Taking Care

TAKING CARE
TAKING CARE
An Alternative to Therapy
David Smail
KARNAC
First published in 1987 by J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd
This edition published in 2015 by
Karnac Books Ltd

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London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 1987 by David Smail
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Contents
New Preface VII
Introduction 1
1 Dreaming and Wishing: The Individual and Society 7
2 The Pursuit of Happiness 24
3 Magic, Interest and Psychology 44
4 Faults and Reasons 66
5 Change: The Limits of Therapy 79
6 'Relationships' 93
7 Growing Up and Taking Care 122
8 Morality and Moralism 143
Index 163
To the memory of Don Bannister
New Preface
Of all my written works, Taking Care provides the clearest state-
ment of issues concerning psychotherapy and society which I have
been struggling with all my professional life. Less ambiguously than
previous books (Psychotherapy: A. personal approach; Illusion and
Reality), it sets out what I see as the limitations of conventional
approaches to psychotherapy. At the same time, it lays the ground
for subsequent works (The Origins of Unhappiness; How to Survive
without Psychotherapy) to elaborate, respectively, a detailed theor-
etical analysis of psychological distress and a kind of manual for
'ordinary people' to understand the significance of their own
suffering.
Principally because, in my view, it became a victim of publishing
take-overs in the eighties, Taking Care was not as widely read as
its predecessor, Illusion and Reality. I have always regretted this:
for me, it is the profounder and more mature of the two. I am
therefore particularly grateful to Carol O'Brien and Constable for
bringing it out in this edition.
It is, to put it mildly, a bracing read, bucking the trends of
fashion, I have to admit, almost foolhardily. For the most part,
works of popular psychology - and many academic approaches
too, come to that- seek to reassure their audience that all is not
as bad as it seems and that their ills can be overcome through the
exercise of some kind of technique or other discovered, or at least
propounded, by the author. Such, I think, is the secret of the success
of much of the best-selling literature in the psychology and psycho-
therapy field: it feeds on the hopes and fantasies of people struggling
against very difficult odds and only too ready to jump at relatively
painless solutions.
No such Panglossian philosophy underlies this work, I fear.
Reading it ten years on, even I was slightly taken aback in places
at the bleakness of the view of society it portrays. The message is
that, far from things being not as bad as they seem, they are in fact
worse, and the (largely commercial) apparatus of social control
through which the relatively more powerful maintain their advan-
tage over the relatively less powerful has become perfected to the
point where it is virtually insuperable. So far as repairing the
damage done by this society is concerned, psychotherapy is an
irrelevance: at best it is a temporary comfort, at worst a distraction.
There is no substitute for taking care, and in the long run how a
VII
New Preface
society takes care of its members is a political, not a therapeutic
matter.
Uncompromising though this message undoubtedly is, I do not
regret it, and indeed I have since retracted no part of it. And
although it is stated in these pages with some ferocity, in places, it
carries with it a level of reassurance for those in psychological pain
more profound than that provided by any form of 'treatment'. For
the whole point is that emotional suffering of the kind which comes
to be labelled 'neurotic' or 'clinical' is the result not of the indi-
vidual's inadequacies, shortcomings, personal or genetic weak-
nesses, but of the inescapable infliction on vulnerable bodies of
noxious social influences which have their origin, most often, far
beyond the orbit of our personal lives.
The issues of responsibility and blame, of what we can and
cannot will (spelt out in most detail, perhaps, in How to Survive
without Psychotherapy), constitute a theme which recurs through-
out my written work, and though I have been hammering away at
it in one form or another for twenty years, it is still, I think, the
one most people find hardest to grasp. The core of our problem is
stated about as clearly as I can manage in Chapter Four, where I
try to show that it is the apparent indubitability of our personal
experience - our intimate knowledge of our feelings - which makes
it so difficult for us to conceive of the source of our difficulties as
outside ourselves. We feel it inside, so we think that that is where
it must indeed originate, and we are, therefore, easily persuaded
that it is we who are responsible for what ails us.
We give up this notion, if at all, only with the greatest reluctance,
for we feel that to do so robs us of our freedom and our agency.
In my subsequent writing I have tried to elaborate the point that
we do have freedom and agency, but only to the extent that they
are accorded to us. The power(s) to choose and to act are not
God-given, personal attributes, simply matters of 'will-power', but
social acquisitions dependent on the availability of essentially
material resources in the world outside our skins. Though some
may find it paradoxical, I resolutely maintain that this is, for those
who are suffering, a counsel not of despair, but of comfort. Cer-
tainly, in my work as a clinical psychologist, I have met many
people who have found it comforting; better to be suffering than
to be sub-standard.
This book is, therefore, more a critique of the society which gives
rise to psychological distress than of the approaches to therapy
which have been spawned to assuage it; the focus has shifted from
individual experience (as in Illusion and Reality) to social structure.
Vlll
New Preface
It was not difficult to see ten years ago how pervasive make-
believe and wishfulness were becoming as ways of interpreting
experience and constructing means of social control - I claim no
prophetic powers- but even so the true prophets of 'postmodernity'
( Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard) may have seemed to be
over-stating their case. Where I wrote in Chapter One of our failure
to distinguish between emdodied reality and dream-like imagery,
the representation of war as an aesthetic, electronic experience was
still almost five years off. The nineties, however have seen the
extension of imagery and make-believe right into the core of the
body politic and the threats to our embodied hold on reality which
were identified in the earlier chapters of this book are now rep-
resented within the official institutions of our society more as a
virtue than a nightmare.
The further disintegration of any idea that politics could be the
proper concern of the citizenry is particularly to be deplored. In
what has become a kind of apolitical, almost 'virtual' government,
issues affecting the material reality of our lives, along with concepts
of economic fairness and social justice, have been set aside in favour
of, for example, variants on the theme of 'responsibility'. Rather
than either the regulation or the overt exercise of oppressive power,
there is an attempt to maintain control (whether of scapegoats,
such as the teachers, or of corrupt commercial institutions selling
pension plans) through shaming and admonishment. The mani-
pulation of image, the frank abandonment of actuality for appear-
ance (for example the celebration of fashion as an 'industry') have
become not just ideological tools of government but the very pro-
cess of government itself. Government has thus become the manage-
ment of appearance; what is done to people is considered
indistinguishable from what they think has been done to them
(hence the successful politician's obsession with 'focus groups' and
the consequent inevitability of demagoguery); magic is officially
rehabilitated at every cultural level - science and soothsaying are
seen as but alternative ways to 'the truth'. The collapse of the
distinction between public and private which so concerns me in
these pages is now virtually complete.
And yet, of course, reality will not be gainsaid. We are still
embodied creatures in a real world even though the concept of a
'real world' has been hopelessly undermined by market rhetoric.
What has happened, of course, is that the demands of global
Business have put out of sight and beyond the reach of our criticism
-beyond, most significantly, the power of national governments to
control - the actual levers of power which constistute the ultimate
IX
New Preface
influences on our lives. A 'Labour' Prime Minister can smugly extol
the virtues of a 'flexible labour market' because the 'reality' of his
world does not include being able to influence the policies of huge
multi-national companies - he can only dance to their tune. And
for the men and women thrown out of work in the interests of
'flexibility' there are no officially authorized words with which to
criticize their condition; if their distress is not simply dumb, it can
be given form only in the language of personal responsibility and
inadequacy. The unemployed are 'jobseekers' or 'welfare-
dependants' and rather than being able to earn the means of their
livelihood they are offered either moral exhortation or counselling.
We need more than ever before to rescue the reality of our world,
if only because of the pain which is inflicted on the lives of so many
'ordinary' people. Our virtual reality is bought at too high a price.
Even in relatively prosperous Britain the suffering of those at the
bottom of the heap - and they are no small minority - is a social
outrage. Though not exactly a secret (ask any inner-city teacher or
health worker) the extent of this suffering is resolutely obscured
by the official institutions of society, not least the therapy and
counselling industry. The very first thing we have to do, therefore,
is to establish with fearless clarity what the nature of our predica-
ment is, and that may indeed prove a somewhat harrowing process.
Our real problem, however, is in knowing where to go from there.
It is easy enough to construct formulae for how our personal
lives should be lived - the philosophy of life sketched in Chapter
Seven, for example, still seems to me a fair enough ideal - but
turning insight into action is not simply a matter of the exercise of
personal will, for as individuals we are not in control of what we
do. In this book I make the case for taking care rather than provid-
ing therapy, but how that is to be achieved requires a political
analysis and understanding beyond the scope of these pages. One
thing, however, is certain: it will require the exercise of social
power.
David Smail
Nottingham, 1997
X
Introduction
Our accustomed ways of looking at the world suggest that we all
live in an unalterable, shared reality which exists quite indepen-
dently of any feelings we might have about how it ought to be.
Equally, our accustomed view of knowledge- especially scientific
knowledge - is that it gives a dispassionate, disinterested descrip-
tion of the way things are, again independently of how we might
like them to be.
These accustomed ways of looking at the world and viewing
knowledge have long been known - at least by many of those
whose business it is to think about such things - to be false.
In fact, the 'reality' we believe in is an illusion. In fact, our
'dispassionate' knowledge is highly partial and selective: it has aims
and purposes inextricable from the interests of power. We use
knowledge to subordinate nature, and that includes ourselves.
These issues may seem a long way from the concerns of a
psychologist whose job it is to try to understand and if possible
alleviate the emotional distress of individual people. However,
having worked for a number of years in the field of psychological
'treatment', I have become convinced, in the first place, that these
issues are central to an understanding of human despair, and in the
second that they should no longer remain the particular property of
'those whose business it is to think about such things'. These issues
are everybody's concern, and though it may be in the professional
interest to limit serious consideration of them to the experts, to do
so would not be, and is not, for the public good.
The central argument of this book is a very simple one, but,
obscured by my professional blinkers, it has taken me nearly three
decades to see it: psychological distress occurs for reasons which
make it incurable by therapy, but which are certainly not beyond
the powers of human beings to influence. We suffer pain because
we do damage to each other, and we shall continue to suffer pain
as long as we continue to do the damage. The way to alleviate and
mitigate distress is for us to take care of the world and the other
people in it, not to treat them.
Although (to me, but I am sure also to many others) this 'insight'
has now become blindingly obvious, it is extraordinarily difficult
to marshall the arguments and evidence which support it, since
they so often run counter to our customary ways of seeing and
thinking about things. It is, however, my belief that one cannot
expect people to give up the hope (not to mention the resources)
1
Introduction
they invest in 'treatment' until they have gained access to and had
a chance to consider for themselves what the arguments and
evidence are. And one cannot expect the sum of human distress to
diminish until we give up our investment in treatment, and address
instead the daunting task of taking care.
In my previous book, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of
Anxiety, • my basic concerns were not different from those
informing the present work, but my focus was particularly upon
individuals and their experience of anxiety within the compass of
their own lives. My aim was to try to offer encouragement to
people {that is, all of us) who have been bludgeoned out of their
understanding of the world by a remorseless 'objectivity', to risk
trusting themselves to become the 'subjects' that, in fearful secret,
they somehow know themselves to be. This time my focus is wider;
having, as it were, stated the dilemma in terms of the way it
presents itself in our immediate experience, I want now to broaden
the view to show how that experience is formed and influenced by
the social and cultural structures which we inhabit, and to suggest
what the implications of that may be for the way we should
conduct ourselves towards one another.
An attempt to understand the influence of social and cultural
structures takes one beyond present times and places, and chal-
lenges familiar and unthinkingly accepted views of what 'society'
is about. In the following pages I shall suggest a number of things
which may well seem at first - or even second - sight hard to
swallow: for example, that the world we seem to know, and which
seems so unalterably hard, and real and resistant to our will, is in
several important ways the illusory creation of our wishes, the
fabrication of our dreams. Indeed, there is a sense in which
dreaming, even when awake, is inescapable. We are, as it were,
doomed to 'grasp' reality only through our interpretation of it, and
hence we cannot really grasp it at all. But we can, as I shall also
argue, have respect for it: we may dream recklessly, or we may go
carefully because we know we are dreaming.
Again, I shall argue that what we take to be dispassionate
knowledge is in fact suffused with interest; that is, our knowledge
is inseparable from the uses to which we wish to put it- we exploit
our knowledge in order to explott the world's resources (including
people), and because so much of that exploitation is fundamentally
dishonourable, we hide its nature from ourselves (we 'repress' it).
My particular concern here will of course be with psychological
knowledge, and again I shall have the difficult - and to many
people perhaps unpalatable - task of suggesting that the main
*Dent, 1984.
2
Introduction
use to which psychological knowledge has been put has been the
exploitation of some people by others for purposes which, though
they do not appear in those others' conscious awareness, neverthe-
less suit them rather well.
Furthermore, if one is to understand the workings of interest,
particularly in relation to psychology and 'treatment', one must
investigate the sources of the plausibility in which it manages to
clothe itself. In part, I believe, these are to be traced to an age-old
and ever-present attraction to magic (which also shapes much of
our dreaming). Magic, indeed, is not at all a relic of the past, but
is found at the very kernel of our enthusiasm for science.
These factors (our wishful dreaming, magic, and interest)
combine with what we take to be the point of our lives - the
'pursuit of happiness' - to enslave us within a society in which
exploitation and indifference are the norm. In this society also, the
intellectual and conceptual means whereby we might get a purchase
on our predicament are largely obscured from us. Nowhere is this
more so than in the case of psychological distress and its treatment,
in which our ideas about why we suffer as we do, and whom we
are to 'blame', as well as how we may change or be 'cured', are
shaped by our social and cultural concerns much more to justify
and permit further exploitation than to allow us an insight into
the true reasons for our ills.
Far from being repairable machines, human beings are embodied
organisms on whom damage will at best always leave a scar. We
simply cannot get away with using and abusing each other as we
do, and it is small wonder that the ways of life into which we have
uncritically fallen, and which we take for granted as the natural
response to an inescapable reality, reverberate so disastrously in
our conduct towards and experience of each other - that is, in
our 'relationships', where, again without noticing, we have carried
exploitation to the very heart of our social undertakings, placing
it between man and woman, and parent and child.
The sense of 'therapy' which the subtitle of this book calls
into question is that in which therapy is 'officially' offered (and
undoubtedly widely accepted in the public mind) as a technical
procedure for the cure or adjustment of emotional or psychological
'disorder' in individual people. There are 'unofficial' aspects of
psychotherapy - recognized at least implicitly by many of its prac-
titioners - which I would not want to question, and indeed in
pursuance of which this book could be said to be written. These
aspects, however, are, in contrast with the grandiose claims and
aspirations of most 'schools' of psychotherapy, extremely limited
(sadly necessary palliatives in a disordered society) and not justifi-
ably professionally 'patentable'. Elaboration of them should in no
3
Introduction
way distract us from the much more essential task of trying to
understand and prevent the processes whereby we come to inflict
upon each other so much incurable damage.
As a matter of fact, though their stated profession and unstated
interest may be to offer cure, most therapists of good will also play
an inadvertently subversive role within the society which damages
us so profoundly. As I tried to show in Psychotherapy: A Personal
Approach, • what most often psychotherapists actually (as opposed
to professedly) do, is to negotiate a view of what the patient's
predicament is about which both patient and therapist can agree
(which is to establish, as closely as one ever can, what is the truth
of the matter), and then to encourage the patient to do what he
or she can to confront those elements of the predicament which
admit of some possibility of alteration. This almost inevitably
means that patients begin to criticize aspects of a social 'reality'
which before they had always taken for granted, and, with courage
or grace, to learn actively to dissent from and oppose the
constraints it had placed upon them: to overcome the tyranny of
objectivity. I would now lay more emphasis than I did in that book
on the value of comfort: for many people, psychotherapy provides
the only source of comfort they are likely to find in what has been,
for them at least, a predominantly cruel world.
The actual possible achievements of therapy may thus be
summarized very briefly as establishing what is the case ('demys-
tification'), and providing comfort and encouragement. Inasmuch
as this book is addressed primarily to people trying to make sense
of their own and others' distress, it is my hope that lessons I have
learned from the experience of psychotherapy (as I have come to
understand it) may to some extent transfer to these pages.
The process of demystification, the examination and clearing of
the confusions which surround the person's deceived or self-
deceiving view of what lies behind the 'symptoms', often forms the
longest part of the therapeutic enterprise. There are, it is true,
therapists who feel that, as long as they are sure of how they can
make patients confront the difficulties which beset them, there is
really no point in spending much time in demystification: what
matters, they say, is getting on with tackling the problems, not
investigating the reasons why they arose in the first place. I do not
myself agree with this view, though I have no doubt that it may
sometimes 'work'. It seems to me essential for people to enter into,
to have the full opportunity to alter and argue with the processes
whereby someone else arrives at a formulation of 'the problem';
the alternative constitutes reliance upon an authoritarian or
•Dent, 1978.
4
Introduction
'parentalist' elite which in the long run infantilizes and makes

dependent- embodies, indeed, a form of tyranny.
It is of course not possible in a book to enter into a dialogue
with the reader, and hence the negotiative element of attempts at
'demystification' has to be missing. I shall, then, have to rely upon
arguments which I hope will persuade, and forego the opportunity
of listening which is so essential to reaching an understanding.
Nobody, I am sure, who is fundamentally antipathetic to any
particular view is persuaded of its truth by argument. I shall,
therefore, be preaching to the at least half converted; in any case
I believe that the most a writer can hope for is to illuminate and
articulate ideas and views which are already partially formed in
the reader.
It is then in a kind of demystification process that the first six
chapters of this book (those, that is, whose contents have been
briefly sketched above) are intended to be engaged. The intention
is to suggest that our ordinary ways of considering our lives and
'relationships' (i.e. the other people in them) obscure a view of
how corrupt, exploitative and emotionally impoverished and
damaging our social organization, and hence our conduct towards
each other, have become. In the course of making my argument I
cannot rely on cast-iron 'evidence', but will have to trust to the
all-too-fallible methods of persuasion (as for example occasional
reference to what may turn out to be entirely idiosyncratic elements
of my own experience) by which I may hope to strike in the reader
a sympathetic chord. Some of the arguments I shall marshall are
based on ideas I know I have gleaned from others, and some, no
doubt, on ideas which I have forgotten that I have gleaned from
others. Whatever their source, all of them are ideas which illumi-
nate and make sense of my experience during the conduct of
psychotherapy: they clarify, for me anyway, the nature of distress.
The final two chapters are written in the hope that some encour-
agement may be derived from them. There are in fact no magic
answers to our predicament, no dreaming away of our real,
embodied, presence in the world. There is no escape from the
necessity to give up an infantile longing for blissful ease, to grow
to maturity and to take care both of our environment and of each
other. We have to rediscover a morality which is not moralistic,
and construct a society which both acknowledges and makes what
provision it can for the difficulties involved in creating tolerance,
forbearance, justice and care. We talk a lot about love, but (as I
suggested in Illusion and Reality) there is not a great deal of it
about. We cannot, therefore, simply love each other better; we
have first to make a society in which love may take root and thrive.
I cannot claim to be optimistic about the prospects of attaining
5
Introduction
any such society (could anyone, who sees the lack of restraint in
our history and the destructive intent of our technology?), but it
might, with the very greatest effort, just be possible.
There is probably not very much of comfort in all this. However,
my experience both personally and professionally is that the
greatest comfort derives from having one's view, however
despairing it may be, confirmed by someone else who is not afraid
to share it. As long, then, as this book helps some people in their
quest to identify the roots of their unease, I hope it may even be
comforting. It would certainly comfort me to think that here or
there it might find an echo.
There is one central and essential point I wish to emphasize
above all others in this introduction, and to beg the reader to bear
in mind throughout what follows: it is neither my wish nor my
intention to engender in him or her any sense of guilt or blame. It
is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, seriously to criticize our
society and our conduct toward each other without challenging
very fundamental and widely shared assumptions, without showing
anger and having at times almost deliberately to shock. Even the
most constructive criticism, if it is to avoid superficiality, necessi-
tates seeing some very familiar things in some very unfamiliar ways.
There are thus some elements of trying to 'negotiate' a view which
just cannot be at all times measured and reasonable and cool. But
it is part of the very heart of my argument that no body - singular
or collective - is to blame for the predicament in which we find
ourselves. We are all, certainly, responsible, in the sense that
nobody but we ourselves wreak on each other the havoc we do,
but the concept of blame is one which mystifies and obscures the
processes whereby this comes about. (Blame is an effective means
of manipulating people and groups, not a valid concept for under-
standing them.) As anyone who has an intimate concern with
human misery knows, blame and guilt, invoked as explanations,
are simply ways of evading the difficulties involved in tackling it.
The same, it seems to me, is likely to be true of misery on a societal
scale.
6
1
Dreaming and Wishing:
The Individual and Society
'All life is a dream, and dreams are just dreams.'
What seemed to me as a schoolboy no more than a poetic
affectation useful for quoting in exams, comes to mind thirty years
later as a statement of the simple truth.
Perhaps all that signifies is that literature is wasted on some
schoolboys; perhaps anyway Calderon • meant something entirely
different by his words from what I now understand by them.
However that may be, it seems to me that we may be sunk more
deeply into our dreams than at any previous time in our recorded
history, and in any case more deeply than we can afford to be, for
our dreams are full of a destructive rage and hatred, a frustrated
craving for omnipotence, a desperation for satisfaction beyond the
bounds of mere greed, through which we may dream ourselves to
our own annihilation.
We can see the world only in the ways that human beings,
with their own particular ways of sensing and experiencing (and
interpreting sensation and experience) can see it. Whatever reality
there may be beyond the 'reality' which filters to us through our
individual, historical and cultural ways of seeing, we shall never
be able to say what it 'is'. We have, of course, a naive belief in a
scientifically establishable, objective reality, but subscribing to that
belief is in truth doing no more than taking, in a very grandiose
way, what is merely our best guess so far about the nature of
things as the nature of things. We have yet fully to accept that we
can never get beyond guesswork.
So we are dreamers within a reality we cannot ever completely
know, but which is nevertheless vulnerable to our conduct. Our
lives are dreamt within a world, indeed a universe, which permits
our dreaming and exists independently of it. Though we cannot
know our world, we can certainly dream its destruction (and
thereby put an end also to our dreaming).
That 'primitive man' lives in a dream is easy enough for most
of us to grasp as we read of his nervous transactions with a world
of ghostly ancestry and dangerous magic. What we find less easy
to see is that our own world is to just about the same extent
constructed out of superstitious fantasies, centring, in our case,
•In his play Life Is a Dream, 1635.
7
Dreaming and Wishing: The Individual and Society
mainly around images of conquest and wealth. Furthermore, our

naive belief in a scientifically establishable objective reality renders
us dangerously blind to the influence of our dreaming. Less wise
than the Australian Aborgines, we do not acknowledge our origin
in a 'dream time', and have not traced its contribution to our
'scientifically established reality'. We mistakenly trust our reality,
therefore, not to be affected by 'primitive' dreaming: we are not
sufficiently on our guard against the influence of our dreams.
Dreams vary in the degree of their 'primitiveness', but this is to
be judged more by the extent to which they are infused by wishful
self-concern than by any lack of correspondence they may have
with what we assume to be 'objective reality'.
Human beings are, so to speak, engines of symbolism. We turn
the reality we cannot finally know into a kind of endlessly enriching
compost of symbols, of which our wide-awake, conscious words
are only one, and by no means necessarily the most profound,
aspect. Anyone who has 'watched' his or her thoughts (i.e. self-
addressed speech) turn at the point of sleep into 'pictures' cannot
fail to be astounded by the economy, complexity and beauty of
the process of symbolic transformation. Since it tends not to have
words attached to it, and since we find it very hard to 'remember'
without the use of language, this process is an extremely difficult
one to capture. Although I know I have experienced it quite
frequently, I can only think of a couple of examples.
Sitting in a London underground train, for instance, I watch the
cables writhe past along the tunnel wall. Some are thicker than
others; they run neatly parallel, until suddenly they switch position,
cross over, alter their height, branch unexpectedly, swerve a little.
I just catch myself 'realizing' that the cables 'are' an argument;
they are a complex logical discourse; in some absolutely direct way
they display the nature of an intellectual thesis. Again, one hot
afternoon, I look slightly sleepily out of the window down at the
car park outside. Suddenly the car park - the arrangement of the
cars, their colours, the way the sunlight reflects off them - is
absolutely full of meaning (I cannot say what, for I am surprised
into wakefulness and have no time to put words to the meaning
before it has gone).
I suspect that our world - the world, that is, of 'developed'
Western civilization- is as saturated with our dream-meanings as
are the cave walls of any Stone Age hunters. We live with the
world we cannot know (in the way we think we would like to) in
a relation of symbolic reciprocity. We extract from the world
meanings and metaphors which we then project back into it as
objective characteristics, though of course there is nothing truly
objective about them.
8
At any moment, waking or sleeping, experience reaches us

through an accretion of meaning, all of it to some extent individu-
ally and culturally idiosyncratic, which has, as it were, become
wired into our bodies from previous experience. This accretion of
meaning thus gives form and colour to everything we experience
in the present, providing a kind of symbolic background to what
we take to be reality. In this sense, we dream all the time. Perhaps
the underground cables have more in common with the caveman's
bison than we might suspect. • More than just dreaming inside
our own heads, we dream into as well as out of the world: our
psychological relation to the world is one of continuous symbolic
interchange. The depth, complexity and significance of that relation
is quite awe-inspiring; symbolization of this kind, asleep or awake,
is the very opposite of primitive. There is no shame in our being
dreamers.
'All life is a dream', if true, seemed to my schoolboy self a
potential reason for taking life less seriously than otherwise one
might. However, the reverse now seems to me the case. If I dream
you, and you dream me (and, of course, we do: how else explain the
rapid shifts in perception of each other we undergo, the discovery in
time that we are more separate than we thought, that wife is not
mother, husband not knight?), then how careful we must be with
each other. For if all there is for us is dreaming there is no possi-
bility of waking to find that the harm we have done each other
was just a dream. Over and over again, as a species, we 'awake'
from our dreams to find our hands covered in blood.
There are all kinds of dreaming, and it is important not to get
carried away by the metaphor of 'life as a dream' to the point
where we lose a conception of reality. Even though we cannot
directly know reality as something 'in itself', existing quite objec-
tively apart from our symbolic understanding of it, we can attempt
to 'unwind' it as far as possible from our wishful fantasies.
This, no doubt, is what science, at its best, achieves. But all too
quickly science itself becomes enmeshed in our autistic reveries of
power, so that we use it as a vehicle for our covert aims and
borrow its authority to justify our ravaging of the world and each
other.
The wishful fantasies we dream in our beds at night - the kind
of which Freud began, at least, to articulate an understanding -
present no great problem of themselves. (In fact, they need no
articulate understanding since their whole meaning is inarticulate
*This line of thought is pursued with great, if at times rather oppressive

erudition by Susanne Langer in her three-volume Mind: An Essay on
Human Feeling, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967-82.
9
and in most respects quite sufficient unto itself.) As we sleep, we

may fantasize any kind of satisfaction or horror with no more ill-
effect than, perhaps, a slight feeling of unease or embarrassment
for half the following day. But, awake, only a faithful respect for
the unknowable reality of the world and the other people in it will
prevent our enacting our dreams in potentially catastrophic ways.
For what else is the man who takes an automatic rifle to mow down
the shoppers in an American supermarket doing but dreaming?
If we are to unwind ourselves from the strands of base magic
which are so thickly interwoven in our dreams we need to remind
ourselves that we are not simply pictures, or shadows, or images,
but bodies in a world. In the second half of this century there has
been an increasing awareness of the dangerous seductiveness of the
image, though interpreted differently by different writers. • At
times, even, it becomes unclear which is more important to us -
the image or the actuality. In the political sphere particularly,
though by no means solely, the explicit concern of the actors (some
of them trained as such!) as well as the commentators is with the
adequacy of their image, the effectiveness of the 'P.R.' battles which
seek to present us with credibility as a higher value than truth. The
awful danger, of course, is that enactment of the fantasies which
such 'images' create can, and does, result in the mutilation of our
bodies and our world.
Contributing to this state of affairs, no doubt, is the fact that
our very experience of the world is becoming increasingly insub-
stantial and disconnected from any bodily involvement in it. For
example, whether presenting 'fact' or 'fantasy', the television- on
which most of us depend for any kind of understanding of world
affairs- deals solely in images. It thus becomes increasingly difficult
to differentiate the images of our dreaming sleep from those of our
waking televisual experience, and gradually the laborious, unedit-
able nature of our bodily experience of the world seems to become
*Daniel Boorstin, for example, in The Image (Penguin Books, 1963)

simply bemoans the usurpation by vulgar and synthetic imitativeness of
values once the hallowed property of an appreciative elite. His thesis that
the populace demands the trash supplied to it by an almost reluctant
commercial world is absurd, though his exposure of the nature of the
trash itself is brilliant. Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (Black and
Red, 1983), born of the Paris riots in 1968, makes an altogether more
plausible link between image and interest, though with great Gallic
opacity. Most compelling of all is Christopher Lasch's The Minimal Self
(Picador, 1985) in which the depths of our confusion between reality and
illusion, and its dangers, are described with considerable power.
10
a kind of irksome, obsolete burden. Our dreams are so much more

attractive, and it seems that technology makes them attainable.
At no time in our previous history can it have been so possible
for people to 'experience' death and destruction - the actual death
and destruction of real people - on such a wide scale but in such
a disembodied and dislocated form. The danger is that we get so
used to them in this form that we think we know what they're
like and that they don't really hurt. Hence perhaps the numbed
amazement written on the face of people who discover that 'it' has
indeed 'happened to them'. Hence perhaps also the unhappy moral
confusion and uncertainty surrounding the deaths of forty spec-
tators at a televised football match - do we treat this as a real
event demanding a flesh-and-blood response to the sensible agony
of those involved, or do we sweep up the bodies like so many
discarded cardboard containers of fried chicken and get on with
the game? Our confusion is genuine - already our world is such
that the values of embodied presence seem not necessarily to
outweigh those of disembodied image.
And yet it is inconceivable that we shall ever be able to achieve
what seems to be our covert aim - that is, to etherealize ourselves
to the point where we become pure, disembodied images, as unen-
cumbered as an electronic pulse. We are creatures of bone and
tissue in a world upon which we depend for our bodily existence.
If we persist in actually involving each other in the pursuit of our
dream images, we shall discover that they are indeed dreams from
which we cannot awake and that the sacrifices we make will be
made not in pictures, but in tears and blood.
In our eagerness to escape the vulnerability to pain to which
our nature as embodied beings exposes us, we construct a variety
of technological and therapeutic 'solutions' which share a common
origin in the wishful magic of dreaming. But no matter how hard
we may try and how fervently we may believe in it, magic still
does not work. The reluctant conclusion to which I have been
driven after having worked for some years in the fields of
psychology and psychotherapy - fields which are, as I shall argue
later, deeply imbued with magic - is that human suffering arises
from our embodied interaction with a world whose reality, though
it cannot be known, cannot be wished away. A very significant
part of the psychologist's role is continuous with that of the
'cunning man' and the astrologer, and as such is a sham. The evil
that we do each other cannot be undone, at least not so easily as
we like to think, and the ravages of the world cannot be erased.
Not for nothing, I believe, are so many people these days
oppressed and frightened by a sense they have that 'things have
got out of control', that people are the powerless victims of imper-
11
sonal forces which are experienced as a strange and barely analys-

able mixture of malignity and inevitability - even necessity. It is
as if these forces are uninfluenceable: we wait for them to crush
us and to destroy our environment with the kind of hopeless
resignation one imagines prisoners awaiting execution to feel.
Fifteen or so years ago, it was quite common for people who
expressed a sense of impending doom, and who perhaps coupled
this with some kind of untutored critique of the societal or techno-
logical influences they took to be responsible, to be diagnosed as
mentally unstable in some way. I have several times in the past
observed at first hand the label 'schizophrenic' being attached to
someone on no better grounds than that they accounted for their
emotional unease in terms judged by their psychiatrists to be
'pseudo-philosophical'. Nowadays, it seems, this sense of helpless-
ness and threat has become much more general, and though the
'pseudo-philosophical' constructions of and reactions to it have
become both more shared and more focused (e.g. in environmen-
talist movements and an upsurge of fundamentalist religious
feeling) there are still many people who feel unable to formulate a
clear idea of exactly what is wrong.
It is no longer plausible to suggest that people who feel this sort
of unease are unstable or even mad (though this is a possibility
that they themselves often consider with great trepidation). Our
feelings seem rather to be indications of a social, not an individual,
'disease', and are to be taken absolutely seriously. 'Ordinary
people', it seems, are swiftly becoming dislocated from any sense
at all that they can influence or even identify those forces which
shape their lives, and this both engenders a despair which is
reflected in their relations with others and stimulates forms of
defensiveness (such as denial, apathy, or ostrich-like optimism)
which only serve to make things worse. The state of affairs, in any
social community, in which people find themselves being carried
along by forces which seem both destructive and out of reach of
their influence, is a recipe for disaster.
'There have always been prophets of doom,' you may say, to
which the answer must be that doom is prophesied only that it
may be avoided. What I find much more chilling than prophecies
of doom is the fact that doom has often enough already occurred
with only one or two observers (out of millions) brave enough to
say what they saw and to draw lessons for the future. The prophet
of doom may indeed be an optimist alongside the observer of
doom, who could under the circumstances scarcely be blamed for
pessimism.
Take, for example, just one fragment of the experience of the
psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who as a youth of barely twenty found
12
himself blown into a shell-hole in a First World War battlefield,

drenched in mud, water, and bits and pieces of other people's
bodies- 'a kind of human soup'. It is surely not surprising that,
having observed the 'progress' of humanity for the ensuing sixty
years he should write:
When the super clever monkeys with their super clever tools
have blown themselves into a fit and proper state to provide
delicate feeding for the coming lords and ladies of creation,
super microbe sapiens, then the humans who cumber the
earth will achieve their crowning glory, the gorgeous colours
of putrescent flesh to rot and stink and cradle the new
aristocracy ...
What is perhaps much more surprising is that so many people
who have experienced similarly horrific circumstances to those
Bion describes in his book, and so many of the rest of us who may
in one way or another learn of them, continue, either by forgetting
them, excusing them or even glorifying them, to believe in any
future at all.
This may seem an unnecessarily drastic theme by which to
illustrate our apparent inability to learn from our mistakes, and
one far removed from the usual concerns of psychology. However,
I make no apologies, since it seems to me that the everyday violence
we do each other, the waste of human talent and squandering of
human resources, the suspicion of and indifference toward each
other which are such features of our alienated existence, all of
which lead to a wreckage of human life which in its own way is
quite bad enough, may eventually- perhaps quite soon- terminate
in a frame of mind in which we really don't care if we try to
destroy ourselves outright. This is not fanciful; it has happened
before. The difference now is that 'we have the technology' to
guarantee success.
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of human nature lies in its vulner-
ability to wishful magic. Perhaps, ultimately, it will prove to be its
fatal aspect. Over and over again we abandon a rational intuition
of our embodiment in a real world for passionate belief in alterna-
tive modes of existence in worlds created out of our imagination.
Our genius as symbolizers and as users of language enables us to
disregard the lessons of our bodily experience, and to construct
acceptable versions of all our lowest motives and actions, in ways
that, fortunately for them, are not available to less 'gifted' species,
which are by contrast firmly anchored in an ineffable reality from
which no flight of fancy can release them. A dead cat is a dead
*W. R. Bion The Long Week-End, Fleetwood Press, 1982.
13
cat, and could never become, for example, posthumous martyr to

some warlike feline cause.
The cultural miasma that we have created inside our heads to
preserve us from catching a glimpse of the mess we make of our
world leads us also to be not easily moved by pity. If our response
to physical pain and death is frequently uncertain, our awareness
of frustration, deprivation and waste seems, on the face of things
at least, largely absent• It was, for example, what he saw as the
appalling waste of youth which inspired Paul Goodman to write a
bitter critique• of American society of the fifties.
In our society, bright lively children, with the potentiality for
knowledge, noble ideals, honest effort, and some kind of
worthwhile achievement, are transformed into useless and
cynical bipeds, or decent young men trapped or early
resigned, whether in or out of the organized system.
In despair, the fifteen-year-aids hang around and do nothing

at all, neither work nor play ... They do not do their school
work, for they are waiting to quit; and it is hard ... for them
to get part-time jobs. Indeed, the young fellows (not only
delinquents) spend a vast amount of time doing nothing.
They hang around together, but don't talk about anything,
nor even - if you watch their faces - do they passively take
in the scene. Conversely, at the movies, where the real scene is
by-passed, they watch with absorbed fantasy, and afterward
sometimes mimic what they saw.
It is sad that Goodman's book, apart from its forlorn thread of
optimism more relevant today than ever, has not become a bible
for anyone (i.e. all of us) who has responsibilities to the young.
One wonders what Goodman would have made now of the dead-
eyed hopelessness of so many young people whose only permissible
aspiration is to acquire the plastic junk they appraise so listlessly
in shopping-precinct windows, and one despairs that so passionate
and articulate a warning should have gone so apparently unheeded.
No one is likely to become more aware of the extraordinary
ingenuity possessed by human beings in the business of magically
falsifying their experience than the psychotherapist. It is in the way
we try to deal with the anguish arising from our existence in the
world that one may see most clearly our reluctance to recognize
its causes and get to grips effectively with its consequences. One of
the earliest lessons learned by any moderately observant therapist is
that what the patient says about his or her predicament is, for a
*P. Goodman, Growing Up Absurd, Vintage Books, 1956.
14
number of reasons (often outside the patient's knowledge or

control), systematically distorted so as to hide its real significance.
In fact, psychological malaise is the inevitable sequel of difficult or
unfortunate aspects of the individual's relation to his or her world,
but (conveniently for the person, society or both) is not recognized
as such. To recognize the real reasons for psychological distress
would, usually, be too painful or threatening, present difficulties
too apparently insuperable, uncover hatred and recrimination too
seemingly unbearable, reveal too much guilty subterfuge, or simply
expose to view social injustice which would be too insupportable
for the attendant difficulties to be kept within manageable bounds.
Patients therefore magically interpret 'the problem' as something
altogether more amenable to professional intervention; a lifetime
of misery becomes an illness with a cure.
So far, psychotherapists, in seeing accurately enough that patients
distort their experience so as to minimize the difficulties of its
implications, have failed to realize that they themselves are playing
a complementary part in this process of mystification by implicitly
offering magic solutions for the 'problems' encountered. These are
points upon which I shall expand in subsequent chapters, but what
I want here to emphasize is that the therapeutic situation as a
whole offers a rare insight into the way collectively we try to use
magic to repair the damage we do to each other. Although it may
be true that psychotherapists (and this was the abiding achievement
of Freud and his colleagues) are able to remove some of the mystery
from the individual person's anguish, they may end up only making
matters worse if they set about trying to put things right merely
through a process of, in the broadest sense, interpretation. We shall
make, and in my view have made, no progress at all by interpreting
human misery merely as the outcome of the individual's misinter-
pretation of his or her circumstances. What is so instructive about
the therapeutic situation taken, again, as a whole, is that it shows
clearly how we collude with each other in trying (on the patient's
side) to falsify our experience and obscure our motives, and (on
the therapist's) to offer magically painless ways out of the predica-
ments we create. A further instructive feature of the therapeutic
situation, again one which I shall criticize in greater detail later, is
that it seeks to understand and explain human distress precisely in
individual terms, as well as implying that it may be 'cured' or
ameliorated through efforts of individual consciousness.
For the moment, then, there are two lessons in particular from
the experience of psychotherapy which I should wish to be borne
clearly in mind. The first is that human beings easily misrepresent
the reasons for their own anguish. The second is that those
supposed to be most expert in the understanding of that anguish,
15
being no more than human themselves, easily succeed in obscuring

its nature even further. As a partial explanation of this I have
concentrated so far upon our wishful fantasies, our greedy, magic-
infused dreams. But at the centre of these is something altogether
harder and more mundane: our interest.
Interest is the method in our madness, the force which pushes
our dreams in some directions rather than others, the guilty secret
which collectively we do our best to keep. It is by dragging interest
into the open, I believe, that we shall most readily be able to
understand the damage we do each other and the pain we cause.
Not that in many ways interest is not perfectly manifest - indeed
in these days in particular it shows itself in some of its aspects
quite boldly - but still, of all our mystifications, the mystification
of interest is the most developed and most defended at every level
of society.
Among other (and more important) reasons for 'neurotic' self-
deception is frequently to be found the individual's camouflaged
interest - the rather base and shameful motive which is satisfied
by the 'illness', the weakness, perhaps, which permits one person
to tyrannize another. Indeed, almost any form of disability can be
turned to the person's interest, and it is only the most unusual
people who do not find some advantage to be gained from their
lameness, deafness or blindness. However, our shameful weak-
nesses, if we are to put them to the fullest use, must be disguised,
or, best, made unknown to ourselves, and for this the process of
repression is most suitable: we do things, but we do not acknowl-
edge (spell out in words) what we are doing. But this, and other
reasons for 'neurotic' conduct identified as residing somehow
within individuals, are not enough to explain their suffering. The
operation of interest and repression at the individual level is useful
mainly for offering us a clue to the understanding of their operation
on an altogether wider scale.
In our everyday considerations of how societies work, repression
is of course used in a rather different sense from that above.
Groups or classes of people are repressed, it is thought, when the
instruments of power are used quite consciously on the part of the
ruling group or class to 'deal with' those it considers for one reason
or another undesirable. And yet it is not only unhappy individuals
who hide from themselves, by failing to acknowledge them, the
operations whereby their interests are furthered. Through manipu-
lation of the media of mass communication - the means whereby
they spell out their intentions to their members - whole societies,
and especially their governments, pursue the interests of those who
wield power while claiming or appearing to pursue the welfare of
all. In part this is of course quite conscious - few people these
16
days, and least of all politicians, are unaware of the importance of

'image' - and yet, I suspect, most would feel (i.e. articulate to
themselves) that the manipulation of image is aimed only at finding
the 'best', most palatable way to present an entirely honourable
policy. In fact, however, it is probably the case that societies no
less than individuals successfully hide from themselves the
dishonourable pursuit of their own interest by an exactly analogous
process of not spelling it out. Furthermore, those people within a
given society who threaten to discover the hidden interests and
expose them to public criticism are likely to be repressed in both
senses of the word: if they are not simply ignored or forgotten by
public consciousness, they will be put down by power. They will
be resisted just as bitterly as the psychoanalyst's interpretation of
the individual patient's baser motives are resisted.
Nobody I know puts the issue of our interestedness with greater
directness and simplicity than Leo Tolstoy. In a book (perhaps
unsurprisingly in view of the nature of social repression) no longer
widely read, nor indeed in print in Britain, • he suggests that the
major cultural preoccupations of society have always been used in
the service of the interests of the ruling group, covert vehicles for
the unworthy motives of the powerful. First the Church, then what
he calls State or 'professorial' philosophy, and now science have
been used as justifications for some people to exploit others. With
the clarity and percipience which are so characteristic of his writing,
and with a relevance which has if anything increased in the hundred
years since he wrote it, he suggests, for example, that the much-
vaunted impartiality of science is merely a smokescreen for the
operation of interest:
Contemporary science investigates facts.
But what facts? Why those particular facts and not others?
Scientists of today are very fond of saying solemnly and
confidently: 'We only investigate facts,' imagining these
words to have some meaning. One cannot possibly only inves-
tigate facts for the number of facts available for investigation
is innumerable (in the exact sense of that word). Before invest-
igating the facts one must have a theory on the basis of which
such or such facts are selected from among the innumerable
quantity.
And, of course, as Tolstoy goes on to point out, the theory is one
which happens to justify the social status quo. A few pages further
on, he also indicates the selective nature of our intellectual interests.
•L. Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do? First published 1886.
17
Citing the influence of Comte's philosophical positivism on the

new enthusiasm for science, he writes:
What is remarkable . . . is that of Comte's works, which
consist of two parts- the positive philosophy and the positive
politics - the learned world only accepted the first: the part
which on the new experimental basis, offered a justification
for the existing evil of human societies; but the second part,
dealing with the moral obligations of altruism resulting
from acknowledging humanity as an organism, was con-
sidered not merely unimportant but even insignificant and
unscientific.
I do not believe that anyone who attends closely to the nature
of ordinary people's distress - even if it appears to be 'purely
psychological' - and confronts honestly the resistance of its causes
to our efforts at magical cure, can ultimately ignore the funda-
mental part played in our suffering by the disavowed (repressed)
operation of interest on a societal scale. Explanations of distress
which rely simply on concepts of the malfunctioning or intransi-
gence of individuals in fact lead nowhere, unless, that is, explainers
and explained manage to collude in an illusory version of a world
which has no substance outside our own heads. We have developed
and exhausted just about every variation on the theme of either
individual mechanical breakdown or personal moral inadequacy
to account for the anxiety, isolation, fear, depression and frus-
tration which are endemic in our society, so far with no convincing
success. There is, for example, no satisfactory evidence that 'mental
illnesses' are illnesses at all, but there is every indication that our
pain, confusion, suspicion and hostility, the vulnerability which we
try to disguise in so many desperate and crazy ways, arise out of
our conduct towards each other.
No matter how appalling the circumstances in which people
live, it seems that sooner or later they grow accustomed to them.
Not only that, but it seems quite quickly that these are the only
possible circumstances which could exist. When one thinks of the
contrasts which are to be found in the world between the ways of
life of the people in it, it is in many ways astonishing that people
so readily accept their lot. For example, both the most and the
least privileged are quite likely to view their circumstances as both
inevitable and somehow deserved. In this manner, when people
seek an explanation for their unhappy situation, they tend to seek
it in some kind of natural rather than social order. This propensity
of human beings, whatever its fundamental explanation, is one
which it is very easy to exploit, often unconsciously, in the interests
of those so disposed, and one of the best ways of exploiting it is
18
by creating institutions (like 'scientific psychology') which reinforce

our readiness to believe that our unhappiness is the natural result
of our personal shortcomings.
It is strangely difficult for the naive investigator (and no investi-
gators are to be found more naive than those in psychology and
psychiatry) to uncover the principles by which modern Western
society seems to render so many of its members so desperately
unhappy. One reason for this difliculty is that the naive investigator
is as prone as anyone else to take society as given and to focus on
the problem of how individuals may be brought to 'adjust' to it.
However, naivety may to some extent be overcome by an (all too
rare) combination of experience and honesty, in which case it
becomes clear that the individuals cannot be taken out of the
context of the society which they inhabit.
Slowly one becomes led to see that the hostile defensiveness
which so often characterizes our relations with each other,
the heartless ways in which we exploit and use each other, the
extent to which we accept and reject ourselves and each
other as commodities, entirely inescapably reflect the culture
in which we live. One can no more easily opt out of a culture
than one can opt out of a physical environment, and a poison-
ous culture will affect one just as surely as will a polluted
atmosphere.
Encapsulated in our belief that the reasons for our conduct are
to be tracked down somewhere inside our own skulls, most of
us assume that, if life becomes uncomfortable, it must be some
individual's 'fault'. Most psychotherapy patients, for example, are
quite surprised, if greatly relieved, to discover that their predica-
ment is not unique in the therapist's experience. What, to the
attentive therapist, comes as even more surprising is the discovery
that not only are patients' experiences and 'problems' often not
unique, they are general, and more than likely pretty familiar in
the therapist's personal experience as well. As I shall discuss in
greater detail in Chapter 6, this is nowhere clearer than in our
'relationship problems'. What seems to millions of men and women
a singularly personal and isolating misery, a purely private mixture
of hate, rejection and despair, is in fact being experienced (or
repressed) in one form or another in practically every household
in the land. We are caught up in the movements of our culture as
droplets in a wave. This is not to say that we have no unique
difficulties or purely individual 'problems', but that very much
more often than it seems our predicament is created by circum-
stances we all share but none of us is able to see or to acknowledge.
Recognition of this state of affairs has the most profound impli-
19
cations, since it opens the way for hatred, bitterness, recrimination,

guilt and self-disgust to be replaced by, at least, a kind of sympath-
etic tolerance for those who are, in Dickens's phrase, our 'fellow
passengers to the grave'.
Culture does not come about by accident. Just as the psychother-
apist may after long and patient inquiry, perhaps with the aid of
one or two fortuitous discoveries, slowly begin to be able to formu-
late an idea of the patient's unacknowledged reasons for his or her
conduct, so may one at the wider, societal level begin to see -
almost by becoming aware of the factors we explicitly do not refer
to - what some of the reasons may be for our adherence to our
'psycho-noxious' ways of life. Most of these reasons, it seems to
me, cluster around a collective aim to maximize, at more or less
any cost (to others), personal interest. We are united nowhere more
than in our selfishness.
When our fundamental collective aim is less than worthy, we
construct special institutions for the more or less sole (if quite
unconscious) purpose of repressing its recognition. Psychiatry and
psychology largely fulfil this role, and so it is not surprising that
the discussion of interest forms virtually no part of their concern.
One has, rather, to turn to social criticism within history for the
beginnings of an understanding of what our inarticulate projects
may be.
It is almost certainly as misleading to look back on former times
as less problematic or destructive than ours as it is to regard our
own times as the inevitable achievement of progress. However,
there seems to be a strong case to be made for the reflection that
for the past four to five hundred years Western society has become
less and less concerned with a social order based on moral prin-
ciples and more and more concerned with one based on economic
principles. It would of course be utterly false to regard the Middle
Ages as a period when no one had an interest in power and riches,
but there seems to be at least a measure of agreement among
historians that some coherence was then lent to society by an
explicit, largely religious philosophy which aimed at the moral
regulation of people's conduct towards each other, and which
indeed had some success in defining a social order in which
everyone had rights as well as obligations. Though exploitation
and corruption may have been rife, it is still worth noting that, as
R. H. Tawney pithily puts it:
If it is proper to insist on the prevalence of avarice and greed

in high places, it is not less important to observe that men
called these vices by their right names, and had not learned
20
to persuade themselves that greed was enterprise and avarice

economy.*
It seems a long way from the experience of distress of individual
people in psychotherapy to reflections concerning the undermining
of ecclesiastical authority at the time of the Renaissance and the
subsequent rise to power of a class of merchants and financiers
who were to change the sin of usury into the virtue of profit. And
yet I believe that the connection is inescapable, and I find myself
unexpectedly grateful to historians who, like Tawney, throw light
on the societal conditions in which our experience is set, and which
go some considerable way towards exposing the reasons for its
so-frequently distressing nature. For while it would be at best
tendentious and at worst entirely misleading to attempt to derive
a psychology of individual experience from an account of historical
processes, it seems much more intellectually reassuring to find in
the historical account explanations for individual experience which
would remain otherwise quite unexplainable.
Most psychologists work within a ludicrously short time scale.
The 'literature' of research and 'laboratory experiment' by means
of which most British and American psychologists orientate them-
selves tends to be compressed within - to put it on the generous
side - the most recent twenty years. Satisfaction with this state of
affairs depends upon a confidence in the relative infallibility of the
'scientific' methodology of 'objective' measurement and 'quantific-
ation' of human 'behaviour', and an indifference to the influence
of historical, social and political factors, which seem to me to be
becoming increasingly hard to maintain. The necessary alternative
is, then, to stray outside the bounds of one's own discipline, and
gladly to accept from whatever other sources offer themselves the
kinds of conceptual help which contribute to making sense of one's
experience. At a time when intellectual specialization is so narrow
that 'education' in one branch of 'knowledge' qualifies one not at
all to judge the validity of argument in other branches, such
straying beyond one's 'legitimate' boundaries is not without risk.
However, since this kind of specialization is one of the conse-
quences of the workings of interest in the very way that I am
seeking to criticize, it is a risk I shall from time to time have to
take.
In trying to understand the frequently quite unconscious aims
of individuals it often helps to ignore what they say, to themselves
as well as to us, and to look as ingenuously as possible at what
*R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Penguin Books,

1938.
21
they seem to be trying to do, in which case the aims may become
quite surprisingly obvious. In the same way, if one wants fully to
comprehend the impetus behind our collective, social conduct, one
need often do no more than ignore the rhetoric and look instead
at our actions. Such ingenuous observation only goes to confirm
the ubiquity of interest. We have carried the commercial values
developed over the last five centuries, at first with shame and later
with enthusiasm, to a point where all our dealings with each other,
at the institutional as much as if not more than at the personal
level, are based on the advantages which are likely to accrue in
terms of power and money. Socially, politically, recreationally,
intellectually, educationally and academically, in every sphere and
department of life, it is towards money and its power that our
conduct is orientated.
There is still a touch of shame about this. Though our fasci-
nation with the struggle for money-power is only too evident to
the most casual observer, we still often tend to hide it behind a
moralistic screen of judgments of good and bad, and in this are
not unlike our Puritan ancestor described by Tawney:
Convinced that character is all and circumstances nothing,
he sees in the poverty of those who fall by the way, not a
misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to
be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion -
though like other gifts they may be abused- but the blessing
which rewards the triumph of energy and will. Tempered by
self-examination, self-discipline, self-control, he is the prac-
tical ascetic, whose victories are won not in the cloister, but
on the battlefield, in the counting-house, and in the market.
In recent years, our love of money and confidence in the values
of the market place, the primacy of cost-benefit analysis to moral
questions of right and wrong, have become more overt, as has our
readiness to expend each other, sacrifice our young and discard
our old in our personal interest. But even still there is a tendency
to disavow our intentions, or at least to draw a veil of repression
over our most basic inclinations.
The crude, 'value-free', 'objective' and mechanistic preoccu-
pations of 'modern science' have of course done much both to
obscure the nature of our enterprise and to lend it an authority
which might otherwise be less easy to establish. This is certainly
the case with psychology, which serves with studied innocence to
divert our gaze from our least creditable undertakings. An examin-
ation of the indexes of the nine textbooks of psychology to be
found in our local university book shop reveals that only three
mention 'power' and none mention 'money'. How seriously should
22
one take a 'science' which claims to deal with 'motivation' and the
'prediction and control of human behaviour' and yet which fails
to mention the one most powerful motivator in every Western
person's life? (The answer should probably be very seriously, since
psychology is clearly about something quite other than a disin-
terested examination of 'what makes us tick', and it is presumably
important to know what that something other may be.)
It is my belief, then, that to trace the sources of what we feel
as our individual distress, we shall need to turn to a critical examin-
ation of what our collective enterprises are. The intertwining of
our interest with our dreams is leading us into a progressive care-
lessness of each other's welfare, to an extent indeed which will, at
the very best, damage us for generations to come.
23
2
The Pursuit of Happiness
It seems a matter of self-evidence to most people (indeed I wonder
if, in our hearts, any of us can escape such a view) that the point
of life is to be happy. If, in an attempt to tap a relatively selfless
opinion, you ask people what they would most want for the lives
of their actual or hypothetical children, they will usually say 'happi-
ness'. They may also specify other conditions, like health, material
success or a modest degree of fame, upon which happiness may be
taken to depend. Not everybody chooses happiness, but most
people do, and in the highly informal 'experiments' I have made
in asking people this question there seem to be no unusual patterns
to the responses they give in terms of age, sex, class, etc.
And yet, in some ways, to hold happiness as the ideal of life
seems to me to involve a number of difficulties and paradoxes, not
the least of which is the extreme infrequency with which, despite
all our best efforts, it seems to be achieved. We appear to be
surprisingly undaunted by disappointment. Infrequency of achieve-
ment does not in itself, of course, render the ideal of happiness
invalid in any way, but it does among other things add an element
almost of cruelty to the pursuit of our elusive goal.
Further reflection leads one to wonder whether the attainment
of happiness may be so infrequent because in fact it is not even
possible. How, for example, does one know that one has reached
the point in one's life where happiness has been achieved? What
does one do with it when one has got it? Can one specify the
conditions in which it may be retained? Can one see what other
people need to do to gain it, perhaps being able to draw up a kind
of blueprint for the achievement of general happiness?
Even if one cannot easily arrive at a formula for the capture of
happiness in the present, it may be misleadingly simple to imagine
what a human life in which ultimate happiness has been reached
might look like, and those of us who have found the early and
middle years of life less rewarding in terms of happiness than
perhaps we had hoped as children, can still probably fantasize how
we may yet grasp it in our declining years. The 'happiness' which
throughout our lives stayed just beyond our reach becomes, in the
nick of time, the 'fulfilment' of old age. Our faded gaze rests with
contentment on the persons of those who love us and who accept
from us with gratitude the fruits of a mellowed wisdom as they
enact in our autumnal world the little dramas we ourselves have
known so well. I have read about such old people, but I have never
24
met one, and unless it is possible that a lifetime's isolation in

some privileged enclave could somehow preserve a person from
knowledge of the world outside, any such 'fulfilled' departure from
this earth would seem to me to involve, at the very least, an extra-
ordinarily egocentric self-satisfaction. Perhaps a merciful old age
would temper our 'rage at the dying of the light', but I hope would
not obliterate it, or transform it into a kind of fatuous contentment
simply because there is no further chance of influencing events.
And so, a further paradox: if we got 'happiness', would we
want it? To take for a moment the extreme case, it is hard to
conceive of any version of everlasting, perhaps heavenly existence
(in this world or the next) which would not become intolerably
burdensome; there could be no more boring place than paradise.
The enormously powerful attraction of 'happiness' lies in the fact
that (in the commodified form in which we conceive of it) we never
experience it, it is always just beyond our grasp. Happiness, of the
kind which can be pursued, is an illusion.
One may ask people a slightly more awkward question than
that concerning what they would want in life for their children.
Imagine that you are visited shortly before the birth of your only
child by an archangel who offers you a choice you cannot decline:
either your child will grow to a great age, loved and respected by
all, having done no wrong or mean thing to anybody, successful,
rich, healthy, and, above all, happy, but will have made no memor-
able contribution to the future of the species beyond the immediate
good works of a lifetime. Or, your child will have a short, bitter
life, full of spiritual pain and bodily ill-health, will be universally
misunderstood and rejected, but will make through his or her work
a contribution which will prove to be of fundamental, beneficial
significance to the culture for centuries to come. Which would you
choose?
My own experience is that people have little hesitation over
choosing one or the other of these hypothetical futures for their
hypothetical offspring, and that the vast majority plump for the
happiness option. To get a reasonably honest answer, the question
has, obviously, to be posed innocently, but even those people
who angrily sense some moral disapprobation of their choice of
happiness, still, very understandably, defend it on the grounds
that whatever their hypothetical child's potential achievement, they
could not wish upon him or her the kind of unhappiness the
archangel promises.
Hypothetical games such as these are of course predictive of
nothing and revealing of very little, and though one can add a
surface plausibility to this example by, for instance, citing the life
of Mozart, there is in fact no necessary connection between ill-
25
health, rejection, etc., and creativity. Indeed, it is a central conten-

tion of this book that constructively creative and socially valuable
conduct is most likely to be fostered by the kind of concern for
their children's well-being which loving parents characteristically
show. In other words, the archangel's offer forces a false choice,
and it is probably that which causes a measure of irritation in some
of those who respond to it. Nevertheless, what is revealed, I think,
by the large preponderance of happiness choices people seem to
make, is the extent to which we implicitly believe in the values of
an illusion. This is, of course, no surprising discovery, but merely
confirms what is already entirely obvious to the most casual
observer of our ways of life. What seems to motivate us, to keep
us going from day to day, is the pursuit of happiness; and yet, if
'pursuable happiness' is necessarily an illusion which can only melt
in one's grasp as soon as one's fingers close around it, how can its
enormous force as a motivator for human conduct be accounted
for? Why is it so hard for people to be able even to imagine any
other point to life than the personal satisfaction of the individuals
living it?
Among the many factors which might contribute to an answer
to these questions, there are two to which I want to give promin-
ence. The first refers to an inevitable feature of every person's
embodied experience - the memory of bliss. The second refers to
a practically inescapable feature of our society, and one without
which it would rapidly crumble and be transformed - the
profitability of illusion.
It is a fact not lost on students of individual psychology- most
notably Freud - that our first and most blissful experience of
happiness is probably also our last. It is a virtually universal tragedy
of human experience that the very earliest impressions we have
should be those of such perfect warmth and protectedness and
oneness (with the mother), both inside and for a while probably
outside the womb, that we may be tempted to spend the rest of
our lives trying to recreate what is in fact an unrepeatable situation.
By the time we have become reasonably competent in the use of
language, that experience of perfect happiness has probably been
overlaid by much harsher realities, and since what we normally
consider as memory depends upon our ability to rehearse experi-
ences in words, our 'memory' of bliss is not something we can get
to grips with in our thoughts, but remains in our bodies as a kind
of aching absence. Those of our experiences which are beyond the
reach of words, when their bodily 'memory' is stirred by some
perhaps fortuitous set of circumstances, tend to be rekindled in a
kind of awe-filled burst of inexpressible, unnameably familiar
ecstasy. (Such an experience is falling in love, but, in some ways
26
sadly, as we must grow out of infancy, so we must grow out of

being-in-love.)
Those psychologists who tend towards a view of human devel-
opment as a kind of mechanical unfolding of an inevitable series
of stages of experience are likely to see the tragic frustration of the
infant's initial experience of bliss as a particularly inescapable and
particularly constant feature of our psychology, and in this they
are unlikely to be wrong. But even so we would do well to
remember that the individual's experience is set within a social
context, and the extent of his or her disillusionment, and certainly
the degree of its painfulness, will depend quite largely on the
provision which is made for it.* Does one, for example, speed the
process of severance from maternal love in the belief that the
sooner the child learns to cope with a hard, tough life the better,
or does one gently protect its tenderness and vulnerability until it
has matured to a point where one feels that it can take on for itself
the unkindnesses of the world? No doubt both answers, as well as
complete indifference to the question, have been popular at various
junctures in our recent as well as our more distant history. For the
moment, however, what I want to highlight are the uses to which
we have put our 'memory' of bliss. It seems to me, indeed, that
assiduity in making use of the aching absence of fundamental
happiness has been far greater than any attempt rationally to
understand the painful passions associated with it and to construct
a social world which treats them with sympathetic kindness; the
brave efforts of some psychologists in this latter direction have,
after all, met with little respect.
The very unrepeatability of that first experience of radical
protectedness and passivity, the effortless achievement (for a while)
of unlimited warmth, gratification and love, has been exploited in
our culture to fuel an endlessly tantalizing hope. We know, in some
sense, that that state is attainable (for once we really did experience
it) and so we easily fall prey to the promise of its reoccurrence. It
is precisely the 'pursuit of happiness'- culturally sanctioned at the
very highest levels - which holds out this promise to us. But the
actuality of its nature as an illusion, the fact that our infantile
experience is unrepeatable, ensures that we do not attain it, and
so we are left in unending and empty pursuit. All the time we see
as just beyond our grasp what is in fact not there at all. And the
more that 'happiness' and 'success' elude us, the harder we strive
to overtake them.
There is a bleak view to be taken of this state of affairs, which,
*In this connection see I. D. Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate,
Penguin Books, 1960.
27
as with Freud's 'death instinct', suggests that our futile pursuit of

effortless gratification leads us eventually to seek the everlasting,
if negative peace of death. Nor is this view to be dismissed lightly,
for there is much that argues in its favour. We do indeed seem
to pursue our fantasies of inert, passive satisfaction beyond the
boundaries of fiction and dream. 'Scientists' actually have exper-
imented with the idea of stimulation of 'pleasure centres' within
the brain as an attractive way of passing our·rime, • and there are
people who do not regard as preposterous or even disturbing the
idea of a totally self-sufficient person living a life of sensual bliss
alone in a glass bubble. One only has to look at the world-wide
success of the American junk food industry,
That is, the drink-down, quick-sugar foods of spoiled chil-
dren, and the pre-cut meat for lazy chewing beloved of ages
six to ten. Nothing is bitten or bitten-off, very little is chewed;
there is a lot of sugar for animal energy, but not much solid
food to grow on t
to see the attractions of a return to infancy, and by extension to
the womb. And it is by no means implausible to project one further
step to complete oblivion as part of our unconscious craving.
And yet - I hope, at least - this is not a necessary feature of
our individual psychology, but an only potentially fatal weakness
brought about by our early experience of bliss. For if this is a
weakness to which the very structure of our bodies exposes us, it
is still one which occurs in a world which may or may not
encourage it. Though weaknesses are indeed likely to be exploited,
they may also be acknowledged, understood, and even, eventually,
turned into strengths.
It does indeed seem that we pursue an illusory happiness with
all the futile enthusiasm of a tame mouse in a treadmill - but how
is it that we could be so blind? Rather than simply being misled
by some intrinsic weakness of psychological structure, we are, I
believe, blinded by interest. There is money to be made from the
pursuit of happiness.
I do not wish to suggest that there is anything fundamentally
wrong with the idea of happiness: it is clearly preferable for people
to be happy rather than unhappy, and there is no necessary connec-
tion between virtue and misery. There have been times in our
history when the pursuit of happiness seemed an altogether less
hollow undertaking than it does today. For example, it is not
*For a particularly disturbing account of one such experiment, see

Chapter 2 of my Psychotherapy: A Personal Approach, Dent, 1978.
tGoodman, op. cit.
28
difficult to detect in the writers of the Enlightenment and in the

philosophical and political works of the British Utilitarians (i.e.
those late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thinkers who
believed that 'good' could be measured in terms of 'happiness') a
spirit of real hopefulness and generosity as they glimpsed the possi-
bility of constructing an unprecedentedly equitable society in which
happiness - freedom from want as well as political representation
and influence - might be spread as widely as possible.
It seems, however, always to be the case that significant move-
ments in our cultural and political history, particularly those which
open up liberating vistas of change, even 'progress', last but a brief
instant before their motivating ideas and the institutions they create
are put to the use of those who have the power to turn them to their
interest. One can think of several examples. Christ's revolutionary
teaching concerning personal responsibility and love, and the
example of his life, were almost immediately turned into an
oppressive church orthodoxy which established a doctrine of myth
and magic and a coercive political power which were to betray
truly Christian values for centuries. Relative freedom from the
sclerotic and corrupt power of a decadent Church offered Renaiss-
ance man a glimpse of what it would be like to organize life on
the basis of scientific reason and subjective authority, but it was
not to be long before science - at least in terms of its intellectually
liberating vision- became a travesty of itself, and man's momen-
tary apprehension of self-responsibility was quickly usurped by the
State in combination with a 'reformed' religious hypocrisy, and
turned against him. Much the same seems to have been the case
with the Enlightened vision of happiness.
It seems as though the new-found freedom of a prosperous
middle class for a while imbued it with a generous impulse to share
its good fortune with those who were, as in contrast with the
landed aristocracy it had itself also so recently been, less privileged.
John Passmore puts it well:""
The Enlighteners ... thought they knew who was bound to
come to overt power in the State - the commercial classes.
And there was, they were convinced, a natural alliance
between the new governors and the spirit of enlightenment.
Overt power to the middle class, actual power to the intellec-
tuals - that was the future of society as they envisaged it.
The 'honest man', the merchant, the 'civically good' man,
replaced the aristocrat and the hero - in England especially
-as the 'ideal type' of humanity.
*J. Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man, Duckworth, 1970.
29
And:
Commerce and liberty, so Voltaire maintained in his Philo-
sophical Letters, are intimately associated. The close link
between literature and finance was, he thought, one of the
glories of the eighteenth century. No Rotarian could be more
enthusiastic about the benefits of commerce than was Joseph
Priestley. By bringing the merchant into contact with other
places and people, he tells us, commerce 'tends greatly to
expand the mind and to cure us of many hurtful prejudices';
it encourages benevolence and a love of peace; it develops
such virtues as punctuality and 'the principals of strict justice
and honour' ... 'Men of wealth and influence', so he sums
up, 'who act upon the principles of virtue and religion, and
conscientiously make their power subservient to the good of
their country, are the men who are the greatest honour to
human nature, and the greatest blessing to human societies.'
A connection between big business and philanthropy would
be unlikely to be one impressing itself upon modern intellectual
observers of society, although of course it is one which big business
seeks, through procedures of 'image building', to create. Once
again, those processes which at the time looked to constitute a
liberating move and were advocated with enthusiastic optimism by
those caught up in it, came very rapidly to be exploited in the sole
interests of those- now the 'bourgeoisie'- with power.
It is instructive in this respect to reflect upon the career of the
most 'official' sanction we have to pursue happiness. It was of
course Thomas Jefferson who first articulated 'the pursuit of happi-
ness' as one of the rights of men in the American Declaration of
Independence. According to Hannah Arendt,* however, Jefferson
himself may at that time not have been entirely clear about what
he meant by the phrase, and his idea of happiness and ours may
well have diverged considerably in the intervening two hundred
years. She argues that by 'happiness' he may have meant, at least
partly, what he meant elsewhere when he wrote of 'public happi-
ness', that is the freedom of people to take part in their political
self-determination. However, as she points out, the phrase
was almost immediately deprived of its double sense and
understood as the right of citizens to pursue their personal
interests and thus to act according to the rules of private
self-interest. And these rules, whether they spring from dark
*H. Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin Books, 1973.
30
desires of the heart or from the obscure necessities of the

household, have never been notably 'enlightened'.
Arendt suggests also that in debates in the Assembly
none of the delegates would have suspected the astonishing
career of this 'pursuit of happiness', which was to contribute
more than anything else to a specifically American ideology,
to the terrible misunderstanding that, in the words of Howard
Mumford Jones, holds that men are entitled to 'the ghastly
privilege of pursuing a phantom and embracing a delusion'.
Arising out of this discussion, then, are two possible views, or
versions of happiness: happiness as something which may attend
or follow from our actions (as for example in the conduct of our
political freedom, our ability to take part in the affairs of our own
government), and happiness as something 'in itself' which may be
pursued. In fact, Arendt suggests that the (illusory) pursuit of
happiness as a thing in itself, and of the associated ideals of 'abun-
dance and endless consumption', are the product of a vision
conditioned by poverty, and it is for that reason that they are so
characteristic of American culture, since it was that country which
seemed to promise so much to the poor emigrants from Europe:
The hidden wish of poor men is not 'To each according to
his needs', but 'to each according to his desires'. And while
it is true that freedom can only come to those whose needs
have been fulfilled, it is equally true that it will escape those
who are bent upon living for their desires. The American
dream, as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries under the
impact of mass immigration came to understand it, was ...
unhappily, the dream of a 'promised land' where milk and
honey flow. And the fact that the development of modern
technology was so soon able to realize this dream beyond
anyone's wildest expectation quite naturally had the effect of
confirming for the dreamers that they really had come to live
in the best of all possible worlds.
Now that America has successfully sold its dream to most of
the rest of the world, those of us in Europe who have become, as
it were, the all-too-willing subjects of an economic and cultural
empire based on the values of which Arendt is rightly so
contemptuous, can no longer stand by (as we seemed only a few
years ago to be able to do) with amusement or disbelief as we
watch the tasteless antics of our trans-Atlantic relatives. For we
are now busily performing the self-same antics. We have bought,
lock, stock and barrel, the idea of happiness as commodity, and
we pursue it with singleminded dedication.
31
The increasing affluence and freedom from want of 'developed'

Western society has, however, not resulted in our seeing through
the illusory nature of our pursuit of happiness, and the reason for
this lies presumably in the changed nature of our enslavement. The
interests of power no longer lie, as until recently they so trans-
parently did, in extracting from an oppressed work force the
maximum production at the minimum cost, but in stimulating from
a dazed and pacified population the maximum consumption at the
greatest price the market will bear. The chief means by which this
may be achieved are through the promotion of happiness as a
commodity and the prevention of happiness as a consequence, or
epiphenomenon, of activity.
Anyone who has tried to do it- and that must, surely, include
everyone - knows how impossible it is to manufacture happiness.
Whether or not one is happy depends entirely upon events and
circumstances which one cannot will, and usually the more self-
consciously one attempts to be happy, the more signally one fails.
When happiness does arise, it does so spontaneously and unbidden,
and often unexpectedly, as a concomitant, usually, of our absorbed
and unself-conscious activity. It arises out of doing things, or out
of our doing things together, and it is often only after we have
ceased doing them that we realize we were happy. Those who
recognize this are easily led to romanticize the lives of people who
are necessarily committed to endless hard work, punctuated only
occasionally by simple festivals or the innocent pleasures of family
celebrations, but such is not my intention. I rather doubt if the
peasant's long-awaited appointment with a happy Christmas is any
more often successful than the culmination of our own harassed
and jaded preparations for that same event. Unremitting drudgery
is likely to be no more rewarding than the apathetic killing of time
and invention of 'pleasurable' sensations necessitated by satiated
affluence. Happiness comes, rather, from having something useful
and absorbing and demanding to do which can be valued by the
doer as well as those for whom he or she is doing it.
It is this form of happiness which has become vanishingly rare
in our world, and in my view it is the lack of the possibility for
this form of happiness which, at least as much as anything else,
lies behind our despair. We have constructed a society which is in
essence a vast machine designed for the maintenance and develop-
ment of an illusion. We believe that the value of our lives may be
measured by the degree of their happiness and that happiness in
its turn may be understood as personal satisfaction and fulfilment,
to be gained, if not through the acquisition of things, then certainly
as the acquisition of things. In these beliefs we are misled on the
one hand by the technological pragmatism we have developed over
32
the past four centuries and on the other by our enthusiasm for
greedy exploitation. Our technological bent has led us to isolate
the happiness we have rightly observed as occasionally
accompanying our activity, to posit it as the point of life, and then
to try to manufacture it as a commodity. Our greed has led us,
freed from the repressive moral strictures of a 'parental' religious
authority, to throw ourselves upon the world's bounty with all the
lack of restraint of a group of adolescents at their first party. And,
of course, our genius for exploitation has quickly revealed that
our unrestrained adolescent greed offers a market for ever more
'exciting' and 'satisfying' commodities which may be tended and
stoked and stimulated more or less endlessly. Rather than being,
as it were, encouraged by our social and cultural in<;titutions to
grow out of our infantile craving for the delights of the womb and
the breast towards a mature and sober undertaking of a contri-
bution to the life of our society and the continuation of our species,
it has become our aim to benefit in every way possible from a
concerted pandering to our longing for blissful satiation. We all
believe in happiness, and most of us have a stake in its production
and consumption. We thus become caught up in a frenzied pursuit
of happiness which, being illusory, renders us ever more dazed and
out of touch with our embodied reality, and ever more vulnerable
to and injured by the abuses of our exploitation of each other.
People suffer bitterly, go crazy and even kill themselves because
(among other reasons) they are unhappy. It is easy to see why: to
be unhappy means in our society to have lost the point of living.
(In making this point I do not wish to justify unhappiness nor to
advocate the policy of the stiff upper lip. All too often unhappiness
is seen as something some people have to get used to so that other
people can escape it. This constitutes a version of moralism about
which I shall say more in the final chapter.) The inevitable non-
achievement of the greedy individualistic satiation which we take
to signify happiness, means that we suffer from a kind of collective,
chronic frustration.
In the very midst of a kind of lunatic celebration of symbolic
satisfactions, a mirage of pleasures excited and achieved, people are
in fact almost beside themselves with need. A sense of despairing
neediness seems to me to be endemic at all levels of our society -
experienced just as much by the 'helpers' as by those they seek to
help - and to lie curled at the centre of most 'relationships'. For
our frantic search for happiness meets only emptiness, and if we
could we would all scream like abandoned infants as our mouths
fail to encounter the promised breast. We are, however, not infants,
but rather adolescents who don't know our own strength, and the
33
response to our frustration is more likely to be a destructive lash-

ing-out than an infantile scream.
Happiness - of any kind, commodity or 'epiphenomenon' -
cannot be the point of life. Indeed, the very expectation that there
must be a discernible point to life constitutes the first step towards
a life-denying individualism in which the future of the species
becomes sacrificed to personal immortality.* Among the reasons
for our reluctance to abandon our pursuit of happiness, however,
is the fact that so many of us make a living by encouraging it. But
abandon it we must if we are to progress beyond a struggle with
illusory unhappiness, grief at the lack of blissful satisfaction, to a
struggle with the causes of real unhappiness - the injuries we do
each other as we exploit and compete with each other for what
we take to be the good things of life.
Whatever their circumstances in life, it is, as I have already
noted, hard for most people to imagine that they could be other-
wise. Even people living in squalor and misery do not necessarily
know that they are, and anyone proclaiming a vision of a better
life may have considerable difficulty persuading unhappy people
that they are indeed unhappy. This is not as paradoxical as it
seems, as any psychotherapist, for example, should know: the
'neurotic' patient's suffering is most often inarticulate and its causes
unacknowledged; he or she has to be brought to see what the
trouble - with the world and with his or her relation to it - really
is. A condition of political repression has always been that it is
able to thrive on the unawareness of the people it oppresses that
they are indeed oppressed, and those of broader vision who are
able to envisage a life of liberty may have to struggle hard to get
their view accepted.
To suggest, therefore, that our current ways of life distort almost
beyond recognition what human existence should look like, and
that our relations with each other and the world constrict and
mutilate our experience, our potentialities and our actual living
presence, is likely to be met by blank incredulity and scorn. To
protect us against any such view (apart from the usual processes
of resistance to change which will be discussed in Chapter 5) we
have on the one hand the whole apparatus of marketing of an
illusory happiness and on the other such a familiarity with the
*It is significant in this respect that even so humane and critically gifted
a believer in the greatest happiness for the greatest number as William
Godwin (see his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793) should have
fallen for a Utopian fantasy of man as non-reproductive and immortal.
There are no doubt millions today who would see nothing the matter with
that as an ideal for the future.
34
conditions of our crippled lives that we take them for an ineluctable

normality.
Nevertheless, almost anyone, if he or she can bear to look, will
catch a glimpse from time to time of the ways in which we have
sold ourselves into slavery, of the sad results of having done so,
and indeed of the devices whereby we prevent ourselves from seeing
what we have done.
Just at the most obvious level, a weakening of our individualistic
and tribal values would allow us to see how our personal, commo-
dified happiness is bought, and always has been bought, at the
expense of others. The evidence of the results of our having
unloaded our want and discomfort on to others - other classes,
races, nations, even continents - is absolutely plain for us to see,
if only in our own inner cities. Sometimes, certainly (as in the case
at the present time with starvation in Africa) our compassion is
stirred, but even then only rarely do we see that 'their' problems
cannot be disentangled from our conduct. Hannah Arendt points
out" how even the civilized prosperity of revolutionary America
was built upon the grotesque values of slavery. Again, it is common
to represent the 'problems' of Western 'civilization' as those which
naturally follow upon affluence: we have conquered want, and
must now concentrate upon our spiritual and therapeutic needs
and cultivate the values of 'fun' and leisure. This kind of view,
probably wearing a little thin now after its particular popularity
in the sixties, is plausible only if we manage to disregard, i.e.
repress, at least half the consequences of our actions: we have not
conquered want, but merely discovered ways of exporting it.
The peculiar dishonesty of repression also haunts our more
personal experience, numbing the pain we would otherwise feel at
the destruction of human potential we witness in our lives more
or less as a matter of course. How easily, for example, the middle-
aged person comes to accept with only a minimum of sorrow the
almost standard transformation of the children he or she once
knew: open, inquisitive four and five-year-olds, bearing the clearly
visible buds of whole ranges of ability and concern, become now
uniform, already half-hopeless nineteen- and twenty-year-olds,
cynical devotees of commodified sex and bad music, defensive
about their feelings and encapsulated in a world bounded by
consumption. I know there are exceptions, but too few, surely, to
justify anything other (if only we could but feel it) than a sickened
rage at the sort of society we have created.
One has often to make a special effort of the imagination to see
quite how mad and destructive the world we live in has become.
• On Revolution, op. cit.
35
This is only a seeming paradox, indicating more a deep and usually

unquestioning familiarity with our environment than any
reassuring possibility that things are not really all that bad. The
effort of imagination needed is like that which dreamers make in
order to wake themselves from a nightmare.
Insights sometimes present themselves at the most unexpected
times and places. For example, a young waiter in one of those
mass-produced Italian restaurants paces across the fake ceramic
floor, gliding from narrow hips, swaying broad shoulders. He
tosses his thick black hair so that it quivers on the collar of his
open shirt, and glances semi-boldly and semi-defensively at the two
girls who are waiting for their food at a corner table. He has
perhaps ten paces to walk from the centre of the restaurant to the
bar where the pizzas are being made. Every step of the way he is
utterly conscious of himself, of his luxuriant mane, his olive skin,
his narrow hips. He is a tall, strong young man caged in a pretend
environment, serving day in and day out the same junk food to an
endless stream of customers for whom the most he may hope to
be is the object of an idle admiration or desire.
In those rare moments when the familiar world (for example of
waiters and restaurants) breaks open to reveal how much worse
things are than they appear, the accompanying emotion seems
usually to be one of sadness. The waiter is not obviously hurt by
his world, and one feels neither sorrow nor contempt for him, nor
even anger at the circumstances which have conspired to make a
mockery of a life which would, one feels (no doubt sentimentally),
have been more suitably spent less self-consciously among vines or
olive groves. For a moment, rather, he becomes a symbol of us all,
and his (and our) unawareness of his (and our) plight, our accept-
ance of what we all too easily see as 'reality', is above all sad.
I remember, years ago, watching the chimps at London Zoo. A
small crowd had gathered to watch them disport themselves in
their 'outdoor' cage. Two of them swung into a smoothly practised
routine: in an almost single movement of flowing synchrony one
ran along the upper branch of a dead tree which lay in the cage
while the other entwined itself gracefully round a horizontal branch
perhaps six feet lower. The reclining chimp arched back his head,
and at that precise moment the chimp on the upper branch, with
pin-point accuracy, urinated into his open mouth. The crowd
gasped with surprise and laughed with a mixture of disgust and
admiration at the virtuosity of the performance, and the chimps
looked towards their audience with unmistakable delight and pride.
I suspect that a lot of what passes for 'human nature' is really
the result of our having to deal with a certain kind of world. Self-
consciousness, for example, whether in the form of vanity or
36
shyness (both of which are characteristic of our time), might not

seem so inevitable in a world which gave us space in which to do
things.
If the possibility is denied you of doing anything of value in the
world, you have to use your ingenuity in order to feel alive while
passing the time. If your activity counts for nothing your person
is likely to become salient - it will become important what you
look like (you could decorate yourself, dye your hair) and what
you feel like (you may become absorbed in the state of excitation
or satiation of your nervous system, stimulation and satisfaction).
In his savagely constricted and inexpressibly sad little environment
at the zoo, Guy the gorilla passed much of his time in a rather
distractedly off-hand indulgence in masturbation. Unlike the chim-
panzees, he did not seem to mind what people thought, apparently
not noticing their blushes and giggles.
It is really not the case that we treat animals differently from
the way we treat each other: what is most disturbing about factory
farming is its revelation of the mentality which lies behind it, and
which is the same as that lying behind, for example, high-rise
building. Point for point, the life of a battery hen is no different
from that of the high-rise tenant. Both are victims of the same
cruelty, indifference and greed, and in all probability neither is
aware of it. Furthermore, the suffering occasioned by their enslave-
ment will be met not with liberation, but with treatment.
Cruelty, indifference and greed are distributed throughout our
society, and are not to be identified solely in the intentions or
malicious motivation of any particular individuals or groups; I
shall return to this question in future chapters.
I think I can remember a time (but perhaps I am deluding myself)
when advertising was a distinctly suspect but sometimes faintly
amusing undertaking in which fairly transparent lies were told
about products which could not be relied upon to get sold on their
own merits. Nowadays, however, we have developed a kind of
commitment to the illusory nature of the artificial 'satisfactions' in
which we imprison ourselves, and we seem therefore to stoke up
a more and more frenetic and hyperbolic language by which to sell
ourselves our self-deceiving vision. The advertising man becomes
a symbol of the only kind of respectability which counts - the
respectability of success - and his power to manufacture images is
regarded, if not quite yet with awe, then certainly with uncritical
admiration. The language of advertising and marketing infects just
about every area of our activity as we persuade ourselves how
'important' and 'major' and 'exciting' our undertakings- academic
and artistic as well as social and personal - are. The very language
of international negotiation, in which 'front' men occupying jobs
37
which might once have been filled by statesmen conduct 'propa-

ganda battles' for the conquest of 'public opinion', becomes one
of 'offers' in which 'fifty per cent reductions' (for example in
nuclear weaponry) are bandied back and forth with all the gravity
of cynical marketing executives whose function in life is to 'hype'
poorly selling breakfast cereals. Even our most serious and vital
concerns become in this way sucked into a kind of make-believe
world in which 'credibility' counts more than life itself.
One's consciousness is relentlessly battered by the weaponry of
image creation and fabricated excitement. Even a simple announce-
ment of forthcoming programmes on the radio or television is
uttered by a voice frenzied with fake enthusiasm, and our language
i!> progressively emptied of subtlety and depth as every kind of
activity possible or imaginable becomes reduced to its significance
for how nice it will make us feel (you don't any longer so much
'have' or 'drink' a cup of coffee, for instance, as 'enjoy' it). It is
impossible, particularly perhaps for a male, to walk through any
city shopping or entertainment centre without coming under a kind
of unremitting sexual assault: at every turn and corner another
sexual image snatches at his flagging nervous system to associate
with a flash of excitement some utterly sexually irrelevant object
or service for sale. And the more habituated we become, the more
lurid, basic or fantastic the sexual pitch is made. The everyday
world we move in thus becomes one of ceaseless, frenetic, raucously
euphoric promises of bliss. But we get used to it, and there are
probably very few of us who do not take this crazy detachment
from our actual embodied reality as normal.
Commodity production and consumerism alter perceptions
not just of the self but of the world outside the self. They
create a world of mirrors, insubstantial images, illusions
increasingly indistinguishable from reality. The mirror effect
makes the subject an object; at the same time, it makes the
world of objects an extension or projection of the self. It is
misleading to characterize the culture of consumption as a
culture dominated by things. The consumer lives surrounded
not so much by things as by fantasies. He lives in a world
that has no objective or independent existence and seems to
exist only to gratify or thwart his desires.*
So that nothing may stand between us and the consumption of
happiness, we are stripped of our functional activity and, like
*Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self. Psychic Survival in Troubled

