The Clare Spark Blog

Graham Nash photoassemblage

This blog is about the almost universal use of the term “the Other” to designate unwarranted “prejudice” in the perpetrator of [ThoughtCrimes]. Presumably, the bigot views his antagonist as not quite human in the same way he is, i.e. he is Other. The notion of “the Other”  comes from two sources, as far as I can tell: 1. German Idealism that sees subjectivity as the human condition (drawing on Plato and Kant); and 2. The psychoanalytic method of Melanie Klein, namely her theory of projective identification. It was taken up by Frankfurt School critical theorists in the early 1940s as far as I can tell, followers of Kantian subjectivism.

What projective identification asserts as truth is as follows: there are no real irreconcilable conflicts of interest in the world. Rather, the prejudiced person projects his own unacceptable (inner, evil) thoughts upon an enemy, who then appears as a monster deserving of annihilation, and at the very least must be controlled. Clearly, a strong dose of multiculturalism will cure the hateful individual, and with such salutary instruction, wars will cease and irrational parties will meekly submit to arbitration by a rational mediator skilled at finding “common ground.”

In all my work, I have fought this strategy, not because I like fighting (as in shooting wars), but because I don’t submit to the notion of a “neutral” liberal state that practices the coercive harmonizing of conflicting interest groups and ideologies. My therapist at UCLA warned? me that a dream revealed that  I was fearful of submitting to my doctoral committee, and he was relieved when I finally got my degree (then he confessed that he disapproved of my prior “defiance”. Wonder ye why I liked Orwell’s 1984?).

This is a portion of how I presented the conception of projective identification in my book on the Melville Revival:

[From chapter 2, Hunting Captain Ahab:] The socially responsible alchemists were joined by the Frankfurt School German-Jewish refugees in the early 1940s. Like other Progressive productions in social psychology, the massive and numerous studies of the “authoritarian personality” by Adorno, Horkheimer et al, have transmuted objective conflicts of interest and rational responses to economic crises into symptoms of personal irresponsibility. The refugee philosophers, Marxist-Freudians to a man [plus Hannah Arendt], explained that the character structure of the middle-class with its falsely feeling “mass culture”/mob society and yen for agitators produced mass death in the twentieth century.[i]

T. W. Adorno

The overall project of their critical theory was to discredit excessively liberal values while subtly accrediting the discourse and world-view of organic conservativism–re-baptised by T.W. Adorno as genuine liberalism, like Wordworth’s “genuine liberty”(The Prelude, XIV, 132 [ii]), antidote to the protofascist “authoritarian personality.”[iii]

[From Wordsworth’s The Prelude:]

I speak in recollection of a time

When the bodily eye, every stage of life

The most despotic of our senses, gained

Such strength in me as often held my mind

In absolute dominion. Gladly here,

Entering upon abstruser argument,

Could I endeavour to unfold the means

Which Nature studiously employs to thwart

This tyranny, summons all the senses each

To counteract the other, and themselves,

And makes them all, and the objects with which all

Are conversant, subservient in their turn

To the great ends of Liberty and Power. (The Prelude, XIV, 127-139)

…………………..

…I remember well

That in life’s every-day appearances

I seemed about this time to gain clear sight

Of a new world–a world, too, that was fit

To be transmitted, and to other eyes

Made visible; as ruled by those fixed laws

Whence spiritual dignity originates,

Which do both give it being and maintain

A balance, an ennobling interchange

Of action from without and from within;

The excellence, pure function, and best power

Both of the objects seen, and eye that sees. (The Prelude, XIV, 367-378)

According to the Kleinian psychoanalytic theory of “projective identification” the self projects forbidden aggression into an external object which must be controlled. In the case of the upwardly mobile middle class, their (contemptible) will to power is supposedly projected upon the Jews. Stubborn adherence to non-dualisms was identified with scapegoating, obviously a bad thing for mental health. Social psychologist Gordon Allport denounced group prejudice in his frequently reprinted Freedom Pamphlet of 1948, The ABC’s of Scapegoating. [iv] Allport advised Americans to adjust to pluralism by looking inside to check their “moral cancer” (7). Whites should stop scapegoating blacks, Christians should stop scapegoating Jews, “labor” should stop scapegoating “the spokesmen for ‘business’ ” (like Allport?), and conservatives should stop confusing liberals with communists by scapegoating FDR (26). Allport’s pamphlet is illuminated by comparison with the worksheets he earlier devised with Dr. Henry A. Murray for the Harvard seminar Psychological Problems in Morale (1941), meant to be disseminated to “private organizations” throughout the nation. As part of the Harvard Defense Council, the seminar was to be “an important component in a general program of coordinated research.”[v] The materials for the course consisted of one short red-bound typescript, and numerous stapled worksheets, each methodically dealing with some aspect of propaganda, including a summary of Hitler’s personality and psychodynamics that would inform counter-propaganda. Hitler’s duplicity, irrationality and contempt for the masses was constantly compared with American rationality, which oddly enough, was derived from the protofascist and irrationalist social theorist, Vilfredo Pareto.[vi]

In worksheet #4, “Determinants of Good and Bad Morale,” the [moderate conservative] authors outlined “aggressive needs in group coherence.” First, there must be “outlets for grievances”: “Provision for the free expression of opinion improves morale.” Second, “scapegoat outlets” were another aid to good morale:

“The direction of aggression against a subversive minority group may reduce tensions, and will be least disruptive if the scapegoat group is one which is in conflict with the total group in respect of major immediate aims. Aggression had better be directed against the external enemy, but if this is frustrated, or the group becomes apathetic, the subversive minority group may improve morale by either (1) reducing frustrated tensions of aggression or (2) reawakening aggression, or (3) displacing aggression away from intra-group aggression, or (4) displacing aggression away from the leaders of the group, if and when reversed [sic] are suffered (p.8).” Did you catch the double message, indeed a case of Doublethink?

