Cultural Evolution and Cultural Lag

 

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This is a continuation from my previous post of 2/24/06. I am continuing to discuss unusual ideas incorporated into my model for the psychotherapy treatment of repetitive self-destructive or self-defeating behavior, which I called Unified Therapy in my first book for therapists back in 1988. I mentioned that something called cultural lag is very important.

But first, a little back story.

When I was a resident psychiatrist in the mid-1970’s, psychotherapy by M.D.'s was dominated by psychoanalysts. Behavior therapy was talked about, and cognitive therapy was just beginning to take hold. Many of the ideas of the analysts, such as intrapsychic conflict and defense mechanisms seemed to me quite valid. 

Of course, schools of thought in psychology aren't single theories, but collections of related theories. And even within psychoanalysis, there were a whole bunch of very different models for treatment -  and not just the three famous ones from Freud, Jung, and Adler. All the different theories behind the models were often in some aspects contradictory to the some of the other ideas in the various schools. As I found out later, there were scores of other, different psychotherapy models for treating the very same conditions!

Now of course there can be several different ways to skin the proverbial cat, but this seemed rather unscientific.

My training supervisors were almost all analysts. When I asked questions about the above, my supervisor pressured me to get psychoanalysis myself to find out why I was "resistant" to the ideas (All members of the psychoanalytic institutes received therapy themselves, supposedly so their own hang-ups would not get in the way if them helping their patients). When I asked if I should see a Freudian or a Jungian, I was told, literally, “It doesn’t matter.” What?? If a theory were valid and contradicted another one, it certainly should matter. That was bizarre. 

I was probably naïve, but that sounded very unscientific to my  mind. That turned me off to becoming a therapist myself, and for a while I decided I would just do biological psychiatry and only treat the psychiatric syndromes that were amenable to medication.

Fortunately for me, my curiosity got the better of me and I started getting interested in doing therapy again when a friend of mine lent me a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn said that any young science is replete with conflicting models, but gradually one gained ascendancy as more and more data came in. This was more problematic in psychology than in most other fields, because experimenters can’t read minds, and folks lie a lot.

In my own narcissistic way, I decided that I wanted to try to unify the main theories into a coherent whole, and I started writing soon thereafter. There was a Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration, which I joined, but they didn’t want to devise an overarching theory because, they assumed, it would just turn out to be one more school. So they contented themselves with modifying techniques from one school and incorporating them into the interventions of another school.

I decided that I would find time to read original works by all the prominent theoreticians.

I found the family systems idea of disturbed family homeostasis (discussed in the previous post) particularly interesting, and wondered if disturbed homeostasis was somehow related to an individual within a family developing an intrapsychic conflict - the central concept of psychoanalysis. I eventually started to see the connection. When family homeostasis was disturbed, it led to an intrapsychic conflict developing that was covertly shared by the entire family. Of course, the next questions were how and why a family’s homeostasis became disturbed, and why couldn’t a family just get together and talk about changing the rules.

In the last post I mentioned the concept of cultural evolution: that the balance between the needs of individuals and their kin group is evolving, so people are becoming freer to follow their own predilections in how they behaved, and in what they thought. The rules of the game for what was acceptable in love, work, philosophy, and play were rapidly changing. But individual families had trouble keeping up with all the changes. The homeostatic rules in many families started to come into question, disturbing the entire system. No one would talk about their ambivalence. This is called cultural lag by sociologists.

I described how and the many reasons why, due to events in family members’ histories over at least three generations, particular rules created ambivalence about themselves. I won’t go into that in this post, but I go into great deal in both my published books for therapists and the self-help book I wrote.

The Role of the Family Black Sheep – The Hidden Aspects

Are you a black sheep in your family? You know, the one that doesn’t seem to go along with the program and acts in ways that seemingly run counter to the values of the rest of the family? Guess what: you are not nearly as rebellious as you think you are.

A frequent topic on this blog and on my blog on Psychology Today is dysfunctional family roles. Because of the biological phenomenon known as kin selection, individuals are often willing to sacrifice their own needs and desires in order to act in ways which stabilize unstable parents and maintain what family systems therapists refer to as family homeostasis. 

The latter is a process by which the family operates by rules, strongly enforced by all family members, in which every family member plays a predictable, designated part. Family rules are originally derived from the culture or ethnic group in which the family has operated as well as by family experiences that necessitated certain behavior. In dysfunctional families, the family rules have become obsolete due to rapid changes in the ambient culture (cultural lag).

