Year 3 Essay 4: Psychoanalytical contribution to understanding cultural and social relationships

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Psychoanalytic ideas challenge some perspectives in social psychology, especially positive psychology that emphasises the rationality and self-determination of the actor. Instead, psychoanalysis moves its attention to the internal battles, the tension between the id, ego and superego, showing how concepts such as bestial self, relational self and defence mechanisms can help understand the social and cultural relationships in a global and diverse society. Psychoanalysis emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century, with the work of Sigmund Freud (Breuer and Freud 1895, 1910, 1916-1917, cited in Kaposi, 2017, p. 130). Studying peoples’ slips of tongues, dreams and jokes, Freud (1910, 1915, cited in Kaposi, 2017, p. 130) postulated that behaviour is determined by unconscious dynamics. Over time, psychoanalysis became more than a method of treatment. Applying psychoanalytic ideas to qualitative studies allowed researchers to identify patterns of thinking, how different people use the same defence mechanisms to protect themselves from aspects of reality that are inconvenient. The essay will argue that even if psychoanalysis was developed in a clinical environment its concepts are used nowadays to understand human behaviour not only at micro levels but also at macro level.

In comparison with some other perspectives in social psychology, psychoanalysis offers a very different approach to studying social and cultural relationships. The human beings are not rational, capable of taking the best decisions to improve their well-being, as positive psychology states (Stenner, 2017). According to psychoanalysis, the psyche is formed of id, ego and superego. The id operates on “the pleasure principle”, but some of the wishes and drives cannot be expressed because society opposes them, therefore they become repressed. The superego is the ideal self that is self-regulatory in a way that concords with social expectations. The ego operates on the “reality principle” mediating between the id and superego (Freud, 1923, cited in Kaposi, 2017, p. 139). According to Freud, there is a continuous battle between the id and the ego and as a result people develop defence mechanisms, such as: projection -happens when feelings that cannot be tolerated are attributed to other people; denial- explained as the failure to recognise thoughts, feelings, desires; and repression- thoughts that cannot be accepted are eradicated from consciousness (Colman, 2008). The defence mechanisms are useful in explaining conflict between different groups of people and the passive attitude to the suffering of others. In this way, a social psychology informed by psychoanalytic concepts explores how some unwanted behaviours are reproduced in society. From a critical perspective, psychoanalysis can be considered a social psychology ‘from the standpoint of the subject’ (Motzkau & Taylor, 2017, p. 75), as it explores how people make sense of social representations. Psychoanalysis explores the concept of power in interpersonal relationships and the context in which the relationships develop is not taken for granted.

One trait of the psychoanalysis theory is that while it preserved most of its main theories, it kept developing and new concepts were added in order to explain peoples’ behaviour.According to Stephen Mitchell (1988 p. 136, cited in Kaposi, 2017, p.141), not only impulses and memories are repressed, but also relationships. Therefore, the unconscious is formed by a bestial self in the way Freud conceptualised the “id” and also by a relational self that consists of feelings of love or hate for other people (Mitchell, 1988, 1993, cited in Kaposi, 2017, p. 141). The relational self is useful in understanding how conflict between different groups of people persist. The defence mechanism of splitting determines the members of one group to see themselves as good people and the members of the group they are in conflict with as ‘evil’. This kind of behaviour was researched by the work of Ruth Sheldon (2016) through studying the conflict between Jewish and Palestinian students at British Universities. Using the ethnographic narrative, Sheldon explores how students understand and enact the conflict between the Israel and Palestine. Both Jewish and Palestinian students fail to acknowledge the suffering of the other group, while seeing themselves as a victim. While describing the conflict between student ‘Pro-Zionist’ and ‘Pro-Palestine’ campaigns, Sheldon considers the historical context as the student debate started in Britain in the 1960’s and it continued to intensify after the 1967 Six Day War. Sheldon acknowledges that the antagonistic narrative between the Jewish and Palestinian students takes place in democratic institutions and their debate is seen as freedom of speech, but their discourse becomes, as Sheldon puts it, a ‘reductive, racializing representation of the other’ (Sheldon, 2016, p. 175). The findings have a crucial significance as it can help policy makers to find ways to communicate and change the narrative of the conflict, perhaps through helping to understand each other’s fault in the cause of the conflict in order to move towards a peaceful coexistence.

The use of psychoanalysis in social psychology doesn’t have only exploratory applications, but it can also be used to solve conflicts. Vamik Volkan (cited in Hartmann, 2008) adopted the psychoanalytic method in the conflict resolution between different ethnic groups. His work had a multidisciplinary approach because he studied the political and social context in which conflict took place, as well as the psychological mechanism. Volkan offered an explanation about his interest in understanding and solving conflict, how psychoanalysis helped him make sense of his own identity in the political context of conflict between Greek Cypriots and Turk Cypriots. While being in the USA he felt survival guilt, and as a teacher, participating in a recreational target shooting he ‘envisioned the image of the Greek political leader who, in my mind, was causing incredible suffering for my family’ (Volkan, 2016). Although this thought scared him, Volkan understood how people might be motivated to kill ‘the other’ - who is seen as an enemy and he started researching how to promote peace. He used the ‘tree model’ in conflict resolution, where the ‘root’ is offered by the psychopolitical evaluation, the ‘trunk’ is the dialogue between leaders of both enemy camps and the ‘branches’ are the dialogue between the influential figures involved in conflict. The dialogue is conducted in the presence of a neutral team of experts that consists of psychoanalysts, historians and political scientists. The ‘tree model’ strategy was applied with success in Estonia while trying to solve the conflict between the Estonians and the minority Russian populations. Both groups had unconscious fears. The Estonians were afraid of being extinct as an ethnic group and the Russian minority was mourning about the separation from Russia. The way the dialogue was conducted allowed both parties to become aware about their unconscious processes and to change the ‘us versus them’ mentality. The project costed $3 million and it led to the resolution of the conflict. For his work, in 2004 Volkan was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (Hartmann, 2008). Perhaps one reason why the conflict between the Estonian and Russian populations was resolved was because the dialogue created space for a plurality of meanings for peoples’ actions. The collective representations based on a long tradition of thinking were challenged. Instead, the Estonians used ‘social representations’ by getting in touch with different ideas supported by the team of specialists that mediated the conflict. Social representations are ideas that develop when people meet individuals from a different cultural background (Moscovici, 1984, cited in Andreouli & Sammut 2017, p. 159). The dialogue between people of different ethnicities allows new social representations to emerge. ‘The other’ is not portrayed anymore as evil or foreign, but as another human being with similar feelings and thoughts.

Why people don’t offer help when they witness someone being in need of help has been a long interest for researchers. The psychoanalysis perspective in social psychology points out that thinking about the reality of other people in distress can be a painful experience and therefore, individuals develop defence mechanisms. A study conducted in UK with sixty-three participants with ages between nineteen and sixty-six who took part in twelve focus groups depicts that people use various tactics to deal with the suffering of others. Irene Bruna Seu (2014) presents the accounts given by the participants to a focus group after finding out about cases of human rights violations. For example, one participant, Leila said that: “after that I wanted to switch off. (…) you know you just feel like it’s kind of, like a kind of shield I’ve got up” Another participant, Tina, also gives the same account of “self-distancing”: “There was a point at which, I, not quite switched off but, the horror sort of subsided and, I don’t know.” When asked by the researcher “How did it happen?”, Tina replied: “I think it’s, in a way it’s because it’s like a defence mechanism. (…) And I can be horrified, immediately horrified by the stories but then, there’s a way of thinking well, telling yourself you can’t do anything about it. So then going off and sort of making yourself a cup of coffee or something. And switching off and getting on with your life.” The discussion with the participants in the focus groups allowed the researcher to understand how people cope with knowing about the tragedy in other people’s lives. The advantage of using rich data from qualitative studies facilitates the understanding of the bystander behaviour in a new way, it’s not only the social situation that determines the behaviour: the presence or the absence of others. The bystander behaviour can also be predicted by the way people react to news about others’ misfortune. Knowing that people use defence mechanisms to deal with information about human rights violations has practical applications. As Irene Bruna Seu emphasised (2014, p. 15), humanitarian campaigns are not successful when using shock tactics.

The psychoanalytic concepts such as projection, denial, repression and splitting are useful in offering an alternative explanation in social psychology for bystander behaviour. The classic studies in bystander behaviour are experiments, such as the one conducted by Bibb Latané and John Darley that showed that in the case of noticing smoke in a building, while being alone fifty-five per cent of people reported the smoke and while in groups of three, only 12 per cent signalled the smoke in the first two minutes. (Colman, A., 2008, p 107). The explanation that people don’t help in emergency situations because of diffused responsibility has not been contested in social psychology, but the experiments have low ecological validity and while they are good to illustrate the behaviour of individuals, they are not as useful in explaining social and political relationships. Why are citizens in developed countries not sensitive to the suffering of populations who experience famine, disease, war or genocide? Stanley Cohen (2001, cited in Seu, p.175) in the book ‘States of Denial’ theorises that when confronted with distressing realities, the public can deny the reality of the facts- ‘factual denial’, offer a different meaning to the reality- ‘interpretive denial’ or reject the moral, psychological and political implications- ‘implicatory denial’. For example, in the case of the Rwanda genocide when eight hundred thousand people were slaughtered, Belgium and the UN did not intervene to stop the killings, despite having forces in Rwanda (BBC, 2019). The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was established only a decade later to prosecute the leaders in the genocide (BBC, 2019). Applying Cohen’s concepts of denial, it can be explained why western powers witnessed the genocide but failed to offer help to the victims. At first, the ‘factual’ scale of killing was not recognised. Consequently, the killings were ‘interpreted’ as the result of the ethnic conflict between the majority Hutus and the minority Tutsi and the reality of the genocide was negated. Lastly, the act of allowing the genocide to be committed was interpreted as taking a stance of neutrality, not having a moral or legal obligation to intervene (Seu, 2014).

The world is continuously changing but the interest for explaining conflict and human passivity to others’ suffering will always interest sociopsychology. The use of psychoanalytic ideas in social psychology allows researchers to explore darker issues about human behaviour that might not be so easily understood by using quantitative methods. Qualitative methods such as ethnographic narrative- in the study about the Jewish and Palestinian conflict and the interviews in the focus group conducted by Seu, allows researchers to identify patterns in peoples’ behaviour that illustrate that individuals are not rational beings, but they often use defence mechanisms in order to cope with the unpleasant and sad aspects of reality. One of the advantages of using psychoanalytic methods and ideas in social psychology is that it allows researchers to be reflexive to acknowledge their own subjectivity and what motivates them in their research. Studies using psychoanalytic ideas often take into consideration the wider social context in explaining cultural and social relationships between people. Unlike in other perspectives in social psychology, such as positive psychology, the context in which people live is not taken for granted. The internal struggle is acknowledged, and the change for better relationships is not imposed through will power alone, but through getting an understanding of other peoples’ perspectives.

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