Is the average person in the dark about how they feel, and unable to make a decision? I would not have thought so, but when I went to Reeducation, this was the expectation. They would ask me how I felt and I would answer. Their next move would be to indicate disbelief. A problem had been resolved, and I was pleased? I could not possibly be! Reeducands are never pleased at success! I must be bluffing!
Then they would ask me what I had done or was going to do. I would answer, and they would express surprise: “You believe you are able, or you have already managed to do all of that? And without calling me?” I am talking about normal, even if not everyday decisions for adults – buying cars, repairing houses, moving, having children.
I went to Reeducation because I had a Psychological Problem, but not because I was impaired or incompetent. Most people I know are similarly competent. But the assumptions of Reeducation were that we did not know what we felt or what to do. If we thought we did, we were “in denial” and acting against our own best interests.
Since we were assumed to have an erroneous understanding of our feelings, the proper and primary role of the Reeducator was to deny the feelings we expressed. “If you say that is how you feel, then what you actually feel must be something else. I you knew what you felt, you would not be here.” (Indeed – and this is the ironic aspect of the entire debacle – if I had admitted how spurious this argument was, I would not have been there.) The secondary role of the Reeducator was to walk us through daily life as one would an impaired person.
I am in fact often bewildered or clueless, but normally my mind is clear. In Reeducation, it was when we felt the clearest that we were supposed to be the most deluded. We were to mistrust clarity and seek muddledness, so that we could experience what Reeducation called more appropriate (higher) levels of difficulty in making decisions.
Reeducation’s other key presupposition about human nature was that people resist and change – any change. Reeducation, of course, wanted you to change, but expected this to be hard for you. If not, it was then assumed that a more difficult change was necessary, since only what is difficult, and what you resist, was real.
I of course had a terrible problem with this since I like change and movement, and the acquisition of new systems. To become yet more open to change meant to become dangerously uncritical. “Change is good” says the slogan, but not every change is, and it was because I had been told I should be (yet) more “open,” for instance, that I gave Reeducation the benefit of the doubt.
In any case: I had always thought that change happened daily, and that people evolved, until I met Reeducation and was informed that this was not the case. Was I terribly misguided? Is it really true that the average person chooses suffering over the chance to stop? Is the average person in the dark about how they feel, and unable to make a decision?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I don’t know about the average person, but then I’m not assuming that these folks in Reeducation were accurately representing the average person anyway. I do know that there are people (and I have been one of them at some times) who will cling to things, people, or behaviors that make them suffer because the fear of change (because it seems to be like losing an identity) is even more terrifying than the suffering itself. Self-examination, in various modes, can be a tool for separating your sense of self from those learned behaviors or feelings that were functional in the past (in a dysfunctional family situation) but which are now impediments or problems in and of themselves (the “coping strategies gone awry” idea). One of my coping strategies for having to move every few years as a child was to not attempt to maintain contact with the people I left behind, to avoid the pain of making and losing friends over and over. Later in my life, this behavior became an impediment to me socially and professionally, and a source of pain in itself.
The dynamic I’ve seen you describing in these entries is not one in which folks were genuinely supporting your process of self-examination, but rather attempting to bully you into a paradigm that was not useful or helpful to you and therefore distorted your process. At least, that’s how it seems from my reading here.
Attempting to bully into a paradigm, yes. Which they claimed was universal, if one only found the right level at which to read the allegory. But what they were expecting, and recommending, they called normalcy and sometimes, even “truthfulness” or “health.” People who did not have *all* of the neuroses they wanted, must be even “sicker.” They could not actually be “healthier” even if this was in fact the case.
The problem was that the allegory itself wasn’t deep enough – virtually any *serious* methodology, rather than this pop-psych/self-help thingamajig, would have been “rereadable.” It was at the moment I realized all I was listening to was pop-psych stuff, not an unfamiliar paradigm I had not yet learned how to “read,” that I quit.
