Daniel Burston on Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Post-Modern University
Several years ago I came across Daniel Burston at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. His biography of Karl Stern (A Forgotten Freudian) was fascinating, and since then I've profited greatly from several of Burston's books, including his study of R.D. Laing, and his work on Erich Fromm, about whom I have myself recently written a chapter for an international project based at Cambridge University in England.
Burston has a new book out, Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Postmodern University (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and having read it with great interest, it was my delight to be able to interview him about it by e-mail.
AD: Tell us about your background
DB: I was born in Naharia, Israel in 1954, and raised and educated in Toronto, Canada. As a child, I attended Bialik Hebrew Day School, and as a teenager, went to Forest Hill High School. I dropped out of High School after 10th grade, and enrolled in a “free school” modeled loosely on A. S. Neill’s experimental school Summerhill, where I focused on English, history and philosophy. After one year, I left that anarchic environment and my parental home, making a meager living on the fringes of Toronto’s waning counterculture, offering Yoga and guitar lessons to raw beginners, working odd jobs in vegetarian restaurants, bakeries, gardening and landscaping companies, picking up new skills and new friends, including some gifted and creative people who introduced me to spiritual, political and psychotherapeutic ideas, practices, and groups of various kinds. My immersion in the counterculture lasted three years, during which time I studied psychology, philosophy, and political theory; sometimes on my own, but often in dialogue with friends who, like me, were intellectually curious but not keen on acquiring a university education.
However, at 21, I finally decided not to remain an auto-didact. I needed a more formal education. So after completing an undergraduate degree in political science at York University, I completed two Ph.D.s there; one in Social and Political Thought (1985) and another in Psychology (1989). My second doctoral thesis became the basis for my first book, The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991). Shortly after the book appeared, I landed a job in the psychology department at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and have taught there ever since.
AD: What led to the writing of Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Post-Modern University?
If I am honest, irritation and dismay--among other things, I guess. When I started my undergraduate career, the university was often described to me by my teachers as “a community of scholars” (Paul Goodman); a community in which the social sciences and humanities held a pivotal, if not a privileged place. Getting a proper education was valued as an end in itself, and not primarily as a means to other ends, i.e. launching a career, making money, etc. Yes, the old “Ivory Tower” was insular and elitist, and therefore in need of urgent reform, as Paul Goodman noted.
But the neo-liberal version of the university, which is dominated by the STEM disciplines and corporate agendas of various kinds, is worse. The professoriate has been transformed, by and large, from a cadre of respected professionals into an army of service workers whose job is to stuff and stock students’ minds with a pre-packaged bundle of information and skills, enabling them to succeed--or at any rate, survive--on the job market. As a result, we have been debased to the status of service workers who increasingly fear the wrath or disapproval of their touchy customers, rather than the other way around, which was how things stood when I started university.
Meanwhile, as the professoriate has been proletarianized, the Liberal Arts have declined steadily in power and prestige, and faculty have been profoundly disempowered by the rise of the administrative (managerial) caste. The ideal of shared governance, once highly prized, is often no more than a pretense.
So, at the end of the day, I have devoted my entire career to scholarship and to post-secondary education, and in the process, born witness to the emergence of many worrisome trends in contemporary university life. After reflecting on them, and how best to address them, for two decades or more, it finally dawned on me that a close look at certain trends in the history of psychoanalysis and critical theory might help illumine the state of contemporary university and intellectual life in useful and unexpected ways. Erich Fromm’s theory of authority – which has seldom received the attention it deserves – was particularly useful in this regard.
AD: I was glad to see your acknowledgement at the opening of your book of the work of the late Paul Roazen, whom I stumbled upon in 2018 and read with great profit. Tell us a bit about your own relationship to him, and why his work is important.
DB: When I was approaching 20 years of age, I stumbled across Paul Roazen's book Brother Animal. During the previous two years, I had struggled with a series of books by and about Freud, C.G.Jung, the Glover brothers, Erich Fromm and Erik Erikson, and the impressions I had gleaned of Freud’s personality from these disparate sources did not create a clear or consistent impression. Freud was doubtless one of the major thinkers of the 20th century. But Freud the man was a mystery to me, rendered all the more elusive by the dense controversies that swirled around him.
So when I read Roazen’s gloss on the correspondence between Lou Salome and Sigmund Freud with respect to Tausk’s abortive analysis and subsequent suicide, I was completely “blown away”, as they say. Thirteen years later, while researching my 1991 book The Legacy of Erich Fromm, I discovered that Erich Fromm also greeted Roazen’s revelations with considerable shock, but in due course, praised Paul’s clarity and courage--unlike Kurt Eissler, whose odd, abrasive, and unpersuasive rebuttal, Victor Tausk’s Suicide set out to discredit Roazen entirely. Indeed, I soon discovered, Fromm recommended Brother Animal to all his students in Mexico and the United States, most of whom read the book with considerable appreciation.
