We all need to be validated. External confirmation that we are making sense is vital for our self-esteem, which is why whenever we venture an opinion we immediately scout around for confirmation – and feel vindicated or isolated depending on our success in this respect.
This is the case with everyday needs – for instance, my parenting actions usually require my wife’s validation (although I notice this is less required in the opposite direction) – and the bigger themes in our life, hence the emotional exchanges when our young career choices frustrate our parents. Certainly, for my new book – a self-help book on overcoming fear of failure called What’s Stopping You? (out in April) – I sought validation. It has as its premise, an attack on the self-help industry, which not only over-promises (we knew that) but offers a cure for conditions that are, fundamentally, incurable.
Yet these are strong opinions, forcefully made: validation is required. Luckily I won it from no less a figure than Donald Kirkpatrick, the Chairman of the London Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. After many conversations and much guidance – helping me crystalise my own views on self-help and fear of failure – Donald agreed to write a summary for the book, thus giving my year-long pursuit that all-important sign-off.
Yet he did more than that. In fact, he so blew me away with his positioning of the book within the history of ideas and alongside current trends in psychological treatment I think it worth pre-publishing:
With my deepest thanks, here it is in full:
"Kelsey has identified a personal problem, the fear of failure, and – I think rightly – argues that this has a mass base. Certainly, the current zeitgeist of endless choice and 'reaching for success' encourages this, and encourages writers such as Kelsey to tackle it. Yet he actually taps into a rich tradition going back to fifth-century BC Greece.
“The people of Plato’s Athens were depressed because they had lost sight of what was good for them and were alienated by the pointless life they were leading. Then as now philosophers arose to offer an answer: that they did know what was good for the people. The project was then the injection of those good ideas into the citizenry by means of words – or rhetoric – the effect of which would be that the citizen would stop being depressed as they energetically pursued the good-life as prescribed by the philosopher.
“Kelsey has taken it a stage further and offered a criticism of this injection – stating that the positive effects of such rhetoric for the citizen are likely to wear off, rendering him or her further confused and potentially more deeply depressed.
“Yet this vein of resistance to what Plato would call the ‘philosopher kings’ also has deeply historical roots. Even in fifth-century BC Athens, Gorgias (Encomium of Helen) was profoundly disturbed by what he saw as the introduction of foreign ideas into a body. Is this not always a kind of poisoning or intoxication, he wondered? Socrates follows on: opining that the people of Athens were depressed precisely because they had been poisoned by swallowing someone else's idea of what was good for them.
“And this debate has more modern reflections. Consider the ‘positive hallucination’ first explored as hypnotism became formalised in 19th Century Europe. If via hypnotism we introduce a foreign idea into the subject's consciousness (‘I am a love God’, for example) the foreign idea sets up a forgetting of what one knows (‘I am terrified of women’) in favour of what someone else knows. The subject then negotiates the object via this ‘false connection’ and wrongly estimates his capacities – in this case rendering the hypnotised subject a clown strutting the stage as a ‘love God’ while we, the audience, snigger as the ones ‘in the know’.
“Skip forward 100-odd years and the concept of conditioning ourselves for success remains, as does the notion that success can be established on the back of a self-induced ‘false-connection’. Renata Salecl argues in her excellent new book Choice (2010) that in today’s abundance we are anxious to choose the right thing. And this often involves electing a temporary ‘authority’ that can tell us what to do. Most often in the secular modern world this authority is the self-help guru or life coach. And Sigmund Freud argues in his Group Psychology (1921) that putting anyone in a figure of ‘authority’ opens one up to ‘suggestion’ with ultimately negative consequences for our condition.
“It is in this tradition that we can understand the new authorities that are CBT and NLP, with life coaching and other motivational treatise its variants. This is sanctioned ‘positive hallucination’ (or ‘positive thinking’). If, with Plato, we accept that we do not know what is good for us, and if somehow we were off sick on the day that the ‘good idea’ was handed out, then we can accept this ‘positive thinking’ as a late and implanted alternative. Unfortunately the clinical evidence is stacking up: successes are temporary and fade away. Meanwhile, core beliefs remain unworked, and re-emerge.
“But how does it manifest? In an alternative school of hypnotism that arose in 19th Century France what was stressed was the negative-hallucination. Here a piece of knowledge is stripped out of the subject’s consciousness under hypnotic influence: for instance, ‘there is no furniture in this room’. If instructed to then proceed to close a door in a furnished room, interestingly the subject will avoid the furniture. But when asked why she took such a tortuous route, the subject offers excuses such as ‘a creaky floorboard’ or ‘I felt a draft’ rather than state the obvious truth of the furniture’s existence.
“This is the result that Kelsey is so alert to in his work. The hypnotist has not reduced the subject's knowledge of the world, instead simply reducing her knowledge of why she took the route she did. Secondly, and more importantly, is the demonstration that we do not tolerate gaps in our knowledge of the world. Faced with a ‘not knowing’ of the real reasons for what we do, we will compulsively manufacture glosses that create ‘false connections’ between things – clinging to those reasons against logical assaults.
“Kelsey’s thesis challenges this notion of ‘collective forgetting’ – as encouraged by the modern philosopher kings – in the way that a hypnotist can cause a ‘forgetting’ with a ‘negative hallucination’. He goes on to show how the omission of that particular knowledge (‘I fear failure’) leads to fictions that we then compulsively elaborate to explain how our world is, and which we then go on to defend.
“Kelsey’s philosophy is more in the Socratic tradition of pointing to the difficulty – stating that ‘fear of failure’ is a militant and systemic fact that we ignore at our peril. If we are aware that this particular conclusion (of fearing failure) pre-determines our actions, then rather than forgetting about it because it is too difficult – via rhetorical devices, or ‘negative hallucination’, or via ‘conditions of cure’ such as NLP that offer ‘suggestion’ and ‘authority’ – we bear it in mind and keep it in our sights, judging each of our actions accordingly.
“This may not lead to the glorious outcomes we hoped for, but it will lead us away from false and temporary pursuits that can ultimately underline, rather than undermine, our negative core beliefs. It also offers a strong building block for sustainable treatment by psychoanalysis, based on the underlying structures established by Freud in the 1880s.”
Donald Kirkpatrick – psychoanalyst and a founder of the London Association for Counselling and Psychoanalysis.
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