The keynote quotes on
the back cover are a comment about this book from Steven J. Wolin, M.D.,
co-author of The Resilient Self, “Highly recommended for any woman who
wants to identify her own strengths and forever abandon the trap of thinking
like a victim,” and the famous quote by Texas governor Ann Richards, “Ginger
Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and
in high heels.” This zeitgeist could apply just as readily to disabled
people, non-white victims of discrimination, even every victim of sinfulness, as
it can to women. So what we have here is that leading normal fulfilling
lives despite having been subjected to trauma or other misfortune, has
everything to do with you. “Specializing in women’s issues” (or disabled
people’s issues or civil rights issues or issues of being victimized by
sinfulness) means treating this as an essential piece that is missing from the
victims’ lives. “The trap of thinking like a victim,” means not that one
overtly manipulates or melodramatically plays the victim role, but that he/she
doesn’t just soldier on in dancing backwards in high heels, or otherwise showing
the same resiliency that alcoholics’ children must show. After all, they
did nothing to deserve what happened to them, but they must show this level of
resilience in order not to seem maladjusted, maladaptive, and dysfunctional.
So why do you deserve more lenient standards than they do? Therefore,
plenty of people who wouldn’t turn off healthy social workers, but aren’t
resilient enough to deal with whatever their problems are, would still seem to
have an essential piece missing from their lives. Or, as Reaganomics would
put it, “the old economy” had a standard for
self-reliance, of, “If you wouldn’t turn off someone who isn’t playing a headgame of, ‘I’m Only
Trying to Help You,’ then you’re trying hard enough,” but “the new economy” must
have a standard of, “If you resiliently deal with your own problems, even when that means,
‘Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world
as it is not as I would have it,’ then you’re trying hard enough.”
The book The Problem of Evil in the
Western Tradition, by Joseph F. Kelley, is on theodicy, or the
theology of why God permits evil. Considering the subject, its tone is
rather dispassionate, but in its first chapter it says two things that would
probably make self-help proponents cringe. The first is that, as when
Kenneth Clark said that he could not define civilization but he could recognize
it when he saw it, “Ultimately, perhaps, we cannot define [evil], but we
can still recognize it when we see it.” This book also quotes Jeffrey
Burton Russell as defining evil, “the essence of evil is abuse of a sentient
being, a being that can feel pain. It is the pain that matters. Evil
is grasped by the mind immediately and immediately felt by the emotions; it is
sensed as hurt deliberately inflicted,” deliberately meaning not sadistically,
just not accidentally.
If we hold that evil is something that we can
recognize when we see it, that would have the danger of one seeing evil wherever
this would suit him to guilt-trip and otherwise manipulate people into giving
him his way. Under the current status quo, you also seem responsible for being
resiliently perseverant, even when another deliberately did something to you
that would be painful to you if you let it bother you. That’s what seems
most in line with human nature, to define “natural law” as the law of the
jungle, “reasoned order” as figuring that we must work around whatever realities
others have created, “human dignity” as dignified responses to hardship and
sinfulness, and “societal obligations” as sufferers’ obligations to provide
homeostasis. Given the self-help
slogan “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional,” the painful sense of evil,
per se, seems to be the real danger.
Every cognitive therapist would hold that “Evil is grasped by the mind
immediately and immediately felt by the emotions,” doesn’t really mean anything.
If anyone looks at the world along the lines of the Prayer of Saint
Francis, that person’s emotions would feel love pardon faith hope and joy,
even when one would naturally feel hatred, awareness of injury, doubt, despair
and sadness. If a self-help authority says, “It is the pain that matters,”
this would probably mean that the pain will be treated as the evil, not as a sign
that what caused it should be addressed and eliminated as if it’s evil.
Or, as Schopenhauer put it in
The World as Will and Representation, “Nature has
produced [the intellect] for the service of an individual will; therefore it is
destined to know things only in so far as they serve as the motives of such a
will, not to fathom them or comprehend their true inner essence,” so if someone
objects to sinfulness, then his will wants this sinful world to be as he’d have
it. Moral relativism becomes amoral absolutism, since objections to
sinfulness seem not only to be merely one’s opinion, but to be merely one’s
shamefully opinion. Of course, the decisions
made by the sinful
übermensch were even more willful, but that’s the sort of thing that
well-adjusted people would accept serenely. Schopenhauer also wrote,
“Just as a magic lantern shows many different pictures, but it is only one and
the same flame that makes them all visible, so in all the many different
phenomena which together fill the world or supplant one another as successive
events, it is only the one will that appears, and everything is its
visibility, its objectivity; it remains unmoved in the midst of this change,” so
everything seems to be a manifestation, objectification, of the will. Of course, our natural
intellect could be a very reliable guide to what helplessness is responsible for
our unnaturally high rates of depression and anxiety disorders. Yet modern
Western culture would likely treat this awareness of what is and isn’t natural, as
willfully manipulative.
