Soundings a journal of politics and culture |
Issue 15 Part II Introduction
Michael Rustin (guest editor)
Soundings is interested in the values and goals of politics
- in the questions of
why? where to? what for? Not merely the all-pervasive how? That is, we
are
interested in the politics of ends as well as means.
We hope this is evident to our readers from our previous theme issues.
For example, One-Dimensional Politics (14) explored what the perspective
of
modernisation - especially New Labour modernisation - leaves out. Emotional
Labour (11) was about aspects of the whole person - the realm of feelings
-
that modern processes of production both engage and exploit. Active Welfare
(8) developed a concept of welfare practice in which individuals were
envisaged as active participating subjects, shaping their own conditions
of
life. In this issue's theme we look at what psychoanalysis can contribute
to
contemporary social debate.
Our first two articles are concerned with the role of psychoanalysis as
a
significant, though minority, perspective within the caring professions
- including,
not surprisingly, the mental health services.
Alan Shuttleworth, in the first of these, 'Psychoanalysis, its connections,
and
change',writes about two opposing intellectual cultures (linked to an
older"two
culture" debate). He contrasts the humanism and respect for individuals-with
attention being paid to their primary relationships-which is associated
with the
psychoanalytic tradition with the more instrumental, standardising methodologies
associated with science. However, he argues that this battleground has
recently
been changing shape in complex, interesting, and ultimately promising
ways. The
individualised casework-based approaches of psychodynamic practice are
being
put under pressure by demands for 'evidence-based' health care, and are
becoming
more difficult to defend in public health settings. Shuttleworth argues
that,
although this may seem like a familiar story - the invasion of professional
autonomy
by instrumental rationalism and proceduralism - these shifts have been
accompanied by changes taking place on the other side of the divide too;
and this
is altering the terms of the long-fought and perhaps now sterile culture-war.
Developments in neuroscience, but also in laboratory-based observational
studies
of infants and their primary relationships, have been bringing emotions,
desires,
and with them the whole person, towards the centre of the 'hard' human
sciences.
So while on the one hand they may be demonstrating that the causes of
some
deficits in mental functioning lie incontrovertibly outside the sphere
of
psychodynamic explanation, on the other hand this work is acknowledging
that
emotions and early relationships have the significance in early mental
life and
psychological development that psychoanalysis has always claimed for them.
Such
work is beginning to undermine the narrowly cognitivist bias of the psychological
sciences. As Sebasian Kraemer put it in a recent television documentary
series,
love makes the brain grow'. Gerald Edelman has argued that development
of the
eural system in the first year or two of life provides an organic substrate
of
differences in character and dispositions between individuals, whose neural
systems
all 'evolve' differently from birth, in response to experience and its
mental mapping.
This provides arguments against the assumption that what is scientifically
relevant
about human beings is solely the attributes which they all generically
share.
Shuttleworth argues that the breakdown of the established defensive and
antagonistic certitudes of both psychoanalytic humanism and empiricist
scientism might result in a new synthetic approach. This would allow
approaches to developmental difficulties and disturbances based on diagnoses
of neural deficit to be applied where these are appropriate. But it would
also
recognise the value of reflexive therapeutic engagements with individuals
when,
as often, these are more appropriate.
Shuttleworth's argument suggests that the 'catastrophic change' (the term
is Bion's) inherent in the breakdown of these reified modes of thought
- the
residues of past battles - may now make possible some open-minded new
thinking
and practice.
Andrew Cooper's article, 'The state of mind we are in', also engages with
contemporary professional cultures and their struggles to survive in the
face of
what one might well call 'one-dimensional' modernisation. Whereas Alan
Shuttleworth's article focuses on the place of psychoanalysis within professional
cultures of care, Andrew Cooper seeks to make use of psychoanalytic insights
to explain what is happening in these cultures. His primary focus is on
unconscious anxiety as a source of disturbance in social processes. His
argument
is that the transition from the traditional and well-established structures
of the
welfare state to new and uncharted waters has generated intense anxieties
in
policy-makers and managers, about loss of control and the unpredictabilities
inherent in the new situation. He interprets the burgeoning and oppressive
'audit
culture' - which is currently imposing itself on schools, the National
Health
Service, universities, the social services, and virtually all other parts
of the public
sector - as a response to anxiety, a means of bringing all this potentially
chaotic
and unpredictable process under a kind of instrumental control.
His own argument, by contrast, is for a climate of more open recognition
and dialogue, such that what is most feared - the unavoidable realities
of damage,
insufficiency and loss - can be faced, and, where necessary, mourned.
In such a
'depressive' state of mind as the Kleinians term it (meaning one in which
the
damage and pain which loved objects suffer is recognised), learning from
experience may become possible, and the institution of real improvements
in
welfare practice. Andrew Cooper's conception of an open-minded search
for
the truth, in a climate in which failure can be tolerated and learned
from,
contrasts with the climate of persecution, cover-up and blame which now
invades
much of the public sector. His argument suggests that a model of consultation
might have more to contribute to the improvement of public services than
current modes of 'inspection'.
Helen Lucey and Diane Reay's article 'Social Class and the Psyche' looks
at unconscious anxiety in a different context, that of the world of
secondary school children growing up in a stressed inner city area. The
authors describe, from their ethnographic fieldwork, how deeply children
living
in neighbourhoods beset by poverty, social antagonism and crime take into
themselves and live their experience of damage and danger. Surprisingly,
perhaps,
they show that poorer children from less advantaged family contexts are
more
frightened and inhibited by this climate than many middle-class children.
