Introduction to the Chinese Edition The Myth of Psychology
By Dan Friedman, Castillo Theatre
[+download] The talks gathered in this volume were delivered by Fred Newman between 1982 and 1990. These eight years overlap with the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), a period of serious political reaction in the United States.
The immediate cause of this reaction was the successful mass movements of the 1960s. They had won equal legal rights for African Americans, ended both the War in Vietnam and the military draft, and sparked the Native American, Chicano, women’s and gay rights movements. In the midst of those political upheavals, the Sixties also give birth to a vast anti-corporate, communally-inclined counter culture and generated dozens of new, albeit small, social democratic and Marxist-Leninist organizations.
On a more structural and economic level, the reactionary era marked by Reagan’s ascent was the beginning of a long, and largely successful, attempt by the authorities-that-be to roll back the gains that the U.S. working class had won during the intense trade union and political struggles of the 1930s. Those fights resulted in reforms that the Democratic Party, under the leadership of Franklyn Delano Roosevelt, adapted as a way of saving capitalism at its most precarious point in U.S. history. Taken as a whole, these reforms were codified and popularized as the “New Deal.”
The New Deal included: the right to organize unions; the building of public housing to provide affordable homes for the homeless and the very poor (funded, in part, by the federal government); unemployment insurance; social security, a program to provide small monthly income for workers when they reached the age of 65; and welfare, which provided a very modest income to those who could not find jobs for an extended period of time. To the country’s corporate rulers, among the most abhorrent aspects of the New Deal were: the restrictions on banking; safety and environmental restrictions on manufacturers; and the relatively high taxes on corporate profits that helped to pay for it all.
In the 1980s President Reagan cut taxes for the wealthy, while increasing the military budget and slashing programs that benefited the poor. He worked actively to break trade unions. During his presidency the gap in wealth been the rich and the poor in the U.S. began to increase for the first time since the 1930s, a trend that has vastly accelerated in the years since. Reagan and his donors and followers opposed women’s rights (particularly reproductive rights), gay rights (he refused to even utter the word “AIDS” during most of his time in office), and he openly used racism to gain votes, particularly in the states of the former Confederacy. He launched his presidential campaign in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the small rural town where civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—two Jews and one African American—had been tortured and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. During the campaign, he also proclaimed that the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed Black people the right to vote in all U.S. states, had been “humiliating to the South.”
This shift from the social-democratically inspired New Deal to what most of the world calls Neo-Liberalism and what in the U.S. is called conservativism (a political tendency infused with deep-rooted American racism), didn’t end with Reagan’s two terms in the White House. The Democratic Party, under the leadership of Bill Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council, instead of defending the New Deal, worked to weaken the influence of the unions within the Democratic Party, and followed the Republicans to the right. It was during Clinton’s presidency (1993-2001) that welfare in the U.S. was abolished; the telecommunication, energy and financial industries were de-regulated; and the 1994 Crime Bill, authored and pushed through the Senate by Joe Biden, was passed. It has resulted, over the last thirty years, in the mass incarceration of millions Black men and the highest incarceration rate of any country on Earth.
The Republicans, emboldened further by the collapse of the Soviet Union, have moved more and more to the right (to the extent that as I write this, an openly racist and authoritarian takeover of the party appears to be underway). The Democrats—while more sympathetic to the cultural changes sparked by the Sixties (women’s, gay and Black rights)—followed the Republicans to the right on issues of political and economic structure. With a few exceptions, the Democratic and Republican parties have supported the endless wars that reap tremendous profits for their corporate donors.
This steady assault on the New Deal took place in a context in which the American people were politically and organizationally virtually defenseless. The U.S. working class’ long, violent and often heroic history of class struggle and radicalism had been eviscerated from historical memory of most Americans by the anti-communist repressions of the 1940s and 1950s. The unions, shorn of radical leadership, threw their lot with the Democratic Party, which at best ignored them and at worst stabbed them in the back. Progressive political alternatives to the Democratic and Republican parties could not gain traction due to the “winner-take-all” system of elections, the amount of money it takes to effectively advertise in the media, and the legal restrictions imposed on other parties, which made it nearly impossible for them to even get on the ballot. At the same time, the rapid expansion of U.S. imperialism, which came hand-in-hand with the militarization of the economy after World War II, resulted in a prolonged economic boom and the relative prosperity of the U.S. working class compared to the rest of the world. This, combined with the ubiquitous racism of American culture, made the white working class, in particular, vulnerable to U.S. chauvinism.