Times, Picador, 1985.
38
battery animals, lifted from the course of time to be located in an
endless present.
'A function may be defined as an activity which embodies and
expresses the idea of social purpose.'• If life is not simply some-
thing for-oneself, to be enjoyed and indulged and spun out as
long as possible (its dream-ideal thus being some form of solitary
immortality), then its most profound value (and satisfaction) may
come from the individual's being able, along with others, to make
a contribution to- perform a function within- something infinitely
larger than him- or herself. As part of an ever-evolving social
process the individual is shaped by a largely unknown past and
projected towards a totally unknowable future. Thus the individual
becomes a tiny particle through which the course of social evol-
ution moves; the meaning of our lives cannot be understood outside
the context of the social and cultural processes in which they are
embedded. It is probably misleading to speak of our bodies as
having been designed for anything, but certainly if there is anything
for which the design of our bodies is suitable, it is for contributing
to a process far too great for us to be able to understand and a
future far too distant and impenetrable for us to be able to divine.
To see our bodies as being designed merely for the experience of
pleasure or 'happiness' is surely to trivialize human existence to
the point of utter despair .
. . . to say that the end of social institutions is happiness, is
to say that they have no common end at all. For happiness
is individual and to make happiness the object of society
is to resolve society itself into the ambitions of numberless
individuals, each directed towards the attainment of some
personal purpose.
Such societies may be called Acquisitive Societies, because
their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to
promote the acquisition of wealth. The appeal of this concep-
tion must be powerful, for it has laid the whole modern world
under its spell. •
Human functions are, sadly, extremely vulnerable to exploi-
tation by interest. Almost anything that people can do in the way
of productive or creative work can be mechanized, objectified,
appropriated and then sold back to them as passive consumers.
The social activity of making music, for example, becomes the
solitary reception of mass-produced sounds through headphones.
Production becomes consumption, activity becomes spectacle. Even
•R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society. First published 1921, Wheat-

sheaf Books, 1982.
39
relatively privileged functions of a service or professional nature

(privileged in the sense that they are themselves not without an
element of exploitation) may fall prey to the 'managerial' stratum
of society which seeks to objectify and manipulate for profit just
about any identifiable and potentially saleable form of human
conduct. Anything people can do for themselves is the waste of an
opportunity to make money, and it therefore becomes important
to find ways of annexing the fruits of their activity and putting
them up for sale. The medium through which the trick is performed
is, of course, our fatal penchant for passivity, the blissful ease of
inert consumption, but this would not have anything like the power
over us it does were it not sanctioned by the values of a society
(maintained through the more or less willing complicity of us all)
which posits the making of money- 'the creation of wealth'- as
the highest good, the necessity of necessities.
One can sell things only in the present. The past, from the
salesman's point of view, is certainly a dead loss (hence the culti-
vation of obsolescence, the frenetic insistence on the 'now' and the
'new'), and the future is uncertain (hence the desperation to close
the deal today). Happiness, therefore, becomes a phenomenon of
the here and now. You must be satisfied, be excited, enjoy, have
fun now. Every moment that passes in which your nervous system
is not perceptibly going through the cycle of sensations involved
in excitation/satisfaction is wasted, mis-spent (and unprofitable)
time. Only new things matter; our pursuit of fulfilment now
uproots us from our past and disconnects us from the things we
knew, enabling us endlessly to recycle the past but preventing us
from developing it. This applies to ideas as well as to goods. The
thoughts that people had in previous times become either objects
of study from which, via the machinery of a vast 'knowledge'
industry, academics may churn out endless exegesis, or they are
left behind in the pervasive fetish for 'novelty', only to be reiterated
as new discoveries by people for whom true scholarship is a lost
art. The future is important only for how it affects our buying
habits now; it may thus be used as a stimulus to anxiety- some-
thing we must provide for before it's too late ('while stocks last')
- but it is unlikely to be seen as something. worthy of sacrifice. We
do not postpone satisfactions, we anticipate them. Our attitude to
the future is symbolized by the credit card - access to it is now.
We no longer have posterity, only children.
The person becomes stripped of function, confined in space and
restricted in time to a ceaseless present, and all in the name of
happiness. The world which is thus created is quite grotesquely
unsuited to our actual embodied existence, but we are used to it and
40
do not, any more than blind fish in subterranean pools, complain of

circumstances which are hard to imagine as otherwise.
But if the damaging nature of the environment we have created
slips easily beneath the attention of our critical awareness, we
certainly do not escape the painful 'symptoms' to which that
damage gives rise. The process of symptom formation is quite easy
to understand in the case of 'neurotic' suffering: for the onlooker
who stands outside the personal predicament of individual patients,
it is more often than not quite obvious that their puzzled, inarticu-
late sense of pain - frequently explained as 'illness' or expressed
in actions distressing to self or others - is directly understandable
in the light of circumstances which they cannot see (because these
circumstances are not in their field of vision) or do not wish to see
(i.e. repress or deceive themselves about). But this is not the sole
or even special problem of 'the neurotic', who merely provides the
paradigm case for a predicament shared by us all.
Frustration, neediness, chronic irritation, suspiciousness, agon-
ized self-concern, feelings of unreality, nausea, dizziness, a whole
host of 'psychosomatic' afflications through which our bodies
'protest' at the treatment we give them, nagging anxiety, rage and
panic: few of us escape for any length of time from some or several
of these. (And in order to try to deal with them we assemble
medical, therapeutic, counselling and other 'helping' professions
whose membership would threaten to outnumber potential clients
were it not for the fact that the helpers themselves need help.)
Apart from the symptoms, there are the signs - i.e. indications
of the injuries done to us by our condition which, however, may
not themselves be experienced as unusually uncomfortable. Since
we have no world to pour ourselves into, no possibility of spon-
taneous absorption in a society within which we may use the
concepts and implements of a tradition to work towards an
unknowable future we may try to make worthwhile, we become
collapsed in on ourselves, not so much introspectively (a cultivable
'inner world' is in any case the invention of a romantic individu-
alism) as self-regardingly. We observe ourselves with minute atten-
tion, alert to the sensations of our bodily organs, monitoring care-
fully our state of satisfaction. We have, like Guy the gorilla, only
our bodies to play with, so we strut and posture in an endless
parade of fashion, or we shrivel and shrink under the glare of our
own self-conscious gaze. We pamper and weigh and tend ourselves,
worrying obsessively about the damage to our health which our
self-indulgence may create. It is utterly characteristic of our society
that it supports side-by-side a huge mass-produced food industry
and a huge dietary and health industry, the latter profiting from
41
the damage caused by the former. This is reflected at the individual

level by the increasing prevalence of 'bulimia'- i.e., the compulsion
to voracious eating followed by self-induced vomiting. Again I must
emphasize that we are caught up in these phenomena, whether at
the societal or at the individual level, quite uncomprehendingly. As
I hope to show later, the operation of the influences and interests
involved does not appear within our personal consciousness nor
under our personal control.
And yet, I suspect, beyond the reach of words, we hate this
world which we have created and which force-feeds us with its
happiness until we choke. There is a deadness in our eyes and an
anger in the air and an almost tangible contempt for each other
which seep more and more overtly from the fantasied televisual
lives of the 'rich and successful' into the everyday transactions of
ordinary men and women. The more sensitive among us may be
so disturbed by observation of this process that they feel they are
going mad - more and more people who come to see me as
patients, and from all walks of life, have literally been unnerved
by an increasingly commonplace brutality and indifference they
cannot believe they are seeing around them.
The hatred of the less privileged for their enslaving environment
is obvious - spray paint and urine are fitting enough adornments
for the walls of battery housing, and who with any spirit, having
too often waited shivering outside it to phone their mother or an
ambulance at the dead of a winter's night, would not want to
vandalize the phone box which stands almost insolently on the
corner to proclaim their subjugation? But perhaps the case is little
different when it comes to those who seem more obviously to profit
from our society: the fact is that we wreck the landscape, pollute
the earth and poison the seas, and treat our fellow beings with a
callous unconcern. However much we may be able to deceive
ourselves about the nature and consequences of these undertakings,
there is still really no doubt that they are ours, and, as with the
individual 'neurotic', the only sure way of determining intention is
to infer it from action. From the way we treat the world and the
other people in it, from our carelessness of tradition and posterity,
from the official endorsement given at the very 'highest' levels
to self-interest as the only possible motive and to the threat of
annihilation as the legitimate ultimate goad, it seems obvious that
our obsession with an entirely self-indulgent 'happiness' has as its
obverse hatred, suspicion and total unconcern with what may lie,
in space or time, beyond our individual lives and the satisfactions
they may afford.
This is not, I am sure, a state of affairs that any of us wants. In
42
order to get to grips with this paradox, one must attempt to gain
a view of the way in which social forces operate through rather
than within individuals, how personal conduct can only be compre-
hensible in the light of collective aims.
43
3
Magic, Interest and
Psychology
Throughout our culture there are, I believe, widely shared and
deeply held misconceptions about human psychological makeup,
particularly concerning 'motivation' (or why we do things) and
'change' (or how in the course of our individual lives we may
become happier, more 'adjusted' people). These misconceptions
make it very difficult indeed for us to get a helpfully explanatory
purchase on the reasons for psychological distress and the chances
of avoiding it. So solidly are they embedded in our culture,
however, we can scarcely even see them. In order fully to expose
their foundations, I believe that one must approach them through
what might at first seem like a detour: one must examine the nature
of 'official' psychology itself.
For while there may be no very direct relation between, on the
one hand, what people-in-the-street consider the causes of their
actions and the possibilities for their self-improvement, and, on the
other hand, the speculations of the professionals, there is little
doubt that both will reflect a general cultural impetus, and this
latter, for me at any rate, is easier to detect in the relatively well
formulated 'official' views than in the often unspoken or more
tentative assumptions of the 'ordinary person'. Though it would
certainly be a mistake to suppose that 'the experts' determine what
the 'lay' person thinks, it is altogether more likely that those forms
of psychological preconception to which our culture inclines us
will find their most exact expression in 'expert' opinions and
procedures. More important than this, clues as to the reasons why
we think about ourselves as we do are, I think, most clearly
revealed by a clarification of the reasons for our having 'a
psychology' at all.
In trying, then, to understand (in the two chapters following
this) how we have come to adopt ideas about 'motivation' which
in fact enslave us, and ideas about 'change' which delude us, I
think it may be illuminating (even if only by indirect lighting) first
to gain some insight into how official psychology and psycho-
therapy came about, and what purposes they serve.
Whether as individuals or groups, people seem particularly
prone to construct for themselves a myth of origin - i.e. a story
about their beginning. Psychologists are no exception. We are the
44
Magic, Interest and Psychology
children, so the story goes, not of Adam and Eve, nor even of their
simian substitutes, but of science.
Though psychologists and other professionals and academics of
the 'psycho-' variety quarrel bitterly amongst themselves about the
legitimacy of their claim to scientific respectability, virtually all of
them trace their origin to a period during the second half of the
last century when scientific method came to be applied to matters
of psychological concern. Most of us, in this way, live with the
happy myth that, intellectually speaking, we arrived but recently
on the scene, bringing with us a clear and virginally pure scientific
gaze with which to peer through the murk of metaphysics and
superstition which had until so recently obscured our under-
standing of the workings of the human mind. It took the world a
long time to get round to the one true belief - science - but as its
children we are unsullied by the ignorance and incomprehension
of the past, and (especially those of us in Britain and America) we
now have the infallible canons of 'objective scientific method'
which, as long as we remain true to them, will guide us through
a future in which freedom from the errors of former times is
guaranteed.
However, the very failure of psychology in its 'applied' and
therapeutic forms to cope with the emotional distress and
confusion which are so prevalent in our society exposes the falli-
bility of our 'scientific' dogma and indicates the falsity of our myth
of origin. And in fact, of course, psychology did not undergo a
virgin birth in the last century, but, like any other human
endeavour, evolved out of, and still serves, concerns and interests
that have been identifiable within our culture for as long as its
intellectual history has been recorded. Indeed, not only are
psychology's claims to an objectively valid understanding of and a
therapeutically effective concern with the ills which beset us false,
but it is more than possible that psychology, far from minimizing,
actually compounds our difficulties.
If I am not to be really seriously misunderstood, however, I
must at the outset make one thing very clear, and that is that I do
not regard psychologists, or psychotherapists, or practitioners of
psychological medicine, as charlatans, nor do I wish in any way
to impugn their motives. A charlatan is one who knowingly
pretends to knowledge and ability he or she in fact does not
have. As far as psychology is complicit in the social evils and self-
deceptions of our time, it is so without (except perhaps for a very
small minority) the knowing connivance of its practitioners. Almost
without exception, the psychologists, psychotherapists and
psychiatrists I have met are, professionally speaking, honest,
concerned and conscientious people who work in what they see as
45
the best interests of their clients and patients, and who do much,
at the very least, to offer comfort and support to people who have
no one else to turn to.
It is, however, an irony instructive of the very points I want to
make in this chapter, that (with some very important exceptions)
it is the 'psycho-' disciplines themselves which have led us
(misguidedly) to seek the reasons for human conduct in the indi-
vidual (and often conscious) motivations of those who enact it. It
thus becomes extremely difficult to call into question the effects of
somebody's actions without apparently implying an insult to the
person; it is hard for me to suggest that what you do has an
effect contrary to what you say your intention is, without seeming
thereby also to suggest that you are a liar. But if we are to be able
to engage with good will and mutual respect in a search for the
truth of the matter, it is essential that we be able to distinguish the
meaning of an action in its widest social context from the verbal
account of his or her intentions the individual actor gives. The fact
is that often, perhaps most often - and arguably even always - we
do things for reasons of which we are not only unaware, but could
not be aware (more will be said about this later), but of which we
are understandably tempted - and easily able - to give a plausible
account.
So-called neurotic symptoms are frequently the experience or
expression of a distress for which individuals cannot accurately
account through an examination of their own conscious purposes.
This of course does not mean that their conduct and experience
itself (as opposed to their conscious articulation of it) is irrelevant
to an explanation of their distress - indeed it is likely to be crucial.
In exactly the same way, psychologists must acknowledge that
what they say they are doing may have very little relevance to what
they actually are doing, and that a more satisfactory explanation
must be sought elsewhere. With individuals, one has to formulate
explanations (as well as evaluations) of their conduct (a) from a
consideration of their history, and (b) by inferring their intentions
from the actual fruits of their activity. The case is no different with
collective human undertakings such as psychology.
The definition of psychology which was taught to me was 'the
scientific study of human behaviour', and the chief aim of its most
representative school - behaviourism - 'the prediction and control
of behaviour'. I am not sure how far academic psychologists have
in recent years modified the expression of this aim, but in so far
as they have softened somewhat its rather stark outline, I suspect
that this would stem less from any embarrassment over its almost
touchingly ingenuous revelation of a dubious interest than from
an uncomfortable awareness that psychologists have, over the last
46
hundred years or so of psychology's existence as a 'scientific',

laboratory discipline, been singularly unsuccessful at predicting
anything of much intrinsic intellectual merit. However, what is
worth noting for the purposes of the present discussion is that,
despite its association with the rigours of a disinterested scientific
objectivity, 'the prediction and control of human behaviour' is, as
an aim of human inquiry, no new phenomenon: it expresses an
intellectual aspiration as old as magic, and restates a practical
interest dear to the heart of tyrants ever since time began.
One of the central arguments of this book is that, far from
'curing' people's distress, psychology too easily serves to provide us
with an excuse for continuing, as a society, to inflict it. Psychology
flourishes not through any truly scientific demonstration of its
validity, but because, on the one hand, it feeds an age-old dream
of the magical conquest of unhappiness and the achievement of
power, and, on the other, it serves the interests not only of its
practitioners, but more importantly of those who have actually
achieved power within society and constructed an apparatus to
maintain it (this, again, not necessarily with any consciously evil
intent). Very much more than most of its practitioners would be
willing to concede, then, psychology offers magical solutions to
human distress which is in fact created by abuses of the very power
whose interests psychology also serves. When 'ordinary people'
accept that psychology represents a 'disinterested' body of 'objec-
tive' knowledge giving the best available account of their nature
and difficulties - as soon, that is, as people abandon their experi-
ence of themselves in favour of the alienating dogmas of 'experts'
- then the process of mystification becomes complete.
Traditionally, 'applied' psychologists- i.e. those working in the
fields of health, education and industry - have claimed for them-
selves two principal functions: the scientific measurement of aspects
of behaviour, 'personality', etc., relevant to their concerns, and a
therapeutic function in dealing with 'mental disorder', 'maladjust-
ment', and so on. Although a continuity between the witch's incan-
tation and the psychotherapist's 'talking cure' could perhaps be
established plausibly enough, it seems that even the 'scientific
measurement' aspect of the modern psychologist's role also had its
counterpart in what would now be considered less respectable
historical precedents.
In his masterly study of religion and magic in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries,* Keith Thomas points out that magic to
some extent filled a therapeutic vacuum created by the disappear-
*K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Penguin Books, 1973.
47
ance of the confessional and the emergence of a note of puritanical
disapproval on the part of the clergy of the kinds of problems for
which people might seek help. Indeed magic, Thomas argues, 'may
have provided as effective a therapy for the diseases of the mind
as anything available today'.
People have always sought to influence by magical ritual what
they could not control in any other way. 'Witchcraft was thus
generally believed to be a method of bettering one's condition when
all else had failed. Like most forms of magic, it was a substitute
for impotence, a remedy for anxiety and despair.' There is of course
an element of pure wishfulness about this, but, again as Thomas
notes, there are facilitative aspects of much magical ritual which,
though they form no part of its central rationale, have the effect of
encouraging people to make up their minds concerning a particular
course of action, or of comforting the person who distractedly
seeks a solution to his or her dilemma. Divination, for example,
could help men to take decisions when other agencies failed
them. Its basic function was to shift the responsibility away
from the actor, to provide him with a justification for taking
a leap in the dark, and to screw him up into making a decision
whose outcome was unpredictable by normal means.
The diviner's predictions, therefore, did not deflect his
clients from their original intentions; on the contrary, it was
the process of consultation which forced them to know their
own minds. Divination could set the imagination free.
In this respect, magical procedures acted precisely in the way
that, as I suggested earlier, psychotherapy acts today. Psycho-
therapy also makes claims to technical processes of cure which are
in fact invalid, but in the course of doing so dispenses comfort and
encouragement which are far from ineffective.
Apart from the directly therapeutic significance of magical
modes of thought, one may note that, for example, both in its
methods (which were to a surprising extent 'objective' and stat-
istical) and in its concerns (which included the study of 'individual
differences' and human typology, vocational and educational guid-
ance, etc.), seventeenth-century astrology bore resemblances to
'modern' psychology so strong that one can scarcely believe one is
reading about a different discipline. Actually, of course, one is not:
As Auguste Comte was to recognize, the astrologers were
pioneering a genuine system of historical explanation. In their
confident assumption that the principles underlying the devel-
opment of human society were capable of human expla-
nation, we can detect the germ of modern sociology.
48
Astrologers, apparently, even justified their failures in precisely

the same way as do present-day applied psychologists. In both
cases, practitioners point out that their 'scientifically established'
procedures are based on an assessment of the probability of a
particular finding, or outcome, or 'behaviour', so that one may
expect there always to be a proportion of cases in which matters
will go astray. Furthermore, both astrologers and psychologists
confess a degree of human error: the procedures and tests used,
they say, have to be to some extent interpreted and the accuracy
of this will depend on the correct following of rules, 'clinical experi-
ence and judgment', and so on. In both cases, then, large loop-
holes are provided in the event of the 'scientificity' of the system
being attacked. The similarity of concerns between astrology and
more modern disciplines is clearly noted by Thomas:
In the absence of any rival system of scientific explanation,
and in particular of the social sciences - sociology, social
anthropology, social psychology - there was no other existing
body of thought, religion apart, which even began to offer
so all-embracing an explanation for the baffling variousness
of human affairs.
As is the similarity of clinical application:
The attraction of having one's horoscope cast was not unlike
that of undergoing psychoanalysis today. The reward would
be a penetrating analysis of the individual's innermost attri-
butes, the qualities which he should develop, and the limi-
tations against which he should be on his guard.
Astrology's 'pretensions to be a genuinely scientific system' again
remind one strongly of the insistence of present-day psychologists
that their scientific orthodoxy must give them a right to respect
and credibility, and they too would argue that their findings are
based 'on the meticulous study of cause and effect'.
As far as 'modern psychology' is concerned, I see no real
evidence that its findings and predictions, its so-called 'laws of
behaviour', and so on, are any more soundly established or firmly
based than were the claims to effectiveness of the astrologers. In
my own field of clinical psychology, for example, it seems to me
that scientific method has merely provided a rhetoric through
which psychologists could (a) introduce ideas and practices which
they felt to be beneficial and probably valid, and (b) create for
themselves a credible professional role. Having largely succeeded
in both these aims, psychologists have now for the most part
abandoned the 'tough-minded' scientific stance by means of which
they bought their respectability, and which would indeed now
49
work against their interests because there is in truth so little

scientific evidence that their procedures do in fact work. Having
become firmly established professionally, psychologists now simply
assert their effectiveness in the confident and correct expectation
that this will be sufficient to maintain their standing.
But when all is said and done, it is of course a mistake to regard
magic and science as opposing points of view, for our scientific
procedures are informed by our wishful magic. As Thomas points
out: 'the magical desire for power had created an intellectual
environment favourable to experiment and induction: it main-
tained a break with the characteristic mediaeval attitude of
contemplative imagination.' Science, in this way, evolves from
magic.
There is indeed a sense in which scientific observation and
procedure need to be dispassionate: the scientist must take note of
what actually happens, as the result, for example, of experiments
which have been conducted, rather than what he or she would like
to happen. But it is only in a relatively limited and technical sphere
that scientists need to maintain this kind of objectivity: the true
scientist needs to pay proper respect to the 'embodied otherness'
of the world and the things and people in it, to recognize that they
are not to be wished in or out of existence, but this does not
mean that he or she is not passionately involved in the search for
knowledge. Above all, however dispassionate science may or may
not be, it is certainly not disinterested. Francis Bacon, whose role
in laying the grounds of scientific procedures is reverentially
acknowledged by philosophers of science today, clearly associated
his aspirations for science with the kinds of powers which at the
time only magic could hope to achieve:
Francis Bacon listed as desiderata the prolongation of life,
the restitution of youth, the curing of incurable diseases, the
mitigation of pain, the speeding up of natural processes, the
discovery of new sources of food, the control of the weather,
and the enhancement of the pleasures of the senses. He
wanted divination put on a natural basis so that it would be
possible to make rational predictions of the weather, the
harvest, and the epidemics of each year. His aspirations were
the same of those of the astrologers, the magicians and the
alchemists, even if the methods he envisaged were different ...
This is not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, but of
knowledge in order to dominate nature and increase the power of
men. And in truth, of course, science has not made a bad job
*Thomas, op. cit.
50
of this enterprise (even if at a cost, in terms of pollution and

impoverishment, etc., which we have yet to count). There is,
however, much less hard evidence that the sciences of man, the
'psycho-' disciplines, have achieved even a tiny proportion of their
aims. The evolution of natural science from magic - of, for
instance, chemistry from alchemy - may be an interesting illus-
tration of the constancy of our wishfulness and a sobering indi-
cation of our lust for power, but it is also an example of a real
evolutionary movement (whether for good or for ill) in the nature
of our search for knowledge. Whether the same can be said for
psychology is another question, and how far it represents a distinct
advance upon magic, in terms of evidential, objective knowledge,
is entirely debatable.
It is my belief that, in terms of their capacity to develop and
apply conceptual thought and practical action, human beings are
broadly equal partners in the creation of a moral world (i.e. a
world which cannot be technically known in advance, but must be
created out of conduct we can characterize only as good or bad).
If this is so, they cannot then expect to be able to understand or
treat each other as if some of them were obiects; methods of
objective, natural science cannot be expected to bear fruit when
applied to a community of subjects (which is the only proper, and
in the long run possible, way of regarding the human community).
Psychology then, it seems to me, is still much more closely
related to magic than is, say, chemistry. Partly, no doubt, one can
explain its continuing success because like magic, in Thomas's
words, it 'lessens anxiety, relieves pent-up frustration, and makes
the practitioner feel that he is doing something positive towards
the solution of his problem'. But I think that there are more
powerful reasons which support the practice of psychology quite
apart from its convincing use of scientific rhetoric and its incidental
provision of comfort and encouragement to those who lack more
effective remedies for their ills, and consideration of these will once
again involve us in an examination of the operation of interest.
Thomas himself notes the role played by some magical
procedures in associating misfortune with moral blame, and hence
contributing to forces of social control. It is precisely this aspect -
that of social control through the establishment of individual guilt
and accountability- which has become, in my view, the principal
function of psychology, and which serves to maintain it in so
flourishing an existence within our society.
Modern psychology's aim to 'predict and control human behav-
iour', as well as its investment in the theory and practice of
conditioning (particularly strong in the behaviourist school and the
associated 'behaviour therapies'), may claim a significant part of
51
their ancestry in the writings of the seventeenth-century philos-

opher John Locke. Showing the same kind of innocence which was
noted in the last chapter in the case of the Utilitarians writing a
century later, Locke seems unaware that his proposals for the
effective education, or perhaps rather shaping, of the individual
would ever be put to any use other than the perfecting of mankind.
To our ears, however, there is already a rather sinister ring to his
proposals. In advocating the establishment in children of habit
through the judicious use of praise and blame (encouragement and
shame), Locke writes:
If by these means you can come once to shame them out
of their faults, (for besides that, I would willingly have no
punishment) and make them in love with the pleasure of
being well thought on, you may turn them as you please, and
they will be in love with all the ways of virtue.*
From this, as Passmore notes:
It will at once be obvious that Locke has opened up, in
principle, the possibility of perfecting men by the application
of readily intelligible, humanly controllable, mechanisms. All
that is required is that there should be an educator, or a
social group, able and willing to teach the child what to
pursue and what to avoid.
Here lies, in a nutshell, the whole point and purpose of the vast
enterprise which present-day psychology has become: the location
of the means of social control inside the heads of the very individ-
uals who are to be controlled. Compare Locke's benign view of
what has come to be known as 'behavioural shaping' or 'behaviour
modification' with the altogether less palatable perspective of
Servan, who wrote in late eighteenth-century France of the
necessity to link the ideas of crime and punishment in the minds
of people such that they
follow one another without interruption ... When you have
thus formed the chain of ideas in the heads of your citizens,
you will then be able to pride yourselves on guiding them
and being their masters. A stupid despot may constrain his
slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even
more strongly by the chain of their own ideas; it is at the
stable point of reason that he secures the end of the chain;
this link is all the stronger in that we do not know of what
it is made and we believe it to be our own work; despair and
*Quoted in Passmore, op.cit.
52
time eat away the bonds of iron and steel, but they are
powerless against the habitual union of ideas, they can only
tighten it still more; and on the soft fibres of the brain is
founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires ...
Already one begins to see why, having considered the associ-
ationist psychology which grew out of Locke's philosophical
analysis, Passmore should judge that:
It is not surprising that, under Pavlov's influence, such a
psychology won official approval in the Soviet Union and
wide acceptance in the United States, both of them countries
which are deeply involved in the technological 'management'
of human beings ...
Independent testimony to the success of this enterprise is lent
by the words of two modern American writers, who in the course
of a disturbing analysis of the uses to which 'therapeutic'
psychology has been put in the United States to control the behav-
iour of children who are in one way or another troublesome to
authority, note that 'behaviour modification can make the effects
of such authority more painless than, for example, the use of a
club or the threat of punishment, but in its ideal form it will erase
all awareness of its existence and thereby make it absolute.'t
Nobody has done more than Michel Foucault to show how the
development over the last few centuries of the human sciences has
become saturated throughout with the interests of power. In his
magnificent book Discipline and Punish, for example, he argues
that 'all the sciences, analyses or practices employing the root
"psycho" ' have arisen in the course of a process in which the
punishment of illegal acts by otherwise anonymous malefactors,
has turned into the maintenance of discipline in people by means
of an ever more finely differentiated analysis of their individual
characteristics. Where once the state discouraged threats against it
through an ostentatiously terrifying recourse to spectacular tortures
and execution, it now does it through a scientific technology of
power - i.e. discipline. Through the use of scientific observation,
the objectifying 'gaze' which seeks to see without itself being seen
(a necessity well known to every student of psychology in search
of 'uncontaminated' observations), social scientists become prac-
titioners of a discipline which dissects, orders and normalizes indi-
.. Quoted in M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Penguin Books, 1979.

tP. Schrag and D. Divoky, The Myth of the Hyperactive Child and
Other Means of Child Control, Penguin Books, 1981.
53
viduals, and documents and traces the roots of their differentiation

or dissent.
The establishment of such discipline is aided by several factors.
There is, for example, the actual apparatus of observation, corre-
sponding to the microscope of the physical scientist: in this respect
Foucault writes particularly interestingly of the 'panopticon', i.e.
the physical structure whereby human beings could be observed or
studied in large numbers by as few as one unseen watcher. The
prototype of this design is the circular prison, in which cells are
constructed around the circumference, facing inwards in such a
way that one warder in the centre would have a direct view of all
prisoners. This kind of structure, several examples of which were
built in the last century, has its parallel today in the one-way glass
screens to be found in every university department of psychology.
(It is characteristic of Foucault's genius to bring one suddenly face-
to-face with a question at once blindingly obvious and excruciat-
ingly revealing: if psychologists' intentions are honourable- as we
have always felt and asserted them to be - why do they need to
shield people from their gaze?)
Apart from the physical paraphernalia of observation, the tech-
nology of power has other tools of its trade - for example the
concept of delinquency, which allows the punisher of acts to
become the disciplinarian who, as it were, invades the internal
space of individuals in order to establish and track their reasons;
instead of punishing the wrongdoer's action, you thus control his
or her biography. There is also the procedure of the examination:
The examination combines the techniques of an observing
hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment. It is a normal-
izing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to
classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visi-
bility through which one differentiates them and judges them.
That is why, in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examin-
ation is highly ritualized. In it are combined the ceremony of
power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of
force and the establishment of truth. At the heart of the
procedures of discipline, it manifests the subjection of those
who are perceived as objects and the objectification of those
who are subjected.
For modern men and women who have never experienced what
it is like not to live under the 'normalizing' gaze of educational,
medical and scientific experts of one kind or another, and who
have been subjected from their earliest days to a rhetoric which
emphasizes the benefits of living in a 'free world', the suggestion
that we are seriously constrained by the unseen discipline of our
54
social institutions may seem simply incredible. Examinations, for

example, seem to be the 'natural' and 'obvious' ways to test
educational achievement, and indeed the educational system itself
seems the 'natural' and 'obvious' way to impart knowledge to the
young. At the same time, I think, we all of us have the evidence
of our own experience to suggest that Foucault and others are not
wrong to alert us to the extent to which our social institutions do
curtail our freedom and cripple our potentialities as human beings.
For example, who does not know for him- or herself the savage
tyranny of the 'norm'? Being different, standing out, feeling differ-
ently from others, experiencing oneself as conspicuous in some
way - feelings such as these are at the very core of much of what
gets called 'psychiatric disorder', and indeed of the everyday terrors
of us all. That such feelings are so familiar a part of our ordinary
experience leads us to consider them as 'human nature', but much
more likely, I suspect, is that they are the internalized values of a
society which depends for its smooth economic functioning on the
willing obedience of the individual. Punishment of illegality has
become, through the processes so brilliantly described by Foucault,
individual guilt over non-conformity.
Although the vast majority of those involved professionally in
the technology of discipline (and ultimately in the engineering of
self-discipline) tend to be quite unaware of their contribution
(feeling instead that their role is merely one of scientific inquiry or
therapeutic service), this is not true of all, and Foucault's insights
find their echo in the observations of some of those much more
directly engaged at the professional level. Not surprisingly,
however, the most trenchant criticism tends to come from those
who obtain a clear view of the 'psycho-' disciplines from outside.
It takes, for example, two journalists, Schrag and Divoky, • to
point out what the actual effects of 'screening' programmes for
American children may be. A combination of parental anxiety,
professional self-interest and undercurrent concern over social
unrest resulted, they write, in a situation in which:
Between 1971 and 1974, thirty states passed special

education laws and more are doing so each year; many of
these mandate the screening of entire school populations not
only for defective vision and hearing, for malnutrition and
bad teeth, but for 'oedipal conflicts', 'ego disturbances' and
'normalcy' in 'impulse control', 'withdrawal' and 'social
*The Myth of the Hyperactive Child and Other Means of Child

Control, op. cit.
55
behaviour'. Such screening is now common, even for four-
year-aids.
While procedures such as these are justified by a rhetoric of welfare,
their actual effect is that
this generation is learning at a very young age that there is
nothing unusual about being watched, questioned, tested,
labelled and 'treated', or about the fact that the results of all
that watching and questioning are being stored and processed
in machines over which the individual has no control. It is
hardly worth saying again that the existence of such a record
can have a chilling effect or that privacy is 'the right to be
left alone'. But for those who have become habituated to
such records and treatment from the age of five, that chilling
effect may never occur because they have never been left
alone, and they will therefore never suspect that there might
have been another way.
And so:
An entire generation is slowly being conditioned to distrust
its own instincts, to regard its deviation from the narrowing
standards of approved norms as sickness and to rely on the
institutions of the state and on technology to define and
engineer its 'health'.
If one is to understand the processes whereby 'scientific
psychology' comes to cooperate with the state in the realization of
the latter's interests, one must, I think, guard against the temptation
- at times very strong - to attribute to those involved, i.e. the
economically powerful, the politicians and the 'scientific'
professionals, implication in some kind of malevolent conspiracy.
Although it would no doubt be equally mistaken to rule out the
possibility that there can be quite deliberate and conscious
components to the exploitation of the weak by the strong, the
process of exploitation as a whole is probably facilitated most of
all by our having been overtaken in recent times by a general
lowering of moral and political awareness. 'Politics and religion',
together perhaps with too indecently direct reference to money (as
in the question of how much a person earns), have become subjects
which many people feel it indelicate to inquire into too closely or
too publicly. This constitutes a form of repression the effect of
which (as is, after all, commonly the case with repression) is to
allow the interests which might otherwise be challenged by, in
this case, moral and political awareness to operate all the more
unrestrainedly. Professional collaborators with such interests have
56
in this way no particular consciousness of the significance of their

collaboration. Economic values have largely replaced moral and
political ones in the public awareness, so that anything which
appears to be conducive to the 'creation of wealth', or at least to
economic stability, is taken as self-evidently desirable.
'Ordinary people', moreover, feel powerless to challenge an
oppressive system partly because the channels of moral and
political understanding which were once available (for example in
the days when political pamphlets would be read in hundreds of
thousands) have largely become closed off to them. (As noted
earlier, this feeling of powerlessness is, these days, very frequently
a complaint of people suffering from 'symptoms' of psychological
distress, many of whom explicitly recognize that the information
that would enable them to make judgments about socially sign-
ificant and disturbing issues- for example 'the bomb', racial unrest
-is not available in those 'media' to which they have ready access.)
It is thus with almost disarming political naivety that
H. J. Eysenck- Britain's best-known psychologist- could write of
a 'technology of consent':
which will make people behave in a socially adapted, law-
abiding fashion, which will not lead to a breakdown of the
intricately interwoven fabric of social life . . . a generally
applicable method of inculcating suitable habits of socialized
conduct into the citizens (and particularly the future citizens)
of the country in question - or preferably the whole world. •
Psychology's most significant contribution to modern society is
less 'scientific' or 'therapeutic' than managerial. The task shaped
by the economic interests of this century has been to shift the
ordinary person's orientation from production to consumption,
and this has been achieved by expropriating his or her knowledge
and skill so that they can become mechanized and managed in a
mass market. Indeed, this programme has at times been put into
operation entirely consciously in the name of 'scientific
management':
The managers assume ... the burden of gathering together
all the traditional knowledge which in the past has been
possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating
and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae ...
•H. J. Eysenck, The technology of consent. New Scientist, 42, 688-90,

June 1969. For this and the following quotations from Taylor, I am
indebted to Dr John Shotter.
57
Because:
... all the planning which under the old system was done
by the workman, as a result of his personal experience, must
of necessity under the new system be done by the management
in accordance with the laws of science. •
The prestige of 'science' becomes associated with whatever social
processes are necessary for the achievement of the economic inter-
ests of power, and to this purpose the 'social sciences' lend them-
selves admirably. As Schrag and Divoky put it:
The normative assumptions and natural order invoked by the
new modes of control are, in one sense, disciplinary replace-
ments for Social Darwinism. Each in its own time was (or is)
'scientific'. But while Social Darwinism was almost entirely
an economic 'law' concerned with the individual's fitness for
the labour market (and particularly the factory), its contem-
porary substitute is concerned with every aspect of the indi-
vidual's life and, most particularly, with his potential as a
client. The system no longer requires his muscle, but it needs
his obedience. It no longer must train him to be a reliable
worker, but it must condition him to be managed.
What Christopher Lasch calls the 'tutelary complex' - i.e. the
amalgam of educational, social and therapeutic agencies concerned
with our 'adjustment' - has in fact become the instrument of
managerial discipline. In a passage strongly reminiscent of
Foucault, he suggests that the tutelary complex:
... both reflects and contributes to the shift from authori-
tative sanctions to psychological manipulation and surveil-
lance - the redefinition of political authority in therapeutic
terms - and to the rise of a professional and managerial class
that governs society not by upholding authoritative moral
standards but by defining normal behaviour and by invoking
allegedly non-punitive, psychiatric sanctions against
deviance.t
Interest is at once the most powerful and the least honourable
motivation of human conduct. Unchecked, its operation is likely
to be extremely destructive, since its long-term effect is to wear
away the ligaments which bind a society in communal purpose. If,
into the bargain, its operation is repressed - i.e. unnoticed and
*F. W. Taylor, Scientific Management, Harper and Bros., 1947 (first

published 1918).
tThe Minimal Self, op. cit.
58
uncommented-upon- the destructiveness to which it gives rise may

turn out to be uncontrollable. That psychology - supposedly the
'scientific study of human behaviour' - concerns itself not at all
with the operation of interest (though it is itself heavily caught up
in it), testifies, in, as it were, silent eloquence, to the extent to
which we do repress awareness of the operation of interest. We
simply do not talk about nor even notice the degree to which our
conduct, at all levels, is aimed at the exploitation of the world and
of each other purely for selfish gain, nor do we see that a great
deal of the distress we experience personally, in our everyday lives,
is traceable to the currents of interest in whose destructive vortices
we are caught up.
We have in our present society largely dismantled the moral
structures by means of which the operation of interest may be
checked, and through the acceptance of mass-market economies as
somehow inevitably necessary we have reduced almost to vanishing
point the degree to which political opposition can expose and
cancel out the operation of competitive interests. In these circum-
stances, it becomes all the more important to increase awareness
of the degree to which we are under the sway of interest - i.e. to
lift our repression of it.
There are perhaps some signs that the appeal of cupidity and
self-interest is becoming less disguised than even a few years ago,
but this seems to be happening not so much through a frank
acknowledgment of greed as through an association of 'market
forces' with a kind of unexamined moral imperative: interest is
breaking free of moral restraint by linking itself directly with an
assertion of moral authority - cost-benefit analysis becomes the
fundamental measure of right and wrong. (The technique of
assertion is, of course, itself characteristic of the marketing society,
and replaces now almost outmoded methods of what one might
call 'evidential' persuasion. When what matters is whether rather
than why you buy- the economy must, after all, expand- attempts
to convince you of a commodity's value by a rational appeal to
evidence of its qualities give way to an almost ritual assertion of
those qualities, a kind of authoritative confirmation that it is indeed
up for sale, and therefore ought to be bought. As I have already
indicated in the case of clinical psychology, the technique of
assertion extends far beyond the boundaries of what we have
traditionally considered the 'market-place'.)
The extent to which the workings of interest are cloaked in
repression is still, however, very great, and represents a process in
which we are all implicated. Disavowed interest, one might say, is
the barely visible oil which keeps the cogs of the acquisitive society
turning. Interest works, indeed, not by the brutal oppression of
59
one section of society by another, but through the interlocking of

many types and sub-sets of interests. I may achieve what I want
(which may easily be against your interest) by recruiting you to my
cause through making the attainability of what you want appear
dependent upon your falling in with my desires. This is of course
nothing other than the ancient art of manipulation long known to
politicians and horse-traders, but I think we fail to acknowledge
how large a part it plays in our conduct, as well as how unre-
strained and dangerous the game becomes when it is fuelled by an
individualistic pursuit of happiness and unchecked by any over-
arching moral purpose.
In the context of the interlocking of our interests, our conduct
tends to slide always in the same direction of exploitation and
maximization of perceived personal gain, harnessing as it goes
baser and baser and coarser and coarser motivations in order to
increase the saleability and consumption of our 'products'. This
slide takes place in an almost infinite number of finely graded steps.
The space between our potential and our actual actions may well
be occupied by feigned considerations of right and wrong, but it
is in fact occupied by the promptings of interest. One might almost
formulate a 'law of human behaviour' in this respect (and one, I
fear, more accurate at the present time than many advanced by
experimental psychologists over the last hundred years): 'faced
with a number of courses of action having roughly equal prob-
ability of achievement, a person is likely to choose that which
conforms most to his/her self-interest'. Furthermore, what the indi-
vidual sees as in his or her interest will be manipulated by higher-
order interests, with the degree of superordinacy of an interest or
set of interests being determined by economic power. We are thus
led more or less automatically into forms of relationship and
communication which are entirely manipulative. The more power
a person or a group has, the more will it be able to determine the
perceptions of their interest held by those lower in the power
hierarchy, so that what low-status people see as in their interests
will probably not be so, but will in fact be in the interests of the
relatively more powerful.
Because the workings of interest are impersonal in the sense that
they do not spring from the conscious intentions of particular
people, it is very hard to find a language in which to express them.
In this respect, one is reminded of nothing so much as the 'Invisible
Hand' which Adam Smith described as responsible for the work-
ings of the market economy, and which is extolled so enthusiasti-
cally by his present-day admirers. Thus, individual people appear
to be absolved (since they are unaware of it) from complicity in a
60
process in which some of them are subjugated to the interests of

others while all believe that they benefit.
Since we are so unaccustomed to locating ourselves within this
process, and have no real concepts with which to do so, it is hard
to think of succinct or sharply drawn examples of its operation.
At the simplest and most direct level, however, most people capable
of honest reflection on their own conduct will be aware of how
easy it is to slide towards rationalizations of actions which are
beneficial (to themselves) rather than right (this is a distinction
which will be taken up in greater detail in the final chapter of this
book). Two apples are left in the bowl; though I am better fed and
richer than you, I take the larger one, perhaps guiltily acknowl-
edging to myself my greed and perhaps not, but in any case telling
myself more emphatically that the slight blemish on its skin in
fact makes it less desirable and nutritious than the other which I
graciously leave for you.
At a less personal level, it may be easiest to see how, for instance,
interest can disguise itself as necessity by examining the conduct
of people other than ourselves; let me take directly from my own
experience an example which I think at the same time illustrates
processes typical of the 'managerial' ethos of so-called 'post-indus-
trial society' on a much wider scale. The activity of some National
Health Service administrators has in recent times undergone a
striking change from the concerned, meticulous support of
procedures of clinical care once characteristic of them to a kind of
swashbuckling managerial bravado in which cuts in services to
patients and jobs of staff are made with apparent indifference or
even satisfaction. The same people whose conduct not long ago
would have been cautious, balanced, concerned for fairness, now
speak the hard, almost macho language of 'the real world' and of
the need for 'efficiency and effectiveness', and actually express
pride in cutting costs by measures which, ironically, are clearly
neither in their own direct interests nor in those of the staff and
patients for whom they are responsible. But there are ways in
which their interests are caught up in this process. Their perceived
interest lies in their 'image' of themselves as 'managers' -no longer
are they seen by 'colleagues in industry' as bumbling clerical func-
tionaries doing a second-rate job of administration in an over-
protected public service: they are managers making the kinds of
hard but necessary decisions made by executives of oil companies
(as seen on TV). They conform to a style and rhetoric which has
been sanctioned and endorsed from high above them by govern-
mental power aimed at dismantling public health care. Their nega-
tive interest lies in the feeling that if they did not so conform there
could be a threat to their jobs, though apart from this there is
61
no tangible advantage to their conduct, .. and indeed considerable