I still say that this was not about how these people were but about what the 12 steps are, and what the marketing strategies are for “therapy,” psychotropic drugs, etc., etc. What the Reeducators were expecting and recommending, they called normalcy (as in, the “normal” “illness” to have). This would then morph into “truthfulness,” and then finally “health.”
***
I think this issue about change may be the main difference between me and Reeducation. I could never imagine choosing suffering over an alternative, so long as I can see one. And if I can’t, the search for it will distract me from everything else until I find it. I don’t like to suffer.
It seems though that some people get mileage out of suffering, or feel they are getting extra credit points for it, or something like this. I did not know that until I started trying to decipher Reeducation.
Could fear of change be in part a question of temperament? I like change, some people don’t, couldn’t it just be that simple? I do realize there are some people who fear change out of general insecurity and fear of life – but I am not one such.
What I found so odd about Reeducation was that one was d-d if one did, d-d if one didn’t. It wanted to educate you out of the fear of change it assumed you would have. But, because I did not have this fear, Reeducation decided
I must be a trauma victim: I was “inappropriately fearless.” They kept asking, “But what if … ?” and I would say, “That’s unlikely to happen; I will deal with it if it does; I am not worried about it now.” This scandalized them. I still do not see what the point of fearfulness would be. I am conservative in some ways and I do not actually take many risks.
And, ironically enough, I took more *actual* risks on the advice of Reeducation than I had ever before. These were quite ill advised, too, as I said at the time, and they had poor results, as I knew they would, and that was no “self-fulfilling prophecy,” it was just good judgment.
P.S. Maybe I should reproduce what I said at Tom’s about something completely different and say that it was over this attitude that I and the Reeducators – white, male, middle class, ex-rural, Southern, and gay, all three of them – were arguing about. They thought the world was awful and I kept trying to tell them it did not have to be. These were the ideas I had, which they found so pathological and strange, and which I was trying to defend:
“Outside the programming – an exciting new universe, I always imagined! … I must be really lucky – born in time to remember the late 60’s really clearly, maybe that’s it. The idea that something totally new was happening and one did not know what it would be like seemed exciting instead of scary. A new day always meant yet another chance to move another inch toward freedom, or at least so it seemed to me – and it went along with getting taller and gaining vocabulary, of course, which was naturally fun, and you never did know exactly what would happen next, but horizons were always larger the next day if you had looked around their edges the day before. (I am starting to realize how unusual it is, and lucky, to have felt like this, still be able to feel like this.)”
I think I was more relaxed and optimistic than people they were used to meeting, or than their friends, and that this was a central problem in the whole experience.
Also, when I started Reeducation and heard peoples’ incredibly negative world views, my first thought was: Oh, no! The dark view of the universe I was taught in that alcoholic household, and did not want to believe was true, turns out to be the “healthy” view of the world!
My next thought was, Oh, no! The pre-feminist conditioning from which I was released from when feminism came in in high school, is actually the “realistic” and “adult” way to think of life!
Oh, no! I thought when I realized these were the two things Reeducation was teaching. I really have deluded myself for almost 20 years!
I was incredulous but gullible since these were familiar ideas; my parents in their own darker moments had told me the world really was that bad in exactly those ways.
It was depressing to have to accept those beliefs in the name of “health.” But that was an absolute error, as I saw at last – to be walked away from.
Hmmm. I think I understand it not as fear of change in and of itself, but fear of that particular change that would mean letting go of something in particular that has had a function and around which other parts of oneself are entwined. In my case, self-sufficiency was a good thing, but cutting myself off from people every time I moved or made a life change started to feel bad, but acting any other way felt unsafe. It wasn’t the behavior as such that was the issue, but the way I continually felt guilty and ashamed over it.
That sounds complicated, although I think I get what you are talking about. If my neighbor’s health improves, she will lose her identity as an invalid, which is important to her for other reasons, so the possible improvement in her health feels paradoxically scary to her. If you give up anorexia, you have to give up the skinny image and if you have a lot of self-esteem bound up in that, it is hard to choose physical health, etc.
And yes, Reeducation wanted me to have a whole lot of specific fears of specific changes, just like that. I had gone there for support of one specific, somewhat difficult change I wanted to make, but Reeducation seemed to want me to be more scared than I was, and scared of everyday types of changes, which I wasn’t.
It also wanted some concrete changes for me that I did not want, namely, to tone down my career and become more marriage oriented. My being in a learned profession was in and of itself pathological. A hobby-job would be nice, or a supporting job, but I should want to cash in *my* job for marriage to someone in a profession. Not wanting to do that was “fear of change.” Not being obedient enough was “fear of change.” Fear of change was also some sort of general, metaphysical fear one was supposed to have, as least as far as I could tell. It was supposed to be very scary to move, or to go somewhere new for a seminar, or to do virtually anything.
Reeducation’s main point, made repeatedly although never this baldly, was: If. you. have. an. alcoholic. parent. then. you. have. no. right. to. a. Ph.D. or. a. job. as. a. professor. You. should. have. an. M.A. and. be. teaching. high. school. Having. done. more. is. overachieving. It. is. proof. that. you. are. even. more. messed. up. than. most. “Fear of change” in this context meant unwillingness to follow that model or believe these assertions.
Your writing has a strong association for me with this article;
MACK, MICHAEL, ‘Freud’s Other Enlightenment: Turning the Tables on Kant’, New german Critique, , 85/Special Issue on Intellectuals (2002), 3-31.
It’s quite interesting, because the kind of personality Reeducation seems to cater to is someone who is extremely afflicted by a strong version of ‘The Oedipus complex’ — in other words, a certain rigidity and blindness to the value that things represent in themselves. Instead of responding to things with a sense of emotional attachment, those afflicted with The Oedipus complex respond to the world around them only in terms of a categorical imperative: “What I should do.” Everything is black and white for them and they have to be taught to see and feel the actual phenomena around them as grey on grey, and to accept the irregular nature of reality and the validity of moral relativism in order to become healthier.
But those who are stuck in this way are not you or I.
If you want the article, seek it at an academic data-base, or ask me for more details by email.
Thanks Jennifer – very interesting – and I think I may actually have that issue of New German Critique and not read it!!! If not I’ll get it, it’s around. That *does* sound like the person Reeducation was for.
Like, the successful man who is working in what his family expected although he is not interested in that, is married because this is expected although he is gay, etc., etc. I see. Unlike me who really did choose. I get it.
***
Back to these big diagnoses like “fear of change” … the other reason I am wary of them is (did I say this already?) I think they tend to overcomplicate. For instance: tomorrow I do not want to work on my article, or go to my gym, because my article is boring and so is my gym. Now, I could try to say I fear change and success – success at finishing, success at regaining my rippling stomach.
But that makes everything scary! It is a lot easier just to say I do not look forward to a slightly boring day but that I would like to have the results I can reap from this day, so I am not going to find something more interesting to do, and I am going to go ahead with the program. Now that may be “denial” of the “fear of success and change” I might have. But if I get the article finished and the rippling stomach, it doesn’t matter, now, does it?!
Reeducation tended to over-analyze, and to be very convoluted. It kept saying, if you think you do not fit our formula, you are being arrogant. At the same time, it mistrusted simpler and more direct formulae.
Also, Reeducation was convinced I had been forced into my profession and was like the Oedipus complex person as per the Michael Mack article. The Reeducators were not at all willing to countenance the possibility that I might really have chosen it, with at least some degree of freedom.
The choice may not have been entirely free, but it was more free than not, and I cannot say I would not have made the same choice had I been entirely free to choose. And I would rather connect with the positive reasons I made the choice, and work from those, than define myself in terms of the ways in which I felt a bit coerced. Thinking this way does me more good, it frees me, it lets me look ahead to what I really want now, it permits me to get more done, and it is not “dishonest” either. In fact, I am sure it is more honest than the woe-is-me, negative version of things Reeducation seemed to see.
(Side notes: 1. In Reeducation you had to second guess yourself, it was very exhausting. 2. I also suspect “fear of change” is another of these big, vague, nebulous, catch-all terms I did not like in Reeducation. It is so broad that almost everything will fit into it or can be translated into it. And yet, the translation takes work, and the nebulousness of the category requires more translation, and all that convolution is hard to carry around. Or at least, so it seems to me.
Hi Prof. Z.
There are various ideological systems that tend to cater for particular types of people, I have discovered. If you’re not that type of person, then others are quite incredulous (because they ARE that type, and cannot imagine anyone not being like they are.)
One of the recurrent experiences I have had, in this regard, is with many of those people who proclaim themselves to be “postmodernists”. Now, I am very, very slowly coming to some tentative conclusions about Derrida, Foucault and co. I have a certain shadowy notion of what these particular intellectuals were trying to do with their philosophies, and there does seem to be some relative merit in the intellectual approaches. So, I have no special quibble with them, except to say that I’m not particularly attracted to their paradigms as such. Yet, their followers, their followers… I can’t quite believe what I am experiencing, nor can I understand why there is such a level of consistency in my experience of the “postmodernist” undergraduate, graduate and professorial set. Yet, all of them seem to be stuck in what Mack terms “The Oedipus complex”.
For instance, I gave a paper recently, and one of my peers, in question time, told me with very little sense of doubt, that “we” had all moved beyond a stage of culture wherein “transgression” was possible. (My paper was using Bataille to interpret Marechera.) Well, not only did I disagree with his assertion, on a personal and experiential basis, but I found his “we” quite disingenuous. However, it is sort of explicable as the level of psychology that Mack calls the Oedipus complex. I mean, the Oedipus complex exchanges an experiential basis for knowledge with an abstract imperative dictating moral behaviour, in terms of my understanding of Mack. So, for those trapped in this psychological place, the road to knowledge via personal experience is blocked. But it is not ‘culture’ that has moved us beyond a point where transgression would be possible (even though much ‘naughtiness’ has been co-opted as advertising for big corporations, it is still possible to risk oneself today, as much as it was possible at any other time in history.) Rather, it is a vicious bite of conscience at the individual level, which makes transgression presently seem out of reach — in fact, prevented at a subconscious level before one is even able to entertain it as a real possibility. Also telling is the assumption of a universal “we” that is not considered be able to transgress. For what is “we” but a universalised abstraction of reality that is reinforced by a perspective that demands a “categorical imperative” for all alike — in other words, demands that each and every other be as much a victim of the Oedipus complex as I am, and is unable to see that others — many others — simply don’t experience things in that same abstracted way?
Interesting, Jennifer C. Is it transgression if, say, the U.S. gets upset and puts an embargo on the relevant country? I would say so. And for your peer, your paper was transgressive, although he is trying to control that by suggesting you are misled, it seems.
It always seemed to me that these pomo types, like Foucault and Derrida, came from a more seamlessly modernized, more uniform place where knowledge was considered more of one thing, than I do or many other people do. France and the French education system, the Academie Francaise, and all, seem to be what they are reacting to. Or, at least this was what I decided when I decided I was tired of putting so much energy into figuring them, and especially Derrida out.
That universal “we” – does anyone but a white guy use this presumptuous pronoun to designate himself?
Oedipus complex – those people would be interested in usurping the power of the father, I guess, taking his authority for themselves but not changing the system? It seems to me that the people involved in my Reeducation were *very* concerned with getting and holding power, and with keeping things as they were as much as possible … allowing change, after all, could mean losing power, even if the power you were losing was destroying you.
I think yes – coming from a different paradigm, that was me – although they of course claimed their paradigm was universal, and although I gave that the benefit of the doubt. There was a comment on one of the earlier posts on or related this, about different worlds – people inhabit different (moral) universes. Reeducation did not allow for this and that was one of the main problems. Nobody could be different, lest they start considering themselves superior.
Since I started getting comments on this post I have been wracking my brain: was there some positive change they wanted me to make that I resisted out of fear? I really do not think so. Mostly I think they were just speculating randomly about an abstract “fear of change.”
I don’t know – it always seemed to me that the postmodernists thought too much and in too convoluted a way. The Al-Anon/psychotherapy people, too. To me both sets seemed convoluted *and* superficial at the same time. They thought their convolution was deep and I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, but all I could come up with in the end was that it was a baroque mask to cover emptiness.
And I have just remembered that when I work my brain this hard about Reeducation, I am trying to negotiate with it once again, trying to find a way to excuse it, figure out what *I* misunderstood. This is an error – it just brings me into the circle of Reeducation again.
P.S. and summing up again: I think this insight on the different ideologies is key.
I notice that even though I have finally seen I should simply renounce all of Reeducation, it is still easy for me to fall into negotiation with it – the idea that there may have been something I didn’t see.
And it isn’t that I think I am perfect – I only think I do not have the worldview Reeducation expected, or the problems and desires it expected. And it claimed its worldview was universal, and that not to see that was to be arrogant. And so I went down the rabbit hole. But really, it was just for a different set of people / different mindset, even if I did share *certain* problems and a *certain* kind of history with these people.
Also key, of course, were the gross misreadings, e.g., if I was a high achiever, it could not be that I was interested in what I was doing, it *must* be an empty gesture undertaken to satisfy someone else.
And hmmm…I really do notice, now that I have mostly dumped thinking about Reeducation except in the blog, how destabilizing it was, how hard it is to stay on my feet and negotiate with it. Once I quit, I was informed that I was now dissociating when it got too close to me. This was true. I was also dissociating at / about work, because Reeducation had turned work into a danger zone. A friend, not a professional, thought I had PTSD symptoms.
Thinking about this now I have flashbacks of the pouting Reeducators, looking disappointed, speaking in baby talk, and using the collective “we” – “Are we not wanting to take our medicine? Are we resisting change? Are we feeling fearful of new things today?” I’d go, HUNH, who do you think you’re talking to? but my skin would really crawl, and I’d throw up after listening to those voices for 50 minutes. “Are we resisting change?” still seems to be some sort of trigger.
Perhaps I need another break. I figured out I should dump all vestiges of Reeducation completely on July 24. Perhaps I should ignore it completely for 6 months, until January 24, by which time I may have had enough time to assimilate the whole thing. And/but there are posts coming up – and/but I have already decided I am not going to write any more of them … *maybe* in response to comments, if any, but it might be a good exercise to refrain from that too!!!
Prof. Remove the traces of doubt planted by those reeducation types. Read about the ascetic priest in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. Those people are of a certain type, and are inclined to do harm, whilst meaning no harm at a purely conscious level.
The whole “universalist” thing they espouse is a harkening back to the categorical imperative (Oedipus complex). They are trapped — and want to trap you too! Yes, it is like the postmodernist’s convolusions of thought — a futile half attempt to break free of the steel jaw trap of the Oedipus complex, whilst not actually wanting to break free, and whilst desiring to fail. The only people who can really relate to this game and find it profound are the ones caught in the same mindset that reproduces the same dilemma. I cannot relate to it because I don’t desire to fail in my attempts at gaining sovereignty. Really, you have to desire failure (you have to desire to become the character of the father) in order to understand those others who really just want to return to conventionalism, despite their claims to want to break free.
The bourgeois universalism is one of their calling cards, too. Everything is understood by them in terms of ego. The unflinching eye of empirical observation tells us that we are all born with differences: We have different genes, different motivations, different ways of thinking, different experiences, different historical circumstances, and so on. But to point out differences (I have found this even with the postmodernists, who claim to be excited by “differance”) is anathema, because it implies to those of this mode of thinking either a claim to superiority or inferiority. But it need be neither — and in the material sense of difference, it is, in fact, neither.
