On Compromise and Compromise Formations

There have been many questions raised about Psychoanalytic theory and Psychoanalytic efficacy.  Many of the earlier conceptions of the structure and workings of the mind have been superceded by new information and research data and our understanding of the mind is moving ahead rapidly.  Newer models of the mind conceptualize it as consisting of multiple modalities which constantly struggle for primacy; out of the competing modes of thought, our mind emerges.

This model of the mind was presaged by Freud's description of behavior emerging from the interplay of multiple determinants via compromise formation.  I briefly defined these terms in The Writing on the Wall:

In Psychoanalytic thinking, there are two crucial concepts which can offer useful ways to organize one's thinking.  They are the idea of multiple determination, and a corollary to this, compromise formation.  What these ideas encapsulate is, essentially, that any and every behavior can be best understood as the result of many different forces coming together (the multiple determinants, such as various desires, drives, and wishes, along with prohibitions, fears, and anxieties, conscious and unconscious) with the ego or executive machinery of the mind, finding a way through the maze of competing wishes and fears, internal and external, to arrive at a behavior (the compromise) which can successfully accomplish what the person desires.

It is implicit in this formulation that compromise formations are dynamic structures.  In other words, the strength of our "desires, drives, and wishes, along with prohibitions, fears, and anxieties" are constantly shifting.  In the simplest terms, when we are starving, our desire for sex will lessen.  Our ego, which includes the executive functions of the mind, must constantly balance all of the competing internal and external demands on us and arrive at behavioral outcomes that satisfy as many of the competing demands as possible in order for us to feel comfortable with our behavior.

When the balance is tilted toward one aspect or another of personality, serious problems can ensue.  For example, someone who has more powerful drives or less capable ego controls over his drives, will be more prone to impulsive behavior with all the risks that entail.  If the aggressive drives are intermittently overbalanced, the person may exhibit an Intermittent Explosive Personality.  Another person, in response to fear of their drives may develop such powerful inhibitions that they become symptomatic and can suffer from an Obsessive-Compulsive Personality.

The healthiest personality is one that can easily adapt to the changing internal and external demands and maintain their behavior within a moderate range of responses.  Adaptation and moderation are most adaptive for successful long term functioning (though there are many highly successful people, and I leave the definition of successful to the reader, who have unbalanced personalities.)   These concepts translate quite well into the cultural and political sphere.

Our political process does an adequate job of compromising the extreme tendencies of parts of the bases and the more moderate centrist tendencies of the vast majority who are much less passionate about politics.  During the primaries, appeals to the base are expectable; the best politicians find ways to do this without alienating the center.  As soon as the nomination is assured, tacking to the center is assured.  Furthermore, even when ideologues do gain the White House the tripartite structure of government tempers their excesses. 

Danger arises when the dynamic tension between the various competing interests becomes unbalanced; an executive who escapes checks and balances can easily become a tyrant, while in circumstances where the legislative branch gains ascendancy, the ability to function can be compromised, ie nothing useful can be accomplished.  If the Judiciary becomes too strong it can impair the necessary functions required for compromises to be reached; without compromises acceptable to most, the outcome can never be stable.  Our founding fathers created a brilliant structure which has always managed to tolerate and ameliorate the worst excesses of our politicians.  Our democracy is more error tolerant and error correcting than any other political system yet devised. 

In the cultural realm it is often more difficult for people to appreciate the dangers of imbalance.  Too many lose sight of the need for dynamic tension when thinking about our culture, a culture that is currently under assault from powerful forces, both within and without. I was struck by the op-ed piece by Roger Cohen this morning in which he appears to misunderstand the value of balance.  He praises Secular Europe’s Merits while decrying the American emphasis on religion and religiosity:

Europeans still take the Enlightenment seriously enough not to put it inside quote marks. They have long found an inspiring reflection of it in the first 16 words of the American Bill of Rights of 1791: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Thomas Jefferson saw those words as “building a wall of separation between church and state.” So, much later, did John F. Kennedy, who in a speech predating Romney’s by 47 years, declared: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”

The absolute has proved porous. The U.S. culture wars have produced what David Campbell of Notre Dame University called: “the injection of religion into politics in a very overt way.”