Having read Brother Animal, I acquired a copy of Freud and his Followers, which was thoroughly engrossing. And since Paul Roazen taught at York University in my own home town, I resolved to study with him. I spent my first year as an undergrad getting core requirements out of the way, but much of my second and third year centered around my course work with him. I was dazzled and occasionally confused by his richly stimulating (but poorly organized) lectures on Freud and his followers, which were leavened with lengthy reflections on Norman O. Brown and Phillip Rieff; philosophers Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Isaiah Berlin; eccentrics and free spirits like Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Thoreau, and T.E.Lawrence; poets like Rilke and Frost; and European and American political commentators like de Tocqueville, William Bullitt, Harold Lasswell, Walter Lippmann, and Herbert Marcuse, among others. It was quite an education! When I started on my MA, I was fortunate enough to continue on as Paul’s teaching assistant for two years, during which time I got to know him and his work even better.
Paul’s work has been largely forgotten in the aftermath of the Freud wars, but his pioneering work exposed many of the problems and oversights of mainstream psychoanalytic historiography right into the 1990s. Like Erich Fromm, he believed that the history of psychoanalysis provided by orthodox Freudians was riddled with distortions and omissions of truly Stalinist proportions. But while he freely acknowledged Freud’s authoritarianism and personal blindspots, he never wavered in his admiration for Freud’s courage and originality as a thinker.
AD: Having gone back to him in my own work just this year, I was even gladder to see Erich Fromm getting renewed attention 40 years after his death in your first and fifth chapters. Tell us a bit about your own work on him both here and in your earlier biography of him.
DB: As it happens, I stumbled on Fromm’s work a few years before I read Roazen’s works. Indeed, I was drawn to Roazen in part because he confirmed many things that Fromm had said earlier about the biases inherent in orthodox Freudian historiography.
I think the first book I read of Fromm’s was The Sane Society, which was published in 1955, in the early years of the Eisenhower era, but which I only read in 1969 or so. What struck me then-- and strikes me still--was Fromm’s contention that an entire society can be mad, and that “adjustment” to a deeply disordered society--one largely unaware of or indifferent to its own perversity--constitutes a “pathology of normalcy.” Of course, in this context, the term “normalcy” denotes something more akin to a chronic, low-grade deficiency disease than it does to genuine health. Normalcy, or normality in this sense reduces internal suffering and ongoing tension or friction with one’s environment to a tolerable minimum, but only at the expense of one’s development as an honest, intact and responsive human being.
As an alternative to this kind of socially patterned defect, Fromm advocated what Martin Luther King Jr. later called “creative maladjustment.” Another thing that attracted me to Fromm’s work was the fact that he cared deeply about spiritual values, and despite his radicalism, demonstrated a deep familiarity with and respect for various (Eastern and Western) religious and contemplative traditions.
As I studied Fromm’s work more closely, it started to dawn on me that he had been unjustly dismissed by many fashionable intellectuals in the late 60s, 70s and 80s as a lightweight, a popularizer or as little more than a self-help guru. Moreover, the secondary literature on Fromm – in psychology textbooks and histories of psychoanalysis – is riddled with errors, oversimplifications, and omissions. That being so, I felt it was time to rehabilitate him, and to situate his work in the history of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School.
AD: In your fifth chapter Fromm appears again along with Reich, Adorno and others on authoritarian personalities, one of whose hallmarks is that they “may become attached or become passionately attracted to others. But they cannot genuinely love other human beings” (p.97). The study of authoritarianism began, as you note, in Europe in the interwar period, but has acquired more recent relevance in the US, Israel, and elsewhere in the last few years. Tell us about the forms of authoritarianism you analyze today—both of the left-wing and right-wing types.
DB: The literature on “the authoritarian personality” is now so vast that I find it difficult to summarize my own thoughts and conclusions succinctly. Suffice it to say that, as a rule, the main difference between Right- and Left-Wing authoritarians resides in the ideologies they embrace or espouse, not in their modus operandi once they are installed in power. In their efforts to win the hearts and minds of the populace, Right-wing authoritarians typically extol law and order, and promise a return to the status quo ante, or the “good old days,” which are heavily idealized, and exist only in the collective imaginary. Their propaganda taps into people’s fear of change and nostalgia for the past, and they preach the pursuit of racial or religious “purity.”
By contrast, Left-wing authoritarians promise their followers liberation and equality, the removal of the status quo and its replacement with a new egalitarian social order, only to renege on those promises later on. Their propaganda doesn’t dwell on the past, or indulge in nostalgia. Instead, they typically tap into people’s anger about current conditions and their hopes for a brighter future. And in theory, at least, they tend to eschew religious or racial purity in favor of ideological purity or “political correctness”, although many Left-wing authoritarians in the West have an affinity – or at the very least, a high degree of tolerance for – Islamic fundamentalism, even though they mistrust and revile Christian fundamentalists.
