One of the more interesting paradoxes that is unavoidable in my work is that our minds are both far simpler and almost infinitely more complex than we realize. Most people come into treatment unhappy about how their lives are progressing but with a fairly confident sense that they can explain why they do what they do. Their motives seem pretty clear and their thinking, except in highly charged areas, appears to them to be quite consistent, logical, and rational. In areas where their emotions are involved, they can almost always offer a consistent explanation for why they feel the way they do. For all of these reasons one of the typical approaches I take during the evaluation, often in the first session, is to make a trial interpretation.
An example: A 22 year old woman came for a consult because she was "depressed." As with so many people these days, her depression was actually unhappiness. She was unhappy with her boyfriend who was poorly responsive an often insensitive. She was worried about getting a job when she graduated form college, and in fact, she was not going to graduate on time. In her last semester she had become unhappy with her courses and dropped two courses; as a result she was several credits short for a degree. She thought it would, in fact, be a good idea to get a job and return to finish her degree once she was more established. As part of her history she revealed that she had similar feelings when she was graduating high school, and had to go to summer school to obtain her diploma. Like a typical HS senior she had not taken her classes very seriously and hadn't turned in a term paper.
My trial interpretation was simple. I wondered if perhaps she "had some difficulty finishing things."
This was not a sophisticated or deep interpretation. It was an effort to find out if she was able and willing to reflect on her own behavior. It was an invitation for her to wonder if her own explanations to herself (typical "senioritis", uninteresting college courses) were adequate to explain her current situation. If she responded that she had never considered such a thing and doubted there was anything to it, it would not have been conclusive evidence of unsuitability for an insight oriented Psychotherapy but it would have at the least suggested the possibility that such a Psychotherapy was not yet indicated and that significant preparatory work (to increase her curiosity about herself and show her how she used rationalization to avoid self-awareness) would be a necessary precondition for successful treatment. Further, if her incuriosity were confirmed and she showed herself to have no particular interest and/or ability in exploring the workings of her own mind, a distinctly different type of therapy, a more supportive therapy, would have been warranted.
Psychoanalysts have long known that the feelings and ideas that animate our defenses are unconscious and often rather simple. I love that person, I hate that person; I want to have sex with that person, I want to kill that person. The complexity arises from the specific relationships, the interplay of reality and our desires, our conflicted feelings (when we love and hate the same person at the same time, for example), and the various ways in which we hide the most unpleasant and conflicted thoughts and feelings from ourselves.
The layers of complexity and the interplay between reality, our drives, defenses, wishes, etc all eventuate in our manifest behavior. Once the unconscious decision, the summation of our multiple determinants, has been executed, our minds find good, logical, consistent, and coherent explanations for the behavior. Even the most problematic behavior can be explained ex post facto.
Decisions in the political arena are no more based on rationality than in our personal lives. David Brooks today explored How Voters Think:
Nobody really knows how voters think, especially during primary seasons when the policy differences are minute, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the cognitive chain went something like this:
After seeing a candidate for 100 milliseconds, voters make certain sorts of judgments based on expressiveness, facial structure, carriage and attitude. Alexander Todorov of Princeton has found that he can predict 70 percent of political races just by measuring peoples’ snap judgments of candidates’ faces.
Then, having formed an impression from these thin-slice appraisals, voters rack their memory banks. Decades ago, Kahneman and Amos Tversky argued that human judgment is less a matter of calculating probabilities and more a matter of trying to fit new things into familiar patterns. Maybe John Edwards reminds one voter of the sort of person he disliked in high school. Maybe Barack Obama evokes the elevated feeling another voter felt watching John F. Kennedy. [Emphasis mine-SW]
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At the same time, voters embark on an emotional journey with candidates. Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux have shown that emotion isn’t the opposite of reason. We use emotion to assign value to things, thus making decision-making possible.
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Each of us has an unconscious but consistent way of construing the world. Some of us light up when we see a candidate being intelligent, others when we see a candidate being friendly or sentimental. This is the mode we use every day to make sense of the world.
My own intuition is that this unconscious cognition is pretty effective. People are skilled at judging character. And through reading, thinking and close observation, they can educate their unconscious to make smarter and finer distinctions.
I tend to agree with Brooks that via the wisdom of crowds, we end up doing fairly well, since as a population, our unconscious irrationalities tend to cancel out. For every democrat who believes George Bush is the devil incarnate, there is a Republican who believes Hillary Clinton is actually the anti-Christ. The idea that both of them are merely human escapes the awareness of those who need to demonize their political opponents. (Yes, even Hillary is human.)
David Brooks warns pundits to exercise caution prognosticating on the upcoming election. (Of course, if they do, they will be out of a job, but that is not germane.) However, Thomas B. Edsall at the Huffington Post in the course of asking Will The GOP Blindside The Democrats On Terror Issues? brings up some very reasonable points that may ultimately make the need for prognostication moot:
While many Democratic strategists are confident that the deteriorating economy virtually assures the victory of their presidential candidate on November 4, there is a quiet debate over whether the party and prospective nominee are likely to get blindsided by Republicans raising issues of terrorism and national security.