impairment to the moral quality of their work. These are decent
people whose conduct springs not from some kind of illusory
personal autonomy, but from a social context structured by
interest.
It would certainly be entirely misleading to locate the reasons
for interest-shaped conduct in the gullibility, perversity or 'selfish-
ness' of people themselves: as I shall try to elaborate in greater
detail in the course of the next two chapters, people react in relation
to a world which impinges directly upon them, but which is largely
shaped by forces not in their sight. The profound and pervasive
significance of this process has become most obvious to me through
working with 'patients' whose conduct is inexplicable, to them-
selves as well as to me, in terms of conventional understandings of
personal autonomy. Why, for example, does someone with a
serious physical condition such as diabetes or kidney failure make
precisely those dietary preferences which create an otherwise avoid-
able threat to life or limb? (Why do people smoke or work in
asbestos mines?) Why do people fail to take measures which would
quite obviously result in improvements to their personal condition
or circumstances? Above all, it has dawned on me- all too slowly
- that the straight distress people feel cannot be explicated by the
traditional conceptual paraphernalia of psychology and psycho-
therapy, etc., but arises out of a highly complex interaction between
the economic coercion which bears directly upon them (you work
in asbestos mines rather than starve) and the availability to them
of information, ideas and language which would allow them to
develop an understanding of their position. This picture is further
complicated by the fact that information, ideas and language, once
acquired (according to processes again to be elaborated in the
following chapters), are not easily altered. This entire complex of
""Since these words were written the British government has adopted an
altogether more workmanlike approach to the manipulation of managerial
interest. The Guardian, 3 September 1986, reports that: 'Health authority
managers could be denied an annual pay rise if they fail to achieve their
individual targets under the Department of Health's new merit pay
system ... But those "consistently exceeding short-term objectives and
making excellent progress towards long-term goals" will be awarded an
extra 4 per cent on salary in the first year ... Health service unions have
attacked the plan as an incentive scheme for accelerating hospital closures
and service cuts .. .' The article goes on to describe how each tier of
management will be 'assessed' by those next highest in authority. This
provides as good an example as any of how interest can be manipulated
via a pyramidal hierarchy ('management') in order to achieve higher-order
political goals.
62
interacting factors is shaped by the invisible handiwork of interest

into a disciplinary network from which there is virtually no escape.
Take, for example, a gentle and sensitive man of thirty who is
thought to be suffering from a 'mild depressive illness' because of
his 'unrealistic fears' of contamination at work and a preoccu-
pation with bronchial discomfort, his gloomy concerns about the
state of the world and his 'undue absences' from work. He works
in a machine shop clouded with industrial dust; he is worried about
the bomb, the frequency of rape and racial tension; he is afraid
that the vegetables in his garden may be polluted by fall-out from
the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and further afraid that this must
mean he's crazy. On the face of it, it may well seem that his
difficulties are 'unrealistic' because they all admit of some kind of
solution. But only if he is empowered to act within the space
available to him. Why, for example, shouldn't he wear a mask (as
he is supposed to) at work if he is worried about bronchial trouble?
Because his much 'tougher' workmates ridicule him if he does.
Why doesn't he get another job, then? He has tried, but there
aren't any. If he's worried about the state of the world, why doesn't
he become socially and politically active? Because he is barely
literate and doesn't know where to start; he has not learned the
highly complex conceptual competence which comes as second
nature to those, for example, who have received a middle-class
education. His horizons are all but inescapably limited by the
comics he reads, lTV news and the Sun newspaper. The tragedy is
that he is a gentle, intelligent, loving and thoughtful man whose
very sensitivity, in contrast to the hardened survivors who surround
him, makes him feel aberrant and even unhinged (which of course,
in relation to his context, he is). He likes his West Indian and
Asian workmates, but still thinks they ought to go 'home' because
'they are taking the jobs of real people'; this is the best judgment
he can make not because he is a 'racist' but because he has been
denied the conceptual and informational equipment which makes
any more sophisticated view possible. (If this seems incredible,
remember how difficult it must have been to learn things which
seem so easy to you now; or imagine, for example, suddenly being
required to perform some complex task which is somebody else's
child's play- glass blowing, perhaps, or speaking Finnish. 'All very
well,' you may say, 'but at least he could look at Channel Four
instead of lTV.' But from his point of view, 'people like me' don't
do things like that: they no more read unusual books or watch
unusual television programmes than the average professional
person attends court functions or rides to hounds, and for precisely
the same reason.) Why, agam, does he not wash the vegetables in
his garden to accommodate what is after all a perfectly legitimate
63
concern? Because authority has instructed him that there is no need

to, and he therefore experiences his own doubt as irrational (those
at the base of our power hierarchy are trained to trust unquestion-
ingly in authority).
At the bottom of the heap there is not a great deal of room for
manoeuvre, and whatever autonomy one has is likely to be strictly
limited to the most immediate personal concerns. Those sufferers
from diabetes, for example, who knowingly risk severe future
injury to their health by eating and drinking too much of the wrong
things, do so largely because the pleasures and possibilities of their
lives are limited to eating and drinking: their conduct in these
respects, though immediately 'motivated' by such restricted satis-
factions, is in fact held in place by a network of interlocking
interests quite out of their sight, and is far from irrational in terms
of their personal circumstances.
It is no doubt easier to see how one can be the victim of the
hierarchy of power than the victimizer, and yet both roles are
played out unconsciously by the vast majority of us. People further
up the hierarchy, having more room for manoeuvre, more access to
information and ideas, etc., are perhaps likely to be more plausibly
convinced of their personal autonomy, but here again their conduct
will be powerfully shaped by the interests bearing upon it from
above, and in the process will interlock in a coercive way with that
of those in a weaker position.
In the barest possible outline, then, one may be able to glimpse
in these far from polished reflections the potential for a psychology
of interest which psychology itself has not even started to make
explicit, but in which it has been extensively complicit. Indeed, the
growth of psychology as a 'scientific' discipline is itself instructive
of the way interests interlock to bring about particular forms of
socio-economic organization as well as to shape the direction taken
by supposedly disinterested academic and intellectual bodies.
Though, arguably, European, and in particular German academic
psychology towards the latter half of the nineteenth century was
overshadowed by the relatively abstract concerns of philosophy, it
received an altogether more practical impetus when it was imported
into the United States. As K. Danziger argues, rather than having
to justify themselves to their more academically respectable
colleagues in faculties of philosophy:
. . . psychologists had to justify themselves before a very

different tribunal. Control of university appointments,
research funds, and professional opportunities was vested in
the hands of either businessmen and their appointees, or
politicians who represented their interests. If psychology was
64
to emerge as a viable independent discipline, it would have

to be in a form acceptable to these social forces. The incli-
nations of those on whose decisions the fate of American
psychology depended were clear. They were men in positions
of genuine social power who were anxious to use their
positions to control the actions of others. They were inter-
ested in techniques of social control and in tangible perform-
ance. Their image of man was hardly that of the contempla-
tive philosopher: a huge system of secondary and professional
education had to be built practically from scratch; the human
fallout from wide-scale migration and urbanization had to be
dealt with; man had to be made to adapt to a rapidly rational-
ized industrial system; products had to be sold. In view of
the weakness of alternative sources of professional expertise,
psychologists might become acceptable if they could reason-
ably promise to develop the technical competence needed to
deal appropriately with these problems.*
Bearing in mind the researches of Foucault, one would probably
be unwise to take the difference between European and North
American psychology as one of kind rather than merely as one of
degree. However that may be, it does seem that present-day Anglo-
American psychology cannot by any stretch of the imagination
accurately be cast in the role of disinterested scientific pursuit, nor
its practical branches be understood as merely the therapeutic
application of insights derived from the laboratory.
As I hope I have already made clear, I do not wish to say that
there is no scientific truth in psychology and even less do I want
to suggest that there is no good to be derived from psychotherapy.
But if we are to extract what is true and good from psychology
and psychotherapy, it is essential that as far as we can we disen-
tangle the strands of truth and goodness from those of magic and
interest. In particular, it is of vital importance to expose the extent
to which psychology has been used to mystify an understanding
of the reasons for our conduct, and therapy to stifle our often
anguished protests at the injustices of our world, all in the interest
of the smooth running of a society which threatens to destroy us.
•K. Danziger, The social origins of modern psychology. In R. Buss

(ed.) Psychology in Social Context, Irvington Publishers Inc., 1979.
65
4
Faults and Reasons
Who is to blame? Whose fault is it? That is the question which
seems these days to leap to the mind of anyone who tries to
understand the causes of unhappiness. It is, for example, conspicu-
ously the question which obsesses all those - particularly journal-
ists, 'media people' and politicians - who have some part to play
in the public analysis of misfortune or unrest. Most inquiries into
politically significant disturbances or catastrophes seem to come to
rest once the blame for them has been established, and indeed the
haste to identify a blameworthy person or group is often positively
indecent. 'Activists', 'extremists', 'criminal elements'- these are the
familiar targets of blame whose identification somehow satisfies, or
perhaps rather pre-empts, our need to understand the causes of
disturbance in our society. The search for a person or people to
blame is equally remorseless in the case of less obviously politically
loaded misfortunes. A child is battered to death: do we blame the
parents, or do we blame the social workers, health visitors, doctors
who had contact with the family? An aeroplane crashes: do we
blame the pilot, the manufacturers, the maintenance engineers, the
air traffic controllers? We do not, it seems, rest happy until we
have located the cause of the disaster inside a person or group of
people.
The case is no different with our individual conduct and experi-
ence. Whose fault is my unhappiness? Is it mine, is it yours, my
spouse's, mother's, employer's?
And yet we have not always been so obsessed with blame.
Explanations for why people do things, or react in the way that
they do to what has been done, seem to conform (within limits)
to fashion. Not long ago, for example, the fashion was to refer
for explanations of human distress to concepts of illness, i.e. to
impersonal, 'dysfunctional' mechanisms within people. Just
recently, the fashion has become more to look for some kind of
{largely unelaborated) moral failing. In psychotherapy, it used to
be an advance for patients to accept a measure of responsibility
for their actions, since this allowed them to get a subjective grip
on their circumstances rather than seeing their 'inadequacy' as the
result of some kind of mechanical deficiency. Now, however, it
seems a positive disadvantage for patients to see themselves as
responsible for their actions, since they appear not to be able to
make a conceptual differentiation between responsibility and
66
Faults and Reasons
blame. What formerly was a route to at least a measure of subjec-

tive effectiveness has now become a terminus in guilty despair.
The reason for these movements of fashion in explanation lies
in the fact that individual psychology cannot be understood outside
the context of a social world. Times change, and with them our
individual conception of ourselves. It would be absurd to suppose
that any one of us can escape the influence of our social, political,
economic and cultural environment, and hence any attempt to
construct an absolute psychology appealing to unchanging funda-
mental principles must be a mistake. But, as I tried to show in the
previous chapter, our psychology may not be designed so much to
reflect the 'truth' of our situation as to shape our ideas about
ourselves, and in this it has not been so inconsistent: it does indeed
seem clear that, though fashion may change in the explanations
we seek for what we do, they have consistently and increasingly
over the last few centuries been focused on the individual. Whether
'fault' is mechanical or moral, it is seen as inside individual people,
and it is precisely the 'psycho-' disciplines, with their internal
probing, measuring, normalizing techniques, which make the
plausibility of individual fault seem almost unassailable.
To depart from the norm in virtually any direction is, practically
by definition, to become conspicuously deviant, and conspicuous-
ness is attended for most of us by a kind of rush of anxious shame.
It is this emotion- the panicky dread of being 'different'- which
signals our departure from, and so pushes us back into conformity
with, the internalized values of a society which tunis us into stan-
dardized objects. Completely accustomed to a bureaucracy of
power which measures, assesses, evaluates, dockets and labels us
from birth to death, we have now, through the transformation of
outside blame into inside shame, become our own disciplinarians.
In precisely this way, people who have been damaged by the
callousness and injustice of our social organization become not
angry but anxious, and see their predicament as a function of their
own inadequacy. The most perfect form of social control is that
which is accepted by those it oppresses as necessary and inevitable.
The progression from punishment to discipline traced so brilliantly
by Foucault finds its completion in our time in the imposition of
self-discipline - a conformity, that is, which is self-imposed, and
which we experience as (for the most part inarticulate) shame.
If, however, we are to elaborate an accurate understanding of
our condition, we must come to recognize the barbaric fallacy
involved in the individualization of fault. The current fashion for
blame (which, after all, so obviously does not explain anything)
seems to me to reveal more clearly the fallacy of individualization
than did the (also by no means defunct!) fashion for mechanistic,
67
Faults and Reasons
'illness' explanations, since the latter were able to draw 'credibility'

from the fundamentally technological nature of modern cultural
concerns. Both, however, serve the same purpose: they assist the
repression of interest. For as long as we seek the explanation for
pain, despair and catastrophe inside people, we shall fail to observe
that they are in fact the result of our construction of a society
serving the functions of power and interest as they operate coerc-
ively and manipulatively between people. If we are to preserve
from ourselves and disguise from others the spectacle of the damage
and injury done by our ruthless pursuit of our own interest (in the
form of 'happiness') we must create unquestioning allegiance to
the view that our misfortunes stem from personal failings, whether
mechanical or moral: the casualties of our system can 'only have
themselves to blame'.
The transparent irrationality of equating blame with explanation
does, however, make it hard to understand the extent to which
people seem ready not to inquire into the reasons for events or
circumstances beyond a mere imputation of blame for their occur-
rence. Though neither have a great deal to recommend them, in
an apparent 'progression' from scientism (mechanistic explanation)
to moralism (moral fault-finding) we seem if anything to be in
retreat from rationality, since moralism offers no form of expla-
nation at all. And yet, perhaps, the degree of popularity seeming
recently to be enjoyed by the 'New Right', by fundamentalist
religions, and by moralistic tracts masquerading as psychiatry:
may reflect an undercurrent recognition that our troubles are
indeed of our own making, and in this sense such popularity may
appear to be not entirely undeserved. At the same time, as long as
any such implicit acknowledgment of our moral responsibility for
ourselves is set within an individualizing psychology, it is not only
utterly misleading, but adds cruelty to error. To see people's despair
as arising from internal mechanical fault is simply incorrect, though
convenient and even humane; to see it as arising from personal
moral failing is both wrong and cruel even if it does gain a degree
of plausibility through a relatively healthy reaction against the
radical impersonality of mechanistic explanations. The persuasive-
ness, such as it is, of Wood's heartless book may in fact derive from
an intelligent, if fairly obvious, analysis of the rank improbability of
many of the more scientistic approaches to 'neurosis', but it shares
with them a view that the cures as well as causes of distress lie
inside the person.
Even psychoanalysis - perhaps one of the most honest and, at
*See for example the insightlessly uncompassionate view of psycho-

logical distress taken by G. Wood in his The Myth of Neurosis.
68
Faults and Reasons
least potentially, genuinely scientific attempts to elaborate a human

psychology - fails to get far beyond the notion of individual
responsibility, despite recognizing that people act for reasons of
which they are not conscious. Implicit in the psychoanalytic under-
standing of the reasons for our conduct is the view that they are
rooted, beyond the reach of awareness, in our personal history,
but that, through the consciousness-raising procedures of analytic
therapy itself, their effects may be put within the influence of our
will.* One could not possibly say that this kind of view is entirely
wrong, but at the same time it leaves too much out of account not
to be harmfully misleading. In locating the causes of distress in
individual experience, and in implying that the amelioration of
distress is a task for the individual will, psychoanalysis places
itself squarely with the other 'psycho-' disciplines in fostering the
interests of power; it obscures the fact that what damages us above
all are the injuries we cause ourselves and each other as we struggle
in the net of inducements and constraints thrown over us by our
interest-saturated social organization.
It is indeed the case, as any psychotherapist well knows and as
I have already had occasion to point out more than once, that
people do not know why they conduct themselves as they do.
Partly (as I argued at greater length in Illusion and Reality) this is
because so much of what we do falls outside the sphere of words.
The fact that we possess language gives us the mistaken idea that
we can describe everything, including the reasons for our day-to-
day activity, in its terms. But, of course, a great deal of what we
do is unconscious in the sense that we cannot put it into a verbal
form. Beyond this, however, is the fact that the reasons for much of
what we do are not even in principle available to our consciousness,
and it is this fact which our beliefs about our reasons for our conduct,
and our official psychologies, are above all designed to repress:
we come to feel personally to blame for social injustices which are
in fact perpetrated far beyond the reach of our awareness.
Our society is constructed as a hierarchy of exploitation based
on power. Its satisfactory functioning depends upon those lower
in the hierarchy not being able to gain sight of the way their
conduct is shaped by the interests of those higher in the hierarchy.
At every level in this society conduct is shaped by the manipulation
of interest in the relations between people. Society, in this way,
organizes itself around an unequal distribution of power through
the 'sliding together' of interlocking interests. Since responsibility
*Some analysts, however, have struggled hard to take account of the

difficulties involved in this view - see in particular R. Schafer, A New
Language for Psychoanalysis, Yale University Press, 1976.
69
Faults and Reasons
for this state of affairs is itself distributed, no doubt unevenly,

throughout society (in the sense that we all contribute to it), and
since there is no necessary correlation of interestedness with aware-
ness, the blueprint for social organization is not to be found in any
person's head, nor in the heads of any group of people (though it
may well be true that it is likely to be more available for articulation
to those high in the hierarchy). The explanation of our conduct is
thus not to be sought in a psychological analysis of individuals,
but in a socio-economic, historical analysis of relations between
people, and of the ways these have shaped the world we have to
live in. Even in the case where an oppressor is perfectly aware of
the principles whereby his or her oppression is maintained, and of
what are its fruits in terms of personal gain, and even if he or she
actively furthers the oppression, it would still be misleading to seek
an explanation for it inside the oppressor. This is presumably why,
whatever its morality, assassination is of doubtful practical value
as a solution in cases of tyranny.
The imputation of blame, and also of self-blame in the form of
guilt, usually arises in circumstances where a wider social view is for
some reason blinkered. Where, as it so frequently is, it is in the inter-
ests of the unequal distribution of power within society to cloud
this wider view, blame and guilt are likely to be actively fostered,
whether directly (e.g. in the form of political vilification) or indirectly
(e.g. in institutional forms of individualizing 'treatment').
It is often hard to see how these processes - of blame and guilt
- operate within one's own experience. One tends to be caught up
totally in blaming or feeling guilty, and it is frequently difficult to
see how any other reaction could be more appropriate. Occasion-
ally, however, perhaps even in the most trivial of situations, the
blinkers slip a little, and one does indeed catch a glimpse of the
wider view. I have not found it easy to think of examples, but
perhaps the two following will do.
It has usually been part of my car-driving experience that in
congested traffic conditions a certain, fairly high, percentage of
drivers can be relied upon to make way for one to enter or leave
a dense stream of traffic which otherwise, without their courtesy,
would block one's progress for a long time. Usually, that is,
someone will pause to make a gap for you to get into the stream
or else to allow you to turn through or out of a stream in order,
for instance, to enter a side-street. There is, however, one particular
right turn I have to make on my way to work which involves
turning across heavy traffic on the main road to enter a side road.
The on-coming traffic through which I have to turn moves very
slowly and haltingly, and all the car, bus and lorry drivers have a
perfect view of my car patiently signalling its wish. It would cost
70
Faults and Reasons
none of these drivers any inconvenience or loss of time to pause

to let me through, since they would be able immediately to catch
up with the vehicles in front of them. And yet, absolutely consist-
ently and day after day, they will crawl past nose-to-tail, stopping
almost provocatively across the mouth of the side road, seeming
nearly intentionally to block my getting into it. Drivers causing me
this frustration will have been able easily to see for themselves that
I have been waiting much longer than necessary to make this simple
manoeuvre. Before I realized the inexorability of this phenomenon
I used to fume with rage at the selfishness and lack of consideration
of the on-coming drivers; every time someone eased to a halt across
my bows I would mime sarcastic gratitude or perhaps even mouth
a reproof. But it soon became clear that blame was not appropriate
- it could not be the case that all these people were so brutally
inconsiderate; there must be a reason for them to behave the way
they did.
It was not until I happened to find myself in the same situation
as the drivers who had so consistently frustrated me that I
discovered what the reasons were. I found that their arrival at
my usual turning-point is preceded by about half a mile of solid
congestion, which may easily take fifteen to twenty minutes to
negotiate. Though a car or two may be waiting to turn right across this
agonizingly slow stream, their wait seems a relatively short one, and
the roundabout ahead, which is the cause of the congestion, is tanta-
lizingly close. When in this situation, the troubles of one or two
would-be right turners seem as nothing when compared with ours!
We have, in other words, reasons for what we do, and they lie
outside us. The 'selfishness' of a driver cannot be invoked as an
explanatory concept out of the context of a situation in which he
or she is to be found.
A woman I know whose job it is to be responsible for children
in care, and who is as conscientious and concerned as anyone in
this position could be, once described how she came to terms, in
part at least, with her tendency to feel guilty over 'not caring
enough' for her charges. She had had to go to a school open
evening to discuss with the head teacher the almost total lack of
progress of a twelve-year-old girl in her care. As she was waiting
her turn she listened to a mother in front of her talking about the
apparently very much more successful performance of her
daughter. What struck my friend was the strength of this mother's
anxious concern: clearly, she felt worried about her daughter in a
way which was simply not possible for someone whose interest in
a child was merely professional. She saw, in other words, that there
were reasons for the relative indifference to 'her' children's school
performance about which she had often felt guilty. Her guilt had
71
Faults and Reasons
consisted in a feeling that there was something lacking inside her

which made it impossible to care properly for her charges, but as
the result of this experience she was somewhat comforted by the
realization that such feelings depend upon the relation between self
and world. One cannot create in oneself certain forms of feeling
just because they are thought desirable; the relation between
mother and child is inescapably different from that between Child
Care Officer and child, not only (and perhaps not most) because
of the emotional bonds involved, but also because of the way
being-a-parent is given shape by the social world in terms of the
expectations, obligations, etc., it entails.
The structures of the world are experienced by us as feelings,
and not as a series of intellectual, articulate appreciations. A parent
feels the expectations and obligations of parenthood, and for most
parents it would be both impossible and unnecessary for them to
be able to 'unpack' these feelings into a verbal catalogue of their
constituent parts. But we all, when placed in the appropriate situ-
ation, do experience the feelings, and because they are experienced
personally, inside our own bodies, it is all too easy to form the
mistaken impression that we as individuals are in some way totally
responsible for them - i.e. that we are 'to blame' for them. To
return for a moment to my example, because 'the system' renders
her acquaintance with 'her' children inevitably intermittent and
temporary, the Child Care Officer cannot be expected to feel caring
about them in the same way as a parent whose connection with
and commitment to her child is expected to be life long. The extent
to which we 'care' is shaped by such issues as these, and not by
some capacity within us for which we are somehow individually
responsible. 'Caring' is not some kind of internal faculty,
possession, emotional gift, or 'skill' - it is a complex phenomenon
which stretches out beyond the individual who experiences it as a
feeling into a network of external significations.
Over and over again we are seduced by the intimate internality
of our experience into believing that the source of that experience
is also to be found inside us, or that we can alter the nature of the
experience by tinkering with our 'inner' workings. The fact that
this is so easy to believe is quickly seized upon by the structures
of interest as a way of mercilessly exploiting the world while
leaving individuals preoccupied with personal guilt over the
damage done: that huge proportion of humanity, for example,
which must inevitably suffer privation if the powerful minority are
to achieve 'happiness', may quite easily be led to feel that its
miseries are caused not by the necessary consequences of social
injustice, but by the personal failings of its members.
My unhappiness seems to stem from inside myself because that
72
Faults and Reasons
is where I feel it. Does it not therefore seem reasonable to suggest

that it will best be alleviated through working on the internal
feelings? This is a fundamental assumption of Western culture -
and yet it is as sensible as looking for (and trying to change) the
details of a picture in the camera that took it. We are so conditioned
to accept this 'therapeutic assumption' (that unhappiness, or
'dysfunction', is to be 'cured' within the individuals who experience
it) that to question it may earn one relegation to the lunatic fringe.
Those who have, as for example Ivan Illich, • questioned the effec-
tiveness as well as the rationality of a high technology medicine
which attempts to 'cure' the world's ravages on our bodies merely
by patching up the bodies themselves, have barely managed to
obtain a hearing because it seems so 'obvious' that illness and
disease are individual matters. (It is, at the same time, quite
common for people to feel personal guilt or shame over being
victims of disease.) Once again (and all the time) one must bear in
mind that as well as being highly plausible (because of the way we
experience our ills), the 'therapeutic assumption' is highly
convenient because it allows us to plunder the world and exploit
each other without having to be accountable for the damage we do
in the process. Just as our 'memory of bliss' renders us vulnerable to
the sales pitch of a society which depends for its continued viability
on selling us 'happiness', so our bodily experience of pain and
disease makes them only too intelligible as individual 'problems';
in both cases bodily experience combines with interest to mystify
our understanding. t
•1. Illich, Limits to Medicine, Penguin Books, 1977.

tit is interesting in this respect to note the reception given by the British
government to the report of the Working Party on Inequalities in Health
set up, also by government, in 1977. The report shows that mortality rates
for almost any category of disease or accident are much higher among the
less advantaged members of society, and suggests that health inequalities
on this scale cannot be explained 'except by invoking material deprivation
as a key concept'. This of course implies that merely treating the damage
after it has been done (the therapeutic assumption) fails to touch the root
causes of ill health and injury, which are more accurately identified as
consequences of socio-economic exploitation. The report has subsequently
appeared in book form (P. Townsend and N. Davidson, eds., Inequalities
in Health, Penguin Books, 1982), the editors noting that: 'The report was
submitted to the Secretary of State in April 1980, but instead of being
properly printed and published by the DHSS or HM Stationery Office, it
was arranged for only 260 duplicated copies of the typescript to be publicly
made available in the week of the August Bank Holiday in that year.
Major organizations within the NHS, including health authorities, did not
receive copies.' Such are the ways of repression!
73
Faults and Reasons
In the case of psychological distress, the therapeutic assumption

applies if anything even more powerfully than in the case of
physical disease. This may in part be because feelings of distress
or unhappiness are not seen as necessarily bodily things at all. Our
mechanistic culture at least gives us a certain respect for the 'reality'
of 'physical' entities like diseases, which we would on the whole
not expect to be able to influence merely through the exercise of
will or wishfulness, but when it comes to feelings, these seem to
many so insubstantial as to be potentially much more amenable to
quite easily conceived operations of will power or self control ('pull
yourself together!'), or failing that, wise counsel and sympathetic
therapy from the experts.
In fact, however, not only are we bodies, but we are bodies
within a world. Our feelings, whether of joy or sorrow, ecstasy or
pain, our most seemingly abstract intellectual and spiritual appreci-
ations and accomplishments, our most finely tuned social sensibili-
ties, all depend to be experienced at all on our bodily location
within a particular spatio-temporal context (i.e. a situation and a
history). I do not mean to say that our feelings are 'nothing but'
physical events, that, for example, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
could in principle (or even best) be understood as a series of
demonstrable events in his brain. This kind of crude mechanistic
thinking has for too long obscured our understanding of the nature
of human experience and achievement, and in fact relies on dislo-
cating the human body from the world in which it is situated,
precisely in order once again to emphasize individuality rather than
relatedness. But it is equally absurd to disregard our embodiedness,
to 'psychologize' our experience so that it becomes dislocated and
disembodied - a play of imagery upon which, it seems, we can
operate with the procedures of magic and fantasy to make of
ourselves anything we wish.
We experience the world through our bodily engagement with
it, and our conduct is for the most part the rational product of the
physical structures of our bodies on the one hand and the social
structures and exigencies of the world on the other. We can, it is
true, pretend that the world is not as it is, and that our experience
of it, especially when painful, is other than what we feel, and it
may be (which was my theme in Illusion and Reality) that such
pretence may become the norm, but in fact we cannot escape our
suffering. However much we mystify our understanding and
deceive ourselves about the meaning of our experience, there is in
the last analysis absolutely no way in which we can avoid the
consequences of being bodies within a world, and of knowing (even
if we cannot say) what it is like to be such. It is this fundamental
knowledge, the irreducible knowledge of the embodied subject,
74
Faults and Reasons
which affords us membership of a human community; however

hard we may struggle to differentiate ourselves from our fellows,
to render ourselves invulnerable to the terrible threats that human
society creates, we can never really obliterate a knowledge of the
truth of our situation, since it is given to us all in exactly the same
way. However ingeniously we may play with words, seek to create
objectivities on the one hand or relativities and perspectives on the
other, we all know what it is like to feel cold, just as we bleed if
you prick us. The 'truth', such as it is, of our situation lies, then,
not in the discovery of some absolute reality beyond ourselves, nor
in the constructions of our infinite ability to dream alternative
worlds, but in the experience of the inescapable relation between
our bodies and the context which envelops them.
Having for some years now watched, as attentively as I am able,
people (including myself) struggling to feel and act differently from
how they do feel and act, I am convinced that feeling and acting
are far from being matters of will,* but are, as it were, held in
place by the situation in which people find themselves - unless,
that is, the person is in some way impelled to act contrary to
reason. This is not to say that people's conduct is determined by
their environment, but rather that they conduct themselves the way
they do for good reasons. Determinism fails when applied to
human conduct not so much because it is wrong as because it is
logically inappropriate when applied to conscious beings: there is
no conceivable situation in which human beings could have full
knowledge of their circumstances and yet still be completely deter-
mined by them, and for this reason determinism becomes of no
further relevance to psychology. On the other hand, this does not
mean that we are free to do what we like or to feel what we want
or think we ought to feel. We act and feel rationally according to
our circumstances, and indeed our interests. To say that we act
rationally is not to say that we act necessarily correctly or sensibly,
but simply that we have reasons for what we do which follow
from our experience of the world and our bodily relation to it.
The 'New Right' provides a good current example of the kind
of moralism which makes use of the implausibility of mechanist
determinism to instil in its victims a sense of guilt (self-blame) for
their predicament, for it seems that if we are not determined by
our environment to 'behave' the way we do, we must be held
responsible for our 'freely' chosen responses to our world. But how
'free' people are to choose depends upon the range of choices open
*See in this respect L. H. Farber's wise little book, Lying, Despair,

Jealousy, Envy, Sex, Suicide, Drugs, and the Good Life, Basic Books,
1976.
75
Faults and Reasons
to them. My experience of people in psychological distress is that

the combination of their history and their personal circumstances
leaves them little reasonable alternative but to be distressed, just
as if you let a naked man loose in the middle of the countryside
in January he will be liable to feel cold, however 'free' he may in
theory be to seek the equatorial sun or to imagine himself wrapped
in a blanket before a blazing fire. In this way, the New Right uses
banalized versions of eternal verities ('the freedom of the human
spirit', etc.) to disguise a concerted and brutal attack precisely on
what freedom people have by undermining the very grounds upon
which they can rationally exercise it. To erode people's financial
security, to limit their access to ideas and education, to impoverish
their environments, swamp their consciousness with gutter propa-
ganda and stupefy it with televisual soporifics, to constrain their
protest through abuse of the law and its enforcement, and then to
tell them to stand on their own two feet quite clearly constitutes
cruel and cynical mystification. Of course, all things being equal,
a person can be said to 'choose' those courses of action which he
or she actually takes, but if the grounds upon which those choices
are made are grossly skewed or distorted, he or she can scarcely
be blamed for the direction taken. If apples cost five pence a pound
and oranges five pounds, my choice of the former is neither forced
by any mysterious process of determinism nor attributable to any
particular moral quality I may possess- it is, even if highly predict-
able, merely rational.
Those people who, through their experience or expression of
pain or confusion, fall into the arms of the 'helping professions',
perhaps becoming psychiatrically diagnosed as psychotic or neur-
otic or 'inadequate personalities', have in my experience almost all
arrived at their predicament through an entirely comprehensible,
rational and (of course with hindsight) predictable process. If you
run over a pea with a steam roller you don't blame the pea for
what happens to it, nor, sensibly, do you treat its injuries as some
kind of shortcoming inherent in its internal structure, whether
inherited or acquired. Similarly, if you place the {literally) unimag-
inably sensitive organisms which human babies are in the kind of
social and environmental machinery which we seem to be bent on
'perfecting', it can be of no real surprise that so many of them end
up, as adults, as lost, bemused, miserable and crazy as they do.
The only surprise, perhaps, is that so many pass as 'normal'.
The understanding which psychotherapists reach of the
difficulties and unhappiness of their patients is unlikely to reveal
any kind of absolute psychological 'laws', or any necessarily funda-
mental psychological 'problems'; what we find will depend as much
upon the times we live in as upon any basic 'facts' about 'human
76
Faults and Reasons
nature'. It might well be, for example, that a psychological

consultant to a closed and egalitarian order of peace-loving and
scholarly monks would find himself focused upon issues of a quite
different order from those facing the contemporary secular thera-
pist - perhaps, for example, in that situation questions concerning
the operation of the will would become paramount. In our situ-
ation, however, what can no longer be ignored, it seems to me, is
the extent to which people are inevitably and in fact quite trans-
parently damaged by the kinds of life which they cannot but be
expected to 'choose' to lead. None of us, rationally, can escape the
pursuit of happiness, nor the meshes of the net of interests through
which we pursue it. What damages us are not our individual faults
or shortcomings, but the instruments through which we wreak our
inhumanity upon each other. We use our 'official' conceptualiz-
ations of the 'causes' of 'behaviour' to blind ourselves to - to
repress - our involvement in a process of mutual exploitation and
injury which serves the interests of a hierarchy of power.
In many respects the 'therapeutic assumption' constitutes an
attempt to replace values of justice and equality (which make social
demands upon us and place limits upon the extent to which we
may indulge ourselves as individuals) with a reassurance that what-
ever harm the pursuit of happiness and self-interest may inflict can
easily be put right. Furthermore, so deep within us is the thera-
peutic assumption established that even when a case for greater
social justice and mutual care and compassion is conceded, we are
still apt to say: 'That's all very well in the long term, but in the
short term there are still all these inadequate and unhappy people
who, damaged by the system though they may be, must still have
something done about them.' In other words: 'Though therapy
may not be the ultimate answer, we still need therapy.' We find it
virtually impossible to abandon the idea of therapy, to contemplate
seriously the possibility that in fact therapy may really not work.
It is not just that such a possibility is seen as empirically unlikely:
to voice it is liable to be taken by many as a kind of offence,
if not against decency, then against fundamentally sane, rational
discourse. And yet I think it may be true.
Even in my own reflections about patients I have known very
intimately, I find it difficult to acknowledge that the circumstances
which seem to attend real improvements in their 'condition' are
the kind of thing which really ought to count as 'cure'- i.e. changes
in the structure of their world such as job improvements, better
housing, alterations in their personal relations (this, however, with
provisos to be inferred from the discussion in Chapter 6). I still,
in other words, find it hard to shake off a conviction that there
ought to be some kind of 'pure' therapeutic change which stems
77
Faults and Reasons
directly and solely from the processes of therapy itself. I feel guilty
that I cannot make magic.
But, like everyone else, my patients feel and act the way they
do because they are bodies in a world, and only in so far as
'therapy' can affect that relation can it be of any help. On the
whole, it is of much less help than almost any of us can bear to
think. That is not necessarily quite such a bad thing as it sounds,
for if therapy were as effective as we would like it to be - if the
relation of the body with the world were so easily manipulated -
human life would quickly be rendered almost entirely trivial. To
gain a deeper understanding of these issues we need, I think, to
examine the processes of 'change'.
78
5
Change: The Limits of
Therapy
Psychotherapists have always had the greatest difficulty in demon-
strating that their activities actually lead to anything remotely
resembling a 'cure' of the 'conditions' presented by the patients
who consult them. The focus of this book is not psychotherapy,
and it is not my intention to try to deal exhaustively with the
question of the usefulness or otherwise of the therapeutic enterprise
as a whole; rather, I want to use the experience of therapy and
therapists to examine the processes whereby people change. For
nowhere do people try harder to change than in psychotherapy,
and few people can have put more effort into trying to get other
people to change than have psychotherapists.
There can, surely, be very few people who do not at some time
in their lives want to change either the way they feel (because they
feel distressed or unhappy) or the way they act (because alternative
courses of action would be practically or morally preferable). But
the possibility of change is not just important as a way of making
life more pleasant, it seems also that flexible modification of charac-
teristic forms of conduct will be necessary if people are to bring
to bear an influence on the world. If we are to understand, and
perhaps even give some deliberate direction to the way the social
world evolves, we shall need to gain some kind of articulate idea
of the ways in which people may change and how these may be
facilitated. I do not believe that the kind of people who consult
psychotherapists are particularly unusual, nor that the kinds of
'problems' they have are any different from anyone else's. Differ-
ences between the kinds of emotional pain and distress people feel,
and whether or not they experience them through 'symptoms', are
matters of degree rather than of kind. For these reasons, what one
learns from the observation of people trying to change through
psychotherapy almost certainly has, I believe, more general
relevance. I suspect also that it is in the various ideas about change
which psychotherapists have developed that the most 'sophisti-
cated' psychological concepts concerning the processes of change
in our culture are to be found. As will become apparent, this, I
think, is not saying very much about the levels of sophistication
psychologists have achieved in this respect.
There is a truly huge literature bearing upon research into the
outcome of psychotherapy. For obvious reasons, it is very much
79
Change: The Limits of Therapy
in the interests of therapists to show that their procedures 'work',

and most satisfactory of all would be if they could be shown to
work straightforwardly as 'cures' in the way that we commonly
conceive of cure in the field of physical medicine. However, as I
have indicated, despite their best efforts psychologists and psycho-
therapists have been able to demonstrate no such simple achieve-
ment. Carrying out research in this field is by no means easy, and
the complexities of research methodology are often cited as the
main reason why results have not been encouraging, but few of
those familiar with the literature could in good faith deny that
therapeutic approaches have failed to live up to the hope once
invested in them as 'cures'. Interestingly, this has not led to a
lessening of therapeutic activity, nor, I think, to a lowering of
expectations of therapy on the part of patients. Most therapists
now agree that the 'does it work' question is far too oversimplified
to allow of a sensible answer, and have become preoccupied instead
with research into the processes of psychotherapy rather than its
outcome, in the hope that a more intricate understanding of the
kinds of events which take place in the 'therapeutic relationship'
will lead to the formulation of more considered and sophisticated
questions about change.
It is not my purpose here simply to attack or condemn psycho-
therapy as a means of offering help to people, but rather to indicate
that the kind of help it offers cannot accurately be seen as one
constituting a technology of change. I have no doubt at all that
psychotherapy has a valid role to play within our society, but if
we are to gain a clear idea of what is its value and what should
be its place, and if, more importantly for present purposes, we are
to understand better the processes whereby people actually do
change, we need to absorb a little more honestly the lessons taught
by the experience of psychotherapy, and question much more rigor-
ously the grounds upon which we hold so tenaciously to the 'thera-
peutic assumption'. Most therapists, I suspect, have been rather
traumatized by the research literature: the lack of hard evidence
that any form of therapy really 'does any good' in the way that it
is supposed to is something to set the seeds of panic sprouting in
those who can see no obvious alternative way of making a living.
Hence, the attempt by and large has been to explain this kind
of evidence away rather than take it seriously and reflect on its
significance. To do precisely this, however- to take it seriously-
might lead to a considerable advance in our psychological under-
standing, and would not necessarily invalidate therapeutic activity
itself, since therapy may have other uses than trying to change the
way people are.
My own experience certainly accords with the findings of the
80
research literature. What is striking, and at times even surprising,

is precisely the extent to which patients do not change. This is not
to say that people- whether 'patients' or not- do not change at
all, but that, as I have already suggested, they do not change in
the way and for the reasons that one might, on the basis of the
best informed psychological 'knowledge', expect them to. This, I
think, is because, in relation to change, the assumptions of both
practical psychotherapy and the theoretical psychology it is based
upon are almost entirely misleading, and entrenched in our
thinking so deeply that we cannot make use of our actual experi-
ence of therapy in order to revise them. We insist that people must
change in the ways we expect them to, rather than learning and
intellectually elaborating the ways in which they actually do
change. We are caught up in a psychological mythology which is
designed to support our dreams of how we would like to be
(and the structures of interest which maintain them) rather than
developing a psychological science which takes serious account of
what it finds. The practical upshot of our error is to persist in the
construction of an ineffective and ultimately damaging psycho-
logical technology, rather than taking account in our moral
conduct toward one another of the relative permanence of the
damage we can inflict, and trying to avoid it.
There are, I think, three main strands to be identified in the
accounts theorists of psychotherapy have put forward of the basic
factors involved in change. These suggest that psychotherapeutic
change may be brought about through the operation of (a) insight,
(b) learning, and (c) love. The first two of these strands rest in
essence on technological values, the third (far less widely
represented) on a 'humanistic' view of the curative powers of
relationship. In the actual practice (as opposed to the theoretical
creed) of almost any kind of psychotherapy, one is likely to find
all three of these strands at work, though in different proportions.
The belief that they should 'work' in the sense of bringing about
change owes much to the tradition of magic from which, as I
suggested in Chapter 3, they may be traced.
The value of insight as a vehicle of change purely in itself is
certainly less readily accepted by most thoughtful psychotherapists
than it used to be, and yet many still work very hard to try to get
their patients to achieve it, and I know from my own experience
how difficult it is to overcome the frustration one feels when people
at last come to see why they act and feel the way they do, and yet
still persist in carrying on as before. There is a natural inclination,
embedded as we are in a technological culture, for us to assume
that we only need to know what the trouble is to be able to put
it right - the greatest challenge appears to lie in the making of an
81
accurate diagnosis. Patients, certainly, are frequently convinced

that if only they can once discover what 'it' is which is troubling
them it will be a simple matter to take the appropriate steps to
recovery. Most of us in everyday life also probably subscribe to a
tacit belief that a causal understanding of any particular emotional
or 'relationship problem' leads more or less automatically to a
prescription for effective adjustment.
Some of the early literature on psychoanalysis testifies to an
enthusiastic confidence in the power of insight simply to evaporate
so-called neurotic 'symptoms'- once the patient accepted that, say,
her functional paralysis was related to an infantile wish to sleep
with her father, it would simply disappear. Whether or not such
spectacular cures were then achieved, they are certainly hard to
come by now, and most therapists today recognize that knowledge
of the history of a 'problem' is not of itself sufficient to make it
go away. Hence the importance of learning. Even if you know very
well why you act and react in the way that you do, you still, in
order to change, have to learn to act differently.
I have no doubt that learning is indeed the single most funda-
mentally important factor in the kind of self-initiated change which
psychotherapy seeks to achieve, and yet, because of their need to
justify their activity in terms of a technical rhetoric (which in turn
contains a still compelling appeal to magic) therapists have handled
the concept of learning very badly. For the most part, they have
cast the processes of learning in almost entirely mechanistic categ-
ories, and have thus reinterpreted them in terms of training or
conditioning. In this way, it is expected that 'faulty responses' may,
through an appropriate course of training designed, naturally, by
therapists who are experts in the relevant 'laws', be replaced by
more 'adaptive' ones. There are many varieties of mechanist
vocabulary in which this fundamental idea is expressed, and it
would be unnecessarily tedious for me to attempt to outline them
here, but they all add up to more or less the same thing. At the
present time, the most widespread version of human beings as
'learning machines', and one which has penetrated deep into
popular culture, is that which characterizes people as bundles of
'skills' whose acquisition is, for the most part, a matter of obtaining
the necessary training from the appropriate experts.
Virtually any competence or ability which can be named,
including those which involve our dealings with others, comes to
be broken down into some more or less plausible combination of
'skills'. Thus we have 'interpersonal skills' and 'social skills' along
with 'language skills' and 'footballing skills'. There is, of course,
something immensely reassuring about a 'skills' model of human
activity: for those needing to acquire some, it becomes merely a
82
matter of getting the right input from a relevant training source,

