From Destiny to Responsibility

1. From Destiny to Responsibility The struggle between duty and desire Israel, February 25, 2010 Farhad Dalal farhad.dalal@devonpsychotherapy.org.uk

2. Three unrelated occurances • The patient and the invoice • ‘there must be a reason for this; there must be a bigger plan that I know nothing of’ • The sumo wrestler • ‘Asked about leaving the sport under a cloud, Asashoryu called his resignation ‘destiny’’. (The Independent Feb 5, 2010, p25). • Doubts about Israel • Doubts about my doubts…

3. Kantian Responsibility • Natural world • Cause and effect • Causes • Human world • Rational Choices, Decisions • Reasons, Meaning

4. Destiny • Comforting • A way of making sense of events • Attributing meaning and purpose to events • Strong destiny • No choice – life is mapped out by gods/fates • Individual has no responsibility for what happens to them • Weak destiny • Legacy • Individual has responsibility to make the most of the potential they are born with

5. Absolute Freedom – New Age Philosophy • Individuals free to become and do anything they want. • The individual is completely responsible for everything that happens to them (including becoming ill and getting cancer) • They have chosen it in some way and for some reason.

6. Strong Destiny and New Age Freedom • Strong destiny • Individual is impotent. • responsibility is lodged completely outside the scope of the individual • New Age freedom • Individual is omnipotent. • responsibility is lodged completely within the individual.

7. Psychotherapy • To break free of habituated patterns • To become autonomous • To have more choice • Psychotherapy as a work that moves from destiny (where one has little or no choice) to responsibility (where one not only has choice, but also the courage to choose). • Freedom is the possibility and ability of being able to choose between different options.

8. Destiny • Stretching ‘destiny’ to include all the various ways in which people feel that they have no choice and are compelled to act, think and feel in particular ways. • I will take all situations in which people feel that they can do no other, to be versions of destiny.

9. Duty as destiny –the traditionalists • Duty to others – god, kind, country, ideology • Conflict between duties: Abraham • Duty to God • Duty to son • Conflict between duties: Ganesh • Duty to mother • Duty to God

10. Desire as Destiny – the Romantics • Rousseau and the Romantics thought it the individual’s duty to turn to the heart. • It is the individuals duty to know one’s true feelings, and to live them out. For Rousseau, this was to be the basis of the ethical life. • These ‘true feelings’ are pre-social and asocial; they emerge from the ‘true self’. • In this scenario the social is the enemy of the internal psychological world. • The Humanistic psychotherapies tend to be grounded in this tradition.

11. Freud – conflicting desires • The ‘traditionalists’: the ethical person desires to do their duty • The Romantics: the ethical person’s duty is to fulfil their desire. • From the superego is the desire to do one’s duty • From the id is the desire to satisfy one’s desire. • In the Freudian picture the individual is subject to two sorts of destiny • one being the disposition and temperament that an individual is born with (the instincts as laid down in the Id), • the other being the kind of world order that the individual is born into (and as becomes laid down in the Superego). • Freedom as such is the prerogative of the Ego, which makes decisions as what to allow and what not to allow.

12. From constraints to enabling constraints • In the Freudian scenario the social acts as a constraint on the ‘natural’ biological – it holds it back, it tempers it. • The Radical Foulkesian schema goes much further to say that the social is an enablingconstraint.

13. Enabling Constraints 1 • Joining a conversation that is already in progress • Cannot just travel directly from A to B; has to negotiate obstacles and travel according to conventions already established. • History is destiny

14. Enabling Constraints 2 • Definition of enabling constraint: Something that enables something else to come into existence, and at the same time, to limit what it is possible for that thing to become. • Examples • Sculptures made of paper, clay, steel, etc. • The circumference of a circle • The walls of a room • as constraint • as well as enabling constraint • Definition of enabling constraints: substances and processes that make it possible for something to come into being, and at the same time limit what those things may become.

15. The Social Unconscious and Biology • The social unconscious is an enabling constraint • Human beings are bodies. • Biology is going to be ever present. • All psychoanalytic schools are agreed that individuals are born biologically pre-programmed to some degree. Disputes are about substance and degree • Kleinians – primary envy • Bowlby – to attach • Winnicott – to relate

16. Two misconceptions • Biological is equated with animal; • we think that our biology is an expression of our animal natures. • We think that biological and sociological evolution took place separately. • That the socialization process starts to work on a fully formed primitive-animal-human: a brute. • In this picture • The social arrives after the biological • the social sits on top of the biological, • The social is in conflict with the biological

17. Elias quote • ‘Human society is a level of nature’ (Elias 1991:85). • ‘humans are by their nature made for a life with each other, a life which… includes interpersonal and inter-group struggles and their management. (Elias 1991:91; italics added).

18. The Social Unconscious and Sociology • Social unconscious as destiny • Social unconscious => discourse • ‘a given language and particularly the mother-tongue, pre-empts an individuals thinking... it is not possible, within limits, to cut oneself loose from categories implicit in one's languages’ (Elias 1991, p70; italics added) • We are born into pre-established cultures with their accepted social conventions. • Cultures are moral orders. • They consist of rationales for conventions as to what is right and what is wrong; • what is good and what is bad; • who is friend and who is foe. • This is what we take in with our mother’s milk, • and this is what pre-empts our experience.

19. Growing up as a Parsee in India • I came to learn and believe that we Parsees were not Indian. • Our real home was Persia. This was so despite being settled in India for almost 1500 years, despite the fact that no ancestor set foot in Iran in all this time, despite the fact that the Persian language was as alien and mysterious to us as Swahili, and so on. • Aryan. • a special people, a chosen people, racially pure • I did not just know this, I actually felt it to be so. • Hindus were good but not clean like us; vegetarians and therefore weak. • Moslems were not only dirty but also had loose morals and were generally bad people. • The British and Christians generally were good folk – to be trusted and our equals in some ways. • natural to look down on servants • The servants - lazy and not to be trusted. potential thieves, liars and cheats; dirty. • But Hindus and Moslems could rise in status and became closer to ‘us’ through wealth, education and social status.

20. Context as Destiny – green shirts and blue shirts • Kill or be killed • Fight or flight • Blue shirt’s destiny to hate and be hated by Green shirts • Blue shirts seemingly born with this apparently self evident knowledge • Cannot reason with a mob

21. The virtue of multiple social orders • If completely at the mercy of social forces then we would simply be pawns of social forces that would imprint and fix us forever. This would be destiny of the first kind. All we would be able to do is to act out our predestined parts. To use the card analogy once more, it is as though there is only one way to play out the hand. • We are saved from this horror by two different factors. • Born not into multiple conflictual discourses, each with their own rationales • Just the very fact that there are alternatives undermines the hegemonic claims to absolute truth by the dominant discourses. • Orthodox communities (religious, political, cultural) wish to keep out and crush knowledge of the knowledge that there exist alternative view points. Through this means they ensure that the young are only ever exposed to one world view – the right world view. • Human autonomy lies in the capacity to question. So even if an individual is only exposed to one text, be it the Bible, Das Kapital, the Torah, the Koran, Mein Kampf, or the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, we find that each person develops their own reading, their own interpretation of the text. • Commentaries written which decree which of the readings are correct and which are false. • But it is never possible to control the mind entirely even in these extreme scenarios. And in ordinary contexts like the modern metropolis, one is constantly being confronted with alternative world views, which one is constantly having to decide between.

22. Fettered Responsibility • As though one can only think to make a choice between milk-in-first or milk-in-last. • As though one never gets to think about other possibilities – no milk, coffee, etc. • Lincoln – wanted to free the slaves, but continued in the old mind set that Blacks were an inferior kind of human compared to Whites. • Treating servants with dignity, but it would not cross their minds to consider the possibility that the servant might sit at the same table as a family member. It is just not done.

23. Karl Marx • ‘humans make their own history but they do not make it under conditions of their own choosing: they make it under conditions handed down from previous generations,… . In this effort, the means of acting upon the world will be expanded, but under conditions inherited from the past.’

24. The Therapist • Therapists are creatures of tradition • Trainings teach us what to see and how to see. (Observation is theory laden) • Taboos – ways of distinguishing us and them groups within the profession • Where is the hysterical patient today? • Language • Kleinians talk of projection and massive projective identification • Freudians talk of the transference and oedipal themes. etc. • Not only are we trained to think in certain ways, we also teach our patients to think in certain ways. • Patients in a Jungian analysis will have dreams that fit well with the Jungian nomenclature, those in a Freudian analysis will dream in a Freudian language, and so on. • All this is a form of destiny.

25. The Patient • Repeating without remembering – Freud • The patient who was ‘meant to’ forget collecting her son from school • ‘Having’ depression – feelings as illness • Illness visits the person • Treatment aimed at illness • Person has no responsibility for either • Destiny – genes, brain chemistry, culture, past, mother. • Entitlement

26. Grievance, Forgiveness, Responsibility • Mother – acknowledges past • Father – unable to • Jim tied to father through grievance • Jim has to act, but cannot • Because betrayal of internal injured child • Grievance an aspect of identity • Hanging onto grievance in order to punish father • Destiny – Jim is caught. He cannot get past his sense of injury. He cannot get on with his life fully and properly. • Responsibility – Jim is required to take initiative, to do something. • The situation is paradoxical. To free himself he has to give up on an injured part of himself. • What is the right thing to do? • Born a Serb it is likely that I will find myself hating Bosnians. How much choice do I really have? • But does this excuse me and what I end up thinking, feeling and doing?

27. Human beings are paradoxical beings. • capable of innovative thought processes with the capacities to generate and create novelty. • also herd animals inclined to go with the crowd and defer to authorities in power. • The mystery of agency; our capacity to surprise ourselves as much as others. • This capacity escapes all analysis. • The mystery called the human condition.