What authoritarians of the left and right both share in common, despite their different ideologies and rhetorical styles, is an attraction towards authoritarian strongmen who place themselves above (or outside) the law and show contempt for weakness, a strong attraction to violence as a means to solve (real or imaginary) social problems, and an eagerness to resort to secrecy, lies and deception to achieve their political ends, which have to do, above all, with seizing and holding onto power. They also have a pronounced tendency to dichotomous, “black and white” thinking, an intolerance of ambiguity and complexity, and to projection, i.e. to seeing authoritarian tendencies on the other side of the political spectrum, but minimizing or disavowing the same tendencies on their own side. All of these traits are in keeping with what Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm first described as the “sadomasochistic” or “authoritarian” character.
AD: Your chapter on Jordan Peterson (whose book I reviewed here) opens by discussing some aspects of the decline of the liberal arts in the university today, noting where Peterson is not entirely incorrect in blaming “post-modernism”, but that such a critique overlooks “cultural and market forces” and “the rather obvious fact that at the end of the day, most people care very little about the pursuit of truth” (136). You sift the contents of Peterson’s claims, and their reactions, and the debates they engendered, with great care before concluding that “Peterson [is] an enabler for Trump’s authoritarian agenda” (p.154). Tell us a bit more what you mean by that.
JB: Look, Jordan Peterson is a complicated man. I vividly remember an online interview he did with a crusty, conservative columnist in Canada named Rex Murphy several years ago. In this interview, Peterson was remarkably honest and vulnerable, the exact opposite of the aloof, steely, hyper-masculine presence he usually adopts in public fora. I remember thinking then that despite our political differences and all the bad press he’s received to date, this guy really means well, that he wants to make the world a better place. In that moment, I wanted to extend him the benefit of the doubt, even though I disagree profoundly with his one-sided analysis of our social ills and with the solutions that he proposes to the current crisis in the Liberal Arts. It struck me then that his basic intentions are good, nonetheless.
Unfortunately, however, Peterson seldom extends the benefit of the doubt to his liberal and left wing critics, whom he swiftly converts from potential partners in dialogue into implacable and unreasoning adversaries because of his penchant for polarizing people. You either love Peterson, or you hate him, as a rule. There is no middle ground. Those like myself, who are prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, but dare to criticize his manner or ideas, are swiftly dismissed by his ardent supporters and his ferocious detractors.
That said, as a somewhat reluctant Canadian ex-pat, and as a (Jewish) resident of Pittsburgh for many years now, I was profoundly disappointed by Peterson’s public remarks about Trump after the Tree of Life massacre on Oct 27, 2017. Don’t get me wrong. Peterson is not an anti-Semite.
However, his efforts to normalize the Trump Presidency, and to depict Trump as someone who is merely disagreeable and bombastic, rather than an authoritarian menace to democracy, seemed extremely blinkered, if not disingenuous, especially in light of all that has transpired since. Now that principled conservatives are slowly finding their backbones, and many are coming out publicly in favor of Joe Biden for president in November, 2020, one wonders why Peterson did not raise the alarm earlier, or say something strongly supportive of their efforts now. In dire situations, like the crisis facing America today, silence is complicity. What purpose does it serve, except to maintain a cozy relationship with Trump supporters?
AD: Your last chapter on anti-psychiatry was fascinating for several reasons, including the role played in it by R.D. Laing, on whom you published two earlier books. I always thought it was very much a fringe movement, but you open by noting that the “number of websites devoted to anti-psychiatry is utterly mind-boggling” (p.158). However, as you go on to show, the term is a bit of an omnium gatherum for diverse if not contradictory agendas. Tell us about how you understand anti-psychiatry and what may be valuable in parts of it today, including the critique of Big Pharma, and the still-relevant insights of Laing into alienation and estrangement.
DB: Like Erich Fromm, R.D. Laing was firmly convinced that psychological adjustment to an insane society was a symptom of alienation or self-estrangement; a form of pseudo-sanity, not the genuine article. Unlike Fromm, who leaned heavily on Marx, Freud, and classical sociology, Laing was schooled in existential psychiatry, and drew inspiration from a wide range of existential and phenomenological thinkers, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and religious existentialists like Buber, Berdyaev, Marcel, Tillich, etc.
Writing in the 1960s, Laing felt that the medical-model or classical psychiatric approach to schizophrenia is inadequate or misleading in many cases, and that the evidence on behalf of the medical model was weak and flawed at best. He believed that everyone, without exception, had the potential to go mad, regardless of their neurological integrity (or lack thereof), and invited his readers to consider madness as an existential crisis brought on by interpersonal defenses, dilemmas and stratagems that landed mental patients in a “check mate” position; one that the patient does not understand, cannot tolerate and yet is powerless to change.
However, despite his reputation to the contrary, Laing was not really an “anti-psychiatrist”, if by that we mean someone who called for the abolition of psychiatry as such. However, he did agree with the anti-psychiatric thesis that most psychiatric interventions into the lives of profoundly distressed and disoriented people entail a massive reification of the person, and an invalidation of their personal experience, and that psychiatric power is often wielded for the benefit of the powerful, not the powerless. And with rare exceptions, he was opposed to involuntary hospitalization and coercive medical treatments, i.e. involuntary drugging, electroshock, lobotomy, etc.