and for those whose job it is to purvey knowledge the whole matter
of teaching and learning becomes a relatively simple one of 'skills
transmission'. In this way training, or learning, becomes conceived
of as in principle no more complicated than popping a program
into a computer. Programs may be popped in or out, erased or
replaced, according to whatever skills you or your trainers may
consider it desirable for you to have at any particular time.
Despite the fact that there is a very deliberate and extremely
heavy investment within 'official' psychology in the people-as-
computers model of psychological functioning, it seems to me that
the propensity of ordinary people to consider themselves as
programmable vehicles of skills has developed alongside rather
than as the result of any campaign on the experts' part to popu-
larize such a view. Quite why this should be so is unclear, but it
is striking how readily, and with what an unself-consciously smug
satisfaction, people talk about the skills they 'have' or intend to
'polish up', etc. Suddenly, and quite without noticing it, we appear
to have entered a world in which people can talk without absurdity
of, for instance, going on a course to 'acquire management skills',
and having been on it, can in all seriousness and in the correct
anticipation of being 'credible', list their mere attendance at the
course on their CVs as evidence of their acquisition of the skills in
question. There is here, it seems, an interlocking of the interests of
trainers and learners, in a society where there is in fact not enough
of importance to train or learn, such that both subscribe, symbiotic-
ally as it were, to an illusion. In an economy which depends upon
the highly artificial production and consumption of worthless
tokens of 'happiness' (and in particular upon the 'management' of
such production and consumption), it is precisely because there is
to be found no real appreciation of skill at anything that we are
able to convince each other that we are the proud possessors of
such a variety of 'skills'. Because our society has drifted so far
from preserving and encouraging in its members activities of any
real meaning or value, we collude in a kind of collective fantasy
of achievement and ability.
In psychotherapy likewise, though not perhaps always quite so
crassly, the assumption is that 'learning to be different', though
not necessarily easy, involves an erasure or replacement of experi-
ence, as though, again, experience were acquired in the manner of
tape recording. In this way, therapists, and indeed their patients,
may expect that through facing up to 'problems' or practising new
'responses' to old 'stimuli', patients' 'maladaptive behaviour' and
the experience which maintamed it will be wiped out. This mechan-
istic approach to learning, though certainly it is not without some
83
therapeutic value, is much too simplistic, and in my view grossly

underestimates the enormous difficulty of change. The difficulty is,
of course, that we are not computers, and our conduct is not the
result of any kind of erasable programming. This is a point to
which I shall return shortly.
Implicit in some currently quite influential varieties of psycho-
therapy (so-called 'cognitive' therapies) is a kind of combination
of 'insight' and 'learning' assumptions which results in the view
that psychological or emotional distress is best dealt with by
learning to take an alternative view of things. This really amounts
to nothing more than a variant on the maxim 'look on the bright
side', and since I have dealt with its inadequacies at some length
in Illusion and Reality I shall not go into greater detail now. Here
again, however, what seems to be suggested is that people's distress
is generated from a program somehow buried inside their heads,
that what matters is the way they see things rather than the way
things are.
The failure of attempts based on the operation of insight and
learning to change 'behaviour' and alleviate distress in any consist-
ently demonstrable way, despite the often plausible claims made
and the plethora of techniques spawned by the various therapeutic
schools, has led some therapists to pass beyond a purely technical
view of change to consider the significance of the personal relation-
ship between patient and therapist.
There is little doubt, I think, that the personal influence of
therapist on patient, and indeed of patient on therapist, is a highly
potent factor in nearly all forms of psychotherapy, whether theor-
etically acknowledged or not. There could be no more superfluous
statement of the obvious than that, in all kinds of relationship and
in all kinds of spheres, people are profoundly affected by other
people. Psychotherapy is no exception, and there has always been
a significant minority of psychotherapists who have insisted on
making the personal relationship between therapist and patient
central to an understanding of therapeutic help. • There can be
very few psychotherapists who have failed to notice the importance
patients attach to their opinion of them and the extent to which
people may blossom under and draw courage from the 'positive
regard', as Carl Rogers called it, of the therapist. Even Freud (who
is not usually credited with obvious 'humanistic' tendencies), in his
*Valuable accounts of this kind have more recently been given by Peter
Lomas, The Case for a Personal Psychotherapy, Oxford University Press,
1981, and R. F. Hobson, Forms of Feeling. The Heart of Psychotherapy,
Tavistock Publictions, 1985. See also my Psychotherapy: A Personal
Approach.
84
study of the 'rat man' betrays an awareness of the effect on his

patient of an expression of warmth: 'In this connection I said a
word or two upon the good opinion I had formed of him, and this
gave him visible pleasure'.*
Some writers on psychotherapyt have overcome professional
reticence sufficiently to be able to suggest that it is essentially the
power of love that lies behind therapeutic potency, but while I
would certainly not want to quarrel with the view that patients
are indeed moved by therapists' affection and concern, and that
their self-confidence may be greatly boosted and their resolve to
tackle their difficulties strengthened, the degree to which ultimately
they do move is still often disappointing. I must say again that I
do not by this mean to belittle the value of therapeutic love, but
only to suggest what should be the limits of the claim it makes. I
have no wish to deny that in some sense or other - perhaps in
many senses - psychotherapy may be 'good for' people, but I do
wish to question how far it changes them, and further, I wish
strongly to cast doubt on any assumption that it 'cures' them.
It is a very frequent experience that patients who have felt quite
seriously disturbed for months or even years may feel an enormous
sense of relief and improvement following their first consultation
with a sensitive and attentive psychotherapist. For a few days their
troubles seem to fall away as if by magic. But this state, sadly,
does not last for long: the initial relief at finding a sympathetic ear,
the surge of joy at feeling less alone, quickly recede as the world
closes in again and the features of it which were causing the distress
in the first place reassert their claims. Of course, in one's battles
with the world, it helps to find an intelligent, experienced, wise
and loving ally, and those adequately provided with such
(especially early in their lives) will never need a psychotherapist.
But allies of this calibre are, in the present-day world, in desperately
short supply, and if you need one badly enough the chances are
you will have to pay for one.
For all the technical mystique psychotherapists have managed
to erect around themselves, for all the reverential awe in which
they have, sometimes rather sentimentally, managed to intone their
rhetoric of love, for all, even, the draining and dedicated effort
they put into what is often a very demanding job, they are still but
weakly allies. Unlike (in ideal circumstances) family or friends,
therapists play an only temporary role in the lives of almost all
their patients, and their commitment to help is strictly limited in
•s. Freud, Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis. Pelican Freud

Library, vol. 9.
tSee for example I. D. Suttie, op. cit.
85
terms of their actual involvement in patients' lives (were this not

so, the job would become demanding beyond endurance). To talk
of love in these circumstances is to edge close to hypocrisy, and
indeed I strongly suspect that the efficacy of therapeutic love is
strictly proportional to the real commitment of therapists to their
patients. Though in almost all ways the comparison is far from
fair, it is nevertheless not totally irrelevant in this respect to point
to the worlds of difference there are between Mother Teresa of
Calcutta and the average Hampstead psychoanalyst (and the
supposed technical expertise of the latter in no way matches in
therapeutic potency the commitment of the former).
Therapeutic love may, I think, most accurately be seen as a
convenient, and infinitely less effective, substitute for the real thing.
Therapists are liable quite happily to talk of 'corrective emotional
relationships', of patients reliving, and somehow exorcizing the
traumata of their infancy under their therapists' soothing tutelage,
and though such talk is, I am sure, uttered with complete sincerity
and in the best of faith, I think the time has come for us to
acknowledge that there is really not a shred of convincing evidence
to support it, and nor would one expect there to be.
On the question of 'cure', not all psychotherapists are as
confident as I may have seemed to suggest. Roy Schafer, for
instance, comes very close to the position I am adopting here:
... while the past may be partially re-experienced, reviewed,
and altered through reinterpretation, it cannot be replaced:
a truly cold mother, a savage or seductive father, a dead
sibling, the consequences of a predominant repressed fantasy,
years of stunted growth and emotional withdrawal, and so
forth, cannot be wiped out by analysis, even though their
hampering and painful effects may be greatly mitigated, and
the analysand freed to make another, partly different and
more successful try at adaptation. The analysand whose
analysis has been benignly influential retains apprehensions,
vulnerability, and characteristic inclinations toward certain
infantile, self-crippling solutions, however reduced these may
be in influence and however counterbalanced by strengthened
adaptiveness. *
But nestling innocently even in this far from over-optimistic text
is the view that patients may be 'freed' from a past which is
(magically) alterable through reinterpretation, and once again we
see the therapeutic assumption refusing in the end to relax its grip.
For while therapy may be or achieve all kinds of things- it may
*A New Language for Psychoanalysis, op. cit.
86
be comforting, encouraging, inspiring, healing of hurt - one thing

it cannot do is free people from their past, because people are
not computers with programs which can simply be removed and
replaced.
Not only are people extremely resistant to the kind of change
which we see as the hoped-for result of therapeutic 'adaptation',
but it is highly undesirable that they should be anything else. Only
if one unquestioningly accepts an individualistic view that all that
matters is the personal happiness people manage to achieve in a
particular lifetime can one feel anything but nervous about the
prospect of a really effective technology of change. It is, after all,
far from obvious that we yet know what form of society is truly
good for us, and if there is to be a sufficient range of conduct and
experience within humanity to ensure a future which makes poss-
ible the evolution of a variety of (at present unknowable) social
developments, it is important that particular lines of experience
and conduct are pursued doggedly, not only throughout individ-
uals' lives, but from one generation to the next. If we really were
as easily alterable as many therapeutic systems (as well as other
more sinister techniques of change) would have us believe, there
can be little doubt that a politically dominant power group would
quickly establish those norms of 'personality' and 'behaviour'
which best served its interests.
This, of course, is exactly what politically dominant power
groups already try to do (and not without a degree of success) but
they do it by standardizing the environment, not people. In this
respect, the modern state which attempts to control people through
a standardization of their environment, shows a more sophisticated
understanding of 'what makes people tick' than do professional
therapists who focus their attentions on what is inside people's
heads. In this way, a standardized, uniform 'psychology' is likely
to be established much more easily by controlling what goes into
people's heads than by trying to alter it once it has got there.
Television is a much more powerful means of ensuring uniformity
of belief than was the Inquisition, and the mentality which invented
factory farming is not slow to appreciate the regularity and predict-
ability to be achieved by standardizing experiential as well as
nutritional diet. Used to it though one is, it is still quite an eerie
experience to walk round any residential suburb after dark and to
note the extent to which people are imbibing exactly the same
impressions and information from the glowing screens; one only
has to check the evening's programme to know what people will
be talking about the next morning.
To try to alter people's experience after they have acquired it is
a bit like trying to control the weight of battery chickens by surgery
87
- in fact the latter would be by far the easier task. The fact is that
people are organisms and their experience is acquired organically,
and so deeply and inextricably bound up is it with the very struc-
tures of the body that erasure of the experience would entail
destruction of the organism. We cannot, like magnetic tape, be
wiped clean of our history, which is, on the contrary, acquired as
are the growth rings of a tree. Our history, the knowledge we have
built up of the world, is our physical, organic structure. Body and
mind are not just inseparable, they are one and the same.
It is certainly an expectation of our therapeutic culture that
somehow our painful experience can be eradicated, or at least that
the misery we feel in the present can somehow be wiped away to
leave us with a 'clean slate' on which to start to chalk up a new
and more promising future. Only an entirely unreflective ideology
of mechanism allows us to think in this way and to shut our eyes
to the obvious fact that our present feelings and perceptions have
a history which is, as it were, deeply and ineradicably inscribed
upon our bodies. In clinging on to a therapeutic illusion, we exempt
those aspects of our conduct and experience we would like magi-
cally to change from rules of common sense which we would think
it close to madness not to apply in other, related areas. Our ability
to construct a social world at all depends on our being able
correctly to anticipate a high degree of regularity and predictability
in the character and conduct of other people. It is in many ways
important that leopards should not be able to change their spots,
and it is certainly our experience that they do not. Nor do any of us
expect to be able to change as the result of any kind of 'therapeutic'
intervention the way we speak, or move, or argue, think, interpret,
react, and we pursue our aims, enact our abilities and competences,
speak languages and ride bicycles without expecting ever to be
'cured' of doing so. It is not, of course, that there is no possibility
of our being able to learn new and different ways of doing things,
but in learning of this kind we anticipate the difficulty involved in
a way which is less characteristic of our therapeutic aspirations,
and we also know that what we learn does not expunge (again, in
the manner of magnetic tape) what was there before.
Over and over again the rooted, organic nature of our experi-
ence has been misinterpreted as indicative of some form of malfunc-
tion or maladjustment. If people do not operate in a mechanically
adaptable way in relation to some particular set of circumstances
defined (usually by a professional group) as ideal, they are seen as
somehow resistant or faulty, for example as demonstrating 'trans-
ference neurosis', 'inappropriate conditioning', etc. However, a
person is not formed by what goes on physically or psychologically
inside his or her own skin, but from a highly permeable relation
88
with a context - the world in which we are situated flows into us
and we into it in a way which makes us inseparable from it, and
which is indelibly recorded in our history. This is the basis of the
importance to human beings of familiarity; we make sense of and
struggle with and grow from our roots in whatever world we
happen to be, and to have been, located. You will not want to
exchange your Belfast back street for a desert island paradise not
because you are crazy or stupid, but because your experience is
inseparable from the one and irrelevant to the other. We can only
deal with what we know. If you suspect that all men are bullying
tyrants as your father was, this is not so much a mistake you are
making as a particular, and quite valid, form of knowledge you
are not merely unwilling, but, as it were, organically unable to
abandon. Our bodies make sure that we do not forget the lessons
of our past. I do not want to say that people are incapable of
developing or modifying experience as they go through life, but
that such development or modification must fit in with and grow
out of what has gone before- it must be organic. People grow from
one position to the next, they cannot be switched. Our experience is
hard won, built into our living tissue, and it should be respected
rather than measured disparagingly against a set of professional
norms of 'adjustment' or 'mental health'.
Unhappily for those who place their hopes in therapy, the
lessons of our exposure to pain, deprivation, injustice and misfor-
tune, are registered as indelibly on our bodies as are those of
love, security and nurturance, and indeed as are those practical
acquisitions (like learning a mother tongue or being able to swim)
which we tend to take for granted. There is no difference in terms
of the quality of the knowledge itself between what an insecure
and anxious person knows about the world in terms of its brutality
and unpredictability, and what a secure and confident person
knows about its potentialities for affection and achievement. There
is no reason at all why one should consider the one person's
experience and expectations 'pathological' and the other's
'adjusted', except of course that a confusion of social with quasi
medical values makes it much easier to ignore the harm we do
each other and to establish a uniform view that any casualties
which may occur in what purports to be a fundamentally benign
society are solely the result of individual 'dysfunction', inappro-
priate 'projection', and so on.
It is, of course, against the interests of a hierarchy of power
which depends on exploitation for people to recognize that the
distress or despair they feel stems from their bodily relatedness to
a noxious world, since any such recognition, should it occur on a
wide enough scale, would quickly lead to demands for social
89
change. In view of this one must note again that, paradoxically,

the fact that people are so resistant to therapeutic change has a
positive value: even if a kind of uniformity and docility can be
imposed through the unification of experience (as through tele-
vision) the actual suffering caused by the injustices and inequalities
of our society cannot easily be concealed under a blanket of
therapy. People cannot but register what happens to them, and
they cannot but spend their lives following out its significance. In
some respects, then, we are less easily turned into battery chickens
than one might fear. I do not, of course, wish to suggest that
suffering is a good thing, only that perhaps it is good that mystific-
ation of the reasons for it may still meet with considerable
resistance.
However, though therapy does not 'work' in the way that we
would like it to, it is still difficult to cast doubt upon its efficacy
without appearing to be cruel. To say that a person's distress arises,
at least in so far as it is historically rooted, out of ineradicable
experience seems to be close to condemning him or her to a lifetime
of unhappiness; after all, our society runs on the expectation that,
in principle at least, happiness is attainable for all. In fact, however,
it is my experience that more often than not people meet the 'truth'
of their predicament with relief, and that what is most painful to
deal with is not the difficulty - even tragedy - of our situation,
but the tantalizing but empty promise of its betterment or 'cure'.
I have often been, and I am sure shall continue to be, amazed at
the fortitude and resilience of people who discover that what they
thought was a curable illness is in fact the outcome of an unalter-
able history and (usually) a highly inimical set of circumstances
which may be desperately hard if not impossible to influence. Most
people are glad to be rid of the mystification which prevented them
from understanding and getting to grips with, often, appallingly
difficult features of their past and present, and enormously relieved
if they find someone who will share with them an unflinching view
of cruelties and injustices whose marks they will always bear.
The errors of our mechanized and wishful view of ourselves are
very often more damaging than the injuries they are designed to
conceal. It is on the face of it paradoxical that a culture which so
much stresses individuality for the purposes of promoting 'happi-
ness' and instilling blame, should at the same time, through the
imposition of uniformity and the standardization of 'normality',
make it so difficult for people to accept and allow for the unique-
ness of their experience. For example, because, in a standardized
society, we not unreasonably take our own experience as the stan-
dard for all, we tend to have a tacit expectation that we should be
instantly 'understandable' by others. If, then, you do not 'under-
90
stand' me, it must be because of some unusual obtuseness or quirk

of personality on your part. We have very little tolerance for the
differences there are between us, the differences which, presumably,
stem from the organic relation of each of us with varying sets of
circumstances. Many people, indeed, live their lives in a kind of
perpetually terrified comparison with a non-existent norm. Thus
people may spend a lifetime trying to achieve an objective standard
(as human being) which in fact does not exist at all, and in so
doing by-pass, discount or try to invalidate their own subjective
experience. But subjective experience is inescapably rendered by
one's embodiment in a world, and the attempt to replace it with
some form of normative, 'objective' ideal is likely to result in either
a kind of mad artificiality or else torments of confusion and despair.
If therapy cannot cure our distress it can, in some cases at least,
clear our confusion, and once this has been achieved it may be
possible for some people to engage with the world, or to change
their situation within it, in a way which leads to its impinging
upon them less painfully. For a small proportion of articulate
and socio-economically advantaged people, it may even be that
psychotherapy has value as an insight-giving procedure enabling
them to see and act upon idiosyncrasies of their history or mistakes
of interpretation about the significance of factors in their past or
present circumstances. But therapeutic benefit of this kind arises
only because such people have available to them (not inside them)
the freedom to do something about their lives. If this is so it is, I
think, of very little general relevance, if only because people in
difficulties of this kind are very likely eventually to work them out
and put them right for themselves.
For the vast majority of people who are driven to despair
(whether they know it or not) by the nature of our society, the
means of rectification of their predicament are usually beyond their
own resources. One should not because of this underestimate the
value psychotherapy might have as a means of clarifying their
situation and offering comfort in their contemplation of it, but nor
should one overestimate its ability to change them. As far as change
is possible, it is likely to be achieved only with great difficulty. We
have been misled by our metaphor of mechanical change to ignore
almost totally the difficulties inherent in organic change and to
overlook the extent to which its possibilities are limited by both
the environment and the bodily history in which we are organically
rooted. Perhaps we can, with painful effort, learn to do differently
some things which we learned to do unproductively or self-destruc-
tively, but we would be foolish to overlook the influence of the
world around us.
We would do better to see ourselves as plants rather than as
91
machines, and we might benefit from applying to our own lives

some very elementary rules of horticulture. Any kind of treatment
for plants which consisted solely of attempting alterations to their
internal structure would be unlikely to recommend itself to
gardeners. Plants grow best in well understood and carefully
prepared conditions - of sun or shade, damp or dryness, heat or
cold, in this or that kind of soil. A plant which grows poorly or
mis-shapenly may well be improved through careful attention to
its environment, provision of light or water, but it will still bear
the scars of an inauspicious beginning. I do not want to overwork
the analogy, but it does seem strange to me that we should often
lavish so much more attention on our gardens than on our fellow
beings and our progeny. Nobody expects their cauliflowers to grow
by magic.
The alternative to reliance on a technology of change is the
cultivation of a society which takes care of its members. If we
cannot cure the damage we have done we can try to mitigate its
effects on future generations, and to achieve this we have to recog-
nize the importance of the conditions in which we live and the way
we conduct ourselves towards each other.
92
6
'Relationships'
By far the greater part of the misery which is experienced by people
in the modern world is unquestionably inflicted through human
agency. It is the things we do to each other which are the immediate
causes of our distress. Superficially, therefore, it might seem as
though one need look no further than our 'relationships' one with
another to identify, and in principle also to rectify, the origins of
our unhappiness.
At no time in previous history, certainly, have 'relationships' so
directly been a focus of concern and discussion as in our own time.
Entire industries have grown up around our ability, or lack of
ability, to attract or be pleasing to others and to enjoy what they
have to offer us. Not the least important section of this market is
that exploited by the therapy industry: 'interpersonal relationships'
are acknowledged as the core concern of a hundred different
'schools' of therapy and counselling, and not surprisingly so, for
anxious rumination about one's personal adequacy in relation to
others, dread of rejection by them and frustration at lack of satis-
faction in 'relationships' seem to lie at the very centre of much of
our acute personal unhappiness. For most of us our 'relationships'
- or at least our fantasies of how they might or ought to be - seem
to constitute the very meaning of our existence: life would appear
to have no point at all were it not for the promise it holds of
satisfying personal relationships.
However, far from exposing or providing an understanding of
the nature of our predicament, this pervasive, almost obsessive
concern with 'relationships' seems to me actually itself to form a
large part of what ails us. Indeed, our desperation to enjoy 'good
relationships' lies behind a great deal of the damage we do each
other, and constitutes much more a reflection than a critique of
social values stemming from the commercialized pursuit of
happiness.
The commercial process turns abstractions like 'happiness' into
saleable commodities. In exactly this way, abstract relations
between people have been turned into 'relationships' which are
treated as the end-product of a process in which people themselves
form the raw material. Thus people have become secondary to the
relationships of which, interchangeably and expendably, they form
a part: what matters is the 'quality of the relationship', not the
characteristics or conduct, or even ultimately the welfare, of the
people who form its terms.
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'Relationships'
The language we use testifies to this state of affairs quite clearly.

'My relationship is breaking up'; 'I think she's looking for a new
relationship'; 'they've got a really good relationship'. The following
extract from an advertisement for one company's 'double cassette
twin-pack courses' puts the issue at its most vulgarly basic:
MAKE AN IMPRESSION!
This course deals with all aspects of self-presentation,
whether in the workplace or in social or family life. The idea
of 'self-marketing' is a major theme and situations in which
the skills have an important role include:
Y starting and maintaining relationships
Y interview training
Y self-presentation in groups
Y developing closer relationships
Y building better interactions at work
Y handling rejection effectively
Y establishing arenas for 'self-marketing'
Y making and clarifying agreements with others.
This, then, is the 'arena' where people ('selves') have become
caught up in a commercialized and competitive jockeying for
position, in which the adequacy of 'self-presentation' will determine
how satisfactory 'relationships' are, and in which the terrors of
rejection may be 'handled effectively' through development of the
appropriate 'skills'.
As the virtually inexhaustible supply of raw material for saleable
satisfactions in the form of 'relationships', people become almost
less than commodities, and this no doubt accounts for the intense
and obsessive anxiety which they experience over their relations
with others. Usually from bitter experience, most people know
how easily dispensed with they are as those 'significant others' with
whom they come into contact during their lives seek through them
the satisfaction of their needs. At the centre of our anxiety, then,
is to be found the terror that we shall simply disappear if we are
not wanted, needed, or 'loved' by someone. Our very sense of
identity and existence depends upon the gaze of someone else
falling upon us - and it is noticeably with identity and existence
that twentieth-century people, as well as much of their literature,
art, psychology and philosophy, have been particularly preoccu-
pied. We are objects, and as such have to be noticed in order to
94
'Relationships'
achieve full 'objectivity'. Objects exist only for others; only subjects
can exist independently of the regard of 'the Other'. And, of course,
we use others in precisely the way we fear they may use us - we
treat them not as ends in themselves, but as means to more or less
satisfactory 'relationships'. As far as you do not satisfy some aspect
of my needs, you do not exist for me. In other words, if one is
nobody's object one is, quite literally, nothing. The value of people
thus becomes entirely utilitarian - if they are no use to anyone,
they are simply expendable. It is no longer human lives which are
important, but the quality of the relationships and satisfactions to
which they contribute.
Our acceptance of the expendability of people who fail to
contribute to our personal happiness is perfectly obvious if one
examines the content of our fantasy. In the media of popular
entertainment, for example 'successful' television drama, characters
are kept in existence only so long as they contribute to the sexual
or material satisfaction of the protagonists. In the glossier American
television series, moreover, these vehicles of gratification are
completely interchangeable, conforming to a standard mould of
youth and 'beauty' which, even though it makes them hard to tell
apart, becomes the heartbreakingly unattainable ideal of those
more normally fashioned viewers who dread being exposed as
substandard. And one should not be led by the tastelessness of
such fantasies as these into believing that they bear no relation to
the values we really hold dear - indeed, their very popularity
betrays the coarse directness of their celebration of what we have
come to be interested in.
Up until very recently there seemed to be little conscious aware-
ness among people I saw as patients (whom, again, I single out
only because I know them best, not because I see them as different
from the rest of us) that the injuries they occasioned and incurred
in the course of their pursuit of happiness were anything other
than the necessary result of failures in 'relationship'. People longed
for relationships they fancied they had never had, or pined for lost
relationships they feared they would never have again. They fretted
and seethed over frustrating relationships they could no longer
abide, they struggled with the panicky loss of identity consequent
on scarcely having any relationships at all, or they tried desperately
to piece themselves together after emerging from years of being the
victim of punitive or destructive relationships. In nearly all cases
these seemed to be 'relationship problems' arising more or less
directly out of human nature itself, and the 'answer' to them
seemed to lie in 'finding a good (or better) relationship'. All that
was needed, so it seemed, was love.
Now there are, I think, signs of a change taking place: no longer
95
'Relationships'
do patients see 'the problem' quite so much as one of being on the

wrong side of a split between 'good' and 'bad' relationships, but
rather they begin to articulate a sense that there is something not
right with the very concept of relationship itself. This feeling tends
to be expressed in one of two ways: either in complaints that our
relations with each other are generally bad and that the world has
become a place of brutality and indifference from which there
appears to be no haven, or in a conviction that the game of
'relating' has become no longer worth the candle, that any kind
of relationship, good, bad or indifferent, somehow imposes an
intolerable strain. I sometimes get the feeling that where not long
ago people longed to be loved, they now long to be left in peace.
Whether or not this is so, and I certainly do not wish to make
a major issue of it, it would not be a particularly surprising or
unpredictable result of our 'commodification' of relationships, for
anything one tries in this way to elevate into being the point of
our lives is bound in the end to turn to dust and ashes. Just as one
is bound to generate despair by trying to turn the 'epiphenomenon'
of happiness into a concretely attainable commodity, so attempting
to make abstract relations between people into 'marketable'
sources of satisfaction is certain in the end to lead to a situation
in which people are in fact treated with heartless unconcern or are
experienced as objects of frustration.
Our mistake has been not to see - or to forget - that relations
become established between people not as ends in themselves but
in the course of doing something else. Over and over again we try
to turn actions into entities, conduct into commodity, abstract into
concrete, quality into quantity. This, of course, not out of wilful-
ness or stupidity, but because we are immersed in a society which
depends for its continued functioning on the manufacture of satis-
factions and the manipulation of interests. The state of the
consumer's nervous system becomes the most potent 'variable' in
the selling process: if there are pleasant sensations attached to any
form of activity, including activities which we pursue together (i.e.
relatedly), they must be isolated, commodified and brought into
the market-place. We no longer see people as there to do things
with or for, but as the interchangeable terms of relationships which
may be more or less satisfying. Love itself ceases to have a function
in the moral sphere of human conduct but becomes a kind of
gratification of need to be sought or even extorted from people as
a good rather than striven after as a form of commitment for the
sake of something beyond personal satisfaction.
The fate of our 'relationships' provides another example of what
happens when human beings are deprived of a function in the
world - when, that is, the possibilities open to people to act on
96
'Relationships'
their environment are, so to speak, drained out of their embodied

existence and re-presented to them as mechanized commodities for
their consumption. Those things which we could do together are
done for us and sold back to us in the form of entertainment,
spectacle or consumer goods. Our communal activities, those
things which we could do in relation with each other, thus become
empty, collapsed in on themselves, literally without meaning. Our
relatedness is overcome by a kind of paralysing self-consciousness
because it can no longer point beyond itself to any kind of purpose.
The most satisfying relationships are again probably those of
which the participants are almost entirely unaware. Even though
opportunities for activity giving rise to relationship of this kind
have become pitifully rare, most of us have probably had the
experience of doing things with someone - working, perhaps, or
playing - in which the complementary abilities and contributions
of the participants achieved a result which neither could possibly
have managed alone, and which led, almost certainly retrospec-
tively, to an awareness of warmth and appreciation which never
needed to be mentioned. It would seem completely artificial for
friends, or lovers, or spouses, suddenly to stop dead in the course
of their mutual activity to comment on the quality of their relation-
ship, and yet, more and more, this is exactly what is happening.
Partly because there seems to be so little of value to do and partly
because we have become objects of gratification for each other,
we spend more and more time talking and thinking about our
'relationships' rather than doing anything with them. It may help
in thinking about this state of affairs to consider one at a time
some of those spheres of relationship which have been rendered
particularly problematic by our social organization.
Friendship
With one or two notable exceptions - for example the American
psychiatrist H. S. Sullivan- friendship is a form of relationship little
discussed in the 'clinical literature' of psychology and psychiatry,
though loneliness and isolation play a very prominent role in the
kinds of emotional distress which drive people to seek help from
the 'experts'. The ideal 'therapeutic' solution to such loneliness is
often seen as the formation of a long-term sexual bond, and when
most people talk of their need to establish 'a relationship' what
they usually mean is an exclusive liaison with someone of the
opposite sex. In this way, and with consequences I shall come to
consider shortly, heterosexual pair-relationships carry a very heavy
therapeutic load in our society: warmth, safety, fulfilment and
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'Relationships'
'understanding' are the hoped-for results of shutting yourself cosily

away with your lover.
Outside this kind of exclusive, sexually based therapeutic inti-
macy (as it turns out, itself largely fantasy) the development of
friendly relations with others appears to be problematic, particu-
larly in the adult population. The reason for this, it seems to
me, again cannot be put down to the internal characteristics of
individuals, but to a social organization which renders adult life,
for most people, both competitive and aimless. We compete in 'the
market' for satisfactions and empty tokens of achievement which
in practice dictate that our activity has no aim beyond its own
temporary satiation. It is thus impossible for the vast majority of
people to find anything to do together in which they can collaborate
wholeheartedly, unreflectively and constructively. Those activities
around which friendships may be formed tend of necessity to be
contrived leisure-time pursuits, failing which friendships must be
manufactured self-consciously as ends in themselves. Apart from
this, relations between people are characterized by a kind of
watchful hostility as they compete with each other in the struggle
to gain recognition of an artificially constructed pseudo-identity.
In a world organized exclusively around commercial and material
interests, the focus of concern for the individual becomes the self
and the gratification which may follow from ministration to its
appearance ('presentation of self') and its needs (the ideal of the
quiescent nervous system). It is only when people are able to focus
beyond themselves as objects on to a goal or aim in pursuance of
which they may lose themselves, that they may join in collabor-
ative, as opposed to competitive, activity with others. It is probably
for this reason that the most rewarding friendships made tend to
be at times of one's life, for example childhood, adolescence or
(particularly perhaps for some women) young parenthood, when
one finds oneself thrown together with other people in activity
which is at least not completely dominated by the ethics of the
market-place.
I wonder if men have particular difficulty in making friends. My
experience with male patients leads me to suspect that the much-
maligned characteristics of masculine insensitivity and emotional
unresponsiveness are much more the consequence of spiritually
mutilating economic values than of any inherently macho person-
ality features of men themselves, or indeed of any real advantage
in power or status to be gained by toughness. In fact we have all
-men and women -been driven by ruthless economic competition,
and by the unavoidable demands which have been placed upon us
to cherish our selves, to retreat into the last embattled refuge of
tenderness, i.e. sex, where undefended intimacies may, if but briefly,
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be exchanged. In other times and places men seem to have been

no more reticent than women in expressing their (non-sexual) love
for others, and my patients (and indeed nearly all the men I have
got to know intimately) experience the necessity to be stereotyp-
ically male as an imposition rather than an advantage. But the
hierarchy of power is held in place by occult violence, not by love,
and its values must be reproduced in the individuals who are
shaped to maintain it; men are its victims no less than women.
Because there is relatively so little scope for the unself-conscious
generation of friendship through cooperative absorption in
constructive activity, our need for friendship has often to be met
artificially. For friendship, which might once have been a, so to
speak, inevitable accident of social relations, an unreflected-upon
bonus of communal life, has now indeed become a need. If the
point of life is the celebration of self, one cannot do without others
with whom to celebrate; if others are not there to confirm my
identity, to reflect my image, I just disappear. As friends we are,
then, mirrors to each other, taking turns to reflect our images back
at each other, entering, for the sake of our emotional survival, a
kind of cowardly pact not to break the rules by saying what we
really see. Like schoolboys in a boxing match who secretly agree
not to hurt each other, we nervously acquiesce in a mutual lowering
of defences on condition only that we shall not criticize. This kind
of fake mutuality is quite explicitly advocated in some half-baked
North American forms of 'therapy', and results in some quite
extraordinarily false types of 'relationship' in which the hollow
exchange of reciprocal 'strokes' is quite likely to end in a burst of
bitter recrimination when one of the participants can no longer
stand the dishonesty and begins to tell the truth.
Increasingly, the precarious fragility of our 'self-images' and the
pervasive treachery of our competitive social existence means that
intimacy becomes altogether too dangerous, and as with so many
other aspects of life, it slowly becomes the business of professionals
to manufacture a marketable substitute for it. More and more the
hazardous birth of undefended intimacy between people is seen as
needing to be attended by professional midwives of some descrip-
tion, and people are taught the ritual 'skills' which are supposed
to ensure safe and 'meaningful' relationship. In an increasingly
wide range of settings - from evening classes to church congre-
gations -lonely people are propelled into a mutually self-deceiving
'togetherness' by means of superficial 'techniques' and games (e.g.
'ice-breakers') which are claimed by their professional inventors to
be the answer to our 'alienation'. Instant intimacy becomes some-
thing you can buy from your local encounter group centre.
When people have nothing other than themselves to talk about,
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conversations become parallel monologues in which the partici-

pants take turns to recite their likes and dislikes, complain or
make confessions which (because of the 'no criticism' pact) are
guaranteed a blandly tolerant hearing. Groups or congregations of
people who are aware of their own or others' isolation become for
want of any real activity artificially (semi-professionally)
constructed round a collaborative contemplation of self, with the
result that the group soon finds itself enmired in utterly futile
discussions of how its members 'relate to' each other - as though
'relating' were a special and specific kind of activity which people
can do.
There is something very sad and touching about our frustrated
need for companionship. Though it is not a fashionable view, and
is one rejected by most of those whose opinions I respect (as well
as espoused by some whose opinions I do not), I do have a sneaking
feeling that, given half a chance, most people would treat their
fellows reasonably decently. The almost desperate love which
people lavish on their dogs, for example, leads one to wonder how
basic to human nature human cruelty is. Might it not rather be
that the kinds of threat to which we respond so violently and
brutally are built into our society more than into our selves? If the
sheer scale of our inhumanity towards each other to which both
our history and our current conduct and experience testify is to be
taken as an indication of the depth of some kind of original sin or
ineradicable natural trait, we might as well consign our species to
an atomic oblivion forthwith. It does appear to me, though, that
many of those who have been lovingly cared for care lovingly for
others, and that many of those who cause pain and injury to others
do so out of a kind of anguished blindness born of circumstances
which they could not escape rather than of any kind of ill-will
or avoidable impulse. Unquestionably there is the most appalling
violence built into the structure of our society (its hierarchical
inequality could be maintained no other way), but the more inti-
mately I get to know those (i.e. all of us) who are the agents of
that violence, the less easy I find it to identify things within them
to blame.
Without doubt, many of the people I have worked with who
have been badly damaged through their relations with others have
been or are being equally damaging to others, but from the un-
threatened - and hence I think more dear-sighted - position of
psychotherapist, that has not made them any harder to understand
or like. For example, one watches people struggle in vain not to
make their children insecure, or listens to a young couple recount
with uncomprehending hopelessness how their baby died through
their neglect, and all one can feel is a kind of helpless sympathy.
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The reasons for the violence we do each other are all too clear,
but do not reside in the individual agent. This insight - common,
I think, to many of those who work in the 'helping professions'
even if they do not always make it explicit - is one which renders
particularly repugnant the righteous indignation of those who
pontificate about the state of public morality, and utterly disgusting
the 'media's' baying for the punishment of people whose wretched-
ness leads to tragedy.
Given a safe enough environment, then, it seems to me that
most people are glad of an opportunity to love their fellows. The
travesty of friendship which one sees in our rituals of fake intimacy,
the timid confidences which are barely heard by partners absorbed
in the formulation of what they intend to confide in their turn,
indicate an altruism stunted and frustrated by a society which
dislocates people from a world of constructive action and turns
them against each other in bitter competition. If we do not truly
'open up' to each other, 'be sensitive', 'show our feelings' in the
way that the therapy industry encourages us to do, it is because
we have good reasons not to - we live in a social world which
really is dangerous. To try to solve the 'problem' by, again, manip-
ulating the surface phenomena of individual behaviour (i.e. simu-
lating behavioural effects rather than tackling socio-economic
causes), is to foster just the kind of faking and artificiality with
which we are so familiar from the world of 'marketing' and to
ignore the abuses of power which underlie our rational fear and
suspicion of each other.
On the evidence to date, it would stretch credulity beyond all
reasonable limits to suggest that human beings, or human society,
were truly perfectible in any absolute sense, and I do not want to
lay claim to a vision of a utopian world in which sweetness and
light will reign supreme and undisturbed. One need not lapse into
'biologisms' concerning human 'nature' or 'instincts' to observe
the hair-trigger nervousness and violence with which people and
societies react to threat,* and the quite appalling terror and
oppression which they will resort to in establishing and protecting
their interests. But however inevitable much of this may be there
is still enormous room for improvement, and such improvement
can only sensibly be looked for in the social, moral and political
*Interesting treatments of the question of violence and destructiveness

are to be found in, for example, E. Fromm, The Anatomy of Human
Destructiveness, Penguin Books, 1977, and F. Wertham, A Sign for Cain.
An Exploration of Human Violence, Hale, 1966. It is inevitable that such
books raise questions rather than provide answers, but these at least raise
interesting questions.
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spheres. Individual consciousness and relations between individuals

reflect rather than cause the power structure within society. In
situations where threat is absent or minimized (there can be very
few of these - the nearest I can think of are some of the artificially
constructed 'therapeutic communities' which were created in the
sixties for the treatment of 'mental illness"') or where people are
united in opposition to a common threat (as in war), people do
seem to be able to conduct themselves towards each other with
concern, interest and affection.
Concern, interest and affection are becoming precisely those
characteristics of relationship which have to be either faked or
bartered. We have an awareness of each other's neediness, but the
latter is so great that we have to make special arrangements for its
(very partial) fulfilment, which is either bought from professionals,
carefully shared out in parallel conversations in which turns are
taken at self-revelation, or merely simulated in ritual but empty
gestures of intimacy (e.g. the technology of the 'encounter' group).
Sex
It has become almost impossible to think clearly or constructively
about sex, since sexual satisfaction is the pivot around which our
commercial culture turns, the sacred central axiom of a dogma of
gratification which will not allow itself to be questioned or criti-
cized. To suggest, for instance, that sex should be for anything
other than itself, or to speculate that there could be any grounds
for control of or abstinence from sexual indulgence (even, for
example, in order to avoid a risk of fatal disease) is to invite
immediate dismissal from the community of rational beings, even
to occasion worried concern for the state of one's mental health.
The isolation of sex from procreation and the refinement and
promulgation of sexual pleasures of every form and variety, the
'liberation' of women by the pill and the widespread acceptance
and endorsement of forms of sexuality once considered 'perverse',
all these are seen as the triumphs of an age which has freed us
from sexual prudery, repression and hypocrisy, and given us
permission to pursue our pleasures, to explore and exploit each
other's orifices without a shred of shame.
Let me hasten to reassure the reader at this point that I am not
about to advocate a 'return' to no-doubt mythical standards of a
past sexual propriety, to suggest that we abandon contraception,
impose unnecessary abstinence upon ourselves or make homosexu-
*See D. Kennard, An Introduction to Therapeutic Communities,

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.
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ality illegal. What we do need to do, however, is to restore to

sexuality a meaning, to re-embed it in our personal lives and
relations such that it regains significances beyond itself.
In his book The History of Sexuality,* Michel Foucault suggests
that the nineteenth century, far from being an era of sexual
repression, was one when sex in fact became the focus of attention,
discussion and scientific investigation as never before. And indeed
it does seem to be the case that in the course of the past hundred
years or so, and with a rapid acceleration in very recent decades,
sexuality has been torn out of any kind of context to be presented
before us as the absolute raw material of gratification; sex becomes
as inherently meaningless but as essentially important to personal
survival and satisfaction as money, and, like money, it is attached
to both people and things - commodities - to lend them a certain
kind of value.
Dislodged from the spatial context of the embodied relations of
men and women, as well as from the temporal context of our
personal histories, sex is installed as the irreducible absolute at the
centre of a commercialized religion of satisfaction, and to ask
questions about its meaning and its value is to commit a kind of
blasphemy. Where once sex may have been surrounded by a
moralism of prudish disapproval, it is now hedged about with, if
anything, an even more thornily impenetrable if quite different
moralism, i.e. one which permits no challenge to the creed that
everyone shall be permitted to enjoy themselves in any way they
choose- 'whatever turns you on'.
The main reason for sexual pleasure's having come to occupy
this central and unassailable position as a kind of cultural impera-
tive is, I suspect, because of its extraordinary efficacy in selling
things. Whether or not Freud was right to make 'libido' the foun-
dation of human psychology, there seems little doubt that sexual
energy has become the basic fuel of the commercial interests which
structure our society. We are sold 'happiness' and 'satisfaction' by
an appeal to their crudest and most basic 'fulfilment', and it seems
as though organizations and institutions at virtually every level of
society conspire progressively to loosen us from any restraint we
may feel in giving the fullest rein to sexual indulgence. Industry,
advertising, education, health, therapy and counselling combine to
give us the green light to pursue gratification to the utmost, to
douse in any way we dream up the nervous itch of our desires.
Sex is a marvellous medium for commodity sales in a market
which demands infinite expansion and the endless obsolescence of
*Published by Penguin Books in 1981. The title is somewhat misleading

in the light of the original French, La Volonte de Savoir.
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fashion, for no sooner has the nervous system achieved a blissful

sexual peace than the engine starts once more to hum, and before
you know where you are the cycle starts all over again. There is,
it is true, an overall element of satiation in this process which
necessitates a continuous escalation in the stimulation of desire, so
that appeals to the 'joy of sex' need, step by step, to be made ever
coarser and more direct. (Where once the camera dwelt shyly on
knees, it now stares straight into the crutch.) But presumably there
is still considerable mileage left in sex.
I do not wish to say that we have become a society of sex
maniacs, or to expostulate indignantly about our 'shame', but only
to suggest that what we take to be liberation may be in fact
enslavement. For the pursuit of sexual gratification seems to be
doing very little for 'relationships', and couples seem to become
increasingly split and isolated from one another as each partner
concentrates anxiously on his technique, worries obsessively about
her attractiveness, and assesses self-consciously the scale of his or
her satisfaction. Indeed, it seems to have become for many people
a source of irritation that they have to depend on someone else to
meet their sexual needs, and when not actually in bed, men and
women tend to eye each other with hostility and contempt, secretly
promising themselves an exchange of partner as soon as a more
satisfactory 'relationship' appears, reluctantly and frustratedly
settling for what they have got when it no longer seems that it is
going to. As with 'relationship' itself, sex has become the
commodity of which people are the interchangeable vehicles,
anonymous purveyors of reassurance or an ego-boost, a momen-
tary respite from sexual restlessness. We use each other to satisfy
needs so personal as to be almost autistic, and sex becomes a kind
of suspicious bartering of incompatible self-indulgences rather than
the unifying joy which sexual rhetoric proclaims. This situation is
epitomized in the 'sex therapy' industry, which advocates a techni-
cized exchange of gratifications whose 'demandingness' may be
carefully graded and controlled.
Although I have no doubt that it would be going much too far to
suggest that sexual love has become entirely an outdated romantic
notion, it does seem to me that, though people may expect and
long for 'deeply fulfilling' sexual relationships, what for the most
part they actually find are uncomfortably combative liaisons of the
kind I have outlined above. The reason for this, once again, is to
be sought not inside individuals, but may be traced to the nature
of our society. As well as being split off by commercial interests
from any relational meaning (sex no longer arises from a relation
to a particular person, but, like 'consumer durables', is a product
to which the agents of production are irrelevant), sexuality is
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located in a social context in which men and women confront each

other in a spirit of competition. In a brave and brilliant book*
which I imagine must, despite its artistry, have lost him a good
deal of support among 'conventional' feminists and other critics of
contemporary society, Ivan Illich has suggested that an economy
which engineers competition for goods and resources perceived as
scarce, encourages men and women to conduct themselves as
beings of essentially the same kind, apart from an accidental differ-
ence in sex, who must compete uniformly for the goods and services
on offer. In this way we become what Illich calls 'sexed neuters',
stripped of any kind of complementary gender, and distinguishable
from each other only by the 'bulge in the blue jeans'. As more and
more of the traditional fields of 'gendered' work and activity are
thrown into the modern unisex economy - for example as men
begin to concern themselves with the arts of baby care - so the
battle-ground of hostile competition between men and women is
widened. 'Invidious comparison now replaces awe as the reaction
to otherness.'
In almost everything one hears or reads, those 'sexual partners'
who are not simply burying their emotions in some kind of wishful
mythology seem to be asking themselves where they went wrong,
or hurrying from the bloody wreckage of the last 'relationship' to
peer hopefully round the corner to see if the next one looks more
promising. But we are caught up in processes beyond our selves
and our individual strengths and weaknesses. Once again, it has
to be pointed out that we cannot escape (unless completely artifici-
ally) the ground we stand on and the air we breathe: relations
between men and women have been cast into confusion by forces
beyond their control, and consequently the experience and meaning
of sex - apart from its commodity value - has also been thrown
into question.
It seems unlikely that the solution to this predicament can lie in
some artificial form of retrogression to a time when men and
women accepted (however unjustly) roles in society which were
gendered and complementary. Rather, we are confronted with a
situation in which the nineteenth-century psychological myth of
the primacy of sex is peeling away to reveal a 'more primary' issue
of power, and how that issue will be resolved only time will tell.
Sex, if ever it was, is no longer a matter for repression, but
questions concerning power and interest are, and our, as it were,
cultural assertion of the absolute value of sexual pleasure makes it
surprisingly difficult to inquire into the history and phenomenology
of power which seem to lurk behind and within the difficulties
* I. Illich, Gender, Marion Boyars, 1983.
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people experience and the injuries they inflict on each other in their
sexual encounters. There is an enormous contrast between the
images of sexual satisfaction in which our culture trades and the
actual experience of the people who are subjected to them, but
attempts to explicate sexual experience (rather than to tend it or
stoke it 'therapeutically') are quite often met with refusal or even
anger. But, I suspect, if one is to gain any understanding of the
painful strife which so often these days infuses both hetero- and
homosexual relations, one will have to be prepared to trace them
back into the power relations which society imposes on its
members. In this way, the sexual experience and proclivities of
individuals cannot be fully understood without investigating their
personal history, particularly in terms of the permutations of
relations between mothers and fathers and sons and daughters,
since it is through these relations that the wider social influences
make themselves felt. Inevitably, we are the agents of our society's
exploitation, and the most potent source of learning in the ways
of relationship (for good or for ill) is the family. The purpose of
trying to trace, for example, the significance of (among other
things) individuals' sexual conduct back into their personal
histories is not, as will be evident from the previous chapter, to
seek to change it, but rather to develop the beginnings of an
understanding of how we come to shape our children in ways of
relationship which they cannot escape.
Marriage
For the psychologist (or anyone else) interested in the kinds of
'relationship' which seem so to preoccupy us, marriage provides
the magnifying glass through which they may be most closely
studied, for it is in the (relatively) long-term contract of marriage
that our mythical expectations as well as our actual experience of
'relationship' are most clearly exposed.
More than any other form of relationship, marriage carries our
hopes for a warm, fulfilling, safe, confiding, mentally and physically
satisfying bond with another person. Yet in practice marriage
causes more bitterness, resentment, disappointment and inarticu-
late pain than all our other 'relationships' put together. For count-
less people, what is confidently embarked upon as an exclusive
mutual alliance against an indifferent or hostile world, a search for
a haven of warmth in a cold and competitive society, turns out to
be a journey into a totally unexpected, private and unanalysable
hell - one seeming, furthermore, to constitute an entirely personal
and exceptional misery which, if it is not ended in a burst of hatred
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and recrimination, can only be endured with dumb

incomprehension.
I do not wish either to decry or to discredit the institution of
marriage, and I have no doubt that for many people (though, if
they are honest, I suspect not unequivocally) it does provide a
refuge of warmth and support without which they would find
emotional survival extremely difficult. However, I do not believe
that this can be the best or most creative function of marriage: if
our world is so beastly that we need to escape from it into the
comparative safety of an isolated pact with one other person, we
need to indict the world rather than extol marriage. It is in any
case almost impossible to gain a clear view of marriage through
the haze of wishful fantasy which surrounds it and which, as ever,
is endlessly and relentlessly fuelled by commercial interests. In
modern marriage, we have been overtaken by a phenomenon of
relationship of which we have no sober or reflective understanding,
but only the wildest and most unrealistic expectations. To be able
to spend forty or more years living happily, or merely reasonably
comfortably, with a single partner- even, or perhaps especially, if
bonded initially by intense sexual desire- is one of the most testing
demands people can place upon themselves, and it is thus small
wonder that attitudes generated by the experience of marriage tend
to split between cynical dismissal and self-deluding sentimentality.
Neither of these extremes seems appropriate to me: precisely
because marriage is so central to our social structure, and yet so
demanding and so much a source of pain and bewilderment, it
seems to me that our stance towards it should be one of honesty
and respect. We need to gain an accurate and honest appreciation
of the emotional demands of marriage and to develop a sober
assessment of what marriage may be for if it is not to be simply
for itself in the sense of constituting the ultimate in gratifying and
fulfilling 'relationships'. Above all, I think, we need to illuminate
the men and women who stand at either term of the marriage
'relationship', i.e. to 'de-commodify' the relationship and to
discover the people who are so easily sacrificed in its pursuit and
who suffer so bitterly as the result. Respect for the extraordinary
difficulty entailed by marriage may lead to respect for the partners
who enter into it. If it is not to disintegrate in reciprocal hatred or
become submerged in a deadening sentimental banality, marriage
cannot be expected to be an end in itself, a pact of mutual self-
indulgence, but must be recognized as a kind of commitment part-
ners make to each other for something beyond the commitment
itself and the 'happiness' it is (falsely) expected to generate. It may
of course turn out to be the case that in the modern world there
is nothing much other than itself which marriage can be for. In
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which case, we may safely expect its gradual demise as an

institution.
Up until comparatively very recent times marriage was linked
much more clearly to economic necessity and the social power
structure than to the search for blissful 'relationship'. As Lawrence
Stone points out, • the 'companionate marriage' was largely a
creation of the eighteenth century, by which time many of the
socio-economic, contractual reasons for marriage had diminished,
leaving an increasingly individualistic and pleasure-seeking middle
and upper class in pursuit of forms of happiness for which the still
officially indissoluble bond of marriage offered to provide a ready
receptacle. Furthermore, it is only even more recently that marriage
can be almost relied upon to last a lifetime (hence, Stone argues,
our need for divorce to perform the task more frequently performed
before by death). From serving hard-headed and practical interests,
then, marriage came to serve as a kind of private personal indul-
gence, the satisfaction of needs for emotional comfort and
companionship.
The romanticizing of love and marriage in this way had dangers
which were not lost on observers of the time. Stone quotes Oliver
Goldsmith's warning concerning the 'mystification' of marriage:
How delusive, how destructive, are those pictures of consum-
mate bliss. They teach the youthful mind to sigh after beauty
and happiness which never existed, to despise that little good
which fortune has mixed up in our cup, by expecting more
than she ever gave.
However, Stone's work also suggests that changes in the social
structure in which marriage is embedded, giving rise as they did to
the 'companionate marriage', led concomitantly to generally more
gentle and affectionate relations within families and to a greater
interest than hitherto in questions of education and child welfare,
so perhaps it would be ungracious to dismiss too quickly as mere
self-indulgence any indication of social movement towards a
climate of opinion which begins to take seriously the well-being of
others. Perhaps, again, this was one of those points in history
where, in another context, enlightened and altruistic thought (for
example like that of Rousseau) might have led to a sustained
improve~ent in social conditions generally. However, nothing
demonstrates more clearly than the career of our attitude to
marriage the pervasiveness of the corruption of interest. For, as
with sex, the comforts and consolations of 'companionate'
*L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800,

Penguin Books, 1979.
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marriage have been commercially isolated and magnified, infused

with our greedy fantasies and served up to us as a 'package' at
once so attractive and so illusory that we can scarcely any longer
bring to bear upon it any form of coherent criticism.* Whatever
else may be the case, it certainly seems that the 'affective individu-
alism' of which Stone writes has arrived in our own time at a point
where any possibility of our being meaningfully related to a social
world outside ourselves has become, as it were, imploded into an
intensely focused 'relationship' which is expected to be not only
'companionate', but even therapeutic, not only sexually fulfilling,
but self-sufficiently and completely emotionally gratifying. If we
continue on this course, there is, saving death itself, only one more
stop on the way to our destination, and that is complete individual
self-sufficiency; the ultimate in security is being able to do without
anyone.
There is virtually nothing in, on the one hand, the welter of
sentimentality, mythology and wishful thinking, and on the other
the angry disillusion surrounding marriage, by which we may begin
to make sense of our experience of married life. Over and over
again people run up against completely unexpected obstacles to
their continued marital happiness from which they recoil hurt and
bewildered, believing themselves in an entirely individual predica-
ment which must be put down to someone's 'fault' - either their
partner's or their own. The irony is that this is in fact the almost
inevitable fate of all those 'embodied subjects' who find themselves
located in this particular world.
There are three particularly frequent constellations of marital
difficulty which may be taken as examples of what I mean. They
correspond roughly to what may be expected (when troubles do
arise) in the early, middle and later stages of marriage, and might
be termed accordingly the phases of disillusion, re-illusion and
resignation.
The disillusion of early marriage is, despite its near-universality,
experienced by those it affects usually silently and very privately,
as a particularly unfortunate and personal failing. As the absorp-
*A characteristically honest (if almost brutally sour!) antidote to the
kind of false sentimentality concerning marriage which is so evident in
popular literature is provided by Leo Tolstoy in an observation in his
diary for 30 August 1894: 'Novels end with the hero and heroine getting
married. They should begin with that and end with them getting unmar-
ried, i.e. becoming free. Otherwise to describe people's lives in such a way
as to break off the description with marriage is just the same as describing
a person's journey and breaking off the description at the point where the
traveller falls into the hands of robbers.' (Tolstoy's Diaries, Vol. I, edited
by R. F. Christian, Athlone Press, 1985.)
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tion in each other wears away and the exigencies of the world
outside 'the relationship' begin to reassert themselves, each partner
reads in the conduct of the other a personal betrayal, or in their
own disappointment a shameful failure of commitment. The
husband (to take the still typical case) finds his wife's lack of
understanding for the call on his attention of his work commit-
ments, and her demand for continual demonstration of his interest
in and affection towards her, irksome and unfair - can't she see
how much he thinks of her? Can't she tell that the work he does
is for her (and perhaps for their young children)? Can't she see
that he needs to relax when he gets home, not to talk about a day
he wants to forget, nor to hear the trivial details of hers? These
feelings his wife interprets as a treacherous decrease of the loving
involvement he had shown. He no longer seems to care, and all
she experiences is the enervating isolation of a life incarcerated
with small children, few friends and a family she rarely sees. Her
husband is uncommunicative, elsewhere, absorbed in a world of
power and money (even if only at the very bottom of its hierarchy)
which seems to mean more to him than she. They no longer talk
to each other as they did. He gets more out of talking to the people
who share his working world, she makes a confidante of one or
two young mothers she knows. She feels his sexual interest in her
as invasive and insincere, mere lust. He is hurt and bewildered by
her lessened sexual interest in him. Each feels that 'the marriage'
threatens to be a failure; it is not what it was, and has not turned
out either as they expected or as it should. Perhaps they were, after
all, not right for each other.
And so to the phase of re-illusion, in which the partners cast
around to rediscover what they feel they have lost. For the wife,
busy with tending to the needs of children, this may mean little
more than daydreaming, fantasizing the appearance of a kind and
attentive, gentle man who will love her for herself alone. As long
as she is dependent on her husband for her keep, she can afford to
show him little of these feelings, but if she becomes more financially
independent as the children get older, she may begin to allow her
contempt and resentment to show rather more boldly; perhaps also
she will turn the children into partners in an alliance against the
unfeeling and insensitive male, the father/husband whose still too-
powerful figure begins to throw a shadow almost of dread over
the household. Re-illusion is perhaps particularly the province of
the male. The husband, sexually rejected, hurt and perhaps
excluded (though perhaps none of these, but rather just pining
for the lost adulation of a woman) finds himself embroiled in a
'relationship' with another woman - the disillusioned wife of a
friend, possibly, or a younger unattached woman at work. The
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springtime of his life miraculously reappears - it is possible to be

loved! And so, confident in the belief perhaps that he now knows
enough from his experience of life really to make 'the relationship'
work, off he goes with his new-found love to start the cycle all
over again, leaving at home a woman too old, too tired, too
encumbered with children and far too angry to be very likely to
take a similar course.
Resignation comes when you look up after fifteen or so years
of child-rearing to find yourself sharing a lonely life with a hostile
stranger. Darby and Joan bickering and sniping at each other with
practised weariness. Far from finding their lives a cosy therapeutic
oneness, they tolerate each other's presence filled with a kind of
seething irritation in which their all-too-familiar mannerisms, even
the rustle of their clothes or the sound of their breathing, are
enough to trigger in the other a barely suppressed wave of frus-
trated rage. For simply sharing a home and a family does not
automatically lead to unity of soul and body - indeed many people
could probably more easily share their declining years with a work-
mate of long standing than with a spouse. Partners' concerns and
interests diverge over time more often than they converge, and the
second half of life - particularly perhaps for women who have
invested a great deal in now fully fledged children - can plunge
people into a sense of isolation and despairing futility at once
inescapable and totally unexpected. Professional guidance and 'the
media' as well as popular literature and entertainment all em-
phasize the positive value of 'relationships' and proffer a tech-
nology for making them 'work'. For this reason it is often with
stunned bewilderment that people come face to face with their
predicament. Nothing prepares us for the difficulties of marriage
in a world which imposes on people the way, in what roles and
arenas, they shall live their lives. The end is resignation, the
discovery that, after all, you have been cheated of happiness, and
can only wait for death in a state of armed truce with your 'one
and only'. But your disappointment will be of no concern to society
as a whole, as by now you have lost your economic significance.
The advertisement, like all advertisements, turns out in the end to
be a lie, but no one will mind, since you will have spent as much
on the product as you can be expected to.
To look at the way we treat the elderly with a gaze as far as
possible unclouded by custom and practice - as if newly arrived
from some other planet where they order things better - is to be
overcome with horror. These are not people sustained by years of
therapeutic relationship, but rather people no longer serving the
purposes that never were their own- no longer serving any purpose
at all.
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I should probably emphasize once more at this point that what

I want to draw attention to are the constraints placed upon our
lives by the structure of the society in which we live and the
mythology which has become established in its service. I have
known enough people who, sometimes in the face of almost unim-
aginable adversity, live their lives with the greatest concern for and
commitment to those they share it with, not lightly to devalue their
undertaking. My intention is not cynically to disparage the loving
concern many people still, against all the odds, manage to show
to others, including their spouses, but rather to attack the values
of a society which makes preparation for and understanding of
'relationship' so difficult and successful 'relatedness' so rare.
We need in fact to dismantle the mystifying rhetoric of 'relation-
ship' which, in order to sell us a whole range of illusory satisfac-
tions and to maintain us in isolated, inactive and uncomplaining
battery units, promises us total gratification in blissful union with
our loved one, and to construct instead a realistic appreciation of
what a commitment to other people must entail. It seems obvious,
for example, that to found the happiness of one's life on another
person is to lay upon him or her a strain which the human spirit
is just too weak to bear, and for two people who are historically
and organically different from each other to be expected to provide
a mutually supportive programme of more or less therapeutic
'understanding' and emotional tolerance, not to mention sexual
indulgence, is stretching the bounds of possibility beyond all
reasonable limit. As far as this is our expectation of marriage it is
bound to be disappointed. The task of couples who wish both to
stay married and to maintain some kind of contact with reality
must be to learn to accept in the self and permit (and tolerate) in
the other an inevitable degree of isolation and 'difference'. There
must be, as it were, permissible areas of non-understanding, recog-
nition of untouchable and impenetrable uniqueness, preparedness
to enter some experiences entirely alone and unaided by emotional
support, not because such support is being wilfully withheld (and
might be available in a 'better' relationship) but because its supply
is illusory. This calls for a tolerance of pain, and an understanding
of its nature, which few of us these days are able to command.
Each partner needs to see in the other a man or woman with needs,
weaknesses, fears and idiosyncrasies parallel to (though far from
identical with) his or her own, not the more or less adequate
purveyor, or indeed recipient, of satisfactions - 'love' and 'under-
standing' - which are the stuff of commodified relationship.
If, of course, marriage is an end in itself, a bid for emotional
security in an otherwise hostile world, the kind of tolerance of
difference I am advocating would amount to an entirely unaccept-
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able renunciation of bliss. But precisely because of the impossible

demands marriage-for-itself places on its partners, I do not believe
that it can survive as such. It is easy enough to see what marriage
has been for in the past (economic advantage or security, the
forging of familial alliances, etc.), but less easy to see what form
it may take in the future. If, however, we come to acknowledge
that 'relationships' of all kinds can arise meaningfully only from
being for something other than themselves, there is no reason why
marriage should not continue as an institution 'for' something.
Even now, it may legitimately enough be seen as for the rearing of
children.
Parents and Children

The way in which the human body is constructed makes it certain
that power will arise as a central issue in human life, and the way
in which human society is organized will determine how power is
to be distributed, used or abused. Inevitably, some people are
stronger than others - men (on the whole) than women, adults
(always) than infants. It is for this basic and obvious reason that
at the very root of the inequality of our power-infused social
hierarchy are to be found violence and the threat of violence
(terror). Nowhere is the issue of power more salient than in the
relations between parents and children, and nowhere are its roots
in violence and terror more frequently, and sadly, exposed.
I find it a matter of some considerable surprise that psychol-
ogists, and especially those clinically involved in the study and
'treatment' of families, have not thought about and addressed more
centrally the issue of power. It has not, certainly, been totally
absent from the thinking of some psychologists, especially those
interested in people's social relations more than merely in their
internal psychic workings - one thinks, for example, of Alfred
Adler and those influenced by him - but on the whole the issue of
power has been overshadowed by, one might say hidden behind,
that of sex, and there seems little doubt that Freud's influence in
this has been enormous. It is tempting to think that concern with
the 'repression' of sexuality which Freud and his colleagues worked
so assiduously to lift served, however unintendedly, as a screen for
a much deeper and more pervasive repression- that of power, its
inequalities and injustices. For if, as Foucault argues, sexuality was
far from being the taboo subject (and practice) of Victorian society
which we have been led to believe, it was precisely in this period of
European history and colonial domination (not to mention familial
relations) that the oppressive use of power reached unprecedented
heights of organization and sophistication. It is, again, surprising
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that, despite the resistance Freud felt he encountered (and resented

so bitterly) towards his theories, his ideas on sexuality were in fact
accepted almost eagerly and adopted into twentieth-century culture
with great rapidity, when even now one might expect them to
stretch the credulity of an averagely critical mind beyond the
normal bounds of reason. And yet at the same time, the quite
obvious importance of disparities in power between adults and
children was largely ignored, and indeed it still is ignored by most
of us today. The basest of human motives lie not in our sexual
affiliations, but in our violence towards one another, and it is
above all these motives which we repress most effectively.
In the orthodox view of the 'Oedipus complex', for example, the
power struggle between son and father is treated in psychoanalytic
thinking as secondary to a sexual struggle for the mother/wife. I
must confess that I have always had difficulty in being able to
take seriously the psychoanalytic view of sexuality in infancy and
childhood, not least because I have never been struck, as psychoan-
alysts clearly seem to be, by a particularly significant sexual
component even to the most honest and undefended accounts
people give of their childhood experience, nor have I observed any
particularly potent or impressive sexual activities or impulses in
pre-pubertal children (which is not to say that such children are
innocent of all sexual feeling or conduct, nor that they may not
imitate sexually mature activity). I have, of course, come across
very powerful and often very destructive sexual components in the
relations of adults towards children, not infrequently their own,
but this is of course quite another matter. Competition between
parents for the alliance of their children is very often observable
and frequently not without elements of sexual seductiveness. In
this way a renaming of the 'Oedipus complex' as the 'Jocasta
complex' (after Oedipus's mother) would make a kind of psycho-
logical sense more often supported by actual clinical experience:
mothers who seduce their sons (and none the less powerfully for
being only metaphorically) in order to isolate and in a sense castrate
their husbands are a far from rare phenomenon (and certainly have
a part to play in the genesis of male homosexuality) - but here
again the essential theme, the key to the understanding of the
'dynamics', is one of power. Though, of course, a small child can
play on the weaknesses of its parents and so exploit their differ-
ences, its power in such situations is merely passive or negative;
its resources of positive power are, in relation to those of its
parents, negligible.
Sons struggle against paternal domination; fathers crush,
tyrannize or patronize daughters; mothers manoeuvre fairly or
foully against male oppression, monopolize their sons' affection or
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competitively drain their daughters of female competence in exactly

the way that a father can use his power never to allow his son to
surpass him in anything. The 'pathology' of family relations knows
many permutations and variations, but most centre on the misuse,
abuse and fear of power. One can very often detect, even on quite
casual acquaintance, how people have learned to deal with their
earliest experiences of the power of others. In the way, for example,
that they characteristically try to assert their own interests- charm-
ingly, perhaps, or cajolingly, defiantly, fearfully, obliquely,
seductively, angrily, sullenly, insistently, etc., etc.- one can almost
see the shadow of a parent falling over them.
We have not developed very much in the way of an ethics of
child-rearing in our culture, and the very idea that we should give
much thought to what might be good for our children seems, in
modern times at least, to have struck us as at all significant only
since the eighteenth century.* We have yet to meditate seriously on
the overwhelming disparity of power between adults and children
(though, of course, we do not hesitate to make remorseless use of
it) and where we do get a glimpse of the ravages the powerful
(adults) wreak on the powerless (children) our first - and so far
only - thought seems to be to 'disband' the family and seek other
ways of organizing the basic units of society. However, nothing
will eradicate the disparity of power between adults and children,
and we might, rather than trying to get rid of it, attempt to find
ways of using it for good rather than ill.
Once again we have at present no concepts even to begin to
think about this undertaking other than those of a semi-articulated
authoritarian moralism or various forms of laissez-faire. This, I
think, is because of the extent of the repression of power in the
wider society. Because we do not comment about or reflect upon
injustice and inequality to any really serious degree, because we
are all to some extent involved in turning blind eyes to the free
play of violence and exploitation in the pursuit of interest, we
can only watch helplessly as these forms of relation reproduce
themselves within our families.
It is not that parents harbour any evil intent towards their
children, and it is the cruellest of errors to suppose that they do
by, for example, dragging the concept of blame into a consideration
of who causes whom psychological injury or distress. It is rather
that, in a culture in which we have no articulate conception of the
loving use of power (and if we ever had one in the past we have
lost it), we are thrown together in contexts - as for example
*L. Stone, op. cit. See also Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood,
Jonathan Cape, 1962.
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families - in which our relations are going inevitably to be shaped

by the social forms of the wider environment.
I do not think it any exaggeration to say that we are approaching
a state of affairs in which we simply do not know how to relate
to one another except coercively and exploitingly, and the effects
of this are going to be particularly severe in cases where - as
between children and adults- there are gross disparities in power.
My reasons for feeling this are based on no mere abstract consider-
ation of social speculation or political theory, but on the endlessly
and dishearteningly repeated experience of witnessing the defor-
mation and ineradicable emotional scarring of people who were
once children by parents whose only conscious wish was to love
them.
At a relatively coarse level of analysis, there are several almost
standard ways- familiar, I would suggest, in most people's experi-
ence - in which the fundamentally baleful nature of our society is
reflected in the manner in which parental power comes to be
exerted over children. Without running into further volumes, I can
do no more here than sketch some of them rather as caricatures.
At the bottom of the pyramid, the very base of the social hier-
archy, many people are just too drained and oppressed, too robbed
of ability or initiative to feel that they can or want to do anything
for their children but simply to keep them quiet. In this kind of
situation children are likely to be indulged, neglected, bullied or
mistreated, handed over to 'experts' in the welfare services, and
generally left to find their way through the system as best they can.
Nobody will have the resources of time, money or personal concern
to observe their talents or nurture their interests and abilities,
though they may encounter a degree of formal (but, because over-
stretched, highly undependable) support from official agencies. To
avoid becoming nothing more than fodder for a depressed labour
market or marginally useful for the consumption of mass-produced
junk, the child in this position needs an almost miraculously lucky
encounter with someone (most often an unusually strong and
capable grandparent or aunt or uncle) who will through his or her
affection, wisdom and energy, open up for it a world of possibility
and a realization of its own potentialities which would otherwise
be missed. The only consolation to occupancy of this level of
society, and it is indeed the smallest of mercies, is that tired neglect,
though it generates the most dreadful waste, often avoids the
malign distortion of growth which leads to such emotional pain in
people who have been subjected to more positive abuses of power.
It is virtually impossible to occupy a precariously insecure
position in the power hierarchy without the anxiety and hostility
such a position occasions being reflected in family relations. People
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who, as it were, find themselves perched on a ledge a little way up

the social pyramid - far enough to want desperately to hang on
to the small advantage gained but not far enough to be unaware
of the unattractiveness of rock bottom -live particularly threatened
lives, and it can be little surprise if they hedge their children round
with all kinds of exhortations and prohibitions, keen for them to
climb higher and anxious lest they drag the family back down to
what they see as social ignominy. Here is to be found the much
maligned 'petty bourgeoisie', renowned for its mean-spirited
narrow-mindedness, envy and authoritarian moralism. But the
values of generosity and liberalism make little sense to anyone
having to cling to this perch, where the threat of economic power
is probably felt at its most acute and life becomes an unrelenting
pursuit of an always just-unattainable security, a panicky clinging
to advantages gained and an angry contempt both for people who
have silver spoons in their mouths and for those who have fallen
back into torpid resignation. The reality here is of economic
survival and obedient subservience to power, and other values,
other ways of perceiving the world, become mere self-indulgence.
Rigid conformity to narrowly ideal standards and denial and
repression of emotions, perceptions and values which do not meet
them, resentful respect for authority and uncritical acceptance of
established social institutions breed an atmosphere in which chil-
dren are likely to find it hard to develop a firm sense of subjectivity,
but will be moulded to occupancy of stereotyped social and sexual
roles and will experience considerable anxiety and guilt when they
find themselves departing from them. Self-deception and hypocrisy,
emotional deprivation and defensiveness follow naturally from this
kind of situation, which, not surprisingly, is one of the most
psychologically mutilating in which one can find oneself.
It is in this stratum, and those close to it, that the course of
development most typical of our society is perhaps most obviously
to be found - the transformation of a lively and promising human
infant, through a period of indoctrination, disillusion and rebellion,
into an emotionally constricted, competitively hostile adult satu-
rated in the values of commodity consumption, desperately
conforming, anxiously pursuing an ever-receding 'happiness',
bereft of any ability to criticize the society in which he or she is
located, pathetically eager to enjoy those of its 'fruits' (consumer
durables) which are within reach. This is the great, inertially stable
backbone of our society, the guardian of its values and the target
of its mass media, working tirelessly in the interests of others and
blindly against its own, forced by the crushing vice of economic
power into reproducing itself reliably and endlessly in its children.
At the upper level of this stratum, and extending into the mana-
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gerial and professional strata, one finds family relations set in a

rather less rigid context in which a degree of economic security
allows room for, on the one hand, genuinely realizable ambition,
and on the other economically riskable (though strictly one-dimen-
sional*) criticism of the status quo. Here, for example, managers
may manage their children, organizing their experience (e.g.
controlling what television programmes may be watched) and to
a lesser extent their social and educational environment in accord-
ance with aims seen as desirable and attainable. The relatively
greater degree of power available at this level makes in general for
a rather more relaxed and less moralistic hedonism, but the culture
is still likely to be highly materialistic in one form or another and
the emphasis in child-rearing will probably be on the gaining of
increased status, so that children will often experience strong
pressure to achie' e and 'succeed'. In the absence of crude economic
threat (e.g. relative security of parental job tenure and provision
of pensions, etc.), the atmosphere is more often likely to be one of
alienation rather than anxiety: the pursuit of comfort and satisfac-
tion, the possibility of actually obtaining recurrent quiescence of
the nervous system, may lead to a kind of flaccidity in values,
an incipient sense of purposelessness and a desperation to realize
purpose in 'relationships', which result in fact in chaotic, manipu-
lative and dishonest relations between parents. Children in this
type of situation may be or feel emotionally distanced from their
families, and their parents, intent on pursuing their own gratific-
ation, may simply buy their offspring's upbringing from education-
alists and 'experts' of one sort or another. Particularly in the
families of middle-class intellectuals and academics children may
be permitted or actually encouraged a kind of rebellion against
conventional norms as long as they 'achieve' intellectually. In
adolescents from this kind of background one can often encounter
an intelligent criticism of their parents' apparently dishonest
involvement in materialist values and lack of emotional commit-
ment to anything very much, but idealism seems to give way all
too soon to a learned indifference to people, a sort of profound
disaffection which in the end simply reproduces a drifting indul-
gence in commodified relationships and embarkation on one of
society's more comfortable vocational bandwagons, propelled
more by fashion than commitment.
*I mean this in the sense developed by Herbert Marcuse in One-

Dimensional Man, Beacon Press, 1964, i.e. that criticism of the social and
conceptual status quo is possible only in the forms and language prescribed
by the self-same status quo, and hence never challenges its fundamental
values.
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'Relationships'
It is only perhaps towards the apex of the social hierarchy that

one any longer comes across the most direct application of econ-
omic power within the family itself, i.e. the parental control of
children through the straightforward manipulation of money-
power. It is no doubt a blessing that for the vast majority of us
institutions such as male primogeniture no longer exist to poison
family relations, but even so it seems to me that we vastly underesti-
mate the psychological consequences of inheritable wealth for those
who stand in line actuallv to inherit it. This does not of course
constitute a widespread ~ocial problem, but it does throw into
relief the way that power may be socially exerted and reflected in
individuals' personal lives and relations. I cannot claim that my
knowledge of people in this position is extensive, but it has struck
me as interesting how often those I have come across - i.e. people
who have wealthy parents and who profit or stand to profit by the
relationship - seem simply to have failed to grow up. For such
people as this, however advanced in years themselves, the parental
shadow seems to fall heavily over them, in such a way that
emotionally and socially they remain perpetual adolescents -
angrily dependent, sulkily rebellious, rather unstable and change-
able in their personal relations, apparently vocationally paralysed,
i.e. dilettantish and unable to strike out for themselves in any
independent direction. However firm our intentions, very few of
us manage to be disinterested, and it is extremely difficult for even
the most affectionate parent not to wield at least unconscious
power over a son or daughter who stands to gain financially from
the relationship. It is not the habit of psychologists to inquire
closely into the financial background and circumstances of those
whose 'behaviour' and 'attitudes' they are trying to understand.
On the whole, I suspect, to do so would be far more enlightening
than to pursue, for example, the much more common inquiries
into sexual history.
Whatever the level of the socio-economic circumstances in which
a given family finds itself - and I should stress that the above
reflections constitute only the broadest and most impressionistic of
sketches - none can escape the prevailing cultural climate, which
rains equally on the just and the unjust, the advantaged and the
disadvantaged. The setting in which emotionally deprived and
economically oppressed men and women compete with each other
for equal shares of satisfaction, the intrusion into personal relations
of inequalities in economic power and its veiled abuse, the pursuit
and inevitable frustration of the desire for 'understanding', all these
lead almost necessarily to a state of affairs in which children's
experience and perceptions are marshalled or distorted to satisfy
parental ambitions or emotional alignments, to 'validate' familial
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mythology or to deny uncomfortable truths. If in this process the

adults' power is not ruthlessly if unconsciously used to transmit
forms of 'socialization' which are built, ultimately, on exploitation
and violence, it is likely simply to be withdrawn as an available
resource, in which case children merely grow up like weeds as their
parents fend off any demand which intrudes on their search for
personal satisfaction. This in fact does seem to be the ultimate
destination of our individualistic pursuit of happiness - simple
indifference to the fate of the next generation. It seems more and
more to be the case that parents are coming to experience their
children as a threat to their emotional peace and independence, as
yet more competition for scarce satisfactions, so that adult power
comes to serve the struggle for personal 'happiness' more than
cultivation of a future for our progeny. This becomes the business
of a professional stratum of educational and therapeutic 'experts'.
What seems increasingly to be characteristic of our 'relation-

ships' as a whole is a lack of charity, an absence of the forbearance
and respect in the face of 'otherness' which are necessary to an
acceptance of each other as fully human. The perception of each
other as vehicles of commodified satisfaction which market values
impose feeds fantasied expectations, the inevitable frustration of
which can only result in desperate Heediness and anger. Human
beings denied the possibility of acting creatively out into the world
for something become in the end reduced to acting out dreams
destructively in a way which pays no regard to the embodied
actuality of their fellows. This tendency is clearly to be read in
the often horrifyingly detached or fantastic sexual and aggressive
preoccupations of modern literature and cinema, etc. ('enjoyment'
of which necessitates a kind of defensive steeling of the sensibilities
if one is not to emerge at least temporarily scarred) but is no less
easily identified in the sense very many 'ordinary' people have these
days of a pervasive cruelty in the world.
Frustration and neediness compounded by recognition of failure
to meet the needs of others create a despair and unintentional
cruelty (i;e. a form of cruelty carrying with it no sense of personal
'ownership') which are reflected as surely in our intimate relations
as they are, for example, in the wider world of national and
international affairs. The profoundly sinister, largely unseen but
enormously complex apparatus of nuclear warfare, the South
African policeman almost frenziedly whipping a peaceful demon-
strator, and the father who regards with stony hatred the despair
of a daughter he cannot love are not separate phenomena, but
together speak to the way in which we have become caught up in
issues of power and competition beyond our immediate compre-
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hension or control. Any improvement in this state of affairs will

depend on a great deal more than our merely 'working on our
relationships'.
121
7
Growing Up and Taking
Care
Understanding, as I have tried to show, does not equal cure. For
the individual starting out on psychotherapy it often seems as if
all that is needed for the relief of his or her nameless distress would
be a clear sight of what the reasons for it are. But even though the
gaining of such a clear sight may be a lengthy, painful and testing
procedure, its difficulties are as nothing compared with those which
arise once the mist disperses and the person can see quite clearly
the nature of his or her predicament. For the predicament is where
one is, and though one may be able to envisage in perfect detail
where one would like to be, the greatest difficulties are encountered
in knowing how to get there. There are, of course, some advantages
in knowing where you are, and for many patients this is an
improvement on the confusion and discomfort of their original
condition, and indeed one which often they have to settle for, if
only because their history or their situation precludes their being
able to act on their world in such a way as significantly to change
it. But even for those who do have some prospect of being able to
influence their situation through their own conduct, the way is
never less than daunting and always demands great effort and
courage.
Precisely the same kind of constellation of difficulties, though
on a vastly greater scale, faces the analysis, such as it is, presented
in this book. Whatever clarity may have been gained through
having broken free of the conceptual restraints placed on our
understanding of human distress by the disciplinary structures,
greedy individualism and meshed interests of a hierarchy of power,
we are still no nearer to knowing how to change our lives or to
escape the influences we may now see as damaging us. However,
perhaps it is a little easier to catch a glimpse of how, if only we
could change them, our lives ought to look: the ends may be fairly
clear even if the means are as obscure as ever. In this chapter, then,
I shall undertake the relatively uncomplicated task of suggesting
what indications for less destructive and deluded ways of living
seem to me to follow from the foregoing analysis. In the next, and
final, chapter I shall discuss, without hoping to resolve, some of
the difficulties and dilemmas involved in trying actually to bring
into existence forms of social conduct which are, I think, easily
enough identified as desirable.
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Growing Up and Taking Care
For no particular reason other than convenience of organization,

shall divide into two broad strands this discussion of how,
perhaps, our lives should be if we wish to escape the ravages of
the pursuit of happiness. The first strand deals with our personal
expectations of life and entails the necessity for growing up. The
second deals with our relations with others and the world we
live in, and entails the necessity for taking care. It is with some
embarrassment that I find myself treading this territory, which is
not customarily regarded as the legitimate habitat of 'scientific'
psychologists, and I am afraid that what I write may sound too
much like preaching. I do not, however, regard myself as in a
different boat from anyone else, and though I certainly feel a degree
of diffidence about this undertaking I make no apology for it: its
justification will, I hope, be argued in the next chapter.
Growing Up
The blissful security of infancy - the inevitable if for some pitifully
short foundation of our experience - is, as has been noted, not to
be recaptured. In circumstances rather saner than those pertaining
in the 'civilized' world towards the end of the twentieth century,
it is likely to be the natural course of a person's life that it should,
once delivered from the womb, turn progressively outwards
towards the world. The process of growing up corresponds to the
cultivation of a 'public' life in which the person is enabled, as well
perhaps as obliged, to make a contribution to the social world
before coming to the end of his or her brief sojourn in it. This is
not to say that 'private' life - the internal world of feelings and
'relationships' - is unimportant or to be despised, but rather that
it is of little interest to anyone other than th,~ individual in question
and those with whom he or she comes into intimate contact.
It is in the public sphere that one may have a more or less
formal function through which one contributes to the world, and
it is in the private sphere that one may tend to the concerns of the
self. The 'pursuit of happiness' is properly a private matter, the
instrumental use of one's body in a social context properly a public
matter. We are, in ways and for reasons which may become a
little clearer in the course of this discussion, chronically confused
between the public and private spheres.
The possibility of public life confers a kind of dignity, a social
as opposed to a purely personal value, even at the lowliest level.
The doorman, for example, in his commissionaire's uniform, may
for many be little more than a slightly comical symbol of petty
authority, but the 'publicness' of his role at least permits him to
wear an expression of pride which will almost certainly be absent
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from the face he watches in the bathroom mirror as he stands

in his pyjamas cleaning his teeth. He contrasts strongly in this
'publicness' with the young girl who walks past him. His body, his
privacy, is hidden behind his function, nobody's business but his
own; her body is packaged and displayed as seductively as it can
be made- she is imprisoned in a kind of cocoon of private sexuality
which is at the same time constructed to be looked at. On the one
hand her appearance issues the strongest invitation to desire, on the
other she meets nobody's gaze, her eyes unseeing, her expression
contemplating some secret inner space. Her determined avoidance
of the gaze her objectified sexuality invites seems to acknowledge
the inappropriateness of publicizing an essentially private concern.
In any case, she is given no function but to be her body, a pure
object; she has been turned inside-out.
The economic structures we inhabit rob most of us of any
function extended out into public space, so that our existence
becomes imploded into an impacted preoccupation with our selves
and our needs; they exploit private impulse at the same time as
appropriating public function.
But privacy is to be respected, not exploited. As far as there can
be a 'point' to our lives, it must, surely, reside within the public
sphere; to focus the point of living on the personal and perhaps
idiosyncratic experiences of individuals and their particular satis-
factions and gratifications is to give the private a degree of import-
ance and centrality far beyond anything morally or rationally
warrantable. Indeed, the emphasis on private satisfaction in our
commercial culture is so inflated as to obscure the sphere of public
living altogether. The promise of bliss holds us within an endless
infancy, or at least makes it impossible for us to progress beyond
a greedy adolescence, and in assuring us that this is the point of
life, it in fact cruelly robs our lives of meaning. It is not merely
that our longing for a blissful past beyond the reach of memory is
nurtured and exploited, but it is also the case that in many ways
the sphere of public living has contracted to a point where most
people cannot enter it even if they want to. It may be true that in
most 'developed' societies the world no longer imposes upon people
a harsh necessity for growing up (our children are not forced to
drop their toys so that they may lay their hands to the plough,
indeed our adult lives are at least as engrossed with toys - mostly
made in Japan- as is our childhood), but it is also true that if we
wish to put away childish things we actually cannot find anything
serious to do. In other words, growing up in our situation has
ceased to be a natural process.
To observe that growing up is no longer a natural process is,
however, not to imply that it is not a necessary one if we are to
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escape the disintegration and despair consequent upon meaning-

lessness. We have, quite literally, bought the idea that the point of
life is the pursuit of happiness, and so we have become, as it were,
collapsed in on a life of private contemplation of how we feel.
Private individualism of this kind leads to public (social) disinte-
gration. It is far from the case that really life's 'problems' have
been solved to the point where we can now just sit back and enjoy
ourselves - even the most casual glance at the state of our own
society, let alone of the rest of the world, reveals that this fantasy
of the sixties no longer holds any plausibility at all. Furthermore,
if ever that distant day should be reached when human society
does seem to have solved all its problems, human beings will have
to think of something better to do than just enjoy themselves
having fun and therapy, for it does not take much imagination to
see how deadening and futile such a life would be.
The greatest violence that is done to people in our society is to
rob them of a public life. As people are persuaded by an unremit-
ting barrage of commercial propaganda that their happiness lies in
the indulgence and satisfaction of their private needs and impulses,
they are simultaneously stripped of the possibility for developing
and using talents, resources and interests which they can place at
the disposal of others and enact for the public good. This is a large
part of the reason for the despair which lies behind our satiation.
Once again one is reminded of battery chickens, whose only differ-
ence from us lies, presumably, in their lack of a consciousness.
Since it knows no other, the battery chicken (if only it could talk
to itself) would no doubt believe that it existed in the best of all
possible worlds, and would see the point of its existence as being
fed regularly and nourishingly, kept in comfortable - if over-
crowded - circumstances of even light and heat, and medicated to
keep it free of disease and maintain its proper rate of growth. What
the chicken would not see, of course, is that there is indeed an
altogether darker and less bland purpose behind its pampered life
of easy passivity, and even on the day of its sudden and terrifying
end it would not realize what its life had been for. Our case is not
so different, for our lives also have a purpose beyond that (the
pursuit of happiness) which we can immediately see, and though
it is one to which, if we are lucky, our private life is not sacrificed,
it is certainly one which claims our public lives. It is however, for
most of us, not a purpose of our own choosing nor one to which
we would consider it right to subscribe, and for most of us also
its nature is located at a point in the hierarchy of interest which
we cannot even see. In order to develop our own purposes we need
to break the unnatural barriers to our own maturity: if we do not
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grow up in response to the pressures of the world, we shall have

to learn how to do so for ourselves.
The infrequency with which one comes across people who have
achieved maturity is perhaps an indication of how difficult, in the
modern world, it is to do so. Even from the perspective of purely
private experience, to grow older, rather than simply to become
advanced in years, is to leave an almost-memory of certain safety
and blissful peace and to penetrate further and further into the
uncertain and unknowable, to relinquish passivity for activity, to
unwind oneself from wishful dreaming and in the process discover
pains and sorrows which no mythology can eradicate. In order to
embark upon any such risky journey, one needs a social world and
a culture which at least make an effort to map the way as far as
possible and to provide support at the most dangerous and
distressing junctures. In fact, of course, that is precisely what is
missing - at every hesitant step we are called back by seductive
promises of security and ease and encouraged to regard any sign
of departure from the standard aim of happy consumption as
close to madnesss. Life does indeed tend to force the inevitable
experiences of increasing age on those of us who live long enough,
but our culture withholds from us (has repressed or failed to
develop) both the conceptual equipment and the compassion we
would need to make sense of what happens to us and perhaps to
put it to some use in our public lives. Almost every milestone we
pass - adolescent sexuality, marriage, parenthood, the departure
of children, the demands of old age, death, to name but the most
basic and obvious - is mystified by the apparatus of interest so
that at any point we are likely to be stunned into guilty silence as
we discover that our actual experience fails to match the social
norms it pays to believe in, and at the first opportunity we are
likely to fall back on comforting but illusory formulations which
seem to relieve us of the necessity for progressing further into a
threatening unknown.
This kind of process illustrates the meaning of the psychoana-
lytic term 'fixation'. We settle for that point of our development
beyond which we dare not advance, and we elaborate a life out of
the safe knowledge thus far gained. Sometimes the point settled
for may not be very far along the chronological path at all -
perhaps merely a matter of months. Unless as a society we provide
people, as far as we are able, with both the understanding and the
encouragement to risk and pass beyond the difficult and painful
experiences which are bound to present themselves at intervals
throughout their lives, we can scarcely be surprised when they
settle for what they know best and baulk at entering areas of
experience which lie, so to speak, outside their field of expertise.
126
We tend to traumatize our children early: rather than trying all we

can to use our adult knowledge and power to stand in their position
and to make sense for them of their experience, to make space in
which they can act from their own perspective, we tend to impose
upon them a cold objective gaze which monitors their every depar-
ture from our norms and enables us to force them back into the
ways of our choosing. In this way, the child becomes terrified of
its own 'interiority': it discovers that most of what it experiences
and feels and thinks is not permissible, and so, as soon as it can, it
opts for any state of 'objectivity' in which it seems to be moderately
successful and reasonably comfortable, and beyond that state it
does not pass.
Partly, this is because the exploitation of privacy for both
commercial and disciplinary purposes, the spilling out of what is
inside us into the field of view of others who need to sell us things
as well as keep us under control, leads us vastly to over-estimate
and over-extend the significance of our private lives and the way
we feel inside ourselves. It is not that such feelings are unimportant
- indeed, as I have indicated, they deserve the greatest respect and
care- but rather that their importance does not extend so far as
to account for or give meaning to our function as social beings.
Once centred on how you feel, however, it becomes very difficult
to concentrate unself-consciously on what you want to do,
especially when what you feel seems to bear no relation to how
you have been led to expect you ought to feel.
Most of us, I suspect, spend our lives elaborating a way of
objective being discovered relatively early in life, rather than
moving through a progression of subjective experience. The
changing nature of one's embodied position in the world (given as
much as anything by the alteration in one's circumstances) and the
accretion of one's history which are necessarily consequent on
becoming older, provide one with an endlessly unrolling sequence
of experience which demands a capacity for continuously learning
anew. For most of us, as already suggested, this is experienced
rather as a series of incomprehensible blows to a (probably tacit)
philosophy of life which we accepted early on as finished and
immutable or else took over uncritically from the 'official' myth-
ology of our time. Life is not seen as something 'open-ended' and
new and requiring learning, but rather as a relatively fluid period
of childhood followed by a relatively stable period of adulthood,*
both calling for nothing more taxing than the acquisition of already
clearly defined 'skills'. It is because of this sharp discrepancy
*An alternative to this conventional view is, however, put by Phillida