Another very apparent cynical Germanic root of victim correction
as a panacea, is in which elements of psychoanalysis it retains. Most
psychoanalysis now seems ridiculous, but two elements seem very unquestionable.
The first, as one could also see in The Serenity Prayer, is that our aggressive,
harmfully “sinful,” desires are inalterable so we all must simply take them as a
given. The second, which is even more cynical, is basically the theme of
Karl A. Meninger’s book from 1938, Man Against Himself. This says
that underlying suicide, or even any behavior pattern that could be seen as
having subconscious self-punishing and/or passive-aggressive motivations, are
these motivations. For example, “These chronic invalid martyrs are so
familiar... Probably the majority of all the patients who consult
physicians and others for relief fall into this category.... perhaps women
are more frequently addicted to this form of self-destruction than are men.” The
forms of this involving interpersonal conflict are exactly the themes of psychoanalysis that
best fit the worldview of Reaganomics. It must seem that in the end we’re all
self-determined, so when it seems that others caused our problems, that’s only
because we let ourselves in for it, in ways that end up making us the villains.
For example, Menninger quoted the following by Clarence Day from The New
Yorker in 1935,
When lovely woman weds a
Tartar
And learns too late that love is grim,
How sedulously she plays the martyr,
And meanwhile makes one out of him.
The whole idea of the weak making
martyrs out of the strong through passive-aggressive resentment, very much
reflects the cynical and strength-loving themes measured by the F-Scale.
And if the motivations of the weak supposedly playing the martyr are
supposed to be subconscious, that would make them all the more insidious, and all
the more un-disprovable.
Such themes are very necessary for Reaganomics, since it requires
self-justifying faith that the strong at least must be accepted, and that the
weak are sedulously and disruptively trying to get away with more than they
deserve.
One element of psychoanalysis that trendy
self-help may not like, is the reality principle. The American
Heritage Dictionary defines this as, “In psychoanalysis, the satisfaction of
instinctual needs through awareness of and adjustment to environmental demands.”
This was supposed to be a hallmark of maturity. According to “Taking as
Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it” (which is now
supposed to be a hallmark of maturity), though, awareness and adjustment to
environmental demands would mean only awareness of what limited opportunities
exist, and what one could get away with. Awareness of the human impact, of
the fact that individuals and societies can take only so much devastation,
doesn’t seem to qualify as environmental demands. The weak are demanding
this, so it could be labeled as Nietzsche would label the demands of the weak,
as if they immaturely want the world to be as they’d have it.
Dr. Eric Berne, in his classic Games People Play,
says that the “two chief characteristics” of games are, “(1) their ulterior
quality and (2) the payoff.... Every game, on the other hand, is basically
dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting,
quality,” and that such payoffs largely “parallel the ‘gains from illness’
described by Freud.” This not only makes the weak seem duplicitous, it
also makes it easier to make innocent people seem guilty of destructive intent,
since by definition this intent would be hidden, even from themselves.
The headgames that Berne described in his
chapter “Consulting Room Games,” are the following:
“Greenhouse,” means the therapist
mechanically telling the clients nice, pop-psychology-sounding things like,
“Your hostility is showing.”
“I’m Only Trying to Help You,” is the
therapist trying to play a rescuer role, rather than doing what would be the
most productive.
“Indigence” is the impoverished client
choosing not to get a job, though he says he really is trying.
“Peasant,” is client flattering the
therapist insincerely, to win him over, as a groveling peasant would.
“Psychiatry,” is the client not really
trying to get better, so that he could continue to play the patient role for
fun.
“Stupid,” which is “played from a
depressive position,” is playing the role of the weak and stupid one.
“Wooden Leg” is the person playing the sick
role, possibly due to a real handicap which he might be able to overcome.
Where the “Wooden Leg” game got its name is, “On the other hand,
during World War II there was a man with a wooden leg who used to give
demonstrations of jitterbug dancing, and very competent jitterbug dancing, at
Army Hospital amputation centers.” Sure, Berne wrote about the “Indigence”
headgame, “First, ‘Indigence’ as a game rather than a condition due to physical,
mental, or economic disability, is played by only a limited percentage of
welfare clients. Second, it will only be supported by social workers who
are trained to play [I’m Only Trying to Help You]. It will not be
well-tolerated by other workers,” but if handicapped people are expected to deal
with their handicaps, plenty of them who aren’t jitterbugging, would therefore
seem to have chosen not to try hard enough. Also, if only the overt
manipulation that would turn off healthy social workers, would qualify as the
“Indigence” headgame, then what’s to be done with clients who aren’t overtly
manipulating, but also aren’t courageously changing everything that they
hopefully could?
The section on the “Wooden Leg” game begins,
“The most dramatic form of ‘Wooden Leg’ is ‘The Plea of Insanity.’ This
may be translated into transactional terms as follows: ‘What do you expect from
someone as emotionally disturbed as I am—that I refrain from killing people?’,”
though obviously some pleas of insanity are valid, and probably most of those
that aren’t, are no different from any other excuses that criminal defenses cook
up. For example, when the defense for Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Richard
Causey said, “It is the defendants’ position, and they believe the evidence will
show at their soon-to-begin criminal trial, that the books were not cooked at
Enron, that its stock was not inflated through fraudulent means, and that the
company’s collapse was not caused by the alleged fraud,” one could call that
“playing the victim role,” but most would say that defendants have every right
to make any claim they want.
Of these, the only one that doesn’t
define evil as whatever springs from weakness is the first one. Since
this would be something that the therapist would be engaging in, he’s probably
not going to misdiagnose himself as playing the “Greenhouse” game. Even if
he does, since it certainly doesn’t seem ignominious, all that the misdiagnosis
would result in would be that he stops saying anything that might sound like
clichés.
The other headgames very much do involve the
ignominious implications of weakness. If one attributes a therapists’
approach, to his choosing to play “I’m Only Trying to Help You,” this would mean
that both the therapist and the client, who’d seem to be his partner in the
game, would seem ignominiously weak. If one attributes the client’s
statements, to him choosing to play any of the other five headgames, that would
make him seem ignominiously weak. If someone really is intentionally
screwing-up his own job-hunting, flattering obsequiously, playing the patient
role as a hobby, playing the stupid role, or playing the sick role, then that
person certainly should get corrected. On the other hand, how would a
therapist really know that a client is trying to play it? Would he
seem innocent of that until proven guilty? If so, how could one prove it?
“Wooden leg,” and therefore, “Indigence,” could apply to any moderately
handicapped person who doesn’t seem to be trying hard enough to work around the
handicap.
Naturally a depressed person would think that
he’s stupid or otherwise incompetent, since he’s not successfully working around
his problem realities, either. One is expected to be self-reliant in situations where people, in order to seem sufficiently
self-reliant, have to face whatever their realities are, and succeed.
For example, the subtitle of
the book The
Manipulative Child, by Drs. E. W. Swihart, E. W. Swihart Jr., and
Patrick Cotter, is, “How to Regain Control and Raise Resilient, Resourceful, and
Independent Kids,” so if even kids don’t face their own problems (whatever they
may be), resiliently resourcefully and independently enough, they’d seem to be
pulling machinations. Poor people whose only inadequacies are that they
don’t seem resilient resourceful and independent enough, would still seem to be
playing the “Indigence” headgame,
even if social workers who aren’t trained to play “I’m Only Trying to Help You”
would support them. Or, possibly, any social worker who supports and
tolerates anyone who doesn’t show enough resiliency resourcefulness and
independence to deal with his problem, would seem to be playing “I’m Only Trying
to Help You,” since what would really do him some good would be to buck
up more. Social workers must expect their clients to function maturely,
which means that they have to deal with whatever they have to deal with.
Most of those who’d be classified as mollycoddles
didn’t engage in overt cunning, but rather failed to show enough resiliency
resourcefulness and independence to deal with their own problems, and the choice
not to do enough is still a choice. Even if they intended to be productive
enough, but what they did didn’t turn out to be adequate, they still could have
chosen to be more productive. Someone absolutely has to have
personal responsibility for dealing with every problem, since no matter
how many sins are forgiven, every problem simply must get dealt with.
ou could find Nietzschian statements like
the following
all over the Internet, as well as in books and magazines. In the
web page 