Many cultural changes have lead to situations in which individuals are much freer to express their own wants and needs separate from those of the family (self-actualization). If the family is stuck in the past, members (especially the older ones) may be threatened by certain aspects of individual freedom. They may be enticing and seductive, but were strongly forbidden to them by the people that raised them in earlier times.

This desire versus fear dynamic is what the Freudians were talking about with their notion of intrapsychic conflict. What they missed, however, was that the conflict is not entirely intrapsychic, but is triggered and reinforced by an entire family. In fact, the “intrapsychic conflict” is actually shared by all of them! It leads to family members giving off mixed and contradictory messages to one another about what is expected of them.

A big source of shared intrapsychic conflict in families that I have not discussed extensively is changing attitudes toward individual satisfaction involving things such as the proverbial sex, drugs, and rock and roll. There has been a marked cultural shift in the propriety of pleasuring oneself with these pursuits. Because of cultural lag, people will often give lip service to such issues as sexual abstinence or reserving sex for procreation only, while at the same time covertly availing themselves of opportunities seemingly at odds with their expressed values.

This is the situation that leads to one member of the family – often but not always a younger child—to volunteer to be the rule breaker, enjoying that which is attractive to but forbidden to all the others. The others, particularly the parents, get vicarious satisfaction of their own secret desires through watching their children indulge themselves. However, the situation is far more complicated. While black sheep may seem to be having a good time so the parents can do this, that unfortunately is not their only job.

If they have too good a time, and end up being happy and content, a parent who was secretly and subtly pushing them to break the family rules starts to become unstable. Vicarious experience, while mildly satisfying, is just not the same thing as actual experience. The conflicted parents start to wonder about their own choices in life and then become depressed, have marital problems with the spouse that has helped them go along with family rules, or engage in self-destructive behavior.

To prevent this and keep the parents stable, the black sheep must also demonstrate the folly of engaging in the “rebellious” behavior. They do so by, in a sense, finding ways to make themselves miserable because of it. In a sense, they fail at it, so the parents can become once again secure in the knowledge that they made the right decision in sticking to the old prohibitions.

In the process of indulging themselves in sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, black sheep may develop an addiction, contract a sexually transmitted disease, have an affair and destroy their marriage and their relationships with their own children, have multiple divorces, or become deadbeat dads. The rest of the family can then hold them up as examples that “prove” that the forbidden impulses are forbidden for good reason. The old family rules against self indulgence simply must continue to be followed. 

If they want to redeem themselves, black sheep may have to join a 12 step program and denounce their own willfulness. They need to go back to that old time religion – and the group that they join, in order to maintain itself, also needs someone to do just that. Just like their families need them to do.

Book Review: Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril by Margaret Hoffernan

In the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, The Emperor's New Clothes,  two con men promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that, they said, was invisible to those who were foolish or stupid. When the Emperor parades before his subjects in his new "clothes," no one dares to say that he is actually naked until a child cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!"

Refusal to see the obvious is a characteristic of groupthink, which is a major theme of this blog and a prime concern in my psychotherapy model of unified therapy. It is part and parcel of something that Gregg Henriques calls the justification hypothesis: that we use reason to justify ideas that cement our position within a group, rather than to arrive at the truth. This was also the main theme of Jonathan Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind, which was previously reviewed here.

A wife ignores obvious evidence that her husband is having an affair. Religious people claim to absolutely believe the most preposterous ideas in order to fit in with their fellow church members. Political ideologues seem immune to certain facts no matter how much the evidence mounts, and make convoluted arguments that they seem to believe prove that their ideas are correct. Children in dysfunctional families act out family rules over and over again no matter how much pain it causes them.

In a fascinating book, Margaret Hoffernan dissects this aspect of groupthink and elaborates on all of its myriad manifestations. While concentrating mostly on the madness of employees in business organizations walking together off a cliff in maddening lock step - with the result that the organization is eventually harmed or destroyed (such as Enron, BP  and the derivatives crisis in investment banking that led to the economic meltdown a few short years ago) - she also gives examples from many other walks of life.