I am suggesting that the ahistoric, irrationalist concept of “scapegoating” or “negative identity” cannot explain “prejudice”; rather, the pluralists are admitting there is no basis for unity in class societies whose politics are organized around national or ethnic “peaceful competition.” If the only unity is found in differing groups worshipping one “ideal self” (or artwork, which will, in practice, be designated by the elite), then the bad individualist like Melville will be attacked. Thou shalt not question the good parent’s (i.e., the welfare state’s) benevolence or the possibility of “group adjustment” by reconfiguring the social structure along materialist, i.e., “Jacobin” lines. As Sartre noted in his wartime essay Anti-Semite and Jew, German unity was forged solely in the common project to remove the social irritant that prevented natural harmony. This “prejudice” against the Jewish intellect and its sulking reverence, so corrosive to “natural” family bonds, was specific to a pluralist society whose objective divisions could not be overcome without some measure of institutional transformation. The rooted cosmopolitanism of the moderate men, by definition masking class and gender conflicts with the bizarre notion of competing, yet peacefully co-existing, mutually adapting ethnic groups, is thus deceptive and discredits all science: its “pluralism” and “tolerance” attack the moral individual seeking common ground by straying outside the boundaries set by elites.

Adorno portrait in urban setting

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                        [i]  91. See T.W. Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, Paul W. Massing, “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda,” Anti-Semitism, A Social Disease, ed. Ernst Simmel (New York.: International Universities Press, 1946): 125-138; Nathan W. Ackerman and Marie Jahoda, Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder (New York: Harper, 1950) and the other publications in the series “Studies in Prejudice” edited by Max Horkheimer and Samuel H. Flowerman, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee.See below for the links of their identity politics (usually attributed to Erik Erikson) to the Harvard/Chicagopragmatists: Parsons and Lasswell. Cf. Hugh Seton-Watson, “The Age of Fascism and its Legacy,” International Fascism, ed. George L. Mosse (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979), 365. They argue: Hitler was only slightly indebted to the capitalists (who did not extensively fund him, or put him in power), and he soon brought them to heel. The irrationalist interpretation of Nazism as an outpouring of bad middle-class taste was followed by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, defending modernism in its reconstruction of the Nazi Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937.

[ii]  92. Melville owned (and took with him on his 1860 Meteor voyage) The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth Together With A Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England, Now First Published with His Works, ed. Henry Reed (Phila., 1839). Some of his (surviving) annotations were discussed in Thomas F. Heffernan, “Melville and Wordsworth,” American Literature (Nov. 1977): 338-351. There is no mention of “The Prelude.” Hershel Parker states that Duyckinck brought the Appleton proof sheets of the poem to the Berkshires in 1850, and even reviewed it, but that neither he nor Melville read the poem at that time; see Parker, “Melville & The Berkshires,” American Literature: The New England Heritage , eds. James Nagel and Richard Astro (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), 68. Parker suggests that Melville’s sympathies for the suffering poor were inspired by Wordsworth’s cottagers and his own professional or personal traumas of the early 1850s (78-79), while Heffernan noted the importance of  “The Excursion” to Clarel (351), a work displaying “the similarity of moral and religious concerns.”

                        [iii]  93. See T.W. Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950), 71, 781-783.The “Genuine Liberal” type is anti-totalitarian and free of narcissism; in Adorno’s appropriation of Freud, the genuine liberal possesses “that balance between superego, ego, and id which Freud deemed ideal” (71). Adorno’s example of the type is a politically naive, but frank and independent twenty-one year old  woman, not given to ultra-femininity/ feminine wiles; she is the daughter of a hiring manager at a railroad; in the family sexual division of labor, her loving mother represents emotions, her father, facts. She is religious (“Perhaps we will all be saved”) and reads Plato for Utopian inspiration. When asked how she felt about Negroes and Jews, she was “guided by the idea of the individual,” but she wouldn’t want to marry a Negro with dark skin or a man with a big nose. However, as a nurse’s aid, she did not object to caring for Negro patients. Adorno quotes her “joke” [what would Freud have said?]: “Maybe if the Jews get in power they would liquidate the majority! That’s not smart. Because we would fight back.” Admirably free of bigotry, she is also free of “repression with regard to her feelings toward her father: ‘I want to marry someone just like my father’ ” (783).

Distinguishing themselves from “manipulative” fascists, the authors, in their concluding sentence, prescribe an antithetical appeal to the emotions: “…we need not suppose that appeal to emotion belongs to those who strive in the direction of fascism, while democratic propaganda must limit itself to reason and restraint. If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy” (976). Henry A. Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test was used by Adorno’s colleagues creating “the F-scale” (the potential for fascist behavior);  Murray’s and Lasswell’s books are recommended in the bibliography

[iv] 94. Gordon Allport, ABC’s of Scapegoating (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, 1983, ninth rev.ed., first publ. 1948).

 [v] 95. Gardner Murphy, Civilian Morale, 427.

  [vi] 96. Murray-Allport worksheet #16, “Psychology of Influence (Education Persuasion) Applied to Morale Building in America,” 13.