Soldz: That's a good question. I mean, all of our self narratives, as you put it, differ from reality in various ways. None of us lives totally 'in reality'. So, but, if too much of it differs from... and especially the internal reality, for example, someone who thinks of themselves as only being a nice person who never gets angry, that can be very limiting. There are many things in the world that do get one angry and if one has to keep that out of awareness that one never gets angry, then it can express itself in various other ways that can cause problems. So no, it's not always a problem, but it often is.
Pinky: In one of your talks, I heard you characterize America as suffering from a sort of 'social narcissism'. Can you please explain what you mean by this?
Soldz: Well, I'm sort of using a metaphor from clinical narcissism, which involves a self-absorption, a general unawareness of other people. It's not that you don't know that there's physically another person and they, you know, they've got a different body and a different name, but you're not really aware that they're different than you, that they have different thoughts, different wishes. You think that they're just like you. You know, like a patient who says "I know what you're thinking!", and it's what they're thinking. It doesn't occur to them that you might be thinking something different than what they're thinking or you might have different feelings than them. So, in a clinical sense narcissism involves this sense that others are just like oneself, and therefore an unawareness of others as real, separate people.
In some sense I think the United States suffers from this at a social level. We have this ideal that we're the best people on Earth. President Reagan described it as the, I think it was "the shining city on a hill" from the New Testament, you know, we're this beacon to the world and all and the rest of the world should just realize that and emulate us. They should aspire to have our cars, our political system, our Coca-Cola, and there's very little interest in or concern that different cultures have different values, different interests. You know: "Why are they so weird?". And I think that, you know, it's true of all countries to some degree, but I think the United States has been particularly true partly because we've been relatively isolated by the oceans and by being such a big country, you know we've had a huge influx of immigrants over the centuries. And we've been relatively spared from internal wars, at least since the Civil War, and... many Americans do not travel overseas, knowledge of foreign languages is like much lower than most other countries, at least most other industrial countries, and there's just a lack of curiosity about other people. I mean, the most extreme of this is our president, you know, I believe who just about never traveled outside of the country, he can barely stand to sleep in a bed different than his own, he needs a very controlled environment, and he just doesn't seem to be curious about anyone in the rest of the world. It never occurs to him that maybe Iraqis have different interests. Maybe they don't want what exactly what he thinks we want. But I think it's true of a lot of Americans in general.
Pinky: Okay, so I assume that these kinds of problems are only compounded when the individual or the nation is very powerful, is that correct?
Soldz: You probably can only keep it up either in isolation or when you're extremely powerful. You know, those at the bottom of the rung probably don't have the luxury of really believing that because they're constantly impinged upon by others. So, in that sense, I think you're probably right.
Pinky: In one of your talks I was listening to, you cited a very interesting statistic re: trust in America. You said that from 1960 to 2000, the amount of people who would agree with the statement "Most people can be trusted" dropped from approximately 55% to 35%, and something like 25% among high school students. What's happening?
Soldz: Well we seem to have a much more fearful society. Since 2001, we've seen the results of this, and the deliberate exploitation of it by certain politicians. But I think it's been true for a long time. There was this myth of this shining city on a hill that lasted through much of the Cold War to a great degree, and it got challenged. In the 60s, it got challenged by the Civil Rights Movement, by the social movements spawned in opposition to the Vietnam War. I know I'm of that generation. In the sense that our country was doing something pretty wrong in Vietnam. It was a pretty rude awakening for a lot of people. And, we've also had increased social tensions around the cities, and then, especially since around 1980, a large increase both in inequality, you know, it's now become accepted, but it's been true for a long time, there's been a large and growing gap between the upper few percent of the population and the majority of the population in income, in social power, which I think is probably almost as important as income. The institutions of popular power in the country have decreased, say, unions, neighborhood organizations, things that allowed ordinary people to exert influence over their lives have decreased radically. So there's much more of a sense of powerlessness, of being driven by external forces.
To a large percentage of the population, there's a decline of security. We know that, for example, retirement, that there used to be a good number of jobs which had pension plans that were guaranteed pension plans, and you put in your 20 or 30 or whatever years and you were taken care of pretty well. And that's gone. Now we have a fractured.. you take care of yourself with a 401k that's never anywhere near equal to an old pension plan. You know, the social welfare net has been frayed in various ways, and people sense it. They don't have a good understanding of it but, there's in many ways people just feel afraid. Unfortunately, I think people often end up attributing it to sort of the wrong things. For a long while the danger was from poor people, and essentially black people, that was exploited. You know, the fear of crime. And I don't want to say that crime isn't a real problem, but we've noticed that as violent crime has declined for the last almost 15 years now, fear of crime has increased. The amount of crime and the danger doesn't reflect your fear of it. I mean, it partially has to do with the media, but it also partially has to do with there's a reflection of an overall sense of just 'Danger', of that things are not safe. And we focus on particular things like crime or most recently like terrorists in order to give some structure to this sense that something's not quite right, that things are getting worse. You know, we've seen in recent polls that there's a radical increase in the sense that the nation is going in the wrong direction, and that leads to this general sense, well, it's easier to find a scapegoat in some sense than to live with that uncertainty and fear.
Pinky: So... into this era of instability and insecurity, from a psychoanalytic perspective, how does one control the population by manufacturing fear in the form of an external enemy?
Soldz: Well, it seems the structure the way people think and in certain circumstances it pulls people together. You know, you think of WWII and the sense of the nation 'being together'. In recent years, is this odd quality. We have this external enemy which is of a very unfocused character, you know, terrorism, which is - "What in the world is terrorism? Where is it located? Who does it manifest?" The administration if they wanted to mobilize, and I'm sort of the opinion that they had at some level consciously or not that unconsciously were aware of creating a new enemy to replace the Cold War enemy. I remember watching Bush's speech after 9/11, his speech to Congress, and I was struck how he defined terrorism in very vague terms, so that the 'war on terrorism' could never be won. I mean, how can you win a war on a tactic? Terrorism has been around for thousands of years. There's no way you can win this war, so therefore, you know, he didn't define it in terms of Al-Qaeda or any particular enemy. And, I think it was deliberate, but we have this war combined with this sort of lack of a war footing in the country because I think that they guessed that they couldn't sustain it, that opposition to their policies would have increased a lot if they actually asked for sacrifice. So if I recall correctly, the same speech told people to go to the mall and go shopping in order to prevent some economic collapse.
So you have this formless enemy. I mean, terrorism can be anywhere, can be anyone, and this sense that there's nothing concrete you're doing about it. This is in some sense the worst situation. If you remember you know you have these fears, go out and buy duct tape, and other nonsense like that that just leads to this increase in fear, but in a formless fear. It's not a fear of the Nazis which is much more concrete. So, it becomes our manifestation of all our worst fears, and it also becomes I think to some sense a manifestation of our guilt, that Americans in some sense know that we have this privileged status in the world, we use a far greater fraction of the resources of the world than our population, which suggests we should, and that it's built upon a world where other people have to be kept down if we're going to keep having these resources. So there is a real danger, and it gets focused but in it's undifferentiated way so that it doesn't work as well psychologically, as more traditional enemies, and I think it leads to greater anxiety.
Pinky: Hmm, this is really interesting. It kind of sounds like, sort of, a cycle, like we're projecting... Is that what you're talking about? Projection?
