Maggie's Farm

A Dr. B. re-post from our long-ago archives -

"Why do I do all these things for Jim, Dr Bliss, when for the past six months I can't stand his presence and I can't even stand the way he eats? Is it because I feel guilty, or have no self-esteem?"

Guilty? Self-esteem? It's of interest to me how the morality-free zone of psycho-babble in our popular culture can obscure the persistence of the old virtues, even among those who live them.

The language of duty, loyalty, honor, self-sacrifice, endurance, perseverance, reliability, courage, self-reliance - the things Bill Bennet wrote about - has been replaced by a language of "feeling" and "guilt" in some strange and ill-informed distortion of psychoanalytic understandings.

Indeed, "my feelings" appear to have replaced the virtues to the point that "not being true to your feelings" is like a modern-day sin. And yes, I guess it is a sin - if you regard yourself as a god.

But back to my patient. I know her well enough to know that she was raised with the sturdy Mid-Western Presbyterian virtues, internalized them, and lives them. Her kindness and thoughfulness with her husband are driven by character (in the old sense of the word) - not guilt, and surely not, at the moment anyway, by "loving feelings." For her, it would not be so much "guilt" in betraying her character - it would be "failure." And not life failure, but a failure to be who she was built to be.

The point I want to make is not about my patient's psychology, or how she ought to deal with her situation. That's another subject. It's about the pop-psych assumptions that are in the air that would cause a person who "does the right thing" despite her emotions of the moment is somehow afflicted by "guilt" or some other pathology (although guilt is not a pathology), rather than being a mature person whose habits of character are stronger than her emotions.

I sometimes joke that if we were all true to our feelings, we'd all be in jail.

A few take-home points:

• Distrust the elevation of "feeling" over character. It is immature. That is not to say that we should ignore our emotions - it's just that they are not sacred, they are seldom what they seem, and they can be very poor guides to life. Contrary to popular misunderstanding, psychoanalytic thinking does not make emotions sacred: they are just surface data points.
  
• Guilt is neither a pathology nor a sin. In my experience, guilt is usually well-earned. So-called "neurotic guilt" is a psychological issue for some, but those with plenty of it never know they have it, without therapy.
  
• "Character" - meaning virtuousness, not personality type - is culturally-defined, and transmitted mainly via family with, one would hope, the support of genetics and of the surrounding culture.
  
• The only definition of "failure" I have is failure of character. We should feel like a failure when we fail in the virtues that we have been raised on - assuming that they are a worthy set of virtues. When we fail, we should repent, seek forgiveness, beat ourselves up a bit, contemplate our shortcomings, learn, and move forward.
  
• Despite the prevalence of amoral, pop-psychological language,  decent people still live, or struggle to live, according to the time-honored virtues. If they do not - keep your distance and beware, because they are "coming from a different place" and are playing by a different rule-book.

New Years Eve. Time to party hearty? Been there, done that in youth. No more. There's no point to it.

We ask our readers to please drink responsibly. Each reader is precious to us, and we cannot afford to lose one to a traffic accident.

Speaking of alcohol abuse and alcoholism, here's an interesting report on The Three Types of Alcoholism. I am not sure whether it corresponds well to my clinical experience or not. Probably not. However, this does:

The authors note that this finding supports two pathways to alcoholism: one where drinking represents a tendency to behave impulsively and seek excitement, and a second where drinking is used to relieve negative mood states and reduce behavioral inhibition.

In other words, substance addiction often - but not always - has underpinnings of either neuroticism or sociopathy. In the end, every human - drunk or sober - is a unique individual with his own basket of issues.

Probably yes.

While I am quite pleased and content with my own (first) marriage, when I talk with unhappy people, which I do all day, I am often reminded that the nuclear family is a very recent invention, that the notion of romantic love is also recent, that arranged marriages and marriages of convenience or necessity were the norms of the past, and that humans are not "naturally" monogamous - whatever I might mean by "naturally".

When you put the nuclear family together with dreams of enduring romantic love, it's a set-up for disappointment. The nuclear family, unlike the extended family (or the tribe), is isolating and does not provide a broad base of support in life. Intense romantic love, unlike plain old-fashioned strong attraction and desire, is a regressed state of mind - some shrinks half-jokingly call it a form of insanity. Not that it isn't great fun, but it gives way to reality in time, although the best marriages can rekindle the old feeling from time to time.

One thing that is probably not talked about enough is how many marriages are not founded in "true love," but instead are founded on loneliness, desire for companionship, desire for babies, desire for security, fear of becoming an old maid, friendship, desire for a social foundation, etc. This is not a bad thing, but I sometimes wonder whether the contrived and ridiculously costly fairy-tale trappings of the typical American wedding is designed to obscure those facts. Young folks these days often talk about having "friends with benefits" while they await true love, without realizing that "friends with benefits" can be one description of one kind of satisfying marriage.

But to get back on track here, yes, I believe that we tend to wish that a marriage could meet all of our emotional and physical needs. Shrinks term that a regressive, ie childish, wish - not just because it is unrealistic, but also because if emphasizes the "meeting my needs"  aspect of a relationship rather than emphasizing "how can I try to give these people (wife, kids)  a good life".