You’re smart, Jennifer C.! And you’re the second person who has said to read about the ascetic priest. I must do it. The rest of this last essay is way smart, too. Excellent on universalism, etc. I think your book is going to be good …
ta, Prof Z.
OMG Jennifer – I’m reading about the ascetic priest – it is beyond apt. This is why the various elements in this Reeducation are so perfect as an Althusserian ISA, etc., etc., as I have been saying. C’est unbelievably precise.
Yeah, I had a quick reread of that section in Genealogy of Morals today, and it is very clear to me what Nietzsche is saying. (I remember struggling to understand the book, reading and rereading it, about 15 years ago. So entrenched was I in bourgeois ideology at the time, that I couldn’t quite understand it then, even though I caught glimpses of outright good sense in the text.)
It is interesting that you are reading this text in terms of Althusserian theory. I do believe that the proletariat (even, surprising the professional level of it, like yourself) are given short thrift by the psychological (and probably psychiatric) profession/s. We are supposed to allow ourselves to become whittled down into interchangeable units, based upon some rough physical characteristics. That is, we are supposed to willingly get rid of our own heterogeneous aspects (those that relate to historical and personal contingencies), and embrace homogeneity (universalism and its rough and categorical distinctions of identity). If we do not do so, then vis-a-vis the productive apparatus of the state, we are considered ‘pathological’.
Still, I would have thought that there would be more leniency towards those of the professoriat, to allow them to express a certain amount of limited or contained heterogeneity. I guess I was wrong about that, or else you just had the bad fortune to encounter some of the cruder policeman of the bourgeois social order.
Yes, this (your 2d paragraph) is exactly what I think the mass psych industry is up to. And Nietzche is smart, smart – and not actually as power-driven and authoritarian as is popularly claimed (doesn’t necessarily have those implications), from what I can tell.
I think I encountered a cruder policeman of the bourgeois social order. Much later I consulted a more subtle one, with a Ph.D. and more experience, to get a read on the whole thing. He was a lot more accepting of heterogeneity, and also more willing to believe that people of adult age could actually be adults.
It can be good to find someone to talk to who is not so crude in their systematisations, as you did find, in your second instance. This can at least give human contact and assure one that one is not crazy. Nonetheless, it pays to keep in mind that as a general rule a member of the proletariat will not be allowed to grow up to adulthood, and must struggle, against various systemic pressures to do so. That is, the system of production (excuse my apparent anthropomorphising of it — it’s just my communicative shorthand…) requires, for its perpetuation, that people do not think critically, do not conduct themselves masterfully, and in total, do not mentally and emotionally ‘grow up’. So, those of us who do attain maturity are really doing so through struggling upstream, like salmon.
The mass psych industry is really there to teach people to be more functional as children. Which is also why psychoanalysis could be subversive, if / when it actually taught autonomy. Struggling upstream, good point.
Flash: I just realized what the answer may be to my age-old question, how academia could expect original research and also perfect conformity. Answer: because it wants narrow specialists. You go brilliant and original in one very small area, not a broad spectrum as an intellectual would do. This makes it possible to remain a child otherwise. Hm.
My supervisor is constantly surprised that I use processes of intuition to understand academic things. For instance, I try to put myself into somebody else’s shoes to see what it must have been like for them. I make intuitive leaps based on the contingencies of personal experiences — who I’m interacting with, as so on. By contrast, a narrow specialist would study a subject and formulate a thesis without necessarily putting themselves subjectively in the picture. This means that they are more likely to know something intellectually, rationally, but yet not know what their knowledge actually implies in terms of the concrete realities (including the political structures) that surround us. So, it’s a kind of knowing whilst not knowing that distinguishes the academic from the broader ranging intellectual.
This, then, might explain why so many academics blink at me, and either ask “how did you figure that out?” (admiringly) or say “how dare you think that?” (disapprovingly).
Yeah, that is probably true. In any case, it surprises me that other thinkers do not put themselves more into the picture in relation to what they presume to be analysing. When they do, the difference is obvious, and when they don’t this is also apparent.