Soldz: Yes, yeah, I'm talking about projection, trying not to use the technical word! [laugh] But yes, projection. And remember, projection is projecting what's in us. Which doesn't mean, you know, there's the old saying "just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that someone's not out to get you" but, it's our own fears and our own hatred, you know, "it's not me who hate those other people for trying to get what I've taken from them or what I'm getting unfairly, but it's them who hate me" is the process of projection. And in fact, it goes to a further step, to what psychoanalysts now call 'projective identification'. Projective identification is where you project your feelings, wishes into another person and you then act in such a way as to get that person to enact it. So you act in such a way as to get the other person to give you grounds to be paranoid of them. You make them so uncomfortable, you know, "Why are you staring at me?" You say that and someone's likely to get hostile. Again these are somewhat metaphors. But in projective identification it's analogous to 'blowback' that Chalmers Johnson and others have talked about. We do things in such a way as to arouse others to take us on and to be a greater danger. I'm not trying to claim, I don't want to be misunderstood as saying that there aren't dangers, let's say Al-Qaeda, or certain Islamic extremists aren't potentially dangerous, but that we act in such a way as to magnify those dangers and increase them rather than to reduce them. Take the war in Iraq, which is you know, in every poll around the world has led to precipitous decline in respect for the United States. That can't be making us safer.
Pinky: Okay, in terms of your work, how would you go about trying to help someone who's suffering from these kinds of mental projections, or narcissism? How do you help them to overcome this?
Soldz: Well, that's a good question, and unfortunately it doesn't easily generalize to the social sphere. You know the first thing is you have to create a safe environment, and that's what we try and do in the office. One where a person can have any thought or feeling and not be afraid that's going to cause problems for them. So it's of course a gradual process. Then, you have to be not too challenging, you don't go telling people, "Hey, you're projecting! Why are you projecting on to me?" That doesn't usually work, that usually arouses greater defensiveness. So you accept whatever it is the person has to say, whatever it is they feel and at the same time you try not to be too alien to them, not to be so "good and understanding" that we increase the feelings a person has for themselves. And so then there's a gradual process of trying to get a person to put into words rather than act to experience. Because a lot of what people do is they act in order not to experience - in order not to feel angry, or not to feel ashamed, or not to feel terrified - they act. You know, it feels safer and more in control if I yell at you instead of having some feeling that I'm in danger or I don't understand what's going on. Or, I'm terrified of myself. It takes a long time for people to get to a point where they will admit that it's primarily themselves that they're most scared of - what they don't know, or what they think they shouldn't know about themselves that's most terrifying. I mean if you can accept that then you can deal better about the external world.
Pinky: In one of your talks, I heard you characterize America as suffering from a sort of 'social narcissism'. Can you please explain what you mean by this?
Soldz: Well, I'm sort of using a metaphor from clinical narcissism, which involves a self-absorption, a general unawareness of other people. It's not that you don't know that there's physically another person and they, you know, they've got a different body and a different name, but you're not really aware that they're different than you, that they have different thoughts, different wishes. You think that they're just like you. You know, like a patient who says "I know what you're thinking!", and it's what they're thinking. It doesn't occur to them that you might be thinking something different than what they're thinking or you might have different feelings than them. So, in a clinical sense narcissism involves this sense that others are just like oneself, and therefore an unawareness of others as real, separate people.
In some sense I think the United States suffers from this at a social level. We have this ideal that we're the best people on Earth. President Reagan described it as the, I think it was "the shining city on a hill" from the New Testament, you know, we're this beacon to the world and all and the rest of the world should just realize that and emulate us. They should aspire to have our cars, our political system, our Coca-Cola, and there's very little interest in or concern that different cultures have different values, different interests. You know: "Why are they so weird?". And I think that, you know, it's true of all countries to some degree, but I think the United States has been particularly true partly because we've been relatively isolated by the oceans and by being such a big country, you know we've had a huge influx of immigrants over the centuries. And we've been relatively spared from internal wars, at least since the Civil War, and... many Americans do not travel overseas, knowledge of foreign languages is like much lower than most other countries, at least most other industrial countries, and there's just a lack of curiosity about other people. I mean, the most extreme of this is our president, you know, I believe who just about never traveled outside of the country, he can barely stand to sleep in a bed different than his own, he needs a very controlled environment, and he just doesn't seem to be curious about anyone in the rest of the world. It never occurs to him that maybe Iraqis have different interests. Maybe they don't want what exactly what he thinks we want. But I think it's true of a lot of Americans in general.
