop
and how their emotions are played out in the public sphere, with action: only then will we have a chance
of moving towards the right solutions”. The key word here is integrate: whereas our current, left-brain
world would prefer to compartmentalise, to divide and rule, to segregate and silo, we must apply a
reconciliatory, compassionate, holistic model in order to be of genuine therapeutic benefit and value.
 “I sense that people are sick of the current
worldview in the West”

“I sense that people are sick of the current

worldview in the West,” observes
McGilchrist in his compelling discussion
with Jonathan Rowson. “We have been
sold a sadly limiting version of who we as
human beings are, and how we relate to
the world.” Like Duffell, Gerhardt, Smail,
Kovel, and Hillman, McGilchrist argues for
a “complete re-think of what our lives are
about”, one that includes transcending the current alienated and dysfunctional economic and
ontological model—what he calls the “morally bankrupt system of competitive capitalism”. “We will
never solve the major global problems we face”, he notes, “by tinkering with the current model” (The
Political Self ). As Nick Duffell (in Chapter Six) similarly remarks, this need for a complete shift in
perspective also applies to our educational and political structures. “British elitism supports an out-
dated leadership style that is unable to rise above its own interests, perceive the bigger picture and go
beyond a familiar, entrenched and unhealthy system of adversarial politics”:

The ‘Entitled Brain’ is “over-trained in

rationality, has turned away from
empathy and has mastered and
normalised dissociation in its most
severe dimensions”

Such a leadership style is not to be

recommended—it may well be
dangerous. It is manifestly unfit for
purpose, given the demands of the
current world in which, increasingly,
problems are communal—indeed
global—and in which solutions urgently demand non-polarised cooperation and clear focus on the
common good, in order to take effect on a worldwide scale.

As he notes, the problems of the twenty-first century are “communal— indeed global” in nature, and
therefore require “non-polarised cooperation and clear focus on the common good”—an outlook
completely at odds with the current, crude, seventeenth-century model of atomised individuals
competing against each other in glorious isolation. This concept of the self, he suggests, is one ultimately
rooted in egoic and dysfunctional left-brain modes of thinking—what he terms the “Entitled Brain”,
denoting one that is “over-trained in rationality, has turned away from empathy and has mastered and
normalised dissociation in its most severe dimensions; it is consequently incapable of recognising the
fault in its own system”. This form of “normalised dissociation”, he notes, characterises contemporary
political debate and discussion, a peculiarly manipulative and unempathic form of the “reality principle”,
and one that—like all such left-brain thought-systems—is ultimately unconscious and narcissistic.
McGilchrist makes the salient point that it is both the virtue and the limitation of the left brain that it
“doesn’t know what it doesn’t know”, which is why, as Duffell notes, it is “incapable of recognising the
fault in its own system”.

“Developing a new politics based on practical caring

and mentalizing is an urgent task”

It is surely time for us to take back our view of

ourselves as compassionate and connected human
beings, and to develop a new, integrated, and
dynamic world in which the values of empathy,
compassion, cooperation, and community are not seen as luxuries or incidental to human progress or
happiness, but as actually driving our psyches, our evolution. “Developing a new politics based on
practical caring and mentalizing”, notes Gerhardt, “is an urgent task”. And also a necessary task, if we
are to seriously engage with the sorts of brains, and lives, we want for our children—one which will
depend on reintegrating the economic and the psychological, the inner and the outer, in order to create
more robust, resilient, and caring communities and contexts for them to grow up in. This requires
thinking differently—as McGilchrist notes, it requires “a complete shift in perspective”—and it also
requires practical changes, so that our economic policies and decisions are based on empathy and
humanity, not on financial profit. Gerhardt writes:

At a time when we need to adjust our values and expectations away from a world economy based on
growth and the exploitation of fossil fuels towards a world based on greater empathy for others and care
for our natural resources, we will need to understand why we behave as we do and what drives us. I
would suggest that we need the more collective values of empathy, care and thoughtful collaboration, if
we are going to solve the problems that face us.

The need for this adjustment—this shift from exploitation to empathy, from content to context, from
narrowly left-brain practices and approaches to right-brain (whole brain) ones—is the challenge for us in
the twenty-first century.

QUESTIONS TO PONDER:

 Why is it easy for some people to convince others to believe them/follow them?
 Why is it easy for some people to get convinced?
 Would a person’s traits and values impact his political self?