Against Victor Frankl's humanistic theodicy: Notes on psychotherapy, Judaism, art, and politics
Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" is "The Power of Positive Thinking" for those desperate to show that even the Shoah (which Elie Wiesel once baptized as "Holocaust," a name that stuck, from the Greek version of the Bible, a term that indicates the sacrifice that makes the identifying observer holy through annihilation of the victim by fire) does not damage our unlimited ability to affirm something like God's presence.
In the end, this optimism is magic, which Judaism has opposed from its beginning. Magic says that the divine power will save you or give you what you want or need, if you perform the right ritual and have the right attitude. What idolatry and magic refuse is a mature way of mastering our relationship to contingency or chance, which is beyond our control (and beyond God's), which is just to say that time does not have the form of instrumentality, which it usually is thought to. This is the Greek logos that Christianity deified. Instrumental temporality masters suffering, defeat, and failure through deferral, announcing the supposed certainty that it will all work out well in the end. The Jewish idea of a covenant is not based on that idea, and does not require that God 'knows' the future and controls what happens, any more than that the world was created prepackaged and perfect, with all things in their place, and no need for the poiesis of creativity that moves from chaos and its peculiar linguistically-dependent idea of a void or nothingness, to an order that is fragile and a creation; or, if you will, the famous trilogy in Judaism of creation, revelation, and redemption, all of which are temporal relationships that are not the instrumental ones of production of a commodity or object that medieval Christian philosophy tended to think of creation as.
Frankl's famous book is an eternal bestseller among New Agers looking for the certainty of a reassurance that "God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world." Both of these propositions are false as far as Judaism is concerned, of course. People want to be reassured that with the right attitude they can master death itself and every kind of evil or destruction. But if, as Sartre put it in his wartime resistance play "The Flies," "Life begins on the other side of despair," that is not because despair is refuted and, as St. Paul said, with the resurrection, death itself is defeated and has no victory or sting.
The triumph of the human soul or whatever is divine in us, the image of God, if you like, is less certain that Frankl makes it, and it is important to recognize that suffering and oppression themselves justify nothing (not Israel or anything else) and make no one and nothing holy. The good is in part a response to evil, but the faith that is part of the covenant cannot be a guarantee. Those who think it is, lie.
In his book Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, which is based partly on reflections on the thought of Shoah survivor Primo Levi, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben develops the idea of a subjectivity that is never fully aligned with a world or language that is something like a totality and a given ordering of things. This in fact is the basis of ‘poiesis' or creativity, and it is the basis of "God's work" of creation, revelation, and redemption. It is a different idea of our finitude than that in Christianity, which is the tacit basis of Wiesel's "holocaust" idea. There is in this also a different idea of time, of mind's inadequacy to its objects and they to it that is given in the Freudian idea of the unconscious, and a different idea of hope and redemption. It is not Christian rebirth through embracing traumatic experience as a destruction of the self that may well be complete. Nor is its relationship to the future merely that of faith in the usual sense, which is the Christian and Islamic sense that was also that of Maimonides. And of course it is also a different idea of the relationship of past and present, and the uses of memory.