It's a truism that people thrive when they have multiple sources for emotional care, and many outlets for love and caring. Friends, colleagues, neighbors, members of clubs or churches, etc, Making and keeping good friends is not really an easy thing to do, and I don't know anyone who doesn't want one, or doesn't want another one. In fact, I suspect that one reason moms want jobs these days is because they feel isolated with their kids.

Althouse noted a NYT op-ed piece by History Prof Stephanie Coontz about the limits of marriage. Althouse comments:

The problem, in Coontz's view, is not only that we deny ourselves the happiness to be found in friendships, but also that by expecting so much from one romantic relationship, we can put so much pressure on it that it breaks. What's worse, if the marriage was our source of happiness, we have nothing.

Quotes from the Coontz piece:

A study released this year showed just how dependent we’ve become on marriage. Three sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University found that from 1985 to 2004 Americans reported a marked decline in the number of people with whom they discussed meaningful matters. People reported fewer close relationships with co-workers, extended family members, neighbors and friends. The only close relationship where more people said they discussed important matters in 2004 than in 1985 was marriage.

In fact, the number of people who depended totally on a spouse for important conversations, with no other person to turn to, almost doubled, to 9.4 percent from 5 percent. Not surprisingly, the number of people saying they didn’t have anyone in whom they confided nearly tripled.

The solution to this isolation is not to ramp up our emotional dependence on marriage. Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion.

Read the whole thing here.

On Friday morning a patient told me that he liked to hire people who are in AA because he knows that they struggle with honesty, and take the subject seriously - and often know more first-hand about dishonesty than most.

So thanks to Assistant Village Idiot for noting a relevant piece by the always interesting Kling at TCS on the anthropological subject of "trust cues" in human relationships and especially in affiliative groups (tribes), That's Your Cue.

Are humans tribal? You bet they are. And it often makes good sense to be.

Trust cues are our ways of indicating that we are members of a group, or tribe, and that it is important for us to be a member in good standing. In a sense, my patient took AA "membership" as a trust cue, because he knows they talk about honesty all the time in AA.

My favorite example of a trust cue which is ceremonially acknowledged is the "made man" in the Mafia: the guys know they can fear and trust him because he has blood on his hands. A similar example might be admission to any exclusive club.

But trust cues aren't always rational or reliable. For example, I have a bias towards trusting the intentions of serious Christians but, as far as I know, serious Christians are as morally flawed as everyone else. I suppose I'd like to believe that we, like the AA "members," worry more about how we treat others.

Thus trust cues do not necessarily mean "trust" in a moral sense, but more "trust that we're on the same page;" that we view the world somewhat similarly, and/or that we share enough similar life experience to constitute some sort of group membership.

When I attend a psychoanalytic meeting, I know it's my "club:"  mere attendance indicates some fundamental interest in unconscious processes. When I go to my church, I know I'm with my "tribe:" we are all interested enough in Christ to show up. And, come to think about it - if you really want to see a trust cue festival, attend a Dartmouth alumni Christmastime cocktail party: you have never seen so much green conviviality since St. Patrick's Day in NYC.

What Kling does, in his discussion of Wade's book Before the Dawn, is to note the ways in which dogma (as opposed to truth) is used or abused to indicate group membership.

Wade says that the evolutionary value of trust cues is that they facilitate peaceful interactions among strangers. When I offer a trust cue, I am saying that even though we do not know one another, I am a member of a trustworthy group. I value my membership in that group, and I know that lying to or cheating another member of that group could cause me to be excommunicated from the group. Since you are also a member of the group, you can trust me not to lie to you or to cheat you.

However,

...political beliefs serve primarily as trust cues. For example, those who favor an increase in the minimum wage are sending trust cues to people on the Left, and those who oppose an increase in the minimum wage are sending trust cues to people on the Right.

The actual consequences of raising the minimum wage are rarely discussed. In other words, political debates often ignore what I call Type C arguments (from empiricism) and turn instead to type M arguments, which accuse one's opponent of belonging to an outcast group. The reason for this is that people are not trying to persuade each other rationally. Instead, they are using trust cues to indicate that failure to agree implies excommunication from the group.

It has been my view that the current fad of getting upset about global warming is a trust cue, and little more. What it actually proclaims is "I am virtuous and I care a lot, and I don't mind more government control over things." The science, and the real empirical debate, lies outside the cue structure. Assertion of tribal membership is what such political postures are all about.

Read Kling's piece here, and Asst. Village Idiot's comments here. Interesting stuff.

I discover, sometimes, that things about others which I detest are qualities of my own which I detest, reject, and attempt to disown by pinning them on others.

Although I am not a Borderline Personality, there is an element of projective identification in this. Whether in fantasy or in reality, we can mentally construct another person so as to contain, embody (or, if the person is in our personal lives, to even get them to enact) our own rejected demons. Then we can detest them or look down on them while preserving an illusionary and undeserved self-esteem.

I have learned to reflect on the qualities I seem to be most irritated by or contemptuous of in others and to do a little reality check to see whether it's more about my stuff than about theirs.

Do you find yourself doing this sometimes, as I do?