The anti-psychiatry movement took root in the mid-to-late 1960s, when involuntary commitment and old fashioned state-run mental hospitals were still prevalent. Places like these warehoused large numbers of people deemed to be deviant and/or dangerous to themselves and others, and deprived them of their basic civil rights. In those days, psychiatric power was exercised chiefly over in-patient populations like these, which were much larger than they are today. Moreover, the average length of stay in such places was much longer than it is now. All this changed with de-institutionalization, and the de-commissioning of state-run mental hospitals, which left many thousands of formerly hospitalized mental patients to fend for themselves on the streets. The resulting spike in homelessness, substance abuse and petty crime in the USA cost tax-payers at least as much as maintaining the old mental hospital system did. And Laing deplored this state of affairs, because it left former patients profoundly vulnerable, too.
However, the de-commissioning of state-run mental hospitals meant that the locus of psychiatric power shifted gradually from the steadily decreasing in-patient population to the burgeoning out-patient population. Why? Because, now people with diagnoses of severe mental disorders – schizophrenia, manic depression, refractory unipolar depression, etc. – were treated on an out-patient basis. If they were committed involuntarily, their stay in hospital would be curtailed to 2 weeks to 2 months, at most. This is when Big Pharma stepped in. As the number of people – including adolescents and children--diagnosed with severe mental disorders started to climb, so did the number of prescriptions they received. Even people who suffered symptoms of mild to moderate severity were now routinely medicated, and their access to long term, insight oriented psychotherapy curtailed by insurance companies. This was – and to this day, remains – a financial bonanza for Big Pharma, despite the fact that the drugs it produces seldom, if ever, cure the underlying disorder, and sometimes do not even control the patient’s symptoms effectively. Alternatively, their drugs may control the symptoms effectively for a time, but the so called “side effects” and neuro-toxicity that results from extended use are very injurious to people’s health in the medium to long term.
So, to summarize, the anti-psychiatry movement of yore emerged in response to conditions and institutions that no longer exist. Since their collapse, through its collusion with Big Pharma, psychiatry has extended its power immeasurably into the “out-patient” population since the de-institutionalization movement of the 1980s. And while the anti-psychiatrists of the 1960s faulted psychiatry for adhering rigidly to the medical model, and refusing to explore or acknowledge alternative ways of understanding madness, contemporary critics of psychiatry tend to focus on the utterly-mind boggling debasement of the medical model, when it is routinely subverted to serve corporate interests in defiance of the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm”. Fortunately, integrative and holistic medicine have recently generated many useful alternative strategies to mitigate and sometimes cure serious psychiatric conditions which do not require psychiatric medication. Indeed, in many instances, the first step in these treatment protocols is to wean patients off of the psychiatric meds they’ve become accustomed (or addicted to), sometimes for decades.
I am not an anti-psychiatrist. But I do think that the psychiatric profession is urgently in need of reform, and that both the earlier and current critiques of psychiatry have considerable merit. While the former is obviously less applicable to contemporary conditions, it still has much to teach us.
AD: As we come to the end of your book, it seems to me every chapter is an attempt to examine the question with which you began: “What happens when people lose all trust in authority” (p.3)? In place of different modes of rational authority, you write, we often instead get identity politics, conspiracy theories, and “irrational doubt.” And nobody, if I understand your argument aright, is free from the temptation of irrational authority or even outright authoritarianism—including not just politicians but also Freud himself and his defenders, or later Lacan, Peterson, or others in the academy, psychiatry, and elsewhere. Is that a fair assessment of what you were trying to do in the book?
DB: Well, not quite. Granted, mistrust of authority – of all kinds, and in all domains of expertise--is extremely prevalent nowadays. And perhaps no one is completely immune from the blandishments of power and irrational authority. But some people genuinely prefer to function and conduct their daily lives in an open and democratic fashion, and become profoundly distressed when the foundations of democracy are eroding before their eyes. But even democracies cannot function without relying (to some extent) on authority in the secular, scientific and spiritual domains. To imagine that we could do this is merely utopian nonsense. That is why it is important to emphasize that the way in which authority is wielded in these different domains of competence has a profound impact on how much the general population is able to trust those we deem to be experts, or to whom we entrust decision making powers.
The mode of authority most conducive to maintaining democratic norms and institutions is rational authority, because it promotes competence and mutual respect, values transparency and honesty, and does not stifle the critical faculties or the conscience of those who are subject to it in the course of their growth and training. Moreover, it strives to promote equality in the fullness of time by bringing those subject to it up the level of the person in authority, rather than the populist approach of leveling things by embracing the lowest common denominator. That being so, we should strive, as much as possible, to identify and root out irrational (and anonymous) authority and to encourage and augment rational authority whenever and wherever we can. This will never restore trust in authority completely, because a healthy dose of skepticism is consistent with an intact critical faculty, and because people in power can mask the exercise of irrational authority behind the rhetoric of freedom and emancipation quite easily.
AD: Having finished Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Post-Modern University, what are you at work on now?
