What’s Wrong with Therapeutic Dualism?
In the “Dualisms” essay I posted a few months ago, I introduced the label “Therapeutic Dualism” in an attempt to describe what I think is a widespread, though inchoate, doctrine. I compared this contemporary dualism with Platonic and Cartesian versions of dualism. The basic ideas, I wrote, are two. First, a person’s true self is to be identified with her heart and not her body; second, recognizing and affirming this true self will improve her life. Both elements of therapeutic dualism can be found in academic writing of many sorts, but more importantly they permeate our popular culture. For example, consider the Disney film for children, The Little Mermaid, in which Ariel improves her life by ceasing to be a mermaid. In a thousand different ways therapeutic dualism teaches us to “follow your heart.” You can become anything you wish, if you truly believe.
The chief problem with therapeutic dualism is that it’s false. You cannot become anything you wish. Young boys cannot become major league pitchers merely by believing in their dream, even if their belief causes them to practice for years. The fact is that years of hard work will only make a major league pitcher if it is combined with a body with certain hard-to-quantify natural qualities. (For example, the boy’s body must be able to endure thousands of practice pitches without career-ending injury.)
But the problems with therapeutic dualism multiply when we consider three strands of thinking that have contributed to it. My earlier essay identified these strands as Marxist, Freudian, and Nietzschean. Individually and together, these strands describe the human “heart.” They rebel against Descartes, who taught that the essential person, the true self, was the conscious rational mind.
Marx taught that social relationships controlled the mind, and social relationships reduced to economic relations in the end. Contemporary therapeutic dualists may not hew to Marx’s materialism, but they accept the importance of social relations. We see this in intersectionality, the idea that a person can only be understood through social relations.
Freud taught that innate drives controlled the mind. All societies teach individuals to repress their innate drives, because social peace requires control, but such repression often leads to psychological problems. Again, contemporary therapeutic dualists don’t have to buy all of Freud’s theories (e.g. that we have an innate drive toward death), but very often they do affirm the idea that a person’s true self is found in his unchosen desires. We see this in sexual orientation, the idea that proper sexual behavior is determined by one’s innate sexual desires.
Nietzsche taught that will to power controlled the mind. Most people deny this fact, having been thoroughly deceived by the cultural taboos of weak people. Ironically, Nietzsche thought, the weaklings of the world had emasculated strong men through collaborative will to power. Against the false rules of the weak, Nietzsche counseled individuals to assert themselves. We see this in non-binarism, the idea that sexual orientation need not be controlled by sexual desires; when it comes to sexual identity, you can literally be anything you choose.
I readily admit there is something right in each of these doctrines. Social relations do affect the way we think, unchosen sexual desires are strong (in most people), and the drive to bend the world to our will is present beneath our conscious rationalizations. But therapeutic dualism absolutizes these factors to produce contradictions and error.
For instance, we are told that it is impossible for Joe—white, male, cis-gendered, heterosexual, privileged, Christian, and old—to really understand a person who is brown or gay or poor or young. This is the extreme form of intersectionality. A person just is the combination of social forces that created him. But if that is true, it would be impossible for persons from different groups to understand each other. Why should we bother to listen to each other if our thinking is determined by social relations?
(This problem traces back to an incoherency in Marxism. According to dialectical materialism all social forces, including religion and philosophy, are determined by the economic base. If that is true, Marxism itself, because it is a philosophy, is determined by economic forces. But Marx and other Marxist philosophers were not proletarians. How could they possibly read history right?)
There is much clinical evidence that same-sex attraction is unchosen in some people. So we have all become accustomed to thinking in terms of sexual orientation. Our unchosen desires determine who we are as sexual beings. At least, that’s the standard line. Children are taught to look inward, into their “heart,” to discover what they really are. It’s not just sexual behavior, but gender itself, that is divorced from the body. But what if some person does not want to be controlled by her heart? What if she investigates her heart and sees many different, competing desires? What if she decides—what if she wills—something else? Here the Nietzschean aspect of therapeutic dualism comes into conflict with the Freudian aspect.
Another problem emerges when we inquire into moral limits on Freudian drives. The standard move is simple utilitarianism: we may rightly indulge our sexual drives however we like, so long as we don’t hurt others. Now, consider a thirteen-year-old boy—at just the right age, when his beard is starting to come in, according to the experienced lovers in Plato’s Symposium. He has examined his heart, and he want to enter a sexual relationship with an older man. But no! According to our utilitarian bent, such a relationship would be unequal and bring harm to the boy. Amid all the many variations of the sexual revolution, this relationship—so highly praised by Plato’s speakers—is still regarded as immoral and illegal. But the same thirteen-year-old boy, if he reports that he has discovered that he is transgender, may demand sex reassignment surgery. At least, that’s the conclusion some have reached. It’s especially important that he not be held back by the backward thinking of his parents. In this conflict, the Nietzschean bent wars against both utilitarianism and the Freudian bent.
I think therapeutic dualism is a real power in our contemporary culture. But it is unstable, self-contradictory, and—most importantly—false. A person’s “heart” cannot be cloven off from his body. We need a new Aristotelian view, in which the soul is the form of the body.