A key meme for Roger Cohen is the danger of religious belief to rationality:

Such beliefs seem to remove decision-making from the realm of the rational at the very moment when the West’s enemy acts in the name of fanatical theocracy. At worst, they produce references to a “crusade” against those jihadist enemies. God-given knowledge is scarcely amenable to oversight.

Finally, he is especially troubled by Mitt Romney's invocation of religion:

Religion informed America’s birth. But its distancing from politics was decisive to the republic’s success. Indeed, the devastating European experience of religious war influenced the founders’ thinking. That is why I find Romney’s speech and the society it reflects far more troubling than Europe’s vacant cathedrals.

There are several problems with this article.  First of all he misunderstands Jefferson's "wall of separation" to apply to our culture, not just our political system.  The recent historical fervor to erase all public displays of religion (except for Islam) has very little to do with government establish of religion  and everything to do with removing religion from public life.  If Europe is to be held out as a model, there are many concerns that can be raised, including, most especially, the effects on a culture when they no longer heed the biblical injunction to "be fruitful and multiply."

Beyond that there is an assumption in his article that is ubiquitous and thoroughly unfounded; that is, the assumption that eschewing religion leads to enhanced rational thinking.  This is a dangerous assumption that has led to the deaths and enslavement of many millions of people in the last century.

Secularists identify religious belief with irrationality and it is certainly true that faith requires an acceptance of ideas that do not meet the current test of rationality.  On this basis one could argue that part of what religion accomplishes is to encompass and moderate the irrational.  This is not the same as saying that religious thinking is irrational or that religious belief and rationality are antithetical.  Pope Benedict made this point explicitly last year when he warned of the dangers of religion without rationality.  Unfortunately sophisticated elites do not recognize the equal or greater danger of rationality without religion.  As I commented at the time of the controversy over the Pope's critique of Islam:

It is a safe bet that most members of the intellectual elites in Academia, the MSM, and Politics, among others, would argue that our civilization is based on the ascendancy of reason.  We have used our rational faculties to tame the irrationality that resides at the core of our minds.  There may be lip service offered to the idea that at one time religion was useful in taming man's irrational inner beast, but most "sophisticates" would argue that religion has out lived its usefulness.  This argument can be seen frequently expressed as there being no difference between Christina fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalists (with occasional references to Jewish fundamentals for trifold symmetry.)   This misunderstands Pope Benedict's message.

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As I have written before, civilization depends on binding and controlling the instinctual energies (both aggressive and libidinal) which arise from our irrational, animal, minds.  Without such binding, we are left with the brutal Hobbesian world of pre-history.   What should have been learned from the 20th Century's blood spattered pages, is that reason alone is insufficient to bind our passions.

The Nazis convinced themselves, through a highly rational process devoid of religious leavening, that the human race was perfectible and that they had the means and knowledge to perform the cleansing required.  The Soviet Union disdained belief in God and religion as the opiate of the masses and simply exchanged it for another faith-based belief system that was most conspicuous for its absence of humility and mercy.

Secular rationalists simply ignore the inconvenient truth that they contain their own unconscious drives and untamed passions; once ignored, such drives can be easily expressed by the Id derivatives, through subversion of the Ego and the Conscious mind.  Drives are always looking for discharge and our minds are quite clever at finding ways to enable them, even in the face of conscious inhibitions. 

Civilization needs all the help it can get maintaining itself in the face of the passions of the individuals who comprise it.  Religion is the one of the most powerful ways to contain the worst within us and rationality without the leavening of religion can, and has, all too easily lead to tyranny.

[Fellow Sanity Squad member Sigmund, Carl, & Alfred has started a several part post exploring some overlapping issues; the first posts are Freud, Trees And A Well Hidden Id and Animal Man vs Elevated Man.  They are worth your perusal.]