I am currently researching a book on the personal and cultural sources of anti-Semitism in the life and work of C.G. Jung and his inner circle, and their relevance to trends in contemporary Jungian (and post-Jungian) thought.
Burston has a new book out, Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Postmodern University (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and having read it with great interest, it was my delight to be able to interview him about it by e-mail.
AD: Tell us about your background
DB: I was born in Naharia, Israel in 1954, and raised and educated in Toronto, Canada. As a child, I attended Bialik Hebrew Day School, and as a teenager, went to Forest Hill High School. I dropped out of High School after 10th grade, and enrolled in a “free school” modeled loosely on A. S. Neill’s experimental school Summerhill, where I focused on English, history and philosophy. After one year, I left that anarchic environment and my parental home, making a meager living on the fringes of Toronto’s waning counterculture, offering Yoga and guitar lessons to raw beginners, working odd jobs in vegetarian restaurants, bakeries, gardening and landscaping companies, picking up new skills and new friends, including some gifted and creative people who introduced me to spiritual, political and psychotherapeutic ideas, practices, and groups of various kinds. My immersion in the counterculture lasted three years, during which time I studied psychology, philosophy, and political theory; sometimes on my own, but often in dialogue with friends who, like me, were intellectually curious but not keen on acquiring a university education.
However, at 21, I finally decided not to remain an auto-didact. I needed a more formal education. So after completing an undergraduate degree in political science at York University, I completed two Ph.D.s there; one in Social and Political Thought (1985) and another in Psychology (1989). My second doctoral thesis became the basis for my first book, The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991). Shortly after the book appeared, I landed a job in the psychology department at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and have taught there ever since.
AD: What led to the writing of Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Post-Modern University?
If I am honest, irritation and dismay--among other things, I guess. When I started my undergraduate career, the university was often described to me by my teachers as “a community of scholars” (Paul Goodman); a community in which the social sciences and humanities held a pivotal, if not a privileged place. Getting a proper education was valued as an end in itself, and not primarily as a means to other ends, i.e. launching a career, making money, etc. Yes, the old “Ivory Tower” was insular and elitist, and therefore in need of urgent reform, as Paul Goodman noted.
But the neo-liberal version of the university, which is dominated by the STEM disciplines and corporate agendas of various kinds, is worse. The professoriate has been transformed, by and large, from a cadre of respected professionals into an army of service workers whose job is to stuff and stock students’ minds with a pre-packaged bundle of information and skills, enabling them to succeed--or at any rate, survive--on the job market. As a result, we have been debased to the status of service workers who increasingly fear the wrath or disapproval of their touchy customers, rather than the other way around, which was how things stood when I started university.
Meanwhile, as the professoriate has been proletarianized, the Liberal Arts have declined steadily in power and prestige, and faculty have been profoundly disempowered by the rise of the administrative (managerial) caste. The ideal of shared governance, once highly prized, is often no more than a pretense.
So, at the end of the day, I have devoted my entire career to scholarship and to post-secondary education, and in the process, born witness to the emergence of many worrisome trends in contemporary university life. After reflecting on them, and how best to address them, for two decades or more, it finally dawned on me that a close look at certain trends in the history of psychoanalysis and critical theory might help illumine the state of contemporary university and intellectual life in useful and unexpected ways. Erich Fromm’s theory of authority – which has seldom received the attention it deserves – was particularly useful in this regard.
AD: I was glad to see your acknowledgement at the opening of your book of the work of the late Paul Roazen, whom I stumbled upon in 2018 and read with great profit. Tell us a bit about your own relationship to him, and why his work is important.
DB: When I was approaching 20 years of age, I stumbled across Paul Roazen's book Brother Animal. During the previous two years, I had struggled with a series of books by and about Freud, C.G.Jung, the Glover brothers, Erich Fromm and Erik Erikson, and the impressions I had gleaned of Freud’s personality from these disparate sources did not create a clear or consistent impression. Freud was doubtless one of the major thinkers of the 20th century. But Freud the man was a mystery to me, rendered all the more elusive by the dense controversies that swirled around him.
So when I read Roazen’s gloss on the correspondence between Lou Salome and Sigmund Freud with respect to Tausk’s abortive analysis and subsequent suicide, I was completely “blown away”, as they say. Thirteen years later, while researching my 1991 book The Legacy of Erich Fromm, I discovered that Erich Fromm also greeted Roazen’s revelations with considerable shock, but in due course, praised Paul’s clarity and courage--unlike Kurt Eissler, whose odd, abrasive, and unpersuasive rebuttal, Victor Tausk’s Suicide set out to discredit Roazen entirely. Indeed, I soon discovered, Fromm recommended Brother Animal to all his students in Mexico and the United States, most of whom read the book with considerable appreciation.