Go along to get along. Be silent in order to avoid conflict because conflict might destroy a family or an organization. Rationalize your misbehavior because "everybody's doing it." Once you've laid out your position, never change it in light of new information because you might appear weak. Be a good "team player" and do not ask any hard questions. Avoid changes you might have to think hard about, because it takes a lot less energy and brain power to believe than to doubt.

Then there is something she calls the Bystander Effect: Don't intervene in a crisis if there are lots of people around - surely someone else will take care of it. The more people around to witness a crime, for example, the less likely it becomes that anyone will call 911.

Powerful people are often the most seriously prone to conform to what the author refers to as received wisdom, or information that conforms to stereotypes.

In another fascinating chapter, the author describes people whom she calls Cassandras. These are the folks who refuse to accept ideas just to fit in, often at great personal sacrifice, and are willing to look at the bigger picture to see potential problems that others blithely ignore. The author writes, "...After every institutional or organizational failure, individuals invariably surface who saw the crisis coming, warned about it, and were mocked or ignored."(p. 201). Whistleblowers are examples of such people; the government tries but usually fails to protect them.

The oddest thing about being willfully blind is the fact that people who do this must be aware at some level of exactly what they are doing. As the author states, "How could we know where not to look without looking first?" (p. 88). In order to lie to ourselves, we have to ignore evidence that repeatedly hits us over the head like a two-by-four. Knowledge of a fact can be inferred when someone deliberately blinds himself or herself to its existence.

As the author mentions, we all use two types of thinking: one is automatic, born of habit, fast, and intuitive. If we had to reason out every move we made, we'd be paralyzed. The second form is the one in which we deliberate, weigh pro's and cons, examine evidence, and such. It involves much more energy and takes way more time. A key point about it is that it is also used to monitor the first type of thinking for errors. No one would survive very long without possessing capabilities for both of these types of thinking. Monitoring for errors is always lurking in the background of our minds, even when we are reacting subconsciously, automatically, and without thinking.

Two recent movies, based on actual historical events, brilliantly depict illustrative, startling, and dramatic examples of large numbers of people engaging in willful blindness - and the Cassandras who finally changed things. Labyrinth of Lies shows Germans in the 1950's acting like the Holocaust never happened. Spotlight shows just how many people knew or should have known about Catholic clergy abusing children sexually, and also shows that the higher-ups kept moving pedophile priests from parish to parish - and for a long time no one did much of anything about it.

Facing problems is almost always better than sweeping them under the carpet for the purpose of furthering group harmony. As long as a problem is invisible, it will remain unsolved. As James Baldwin once said, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

Dr, Allen Interviewed by a Website about Family Systems Issues

The website AskimoTV posted four short interviews with Dr. Allen about Family Systems issues, including issues about the theory and therapeutic techniques.  They can be found at:


http://www.askimotv.com/pages/PlayVideo.aspx?vid=2304
http://www.askimotv.com/pages/PlayVideo.aspx?vid=2305
http://www.askimotv.com/pages/PlayVideo.aspx?vid=2307
http://www.askimotv.com/pages/PlayVideo.aspx?vid=2310

The Meaning of Life



Existential philosophers express a great deal of angst about four different concerns:

• The knowledge we have that we will all die eventually
• The freedom to be the author of your own life (as opposed to doing what your society wants you to do)
• Isolation (the feeling that there is an unbridgeable gulf between ourselves and others, as expressed in the sentiment "you come into this world alone and you die alone"), and
• The meaning of life.

Irvin Yalom, an influential psychotherapist, believes that these are the four areas of concern most important in the genesis of psychological problems, rather than, as the Freudians believe, biological urges like sex and aggression. 


Irwin Yalom

He thinks that the traditional psychological defense mechanisms are aimed at the avoidance of the anxiety that is created when one ponders these "existential" concerns, rather than anxiety over forbidden impulses. In particular, religion is seen as a form of self-delusion designed to protect one from a sense of meaninglessness in an absurd universe in which everyone eventually dies with no guarantee of an afterlife.

Everyday people, on the other hand, tend to think that worrying about such abstract concerns is the province of crazy intellectuals and bored housewives with too much damn time on their hands.

Not so! Granted, those people who are completely engrossed in just trying to survive do not have much time to think about such things, but most individuals in industrialized country are not completely consumed with finding food and shelter.  And most people seem to feel that their life has meaning, even if they can not precisely define it, so they do not seem to worry about looking for it. 

