“Passive - Aggressive Disorder” was also included in the DSM at about that time. This should have
been called “Omissive - Commissive Disorder,” since the whole idea was that if
you omit Stoically setting about solving your problem, you’d therefore seem to
have committed playing the victim role. This definition was later rejected
for condemning a person for characteristics that were actually “situational,”
since the worse are the characteristics of the situation, the more insidious
victim-power he’d have if he didn’t simply take response-ablility for his own
problem, the more that the
victim should do to benefit himself by dealing with reality, and the more that
saying this would seem to be constructive criticism that’s imperative. Yet what
this condemnation of the situationality as not being scientifically valid,
misses is that it necessarily victim-bashes, blaming victims for the
characteristics of their arduous situations, that the victims didn’t deal with
stolidly enough to rectify them so seem to have tacitly approved of them. In
spirit, one could say that while the Self-Defeating Personality Disorder would
be victimity for fun though a perverse fun, the Passive-Aggressive Personality
Disorder would be victimity for profit.
Yet exactly what would be seen as passivity, would
depend on how much active response-ability a person is supposed to have. What this is in the context of, is the norms that
lead to, as
Abnormal Psychology and Modern Life, Sixth Edition, by James C. Coleman,
James N. Butcher, and Robert C. Carson, copyright 1980, describes, “In fact, it
has been estimated that some 8 to 10 persons in 100—about 25 million
Americans—will evidence a severe depressive episode at some time in their lives
(Brown, 1974). Over 2 million of these will suffer profound depressions
(President’s Commission on Mental Health, 1978).”
When you’ve seen guides that say things like this, you
may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this?
Everyone knows that I’ll simply have to deal with reality, meaning whatever my
realities are. If my realities are typical for a society with rampant
depression, then those around me would tell me that if I’m not putting out
enough effort to deal with your ordinary realities, then I’m derelict. In
such an adversarial society, naturally I’d have to face many situations where
I’d have to prevent or fix problems that others caused me, or not let them
bother me. Therefore, what would seem ‘passive-aggressive’ in such a
society, would mean inadequately taking care of a good deal of problems that
aren’t at all my fault. Dr. David Burns, in the classic cognitive therapy
self-help book Feeling Good, defines the cognitive distortion
‘Personalization,’ the juggernaut of the cognitive distortions of modern Western
depression, as, ‘You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event
which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.’ I could very easily
be treated as passive-aggressive, simply because I seemed to be too passive
about a problem which in fact I was not primarily responsible for!”
Psychotherapy of Addicted Persons, by Edward Kaufman, copyright 1994,
summarizes that era’s definition of Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder:
DSM-III-R (American Psychiatric
Association, 1987) requires five of nine behaviors for a diagnosis, including:
(1) procrastinates; (2) becomes sulky, irritable, or argumentative when asked to
do something he/she does not want to do; (3) works deliberately slowly or
poorly; (4) protests unjustly about demands made; (5) forgets obligations; (6)
believes he/she is doing a much better job than others think; (7) resents useful
suggestions about productivity; (8) obstructs efforts of others by failing to do
his/her share; and (9) unreasonably criticizes or scorns those in positions of
authority. In order for a diagnosis of PAPD to be made, these behaviors
must be chronic and inflexible—not situational reactions to stress or a
particular life situation in which there is perceived helplessness, such as
military service or incarceration.
No doubt, living in a society in which 10 persons in
100 will evidence a severe depressive episode at some time in their lives,
wouldn’t qualify as a particular life situation in which there is perceived
helplessness. Chances are that even if someone was unusually helpless
throughout his entire life, maybe because he lived in poverty, his reactions to
this would therefore qualify as chronic and inflexible, rather than due to a
particular situation. Yet for this very reason, such a society would have
to make unconditional expectations that people simply deal with their own
problems. Otherwise, with all the helplessness that leads to the
extraordinary rate of depression, too many problems will have no one
wholeheartedly taking responsibility for them.
In the original
meaning of the term “Passive-Aggressive Disorder,” the person would have had to
neglect to do something that, in objective terms, he clearly should have done,
in order to seem passive-aggressive. Psychoanalyst Karl Menninger, in his
book from 1938, Man Against Himself,
tells of how many behavior patterns that may seem
ultimately self-defeating, actually have an insidious “secondary gain,” and
“aggressive purpose,” of the sort that the Wagnerian attitude of psychoanalysis
is likely to see underlying a lot of weaknesses. This book includes, in
its chapter ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, a subchapter PASSIVE NEUROTIC AGGRESSION,
which begins,
Sometimes instead of blustering, fighting, and
trouble-making, the individual accomplishes his aggressions and his
self-destruction by a more passive technique. Passivity can be just as
provocative as active aggression. In fact, perhaps those who exasperate
their associates by laziness, indifference, and ineptitude are more numerous
even if less conspicuous than those of the type illustrated above. In
such cases the punitive [i.e. ultimately self-defeating] effect is likely to
be more insidious and to appear more definitely as if the individual were the
victim of fate or of inexorable forces such as economics rather than of the
vengeance of those whom he has injured [which is how anti-social people
usually get theirs predictably].
For want of a better name, we might call this kind of neurotic character
the
“helpless”
type.
As is also typical for modern self-help, what’s meant by
“the ‘helpless’ type” is the supposedly helpless type, the intentionally
helpless and therefore not really helpless, type. The person
seems to fit the pattern as described by Hitler’s main inspiration,
Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, “Wrong
through violence is not so ignominious for the perpetrator as wrong through
cunning, because the former is evidence of physical strength, which in all
circumstances powerfully impresses the human race. The latter, on the
other hand, by using the crooked way, betrays weakness, and at the same time
degrades the perpetrator as a physical and moral being.” The
supposedly ignominiously cunning weakling, is supposed to be faking his
helplessness to achieve a hidden agenda that’s actually aggressive. Just
as the two relevant definitions of the word passive, in the current
Merriam Webster’s computer dictionary, are, “not active : acted upon,” and
“SUBMISSIVE : PATIENT,” we tend to figure that passive could mean
involuntarily passive, or voluntarily passive.If we limit this concept to those who could be
proven guilty of putting on their laziness, indifference, ineptitude, etc., and
could make up an actuarial test that would test for signs that someone likes to
play the helpless and/or incompetent role, then fine. The big “catch” is
that whether someone seems passive in the real world, would depend on what’s
happening to him, and what he must do in order to take care of the resulting
problems well enough. It could seem not only that “everyone knows” that if
something is reality for you then of course you’re supposed to deal with
it, but that if any limits were put to this, it would be unrealistic, since no
matter what happens to you, you’ll simply have to take care of it. For
example, the conception of personal responsibility as shown in that
Alateen comic strip,
might seem extreme, but obviously, all of the self-help
gurus who use Al-Anon as a role model, don’t regard their conception of personal
responsibility as extremist laissez faire. In a society in which 10
persons in 100 will evidence a severe depressive episode at some time in their
lives, it would be pretty routine for someone to find himself (or, more likely,
herself) in a situation in which she is undoubtedly a victim of someone
else’s choices, that she will simply have to take personal response-ability for
her own welfare. That’s what would be necessary to get through life, get
on with life, etc. Therefore, if she doesn’t do enough to succeed, she
could seem to be using enough laziness, indifference, ineptitude, etc., to make
her seem helpless, though not enough that she could be proven guilty of having a
“helpless” character. If someone who seems to have a “helpless” character
seems to be trying to take personal response-ability for her own welfare but
doesn’t do enough, then her half-measures could seem to be, at least on a
subconscious level, ignominiously cunning, or, as modern self-help thinking
would put it, “manipulative.”
No actuarial tests, diagnostic criteria, etc., could
recognize attitude problems that those who have them hide through subconscious
ignominious cunning, since you couldn’t recognize it if you presumed people
innocent of it until proven guilty. Anyone who’s any good at any tactic
that could be called “ignominiously cunning,” or “manipulative,” would use
tactics that could be called “textbook cases.” Therefore, in the real
world, anyone who’s trying to decide whether anyone’s behavior was
passive-aggressive, or otherwise manipulative, would have to look for
ignominiously cunning behavior other than what the textbooks list. It’s
very easy to be passive-aggressive without unambiguously: procrastinating;
protesting when asked to do something he/she does not want to do; doing a job
inadequately (For those who chronically live with alkies, doing one’s jobs
adequately might require unreasonable effort and sacrifice.);
protesting unjustly (unjustly in whose opinion?) about demands made; forgetting
obligations; overestimating (in whose opinion?) the value of one’s own work;
resenting useful (in whose opinion?) suggestions about productivity (Even if
you’re an alkie’s kid, and you do blame others instead of looking at yourself,
then handling your own problems more productively would mean courageously
changing whom you can, yourself, and serenely accepting whom you can’t, everyone
else. Believers in Alateen find such self-help advice useful,
maybe even necessary to be well-adjusted.); obstructing efforts of others
by failing to do his/her share (In whose opinion would one be obligated to do
that?); and unreasonably (in whose opinion?) criticizing or scorning those in
positions of authority.
There would be no room for
rule 2.04 of
The Code of Ethics of the American
Psychological Association, “Bases for Scientific and Professional
Judgments,” which says, “Psychologists’ work is based upon established
scientific and professional knowledge of the discipline.” One could prove
a diagnosis of PAPD if the person had a manifest penchant for acting lazy, indifferent, inept,
etc. due to a helpless character, but how do you prove an ignominiously cunning
intent if the person tries to succeed but doesn’t try hard enough? How do
you prove an ignominiously cunning intent if an alkie’s family member is showing
as much resolve as would be expected of someone in a normal situation, but when
living with an alkie, that level of resolve would obviously lead to failure?
This guidebook is also Al-Anon Conference-Approved
Literature. And, if one is willing to call someone “pasive-aggressive”
simply because she didn’t show as much resolve as her reality requires, this
could very easily mean expecting her to make her crises work for her. If
it seems that she could have made a crisis of hers work for her, but she didn’t,
one could ask why she chose to let her crisis remain a crisis. It wouldn’t
matter if she was as unambiguously helpless as an alkie’s wife would be in the
face of the problems he’d cause. What would matter is if she seems to have
chosen to let her problems happen, continue, or bother her. One can only
imagine how many times women diagnosed as codependent, were lectured that since
they didn’t show enough resolve and resourcefulness to deal with the
crises that their impossible husbands caused, this must be a symptom of their
codependency, that they must have intended not to do enough to stop their own
martyrdom.
In order to seem not to be passive in a society with rampant
depression, you just might have to deal adequately with the realities that you’d
encounter in that society. Objectivism would probably say quite
explicitly, that how one determines objectively whether or not you’re too
passive, is whether or not you deal adequately with your realities, whatever
they may happen to be. And if you responded to this by saying, “But I’m
not volitionally creating my own failures,” you’d be told that if you didn’t
deal with your realities as adequately as it seems you could have, that still
would have been a passive-aggressive choice you made.
Very
telling is the fact that the two definitions of the word passive in the
computer Merriam Webster’s Dictionary, which have to do with
interpersonal interactions, are, “not active : acted upon,” and “SUBMISSIVE :
PATIENT.” In other words, this could mean either involuntarily passive, or
voluntarily passive. Self-help literature could also use the word
victim in both senses, in that it could mean that the person chose to be a
victim for “fun” and/or profit. Given how prone our culture is to see
passivity just as the philosopher who most shaped Hitler’s thinking, Arthur
Schopenhauer, did, “Wrong through violence is not so ignominious for the
perpetrator as wrong through cunning, because the former is evidence of
physical strength, which in all circumstances powerfully impresses the human
race. The latter, on the other hand, by using the crooked way, betrays
weakness, and at the same time degrades the perpetrator as a physical and moral
being,” and, “The concept of good is divided into two subspecies, that of the
directly present satisfaction of the will in each case, and that of its merely
indirect satisfaction concerning the future, in other words, the agreeable and
the useful. The concept of the opposite, so long as we are speaking of beings
without knowledge, is expressed by the word bad, more rarely and
abstractly by the word evil, which therefore denotes everything that is
not agreeable to the striving of the will in each case,” we’re very likely to
see passivity as a form of voluntary, cunning aggression, striving for more than
what one had won. In any
relationship that could legitimately be called codependent, one person is
glaringly morally responsible for the misery of another, yet if she doesn’t just
shut up and deal with her own problems, that would seem to reflect her
. In fact, since the diagnosis of “passive-aggressive” first came from
psychoanalytic conceptions of human nature, which are based on Wagnerian German
conceptions of it, it’s no wonder that this diagnosis sees people’s unquenchable
making them ignominiously and underhandedly (but not consciously) use weakness
to aggress.
Yet another example of what
Twelve-Step groups
attribute to resentment, is that
the second
chapter of AA’s Big Book, in warning that one’s alcoholism causes others
distress and suffering, described those suffering the effects of others’
alcoholism, as feeling “fierce resentment,” which certainly makes their travails
seem aggressive, especially when you keep in mind the fierce connotations that
the word “resentment” had to the writers of the Big Book. “[Alcoholism] engulfs
all whose lives touch the sufferer’s. It brings misunderstanding, fierce
resentment, financial insecurity, disgusted friends and employers, warped lives
of blameless children, sad wives [and they’re not blameless, their lived not
warped?] and parents anyone can increase the list,” which, I’m sure, is what
others’ distress looks like to alcoholics who are being held accountable, all
that misunderstanding, fierce resentment, disgust, and similar ungraceful states
of mind which adult victims could choose not to have.
The only physical reality that they see
as resulting from alcoholism is “financial insecurities,” though even
“insecurities” make this sound like anxious uncertainty rather than a very real
lowering of standard of living. This book should have said instead, “It
brings financial and other physical burdens.” All that you have to do is
read all of the other things that the Big Book, publications from Al-Anon, etc.,
have to say about distress and suffering, and you could see that victim-blaming is, quite
literally, the attitude that Twelve Step groups have towards distressed feelings
about what others do, though distress about the harm that one’s own addiction did to
oneself is certainly encouraged. It seems that since, unlike the animals,
we can choose how we perceive what happens to us, if someone feels fierce
resentment, then that must reflect his own attributes and character. This
can also have the quality of survival skills. As the title of a
Libertarian self-help book put it, You
Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought. If you think
something that
you can’t afford to think in your situation (such as having any objections to
victim correction as a panacea, while living with an alcoholic), though in another situation you
could have afforded to think it (such as having objections to victim correction
as a panacea, while not relying on with a problem person), then, plainly and simply, you blew your budget. Of course, it seems that we mustn’t address the question of whether anyone can
afford the luxuries of any of the sinful thoughts of anyone else. We’re
explicitly commanded to take sinfulness as a given.
Oftentimes the “passive” in passive-aggressive comes from the person being at
the mercy of someone’s aggression or heedlessness, or does that matter at all? Considering that this has the same distortions as does survival skill logic in
general, “passive” has the characteristic self-responsible connotations of
“volitionally,” even if the volition didn’t really exist. When one is
described as “passive,” you could be pretty sure that this intends to imply
“volitionally passive,” choosing passivity as a mollycoddle tactic for fun and
profit. If you’ve
been walloped, the only way in which you could seem to have backbone is by just
shutting up and taking response-ability for your own welfare, unless the
situation is bad enough that this would seem untenable. If you bring
up the situation, this could be labeled as passive-aggressive “excuses”
“blame-finding” or machinations. If freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you,
then any situation would seem like just an opportunity for freedom as long as
the victim has enough backbone. Psychology since the Reagan/Thatcher era
often thought in terms of survival skills rather than fixing mental illness. I could just imagine someone in a support group for women’s labeled
codependent because of their husbands’ penchants, not because the women want to
be martyrs or caretakers, saying, “Don’t criticize me for not doing whatever it
took to deal with a huge disaster that my husband caused for me, since that
doesn’t constitute a mental illness.” As usual the idea of
Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder would go against Occam’s Razor since the
problems that the victim receives passively would seem to be his aggressive
ploys, so this would require enough sophistry to make the situation’s supposedly
aggressive characteristics seem to be the passive victim’s characteristics, and
against falsifiability since if you refused to accept such a diagnosis because
it can’t be disproved, you’d seem to be ignoring the warnings that good survival
skills would take seriously. Giving someone the label “passive-aggressive”
is done out of survival skills, intuition that a danger exists, and survival
skills are a matter of perceived risk assessment and erring on the side of
caution, not scientific skepticism. If people are to be judged by the
standards of The Serenity Prayer, no possible personal shortcomings would seem
situational, and people would be judged as bill collectors would judge them,
simply according to whether or not they’re meeting the demands of whatever their
reality is. If they don’t then it would seem that they’re simply in
default, and that if we let people get away with defaulting then they won’t make
adequate provisions to protect themselves from this happening in the future,
they’ll use their situations as excuses, etc. Another synonym for
“passive-aggressive” is “mollycoddle.”