Having read Brother Animal, I acquired a copy of Freud and his Followers, which was thoroughly engrossing. And since Paul Roazen taught at York University in my own home town, I resolved to study with him. I spent my first year as an undergrad getting core requirements out of the way, but much of my second and third year centered around my course work with him. I was dazzled and occasionally confused by his richly stimulating (but poorly organized) lectures on Freud and his followers, which were leavened with lengthy reflections on Norman O. Brown and Phillip Rieff; philosophers Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Isaiah Berlin; eccentrics and free spirits like Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Thoreau, and T.E.Lawrence; poets like Rilke and Frost; and European and American political commentators like de Tocqueville, William Bullitt, Harold Lasswell, Walter Lippmann, and Herbert Marcuse, among others. It was quite an education! When I started on my MA, I was fortunate enough to continue on as Paul’s teaching assistant for two years, during which time I got to know him and his work even better.
Paul’s work has been largely forgotten in the aftermath of the Freud wars, but his pioneering work exposed many of the problems and oversights of mainstream psychoanalytic historiography right into the 1990s. Like Erich Fromm, he believed that the history of psychoanalysis provided by orthodox Freudians was riddled with distortions and omissions of truly Stalinist proportions. But while he freely acknowledged Freud’s authoritarianism and personal blindspots, he never wavered in his admiration for Freud’s courage and originality as a thinker.
AD: Having gone back to him in my own work just this year, I was even gladder to see Erich Fromm getting renewed attention 40 years after his death in your first and fifth chapters. Tell us a bit about your own work on him both here and in your earlier biography of him.
DB: As it happens, I stumbled on Fromm’s work a few years before I read Roazen’s works. Indeed, I was drawn to Roazen in part because he confirmed many things that Fromm had said earlier about the biases inherent in orthodox Freudian historiography.
I think the first book I read of Fromm’s was The Sane Society, which was published in 1955, in the early years of the Eisenhower era, but which I only read in 1969 or so. What struck me then-- and strikes me still--was Fromm’s contention that an entire society can be mad, and that “adjustment” to a deeply disordered society--one largely unaware of or indifferent to its own perversity--constitutes a “pathology of normalcy.” Of course, in this context, the term “normalcy” denotes something more akin to a chronic, low-grade deficiency disease than it does to genuine health. Normalcy, or normality in this sense reduces internal suffering and ongoing tension or friction with one’s environment to a tolerable minimum, but only at the expense of one’s development as an honest, intact and responsive human being.
As an alternative to this kind of socially patterned defect, Fromm advocated what Martin Luther King Jr. later called “creative maladjustment.” Another thing that attracted me to Fromm’s work was the fact that he cared deeply about spiritual values, and despite his radicalism, demonstrated a deep familiarity with and respect for various (Eastern and Western) religious and contemplative traditions.
As I studied Fromm’s work more closely, it started to dawn on me that he had been unjustly dismissed by many fashionable intellectuals in the late 60s, 70s and 80s as a lightweight, a popularizer or as little more than a self-help guru. Moreover, the secondary literature on Fromm – in psychology textbooks and histories of psychoanalysis – is riddled with errors, oversimplifications, and omissions. That being so, I felt it was time to rehabilitate him, and to situate his work in the history of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School.
AD: In your fifth chapter Fromm appears again along with Reich, Adorno and others on authoritarian personalities, one of whose hallmarks is that they “may become attached or become passionately attracted to others. But they cannot genuinely love other human beings” (p.97). The study of authoritarianism began, as you note, in Europe in the interwar period, but has acquired more recent relevance in the US, Israel, and elsewhere in the last few years. Tell us about the forms of authoritarianism you analyze today—both of the left-wing and right-wing types.
DB: The literature on “the authoritarian personality” is now so vast that I find it difficult to summarize my own thoughts and conclusions succinctly. Suffice it to say that, as a rule, the main difference between Right- and Left-Wing authoritarians resides in the ideologies they embrace or espouse, not in their modus operandi once they are installed in power. In their efforts to win the hearts and minds of the populace, Right-wing authoritarians typically extol law and order, and promise a return to the status quo ante, or the “good old days,” which are heavily idealized, and exist only in the collective imaginary. Their propaganda taps into people’s fear of change and nostalgia for the past, and they preach the pursuit of racial or religious “purity.”
By contrast, Left-wing authoritarians promise their followers liberation and equality, the removal of the status quo and its replacement with a new egalitarian social order, only to renege on those promises later on. Their propaganda doesn’t dwell on the past, or indulge in nostalgia. Instead, they typically tap into people’s anger about current conditions and their hopes for a brighter future. And in theory, at least, they tend to eschew religious or racial purity in favor of ideological purity or “political correctness”, although many Left-wing authoritarians in the West have an affinity – or at the very least, a high degree of tolerance for – Islamic fundamentalism, even though they mistrust and revile Christian fundamentalists.
What authoritarians of the left and right both share in common, despite their different ideologies and rhetorical styles, is an attraction towards authoritarian strongmen who place themselves above (or outside) the law and show contempt for weakness, a strong attraction to violence as a means to solve (real or imaginary) social problems, and an eagerness to resort to secrecy, lies and deception to achieve their political ends, which have to do, above all, with seizing and holding onto power. They also have a pronounced tendency to dichotomous, “black and white” thinking, an intolerance of ambiguity and complexity, and to projection, i.e. to seeing authoritarian tendencies on the other side of the political spectrum, but minimizing or disavowing the same tendencies on their own side. All of these traits are in keeping with what Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm first described as the “sadomasochistic” or “authoritarian” character.
