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.
Showing posts with label Renata Salecl. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Renata Salecl. Show all posts
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Monday, November 22, 2010
Does choice mean happiness? You choose
Books on choice and choosing have been hitting the bookstores and Amazon rankings lately – mostly dealing with the potential consequences of choice. Speak to the rich and they’ll immediately tell you that the key advantage of wealth is choice, making the lack of choice – consequently – one of the worst downsides of poverty.
Yet choice also has its downsides. Untutored, we can become stymied by choice. Scared of making the wrong choice, we wring our hands and hesitate. And while this may seem like a harmonious dilemma – compared to those forced to live their life without choice – their restrictions are little comfort as we become potentially terrorised by our own autonomy. If we can choose anything: our career, class, gender, sexuality, identity – then who do we blame when that future turns out not as we had hoped?
Fear of failure is, of course, the psychological consequence of this. Having total freedom to choose our future – with only ourselves to blame for our failures – is enough to make even the confident hesitate at the threshold of a major decision. This, as Renata Salecl argues in her new book Choice, is the “tyranny of choice”, which – she claims – is founded on a series of lies.
The first lie is the notion (often put about by economists) that our individual choices are rational, when they are mostly irrational – based on our unconscious desires. These are likely to be insatiable, meaning that we will always be dissatisfied – hardly a recipe for greater happiness. Indeed, her second lie is the notion choice creates happiness, when in fact choice-overload causes anxiety. We become concerned that our poor choices will lead to public humiliation (a classic concern of the High-FF as I call those with fear of failure).
Salecl states that society’s response to this “tyranny” is a growth in the self-help industry – aimed at aiding choice for the masses. She cites the popularity of books on Feng Shui, for example – helping us even choose where to place the furniture! Certainly this is a major theme of What’s Stopping You? my book on fear of failure (TBP March 2011 by John Wiley & Sons). Seeking a cure for the incurable (our insecurities) we elect temporary authorities that tell us how to behave and how to decide. In the secular modern world these authorities are the self-help gurus or life coaches, and the cure can be NLP or CBT, perhaps delivered by hypnotism or acupuncture or even, what the heck, Feng Shui – anything that is instant and life-changing.
Ultimately, Salecl argues, self-help books perpetuate these anxieties, rather than alleviate them. Offered the chance to become a better person making better choices, we grab it. Yet our insecurities remain unworked and ultimately return – although now we are more jaded than ever because they are laced with disappointment.
Even at street level we outsource our choices to “gurus”, whether these are for fashion or “style”, or – more fundamentally – role models that sway our career preferences (deciding between a career as a popstar or celebrity chef, perhaps). After all, “queen of shops” Mary Portas defined the mid-noughties UK “followers of fashion” as the “disciples of Beckham” – meaning that they had entirely outsourced their reasoning regarding what was and wasn’t fashionable to a celebrity couple from Essex.
More damaging (at least in my view) is Salecl’s noting that the consumer-choice model has ingrained itself into our view of relationships – our search for love following the same pattern of constant comparison and, therefore, near constant switching as we convince ourselves we are missing “a better deal” elsewhere. We are condemned to imagining parallel lives based on perceived wrong turns – especially with our choice of partner.
This brought in the other recently-published book on choice I’d been studying: The Art of Choosing, by Sheena Iyengar. In one passage she discusses arranged marriages, which for 5,000 years was the compact by which women met their husbands in many societies (including in Europe), without any noticeable detriment to that society’s happiness despite contemporary incomprehension that anyone could allow others to handle such an important decision. Some religions still prescribe many aspects of life for their believers, again without any noticeable heightening of hopelessness or depression: in fact quite the opposite.
“Perhaps the main issue with increasing choice is that it betrays our expectations,” says Iyengar – meaning that upping the choice also raises anticipation of a beneficial outcome, which increases disappointment, leading to heightened levels of dissatisfaction: even in marriage.
Yet something bothered me about both Iyengar’s and Salecl’s thesis. Was there not something a bit, well, patronising about them both? I hasten to add that Iyengar was not endorsing arranged marriage, but nonetheless both writers’ attack on choice reminded me of the witty Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander. “Knowing What’s Best for Poor People” was number 62 in his ironic list, in which he discusses the fact white people (by which he means the educated and liberal middle classes of America) get very excited by the idea of “poor people” (by which he means the less-educated, often over-weight Republican voters of the “flyover” states) being offered better (not more, note) choices: for instance being encouraged to abandon Wal-mart for a new trendy whole food market. Yet he ends with a sardonic warning: “It is essential that you make it clear that poor people do not make decisions based on free will. To suggest anything to the contrary could crush white people and their hope for the future”.
Care is therefore needed when describing the confusion created by choice. Sure, choice creates confusion, but our displeasure at the freedom others have to make what we may perceive as the wrong choice is, in fact, our confusion, not there’s. And choice is only confusing for the uninitiated. Study something – anything – and, soon enough, the choices (even bad ones) start to make sense. This is as true for the shopping preferences of the “lumpenproletariat” as it is with respect to “bourgeois” pursuits such as modern art or French cheese.
And what’s the alternative to choice? Presumably, it’s no choice, which is dangerous territory in my opinion. Don’t we end up in some form of paternalistic utopia of Maoist uniformity? At best this will look like an unreformed NHS. At worst like the Year Zero fanaticism of Pol Pot. And as for those stricter societies with restricted choice: well, ignorance is bliss – as they say – but that doesn’t make ignorance preferable. I’ll take choice over clarity anytime because clarity is usually someone else’s imposition.
Perhaps a society of choice is, therefore, the worst, err, choice, except for all the others (to paraphrase Churchill’s line on democracy). But even that seems trite to me: an intellectual victory for the totalitarians even if they know their dream of benevolent uniformity (chosen by them) is impossible to implement, at least without millions dead. For me choice is an absolute if imperfect good. We just need to learn how to exercise it.
Although a bit New Age for my tastes, The Mind of the Soul by Gary Zukav and Linda Francis tackles what they call “responsible choice”. They accept that choice can create fear, and that fear can destroy – rather than create – opportunities. But by taking responsibility for our choices, their view is that we can dispel the fear of choice.
“Each choice you make creates experiences for you and others…In fact, the way you perceive yourself is a choice,” they state, so we must choose, but wisely. This means that the stakes are high – hence employing gurus to help us. Zukav and Francis, however, think wise choices possible once we begin out career as a “scientist of consciousness” (I did say it was a bit New Age). Here’s their dynamic for achieving this:
• Reflect on your intentions before acting or speaking,
• Reflect on the consequences of each intention,
• Choose the consequences you want,
• Observe the change you experience,
• If you do not experience change, re-examine your intentions.
All this is really saying is that, when exercising choice, we should work out what we want (in the long term), as well as why we want it, and observe whether each choice is a step towards that goal or a step away from it. And if we can’t tell, the chances are the choice is of no consequence, which mean it’s nothing to be afraid of.
Where’s the tyranny in that?
Yet choice also has its downsides. Untutored, we can become stymied by choice. Scared of making the wrong choice, we wring our hands and hesitate. And while this may seem like a harmonious dilemma – compared to those forced to live their life without choice – their restrictions are little comfort as we become potentially terrorised by our own autonomy. If we can choose anything: our career, class, gender, sexuality, identity – then who do we blame when that future turns out not as we had hoped?
Fear of failure is, of course, the psychological consequence of this. Having total freedom to choose our future – with only ourselves to blame for our failures – is enough to make even the confident hesitate at the threshold of a major decision. This, as Renata Salecl argues in her new book Choice, is the “tyranny of choice”, which – she claims – is founded on a series of lies.
The first lie is the notion (often put about by economists) that our individual choices are rational, when they are mostly irrational – based on our unconscious desires. These are likely to be insatiable, meaning that we will always be dissatisfied – hardly a recipe for greater happiness. Indeed, her second lie is the notion choice creates happiness, when in fact choice-overload causes anxiety. We become concerned that our poor choices will lead to public humiliation (a classic concern of the High-FF as I call those with fear of failure).
Salecl states that society’s response to this “tyranny” is a growth in the self-help industry – aimed at aiding choice for the masses. She cites the popularity of books on Feng Shui, for example – helping us even choose where to place the furniture! Certainly this is a major theme of What’s Stopping You? my book on fear of failure (TBP March 2011 by John Wiley & Sons). Seeking a cure for the incurable (our insecurities) we elect temporary authorities that tell us how to behave and how to decide. In the secular modern world these authorities are the self-help gurus or life coaches, and the cure can be NLP or CBT, perhaps delivered by hypnotism or acupuncture or even, what the heck, Feng Shui – anything that is instant and life-changing.
Ultimately, Salecl argues, self-help books perpetuate these anxieties, rather than alleviate them. Offered the chance to become a better person making better choices, we grab it. Yet our insecurities remain unworked and ultimately return – although now we are more jaded than ever because they are laced with disappointment.