Soldz: You probably can only keep it up either in isolation or when you're extremely powerful. You know, those at the bottom of the rung probably don't have the luxury of really believing that because they're constantly impinged upon by others. So, in that sense, I think you're probably right.
Pinky: In one of your talks I was listening to, you cited a very interesting statistic re: trust in America. You said that from 1960 to 2000, the amount of people who would agree with the statement "Most people can be trusted" dropped from approximately 55% to 35%, and something like 25% among high school students. What's happening?
Soldz: Well we seem to have a much more fearful society. Since 2001, we've seen the results of this, and the deliberate exploitation of it by certain politicians. But I think it's been true for a long time. There was this myth of this shining city on a hill that lasted through much of the Cold War to a great degree, and it got challenged. In the 60s, it got challenged by the Civil Rights Movement, by the social movements spawned in opposition to the Vietnam War. I know I'm of that generation. In the sense that our country was doing something pretty wrong in Vietnam. It was a pretty rude awakening for a lot of people. And, we've also had increased social tensions around the cities, and then, especially since around 1980, a large increase both in inequality, you know, it's now become accepted, but it's been true for a long time, there's been a large and growing gap between the upper few percent of the population and the majority of the population in income, in social power, which I think is probably almost as important as income. The institutions of popular power in the country have decreased, say, unions, neighborhood organizations, things that allowed ordinary people to exert influence over their lives have decreased radically. So there's much more of a sense of powerlessness, of being driven by external forces.
To a large percentage of the population, there's a decline of security. We know that, for example, retirement, that there used to be a good number of jobs which had pension plans that were guaranteed pension plans, and you put in your 20 or 30 or whatever years and you were taken care of pretty well. And that's gone. Now we have a fractured.. you take care of yourself with a 401k that's never anywhere near equal to an old pension plan. You know, the social welfare net has been frayed in various ways, and people sense it. They don't have a good understanding of it but, there's in many ways people just feel afraid. Unfortunately, I think people often end up attributing it to sort of the wrong things. For a long while the danger was from poor people, and essentially black people, that was exploited. You know, the fear of crime. And I don't want to say that crime isn't a real problem, but we've noticed that as violent crime has declined for the last almost 15 years now, fear of crime has increased. The amount of crime and the danger doesn't reflect your fear of it. I mean, it partially has to do with the media, but it also partially has to do with there's a reflection of an overall sense of just 'Danger', of that things are not safe. And we focus on particular things like crime or most recently like terrorists in order to give some structure to this sense that something's not quite right, that things are getting worse. You know, we've seen in recent polls that there's a radical increase in the sense that the nation is going in the wrong direction, and that leads to this general sense, well, it's easier to find a scapegoat in some sense than to live with that uncertainty and fear.
Pinky: So... into this era of instability and insecurity, from a psychoanalytic perspective, how does one control the population by manufacturing fear in the form of an external enemy?
Soldz: Well, it seems the structure the way people think and in certain circumstances it pulls people together. You know, you think of WWII and the sense of the nation 'being together'. In recent years, is this odd quality. We have this external enemy which is of a very unfocused character, you know, terrorism, which is - "What in the world is terrorism? Where is it located? Who does it manifest?" The administration if they wanted to mobilize, and I'm sort of the opinion that they had at some level consciously or not that unconsciously were aware of creating a new enemy to replace the Cold War enemy. I remember watching Bush's speech after 9/11, his speech to Congress, and I was struck how he defined terrorism in very vague terms, so that the 'war on terrorism' could never be won. I mean, how can you win a war on a tactic? Terrorism has been around for thousands of years. There's no way you can win this war, so therefore, you know, he didn't define it in terms of Al-Qaeda or any particular enemy. And, I think it was deliberate, but we have this war combined with this sort of lack of a war footing in the country because I think that they guessed that they couldn't sustain it, that opposition to their policies would have increased a lot if they actually asked for sacrifice. So if I recall correctly, the same speech told people to go to the mall and go shopping in order to prevent some economic collapse.
So you have this formless enemy. I mean, terrorism can be anywhere, can be anyone, and this sense that there's nothing concrete you're doing about it. This is in some sense the worst situation. If you remember you know you have these fears, go out and buy duct tape, and other nonsense like that that just leads to this increase in fear, but in a formless fear. It's not a fear of the Nazis which is much more concrete. So, it becomes our manifestation of all our worst fears, and it also becomes I think to some sense a manifestation of our guilt, that Americans in some sense know that we have this privileged status in the world, we use a far greater fraction of the resources of the world than our population, which suggests we should, and that it's built upon a world where other people have to be kept down if we're going to keep having these resources. So there is a real danger, and it gets focused but in it's undifferentiated way so that it doesn't work as well psychologically, as more traditional enemies, and I think it leads to greater anxiety.
Pinky: Hmm, this is really interesting. It kind of sounds like, sort of, a cycle, like we're projecting... Is that what you're talking about? Projection?
Soldz: Yes, yeah, I'm talking about projection, trying not to use the technical word! [laugh] But yes, projection. And remember, projection is projecting what's in us. Which doesn't mean, you know, there's the old saying "just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that someone's not out to get you" but, it's our own fears and our own hatred, you know, "it's not me who hate those other people for trying to get what I've taken from them or what I'm getting unfairly, but it's them who hate me" is the process of projection. And in fact, it goes to a further step, to what psychoanalysts now call 'projective identification'. Projective identification is where you project your feelings, wishes into another person and you then act in such a way as to get that person to enact it. So you act in such a way as to get the other person to give you grounds to be paranoid of them. You make them so uncomfortable, you know, "Why are you staring at me?" You say that and someone's likely to get hostile. Again these are somewhat metaphors. But in projective identification it's analogous to 'blowback' that Chalmers Johnson and others have talked about. We do things in such a way as to arouse others to take us on and to be a greater danger. I'm not trying to claim, I don't want to be misunderstood as saying that there aren't dangers, let's say Al-Qaeda, or certain Islamic extremists aren't potentially dangerous, but that we act in such a way as to magnify those dangers and increase them rather than to reduce them. Take the war in Iraq, which is you know, in every poll around the world has led to precipitous decline in respect for the United States. That can't be making us safer.
Pinky: Okay, in terms of your work, how would you go about trying to help someone who's suffering from these kinds of mental projections, or narcissism? How do you help them to overcome this?
Soldz: Well, that's a good question, and unfortunately it doesn't easily generalize to the social sphere. You know the first thing is you have to create a safe environment, and that's what we try and do in the office. One where a person can have any thought or feeling and not be afraid that's going to cause problems for them. So it's of course a gradual process. Then, you have to be not too challenging, you don't go telling people, "Hey, you're projecting! Why are you projecting on to me?" That doesn't usually work, that usually arouses greater defensiveness. So you accept whatever it is the person has to say, whatever it is they feel and at the same time you try not to be too alien to them, not to be so "good and understanding" that we increase the feelings a person has for themselves. And so then there's a gradual process of trying to get a person to put into words rather than act to experience. Because a lot of what people do is they act in order not to experience - in order not to feel angry, or not to feel ashamed, or not to feel terrified - they act. You know, it feels safer and more in control if I yell at you instead of having some feeling that I'm in danger or I don't understand what's going on. Or, I'm terrified of myself. It takes a long time for people to get to a point where they will admit that it's primarily themselves that they're most scared of - what they don't know, or what they think they shouldn't know about themselves that's most terrifying. I mean if you can accept that then you can deal better about the external world.
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