The New Age is Protestant. Frankl is, like much of Reform Judaism, a Jewish Protestantism, and so not very Jewish. Alas, undamageable existence, blind faith, and perfect hope, even in a humanistic sense affirming the divinely imaged powers of persons to -- triumph in and through their will, in a work that is certain to make free-- is far more easily managed and understood in an economy of the production, and distribution through marketing and sales, of perfected (thoroughly made: Latin per+facere) objects, or commodities. Frankl still sells books; Jews and Christians who have his book on their shelf next to Anne Frank and maybe Wiesel and people like him, will keep on swearing by the false God of Easy Solutions that require only faith. Judaism is ‘a religion for adults’ (Levinas); only a childish mind trust a divine parent figure who is absolutely guaranteed to make it all good. But the real disproof of that temporality of technique lies in the mere recognition of the reality of what it denies by pretending, in time, to overcome: suffering, death, destruction, and the destructive reactivity or will that is evil. The mere fact that at this moment anyone, including the one thinking about the matter, suffers, and that that suffering is real, that is, that we live in a world of materialist contingency (worthy of late Althusser no less than Lucretius--and the Genesis creation story in my reading of it), this definitively negates and refutes all such father-knows-best, it-will-come-in-time false and childish hope. The logos or logic of narrative and instrumental justification by rhetorical redemption of suffering is refuted by the facticity and reality of what it refutes. The man or woman or child in the camp prays, ‘Father, can't you see I'm burning?’ And God is silent. We don't know. If he or she survives and in some tomorrow a child is born or a book written or a great mitzvah performed or grace experienced, that will be good, as good as God is said to be in the prayer for the dead that does not mention death because it knows it to be undeniably real. People will go on, if they live on (sur-vivre), they will not necessarily triumph through their own will or God's, the uncertain future will depend on both what they do and what can only be called chance, which is the dependence of contingent possibilities that can be imagined and represented on others that cannot be. But we will still remember the suffering, that memory will remain. Love is as strong as death, which ends it in every instance, but not by abolishing it in a world with suffering, pain, and loss. And yet those joyful triumphs we do have are surely far more joyful for being built on that uncertain basis. Do not stand idly by while there are torments and screams, do not comfort falsely, and take your copy of Frankl and move it to the Liar's Section.
Along with those books proclaiming that the gain of a Jewish state cancels out the loss of Jewish Europe that is now justified as enabling the realization of that divine promise as dependent more on a ‘where’ and ‘who with’ than a ‘how’; notions that, in line with the same romantic nationalist ideas that led to the two world wars and all that came with them, proclaim their great faith in the romantic nationalist narrative of redemption. This is a different matter than the materialist idea that a largely Jewish society should continue to exist so that people can go there who cannot continue living somewhere else without being hated as pariahs who don’t seem to get the Truth of the Good News, or who are outside some other dispensation of the good as guaranteed in some discourse announcing the actuality of a utopia, to which Jews might again be left outside. The real triumph of Jewish thought in our time is the generalization of the experience of social and existential exile in a modern world that creates and manages dissatisfactions, where alienation has become chic, yet where because of that, and through the prise de conscience and conceptual grasping of what this can mean, is thereby also liberated from many traditional notions and provincialisms. A world where everyone is an alien is one beyond normality and the infinitely enforceable tacit normativities of ‘blood and soil,’ as in Nazism with its naturalist nationalism, or master and norm more commonly, that relentlessly punishes disaffection and deviance. As in psychiatry, whose increasing intolerance today is well-supplemented by the whole New Age of unofficial as well as ‘official’ therapeutic practices that are little more than a training in self-management that is premised on the Stoical ability of the power of positive thinking to overcome all adversity.
