Nietzsche is a psychological thinker.  Sometimes he extends his psychology into political theory, sometimes in a way that seems to give psychological insight to political movements. More often than not, his psychology cannot be generalized into political statements, although Nietzsche wants to do this.

In his book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he is at his best since he is a psychologist and not a social critic. (Where he dabbles too much into issues of politics and gender, he is inclined to err.)

Nietzsche's Zarathustra is a prophet for a secular era. It's very interesting how much the ideas in the book parallel those later discovered by Wilfred Bion, especially in terms of the psychology of group dynamics. Nietzsche had insights into the ways that groups unconsciously coördinate their members to reinforce conformity and compliance. There is no place for a self-reliant person where there is a "herd". Creativity is even less respected by the "herd", because it disrupts the unconscious mechanisms of herd organisation. Without needing to have any intellectual grasp of a reality outside of the herd, those who partake of group dynamics are still capable of annihilating anyone who thinks and acts differently from the group. The attacks by the herd against the one who stands alone and the counter-struggle for survival have psychological origins at a subliminal level.

Nietzsche makes visible these otherwise hidden phenomena: he shows that generally those who stand alone are destroyed, that nobody has to say anything for these attacks to begin to occur. They happen automatically without overt provocation. It's group psychological dynamics at work.

Nietzsche's solution to those who are likely to be attacked for their qualities of independence is that they should prepare for this to happen. They should also throw all their weight into the creative side of their characters, and forget about conforming. If you have intellectual qualities, or creative qualities that distinguish you from the herd (not in your own mind, but in theirs), you may as well invest in these totally, even if it means willing your own destruction -- because the greater your ability, the more likely you are to disquiet those who have chosen to relinquish their independence for the sake of being protected by the group.

Self-Esteem Gradations « Clarissa's Blog



I must say that, not discounting that there is a psychological dimension to self esteem, I see it primarily as a cultural issue. I’ve had too many strange encounters with the Western ideology of self esteem to be able to feel confident with it.

For instance, issues which are not related to self-esteem, but are practical issues, are often deemed to be self esteem issues. Self-esteem becomes a magic formula, whereby the more you increase it, the better you are supposed to do.

I’ve found this ideology to be totally counter to my actual needs. For a very long time, I tried to cater to the idea that I had to be very careful about how I spoke to people, as I might damage their fragile self esteem. This made me tongue-tied, emotionally numb and resentful. I had no idea how to speak to those sorts of people whom I thought might be susceptible to complaining about my too-direct ways. (My original culture is extremely stoical and inclined to black humour.)

Then I got the job I now have. I expected to be walking on egg shells, but nobody had the self-esteem ideology, and everything progressed okay. After several years, I eventually learned that the people I was talking to had not only a similar sort of stoicism to me, but a dry sense of humour. This makes me very comfortable indeed.

I think my stoicism and black humour often appear incomprehensible to people, and before I realised there were cultural differences, I didn’t exercise enough caution with them. Stoicism and humour are absolutely fundamental to my personality, so I can’t really deny them without really having a personality to offer. Interestingly enough, when I spent a very short stint in the military, I encountered exactly the same stoicism and black humour together in one place, and this made me ecstatically happy.

My current job has also reassured me that I’m absolutely normal — that so long as a weird ideology does not intervene, all people really require is to be treated in a sincere way. It’s when self-esteem becomes emphasized as an issue that everything goes to pieces, as the underlying characters of those involved become difficult to discern.

Self-esteem discourses have no meaning to me. Certainly, had I not passed my PhD, it would have an overwhelming meaning, but because of the way things turned out, it doesn’t. It’s like I’m safely on the other side of any nagging self-doubt, nowadays. Above and beyond this, my training is such that I don’t believe in a self that can lose or gain value on the basis of external changes. At least, that’s the way I feel. Someone can approve or disapprove of what I do, and everything will remain the same. I may experience clouds of unhappiness, or even abject misery, but fundamentally, I will not change.

I’m not sure I ever felt that I had anything to prove to anyone other than myself. I’ve never personalized my experiences to the point that I felt they constituted my essence. I’ve experienced too much change in life to engage in that sort of naivety.

I don’t think I’ve ever “worked on” myself so much as tried to find ways to indulge myself and reawaken myself. I’m looking for a project right now that will do it, but all I can come up with is sleeping in the new swag overnight, whilst it is raining.