Salmon in her Living in Time, Dent, 1985.
127
between the official mythology and what people actually experience

of life and death and love and work that it is common for them
to feel traumatized and to 'fixate' on what they know best. It is
not difficult to think of examples - most of us know people who,
whatever the situation they find themselves in, rather than experi-
encing it, work out within it their practised form of objectivity.
The young man, for instance, who is always beautiful and clever
no matter what is being asked of or enacted around him: his
specialism in life is to be beautiful and clever, and his eyes are cast
modestly down when he feels the eyes of others noting his beauty,
and his aphoristic speech turns every occasion into an appreciation
of his wit and intelligence. This kind of self-conscious objectivity
is the curse of a society which penetrates private life with a public
gaze, which maintains discipline and furthers interest by censoring
our experience and so making it impossible for us to act out into
public space without worrying too much how we look or feel. The
result is that we become paralysed, unable to function. With a
longing backward glance at a safer past we turn ourselves into
pillars of salt.
In order to grow up, we have perhaps above all to learn renunci-
ation rather than longing. All promises that we may return again
to the blissful ease of infancy are false. Though we may entirely
legitimately mourn its passing, and no doubt enjoy those beautiful
if brief times when (as in falling in love) something like it seems
to reappear, it is not wise to pine for the paradise which, because
we cannot quite remember it, seems like a hope for the future.
Wishful dreaming merely renders one vulnerable to commercial
promises of its coming true and sucks one into a life in pursuit of
the illusory. This is the entirely private life of personal satisfaction,
which even if we could achieve 'fulfilment' would be totally devoid
of meaning. The renunciation of bliss constitutes not some kind of
self-imposed penance or unnecessary asceticism, but rather a sober
recognition that a life lived in the public domain (i.e. one in which
thought, feeling and action are turned outward to the world) is
one which necessarily involves difficulty, uncertainty, isolation and
a measure of pain.
What is needed is a degree of stoicism. What so often we antici-
pate as unbearable we might better come to see as inevitable, and
possibly even not all that bad. (The aim here of course is not to
submit stoically to the authority or values of an immutable hier-
archy of power, but to liberate oneself from the mythology through
which it furthers its interests and maintains its discipline.) There
is, certainly, not such virtue in emotional pain that one need seek
it out, but there is an inevitability about it which makes repression
of any familiarity with it counterproductive: no life spent running
128
away from the inevitable can be particularly worth while. There

are risks inherent both in forming attachments to others and in
trying to make whatever contribution one can to tne public good,
but a knowledge of risk and a readiness to experience loss, rejection
or failure actually make them easier to bear when they do occur
than does the single-minded pursuit of gratification.
There is, of course, nothing the matter with the enjoyment of
private pleasure or happiness (nor with eccentric personal
suffering) but, being private, they need to be covered by a decent
reticence. It is characteristic of modern marketing strategy to drag
values and feelings out of the private domain and to harness their
power as 'motivators' to saleable commodities. In this way the
domain of public life - the sphere of conduct in which we act
outwardly to and with each other for something beyond our private
satisfaction - has become inverted into a kind of public privacy,
i.e. emptied of public significance and filled instead with objectified
personal feelings and needs. Our privacy and interiority have been
invaded, raped, and dragged out for public scrutiny in a way which
only seems without shame because we are all involved. The barriers
by means of which a personal interiority used to be defended, and
which thus permitted the living of a private life, have one by one
been broken down, and our legitimate concern with ourselves and
our feelings has been exposed to an objective gaze and made public
property. One thinks, for example, of the erosion of the right to
the dignity of a surname through the generalized use of first names
by which was once conferred a gift of intimacy. The touching and
gazing and exteriorizing of thoughts and feelings which are the
stock-in-trade of the therapy industries are little more than tech-
niques for making us less resistant to the demands and blandish-
ments of the market as well as more uniformly vulnerable and
obedient to the discipline of social norms. All this, it seems,
amounts to another form of one-dimensionality: in becoming fused
into a single realm of publicly private commodification, our lives
have lost both a decent and enjoyable (or sufferable) privacy as
well as the possibility for altruistic action in a public domain.
It is not, then, that our private lives are unimportant or of no
consequence, nor that the pleasures and pains they contain should
be a matter of indifference to us, but that they are indeed a private
concern. We need to take back our private lives, to retrieve them
from the intrusive interests both of the market and of social disci-
pline (norms) so that we can live them, in privacy, as diversely,
eccentrically, and if the occasion demands as unhappily as we like.
It is indeed a particular privilege of the grown-up to live a private
life however he or she likes. (It is, furthermore, the business of the
psychotherapist, if asked, as far as possible to help people to do
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precisely that, and not to try to push them into conformity with
some standardized conception of 'mental health'. Rather than
being, as they unwittingly too often are, representatives of a form
of social discipline, psychotherapists could better become the reti-
cent and unheroic assistants of people whose private struggles are
nobody's business but their own and that of those in whom they
choose to confide. In this way psychotherapists should occupy a
status position more similar to that of those old-fashioned phys-
icians who in order to test their patients' urine had to taste it than
to that of magicians or social engineers; there is, in other words,
not a great deal of glamour or mystery in examining the difficulties
and distress we encounter in our private lives.)
While an individual's happiness or despair may indeed reside in
his or her private life, the point of living has more relevance to the
public sphere. Indeed, the very possibility of being able to
contribute to the society in which one lives may well redeem or
give meaning to a life lived otherwise in misery. Even were our
exclusive interest in people's private lives compassionate rather
than commercial, we should still, by draining off the possibility for
public conduct, render them meaningless. Suffering is not to be
desired for itself, but better suffering with the possibility of redemp-
tion than a purely private bliss.
It is almost impossible to envisage what sort of society it would
be which permitted or encouraged all its members to turn their
lives towards some public function. Our own society, certainly, is
diametrically opposed to this: it siphons off the possibility of 'other-
directed' (altruistic) conduct in order to commodify its products
and sell them back to people as consumers. But if there is any
'point' to living, it must surely lie in what we can do; our embodied
organisms are surely for something other than their own satisfac-
tion. Only if we live in the perpetual 'now' of the advertiser's
euphoric world could we really believe that a life which is not
permitted to develop and apply its talents for the benefit of all is
not, no matter how great its private satisfaction, a life wasted. It
is the instrumentality of the body which renders it indispensable
to the evolution of a social world, not its capacity for enjoyment,
nor even, I would suggest, its inclination towards spiritual
'fulfilment'.
It is indeed the very uni-dimensionality of our materialistic phil-
osophy which leads us to think it essential that we should know
what the 'point' of living is in any case. We tend to assume, for
example, that unless we can identify a 'point', life becomes pointless
or absurd. But there is no compelling reason to believe that, for
there to be a point, we should know what it is. It is, after all, likely
to take many more thousands of centuries before we have got as
130
far as learning how decently to live together, without worrying

about what the point of it all might be. The very most we can
hope to do is make what contribution we can in the vanishingly
brief time available to us. In view of the heartless waste of talent,
the systematic destruction of intelligence and the commercialized
emptying-out of mentality which, in particular, characterize our
treatment of the young, it seems to me that to aim at maximizing
the possibility of our contributing, through our embodied instru-
mentality, to a future none of us can foretell, is far from an
unworthy or uninspiring goal.
For it is certainly not that there is nothing for us to do. A world
which is built on injustice, inequality and violence, in which the
relative comfort and 'happiness' of a few is founded on the exploi-
tation and degradation of the vast majority, leaves plenty of room
for improvement, and we certainly need not yet despair that human
life is rendered meaningless through its very affluence and techno-
logical success (in this respect it is interesting again to remember
that all those epochs of our history which have been characterized
by self-confident assertions of comfort and sufficiency in fact seem
to have derived their security from a basis in some form of slavery).
Far from there being 'nothing to do' the domain of public life is
in fact empty behind the illusion of activity created by the pervasive
concern with what is in truth private indulgence (the moral bank-
ruptcy of Western politics may perhaps be seen as testimony to
this state of affairs: politicians become the cautious representatives
or 'front' men and women for the interests of managerial,
marketing and military power, and public policy is sacrificed to
and for private interest).
It is a frequent complaint of 'patients' growing out of their
longing for the bliss of infancy that their struggle to influence the
circumstances of their lives 'doesn't have any effect'. This, again,
seems to rest on the failure of a mature appreciation of scale:
somehow, it seems, we have come to accept the values of instancy
(instant availability and instant success) to the point where we lose
sight of the smallness and relative insignificance of the individual.
We have bought the belief that if one cannot change the world it
is not worth trying, and so we become morally and politically
paralysed. Part of the process of growing up entails the recognition
that 'trying' is something to be done whether or not it has any
degree of observable success. We have to reckon with the wasteful-
ness of human society, to accept what is a fact as a fact: not only
is it in most cases impossible to tell whether one's efforts in a given
direction are or have been of any avail, but one must be prepared
for the near certainty that they will have no measurable effect at
all. Societies evolve through the agency of their members, but
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with a profoundly disheartening degree of redundancy - for every

contribution that 'succeeds' there will be countless contributions
which, at the very least, appear to go unnoticed. This state of
affairs is an occasion for neither complacency nor despair, but
sober recognition of it will at least militate against a belief in
magic which can in the end only weaken our purchase upon our
predicament.
Both the future of the species and the meaning of the individual's
life cannot but be attended by great uncertainty. Despite the
confident promise of the 'experts' to reveal and train us in the
'skills' required, there are no guarantees concerning the course of
our lives, if only because that depends as much upon the context
in which they occur as on the personal aims we have. The conduct
of a life cannot be reduced to a technical performance of achieve-
ment or acquisition, but opens out into a range of possibilities
which can only be acted into with faith. Faith is thus not a wishy-
washy substitute for technical certainty, a form taken by lack of
knowledge, but rather a necessary attitude or stance without which
life cannot be lived except as private self-indulgence. Faith, more-
over, does not have to be faith in anything more than possibilities
which one cannot see, meanings not yet revealed, values whose
worth one will never have a chance to measure.
Taking Care
It is not easy to think of the privileges and obligations of growing
up in any terms other than those relating to an economics of
consumption, the values of which are essentially passive and mech-
anically automatic. Thus progressive maturity becomes a question
of the widening availability of certain commodities or pleasures
(initiation into smoking, drinking, sex and 'adult' entertainment,
availability of credit facilities, mortgages, etc.) and responsibility in
observing certain legal and fiscal rules (e.g. in relation to taxation,
military obligations, etc.). Since our ethics are those of the market-
place and our view of knowledge and learning mechanistic and
'objective', we tend not to regard the transmission of our culture
as a central task of all those 'embodied organisms' who go to make
up our society, but rather as something which can safely be, and
probably should be, left to professional experts of one kind or
another. The rest of us can then get on with the serious business
of making enough money to enjoy ourselves.
If, however, one takes seriously the argument put forward earlier
in this book that indeed we are embodied organisms, that we are
formed in the context of a history and a current set of circum-
stances whose effects are likely to be ineradicable, and that the
132
society we build is the creation of human agency rather than the

result of some kind of inexorable, natural objectivity, then it begins
to become evident that one of the greatest responsibilities of
maturity resides in the fact that we ourselves are the custodians
and transmitters of our culture. What is known about the world
of human society, and what therefore forms the basis of its further
evolution (or indeed dissolution), is passed on to later generations
through us: our culture is transmitted and developed through its
assimilation and elaboration in the embodied practice of people.
We cannot, then, merely pursue happiness while leaving the stew-
ardship of the social world to nameless experts without risking a
fundamental rupture in our cultural evolution and the complete
loss of any sense of meaning to our lives.
It is, for example, easy to see how human knowledge and craft
can be wiped out in two or three decades if it does not travel
through people from one generation to the next. Even though the
invention of printing 'de-skilled' large sections of the population
by removing from them the necessity for the 'organic' transmission
of knowledge, at least that knowledge is to some extent recoverable
(if only with great effort) from books. In the case of mechanized
knowledge, however, not only do we risk losing sight of the origins
of our knowledge altogether (human knowledge literally disappears
into the computer program in such a way that it is not recoverable
without the aid of complex machines the destruction or non-
comprehension of which would necessitate the re-invention of the
knowledge) but we also render people functionless, and it is above
all this which creates despair. It seems to me to follow from this
that it is an essential part of human, and particularly of adult,
existence to pay respect to our own nature as organisms and the
organic nature of our culture by taking care both of each other
and of those structures and institutions of the man-made social
and cultural world which we wish to preserve and develop. This
means taking care of people as ends in themselves and taking care
that the best possible conditions are created for the performance
of their functions (i.e. that we value people's instrumentality above
their economic worth as consumers).
Attention to the conditions which make possible a public life
would do r.mch to alleviate what so many of us experience as
purely private pain. The manipulation of people as units of
consumption and re-recordable registers of fashion (in cultural as
well as material life) places them in an endless, self-indulging
present which has no past (in the sense of organic tradition) and
no future (in the sense of evolving purpose). Rather than trying to
'normalize' the infinite range of differences between people and to
'pathologize' the extraordinary tenacity with which they live out
133
their experience, we should be attending to those very conditions

which make culture historically transmissible and the future open
to forms of social evolution which cannot now even be guessed at.
We should, in other words, seek to nurture, not reduce, the diver-
sity and tenacity with which cultural forms are embodied in people.
For older generations to attempt to shape younger ones to predeter-
mined ends and ideas concerning the 'good life' amounts no matter
how good their intentions to a form of spiritual murder, since by
this means the young are deprived of the one function (to open up
a future) which may give life a sense of meaning. But most of our
effort seems to be put into repressing or destroying those very
factors which make it possible to develop one's gifts to the full and
to become unself-consciously absorbed in public activity.
As already suggested, mechanistic ways of thinking about
human experience and learning threaten to lead to a catastrophic
loss of social as well as practical and intellectual ability in both
range and depth. Precisely because of the organic nature of human
experience one cannot quickly replace what has been lost to human
mentality, although, by neglecting to pay attention to the import-
ance of history and embodiment, one can very quickly wipe out
human culture. Ivan Illich * writes of having seen children of ten
in New York slums who 'could not speak a word, although the
television was blaring, sometimes two televisions in the same
welfare apartment'. Novels such as Last Exit to Brooklyn should
have alerted us years ago to the likely fate of a society which
ignores 'organic' values. Despair and brutality are the entirely
natural recourse of people who have been dislocated from the flow
of human culture and deprived of the possibility of putting their
bodies to good use. It is scarcely surprising that both our 'entertain-
ment' and our 'news' media should be almost obsessively concerned
with rape and murder, since these are the rational end-points of
any disintegrated society which is concerned more or less solely
with removing the obstacles to getting what you want. Very perti-
nently does R. D. Laing write that all of us are born as Stone Age
babies (though even Stone Age babies were born into a culture
which was transmitted through embodied human beings).
One does not have to search our own inner cities very far before
coming across indications of what an uncultivated Stone Age baby
may become in this 'technologically advanced' society. Four boys,
for example, idle down a back street in the city centre, truanting
from school one week-day morning. Every few yards they stop, for
no apparent purpose, looking around them with a kind of
*Vernacular values, in Satish Kumar (ed.), The Schumacher Lectures,

Abacus, 1982.
134
menacing casualness, aimless and yet embodying some kind of

want. One of them gobs every twenty seconds or so with a
contemptuous accuracy, exercising listless pride in a negative art.
Their faces have an expression of sardonic brutality, a youthful
energy but empty of purpose and unlit by intelligence; their eyes
are watchful, but veiled, unfocused and dead. They seem sadly at
home in this quiet, unpeopled street with its few tradesmen's shops,
service entrances to the backs of stores, empty Coca-Cola tins and
refuse blown from black polythene sacks; there are no demands
here that they cannot meet. The overwhelming impression is that
these are wasted people, bodies in which no function dwells. They
seem to exist outside of any developed culture, unanimated by any
refined tradition, and there is about them a heavily threatening air
- one senses that they do not know how to do anything but
respond to their own most basic, private impulses, that they could
not negotiate social rituals which have become to them mysteries
bristling with the risk of ridicule; one senses that they could only
take.
A number of social phenomena - for example the strange
mixture of therapy and programming, the gradual fusion of
teaching with social work, the transformation of 'parenting skills'
into a professional training 'package' to be delivered by experts -
suggest that we have become extremely confused over the means
as well as the ends of taking care of those for whom we are
responsible. The ineradicability of human experience coupled with
the ample evidence we have of its so-frequently distressing nature
should make us much more concerned about what we want to
teach our children and why, and far less sanguine about being able
to control or alter the 'input' in any way we happen to feel like.
Confidence in technology makes us scornful of tradition, and it
may no doubt be true that sentimental attachment to tradition for
its own sake can have a deadening effect on cultural evolution.
However, recognition that a culture can be stably transmitted only
through the painstaking induction of 'Stone Age babies' into a
history is something that should make us revise our too-unthinking
trust in 'techniques' of training and therapy. What actually happens
to people is of the most fundamental importance, and the nature
of the world in which they are located will have far more signific-
ance for their experience than will the latest fashions in educational
'technique'.
At the very simplest level, our faith in and dependence upon
'experts' leads many people (both parents and teachers) to overlook
the importance of doing things with children, of passing on to
them what we know through living, embodied contact, just as it
was passed on to us. Nobody entirely in his or her right mind
135
would expect someone to learn to play the violin purely from

audio-visual displays, and yet there is no difference in principle
between the ways in which this and more simple kinds of knowl-
edge are learned. Even where there is anything to be learned beyond
the means of mere private gratification, because our own functional
activities have become so minutely specialized, managerially frac-
tured, pressured by time, and often simply meaningless, children
tend not to be admitted into a participatory involvement in the
lives of those adults to whom they are closest. Children occupy a
separate world, or rather a separate market in which they consume
commodities designed specifically for them (e.g. 'toys') rather than
starting to practise functions mastery of which would admit them
in due course to an adult world. This has the result that knowledge
and ability die out with the bodies of an older generation by
which they have been organically acquired, while the bodies of the
younger generation are for the most part empty of instrumental
function. Even when a talented boy or girl teaches him- or herself
something (say, for example, playing the guitar) by virtue of
persistent curiosity and observation, the result, even if greatly
admired and commercially successful, often betrays a kind of
untutored rawness, an uncultivated creative potentiality which,
however, would need the knowledge and tradition of a culture
were it to be fully realized. The rhetoric of our marketing society
betrays well enough an awareness of this kind of loss - in prattling
of 'excellence', for example, it somehow hopes to compensate for
its systematic destruction. We end up with a culture in which each
generation discovers for itself anew forms of unrefined knowledge
the 'excellence' of which is never honed beyond the span of an
individual life: yet another form of 'built-in obsolescence'.
If we need to pay much closer attention to the way people learn,
we may well need to be far less controlling than we are about what
they learn. Only a society interested in establishing a disciplined
conformity will try to legislate for exactly what experience a person
ought to have, and I do not wish to suggest that we need to
construct any particular kind of world for our children. The very
openness of the future means that the wider and more exuberant
the diversity of their knowledge, interests and talents, the better.
What is important to remember is that whatever world people do
find themselves in, they learn its lessons well, and we do therefore
need to consider very carefully what we want our own contribution
to it to be. We have in fact not developed anything like an articulate
understanding of what the forms of 'taking care' might be. We are
much more tempted, in accordance wi~h the values of technology,
to develop ideas about the content we consider desirable for
136
programmes of instruction, etc., and in that very process have

substituted a mythology of training for a philosophy of learning.
There is, of course, an enormous amount of inarticulate knowl-
edge about teaching and learning embodied in all kinds of people
who have care of others at all levels of society, whether informally
or formally, privately or institutionally, but when such people do
try to articulate their knowledge they usually do so in the
prescribed technological manner with which we are so familiar,
and while this does not necessarily invalidate their actual conduct,
it certainly does not facilitate it. I know many people - parents as
well as professional 'carers' - who in fact develop and cultivate
with the greatest sensitivity and intelligence a world in which their
charges ca:n grow, who teach and transmit an embodied mentality
and a cultural ethics of the highest complexity, without having the
slightest articulate idea of what they are doing. If asked, they are
as likely as not to fall back on the crassest banalities drawn from
current 'skills' or 'relationship' jargon. Not the least penalty of our
mechanistic, ahistorical, individualizing and objectifying culture is
that it deprives us of a language in which we can elaborate what
we know (and by means of which also, of course - and hence the
deprivation - we could begin conceptually to dismantle the
ideology which underpins our way of life).
Loving cultivation of a child's interests and abilities, painstaking
construction of a world in which he or she may practise them,
respect for the embodied experience through which traditional
knowledge is communicated - all those ways in which care is
actually taken form no part of our official systems of training and
treatment. This is of course not to suggest that they could or should
be formalized into a system of technical expertise, in which they
would swiftly be appropriated by 'professionals', but rather to
suggest that we should value and where possible facilitate their
very informality. It would help in this to recognize our formal
systems of 'care' for what they are (i.e. institutions built around a
disciplinary interest) and to try to develop a language by means of
which we could talk to each other in terms which are, precisely,
subjective and informal (i.e. as nearly as possible uncorrupted by
power).
One cannot, of course, say how this might be achieved. One
thing, certainly, would be to withdraw from the 'experts' the right
tacitly accorded them to have the final (and indeed often the only)
say in how things should be done. Because we have come to see
knowledge and learning as purely technical matters we have not
only become blind to the manner of their transmission, but indif-
ferent to the structures in which they are organically embedded.
Traditions associated with human intercourse of all kinds, whether
137
in work, 'gendered' activity, religious ritual and so on, are likely

to be seen as unintelligible or absurd merely because there issues
from them no digitally unambiguous 'read-out' of their meaning.
The wisdom built into the apprenticeship model of learning (and
not only, of course, in the manual trades), the knowledge of social
and familial roles and conduct transmitted through direct partici-
pation in them, the understanding that ability is acquired only
through the taking of pains (and is then not quickly forgotten) -
all these ways of coming to know have become atrophied or lost
because they have to be passed on through a process of embodied
activity rather than articulated in verbal instructions, and since we
overvalue the latter we cease to practise the former.
Our preference for professionally specifiable, highly symbolized
and mechanizable 'knowledge' is simply a mistake, and one which
empties out an impoverished culture into machines while rendering
us blind to what we do learn from the world. Children know
television advertising jingles and the detailed personal histories of
popular singers and guitar players; they learn informally from the
culture which engages their interest, but because we define learning
in terms of the highly oversimplified 'modules' of school curricula,
we barely even notice what is indelibly finding its way into the
structure of their bodies. We no longer initiate them into the social
processes of a communal life not only because these are in any
case sadly deprived of meaning, but also because we assume that
when necessary they will be able to get all they need to know from
audio-visual displays put on by the experts.
It may be the case that no society has yet been very good at
articulating and understanding the processes whereby it evolves,
and hence at preserving those traditional forms within which its
members' conduct may carry its culture forward. Part of the reason
for the rejection and abandonment of traditional modes of cultural
transmission may be that the, so to speak, embodied rituals through
which they were enacted tended to be accompanied by a justifica-
tory rhetoric which lost authority through its very implausibility.
The ethics of Christian society, for example, are unquestionably
weakened for most people when associated with an insistence on
a belief in miracles, immaculate conception, resurrection, etc.,
which can no longer command credence. But as long as the culture
was embodied in the traditional practices of its members the rhet-
oric never really mattered. A problem with modern society is that
we really do believe in our techno-scientific rhetoric to the point
where we have almost ceased to pay attention to anything but
words and images, and our actual embodied existence has slid out
of sight to become the prey of repressed interest and hence the
unidentified source of our distress.
138
We need to recover our knowledge of the world and of the

conditions of human experience and learning in terms of an
informal language which strives after truth rather than authority,
compassion rather than power, care rather than control (a
language, in fact, which reflects what Ivan Illich calls 'vernacular'
rather than market values). No society, as far as I am aware, has
yet tried in any concerted or protracted way to develop such an
'ideology', though there have of course always been scattered indi-
viduals who have argued for it; perhaps all this shows is that there
are little grounds for optimism about the future.
Knowledge of the essential conditions for the development of
an embodied existence capable of contributing to public life is
automatically repressed by the disembodied technical language of
training and therapy, which on the contrary moulds people to
disciplinary norms and shapes them as the means to commercially
determined ends. The modern conception of an ideally adjusted
social being, technically programmed for maximum success and
happiness, sets up an entirely fictional standard which everyone
fails more or less painfully to meet. The practical effect of this is
to engender in people a guilty awareness of their own shortcomings
in relation to the norms even while they insist that those with
whom they 'have relationships' should themselves strive harder to
reach them. We have, in short, a pervasive sense that we are not
as we should be. If, however, we could begin to see ourselves and
each other as embodiments of ineradicable experience and, because
of this, as bearers of a multifarious knowledge of the world which
has contributions to make to a future we cannot predict, we might
then learn to 'relate to' each other more as what we are rather
than as what we think we ought to be, and to treat each other as
ends rather than as means.
When reading, for example (but perhaps also especially), the
works of Dickens, one gets a feeling of entering a strangely unfam-
iliar world in which others exist as distinct entities with a value
inseparable from their individuality, as living forces to be attended
to and learned from because of rather than in spite of their 'other-
ness'. There is something in the brilliance of Dickens's caricatures
which draws sympathetic attention to the way a person is made in
relation to a context rather than a standard; though he disapproves
of and frequently punishes his villains, there is nevertheless behind
their villainy the sense of a history which cannot be wished away,
and those characters he approves of are appreciated because of
their very quirkiness. This feels more like a forgotten than a
fictional world, but in any case points to a way of seeing and
treating people which has become almost foreign to us. Our instinct
is to approve of those people who most completely meet our
139
standards for the gratification of our needs, and we do not on the

whole see it as the task of 'relationship' literally to learn to live
with the idiosyncrasies of the other. And yet, if it really is the case
that we are each of us inescapably the unique embodiment of a
particular history, the 'Dickensian' approach to 'otherness' is by
far the more appropriate, if also more demanding.
Because, inevitably, there will be areas of your experience which
do not overlap with mine, things you know about, as part as your
emotional embodiment, of which I have no inkling, and because
similarly my experience is shaped by events of which you have no
knowledge or understanding, we must both take care not to
confuse each other with our dreams of who we are and ought to
be. Perverted by the blandishments of a commercial culture which
markets people, we expect to be able to transform ourselves within
relationships in such a way as to meet each other's needs, and if
we cannot we assume that it must be because of a lack, if not of
willingness, at least of 'interpersonal skills' or sexual 'technique',
and so on. If the person does not come up to the demands of 'the
relationship' he or she must either be trained to 'shape up' or
exchanged for someone more malleable. You must fit my dreams,
and I yours.
But it is part of the process of growing up to realize that some
dreams are just dreams and will not be fulfilled, and it is part of
a process whereby we might take care of each other to learn to
accord to each other a reality which can be neither changed nor
penetrated - the aim of 'relationship' cannot therefore be 'under-
standing'. My guess is that people who vow that their 'long-term
relationship' shall be for better or for worse do so more as an
expression of an exalted passion in the present than out of a sober
commitment to a future in which the balance between better and
worse may really be judged as no better than even. If we expect
our 'relationships' to be matters of more or less unalloyed satisfac-
tion we are certain to discover that they will be for worse rather
than for better, but if we could learn to appreciate and protect
each other's difference without having to 'understand' it, to tolerate
and perhaps even be ready to explore a degree of isolation, we
might then be able to avoid inflicting upon each other some of the
pain we currently take as justified in our pursuit of happiness.
In renouncing the standards we set for each other we would
allow ourselves to emerge before each other as embodied presences
each containing a core of private 'interiority' which we would feel
no compulsion to reveal even if we could. Rather than being the
transparent vehicles of 'relationship', trembling with anxiety before
the discipline of the norm and pierced by the gaze of a market
searching for deficits to be made good, we might become people
140
whose privacy, beyond the point at which it could be shared in a
privileged intimacy, would be appreciated, protected or cherished,
not emptied out into an arena where it becomes the focus of
competition or frustrated rage.
On the 19 June 1896, Tolstoy• noted what seemed to him a
'very important' thought: 'What is beauty? Beauty is what we love.
I don't love him because he's beautiful, but he's beautiful because
I love him.' In other words, it is in the commitment to the other
(for example in coming to know the other's difference) that the
value of 'relationship' lies, not in the acquisition through the
relationship of commodity-characteristics which the other possesses
somehow objectively.
Only very partially can we repair after the event the damage we
so easily inflict upon each other in the pursuit of happiness. It is
for this reason above all that we need to establish now procedures
of care-taking which will bear fruit only in a future we shall not
see. Our most reliable guide in the formulation of our conduct in
this respect is not the longing for an unattainable bliss but rather
the private knowledge of pain. For though the knowledge is private,
the pain is not merely personal, but arises from an embodiment in
the world which is our common fate. It is not only you who are
the victim of the other's indifference, contempt or spite, but the
other is the victim of yours: you are other for others exactly as
much as they are other for you. This is a fact which is necessarily
overlooked in the struggle for resources which the pursuit of happi-
ness entails; the inevitable individualism of the latter reduces
universality to, at most, a grudging reciprocity, and transforms the
public world into a projection of private dreams in which others
become sacrificed to the needs of an insatiable 'self' or its various
extensions (family, tribe, nation, 'the free world', etc.). It is the
sensations of our bodies which give us knowledge of the world we
share: as close as we can ever get to it, reality is revealed most
undeniably in the experience of pain. One might almost say that
reality is rooted in pain, and over and over again it is the pure
sensation of pain which calls us back from disembodied reverie to
habitation of a common world. And it is only in the knowledge
that your embodiedness exposes you to the same risks as mine that
we may make common cause to share the world. Lust for power
and fantasies of invulnerability, trust in the magic of technical cure,
lead us only into dreams of destruction.
The only way significantly to reduce the virtually universal
distress and damage which our way of life causes is to construct
social institutions which take account of the 'organic embodied-
•Tolstoy's Diaries, vol. 2, op. cit.
141
ness' of our experience, the way we learn, etc., and to replace

the 'pursuit of happiness' with an ethical awareness capable of
making room for generosity, love, justice, equality and truth (i.e.
values which - it cannot be overstressed - are necessarily sacrificed
in a way of life which depends on competition and the creation of
illusion). There will no doubt always be a place for therapy (i.e.
for kindness, encouragement and comfort), but it is surely too
much to expect a professionalized, and hence interest-saturated,
therapy industry somehow to replace or take over the function of
an ethics of human conduct.
However, although the statement of what needs to be done is
so obvious as to be almost embarrassingly trite, one is still no
nearer being able to see how to do it. The difficulties, certainly,
seem insuperable, and it is virtually impossible for us even to
imagine how we could find the courage to renounce our current
ways of doing things, if only because we are all equally restrained
by the enticing safety of familiarity from venturing into forms of
conduct of which we have no practised understanding. Not that a
reorientation of our lives, just supposing that we could make it,
would necessarily be all gloom and self-sacrifice. The renunciation
of a commodified gratification which is in any case illusory and
the readiness to inhabit a degree of private isolation which is in
any case inevitable may not be asking as much as it at first sight
appears. Just as 'patients' who do screw up their courage to launch
themselves into situations previously imagined as impossibly
terrifying often find the reality positively liberating, so escape from
the discipline of the norm, if only we could effect it, might prove
to be a joyous relief. But this cannot be a 'boot-strap' operation
to be achieved through exhortation or will power. Our conduct
and our way of life are held in place by that world to which they
are a rational response (in the sense elaborated in Chapter 4), and
we are the embodied products of a history from which there is no
escape.
The present - our current predicament - is, I suspect, irredeem-
able to an extent far beyond anything our self-deceiving therapeutic
optimism has permitted us to see, and indeed there seems to be
little sign that we are going to employ anything more substantial
than 'public relations' and the machinery of illusion to appear to
counter a continued squandering of human (not to mention other)
resources. The damage we have done, and the damage we do now,
will be felt for generations. If the future is to be rescued, it will
not be through magic or wishful thinking, but through the creation
of a social structure which encourages us to take care of each
other.
142
8
Morality and Moralism
It is hard to conceive of a society in which all its members actually
treat each other well. Presumably there has never been one. There
have been, and are, societies in which a (usually religious) ethical
code prescribes how people ought to treat each other even though
they fail lamentably to live up to it. It is becoming increasingly
apparent that contemporary Western society has no such ethical
code. The empty shell of a system of Christian ethics, having for
many centuries been laid siege to by the interests of power, has at
last been taken over by the values of the market: Christianity
becomes simply another way of getting things, achieving 'fulfil-
ment' or a kind of exclusive 'salvation'. Most of us, therefore, live
in a society in which there is no formal moral authority, no ethically
based, publicly institutionalized code of conduct to which people
subscribe in common. This is not to say, of course, that people do
not still behave decently towards one another, but the grounds of
this decency are hidden away tacitly and informally (and vulner-
ably) in their private lives. The maxims of public life centre around
competition, cost-effectiveness and the 'creation of wealth'. Ours,
in short, is no longer an ethical community.
There are many perfectly understandable reasons for this state
of affairs, but I suspect that the most important are those of which
'ordinary people' are least aware. For many people moral attitudes
and prescriptions have too often been associated either with no
longer credible religious magic or with hypocritical abuse of auth-
ority for them to be able to submit to rules which so often turn
out to be in somebody else's interest. The gradual fusion since
mediaeval times of religious ethics with powerful commercial inter-
ests has more recently accelerated to culminate in the supplantation
of the former by the latter, has rendered moral understanding
increasingly obscure, and has bred an entirely justifiable distrust
of what has come to be seen as moralism. However, by far the
most important reason for the disappearance of what one might
call a 'public ethical code' is that its continuation would place
unacceptable restraints on commercial exploitation. However
brutal the mediaeval feudal lords may have been, and however
corrupt the Church, at least, officially, they were not supposed to
be. We have now reached a stage when the precepts of exploitation
and self-interest are being slid into the place of moral values which
can scarcely any longer be remembered.
The very idea of 'morality' - again understandably - is likely
143
to arouse in people a range of unfavourable reactions. Apart from

those who feel confident that they know what 'moral standards'
are and are only too ready to say who ought to be made to conform
to them, most people are quite likely to feel embarrassed, suspicious
or contemptuous if asked explicitly to define what moral conduct
in the public sphere might be. Morality has in this way come to
be associated with sentimentality, hypocrisy, or 'unscientificness'.
However, unless morality is rescued from its obscurity - what
is even almost a state of ignominy - and reinstated at the centre
of our public life, it is hard to see how we can begin to construct
a society worth living in. There are some ways, obviously, in which
this will not happen. For example, morality as the revelation of a
magical religious authority is surely something no longer likely to
command widespread acceptance (far more likely, perhaps, is a
resurgence of moral consciousness as the result of some kind of
global catastrophe). Rather than having ethical standards imposed
upon us through either magic or the law, it may be that we have
reached a stage where, if we are to survive socially, we shall have
in some way willingly to adopt an ethics of public life as our own.
To employ an analogy which I have no doubt is dubious from
many points of view, it is as if, having overthrown parental auth-
ority (religious morality) and 'enjoyed' a prolonged and irrespon-
sible adolescence (the pursuit of happiness) we must now take
upon ourselves the cares and responsibilities of adulthood and
create out of our own ethical awareness and conduct a world in
which human society can continue to evolve. Whether we can
actually do this must seem doubtful if only because it is impossible
to see what changes in our circumstances will force such a course
upon us. It can certainly do no harm, however, to try to clarify
what might be meant by 'moral' conduct.
It is important at the outset to distinguish 'morality' from
'moralism'. The form in which the majority of us these days are
most likely to encounter overt discussion or prescription of 'moral
values' is perhaps as pronouncements by one individual or group
concerning what other individuals or groups ought to do or how
they ought to conduct themselves. Thus, it seems to me, it is
characteristic of moralistic injunctions that they are one-sided, and
most frequently they are delivered by the stronger or more privi-
leged as admonishments to the weaker or less privileged concerning
how they should behave. Moralism is thus usually designed to
protect the interests or 'image' of the relatively more powerful in
their efforts to maintain others in their position of relatively less
power. The idea, for example, that those who are well off in our
society owe their fortune to some kind of moral superiority is taken
as an entitlement for them to lecture the less fortunate in the ways
144
of prudence and thrift, when they might better consider the purely
logical dependence of wealth upon poverty and the social issues
raised thereby.
Moralism is typically exemplified in the imputations of blame
through which, as was argued in Chapter 4, the inequalities and
injustices of our society are 'explained' as the moral failings of
individuals. It is characteristic of moralism to attempt to cast
morality in an explanatory form, either as causes of distress or
failure or as motives which may be appealed to in exhortations to
bear with adversity. But, of course, moral precepts are not things
or forces which can be appealed to as operating somehow mechan-
ically inside people, but rather are formulated as guides to public
conduct. People, clearly, may conduct themselves morally or
immorally, but they do not do things because of morality or
immorality.
Moralism 'privatizes' morality. 'Moral responsibility', writes the
archpriest of monetarism, • 'is an individual matter, not a social
matter.' This, of course, leaves one conveniently placed to chide
individuals who have succumbed to misfortune for their lack of
moral fibre while allowing public conduct to be determined by the
dictates of 'the market'. The 'invisible hand' of the market relieves
one of the disagreeable necessity for deciding whether one's public
activity is right or wrong, since its guidance is regarded as somehow
infallible. Moral values thus become prescriptions identifiable by
powerful people whose public conduct is seen itself as somehow
above moral judgment, and applied to private individuals usually
in the form of explanations concerning the personal failings that
have led to their lack of success. The apparatus of interest, by
transforming morality into moralism, turns it to its own advantage:
the undoubted force of moral precept is deflected from its valid
function of guiding public conduct and reshaped as a mystifying
'explanation' (as individual fault) of evils which are in fact the
consequence of an immoral abuse of power.
One of the most striking and interesting things about the concept
of morality itself is precisely its force. However disguised its oper-
ation or mystified its application, morality will simply not go away.
Despite a widespread dissatisfaction people seem to feel with
having to base their conduct on anything so vague and uncertain
as moral judgment, and despite also the success of technological
approaches which are based on a science supposedly 'value free',
we can still, it seems, not dispense with words like 'right' and
'good' and 'ought'. It is no doubt easy to confuse technical with
moral prescription: there are many areas in which accurate know!-
•M. Friedman, Free to Choose, Penguin Books, 1980.
145
edge of how to do something has replaced the necessity for argu-