In the talks gathered in this book Newman’s targets are the harms propagated by the institution of psychology—among them, therapeutic transference, the psychopatholizing of depression, the substitution of drugs for community and development, and the socially constructed trap of addiction. While he speaks here primarily as a therapist (he was, after all, one of the most innovative and skilled therapists of the 20th Century), he also, and always, speaks as a Marxist and a revolutionary (he was, also, one of the most innovative Marxists of the 20th Century). That is what is most radical about Newman and the talks collected here. He was an innovative and non-dogmatic Marxist who seriously engaged the institution of psychology, its foundational roots in Western modernist philosophy, and the role it plays in perpetuating the pain and misery of capitalism. While some earlier Marxists had written scathing critiques of psychology, they did so primarily as an intellectual exercise. Newman’s engagement was as a mass organizer. His critique was practical-critical activity: leading the creation of a new non-psychological therapy (social therapy) along with numerous other grassroots cultural and political organizations. (Among them, and central to his work beginning in the 1980s was, initially, organizing electoral parties independent of the Republicans and Democrats and, subsequently, working more broadly to transform the bipartisan mindset and electoral laws that make political alternatives so challenging in the United States.) There was an endless loop between his overall political practice and the ideas articulated in these talks.
While we may now take for granted the need to engage psychology, it was quite unheard of, and very controversial, among political progressives in the 1980s. Marxism, over the last two hundred years—in both its social democratic and Marxist-Leninist varieties—has, with a few exceptions, ignored the subjective elements of social change. Orthodox Marxists have clung to a crude mechanical materialism that holds that people can’t qualitatively develop until after a revolution that changes the material conditions of life. As a consequence, they ceded the whole field of psychology to the bourgeoisie. Indeed, traditional Marxism took psychology’s claim of being apolitical at face value. The notion of actively engaging the organization of emotionality was totally foreign to them. With a few exceptions, they had (and have) no understanding that bourgeois psychology is a sophisticated enemy of radical change that needs to be constantly challenged because the assumptions it perpetuates hold back human development. The talks collected in The Myth of Psychology represent some of Newman’s earliest public challenges to psychology and they remain foundational to social therapeutics and to the overall engagement of the subjective factor in revolutionary transformation.
Newman’s singular genius aside, his ability to recognize the institution of psychology for what it is and his insistence that the engagement of subjectivity was a necessary component of revolutionary change, was made possible by the economic and social conditions we have just been examining. While classic Marxism arose in response to the brutal birth of industrial capitalism in 19th Century Europe, and Marxism-Leninism grew out of the crisis of world war and subsequent worldwide economic depression in the early 20th Century, the Marxism that was emerging under Newman’s leadership developed within the world’s wealthiest and most privileged nation during a half century in which it reached its height of power and prosperity. Newman and his followers had experienced the “success” of capitalism and found it wanting.
They were not alone in this. The counter culture of the Sixties can be understood as a mass reaction to the spiritual emptiness and emotional pain that is the normal state of mind under corporate capitalism. The Counter Culture was a mixed bag containing many, sometimes contradictory, political and cultural activities and attitudes. It included a strong “do your own thing” ethos that led to, among other things, the (now right wing) Libertarian political tendency. At the same time, there was a very powerful communalist pull within the counter culture. There were millions of (mostly) young people seeking a way out of the isolated, alienated (albeit relatively prosperous) worlds they had grown up in. In addition to feeling confined by the conformity of corporate culture, many were repulsed by its glorification of competitiveness and were left empty by its ethos of “looking out for number one.” They were searching for ways to connect to people in meaningful new (non-alienated) ways not defined and confined by the traditions they were rejecting. They wanted to be part of something more (or other) than their alienated selves, to live in ways that went beyond a boring job or a money and status-driven career track and an isolated family. They did so by trying to live their daily lives in more communal and loving ways. It is this cultural movement—the women’s liberation movement in particular—that gave us the slogan “the personal is political.” These values were embraced by Newman and his followers who sought ways to bring them into Marxism and keep them alive and developing during the period of Reagan’s reaction.
At the same time, Newman and his followers were acutely aware that however alienating the prosperity of post-World War II America was, that prosperity was being denied to its Black citizens. After four centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, the African American community, on the whole, was being systematically and forcefully kept in the grip of chronic poverty and underdevelopment, with vast numbers of its young men and women unable to find productive work, caught in a web of despair and crime. Newman also understood that the U.S.’s and Western Europe’s economic prosperity was dependent on constant war and the increasing immiseration of the hundreds of millions of (mostly) people of color around the world. This is the historical, political and cultural context which created The Myth of Psychology.