Indeed, Frankl himself was a psychotherapist, influential in this domain; today’s Cognitive-Behavioral Theory is based on the idea that one should and always can manage one’s emotional responses so as to have the contentment that is only, negatively, absence of disaffection, based on the idea that there is almost or in fact nothing that can happen to a person that they can’t cope with and manage by recognizing that it is not a catastrophe or something they ‘can’t stand’; American Buddhists like Jon Kabat-Zinn and Marsha Linehan, founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, have further developed this idea, whose origins are ultimately in the American neo-Freudian school of psychoanalysis that emphasizes social adaptation and conformity, strengthening the ego, the analyst or therapist serving as teacher/trainer, role model, and judge who rules on what is good and bad in what the patient does, thinks, and feels, all of which are to be modified. Behind this of course lies not only Anna Freud but American philosophical pragmatism and behaviorism, and, above all, American Protestantism when it takes a secular form, quite naturally more inclined to optimistic magic on the one hand and a de-moralized Buddhism fit to serve as a new ethics for managing self and others, through trained attention to both the demands of situations and the obstacles that emotions would serve primarily as indicators of, calling for ‘emotional intelligence’. Readers of the Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel, and anyone with an appreciation of most forms of romanticism, will recognize that emotions are not, as in Buddhism and Stoicism, just what economists call ‘negative externalities’, to be managed and kept under control, but are, as Heidegger argued, part of how the world appears to us in light of our concerns, projects, and situation, and so inseparable from the thoughts that both express and articulate them on the one hand, and provide our only possible meaning grasp of what they ‘say’ or ‘are’. Shakespeare seemed to understand this well; as in Racine a bit later, it is really meaningless to try to separate in his more expressive and self-reflective characters and their statements, what one is ‘feeling’ from what they are saying, thinking, and indeed, recognizing. This quality of self-representation had disappeared from Western theater by the time of the prosaic theater of Ibsen and Chekhov that underlies most film and television discourse, one of characters who must be in search of authorizing interpretation, since clearly they don’t know the meaning that can be found in what they say, do, and want, which now is displaced onto ironies that the spectator alone gets, maybe. Freud’s statement that a society in which psychoanalysis would be most effective would be one that no longer needed it may find its meaning partly in this; that is, in realizing a need to rediscover the poetry in the prose of the world we live in, shifting into conscious practice the boundary between the said and sayable and the unsaid and unsayable, and so ultimately creativity itself as the poiesis that is always shifting from the chaos of consciousness’s aleatory contents to the determined or determinable order of things in the actual world, that is theorized through the notion of an unconscious. Such a poetics would likely include artistic practices that are both universalized and that are rooted in the temporality of experience and thinking proper to the work of critique and experimentation that Foucault spoke of his essay on ‘Enlightenment’, which does not presume as starting point an unsituated and disembodied Cartesian or empiricist observing mind for which ‘the political’ would be an implementation or enforcement (these are ultimately the same thing) of a knowledge, as in applying ‘theory’ in a ‘practice’ that can only be a technique.
Ultimately this is also the question of democracy, since possession and use of knowledge as the paradigm of thinking entails and is wholly bound up with the idea of experts, professionals, and managers ruling in their mastery persons who in lacking this knowledge are essentially bodies to be put to work, for the profit made possible through this mastery. Today there are certainly hopeful signs, in fact, of the emergence of a society of citizen-artists who make objects that embody and express thought and meaning and in ways that are quite available to audiences. Though the subsumption of the genre that is and was the modern novel, with its particular temporality linked to reading and writing, and its typically dystopian social worlds and alienated antihero protagonists, into cinema as the art form that continues this, may not suffice to outweigh the force of immediacy and reactivity that online culture promotes along with marketing and surveillance as well as universal management and self-management. It is perhaps too early to know if the culture of liberty will disappear, by reason of its dependence on a reflective interiority, along with the petty bourgeois society that has seemed endangered since Marx and indeed early industrial monopoly capitalism; obvious enough are this possible future’s ominous signs. Psychoanalysis itself emerged within this petty bourgeois society in crisis, at the same time as an artistic practice whose dependence of the fragmentation of what is visibly and audibly recorded, recombined in art of moving images (meaning both an image that moves, and a visible field in whose framing spatial delimitation a series of images are linearly arranged). Both the novel and film allow particular temporalities, discourses, and worlds to multiply and take on multiple forms, within an overall packaging that is linear if only in the minimal literal sense, of a sequence, of images, sounds, and/or letters and words. The interiority and privacy of practices of reading is rendered immediate, and placed in what until recently was normally a social space shared by a plurality of persons but experienced in solitude within that space, and this is facilitated by the productive and reproductive apparatus (camera and cinema projector) that literally is one of introjection and projection, metaphors psychoanalysis would find useful. The similarities and differences of novel