ment over which approach might be 'right' or 'wrong'. But to
conclude from this that technical 'know-how' reduces the need for
moral judgment is based on an obvious confusion between 'right'
and 'wrong' in their moral sense and their use in the sense of
'effective' and 'ineffective'. The passion to be free of moral uncer-
tainty results over and over again in attempts to find infallible
guidelines which will remove from us the necessity for thinking
about whether or not we ought to do something. Despite conclusive
philosophical arguments that one can never replace an 'ought' with
an 'is' - i.e. never decide what it would be right to do merely
through a knowledge of the 'facts' - the search for some kind of
infallible technical rule shows no sign of abating. The current craze,
of course, is to supplant moral values by economic ones.
The result of this and other such attempts is always the same:
the force of what is essentially moral judgment becomes attached to
what purports to be a merely technical or dispassionately 'scientific'
judgment, so that the latter comes to be asserted with a strangely
puzzling ferocity. Michael Polanyi• called this process 'moral inver-
sion'. In the case of apologists for the operations of 'the market'
this kind of moral ferocity is unmistakable, and Adam Smith's
'invisible hand' becomes tacitly invested with positively awesome
authority, while opponents of the system are attacked with all the
vituperative fervour of religious bigotry.
Moral judgment and moral values cannot be avoided, but only
inverted. The attempt to remove questions of ethical value from
the public arena leaves a vacuum which is immediately filled by
fiercely moralistic systems of prescription and control which assert
a claim to absolute sovereignty even as they protest their 'freedom'
from values.
That something is cheap, for example, or 'cost-effective' involves
nothing more exciting than its monetary value, and certainly
confers upon it no moral worth. But if we attempt to remove from
the sphere in which costs are counted the moral judgment of
whether or not we should count them, we leave a vacuum which
is immediately filled by the inverted moral passion inhabiting, for
example, the epithet 'effective' which seemed so innocently linked
with 'cost'. Invertedly moral expressions have a secret power which
to some extent accounts for their ferocity: we bury in the
expression 'cost-effective' an assertion of moral superiority which
is at the same time disclaimed and therefore cannot be submitted to
ethical discussion. In fact, in supposedly making a purely 'scientific'
economic judgment, we assert an invertedly moral judgment which,
*M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958.
146
simply because it is out of sight, makes it almost impossible for us

to ask whether something is right just because it is cost-effective.
All forms of discourse or rhetoric which purport to be 'value free'
and yet which attempt to give direction to our lives are riddled
with moralistic maxims disguised as matters of fact.
Human beings cannot escape moral judgment and ethical
precept if only because they alone determine the ends of their own
conduct. We are the subjects, not the objects of our world, and
nothing (except, perhaps, the unexpected revelation of itself by a
Supreme Being) could relieve us of the necessity for deciding what
we do. Once power has become distributed unevenly within a
society, however, it is in the interests of those with more, to hide
from those who have less both the universality of the application
of moral standards and the inevitability of moral action as the way
of making the future. The inversion of moral values, and the
discrediting of ethical conduct as somehow 'unscientific' both have
the merit, from a viewpoint towards the top of the power hierarchy,
of furthering the idea that our social order is based upon natural
rather than man-made laws: inequality, injustice and exploitation
thus become the natural order of things rather than issues which
could or should be open to moral questioning and debate.
The airing in public of issues having a high moral content,
except at carefully prescribed times and places, comes to be associ-
ated with disreputability or bad taste. The discussion of 'politics
or religion', for example, is almost proverbially seen as something
bordering on the indecent if performed outside those arenas speci-
ally constructed to contain it. The 'privatization' of ethical
considerations not only removes them from the public sphere in
which they may challenge established forms of exploitation, but
also renders them more amenable to manipulation. Mystification
in this respect is quickly achieved: it is hard for us now to see why
men of good will in the eighteenth century were outraged by the
idea of the secret ballot as a way of voting on matters of political
importance. However, a little reflection suggests easily enough how
secrecy in this respect, while purporting to allow people's political
will to operate in unmolested privacy, actually makes it more
possible to manipulate their conduct through underhand appeals
to their interest. The slightly furtive atmosphere of the voting booth
is thus by no means an entirely accidental phenomenon, but reflects
the extent to which public courage and candour in discussing
and contributing to policies which determine the nature of our
communal life have been transformed into an officially sanctioned
reticence about what we stand for and why. We discharge our
public duty, or such remnants of it as are left, in silence and secrecy
147
in a solitary act of political consummation once every four or five
years.
The attachment of shame to public passion in matters of moral
debate is but another way of maintaining discipline without the
use of force at the same time as permitting the networks of interest
to proliferate unchallenged. At the time when Kant wrote his
Critique of Practical Reason it was still possible to regard the airing
of ethical questions in public as one of the noblest activities in
which people could engage, and he leaves us in no doubt either as
to the error of confusing moral principles with considerations of
interest. Since this was close to the time when the 'pursuit of
happiness' was being written into the American Declaration of
Independence and the British Utilitarians were busily trying to
construct a calculus of happiness with which to solve the problem
of moral uncertainty, Kant presumably had a clear sight of what
was afoot. In formulating his 'categorical imperative' ('So act that
the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a
principle establishing universal law') Kant is at pains to show that,
since one ptrson's happiness is not necessarily linked with that of
others, happiness cannot rationally be pursued without trans-
gressing the fundamental moral rule that you should do as you
would be done by. Though his language is a little awkward on
modern ears, his contempt for the pursuit of happiness is plain:
Now, if I say that my will is subject to a practical law, I

cannot put forward my inclination ([e.g.] my avarice) as fit
to be a determining ground of a universal practical law. It is
so far from being worthy of universal legislation that in the
form of a universal law it must destroy itself.
It is therefore astonishing how intelligent men have
thought of proclaiming as a universal practical law the desire
for happiness, and therewith to make this desire the deter-
mining ground of the will merely because this desire is
universal. Though elsewhere natural laws make everything
harmonious, if one here attributed the universality of law to
this maxim, there would be the extreme opposite of harmony,
the most arrant conflict, and the complete annihilation of the
maxim itself and its purpose. For the wills of all do not have
one and the same object, but each person has his own (his
own welfare), which, to be sure, can accidentally agree with
the purposes of others who are pursuing their own, though
this agreement is far from sufficing for a law because the
occasional exceptions which one is permitted to make are
endless and cannot be definitely comprehended in a universal
rule.
148
It is moving now to encounter in his text Kant's uncomplicated

faith in reason and his commitment to a social community in which
it seemed axiomatic that others should be valued as the self. But
while he puts to shame those professional apologists for the market
economy some of whom pass for moral and political philosophers
these days, we have nevertheless become so saturated in and hard-
ened to the values and rhetoric of interest that it is almost imposs-
ible to share with Kant the inarticulate premises of his argument
- he takes for granted a moral sentiment in the reader which today
has all but disappeared from view.
Its disappearance from view does however not entail a dimin-
ution of its force- as I have tried to show, inverted moral passion
becomes attached to statements of 'scientific fact' or to moralistic
exhortations to others to conform to standards which are taken as
indisputably valid, and comes to be used as a kind of, literally,
secret weapon with which to bludgeon doubters. But it is always
possible to ask of 'indisputable' standards, and indeed of any
prescription masquerading as fact, whether it is good or right and
whether we ought to obey it. These are questions we cannot escape
because it is inconceivable that any authority other than our own
will ever be established to guide our conduct, and even the fact
that our moral decisions could in theory be shown by an (again
inconceivable) objective observer to be determined by our history
and experience, does not relieve us from the necessity of making
them. It is an absolutely inescapable necessity of human existence
that we assign value to our conduct.
For this reason, the ways in which society is ordered must always
be open to ethical questioning, and all attempts (guided by interest)
to associate the social order with some kind of impersonal necessity
or authority are bound to be mystifications aimed at obscuring
from people their freedom to challenge the status quo on moral
grounds. While the pursuit of private happiness has become the
obsession of our age, the possibility of 'public happiness' - the
opportunity to engage publicly in the discussion, determination
and implementation of value - has become eroded to the point of
disappearance, and an apparatus for involvement in public affairs
is excluded and prevented by an apparatus of discipline. Ethical
instruction and discussion has become a purely private and
informal matter unsupported by any institution of public life, and
indeed for most people does not take place at all in any organized
way. Even the churches, though of course always deriving ethical
guidance from an essentially magical authority, have now more or
less entirely abandoned moral teaching in favour of a euphoric
commodification of magico-religious and deeply irrational 'goods'
supposed to protect 'Christians' from the brutalities of this world
149
and provide them with spiritual satisfactions barely distinguishable

from the gratifications we are led to expect from the purchase of
consumer durables.
The inescapable facts of existence - the exigencies of being
embodied in time and space - mean that there is no possibility
that the process whereby we assign value to conduct will disappear
(and indeed without an at least tacit sense of right and wrong one
could not act at all), but our articulation of this process and our
development and institutionalization of an explicit understanding
of it may well do so. If our interests, particularly in the shape
of greed, exploitation and mindless damage, are not to run riot
completely unchecked, we are going rapidly to have to recollect
and recover our ability to submit them to ethical criticism and to
repudiate any sense of intellectual disreputability or even shame
which may, through the structures of interest, come to be attached
to our endeavour. This task is appallingly difficult, since it will
have to be done without the help of God, indeed without the help
of any objective authority at all, and in the face of the concerted
opposition of all those who, knowingly or unknowingly, stand to
gain from the inequalities of our hierarchy of power (not to
mention those who think they gain from what they believe to be
the best of all possible worlds).
Because much of our conduct is inevitably enacted towards an
open and evolving world, there is no possibility that we can settle
upon a kind of permanently enshrined code of ethics, and the
content of our moral prescriptions need be no more stable than
our judgment of truth (the degree of accuracy of 'factual' state-
ments changes constantly over time even though at any one point
we are, not unreasonably, quite ready to say what 'the truth' of a
given question is). This suggests that, for example, Kant's attempt
to identify the form of moral precepts is much better founded than
attempts to decide, in any absolute sense, upon their content. But
there are in any case some chracteristics of ethical conduct which
do not seem reasonably disputable, and one is the likelihood that
observance of moral principle will often operate against individual
interest. Treating others as one would wish to be treated oneself
means that on occasion, indeed perhaps frequently, one will have
for the sake of others to forego pleasures or advantages which
would otherwise be quite easily obtained. Unless one defines
'interest' so widely as to make self-indulgence synonymous with
altruism, then, what is in one's interest is often likely to conflict
with what is right, and in fact one might almost say that such
conflict is a mark of moral conduct.
It seems altogether likely that human societies are unable to
organize themselves without a degree of inequality, and that, there-
150
fore, disparities in power are inevitable. The ideal of a just and
equal society in which care is taken that every member of it shall
be able to develop his or her potentialities to the full, and in which,
for example, largely illusory processes of therapy are rendered
unnecessary through the ministrations of love, represents an
achievement so distant as to be indescribable in any coherent
formulation. But this does not mean that we should attempt to
make a virtue of necessity, or even take advantage of our plight,
by arguing that we should morally endorse forms of social organiz-
ation which we can see no way of changing. It is precisely the
function of an ethics to combat and contain forms of conduct
envisaged as ineradicable. Were sin easily banished, merely a tech-
nical imperfection on the face of the social world, there would be
no need for morality.
What is so disturbing, if also so inevitable, about the structure
of interest, is that it equates moral value with an assertion of its
own aims. Such an equation is already apparent in embryo in the
formulations of 'enlightened self-interest' of the Utilitarian philos-
ophers of the eighteenth century, though they would no doubt have
been horrified to see where their arguments would lead. Today, the
'freedom to choose' on the basis of an accepted and unquestioned
inequality already built into the social structure, the valuation
of appearances and 'public relations' above respect for embodied
actuality, and the translation of exploitation into appeals to the
virtuousness of 'giving people what they want', suggest an almost
total submergence of morality in interest.
Most of the evils of our society, and certainly by far the greater
part of the so-called 'pathological' emotional distress experienced
by its members, are more or less directly attributable to the unequal
distribution of forms of (usually economic) power which are
abused and corrupting. Up until very recently even those maximally
benefiting from the abuse of power and maximally corrupted by
it would at least have paid lip-service to the view that such abuse
was wrong, and, even if hypocritically, would have been able to
make a conceptual distinction between morality and interest. The
time is now fast arriving when to make such distinctions is seen
simply as 'wet', and before long it may become almost impossible
for 'ordinary people' to make it at all; already it has become
virtually impossible for many people to see beyond a blinkered
interest-stratum in the power hierarchy, and even in my personal
experience I have come across many situations in which people are
unable to conceive that economic considerations - for example
questions of 'efficiency and effectiveness' in the running of the
British National Health Service - do not coincide exactly with
moral questions of right and wrong.
151
And yet, if one is to be able to understand the processes whereby

people become unable to realize their potentialities in public living,
to learn how to make a bodily contribution to the social world, to
treat each other with kindness and forbearance as ends rather than
means, and to become, as it were, the organic custodians of an
unknowable future, the ability ethically to criticize the social struc-
tures in which we live is one which will have actively to be
preserved. Not, of course, that the ability to make moral judgments
will of itself change the world, but it is certainly a prerequisite to
the kind of moral and political action by which the actual structures
and institutions of society may be altered. The ills we suffer are
not consequent upon our personal inadequacies or moralistically
attributed faults: they are the inevitable result of publicly endorsed
and communally practised forms of indifference, greed and exploi-
tation, and require a moral reformation of our public, not our
private ways of life. Instead of abusing power, we need to use
whatever power we have to increase the power of others, to take
care rather than treat, to enlighten rather than mystify, to love
rather than exploit, and, in general, to think seriously about what
are the obligations as opposed to the advantages of power. Ideally,
the foremost obligation on power is to 'deconstruct' itself.
All this, no doubt, is hopelessly idealistic, and it is salutary to
remember that, even were they possible, changes of heart would
have little impact on the real world unless accompanied by highly
organized and concerted action. However, an impotent recognition
of moral failure is in my view preferable to a misguided trust in
technical solutions which simply serve to justify further abuses. It
is in any case difficult to be optimistic about the future: perhaps the
only way the social world evolves is by lurching forward through
revolution and catastrophe.
It is difficult enough - indeed bordering on the impossible - for
individuals to mend their ways following therapeutic insight; how
societies do it (unless, indeed, through the shedding of blood or
the making of catastrophic mistakes) is infinitely more difficult to
see. But unless our society does mend its ways we may expect no
improvement to occur in our private lives, no greater satisfaction
in 'relationships'; there will be no 'breakthroughs' in scientific or
psychological understanding to patch up our unhappiness and
allow us to carry on as before.
In trying to think about the future, it may be instructive to
consider for a moment a more or less random selection of the
views of some of those whose thought has contributed to these
pages. All of them are people who were deeply critical of the
economic and political structures in which they found themselves,
in some cases making just about the blackest possible diagnosis of
152
the social ills of their time, and yet all of them also orientate
themselves to the future with optimism.
Particularly poignant is the view expressed by William Godwin,
the Utilitarian political philosopher whose Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice, published in 1793, is taken by many as one of the
principle intellectual foundations upon which to build opposition
to governmental power and its abuse:
Wealth was at one period almost the single object of pursuit
that presented itself to the gross and uncultivated mind.
Various objects will hereafter divide men's attention, the love
of liberty, the love of equality, the pursuits of art and the
desire of knowledge. These objects will not, as now, be
confined to a few, but will gradually be laid open to all. The
love of liberty obviously leads to a sentiment of union, and
a disposition to sympathize in the concerns of others. The
general diffusion of truth will be productive of general
improvement; and men will daily approximate towards those
views according to which every object will be appreciated at
its true value. Add to which, that the improvement of which
we speak is public, and not individual. The progress is the
progress of all. Each man will find his sentiments of justice
and rectitude echoed by the sentiments of his neighbours.
Apostasy will be made eminently improbable, because the
apostate will incur, not only his own censure, but the censure
of every beholder.
A century later, Leo Tolstoy, who spent the second half of his
life dose to despair over the state of society but whose world-wide
influence and fame as a moral thinker is now largely forgotten,
wrote the following:
'One trembles before the present horrible condition of human
life: taxes, clergy, great landed properties, prisons, guillotines,
cannon, dynamite, millionaires and beggars. In reality all
these horrors are the result of our own acts. Not only can
they disappear, but they must disappear, in conformity with
the new conscience of humanity. Chri~t said that He had
conquered the world; and in fact He has conquered it.
Dreadful as it may be, the evil no longer really exists because
it is disappearing from the consciences of men.
'Today humanity is passing through a transitory phase.
Everything is ready for passing from one state of the human
condition to another; it needs only a slight push to set it off
and it can take place at any minute.
'The social conscience of humanity already condemns the
153
former way of life and is ready to adopt the new. The whole
world feels it, and is convinced of it. But inertia and fear of
the unknown retards the application in practice of what has
for a long time been realized in theory. In such cases it
sometimes needs only one word to make the force called
public opinion change the whole order of things at once, and
do it without struggle or violence.
'The freeing of men from servitude, from ignorance, can
not be obtained by revolution, syndicates, peace congresses,
etc., but simply by the conscience of each one of us forbidding
us to participate in violence and asking us in amazement:
Why are you doing that?
'It is enough for us to emerge from the hypnosis that hides
our true mission from us, for us to ask with dread and
indignation how any one can insist upon our committing
such horrible crimes. And this awakening can take place at
any instant.'
This is what I wrote fifteen years ago, and I repeat today
with conviction that this awakening is about to take place.
Certainly I shall not be there to take part in it, I, an old
man, more than eighty years of age; but I know with the
same certainty as I see spring follow winter and night day,
that this hour has already come in the life of Christian
humanity.•
In 1921 R. H. Tawney's The Acquisitive Society was published.
In its final paragraph Tawney states its principal conclusions and
predicts the disappearance from society of purely economic
preoccupations with a confidence beginning to sound rather
familiar:
The burden of our civilization is not merely, as many suppose,
that the product of industry is ill-distributed, or its conduct
tyrannical, or its operation interrupted by embittered
disagreements. It is that industry itself has come to hold a
position of exclusive predominance among human interests,
which no single interest, and least of all the provision of the
material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like a hypochon-
driac who is so absorbed in the processes of his own digestion
that he goes to his grave before he has begun to live, indus-
trialized communities neglect the very objects for which it is
worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation
with the means by which riches can be acquired.
*L. Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence, Anthony
Blond, 1970.
154
That obsession by economic issues is as local and transi-

tory as it is repulsive and disturbing. To future generations
it will appear as pitiable as the obsession of the seventeenth
century by religious quarrels appears today; indeed, it is less
rational, since the object with which it is concerned is less
important. And it is a poison which inflames every wound
and turns every trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer. Society
will not solve the particular problems of industry which afflict
it until that poison is expelled, and it has learned to see
industry itself in the right perspective. If it is to do that, it
must rearrange its scale of values. It must regard economic
interests as one element in life, not as the whole of life. It
must persuade its members to renounce the opportunity of
gains which accrue without any corresponding service,
because the struggle for them keeps the whole community in
a fever. It must so organize its industry that the instrumental
character of economic activity is emphasized by its subordi-
nation to the social purpose for which it is carried on.
Many of those writing in more recent times, particularly perhaps
in the United States, tend to combine the bleakest views of the past
and present with an optimistic trust in youth to put matters right.
Paul Goodman, for example, saw in the attitudes of the 'beat
generation' and the 'angry young men' of the 1950s hope that the
tide might be turning:
I think that the existential reality of Beat, Angry, and Delin-
quent behaviour is indicated by the fact that other, earnest,
young fellows who are not themselves disaffected and who
are not phony, are eager to hear about them, and respect
them. One cannot visit a university without being asked a
hundred questions about them.
Finally, some of these groups are achieving a simpler frater-
nity, animality, and sexuality than we have had, at least in
America, in a long, long time.
This valuable program is in direct contrast to the mores
of what we have in this book been calling 'the organized
system', its role playing, its competitiveness, its canned
culture, its public relations, and its avoidance of risk and self-
exposure. That system and its mores are death to the spirit,
and any rebellious group will naturally raise a contrasting
banner.
Now the organized system is very powerful and in its full
tide of success, apparently sweeping everything before it in
science, education, community planning, labor, the arts, not
to speak of business and politics where it is indigenous. Let
155
me say that we of the previous generation who have been

sickened and enraged to see earnest and honest effort and
humane culture swamped by this muck, are heartened by the
crazy young allies, and we think that perhaps the future may
make more sense than we dared hope.*
Only a few years later Lewis Mumford's almost savagely
revealing analysis of the evils wrought on society by the impersonal
violence of a technology of power is unexpectedly and almost
incongruously muted by views such as the following:
The yearning for a primitive counter-culture, defying the
rigidly organized and depersonalized forms of Western civiliz-
ation, began to float into the Western mind in the original
expressions of Romanticism among the intellectual classes.
That desire to return to a more primeval state took a folksy
if less articulate form, in the elemental rhythms of jazz, more
than half a century ago. What made this idea suddenly erupt
again, with almost volcanic power, into Western society was
its incarnation in the Beatles. It was not just the sudden
success of the Beatles' musical records that indicated that a
profound change was taking place in the minds of the young:
it was their new personality, as expressed in their long, nco-
mediaeval haircut, their unabashed sentimentality, their
nonchalant posture, and their dreamlike spontaneity that
opened up for the post-nuclear generation the possibility of
an immediate escape from mega-technic society. In the Beatles
all their repressions, and all their resentments of repression
were released: by hairdo, costume, ritual, and song, all
changes depending upon purely personal choice, the new
counter-ideas that bound the younger generation together
were at once clarified and magnified. Impulses that were
still too dumbly felt for words, spread like wildfire through
incarnation and imitation.t
What strikes a chill in the contemporary reader's heart about
such passages as these (which fell easily to hand - I did not have
to comb libraries to unearth them) is that their future has now
come, and perhaps even gone, with none of the expected improve-
ment. What possibilities Godwin saw in an understanding of the
nature of 'happiness', his faith in the good will of those with the
power to reason, have been mercilessly betrayed in the pursuit of
interest. Tolstoy's intimation of a revival of Christian ethics would
•crowing Up Absurd, op. cit.

t L. Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, Seeker and Warburg, 1971.
156
surely have been sadly extinguished by now. Tawney's was no

doubt a longer view, but even in this case one wonders whether
he would have been so sanguine could he have witnessed the speed
with which the more caring society for which he worked so hard
is currently being dismantled. And we have now had the chance
to observe for ourselves the growing up of the beats, the angry
young men and the Beatles: all securely locked within the deadly
serious world of the market, privately preoccupied with success or
survival, some de1d and some assassinated.
So how to account for such optimism on the part of people
whose gaze on their contemporary scene was so penetrating, so
honest and so unflinching? Perhaps in part they were the victims
of the mistaken belief that cure must follow an accurate diagnosis,
perhaps they were misled by their passionate hope or by over-
generalizing their own good will. Perhaps, again, it is impossible
for humane men and women, however black the portents, to
envisage the future with anything but at least a degree of optimism.
It is not at all difficult, certainly, to bring out the ostrich in
those unable to contemplate without pain the ways we conduct
ourselves towards each other. We can drop out into 'counter-
cultures'; we can become 'born again' into the magical belief
systems of fundamentalist religions. Perhaps, even, we really can
create through science and technology a dream-world shaped
entirely by our wishes and in which we could live our lives encapsu-
lated in fantastic gratification. But in the end, I believe, none of
these 'solutions' represents anything other than extremes of wishful
thinking, a kind of communal madness from which embodied truth
would one day drag us back to a devasted reality.
The development of 'counter-cultures' relying on some form of
magical or ideological escape from the larger social world, simply
evades the difficulties of getting to grips with the structures which
cause us such distress. An entirely justified and understandable
disgust with the abuse of scientific knowledge and technological
power leads to the wishful positing of alternatives which side-
step experience and challenge rationality. While welcoming and
endorsing much of the theory and practice of what he calls the
'party of Narcissus' - i.e. of those aligning themselves with
feminism, environmentalism and the peace movement, etc.- Chri-
stopher Lasch takes a line very similar to that argued in this book:
It is the deterioration of public life, together with the privatiz-

ation and trivialization of moral ideas, that prevents a collab-
orative assault on the environmental and military difficulties
confronting modern nations. But the party of Narcissus does
not understand the source of these difficulties: the confusion
157
of practice with technique. It shares this confusion and thus

repudiates all forms of purposeful action in favor of playful,
artistic pursuits, which it misunderstands, moreover, as activi-
ties without structure or purpose. When it insists on the
pathology of purposefulness, it merely reverses industrial
ideology. Where the prevailing ideology swallows up practice
into a cult of technique, the 'counterculture' indiscriminately
rejects both and advocates a renunciation of will and purpose
as the only escape from Promethean technology. Disparaging
human inventiveness, which it associates only with destruc-
tive industrial technologies, it defines the overriding impera-
tive of the present age as a return to nature. It ignores the
more important need to restore the intermediate world of
practical activity, which binds man to nature in the capacity
of a loving caretaker and cultivator, not in a symbiotic union
that simply denies the reality of man's separation from
nature. •
In the last few paragraphs of his sweeping and deeply i!Jlpressive
three-volume historical analysis of the economic structures of the
modern world, Fernand Braude! perhaps comes closer than anyone
to giving us a glimpse of what we are up against:
Jean-Paul Sartre may have dreamed of a society from which
inequality would have disappeared, where one man would
not exploit another. But no society in the world has yet given
up tradition and the use of privilege. If this is ever to be
achieved, all the social hierarchies will have to be overthrown,
not merely those of money or state power, not only social
privilege but the uneven weight of the past and of culture.
The experience of the socialist countries proves that the disap-
pearance of a single hierarchy - the economic hierarchy -
raises scores of new problems and is not enough on its own
to establish equality, liberty or even plenty. A dear-sighted
revolution, if such a thing is even possible - and if it were,
would the paralysing weight of circumstances allow it to
remain so for long? - would find it very difficult to demolish
what should be demolished, while retaining what should be
retained: freedom for ordinary people, cultural independence,
a market economy with no loaded dice, and a little fraternity.
It is a very tall order - especially since whenever capitalism
is challenged, it is invariably during a period of economic
difficulty, whereas far-reaching structural reform, which
*The Minimal Self, op. cit.
158
would inevitably be difficult and traumatic, requires a context

of abundance or even superabundance. And the present popu-
lation explosion is likely to do little or nothing to encourage
the more equitable distribution of surpluses. •
The conclusion to Braudel's gargantuan intellectual undertaking,
though stated undramatically enough, strikes, especially in the light
of others' optimism, an unusually sombre note:
If people set about looking for them, seriously and honestly,
economic solutions could be found which would extend the
area of the market and would put at its disposal the economic
advantages so far kept to itself by one dominant group in
society. But the problem does not essentially lie there; it is
social in nature. Just as a country at the centre of a world-
economy can hardly be expected to give up its privileges at
international level, how can one hope that the dominant
groups who combine capital and state power, and who are
assured of international support, will agree to play the game
and hand over to someone else?
Can one then really not hope that people will act against their own
immediate interests? Either the question as posed by Braudel is a
rhetorical statement of despair, or it demands an answer.
Hope is a very private matter, and what grounds for hope I may
find in my own experience are therefore likely to be of little use to
anyone else. However, perhaps there are some observations which
may be found sustaining. One- the most important- is that people
uncorrupted by power and unblinded by interest (and therefore
most often to be found at the very base of the social hierarchy)
are in my experience perfectly able and often eager to act lovingly
and altruistically when permitted (which is rare) the space to do
so. It seems to me, again, that reflection able to break free from
injunctions to the pursuit of happiness quite quickly suggests that
the only life worth living is one which points beyond itself. And
from the perspective of history the past is short and the future
long; we have yet to try living by an ethics which is based neither
on God nor on slavery.
From the point of view of public life, however, there are altoge-
ther cooler and more rational reasons for conducting ourselves as
if hope for the future were justified. Not the least of these is that,
even though we may be sure that they will involve us in the greatest
*F. Braude!, Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, 3 vols.,

Fontana, 1985.
159
difficulty, we cannot possibly foretell what our endeavours may

lead to.
It may indeed be impossible from our present position to
envisage a society in which the hierarchies of which Braudel writes
could be dismantled, but though the weight of the evidence which
he reviews is almost crushingly dismaying, the span of history is
still extremely short. What lends a note almost of fatuity to some
of the more optimistic prognostications quoted above is the
immediacy of the improvement they envisage. Having correctly
identified the grave shortcomings of a society which pursues instant
happiness, they then themselves propose an instant remedy for
them. The absence of an instant remedy, however, the impossibility
of the 'cure' we all - as I have argued, misguidedly - so readily
seek also for our personal distress, is not a reason for resigned
acceptance of the inevitability of exploitation and greed and the
harm they do. What we need, rather, is to develop the very serious-
ness and honesty which Braudel acknowledges as possible, to foster
a patient 'care-fulness' designed to last over generations, and to
recognize that greed and exploitation, even if they cannot be wiped
out within any imaginable span of time, must be opposed. It is
precisely the possibilities for the development of any such oppo-
sition which have become so drastically eroded in recent times by
interests which have the power to collapse the kind of moral space
in which they can develop.
The privatization and inversion of the moral impulse of 'ordi-
nary people' impose upon them a moralism which asserts that not
only are their difficulties and distress their 'own fault', but that the
remedy also is somehow up to them as private individuals. Moral
responsibility, which should be socially recognized as an integral
part of an individual's public duty, thus becomes a kind of private
burden, and the onus for changing the world falls with a punitive
heaviness on each one of us as something we have to wrestle with
on our own. Now there is of course a perfectly acceptable sense
in which 'things will only change' through the separate contri-
butions of individual embodied subjects, but in saying this it is
easy to overlook the fact that a person cannot act at all unless he
or she has the space in which to do so.
There are very many people, worried and concerned about the
state of the world and of society, whose moral integrity and forti-
tude lead them to accept with resignation that 'you can only do
what you can'. In this, they are rather like those 'patients' not
infrequently encountered in psychotherapy who accept that 'there's
only me who can do anything about it' and who struggle bravely
against an often inimical world. But though there is certainly truth
in this attitude as far as it goes, it overlooks a dimension absolutely
160
essential to the effectiveness of action, i.e. the public dimension

which combines with private intention or impulse to open up a
moral space.
In order to change things for the better - in order, that is, to
be able to act morally - the individual must have the moral space
in which to do so. This is not something which people can create for
themselves as private individuals, but something which is socially
created and maintained through the proper use of concerted
(political) power. A politics which perverts and abuses power in
order to operate a network of vested interests collapses the space
in which people can conduct themselves instrumentally to exercise
a public function, and it does this mainly by focusing attention on
purely private needs and treating 'politically motivated' conduct as
somehow suspect or reprehensible. If, however, we are to come to
see that we are inflicting incurable but avoidable damage on each
other rather than merely suffering personally unavoidable but
curable 'breakdown', if, that is, we are to move from an ideology
of therapy to a culture of care, we shall have to force open around
ourselves a moral space which gives us room for concerted action,
and this can only be done through the re-insertion into that space
of a 'public dimension'. We shall have, to put it another way, to
re-establish an ethical politics in the place of an apparatus of power
for the manipulation of interest. It is important to remember,
furthermore, that we need to do this not to change our selves nor
to try magically to put right injuries irrevocably inflicted, but to set
up a framework in which future injuries may perhaps be avoided.
It is simply too much to expect people to take on the moral
burden of their own suffering, however much therapy we may offer
them. Much of what people take to be their own private misery is
generated within the social structure in which everyone is located,
and is therefore, in every sense, a matter for the greatest public
concern.
161
Index
Adler, A., 113 Davidson, N., 73n
'Angry Young Men', 155, 157 death instinct, 28
Arendt, H., 30-1, 35 Debord, G., 10n
Aries, P., 115n delinquency, 54
astrology, 48-9 demystification, 4-5
determinism, 75
Bacon, F., 50 Dickens, C., 20, 139
'Beat Generation', 155, 157 difficulty, 88, 91, 122, 128
beauty, 141 discipline, 53-5, 67, 128-30, 142,
behaviourism, 46, 51 148-9
Bion, W., 12, 13n disease, 73-4
blame, 6, 66-72, 76, 90, 115, 145 disillusion, 109-10
bliss, memory of, 26-7, 33, 73, divination, 48
123-4 Divoky, D., 53n, 55, 58
Boorstin, D., 10n dreams, 2, 7-11, 16, 75, 81, 120,
Braude!, F., 158-60 128, 140-1
bulimia, 42
Buss, R., 65n embodiedness, 11, 13, 74-5, 120,
133, 138-42
Calderon, P., 7 encounter groups, 99, 102
caring, 72 encouragement, 4-5, 48, 51, 126,
categorical imperative, 148 142
change, 44, 79-81, 84-7, 90-1 Enlightenment, the, 29
children, 106, 113-20, 127, equality, 77, 142
135-6 examinations, 54-5
Christianity, 138, 143 'excellence', 136
Church, the, 17, 29, 149 exploitation, 69, 77, 89, 106, 115,
comfort, 4, 6, 46, 48, 51, 91, 142 120, 143, 147, 152, 160
commitment, 96, 107, 112 Eysenck, H. j., 57
commodity, 19, 33, 93-4, 96-7,
103-4 factory farming, 37, 87
Comte, A., 18, 48 faith, 132
consumption, 39, 97, 117, 126, familiarity, 34, 36, 89, 142
132 family, 106, 113-19
counter-culture, 157 Farber, L. H., 75n
cruelty, 120 fathers, 106, 114-15
culture, 19, 132-5, 138 fault, 19, 67-8, 77, 109
cure, 15, 48, 73, 79-82, 85-6, 90, feelings, 72-4, 127, 129
122 fixation, 126-8
Foucault, M., 53-5, 58, 65, 67,
Danziger, K., 64, 65n 103, 113
daughters, 106, 114-15 freedom, 7 6, 91
163
Index
Freud, S., 9, 15, 26, 28, 84, 85n, Laing, R. D., 134
103, 113-14 Langer, S., 9n
Friedman, M., 145n language, 69, 137, 139
friendship, 97-102 Lasch, C., tOn, 38n, 58, 157
Fromm, E., lOln learning, 81-4, 136-9
function, 39-40, 96, 123, 133 Locke, J., 52-3
future, 39-40, 131, 133-4, 141-2, Lomas, P., 84n
152-3 love, 5, 27, 81, 85-6, 96, 100-1,
142, 152
gender, 105
God, 150, 159 magic, 3, 11, 13, 15, 47-51, 78,
Godwin, W., 34, 153, 156 81-2, 132, 141-2, 144
Goldsmith, 0., 108 managerialism, 40, 57-8, 61
Goodman, P., 14, 28n, 155 Marcuse, H., 118n
gratification, 95-8, 102-4, 112, marketing, 37, 59, 101, 136
129, 142 marriage, 106-13, 126, 129
growing up, 123-32 men,98-9, 104-5,107
guilt, 6, 51, 55, 70-2, 75 monetarism, 145
money,22,28,40, 56,103,119
happiness, 24-35, 39-40, 42, 68, moral inversion, 146, 149, 160
72-3, 83, 90, 93, 95, 103, 108, moralism, 68, 103, 115, 143-47,
120, 125, 141-2, 148-9 160
history, cultural, 20-1, 29, 135 morality, 143-52, 160-1
history, personal, 46, 69, 74, mothers, 106, 114
88-91, 103, 106 motivation, 44, 60
Hobson, R. F., 84n Mozart, W. A., 25
hope, 159 Mumford, L., 156
mystification, 15, 47, 73, 90, 108,
Illich, 1., 73, 105, 134, 139 147, 149
image, 10, 17, 38, 61, 99
individualism, 34, 41, 77, 87, 109, need, 33, 95-6, 99, 120
120, 125, 141 negotiation, 4
individuals (vs. society), 19, 67, New Right, 68, 75-6
70, 104 'normality', 90-1, 139
insight, 81-2, 84, 91, 152
interest, 2, 16-22, 28, 39, 47, 51, Oedipus complex, 114
56, 58-65, 68-9, 72, 81, 83, old age, 24-5, 111, 126
96, 105, 108, 115, 125, 131, oppression, 70, 101
145, 148-51, 161 optimism, 139, 142, 153, 157, 160
interpretation, 15, 86, 91 organism, 88-9, 91-2, 133-4
intimacy, 98-9, 102, 129 'otherness', 105, 139-40
'Invisible Hand', 60, 145-6
pain, 11, 41, 73, 112, 128, 141
Jefferson, T., 30 parenthood, 72, 126
justice, 77, 142 parents, 113-20
Passmore, J., 29, 30n, 52-3
Kant, 1., 148-50 past, 40
knowledge, 133, 136-8 point of life, 26, 33-4, 93, 99,
Kumar, S., 134n 124-5, 130-1
164
Index
Polanyi, M., 146 'skills', 82-3, 94, 99, 132, 137
politics, 56-7, 147, 161 slavery, 35, 131, 159
posterity, 40-2 Smith, A., 60, 146
power, 22, 30, 47, 53-4, 57-70, social evolution, 39
77, 89, 102, 105-6, 113-20, sons, 106, 114-15
147, 151-2, 161 stoicism, 128
private life, 123-31, 15 2, 160-1 Stone, L., 108-9, 115n
psychiatry, 20 Sullivan, H. S., 97
psychoanalysis, 68-9, 82 Suttie, I. D., 27n, 85n
psychology, 11, 19-20, 22, symptoms, 41, 46, 57, 79, 82
44-53,56-9,64-5,81,83
psychotherapy, 3, 11, 48, 79-82, taking care, 93, 132-42, 152
84-5, 91 Tawney, R. H., 20-2, 39n, 154,
public life, 123-31, 133-4, 139, 157
143-9, 152, 159-61 Taylor, F. W., 58n
television, 10, 38, 87, 90, 95
reality, 7-11, 36, 75, 141 terror, 113
reasons, 69, 71, 75 therapeutic assumption, 73-4, 77,
re-illusion, 109-10 80, 86
'relationships', 33, 93-7, 99-100, therapy, 3, 77-8, 90, 93, 139, 142,
104-13, 118, 120, 123, 137, 161
140-1 Thomas, K., 47-51
religion, 56, 68, 143-4, 147 Tolstoy, L., 17, 109n, 141, 153,
renunciation, 128, 142 154n, 156
repression, 16-17, 22, 34-5, 41, Townsend, P., 73n
56, 58-9, 77, 103, 105, tradition,41-2, 135, 137
113-15 treatment, 70, 152
research, 80-1 truth, 75, 142, 150
resignation, 109, 111
Rogers, C. R., 84 'understanding', 90-1, 98, 112,
Rousseau, J.-J., 108 119, 140
Utilitarian philosophy, 29, 52,
Salmon, P., 127n
148, 151, 153
satisfaction, 40-1, 93-4, 96,
103-4, 112, 120, 124
Schafer, R., 69, 86 violence, 99-100, 113-15, 120,
Schrag, P., 53n, 55, 58 125
science, 9, 17, 29, 45, 50-1
secret ballot, 147 Wertham, F., 101n
self, 98-100, 141 will, 75, 77
Servan, J., 52 women, 104-5, 107, 111
sex, 38, 102-6, 113-14 Wood, G., 68
shame, 67
Shotter, J., 57n young people, 14, 134
165

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This edition published in 2015 by

Karnac Books Ltd

Copyright © 1987 by David Smail

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Printed in Great Britain

New Preface VII

'parentalist' elite which in the long run infantilizes and makes

•In his play Life Is a Dream, 1635.

mainly around images of conquest and wealth. Furthermore, our

At any moment, waking or sleeping, experience reaches us

*This line of thought is pursued with great, if at times rather oppressive

and in most respects quite sufficient unto itself.) As we sleep, we

*Daniel Boorstin, for example, in The Image (Penguin Books, 1963)

a kind of irksome, obsolete burden. Our dreams are so much more

sonal forces which are experienced as a strange and barely analys-

himself blown into a shell-hole in a First World War battlefield,

*W. R. Bion The Long Week-End, Fleetwood Press, 1982.

cat, and could never become, for example, posthumous martyr to

In despair, the fifteen-year-aids hang around and do nothing

*P. Goodman, Growing Up Absurd, Vintage Books, 1956.

number of reasons (often outside the patient's knowledge or

being no more than human themselves, easily succeed in obscuring

days, and least of all politicians, are unaware of the importance of

•L. Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do? First published 1886.

Citing the influence of Comte's philosophical positivism on the

by creating institutions (like 'scientific psychology') which reinforce

cations, since it opens the way for hatred, bitterness, recrimination,

If it is proper to insist on the prevalence of avarice and greed

to persuade themselves that greed was enterprise and avarice

*R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Penguin Books,

met one, and unless it is possible that a lifetime's isolation in

health, rejection, etc., and creativity. Indeed, it is a central conten-

sadly, as we must grow out of infancy, so we must grow out of

as with Freud's 'death instinct', suggests that our futile pursuit of

*For a particularly disturbing account of one such experiment, see

difficult to detect in the writers of the Enlightenment and in the

*J. Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man, Duckworth, 1970.

*H. Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin Books, 1973.

desires of the heart or from the obscure necessities of the

The increasing affluence and freedom from want of 'developed'

response to our frustration is more likely to be a destructive lash-

conditions of our crippled lives that we take them for an ineluctable

• On Revolution, op. cit.

This is only a seeming paradox, indicating more a deep and usually

shyness (both of which are characteristic of our time), might not

which might once have been filled by statesmen conduct 'propa-

*Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self. Psychic Survival in Troubled

•R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society. First published 1921, Wheat-

relatively privileged functions of a service or professional nature

do not, any more than blind fish in subterranean pools, complain of

the damage caused by the former. This is reflected at the individual

hundred years or so of psychology's existence as a 'scientific',

Astrologers, apparently, even justified their failures in precisely

work against their interests because there is in truth so little

*Thomas, op. cit.

of this enterprise (even if at a cost, in terms of pollution and

their ancestry in the writings of the seventeenth-century philos-