Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic 4.4 (with some notes on current Church)

29 Friday Jan 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in Apologetics, Psychology

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Apologetics, Christ and Culture, Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic

The pervious post in this series concerning Rieff may be found here: https://memoirandremains.com/2020/08/28/philip-rieff-the-triumph-of-the-therapeutic-4-3/

In the remainder of the book, Rieff is going to examine what various disciples of Freud did with Freud’s original work. Thus, we will examine Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and D.H. Lawrence. But before he turns to these men who developed the ideas of Freud in strikingly different directions, Rieff considers those who make up the mass of psychoanalysts. In the main, Rieff has little good say about such practioners.

The fault, as I read Rieff, is that the analysts follow Freud so well. The practice of psychoanalysis is not to construct some new culture but rather to free one from the symbolic world which they have internalized. As such, it is a sort of indefinite project, but the world which followed Freud domesticated it, Freud “could cope with his enemies; his friends defeated him.” (85)

Those who take up the practice have attended “trade schools” (89) who wish to take up a quiet, stable, “suburb[an]” life.

The need for conflict with opposing structures is necessary to keep the disciple alive, “As an ultimate rule of organization, honesty is death to organization itself. Reticence, forbearance, tolerance – these civilities and hypocrisies are necessary to organized life.” (91)

To that extent his epilogue is of little interest except as an observation. What I do find interesting is an observation he makes early in this section. He notes that orthodoxy is sharpened in conflict: which is a point Harold O.J. Brown made in his work Heresies.

It is at this point he makes a point which may be of some encouragement to Christianity at this point in the West, “Nowadays, the world is full of tame Christians; in consequence, the churches are empty of life, if not of people.” (84) The Church seems to suffer worse from excess of ease than even trial (which seems to be true for us personally as well). Thus, our current conflict may be of use by putting the church into a position where it may critique the culture rather than be overly at home.

While there are various positions which have been offered by many, such as Niebuhr’s Christ & Culture, (Christ Against Culture, Christ of Culture, Christ Above Culture, Christ and Culture in Paradox, Christ the Transformer of Culture), Luther’s Two Kingdoms, and so on. All of these positions have shown themselves to be useful at some times and places, and disastrous at others.

When the Netherlands can elect a Kuyper as Prime Minister, Christianity is a position to influence culture in a way that the Baptist in the Gulag of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich could never dream. When being an influence entails comprising, then the church must take a prophetic stance. There are issues on which the church has no dogmatic position (should the capital gains tax be 15% or 20% on securities held over five years but less than ten?). But there are issues where the Church – if it has a public voice, cannot remain silent.

There are issues of wisdom: At what point does one confront the state; at which point should the church retreat? The church in the West (this is not to prioritize the Western church, nor to ignore the very real troubles faced throughout the world; it is simply I know far more about where I live and what I experience than things which I learn secondhand. I simply wish to avoid speaking where beyond what I could reasonably know) is coming to face increasing troubles from a direction it did not expect.

In the early 20^th century, the church on one-side retreated from intellectual engagement with a hostile culture. Another element of the visible compromised. The space of engagement deepened theological positions in many areas and gave us an apologetic and social voice.

Now we are facing an entirely new challenge for which the church broadly is not ready. Even the previous secular adversaries of the church have little idea on how to respond. But as Rieff noted in connection with Freud’s tame disciples, conflict can deepen and sharpen our thinking. Let’s pray that God gives us the wisdom for our age.

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 3.1 (Community and Therapy)

07 Tuesday Jul 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Freud, Psychology

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community, Philip Rieff, Therapy, Triumph of the Therapeutic

The prior post on Triumph of the Therapeutic may be found here.

Community and Therapy, Chapter 3

In this chapter, Rieff begins with an understanding of mental health as provided by means of a symbolic system. By means of a symbolic system, the society creates a matrix in which the individual person can achieve a character ideal. To be a functioning person, the person must belong to a “positive community” which “offers some sort of salvation to the individual through participant membership.” (60)

In this scenario, the system works if the individual functions reasonably well. The system will need a sufficiently robust symbolic format and mechanism for involvement in that system.

For the individual to function well, the individual not may but must participate in the communal life: it was only the life of the community that the life of any individual would be sufficiently well served.

Rieff then subsumes the history religion and culture into a concept of therapy:

Ultimately, it is the community that cures. The function of the classical therapist is to commit the patient to the symbol system of the community, as best he can and by whatever techniques are sanctioned. (57)

Rousseau provided a seeming break from this concept by introducing the idea that the individual must break free from the confinements of the community. But in the end, Rousseau ended up in the same place, because he merely posited the creation of a new community in the future.

Marx took Rousseau a step further and argued that the community was utterly broken and that all that currently existed is cash interactions. But Marx was still looking for a community, just a new future community where the individual could finally be integrated into the communal whole.

From a slightly different perspective, De Tocqueville considered the possibility of a wholly democratic society where all communal bounds would be broken down and all life would be private.

But for all that, Rieff contends that prior to Freud, mental health was a matter sociology: it was obtained by means of integrating the individual to the society’s system to simultaneously define and give room for expression of the individual.

At this point, Rieff places Freud as the one who provides a therapy to the individual when no positive community exists.

Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic 2.2 (Therapy as Re-Education)

12 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Freud, Psychology, Uncategorized

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Freud, Philip Rieff, Pscyhology, Therapy, Triumph of the Therapeutic

The previous post on Rieff may be found here.

Therapy as Re-Education

Rieff has a useful understanding of therapy in contrast religion (which in the case of Freud would be Christianity of Judaism) which Rieff refers to as “older moral pedagogies.” (45) The prior moral system required one “concentrating on the life of trying to order the warring parts of the personality into a hierarchy.” (45).

This ordering of one’s competing demands and impulses is done in accord with the requires of a “positive community” which promised “a kind of salvation” for such accord. (43).

Freud and therapy provide a completely different manner of understanding one’s self. Rather looking at the various “impulses” as a matter of good or bad, higher or lower, one should consider demands as “a jostling democracy of contending predispositions”. (46-47)

Freud realized that this new means of understanding the various “impulses” would result in a subversions of the expectations of life. In particular, the position of the “father” would be particularly subverted, because the position of father takes the position of maintaining of “repressive command”. (47).

Now it may be thought that Freud encourages immorality. But the understanding of the impulses as there does not necessarily result in the encouragement of acting on such impulses. What Freud did do was seek to exhaust a sense of guilt built upon these moralities.

At this point, Reiff makes a rather self-contradicting argument. Freud’s analysis:

Help[s] us distinguish between guilt on one hand and a sense of guilt on the other, between responsibility for an offense committed and fantasies about offenses intended or merely imagined, seems a moral as a well as a therapeutic aim.

This argument seems to be that the older moral orders merely imposed a “fantasy” of moral order in exchange for a promise of salvation as contrasted one making a conscious decision based upon “responsibility.” Upon what moral basis could one determine concern for “responsibility”?

There is not any rational basis for responsibility. You could say I would like to avoid whatever I might see as a negative consequence (like avoiding imprisonment) was rational – but seeing a connection between the consequence and the result does not determine whether I should not engage in the conduct. The decision to avoid the behavior to avoid the consequence is a moral decision. Granted it is a very limited morality (I want to avoid negative consequence), but it is still a moral decision.

If the negative consequence is less than imprisonment or death, than what do we mean by “responsibility”? Does he that I could care about what my behavior would do to another? That would be a moral decision.

The only sort of amoral decision would be one where I see the consequence and have not concern for the consequence.

Perhaps the concept is that I can decide whether I wish to abide by the moral code I see raised by my “impulse”. But one still must made a decision to be moral; that decision may have a very habitual basis, but it is not a reflex in the sense of blinking an eye.

Indeed the decision to forgo an “older moral paradigm” is itself a moral decision.

Freud may make one explicitly conscious of the moral decision. Freud also grants a certain sort of sanction to forgo moral decisions (this is an evil desire, it is just a desire – evil is what I have been taught to call this desire; but the desire is not in itself evil). All Freud has done lay the basis for a new morality where personal desire is necessarily good.

Thus, therapy is a matter of “re-education” into a new basis for morality.

Philip Rieff, Trumph of the Therapeutic.1

07 Tuesday Apr 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Freud, Psychology, Uncategorized

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Freud, Philip Rieff, Sigmund Freud, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Therapeutic, Therapy

Introductory: Toward a Theory of Culture

If I am tracking Rieff correctly at the beginning, he speaks of the older forms of culture which fell apart in 19^th Century; a culture which in particular utilized a religious form as the means of “controlling the infinite variety of panic and emptiness to which they are disposed.” (3) A culture is a mechanism which makes possible a communal understanding such that the people can live with one another and themselves.

A culture permits its members to “sublimate”, a process of renunciation and from that the creation of something greater.

But throughout the 19^th century there was a “deconversion” form a “series of symbols” to a superior “system of symbols – Science”. (6) This system, which Rieff compares to a stiff collar is in process of being changed. Freud sought to “soften” the collar; others have sought to take it altogether off.

Freud saw as a necessary the elements of coercion and renunciation to the maintenance of a culture. This process of renunciation works itself out in sublimation, which the creation of cultural artifacts of value within the culture.

Here is where becomes interesting: There are those who seek not merely to soften the collar but rather to remove it altogether. They seek a culture with no aspect of renunciation. Rieff refers to this as a cultural suicide. It is a religion of self; thus, apparently something without any culture, because culture “is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.” (3)

This is an anti-culture of intellectuals Rieff describes as “the most elaborate act of suicide that Western intellectuals have ever staged.” (7)

He sees a force toward an atomization of the individual and the countervailing force toward structures which permit communal life. “Every culture must establish itself as a system of moralizing demands”. (8)

He then comes to the “unreligion of the age”, the “therapeutic” which has “nothing at stake beyond the manipulatable sense of well-being.” Prior culture had mechanisms to permit renunciation, provide for sublimation and provide a type of judgment, admonitions and reassurances. (11) There is a type of human aimed by such a mechanism. And when the culture changes the nature of human “perfection” changes. (8)

It should be noted that the mechanisms do not seek merely the complete extirpation of desires. In reference to Christian asceticism, the aim was “control and complete spiritualization” of sexual desire. (13).

Speaking of modern culture (at the time of his writing in the 1960’s) he noted that the movement of sexual desire was away from renunciation toward “release”. The previous “desire” has become a “need”. (13)

And so, since the previous religious (primarily) culture makers have failed to communicate their symbolic vision to others in an inherently compelling way, “We are probably witnessing the end of a cultural history dominated by book religious and word-makers.” (15)

We have moved to a therapeutic culture of individualized management of the self for a sense of well-being, “With the arts of psychiatric management enhanced and perfected, men will come to know one another in ways that could facilitate total socialization without a symbolic of communal purpose.” (17)

“Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.” (19)

Thus, what may have been before considered immoral may be rejected if it is seen in a therapeutic light of “enhancing one’s sense of well-being.” (21)

What is not mentioned in this end of individualized well-being (particularly as to sexual desires) brought about without a cultural control which applies to others is the conflict of my desire and your counter-desire. The history after Rieff has witnessed a contrast of predators and then the pain or remorse or shame or ruin of their prey. But on what account can they be accounted wrong? We have to reach back to prior categories that do not quite make sense.

We have the question as to why “consent” carries sufficient moral weight to require imprisonment. I’m not saying by any stretch that non-consensual actions are morally good. But rather that consent is made to carry enormous moral weight.

Consent is a difficult matter, because it raises all sorts of questions of moral ability, freewill, influence, excessive influence and such. Moreover, those questions of human moral capacity do not fit easily into a naturalistic empiricism. The moral reasoning which underlies such matters borrows from other understandings of human value.

We are also seeing the emergence of a new sort of insistent moral reasoning respecting sexual desire which is every bit as demanding as any parody of previous Western moralities (influenced obviously by Christianity). Indeed, this new religiously insistent morality sees it perfectly fit to end the public life of those who violate the rules (whatever those rules may be).