reading, the art of cinema, and psychoanalysis, with its couch, free association, and unfixed attention, are numerous, and their respective utility for some politics, actual or to come, still warrant reflection, including on the relationship of both psychoanalysis and cinema to theater. Theater is a public art whose connection to the political has been much discussed though too little recognized, since the idea of politics as a mode of public life has been for some time now something of a doubtful possibility or uncertain question. Popular music is often very political, but it rarely provokes discussion, and instead is usually just ‘liked’ and maybe imitated, in a manner that uncannily resembles politics as voting, or as, what Carl Schmitt thought it is and should be reduced to, citizen affirmation. Which was on display in the recent American political party conventions, which made much use of references to religion proper and religious notions of the polity and social life, as if the parties wanted to get us to vote for their candidates mainly by telling us not who they are but who we are supposed to be. Psychoanalysis is like a private theatrical art in which anything is possible and all permitted at the level of the sayable, given the basic framing of the situation as a reparative space that puts to work memory and imagination. Cinema, like the novel, transmutes and displaces questions about relationships and persons, or character, dramatic conflict, plot, affective identification (and perhaps Aristotelian catharsis), and recognition, away from the site where these are most directly used, whether or not they are themselves as modes being into question, as modernism sometimes does, and as a film can seem to do with respect to theater and what seems so proper to it, partly because it does so by reflecting not on its own possibilities but that of the paternal form of its ‘mentor’, theater. Theater’s possibilities are generally linked to its space and time, which always essentially unitary, with the persons present (actors/characters and audience, there in a division of the same space and at the same time)
onto, into, a space potentially of thought and reflection that makes a virtuality of those personal and interpersonal potentialities and ways of being. If theater is the art of persons (‘persona’ in Latin meant an actor’s mask as well as a subject in a legal tribunal) and what is and can happen between or within them, in their presentation and representation, cinema, like the novel, displaces this immediacy of social life onto a more purely imaginary plane. There spaces, times, persons, and stories all are quite fungible as they are essentially seen, in and through forms of image, and image in temporal motion, and so nothing is really given except the moving image of the visible (and perhaps also audible). Psychoanalysis is perhaps a practice of understanding one’s own life in a way that transforms memories and ways of being affected, into what is perhaps a thought or just a reconfiguration. In this it no more needs an idea of illness and cure than does theater, which in its first theorization, by Aristotle, absolutely does need that. Psychoanalytic treatment and cure are a use of psychoanalysis for medical or therapeutic purposes. One can use art that way too, and indeed, redemptive or soteriological notions of art’s function have been many and enduring, even if like theories of the beautiful or the sublime, they ultimately fail to account for everything in the domain thus theorized. Related to this is the fact that psychoanalysis does not theorize its characteristic forms of lack in terms of property and crime, which is how bourgeois society, and every other form of medical and discursive psychotherapy along with it, always and inevitably does. This is why all psychotherapy and psychiatric medicine are not only normalizing but are ultimately forms and resources of policing. This is a possibility of any discursive practice that should not be disavowed (rather, practitioners should acknowledge their potential implication in forms of social power that they cannot free themselves and their patients from but only resist more or less deliberately and with whatever notion of alternative at least as focus of interest). But once analysis has created this aesthetic space of a microcosm with juridical implications and ties, such policing or management becomes strictly a secondary side effect; there is no reason to suppose that the self-understanding that it makes possible and works on and at is a cure or control procedure addressing itself to lack conceived as risk of crime or failure to be managed. Its clinical categories also therefore are mostly larger than the diagnostic ones of illness that belong to medicine proper: neurosis and psychosis ultimately are forms of structuration of the mind, of which the illnesses proper to them are possibilities. Any other way of thinking about this ultimately reduces to something like Calvinist Christianity: there are the saved and the damned, and today medicine and the entire mental health industry, official and unofficial, addresses itself to saving damned persons so that they no longer have criminal lack, as their potentiality is for medicine (which is a normative practice of curing or treating illness or dysfunction in essence and inevitably) only for crime, which is defined as any possible (that the doctor could imagine and attribute to you?) harm to others or oneself.
