In my work as a psychologist and psychoanalyst, I treat cynicism every day. Cynicism is at the heart of what ails most of the people who come into a therapist’s office. At the core of most psychic suffering is the belief that the way things are is the way they’re supposed to be.
All of us grow up in families on whom we’re dependent and that have the power to define both reality (the way things are) and morality (the way they’re supposed to be). Further, most children grow up with the tendency to take responsibility for the hurts they experience growing up. Put these two things together and you have the conditions under which we grow up acquiring painful beliefs about ourselves and others, about what makes people tick and what makes the world go ’round, beliefs based on traumatic experiences for which we ultimately blame ourselves.
Thus, the belief that the way things are is the way they’re supposed to be is wired into what it means to be a normal child. The problem is that the world changes when we mature, and we hopefully develop all sorts of adult capacities to think things through and get perspectives we never had as children. When we get stuck, however, it’s often because the child in us persists and keeps imposing its beliefs and expectations onto our adult life.
This is what I see every day as a therapist, together with great difficulties in imagining a different way to feel about one’s self, the social world, and one’s future. At the heart of the matter is a belief that the world is fixed, and that ultimately, there’s not a lot that one can do, despite one’s suffering and wishes for relief.
Thus, whether it’s patients who feel undeserving of love, or those who believe that they have to suffer and sacrifice in order to earn recognition and acceptance, or who feel that the world is a hostile place within which survival depends on being aggressive, the heart of all psychological suffering are these painful unconscious beliefs that personal and interpersonal reality is somehow fixed.
This is exactly what Michael Lerner talks about in relation to the wider social and political universe. Beliefs like “reality is what can be verified by sense data,” or “ultimately human beings are selfish,” or “it’s the economy, stupid” are exactly the same as the neurotic beliefs of my patients. And they’re just as difficult to change because culture, like a family, has the power to define what is and what’s supposed to be.
One of the big difficulties in curing cynicism is that no one actually admits to having this affliction. What do they say when challenged? “I’m not cynical…just realistic.” Unfortunately, we know from experience how hard it is to fix something that a person doesn’t believe is broken, whether in therapy or political life.
The real reason that my patients often change in therapy is because I’m able to help provide an alternative reality for them by creating a relationship that helps challenge and counteract what they believe is normal in relationships. That’s how people get better in therapy. The therapist dis-confirms their expectations, and thereby makes it safe enough for patients to experiment with a new way of thinking about or doing things.
That’s what we can do as a movement. First of all, we don’t have to be embarrassed about speaking of ideals, love or changing the bottom line. We can explicitly take on cynicism by making cynicism itself the issue, in every way possible. We can also challenge leaders to address the issue. We can put it in sound bites, and we can make the press write about it too.
By making our ideas and spiritual sensibility a public presence, we can figure out a way to be openly spiritual and still win. This is extremely important. We need not to mistake our critique of the self-defeating win at all costs strategy of mainstream Democrats for one of avoiding the importance of winning real political power, of real victories that tell people “You can be your highest self and still acquire practical influence, still change people’s actual experience.”
If we can do that, see, we defeat cynicism on its own terms, as well as demonstrate in practice that the way things are is not the way they’re supposed to be, and that the past doesn’t determine the future. We then stand up for the values that are at the heart of healthy childhood and good mothering: an appreciation of the centrality of love, discovery and human connectedness.
Michael Bader, DMH is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in San Francisco. He has contributed widely to Tikkun Magazine on issues involving the interaction of psychology, culture, and politics. He is the author of Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies. Dr. Bader is also one of the founders of the Institute for Change, a leadership development program currently associated with the labor union, SEIU