I’ve found that I function at my best when I don’t have to think about issues that perplex me, like self esteem or identity, or other phantoms. On some fundamental level, I really don’t know what these mean, so I don’t respond effectively to others who have these concerns. If I start to question myself as to why I can’t understand these issues, I become disturbed. It seems that generally a certain amount of stoicism is a solution to these problems, at least that is what I would prescribe, but I dare not intervene in situations that I cannot grasp.

I live pretty well these days.

Theo Dorpat gives a really good critique of a tendency I've been noticing for a long time now (I would say toward the second half of writing my thesis, when I really began to look more closely at psychoanalysis).

The tendency to view conditions of trauma as being made up of nothing more than psychological perceptions was a large part of the problem with Freud's paradigm.

QUOTE:  In his introduction to the Dora case history, Rieff, (1963) takes into account social and interpersonal factors when he concludes, "[Freud's] entire interpretation of the case...depends upon limiting the case to Dora, when, in fact, from the evidence he himself presents, it is the milieu in which she is constrained to live that is ill" (Quoted by Dorpat, p 143).

A few pages later, Dorpat discusses "Shaming as a Method of Indoctrination".  "Freud attempted to shame Dora into submission by the way he discussed Dora's alleged homosexuality and her masturbation.....Though Freud did not view homosexuality or masturbation as sinful or evil, he did view them as manifestations of psychiatric illness." ( p 153)

Clearly, Freud was treading a thin ( non-existent?) line here between preaching about moral fiber and taking care of his patient.

Dorpat says:  Freud's observation that Dora was "anxiously trying to make sure whether I was being straightforward with her" should have alerted him that issues of trust, fidelity, and integrity had an urgent priority over any explorations of the early childhood origins of her libidinal development.  ( p 155)

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MY NOTE:  Dorpat seems to make a good case for my view that Freud was treating Dora's symptoms of trauma as a sign of lacking moral fiber.  [That term is my own, which intends to give historical context and meaning to Freud's strange behaviour.]

This book was instrumental in providing me with a lot of insights that changed the way I understand misfortune.

Many intellectuals who borrowed from psychoanalysis, including Erich Fromm, Kleinians and others I read whilst studying for my thesis, implied indirectly that the symptoms of trauma were a result of moral failure. Indeed, I was only reminded of the nature of this association last night, when I watched the World War One drama, DOWNTOWN ABBEY. What can be worse that being killed? To be killed for cowardice. So a household servant is informed that her relative died in the war, but it was "worse than that". The ideology of "moral fiber" that is central to the 19th Century has not been overturned by the early part of the next. Rather, there was a notion that some possessed moral fiber (See pp 271ff) whereas others did not..

You would be able to see this ideology regarding the all-conquering character who makes no excuses, in Nietzsche. I'd like to think that my thesis on Marechera, who also has much of the Nietzschean spirit of wanting to conquer the world, but in an entirely different context, which did not permit permanent or definitive success, corrects previous suppositions about the structures of the psyche. The ability to persist in dangerous situations is certainly laudable, however, in contradiction to the 19th Century view we must now assume that such determination to persist when all the odds are against one will take its toll on the mind. This extraction of a cost nothing to do with anyone's innate capacity to follow through on an extremely difficult task. Rather, as we know today, everybody, even the strongest, has a breaking point. Some people may last longer than others under extreme duress, but more those of more rational views would frame this as a psychological issue, not a moral one*.

Judith Herman puts everything into context when she shows that those who suffer from trauma suffer not from their own limitations but from the limitations of those who should be part of their nearest communities. To take a brave risk is one thing, but if your community doesn't back you up, you are probably going to suffer from psychological trauma. Herman is certainly not suggesting a hippy-dippy attitude, where "community" is the answer to all wrongs. Rather, what she seems to suggest is that we are all interconnected. If you withdraw the human connection -- that is, the lifeline -- from somebody who has taken a risk, they are going to feel more in danger. The betrayal of trust will compute, at a psychological level, as trauma.

So it's not that the particular individual from whom you withdrew your moral support has some intrinsic moral lack.

The origin of the trauma is that you withdrew your support.

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*These days we seem to have flipped into biologism which, on the surface at least, seems exactly the opposite of the 19th Century view. In other words, biological "reasons" are invoked for people to take various chemicals to make them "normal". The problem is no longer a moral one, but one pertaining to one's unique, individual biological make-up. This view is as false as the 19th Century one -- even if it seems to offer the sufferer less difficulty in the short-term -- because the demand to unquestioningly conform to social norms remains as an unethical pressure.

Many are the benefits of maturity.   One is in realizing what one had failed to recognize before -- that people often have readily identifiable propensities that having no relationship to what it means to be an individual.