Psychiatry punishes, or manages and controls on the one hand and sanctions on the other, what may be called the five D’s: plainly, deviance or abnormality and, behind it, disaffection, which is the great meta-symptom (patients will understand that, as in many forms and uses of Christianity, as well as in most corporate office or store work environments, they are expected to be happy, or at least contented: disaffection is always a problem, in fact, it is everywhere treated as latent violence and crime, and so is symptomatic; your doctor or therapist will help you become happy). Behind or alongside deviance and disaffection are the great bugbears of the secular Protestantism of enforced contentment that are the feared political vices: dissidence, dissent, and disagreement. People today are sold canned identities to package and market their difference so that no one in the kindergarten that is our contemporary utopia, which advertising shares with Communism, where it is proclaimed and enforced that everyone is happy and had better be, or else. Instead of Frankl’s New Age triumph of the will, whose strength enables the faithful to overcome all adversity, why not the patient labor of thinking, which ‘preferring not to’ join the chorus cheerleading on an endless affirmation (thinking, cowards never die), instead asks, what shall we do now, in light of what we remember and what we desire; and given where we are here and now, how can we best understand and make sense of what we remember and desire? Today, and this is perhaps the meaning of the popularity of talk about the Holocaust and trauma (individual or collective) generally, the question often may be, do we remember and can we desire? Zen Buddhism’s concern to get people to focus on the here and now, and orienting themselves to the world essentially through the innocence and purity of perception rather than the problematizing potentialities in language, is mistaken in supposing that we are in danger of losing our grip on being present to what is happening, being there. A commodity and media society or workers and consumers is not likely anytime soon to forget how to be purely present, and available when the boss gives you a head’s up, telling you what is the truth you had better remember (schoolchildren get this partly through multiple-choice exams that are about remembering ‘facts’); what is in danger is our sense of how to deal with remembrance of things past, pleasant and unpleasant, and the ways in which we can employ or make use in the present of those significant memories, relevant, doubtless, to our current projects and partly informing them and conferring on them the passionate urgency they have, as well as keeping in mind what it is we are aiming towards or hope for. Neither of these is exactly a science, but anyone who even sketchily remembers some basics of psychoanalysis according to Freud knows that what it aims at is partly a learning how to think that has a great deal to do with understanding and configuring what we remember and what we desire. For the man of resentment, the meaning of past events is pre-packaged, and may legitimate his own participation in the great shared project today, differing only locally in terms of the ‘who’ of the oppressed group he belongs to and the wrongly ‘privileged’ ‘oppressor’ group that is its imaginary counterpart: a society that has in some ways abolished the political as a way of being in the social world sees it return as the false politics of a reassuring but depressive moralism that ‘knows’ that ‘I/we are so right because you/they are so wrong’. And the future is of course is also presumed given, for everyone knows who, what, and where they are, and what they want. Or do we? Is our manner of being in the world, for each of us, as Heidegger thought, a question, an issue, and a problem, and not just a task? Is there an instruction manual for living a life, or the good life, that you can just pick up, read, apply, and bingo, by magic, you have got what you need? Or if such a book of good news is necessarily and painfully absent, ….? Pop psychology can only offer answers to given questions, which ultimately will be, in the absence of a religious framework that poses ‘the fundamental question’ as what one ought to do, what one needs to be successful and happy, or even, what do you really want?, a question that a consumer society will pose and fail to answer relentlessly. Philosophy was always much more honest in that, when understood rightly, its question is, what is the question? Thinking is not, as pragmatism believed, problem-solving, so much as problematization. This is why, as Alain Badiou has argued, science, art, politics, and love are, when properly undertaken, all forms of thinking. If someone asks you, what is the matter?, they probably mean for you to reference what is the difficulty you are presently having in getting whatever you want. Figuring out what you really want would be the same inquiry carried out a bit more deeply. Viktor Frankl’s question is the banal one, given what has happened or is happening (that is, given what is given), how can I manage it?
Perhaps, you cannot; what then? What begins in wonder is neither philosophy (Plato) nor religion (Heschel), but the aesthetics of beauty. In effect, Frankl and the many likes of him are offering up for the modern protestant self aiming only to realize its potentiality and thus be happy, a secular equivalent worthy of this de-moralized protestantism of a proof of the existence of God. Instead, thinking begins, and politics with it, when the business model of social life fails, when the time of experience becomes unmanageable, when we admit that a human life is irremediably traumatic, and that we can and must want to change the world that we cannot perfect nor taken for granted nor have faith in nor master, when we are unsure about the meaning of what we seem to remember and what we want. Then the near-university lack of precarity will no longer be considered a failure that requires managerial interventions, which is another way of saying that today’s ‘mentally ill’ person, which is rapidly becoming a category that includes everyone, is in essence, for this system, which is capitalism, a potential only for unhappiness and criminality, or deviance and thus disaffection as crime. The therapists search for your lack and will hold you to account for it. For they know it is dangerous. The business society has become, under neoliberalism, not just the risk society but the society of generalized fear seeking, for ‘liberals’ or rather ‘progressives,’ its safe spaces, secure and fulfilled identities (based on demographical categories, and not ‘oppressed’ because allowed expression and visibility), with zero tolerance for any speech or behavior that makes anyone else uncomfortable, as well as, for blatant conservatives, fear of foreigners and crime; and beneath all of this, fear of death or destruction through failure of a contingent form of work, fear of the oppressive domination of bosses, and the gratuitous punishments by intolerant authorities (in terms of conservative or liberal codes of ethics, or both at once), and in the end, a business society’s universalized fear of failure that is exacerbated when neoliberalism withdraws the state from welfare state support to punishment only, its functions being essentially war and policing. In the broad sense that is management of every kind, which is the original meaning of the word ‘economy’, Frankl and his numerous semblables in the self-help therapy and mental health system worlds, are agents of police and policing.
