The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cultural Compensation

The Examined Life strikes me as a re-incarnation of Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled which was published 40 years ago - before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher decreed the non-existence of society. Both books are written with the same structure of patient case studies. They contain the same histories of development of the writers into therapeutic maturity; the same essential message of human psychic complexity and mystery; and even some almost identical patient accounts. This doesn’t make The Examined Life redundant, only, I’m afraid, another voice crying in the wilderness of a society which doesn’t actually register its implications.

One of the unexpected side-effects of psychotherapy is the establishment of two independent Cartesian worlds - the world of everyday life in which people act stupidly as if driven by hidden forces of self-destruction over which they have no control; and the world of therapy in which the underlying purpose of such behavior is uncovered and found to be entirely rational. The first world is full of error, mishap and criminality; the second of clever adaptation to circumstances, understanding and reconciliation. The first is accepted as reality; the second as one of repair for a return to the first. They are distinct, separate, and entirely alien to one another, just as Descartes imagined them to be. But the first world is definitive as a cultural norm.

The second world, let’s call it the world of the spirit, is teleological. It presumes a purpose which can be articulated in a coherent narrative. According to Grosz, “all of us try to make sense of our lives by telling our stories... When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us – we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.” And empirically, the formulation of such stories does have an effect on the lives involved. Therapy for Grosz is largely a matter of helping patients construct coherent stories which allow them to re-enter the somewhat solipsistic mechanical world of social cause and effect with some sense of individual purpose. (As I recall Scott Peck’s stories were ones that were essentially false rationalizations. Perhaps it us story-telling ability tout court which has deteriorated during the period.)

But there is the obvious other side of the coin. We live in a culture which chooses to presume that aberrant behavior is just that - aberrant - rather than a purposeful and quite sensible adaptation to cultural presumptions. It appears that, at least in this respect, Freud was correct: society does intentionally suppress the individual for its own ends. Given the extent of psychic repression involved, it is perhaps remarkable that we have don’t have more mass murders and terrorism than we do. By the standards of psychotherapy, it is society which is in need of help since coherent narratives of purpose have fallen apart. The democratic state has demonstrated its essential absurdity; the church its political malleability and moral corruption; the corporate world its banality and indifference to human welfare.

Like Freud, I think this social/psychic schizophrenia has a great deal more to do with the doctrines and cultural remnants of religion than with the necessary conditions for the smooth-running of civil society. It is religion which has supplied us with the grand narratives of our lives even if we forget or reject them. This is particularly so in a Christianity which inserted its narrative of sin into an existing political structure and ideology. This Christian ‘meta-narrative’ restricts what other narratives, and therefore purposes, are acceptable and allowed to be thought much less expressed. Religion, therefore, once the supplier of narrative coherence for society is now the main impediment to the expression of collective purpose.

The narrative limitations imposed by Christianity are of course powerful, not only because of their persistent and pervasive presentation but also because of their political endorsement. For example, I live in a rural part of England. From a nearby hillside I can see five church spires evenly spaced over a beautiful pastoral landscape. The church was and still is present in every village. It, not some government department, was historically the enforcer of civil peace in the name of the sovereign and still provides substantial social cohesion. In America, the spires and steeples have a more subtle but more important effect. Since there is no direct connection among the federal, state, county, and local levels of government except through the courts, the denominational churches have been the traditional glue creating cross-geographic social unity.

Thus Christianity and its doctrines have been absorbed into the social fabric, including the central concept of sin. The idea of sin in Christianity is equivalent to aberrant behavior, is equivalent to subversive intent, is equivalent to criminal act. One has only to think thoughts outside the norm to be and to feel guilty. This equivalence holds even if we have largely dropped the first term in the series - sin - from respectable conversation and political debate. We don’t have a more modern term for sin, yet the concept persists in our unwillingness to accept the purposes which occur quite naturally and reasonably in fellow human beings - regarding gender, sex, race, poverty, protection, respect, among many others - that have been denied as valid and therefore repressed psychically and suppressed socially.

So I hope Grosz’s therapeutic memoir inspires individuals to consider their own personal stories. It certainly has for me. But I also hope that it provokes those same individuals to indulge the strangeness of others, including their apparent anti-social behavior, as more than what it seems. The presumption of purpose in others is often difficult but frequently rewarding, just as it is for oneself. And without that presumption, the political search for new narratives of collective purpose will fail. Scott Peck was an icon of an era of fading liberalism and its implicit recognition of social purpose; Steven Grosz, one can hope, marks some sort of return to the recognition of purpose in an apparently purposeless society.

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