It is
middle-class children - contrary to what is often conveyed in images of
the city
- who feel more confident in their relationship to urban space, and less
besieged
and trapped in their localities. Rational mastery of these prevailing
fears and
anxieties is a conscious preoccupation - almost a life-strategy - for
these children,
one with its own psychological risks for them. Helen Lucey and Diane Reay
note however that the rational control and self-mastery of these children
involves
a projection of irrationality, inadequacy, and dangerousness outside themselves
and into others. This can become part of a transitive, projective, labelling
process, amplified by society in many ways, whose effects may be to undermine
the self-worth of more vulnerable children, and leave them exposed to
difficulties
not of their own making.
One way of interpreting Lucey and Reay's narrative is that it describes
a process in which the most vulnerable are made to bear the
psychological burdens of an unequal society. The authors develop
psychoanalytic insights into relations between classes in ways which have
hitherto been more often explored in the sphere of race and ethnicity.
Our remaining two articles diverge from these explicitly socio-political
concerns. The first is about one of Dennis Potter's last great films for
television,
and the second is about still-life paintings and the reasons for their
power to
engage the attention of those who look at them.
Richard Graham notes in his article, 'Remembering, repeating, redemption:
reflections on Dennis Potter's Karaoke' - that karaoke is a metaphor in
the film
for mainly inauthentic kinds of performance or impersonation. The film,
like
The Singing Detective (on which we published an equally searching article
in
Soundings 2, by David Bell), is an exploration of the inner world of a
writer who
no doubt bears some relation to Potter himself. Daniel, the main character
in
Karaoke, finds himself to be dying of cancer, as Potter was when he was
writing
it. The film depicts the confusions between 'reality' and the imagination,
as the
fictional author's characters turn out to have escaped from their script
into the
world, or to be real persons who have taken over the author's imagination.
The central issue in this film for television is the relationship of several
male
characters to the women in their lives - 'Pig' Mailion, a night-club owner
and
gangster, the director of Daniel's current film, and Daniel himself. Mailion
uses
the sexuality of his women as an instrument for blackmail, as well as
for his
own pleasure. The director betrays his wife whilst he is pursuing an affair
with
his leading actress, and is subsequently blackmailed by Mailion and beaten
up.
Daniel finds that the escort girl he has followed to her club, and who
befriends
him, is the daughter of a women whom Mailion has badly disfigured. Daniel
adopts her as his quasi-daughter
Referred to by implication, perhaps, is the world of commercial sexual
exploitation memorably attacked by Potter in his last television interview
in the figure of Rupert Murdoch. One might say that Potter here reflects,
in the various qualities of men's relationship to women, in the love shown
to
Daniel as he nears death, and perhaps also in a final 'political' act
of Daniel's
killing of Mailion, on the conditions of possibility of a better society.
Richard Graham shows the contribution that can be made by a
psychoanalytic perspective to the understanding of a major popular work
of
art, through its recognition of the role of unconscious hatred, of the
capacity
for love and reparation, and of the powers of the creative imagination
in working
Still life painting, as Jennifer Wakelyn tells us in her article, is about
objects
- what we might now be tempted to think about as the objects of consumption.
Simon Schama, in his book on seventeenth century Holland, The Embarrassment
of Riches, described the inner conflicts in an earlier period between
a world of
material abundance and Protestant inhibitions about the enjoyments of
the
senses. Schama's focus on the complexities of relations to objects has
its earlier
precedents, as Jennifer Wakelyn points out, in Marx's reflections on the
fetishism
of commodities, and in Freud's explorations of fetishistic relationships
to objects
of desire.
Her own argument is that still life painting enables us to reflect on
how we
know objects, and to explore their meanings for us and our feelings towards
them at levels deeper than we consciously understand. She shows that the
experience of still life painting evokes our most basic relationships
to sensory
experience, enabling us to hold in contemplation a complex interplay of
desires,
feelings and perceptions which are the foundations of our capacity for
experience.
One would hardly try to construct a politics from still-life painting.
But on
the other hand, the opening of Tate Modern, the new Walsall Art Gallery,
the
extended National Portrait Gallery, Somerset House, the refurbished Dulwich
Art Gallery, and the Lowry Museum at Salford Quays, all in the space of
a few
months, makes it clear that visual art is at this point a far from marginal
area of
the national life.
To return to our initial set of questions about the purposes which underlie
political projects. What are all these art galleries for if not to create
spaces for
thinking, for the exploration of meaning? Museum developments are often
undertaken and justified as vehicles for urban regeneration, or as competitive
attractions for tourists. But they are only effective even in these secondary
purposes if there are real experiences to be had in them, at the end of
the
journeys.
In the end, a worthwhile political project has to connect with fundamental
questions of human meaning and value. We have tried to show in this
Soundings theme section that these are at issue in current scientific
debates
about the mind, in the trials of the public welfare system, in the experience
of
growing up in the inner city, in the self-explorations represented in
the final
works of a great writer's life, and in the meaning of an art form as classical
and
apparently unpolitical as still life painting. We have tried to show something
of
what psychoanalysis - a humanism whatever else it might be - has to contribute
to this fundamental inquiry. One reason why these articles are about such
apparently disparate topics is that we think that value and meaning is
best
clarified through engagement with particular areas of experience, rather
than
through generalities.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |