Washington Mutual NYC June 2009

The bubble burst. Waking up to this reality is a process. And there is no quick fix.  What burst apart was more than the banking, automobile, and housing industries. A set of cultural beliefs and values lay in the debris of the economic collapse. Reminiscent of 9/11, our “collective illusions of safety, inviolability and grandiose invincibility, illusions that had long been mainstays of the American historical identity” was shattered.  Stolorow in the Huffington Post (10/15/08). These illusions girded the economic growth leading up to the recession and remain a ghostlike presence in the recovery process.

“No Fear” is a slogan that captures the mindset of this identity, a mindset intoxicated with denial. Being intoxicated with denial glorifies risk and the accompanying blinding sense of invulnerability. Risk imbued our spending, investing, and thinking in general. Being guided by risk is like riding a motorcycle drunk without a helmet. Wall Street and Main Street bet that the cycle would not crash.

When it did, there was an eruption of fear, panic, and pain. During stressful times, emotional life becomes turbulent and complex. It is the nature of being human that current stresses, especially when severe, can trigger old wounds and memories. The stress associated with financial worry can feel like a brain wreck. Real survival concerns and worries are intertwined with past experiences, stirred by feelings of shame and guilt.

Conventional wisdom often fails to grasp the complex psychological dimensions of hard times. It values hardiness and active mastery and devalues vulnerability and weakness.  It preaches a code of behavior embodied by the saying, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Its message exacts a quiet toll as it encourages the restoration of self to its prior position of power and invincibility at the expense of authenticity.

Store Closing (freefoto.com)

Ironically, when the going gets tough, the tough don’t always get going.  Many get irritable, hide their fragility, drink excessively, and isolate themselves or at least their pain.  Rather than aspirational, these behaviors represent a model of maladaptive coping. In contrast when the going gets tough, the weak and vulnerable become depressed. They feel conflicted, confused, doubt themselves, blame themselves, complain, possibly drink and withdraw, but are more likely to seek support and even professional help.

A commentator recently suggested that we call the recession a reset as a way of thinking more hopefully about current conditions. If we reset the economy without re-evaluating the assumptions and beliefs underlying the mindset that generated these problems, then the reset will simply create the conditions for the repetition of old patterns in new situations.

As Stolorow suggests our individual beliefs about ourselves are deeply rooted in our collective psyche. Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction provide a framework for understanding this connection. According to Derrida (1)(Sarup 1988), western thinking is rooted in a “logic of binary oppositions” that establish the hierarchical categories that we use to think. This form of thinking splits reality into polarities such as good/bad, active/passive, rational/irrational, masculine/feminine, sane/insane, strong/weak, and healthy/sick. Psychoanalysts refer to this polarization of reality as splitting. Colloquially it is referred to as black and white thinking.

In Derrida’s framework, the first term of the binary is privileged and overvalued.  It depends on its meaning through the tacit exclusion and subordination of the second term. In other words when the tough get going, weakness is present through its absence. Life is never simply how it appears. Tough and weak are not mutually exclusive, but indivisibly alloyed.  One quality is felt and the other split off

While Psychoanalysis views splitting as a form of primitive thinking characteristic of severe personality disorders, Derrida’s framework suggests that binary oppositions (splitting) permeate psychological discourse and structure the categories we use to understand and describe who we are and how we judge others,

Splitting as a phenomenon of everyday life is illustrated in how average individuals experience the Self. Personal identity and perceptions of others are gauged on a dichotomous rather than continuous scale. Binary terms like good/bad, strong/weak, extrovert/introvert, smart/dumb, beautiful/ugly, cool/uncool form the building blocks of identity that become fixed ideas, and endure as convictions that indelibly define the self and the Other. I am not good enough, smart enough, attractive enough speak to how individuals experience their low self-esteem and constitute the reasons many seek psychological counseling.

It is helpful to think of these psychological splits like fault lines that lie beneath the earth’s surface creating an invisible structural fragility. The dichotomization of reality exemplified by splitting creates a linguistic matrix in which self and others are judged against absolute categories. It engenders an “us versus them mentality,’ where individuals either externalize blame on others or collapse under the weight of self-blame. Somebody wins and somebody loses. Splitting reinforces the polarization of difference between sick and healthy, high and low functioning, good and bad, tough and weak that leads to an increasing sense of either personal inadequacy or grandiosity and to the alienation of the individual from the group.

The collective anxiety and uncertainty about our future is potentially transformative. The psychological reset that is needed starts with personal accountability, but not accountability driven by the logic of binary oppositions. Different conceptual tools are required to facilitate this personal/cultural transformation. We need to develop a more permeable, flexible, and compassionate way of thinking about the self while creating a greater openness to and acceptance of the influence the others. Our need for a psychological overhaul while perhaps more subtle is just as critical to the nation’s wellbeing as the economic bailout.

(1) Sarup, Madan, (1993) An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism