To Live in Denial
Last month I reflected a bit on psychological theory regarding narcissism. According to one prominent theory as to the etiology of narcissism, the condition arises because people fail to make a sufficiently good adjustment to reality. Now, this failure supposedly occurs in toddlerhood, somewhere between ten and thirty months of age. So, the theory is fraught with evidentiary problems. How do we explore the unconscious minds of two-year-olds? Nevertheless, it sounds plausible. If persons don’t come to terms with the real world, they may fall victim to the “narcissistic lie,” the unconscious belief, “I am worthless unless . . .” No matter how someone completes that sentence, it is a lie, and it undermines a person’s psychic life.
So far, so good. I’ve said nothing controversial. But I think there are other ways to live in denial of reality, and some of them currently receive much social support and professional psychological approval. If I say these ways of thinking deny reality, and because they deny reality they pose a threat to persons’ well-being, I will be a target of criticism. (Or I would be if anyone read this blog. Since I took down Castles, my readership has fallen to zero.)
Current dogma holds that gender is independent of sex. That is, a person’s sex is determined by biology, but a person’s gender is a social construct. Much discussion or debate of these topics is clouded by imprecise language. We use “man” or “woman” as labels for both sex and gender. It would be better if we had one set of terms for biology and another for gender. Since we don’t have clear terminology, we need to let individuals define for themselves what they mean when they self-identify. So says current dogma.
For example, each person has the right to choose her or his self-identifying pronoun. It is routine in many places, including many university settings, for persons to include her or his chosen set of pronouns when signing into an online discussion. Another example: recent commercial advertisements for certain drugs (drugs used to treat sexually transmitted diseases) include a disclaimer, warning that the drug is not helpful for “persons assigned female at birth.” That is, the drug is ineffective against the disease for persons whose sex (biology) is female, even if that person’s gender (social construction) is male.
What is going on here? The root, I think, is a kind of anthropological dualism. I call it “therapeutic dualism.” Anthropological dualisms have a long history in western philosophy. In Platonic dualism, the real person is the soul, and the body is a moral and epistemological distraction. In Cartesian dualism, the real person is the conscious rational mind, and the body is an irrelevant machine. Platonic and Cartesian dualism have greatly influenced our culture, in the past and to this day. Each has certain attractive features, but on the whole I think they deform our understanding of human existence. I think the same is true of therapeutic dualism.
Therapeutic dualism says the real person is the heart, and the body is a tool the heart uses to express itself. Notice that all three dualisms deny that the body is the real person.
There are different aspects of therapeutic dualism. Borrowing from Marxist social analysis, therapeutic dualism rejects Cartesian dualism, because a person is not her conscious rational mind. Rather, a person’s thinking and action represent the interests of her social class. For Marx, social class always represented economic interests, but therapeutic dualists don’t affirm that bit. Social classes form around gender, race, ethnicity, religious, and other identities (and economic interests, but that’s just one factor). Therapeutic dualism analyses persons in terms of intersectionality. A person would be the product of many factors: gender, age, race, religion, and so on. The person’s biological sex might be included, but maybe not.
Borrowing from Freudian theory, therapeutic dualism says a person’s “heart” (my term) is largely a product of unconscious, and sometimes repressed, desires. Sexual desires are especially important, but other deep drives also contribute to one’s true being. Freud himself thought we have a drive toward death. Therapeutic dualists could buy that idea, but they don’t have to.
According to therapeutic dualism, persons need to get in touch with their true nature, especially their sexual nature. But be careful. A person’s sexual nature refers to his gender, not his sex. Sexual natures vary. Some people feel sexual attraction to persons of the same gender, some to the other gender, and some to both. Borrowing again from Freud, therapeutic dualism warns that if social rules force people to deny their true sexual nature, psychological problems will result. Some will repress their desires, with the result that they aren’t consciously aware of them. Some will fall victim to depression and suicidal ideation. And so on.
Now there must be some socially imposed limits to sexual expression. Therapeutic dualism almost always includes the utilitarian slogan: so long as no one gets hurt. Should people have multiple sexual partners? So long as no one gets hurt. Should persons practice chastity? So long as no one gets hurt. Should persons expect and demand fidelity from sexual partners? Only if no one gets hurt.
Therapeutic dualism also borrows from Nietzsche and his notion of “will to power.” The true self, according to Nietzsche, is not the conscious rational mind, but a deep drive to assert oneself. This is why, in therapeutic dualism, every person has the right to choose his or her gender and the pronouns other people should use when addressing him or her.
There are points of ambivalence and inconsistency in therapeutic dualism. Should adults enjoy sexual relationships with children? Therapeutic dualists routinely say no. Someone will get hurt, they say, the child. So there should be social restraints on sexual behavior.
(As an aside: where’s the evidence for this belief? How do we know man/boy relationships are harmful? In the ancient world, e.g., Plato’s Symposium, we find a very different view. Should we say: we know such relationships are harmful because of psychological studies? Were those studies neutrally designed? There were psychological studies of the harmfulness of gay parenting in the 1950s and 1960s. But those studies are now discredited, because they were designed under the assumption that homosexuality was deviant. What we need, someone might say, are neutrally designed studies that ask what harms arise from man/boy sex, studies that start with the assumption that all love is good love.)
The Nietzsche aspect of therapeutic dualism says a person’s gender is what he wills it to be. But the Freudian part says a person’s sexual nature derives from deep, unconscious drives. Therapeutic dualism tries to have it both ways. A person’s true sexual nature is unchosen. He or she should explore within the self to discover it. Apparently, even school age children should be exploring their feelings to discover their sexual nature. Otherwise, they will be subject to repression and worse. At the same time, each child has the right to assert their own will in this regard; no one has authority to tell a girl that she is a girl or a boy that he is a boy. Nietzsche would applaud the honesty of such self-assertion.
As with Platonic and Cartesian dualisms, there are intriguing features of therapeutic dualism. There are bits that sound right. But the dogma is not true. Though it currently shapes our culture—and for all I know it may shape our culture for hundreds of years, like Cartesianism, or thousands of years, like Platonism—it deforms our understanding of human nature. Saying why will take another essay.