AD: Your chapter on Jordan Peterson (whose book I reviewed here) opens by discussing some aspects of the decline of the liberal arts in the university today, noting where Peterson is not entirely incorrect in blaming “post-modernism”, but that such a critique overlooks “cultural and market forces” and “the rather obvious fact that at the end of the day, most people care very little about the pursuit of truth” (136). You sift the contents of Peterson’s claims, and their reactions, and the debates they engendered, with great care before concluding that “Peterson [is] an enabler for Trump’s authoritarian agenda” (p.154). Tell us a bit more what you mean by that.
JB: Look, Jordan Peterson is a complicated man. I vividly remember an online interview he did with a crusty, conservative columnist in Canada named Rex Murphy several years ago. In this interview, Peterson was remarkably honest and vulnerable, the exact opposite of the aloof, steely, hyper-masculine presence he usually adopts in public fora. I remember thinking then that despite our political differences and all the bad press he’s received to date, this guy really means well, that he wants to make the world a better place. In that moment, I wanted to extend him the benefit of the doubt, even though I disagree profoundly with his one-sided analysis of our social ills and with the solutions that he proposes to the current crisis in the Liberal Arts. It struck me then that his basic intentions are good, nonetheless.
Unfortunately, however, Peterson seldom extends the benefit of the doubt to his liberal and left wing critics, whom he swiftly converts from potential partners in dialogue into implacable and unreasoning adversaries because of his penchant for polarizing people. You either love Peterson, or you hate him, as a rule. There is no middle ground. Those like myself, who are prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, but dare to criticize his manner or ideas, are swiftly dismissed by his ardent supporters and his ferocious detractors.
That said, as a somewhat reluctant Canadian ex-pat, and as a (Jewish) resident of Pittsburgh for many years now, I was profoundly disappointed by Peterson’s public remarks about Trump after the Tree of Life massacre on Oct 27, 2017. Don’t get me wrong. Peterson is not an anti-Semite.
However, his efforts to normalize the Trump Presidency, and to depict Trump as someone who is merely disagreeable and bombastic, rather than an authoritarian menace to democracy, seemed extremely blinkered, if not disingenuous, especially in light of all that has transpired since. Now that principled conservatives are slowly finding their backbones, and many are coming out publicly in favor of Joe Biden for president in November, 2020, one wonders why Peterson did not raise the alarm earlier, or say something strongly supportive of their efforts now. In dire situations, like the crisis facing America today, silence is complicity. What purpose does it serve, except to maintain a cozy relationship with Trump supporters?
AD: Your last chapter on anti-psychiatry was fascinating for several reasons, including the role played in it by R.D. Laing, on whom you published two earlier books. I always thought it was very much a fringe movement, but you open by noting that the “number of websites devoted to anti-psychiatry is utterly mind-boggling” (p.158). However, as you go on to show, the term is a bit of an omnium gatherum for diverse if not contradictory agendas. Tell us about how you understand anti-psychiatry and what may be valuable in parts of it today, including the critique of Big Pharma, and the still-relevant insights of Laing into alienation and estrangement.
DB: Like Erich Fromm, R.D. Laing was firmly convinced that psychological adjustment to an insane society was a symptom of alienation or self-estrangement; a form of pseudo-sanity, not the genuine article. Unlike Fromm, who leaned heavily on Marx, Freud, and classical sociology, Laing was schooled in existential psychiatry, and drew inspiration from a wide range of existential and phenomenological thinkers, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and religious existentialists like Buber, Berdyaev, Marcel, Tillich, etc.
Writing in the 1960s, Laing felt that the medical-model or classical psychiatric approach to schizophrenia is inadequate or misleading in many cases, and that the evidence on behalf of the medical model was weak and flawed at best. He believed that everyone, without exception, had the potential to go mad, regardless of their neurological integrity (or lack thereof), and invited his readers to consider madness as an existential crisis brought on by interpersonal defenses, dilemmas and stratagems that landed mental patients in a “check mate” position; one that the patient does not understand, cannot tolerate and yet is powerless to change.
However, despite his reputation to the contrary, Laing was not really an “anti-psychiatrist”, if by that we mean someone who called for the abolition of psychiatry as such. However, he did agree with the anti-psychiatric thesis that most psychiatric interventions into the lives of profoundly distressed and disoriented people entail a massive reification of the person, and an invalidation of their personal experience, and that psychiatric power is often wielded for the benefit of the powerful, not the powerless. And with rare exceptions, he was opposed to involuntary hospitalization and coercive medical treatments, i.e. involuntary drugging, electroshock, lobotomy, etc.
The anti-psychiatry movement took root in the mid-to-late 1960s, when involuntary commitment and old fashioned state-run mental hospitals were still prevalent. Places like these warehoused large numbers of people deemed to be deviant and/or dangerous to themselves and others, and deprived them of their basic civil rights. In those days, psychiatric power was exercised chiefly over in-patient populations like these, which were much larger than they are today. Moreover, the average length of stay in such places was much longer than it is now. All this changed with de-institutionalization, and the de-commissioning of state-run mental hospitals, which left many thousands of formerly hospitalized mental patients to fend for themselves on the streets. The resulting spike in homelessness, substance abuse and petty crime in the USA cost tax-payers at least as much as maintaining the old mental hospital system did. And Laing deplored this state of affairs, because it left former patients profoundly vulnerable, too.
However, the de-commissioning of state-run mental hospitals meant that the locus of psychiatric power shifted gradually from the steadily decreasing in-patient population to the burgeoning out-patient population. Why? Because, now people with diagnoses of severe mental disorders – schizophrenia, manic depression, refractory unipolar depression, etc. – were treated on an out-patient basis. If they were committed involuntarily, their stay in hospital would be curtailed to 2 weeks to 2 months, at most. This is when Big Pharma stepped in. As the number of people – including adolescents and children--diagnosed with severe mental disorders started to climb, so did the number of prescriptions they received. Even people who suffered symptoms of mild to moderate severity were now routinely medicated, and their access to long term, insight oriented psychotherapy curtailed by insurance companies. This was – and to this day, remains – a financial bonanza for Big Pharma, despite the fact that the drugs it produces seldom, if ever, cure the underlying disorder, and sometimes do not even control the patient’s symptoms effectively. Alternatively, their drugs may control the symptoms effectively for a time, but the so called “side effects” and neuro-toxicity that results from extended use are very injurious to people’s health in the medium to long term.
So, to summarize, the anti-psychiatry movement of yore emerged in response to conditions and institutions that no longer exist. Since their collapse, through its collusion with Big Pharma, psychiatry has extended its power immeasurably into the “out-patient” population since the de-institutionalization movement of the 1980s. And while the anti-psychiatrists of the 1960s faulted psychiatry for adhering rigidly to the medical model, and refusing to explore or acknowledge alternative ways of understanding madness, contemporary critics of psychiatry tend to focus on the utterly-mind boggling debasement of the medical model, when it is routinely subverted to serve corporate interests in defiance of the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm”. Fortunately, integrative and holistic medicine have recently generated many useful alternative strategies to mitigate and sometimes cure serious psychiatric conditions which do not require psychiatric medication. Indeed, in many instances, the first step in these treatment protocols is to wean patients off of the psychiatric meds they’ve become accustomed (or addicted to), sometimes for decades.
I am not an anti-psychiatrist. But I do think that the psychiatric profession is urgently in need of reform, and that both the earlier and current critiques of psychiatry have considerable merit. While the former is obviously less applicable to contemporary conditions, it still has much to teach us.
AD: As we come to the end of your book, it seems to me every chapter is an attempt to examine the question with which you began: “What happens when people lose all trust in authority” (p.3)? In place of different modes of rational authority, you write, we often instead get identity politics, conspiracy theories, and “irrational doubt.” And nobody, if I understand your argument aright, is free from the temptation of irrational authority or even outright authoritarianism—including not just politicians but also Freud himself and his defenders, or later Lacan, Peterson, or others in the academy, psychiatry, and elsewhere. Is that a fair assessment of what you were trying to do in the book?
DB: Well, not quite. Granted, mistrust of authority – of all kinds, and in all domains of expertise--is extremely prevalent nowadays. And perhaps no one is completely immune from the blandishments of power and irrational authority. But some people genuinely prefer to function and conduct their daily lives in an open and democratic fashion, and become profoundly distressed when the foundations of democracy are eroding before their eyes. But even democracies cannot function without relying (to some extent) on authority in the secular, scientific and spiritual domains. To imagine that we could do this is merely utopian nonsense. That is why it is important to emphasize that the way in which authority is wielded in these different domains of competence has a profound impact on how much the general population is able to trust those we deem to be experts, or to whom we entrust decision making powers.
The mode of authority most conducive to maintaining democratic norms and institutions is rational authority, because it promotes competence and mutual respect, values transparency and honesty, and does not stifle the critical faculties or the conscience of those who are subject to it in the course of their growth and training. Moreover, it strives to promote equality in the fullness of time by bringing those subject to it up the level of the person in authority, rather than the populist approach of leveling things by embracing the lowest common denominator. That being so, we should strive, as much as possible, to identify and root out irrational (and anonymous) authority and to encourage and augment rational authority whenever and wherever we can. This will never restore trust in authority completely, because a healthy dose of skepticism is consistent with an intact critical faculty, and because people in power can mask the exercise of irrational authority behind the rhetoric of freedom and emancipation quite easily.
AD: Having finished Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Post-Modern University, what are you at work on now?
I am currently researching a book on the personal and cultural sources of anti-Semitism in the life and work of C.G. Jung and his inner circle, and their relevance to trends in contemporary Jungian (and post-Jungian) thought.
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