He quotes several democratic strategists, offering some interesting perspectives:
At one end of the spectrum, former Senator Gary Hart warns that Democrats are vulnerable and unprepared. "The ghost of Karl Rove will raise the specter of terrorism and swift boat whomever the Democrats nominate. The fear card is the last resort of the collapsing W. coalition," he said.
At the other end, Joseph Cirincione, Senior Fellow and Director for Nuclear Policy at the Center for American Progress, contends the Democrats will offer stronger messaging:
"The Democratic candidate will have a very strong case to make to the American people that the conservative national security policies have failed. We are less secure now than we were in 2000, in 2001 or in 2002. Osama bin Laden is closer today to getting a nuclear weapon or weapon materials than he ever has been. This is the most serious national security threat facing America. The president's policies have increased this threat, not decreased it. I do not believe that the Democratic presidential candidate will have any trouble making that case to the American people."
As I have pointed out in the past, Cirincione's perspective is unsupported by anything approaching real data; to say we are less safe in the absence of any actual attacks since 9/11 is an appeal to feelings rather than reason. However, in the absence of attacks, it may be actually be an adequate argument since it allows the Democrats to avoid presenting alternative plans to protect us.
The most nuanced analysis of the politics of terror was provided by Brian Katulis, a less well known figure in the Democratic foreign policy establishment who is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress where he is a Senior Advisor to the Center's Middle East Progress project.
"I wouldn't say that Democrats have avoided national security as much as they have not yet developed a coherent narrative that simply goes beyond 'Bush screwed things up.'....Conservatives have an overarching story when it comes to talking about national security - it's not dissimilar to Bush's narrative: there are bad people out there, we need to go out there and try to kill them ourselves before they get us. Simplistic, and applied to many different threats, but it's kind of an easy story line....
"It's those political consulting classes on the Democratic side who are particularly wounded and still operating on the defensive when it comes to national security - which is truly a stunning thing when you think about it, given all of the strategic errors conservatism is responsible for on the national security front the last seven years.
"So I think there's a sweet spot for Democrats to actually say something that connects the dots on the national security and terrorism front - one that actually responds to a need from the American people to hear a viable alternative - but we're just not hearing it yet at that political communications level. We're seeing and hearing tick lists that make the broader public's eyes glaze over. On the conservative side, we hear a story line - a batshit crazy one for the most part that got us in the predicament that we're in now, but hey, it's a story. Most people would rather go to a movie that has a plot."
It is not at all surprising that the Democrats have been unable to develop a consistent narrative. They have many people emotionally primed to vote for them. Because so many feel, correctly, that the Republicans have "got us in the predicament that we're in now", close attention to their programmatic approach to Islamic terrorism has been conspicuously avoided. Their program has essentially amounted to retreat from Iraq as quickly as possible and ignore the consequences, stop listening in on enemy communications if there is any chance that any electrons will travel through American wires, offer full Constitutional protections to enemy combatants, etc. This program is acceptable, ie not carefully considered, in the absence of a successful terror attack. A large scale attack, almost anywhere in the world, in the weeks to months leading up to the election, will change the unconscious calculus by which we make our voting decisions; this would not be helpful to the Democrats.
The upshot is that the outcome of the election in November may well depend on the behavior of the terrorists we are fighting against. If they are smart they will wait until after the elections and then stage attacks. For all its faults the Bush administration's ability to protect us since 9/11, for which it receives almost no credit, may prove to be the single most significant reason for a Democratic victory in November.
As luck would have it, the Islamic terrorist are discussing this very subject in their forums. This is courtesy of MEMRI:
Participants in Islamist Forums Discuss Proposal for Terrorist Attack in Paris
January 4, 2008, the Islamist forum Al-Ekhlas (www.ek-ls.org), hosted by NOC4Hosts Inc. in Florida, USA), posted a message by a participant calling himself Al-Murabit Al-Muwahhid ("The Monotheistic Jihad Fighter"), discussing the possible benefit of a terrorist attack in Paris. The writer speculated that such an attack would bring about the collapse of the French economy, and serve as a warning to other European countries "which are collaborating in the war against the Muslim countries." He added that the attack would also break the "security siege" on the Muslim population of France, and would enable the establishment of terrorist cells that would operate in the capitals of neighboring European countries. After providing a list of possible targets – major sites and tourist attractions in Paris – the writer elaborated on the possible results of the attack and how they would benefit the global jihad campaign.
The posting evoked numerous responses, mostly practical suggestions regarding the type of attack, possible targets, etc.
The Islamists have the ability to render much of our primary season moot. The bombs are now in their hands and their use or quiescence will likely be determinative.
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