Even at street level we outsource our choices to “gurus”, whether these are for fashion or “style”, or – more fundamentally – role models that sway our career preferences (deciding between a career as a popstar or celebrity chef, perhaps). After all, “queen of shops” Mary Portas defined the mid-noughties UK “followers of fashion” as the “disciples of Beckham” – meaning that they had entirely outsourced their reasoning regarding what was and wasn’t fashionable to a celebrity couple from Essex.
More damaging (at least in my view) is Salecl’s noting that the consumer-choice model has ingrained itself into our view of relationships – our search for love following the same pattern of constant comparison and, therefore, near constant switching as we convince ourselves we are missing “a better deal” elsewhere. We are condemned to imagining parallel lives based on perceived wrong turns – especially with our choice of partner.
This brought in the other recently-published book on choice I’d been studying: The Art of Choosing, by Sheena Iyengar. In one passage she discusses arranged marriages, which for 5,000 years was the compact by which women met their husbands in many societies (including in Europe), without any noticeable detriment to that society’s happiness despite contemporary incomprehension that anyone could allow others to handle such an important decision. Some religions still prescribe many aspects of life for their believers, again without any noticeable heightening of hopelessness or depression: in fact quite the opposite.
“Perhaps the main issue with increasing choice is that it betrays our expectations,” says Iyengar – meaning that upping the choice also raises anticipation of a beneficial outcome, which increases disappointment, leading to heightened levels of dissatisfaction: even in marriage.
Yet something bothered me about both Iyengar’s and Salecl’s thesis. Was there not something a bit, well, patronising about them both? I hasten to add that Iyengar was not endorsing arranged marriage, but nonetheless both writers’ attack on choice reminded me of the witty Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander. “Knowing What’s Best for Poor People” was number 62 in his ironic list, in which he discusses the fact white people (by which he means the educated and liberal middle classes of America) get very excited by the idea of “poor people” (by which he means the less-educated, often over-weight Republican voters of the “flyover” states) being offered better (not more, note) choices: for instance being encouraged to abandon Wal-mart for a new trendy whole food market. Yet he ends with a sardonic warning: “It is essential that you make it clear that poor people do not make decisions based on free will. To suggest anything to the contrary could crush white people and their hope for the future”.
Care is therefore needed when describing the confusion created by choice. Sure, choice creates confusion, but our displeasure at the freedom others have to make what we may perceive as the wrong choice is, in fact, our confusion, not there’s. And choice is only confusing for the uninitiated. Study something – anything – and, soon enough, the choices (even bad ones) start to make sense. This is as true for the shopping preferences of the “lumpenproletariat” as it is with respect to “bourgeois” pursuits such as modern art or French cheese.
And what’s the alternative to choice? Presumably, it’s no choice, which is dangerous territory in my opinion. Don’t we end up in some form of paternalistic utopia of Maoist uniformity? At best this will look like an unreformed NHS. At worst like the Year Zero fanaticism of Pol Pot. And as for those stricter societies with restricted choice: well, ignorance is bliss – as they say – but that doesn’t make ignorance preferable. I’ll take choice over clarity anytime because clarity is usually someone else’s imposition.
Perhaps a society of choice is, therefore, the worst, err, choice, except for all the others (to paraphrase Churchill’s line on democracy). But even that seems trite to me: an intellectual victory for the totalitarians even if they know their dream of benevolent uniformity (chosen by them) is impossible to implement, at least without millions dead. For me choice is an absolute if imperfect good. We just need to learn how to exercise it.
Although a bit New Age for my tastes, The Mind of the Soul by Gary Zukav and Linda Francis tackles what they call “responsible choice”. They accept that choice can create fear, and that fear can destroy – rather than create – opportunities. But by taking responsibility for our choices, their view is that we can dispel the fear of choice.
“Each choice you make creates experiences for you and others…In fact, the way you perceive yourself is a choice,” they state, so we must choose, but wisely. This means that the stakes are high – hence employing gurus to help us. Zukav and Francis, however, think wise choices possible once we begin out career as a “scientist of consciousness” (I did say it was a bit New Age). Here’s their dynamic for achieving this:
• Reflect on your intentions before acting or speaking,
• Reflect on the consequences of each intention,
• Choose the consequences you want,
• Observe the change you experience,
• If you do not experience change, re-examine your intentions.
All this is really saying is that, when exercising choice, we should work out what we want (in the long term), as well as why we want it, and observe whether each choice is a step towards that goal or a step away from it. And if we can’t tell, the chances are the choice is of no consequence, which mean it’s nothing to be afraid of.
Where’s the tyranny in that?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)