And since policing’s target is evil as psychology (as war’s is an evil that combines foreignness and ideology in its imagination of crime), what better context than that which moved to prominence during the neoliberal epoch that is now coming to an end: politics shifted from enthuasiasm for utopia to mourning for the losses due to evil (sometimes identified with the desire for utopia itself), with the mass crimes of Hitler and maybe Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot as well, basing politics on the negativity of a ‘resistance’ to what cannot be opposed as its triumph is inevitable, the triumph of bureaucratic capitalism and its often violent forms of social control and exclusion (see on this, Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity, and Alain Badiou, Ethics). After the European ‘Holocaust’, many people who were refugees from it, sought to address the underlying problems by curing evil through psychoanalytic and other therapeutic techniques directed at individuals. This view is widespread; in a more authentic form, it is perhaps the meaning of the cinematic oeuvre of Hitchcock: an anxiety and dread are evoked, which are universal, though they lie at the basis of both the capacity to perform evil and to endure it. The great psychoanalytic theorists of the new prevalence of narcissism, Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut, were European Jewish refugees who followed Melanie Klein in finding evil in the psyche and its cure in psychoanalysis. Klein’s theory and practice can be reduced ultimately to the thought that it is evil to think of the world in terms of good and evil. Thus, a critique of Kleinianism might well begin with opposing an intuitionist logic that insists that a possible truth must be exhibited concretely, and not inferred through negation of the negation in a dialectical logic that allows proof by reduction to the absurd of a possibility being criticized. It also fits the thinking of the Cold War, when intellectual blackmail could be used to say if you are not for us, you are with them, as the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The apparent truth of the Cold War was indeed that both sides were right about the other, but the deeper truth lies in grasping what they had in common, as in some ways, they were not that different. Your Kleinian analyst will convict you of hating anything on the one hand and idealizing the objects of love on the other. A ‘Christian’ critique of those who hate broadened to a critique of political Manichaeanism: this was the renovated Cold War ideology that was applied when America’s global enemy shifted from Communism to ‘radical’ or ‘militant’ Islam, and once again the subjectivity that was promoted to work against that was conceived a bit too much in its mirror. Unable to truly link affects to thoughts and signifiers, the Kleinian will try to move you into a ‘depressive phase’ of accepting things as they are, and so perhaps to the American Buddhism, denuded of that religion’s morality, that finds truth in intuition (perception and feeling) rather than thinking, which American culture has always been skittish about. To such false Gods, I have nothing to suggest putting in their place beyond some work of thinking and some love of what thinking feeds on, which is perhaps what today is most often found in art, and perhaps also in certain forms of philosophy and psychoanalysis, which is maybe just, beyond the fetishes of the beautiful and the sublime (or the holy), the ‘interesting’. This has been my own simply maxim in writing about cinema: find something interesting, and then search for the problematic most proper to thinking about it in critical interpretive discourse. The answers all negated, what is the question? The question to be asked is what is the question to be asked. As here what the mathematicians Cantor and Badiou in his wake called the ‘inconsistent multiplicity’ in its unknowable in-itself-ness, is grasped from the standpoint of thought as a void, absence, or nothingness, which in Western thought is the basis of world-creation. That is thinking at its most radical.