The overall arch of American political history has remained consistent since the 1980s: the ongoing dismantling of the reforms of the New Deal; the slashing of corporate taxes; the deregulation of industry; the increasing impotence of trade unions; the militarization of the police; the mass migration of U.S. industry and capital overseas. All of which has resulted in tremendous material loss and emotional pain for the majority of the American people—and, in even more drastic ways, for people in other parts of the world. That is where Fred Newman’s lectures and speeches from the 1980s come to the fore, and why they are so important to us in the 21st Century.
Many young Americans today are growing up in cities that have no jobs for them, where the option is joining a gang or joining the military. They’re growing up in towns where the factories that gave their community work and stability for 150 years have been closed and their unions broken. They now have to work 2 or 3 low-paying service jobs to survive. Or, if they’re financially better off, they’re growing up in an environment so atomized and alienated that it leaves them feeling alone, scared and angry. They have had no say in the economic and social policies that have created these conditions—and the two-party monopoly is so unresponsive that they seem to have no way of impacting on it.
The alienation Newman explored in “Talking Transference” has grown so acute that some young men (mostly white) in the U.S. go out and shoot groups of people for the hell of it. It has become a normal part of American culture, and it keeps accelerating. There were 427 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2017; that’s more than one per day. In the poor Black community, the alienation and violence look different but are equally devastating. Young men with no jobs but with the wealth of America paraded before them on television every day, turn to drug dealing to make a living and to the “protection” of gangs to stay alive (at least for a while). According to the University of Chicago’s Center for Youth Violence Prevention, in 2018 in that city alone, on the average, 12 young people were being shot dead every day. The “Myth of Addiction” that Newman writes about has taken hold on a previously unprecedented scale. Young people across the U.S. are essentially committing mass suicide with opioids—70,000 deaths by overdose in 2019 alone. To Newman’s point about the addiction industry being real, while addition itself being a myth, I need only mention the many billions of dollars the pharmaceutical companies have made over the last 20 years peddling opioids and other legal drugs.
The anxiety-becoming-panic that Newman explores in his 1988 talk “Panic in America,” has developed into what a BBC commentator in 2021 aptly described as “frozen hysteria” that has left tens of millions in an impotent state of intense fear and anger. Over the last four years, the far-right, drawing on centuries of racism and xenophobia have succeeded in “unfreezing” this hysteria and directing the fear and anger of many white working-class people against African Americans, immigrants and Jews. As Newman puts it in the “Foreword” to this book, myths, “… do not drop from the sky. They are constructed accompaniments serving the interests of controlling forces even as they are (if effective) self-destructively adopted by those under control.”
The psychopathologies unpacked by Newman in the 1980s, while they have grown more twisted and debilitating over the last forty years, remain part of the emotional construct of the United States (and I would add, at this point in history, much of the rest of the world), as have the economic and political constructs that generated and sustain them. Neo-Liberalism and its even uglier political sibling, fascism, are stronger than they were in the 1980s and the myth of psychology, while it has generated many new “schools,” retains its destructive hold on our culture—indeed, it is more pervasive and invasive than ever.
This collection starts and ends with talks that provide us with the means to take on the myth of psychology—as well the many other myths, “self-destructively adopted by those under control.” In “The Patient as Revolutionary” Newman teaches that social therapists should treat all patients as potential revolutionaries, that is, as human beings capable of engaging and changing themselves and the world. Nor did he ever mean for this to be limited to social therapy patients per se. Numerous times he advised me, as a political and community organizer, to approach everyone I met as though they might become the leader of the revolution. The closing talk in this book, “Community as a Heart in a Havenless World,” sketches out a new kind of social unit capable of sustaining itself across borders of all sorts while continually re-inventing itself–the development community. It is a community that self-consciously creates/performs itself, an ensemble that constantly works to add new members to its cast, and in which each new cast member has the power to impact on the totality. Community in this sense is not so much a thing as an activity, a mass improvisational performance.
That is what has qualitatively changed over the last forty years. We now have, thanks to work pioneered by Newman and first articulated in these talks, both the method for engaging the myth of psychology (and the entire structure of corporate capitalism) and the social form for sustaining and deepening that work. The handful of organizers, therapists, intellectuals, artists and poor people who Newman was speaking to in New York City forty years ago has grown into an international development community consisting of tens of thousands of people from a wide range of cultures, histories and walks of life on every continent.
The work and play needed for development is under way. As Newman put it in his Foreword, “…the only way to engage a myth is to develop an anti-mythic historical (pro-human) practice (in Marx's language a practical-critical, i.e. revolutionary activity; in Vygotsky's language a dialectical tool and result methodology) which does not simply offer a cognitive critique (myths eat cognitive critiques for breakfast) but which organizes people (the rabble) to destroy the myth and then to use the rubble to build something of use for us.”
Dan Friedman
February 14, 2021