Social psychology is more important to know that individualistic psychology,  if you want to make your way through everyday life.   In the past I was under the mistaken impression that everybody around me was an intellectual who thought very deeply about every sort of issue.   Many people represented themselves that way to me.   I later learned that intellectuals are not that great in number.   They are those who can generate an original thought, rather than reacting to the world and repeating what they've heard.  To be assertive is not the same as generating original thought.   One really has to have thought it through.

Other myths I've managed to shrink over time include the idea that one necessarily stands out as being more intelligent if one's life follows a smooth and easily managed path.   There's no logic behind this supposition.   One cannot account for all the variables influencing our existences with such a trite formulation.

I've also developed a much better understanding of the two enemies of shamanistic thinking:

1.  Identity politics, which has an agenda to morally reform the world.   Moral reforms are hopeless.  Genuine change has to be willed and has to come from within.

2.  Biologism.   There are many forms of biologism on the left and the right.   Essentialist feminism and biological determinism both are detrimental to intellectual development.   You cannot be open about the future if you are working within deterministic systems or within categories of pre-defined identity.

Far beyond and above this, the most important insight I've had in my life to date is that most people, when they seem to be addressing you, are really addressing an idea of you based on narrow, categorical assumptions.   That is, most people don't rely upon direct perception.

That makes sense when you later understanding how many social constraints act to condition us against direct perception.   One sees people in terms of categories, as one is trained to.   One doesn't see the behavior, the  tendencies, the nuances.  It is particularly Americans not to take the time to see these, for Americans are the ultimate sales people, and one doesn't make a sale unless one seizes up the prospective buyer in the first few seconds of interaction.

To have an accurate perception is difficult, since one must constantly clean the windows of the psyche to reduce effects of cognitive distortions and mental projections.   Otherwise, one sees the world precisely as it isn't.  Most people don't have the basic strategies in place to achieve visual hygiene.   They can be great people, but don't expect them to perceive anything accurately.   This they cannot do.  It's not because they're bad, or mean or wrong.   They just don't have the necessary training and awareness.

MARECHERA'S VIEWS ON THINKING/MATURITY

There are a lot of guys right here who've got the maddest notions in the world and each day all they are waiting for is to act out their weird descriptions. Just like I am doing. You look them in the eye and that's that. You've had it. It's like looking the Ancient Mariner in the eye. Afore ya know the yarn you already It. No escape from their mazes. No exit from Brooklyn. [a reference to Sartre's "No Exit"?] Only the Sartre nausea. Only the mesmerizing outsideness with Albert Camus shouting: "Seconds out. Round twenty-first century!" and you know you gotta fight and fight till you're down and the chips and the odds and the neuroses are hanging out like your intestines after the knife fight. There they are hanging out like nothing in the bloody world. [...]How enticing, the notion of uniqueness -- suddenly dispelled by the raucous voice, the shrieked insult, the horrible truth under the fine skin of humanity. Were I a pathologist, a forensic scientist in the police murder laboratory ... What the means? Why the irrevocable? How the exit of these Hararean mazes?"

The capacity for intellectual shamanism is based on having superfluous energy to spend on exploring inner, psychological dimensions.   The prerequisite for engagement puts intellectual shamanism at odds with many, perhaps most, other philosophies of life that demand one's time and commitment in other ways.  Even holding other implicit philosophies, such as a prevalent one of our age -- biological determinism -- moves one several steps away from understanding how intellectual shamanism is expressed.  Those whose purpose in life is sex and reproduction will not find anything of value in this paradigm.

Somebody whose life is guided and determined by biological imperatives would experience intellectual shamanism as only threatening to take them away from their allotted tasks.   A typical misunderstanding I have found in those who read Nietzsche is in the idea that one can use one's reading as a means to gain the kind of "wisdom" that would enable one to fully express one's innate biological urges.   Yet, the desire to move in a direction that fulfills one's needs as a creature of one's biology is exactly opposed to the desire to further one's knowledge about subjectivity and inner worlds.   To follow a biological deterministic path requires a calm and yielding disposition.   Any emotion or sensation that is not in this vein is a threat to one's determined destiny.

By contrast, with regard to shamanism a lot of actions may be done and a lot of words spent, which have no biological purpose whatsoever.   The meaning of looking into one's inner worlds is not to lament anything, but simply to look around at one's leisure.  There is nothing to win or lose here, in terms of any sense of necessary or inevitable destinies.   One has all the time in the world to waste and no purpose to achieve except that intrinsic to looking.  One can scream and shout all one likes.   This ought to be actually encouraged.

Those in a hurry to take life in the opposite direction will, of course, not find anything here.