Psychology – Page 20 – Michael Karson, Ph.D.

Never Out Loud

At my dissertation proposal meeting, supposedly a scientific consultation to massage and critique my research program, one of my esteemed faculty members asked me what I thought of his idea. “Well,” I said, “naturally I want to do as little as possible and still get my degree.” A hush of epic proportions descended on the little group, whereupon my chair muttered in a barking but muted voice, “Michael, never out loud.” He made it clear by his tone that scientific culture insisted that my dissertation represent a thirst for truth, and by his words that he condoned a desire just to get it done as long as I kept quiet about it.

This is what the Jews mean when they say, “Dress British; think Yiddish.”

I wanted my children not to feel guilty about anything they thought, even as I wanted them to be careful about where they spoke it. Free thinking, like masturbation, was to be enjoyed in private and among select friends.

As far as I can recall, I lied to my children only once. Little had picked up some advanced verbiage from Big, and I was admonishing him not to say certain words in certain places while reassuring him that he could say to me anything he wanted. But then I was hit by a sense of my own power, something parents can indulge at any time, the sense that I could tell him absolutely anything and he would believe me. Did I use my carefully constructed credibility to sell him the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, or God? No. Instead, I told him that there was one word that was so bad that it must never even be written much less spoken aloud. He wanted to know what that word was, but of course I couldn’t inform him without saying or writing the forbidden word. He begged me for ownership of that weapon that was so powerful it could disrupt any occasion, so I took pity on him and told him that I would say it one time, and he must never repeat it. “The word is Jeshoshaphat.” He nodded grimly, aware of the immense power and, with it, the immense responsibility he now wielded. He was about five years old. A year later, I dropped a plate of pasta in the kitchen and I cried out, “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat.” He looked at me with horror, surprise, alarm, and finally betrayal as he realized that it was just another word. He hasn’t really trusted anything I’ve said since.

All this time, I thought I was honest with my children to make them think they could rely on me, on a benign authority whom they could question and expect an honest response from, an authority who would bless their critical thinking. But maybe the edge for generating critical thinking goes to the parents whose children learn with dismay that there is no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy. Maybe their kids learn to question authority at the deepest level, the level driven by disappointment and suspicion. Maybe the therapists who come late to sessions and intrude with other agendas and pull rank on their patients to pressure them into not complaining—maybe those therapists are generating free thinkers in a way I never could by telling the truth.

A year later, at my dissertation orals, I employed the good advice I had received from a clinical supervisor: “Get them talking to each other and they won’t interrogate you.” I nearly made it through the two hours with the art of conversation when one of my committee members said, “Hey, we haven’t asked him any questions yet.” A statistician, he said, “How can you use the output of a discriminant function as a continuous variable?” I said, “Simple. If there was something wrong with doing that, you’d have spoken up long before now.” All four of them started shaking their heads, and it was the art historian on my committee who said, laughing, “Michael, never out loud.”

Supervisory Sex

I’ve known several psychologists who either had sex with or started a romance with former supervisees. This is not unethical or illegal, but it creates a performance problem for the psychologist.

More than other fields, clinical psychology frowns upon sex or romance with supervisees because of the nature of psychotherapy supervision, which often involves discussion of personal matters. This makes the relationship susceptible to exploitation by supervisors—they get the supervisee vulnerable in the course of supervision and then pounce. Of course, the students don’t feel exploited, they feel special; and the supervisors don’t feel like predators, they feel like lovers. Indeed, one of the many things I love about Janna is the image of me I see in her eyes. An equally positive (but less realistic and therefore less satisfying) image of me can be found in the eyes of many of my students. (Also, of course, almost all the other aspects of our marriage benefit from our being equals, in conversation, in bed, in making decisions, and in combat.) Still, the long list of famous clinicians who slept with or got romantically involved with patients and students gives us an idea of how big a problem this is.

Another reason psychology frowns upon sex in supervision and therapy, besides protection of vulnerable people, has to do with the role of the psychologist. The clinician is invited into the inner workings of the patient’s life and mind, and this position of intimacy can be sustained only if there are certain guarantees that the clinician is there as a guide, not as a tourist. It’s a performance of professionalism that must be thorough to be effective. Much as the proverbial banker could not act licentiously or drunkenly and expect people to ask him to safeguard their funds, the clinician cannot act impulsively and expect people to ask her to safeguard their secrets. That’s why the Hippocratic Oath states, “In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction and especially from the pleasures of love with women or men, be they free or slaves.”

Goffman teaches us that the great story of life involves our performance of roles and our concern about whether our performance will be discredited. The way you present yourself as a supervisor dictates your performance problems. If you claim wisdom, then foolishness and stupidity undermine you. If you claim to be expert in intimate, authentic conversation, then stiffness and caution give your performance the lie. If you claim to have transcended your own psychology, then any emotion at all, instead of enriching the supervision, will mock it.

One performance of supervisor that is especially susceptible to discreditation by sexual behavior is that of the charismatic leader. One wants to devote oneself to Skinner because of the clarity and brilliance of his ideas, and his absolute repudiation of any cultlike behaviors satisfies the devotee’s anxiety that Skinner might be after admiration and not truth. If you look at actual cults, you tend to find leaders (a shout out here to feminism for providing the world with women who are as bad as men) who exploit devotion for lust, greed, political power, and admiration. When supervisors do the same, only emotional cripples stay with them. The charismatic leader is the best positioned to exploit followers and the one whose entire performance is cast in cultish and narcissistic terms by any sexual, financial, or devotional agenda. If you want followers of the sort you want, then you have to be above suspicion when it comes to lust.

It’s empathy that levees and diverts supervisory lust. I meet young women who are both worried and perhaps a little relieved by the idea that they can make their way in psychology on their looks, with the crushing disappointment (whenever it turns out to be true) that Irene Cara’s character displays in Fame when she thinks her singing voice has earned her a major opportunity and she is told to take off her shirt. And even if a student wanted to be seen sexually, I can’t believe it would be good for her. For this reason, I don’t have an opinion about supervisory romance between people who are fundamentally equals and only happen to find themselves in a supervision together. Like so much else, it’s the function of the romance that matters, not its topography. But even then, the charismatic supervisor will find himself with a discredited performance that might not be salvageable.

Misunderstandings of Aggression 2

A friend writes, “When you are direct, bold, provocative, edgy, ambitious, courageous, and challenging, that is very different from being hostile, mean, dominating, or sadistic. I think that women who have a hard time with that first set of adjectives often confuse the two (and also express their own ambitious energy in indirectly hostile ways, but that is another story!).”

I guess I don’t think that direct and courageous are so very different from hostile and mean.

I don’t think the problem is that some people who have a hard time with hostility confuse it with assertiveness and courage; I think the problem is that these people recognize the hostility intrinsic to assertiveness and courage and react accordingly. In fact, I think the only difference between assertiveness and hostility is the preparation of the audience. In martial arts training and tournaments, whacking someone with a sword is assertive; in most other contexts, it would be hostile. Invading another country and killing its inhabitants was hostile when the Germans did it and assertive when the Americans did it (in World War II; it was hostile in Vietnam). Neville Chamberlain is shamed by history for not standing up to Hitler, but standing up to him meant threatening to kill and then killing Germans. Corrective criticism is challenging when the student wants to get better at whatever she’s studying; it’s hostile when the student wants to be validated for already being good at whatever she’s studying.

Further, I believe that the first, endorsable set of adjectives and the second, rejectable set of adjectives come from the same place (call it the will to power, aggressive instinct, status dynamics, or the reinforcing effects of other people’s obedience).

Skinner points out how many of life’s rewards are brought by other people, so that certain social experiences become secondarily reinforcing through conditioning, in an exact analogy to the way money becomes a conditioned reinforcer. He lists attention, affection, approval, and obedience. The first three become conditioned reinforcers only if social relationships are benign, on balance. If other people’s attention is preparatory to rebuke, if affection leads to crippling expectations, if approval is for an agenda that serves the approver but not the individual—then none of these will become reinforcing. But you can always count on obedience. Other people doing what you want them to do, even if what you want them to do is to surprise you, is bound to feel good.

So, even aside from the fact that we are the most innately aggressive mammals on the planet, bending others to our will is bound to become a major force in human affairs given how social we are. The essence of enlightenment values is the recognition of this fact (“power corrupts”; “if men were angels, no government would be necessary”), and the construction of a system that takes it into account.