What they may not realize is that they may only feel that way as long as they do what they believe they are "supposed" to be doing.  There is something comforting about following rules and not having to think too much about what existence is all about. 

Erich Fromm wrote a book called Escape From Freedom that put forth the proposition that people are rather fearful concerning the prospect of complete freedom.  If they can do whatever they please, perhaps they might make an terrible error.

The rules about what one was supposed to do in life used to be much clearer than they are now for the majority of people. Various institutions like schools and churches laid out your options for you, and you went along. Even when you technically "broke" the rules, you were often validated by your friends for having done so.  In a sense, the answer to the question of which rules could be broken in private (though not in public) was actually covertly specified by the rules themselves!

Things have changed. Culture has evolved to our current "post-modern" society where all bets are off, and different value systems compete with one another. One often hears that many different points

Erich Fromm

of view are of equal validity.  Your family itself may be divided over the validity of certain values and societal mandates.

So, every so often, almost everyone is overcome by a sense of doubt about who they are and the choices they have made, as well as an existential sense of the meaninglessness of all of it.  However, because most of us will go to any length to avoid feeling that way - let's call this feeling groundlessness - it usually does not very last long.  And so we think that this feeling cannot be very important.

In therapy, on the other hand, when we try to help patients follow their own muse, so to speak (self actualize), they often find themselves at odds with a set of rules that they had learned in their families of origin.  And when they begin to experiment with breaking those rules, a terrifying sense of groundlessness begins to manifest itself.  The feeling is so distressing that patients may think they are getting worse, and may even start to seriously contemplate suicide. 

The descriptions they give of the feeling in psychotherapy are fascinating.  Yalom discusses something he calls de­familiarization. In the normal course of everyday life, we feel at home in the world; we feel connected. Everything in the world about us - objects, people, roles, values, ideals, symbols, institutions, and even the sense of who we are in relationship to the rest of the world - seems comfortable, fa­miliar, and meaningful.

This meaning is reassuring and provides a sense of belonging, for while it is to some extent personal, it is more primarily collective. We share much of our sense of mean­ing with others within the particular systems in which we operate.

Defamiliarization is a disturbing feeling that all is not well, that the outward appearance of the world disguises the fact that its meaning and purpose are not at all clear. This strange feeling is part of the sense of groundlessness.

To again quote Yalom, we gain a terrifying sense that "everything could be otherwise than it is; that everything we consider fixed, precious, good can suddenly vanish; that there is no solid ground; that we are 'not at home' here or there or anywhere in the world." Life begins to seem absurd and pointless, utterly devoid of significant meaning. Pushing on with one's goals begins to seem like an exercise in futility; what's the point?

All that one holds to be important takes on a cast of silliness and, ultimately, unreality. The sense of unreality brings with it something that is even more unnerving, if that be possible, than the sense of meaninglessness: the aforementioned paralysing doubt. If everything one holds to be gospel is not at all real, then perhaps what I think I know I do not know. And maybe it is just me. Maybe I am wrong, but everyone else is right. Maybe what I feel is invalid; maybe I am a nothing.

One patient described the feeling thus: "I felt my identity disintegrate. My career was in jeopardy. Little flags of doubt about what I was doing led to a depression. I felt like a zero." Another patient described a feeling that she was "neither fish nor fowl." Yet other statements made by patients that indicate groundlessness include the following: "I felt as if I were on a different plane from everyone." "I felt I was overstepping my bounds." "I felt disconnected." "There was a barrier between me and everyone else." Patients may complain of feeling "amorphous" or "undefined and void."

How much more comfortable to go back to following all of the old familiar rules, even if they make you miserable in every other conceivable way. The pull of the family system to go back to the family rules is a very powerful one, both in one's relationships and in one's own mind.

This feeling may be our brain's way of expressing a biological tendency that we have inherited to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of our family or ethnic group, or to die for one's country.  This innate tendency, called kin selection, was discussed previously in my post of January 21, Of Hormones and Ethnic Conflict.

Being part of a group and belonging to something that will continue on after we pass away also gives us a modified feeling of immortality that makes death somewhat less frightening.  It eases the sense of ultimate aloneness, and it give our lives meaning.  Plus, we do not have to make the types of decisions that make freedom frightening. In short, it provides answers for us, flawed as they may be, for all four existential concerns.  No wonder psychotherapy with the goal of helping someone self actualize is so difficult.