I think that the employer who calmly “lets go” a difficult employee is tapping the same energy as the employer who feels like beheading that employee. It’s the similarity between the two that leads some employers never to consider firing anyone. If we are not comfortable with our fantasies of beheading people we will resist letting them go unless we can, as my friend implies above, let them go in a way that is so passive-aggressive that it escapes our own detection of hostility. If we are comfortable with our aggression, we are more likely to engage bad employees in a dialogue of frustration, to hear their own frustrations, and to find a solution (which may be to fire them but is almost certain to be firing them if we react to their own frustrations as if they were bomb threats).

So my view of the gender issue is that girls in our country are much more likely to be punished for aggressive behavior than boys are. Punishment never changes the tendency to engage in behavior, but it can change the tendency to disguise it. In my childhood, most boys learned to settle their differences with fists, and this led to settling differences with debate. Most girls were punished for using fists (“unladylike”), and this led to settling differences with backbiting, moralizing, and cutting remarks. Especially moralizing.

I was at a case conference last week to decide whether a mother was unfit to raise her children or whether to pursue reunification.

Me: She’s a bad mother.
Female State Social Work Administrator: That’s judgmental.
Me: I thought we were here to judge her parenting.
FSSWA: We teach case workers to talk about clients like they’re human beings.
Me: Only human beings are bad mothers.

It chills me to think that people would sever a mother’s relationship with her children without even a hint of anger on the child’s behalf, like the high school principal who dully and calmly tells you he’s going to expel your son. To me, that’s inhuman.

[By the way, Webster’s also includes “healthy self-assertiveness or a drive to mastery or accomplishment” in its definitions of aggression.]

Can I Give You a Hug?

This week, a former student told me that her therapist says to her at the end of most sessions, “Can I give you a hug?” The student, a woman, guarantees that there is no sexual motivation, which I accept. The woman does not want to hug the therapist for reasons she does not understand. If only she had a relationship with a benign but curious guide who could create a space with her in which her associations and reactions to the idea of hugging her therapist could be explored. Nah.

My colleagues initiate hugs with their students; I do not. I refuse to believe that my colleagues initiate hugs with their therapy patients, so I am distinguishing two separate issues, the hugging of patients and the hugging of others. And of course, there are many kinds of hugs—the quasi-sexual hug of women in my social life I find attractive; the warm, loving hug of friends and relatives (my boys especially); the all-around hug reserved only for Janna; the make-the-hurt-go-away hug that I never give (I’ve been a therapist too long for that); the congratulatory hug; and so on.

With former students, there may come a time when we are socializing rather than revisiting our student-teacher relationship. These people I hug, but only if it’s mutual. As I said to my son when he asked me about kissing girls in middle school, you lean forward and if she leans forward, you keep leaning forward, but if she leans back, you lean back. To me, a hug has to be mutual, so when a male friend extends his hand at the end of the evening, I shake it. Other friends of mine parry the hand and move in. I don’t like this, even if the other person is a good-looking woman.

I admit I’m a prude outside of my sex life. I hate it when people leer at strangers, turn unsuspecting students into sex objects, or impose on other people’s tact to get a quick feel of someone’s waist or shoulder. There are several beautiful women in my life, and with them I prefer the head hug, where the primary contact and pressure of intimacy is carried by the sides of our heads. It’s not just that I don’t want to be seen as a lecher, although there is that; it is also that I identify with the woman, and I hate it when people I don’t want sexually kiss me on the mouth or press themselves against me.

I don’t see how a hug can be mutual when one person dictates that it will happen. If one party has power over the other, as in a teaching relationship, then the more powerful person’s initiation of a hug will almost always be dictatorial, because even if the student wants a hug, they can’t have made a choice. And once the hug is described as imposed, it’s pretty unappealing. I was upset when one of my kids in first grade told me that on Valentine’s Day, you had to give everyone or no one a card. Like T-ball for love, no one should ever feel bad (or correct their behavior to get what they want). Later, he was told that at the first dance in middle school, you had to accept if someone asked you to dance. I wonder whether they would have imposed that rule on homosexual offers.

But in therapy, it’s much less complicated whether to hug, and much more complicated when it happens. The whole idea of therapy is to create an exploratory space in which things are discussed rather than enacted. Different schools explain the reasons for this differently: extinction of punished behaviors, discovery of hidden identity elements, teaching reflection and metacommunication as conflict resolution strategies, for example. But the key element is analysis rather than action. A hug defeats the whole structure and purpose of therapy. Therapists who don’t understand that should be daycare workers—or prostitutes, who also provide a useful service by exchanging bodily contact for money.

Misunderstandings of Aggression

It takes a certain amount of aggression to put yourself out there enough to write a blog, correct a student, or confront however gently a patient who has gone wrong following an outdated psychological map. Many people with the requisite level of aggression find themselves fitting poorly with the culture of psychology; they become lawyers instead. Sometimes the aggression inherent in asserting something or, even worse, questioning someone else’s assertion, is mistaken so thoroughly for hostility that the content of what I say is twisted by the expectation of hostility.

I said to a social worker who wasn’t quite ready to give up on a bad mother, “I disagree, but I have only respect for your point of view.” When a number of people at the meeting stared at me in horror, I asked them what they thought I’d said, and fully half of those present thought I’d said, “I disagree, and I have no respect for your point of view.”

I said to a group of students who came late to the first day of assessment class that there were a lot of reasons why they might have come late, some incidental, some situational, some as a considered choice, and some psychological, so this was a good example of keeping an open mind when approaching the assessment of behavior. At least one of them thought I’d chastised them. Again, it took a certain amount of aggression just to mention that they had been late, and the student seems to have expected aggression to produce chastisement.

I taught a class period on borderline personality organization, and I suggested that you might want to consider borderline functioning if the patient does something that you would never do. I would never murder someone or steal money or smack a child, but I can imagine doing those things under the right circumstances. I cannot imagine any set of circumstances that would lead me to put a cigarette out on a baby or commit a forcible rape. So if someone does something you would never do, consider that their personality may be structured fundamentally differently from yours. The following week, we discussed a patient who had done something I would never do (I forget what). I asked the class what I’d said about that, and an intelligent, likeable student said, “You said they might be borderline if you would never do them.” Presumably, the aggression inherent in calmly discussing burning a baby and committing forcible rape made me seem rapacious. I told the student that if she tracked down and corrected everyone she had misquoted me to, I would not use her name when I told this story for the rest of my life. When I told a forensic colleague (i.e., a colleague comfortable with aggression) the story, she said, “But that’s also a pretty reliable sign of borderline personality organization, if you would never do them.”

How to stop worrying about resentment

“Perhaps you could say more about how to stop worrying about the frightened, resentful folks?”

I’ll try.

We tend to surround ourselves with friends and partners who respond positively to what we’ve been conditioned to show and negatively to what we’ve been conditioned to hide, since when we first met them, we showed what we show and hid what we hide. If the relationship worked well enough under those circumstances to lead to friendship or romance, it’s often because they liked what they saw and didn’t lose interest when they didn’t see what was hidden.

People also become friends and lovers for reasons other than liking each other; for example, they are thrown together by circumstances, or they over-emphasize physical attraction, or they have an arranged marriage. When this happens, each person tries to impose his or her definition of himself or herself within the relationship by showing or hiding various aspects of the self, and relationships then work well or work badly depending on what is accepted and what is rejected. Showing, hiding, accepting, and rejecting are thus the relevant behaviors that determine how our interpersonal world suits us.

In this respect, it’s not surprising that so many partners resemble a parent. After all, it was our parents who first conditioned us to show certain things and to hide others. To the extent that a partner has the same taste in humanity as your parents, you are likely to experience less conflict around who you are with that person (and less freedom around deciding who you want to be).

The thing to do, if you don’t want to just be a doll created by your parents, is to decide what your own values are, which aspects of the self you think should be treasured, and which managed. Of course, you can only choose among values you have encountered, so if you want to be free, you have to meet a lot of people with different values from yours, possibly by traveling to a lot of different places, possibly by having intimate conversations with the people you happen to meet nearby. You can also get a wide sampling of values by reading literature, history, and philosophy without ever leaving your computer screen. The greatest of these is literature.

Cognitively, the best way to achieve freedom is to learn critical thinking and to apply it to all propositions, not just scientific truths, but also to all propositions about yourself, whether they be emotional, spiritual, or behavioral. (Critical thinking is, in short, a verbal method of testing and contextualizing propositions that values evidence and logic.) Emotionally, the best way to achieve freedom is to spend time with people who value different aspects of yourself from those that you value and to see whether your values are really just ways of pretending that you are not who you are as opposed to ways of ordering and organizing all of who you are. Psychotherapy, when done right, is a place to discover and accept all the aspects of yourself, so you can behave according to your values rather than according to what you are afraid to discover about yourself.

So the way to stop trying to please people who fear or resent you is to treat your happiness, creativity, humor, and insight as you would like a four-year-old child to be treated at home and not as a four-year-old child ought to be treated at a funeral or other ceremonious occasion. Enjoy rather than hush yourself. Then, when someone resents you, you will react as you would react had the person just told you that your four-year-old niece’s fantasy play in her own room was “inappropriate.” You would tell your niece to pay no heed to the strange lady (and then, I hope, your niece would add to her game a disapproving bystander, to whom unexpected and embarrassing things would happen: “And this is the lady that thinks the funny girl is unladylike, but a bird flew by and now she’s a poopyhead”).

Analogy 1

Understanding analogy is the single most important issue in multiculturalism and in psychotherapy. It’s what enables the Christian to understand that the Muslim feels about burning the Koran the way the Christian would feel about burning the Bible. It’s more than empathy; empathy allows the Christian to see that the Muslim is upset, just as the Christian would be upset if he lost something to which he was attached but which was ultimately false. Empathy analogizes the Koran to the Christian’s attachment to false beliefs. Analogy is needed to fully grasp the significance of burning the Koran. It’s what allows the privileged to understand the marginalized. It’s what allows the therapist to understand that the way the patient approaches the hierarchy in therapy is like the way she approaches other internal and external hierarchies.

A strange thing about analogy is that once you use it, the thing you analogize loses its quality of a sacred cow. For a thing to be sacred, it must be literal, and to be literal, it must be understood in a fundamental frame, a context that cannot be transliterated. If you say that the thing that matters most to you is combatting racism, say, you can proceed with zealotry. But as soon as you think that combatting racism is like welcoming people who at first seem intolerable and that this in turn is like welcoming racists, your zeal is deflected.

Similarly, once you analogize yourself to other people, you lose certainty about who you are. Instead of defining yourself as virtuous and valorous, you have to see yourself as a bundle of complex agendas. This can bring peace and freedom, which is why people pursue it in spiritual practice, psychotherapy, and elsewhere, but it can also bring confusion, which is why people resist it. Part of the appeal of turning clinical psychology into a healthcare profession, besides the fact that it’s where they keep the money, is that it allows people to treat depression, anxiety, and disappointment as literal conditions that leave intact their personas and self-definitions.

Jesus is one of my heroes because of his concern for the marginalized and his appreciation of analogy, which he called parable (from a Greek word that means comparison or analogy). That all speech is metaphoric is hinted at by the fact that the word, talk, comes from tale; the Spanish word for talking, hablar, comes from fable; and the French word for talking, parler, comes from parable. Jesus said two things about analogy that you might want to keep in mind. In Matthew 3:10, he explains to his disciples that he teaches in parables because to those who understand them, “it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven,” but to those who do not understand them, “it has not been given.” Thus is analogic thinking a sifting of people, as he discusses in the same chapter. Then, when the disciples still don’t get it, after a parable about leavening, he tells them, in Matthew 16:11, “How could you fail to perceive that I was not speaking about bread?” (New Revised Standard Version.) Are we willing to sacrifice our certainty and self-righteousness to get to heaven? (For God’s sake, don’t tell me I have to specify that “heaven” in that sentence is a metaphor.)

Paranoia and violence

Because we have such good imaginations, we can always envision things going smoothly, or even wonderfully. Therefore, we are constantly frustrated, constantly dealing with disappointment. There are a lot of good coping strategies for this problem. You can shrug; you can count your blessings; you can take setbacks as opportunities or lessons; you can laugh or blog or make art or hang out with a friend. There are also bad coping strategies, including using drugs, indulging impulsivity, and viciously blaming yourself for the setback.

Positive coping strategies generally require some ability to see yourself as just another person facing just another setback. This is difficult for some people most of the time and for everyone at least some of the time. Lao-tzu said that the sage sees people as straw dogs. Straw dogs were woven for a ceremony, treated ceremoniously during the event, and then unceremoniously discarded. I can’t help but notice that sages are people, so sages must see themselves as straw dogs, not just other people. Sages don’t get too attached to outcomes, or to themselves, so they don’t get too upset by setbacks and disappointments. You are a sage when you shrug or make a joke or get some perspective on yourself. It can be as small as the difference between saying “I am a failure” (which overstates the case) and “That didn’t go so well.”

It’s hard for some people to have perspective on themselves because, for reasons I won’t go into right now, they are overly impressed by evidence that they are the main character in this thing called life. After all, each of us is constantly hearing ourselves narrate earthly events, and each of us was present—on camera, if you will—whenever anything happened onscreen. And whenever anything happened off screen, we were the person who was being informed of the event. We feel our own feelings but only observe other people’s, so we have firsthand knowledge that we are flesh and blood but we have to infer this about others. It’s not hard to see why some people conclude that they are the main character not just of their own lives but of life itself. Such people are said to have a personality disorder.

One way of managing disappointment and frustration is to think you’re in a thriller, to assume that setbacks are obstacles put before the hero by nefarious forces. This way of managing setbacks is called paranoia. It has some serious drawbacks. It distances you from other people because, like the hero of a thriller, it’s an outlook that makes all your friends suspect. It makes you want to hole up and arm yourself either literally or with anger, and this drives other people away. It’s also exhausting and, exhausted, you stop questioning your assumptions. Paranoia also has some advantages. It focuses the mind wonderfully, making you alert and hyper-rational. It gives your situation a sense of purpose, makes the universe seem meaningful rather than random, and energizes you to set things right (because what is wrong is not just misfortune, but injustice).

When people get paranoid, they feel like you feel if you are engrossed in a really good action movie, which usually begins with a series of injustices perpetrated on the main character or innocent people. You hope for, relish, and cheer a burst of violence in the name of justice. Paranoid people differ from you in what they consider an injustice, who they think is to blame, and what steps they think are needed to rectify the situation—but the feelings are the same, even down to the point of not thinking that objects of one’s anger (movie characters for you, other people for the paranoid) are fully human. In the same way that a good thriller often ends in violence, a paranoid method of managing setbacks also often ends in an outburst of anger, or even violence.

Why the news coverage of the rampage annoys me

Earlier today, a man shot up a crowded movie theater, killing a lot of people and injuring even more. Nearly everything said about this situation irritates me. I think this is because I have ideas and emotions about the shootings that are in conflict with each other, so everything I read or see ignores some aspect of my reactions.

The people who were there should be left alone. Either they have a lot to deal with, in which case pestering them for information and glamorizing their situations does not help, or they are already dealing with it, in which case sonorous concern about their well-being is likely to undermine their coping.

The people who were there should be honored. The deceased deserve to have their stories told; the wounded deserve our support; everyone, including families and friends of the people there, deserves our condolences and affection.

The shooter is an asshole. No matter what has happened to him, what drugs he was on, what disappointments he has suffered, he had no right to shoot those people. Any remark that says anything other than, “He is an asshole,” leaves me angry. Even naming him suggests he was less of an asshole, that he has some sort of backstory that contextualizes his regard for other people as only enemies, admirers, cowards, and victims. I’m a fanatic about free speech, but at moments like this, I wouldn’t mind a law that made it a crime to report his name or anything about him.

The shooter is one of us. No matter what he did, we have to acknowledge that horrifying fact. That a human is capable of this behavior, and that I am a human, is disgusting and humbling, but I can’t pretend that it is otherwise. We have to learn about him to learn about us.

I need to make sense of tragedy. I want details of the event and people involved so I can create a symbolic narrative that fits my values and my view of the world.

I want to be entertained. My son, Max, noticed while we watched the replays of 9/11 that the planes flying into the buildings had gone from horrible to kind of cool. This sense of spectatorship today makes me disgusted by my own interest.

So whatever is said about today’s shooting is bound to piss me off. I don’t like how it paints the victims, the shooter, the public, the journalists, or me.