Scribe Publications
WHAT ABOUT ME?
Paul Verhaeghe is professor of psychoanalysis at the University of Ghent in Belgium, and is also in private practice. He is the author of Love in a Time of Loneliness and Does the Woman Exist?
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*/ span.dg-Italic { font-style: italic; } /* CH-TITLE used 13 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0040-INTRODUCTION.htmlINTRODUCTION
*/ p.CH-TITLE { font-family: sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; text-align: center; font-weight: bold; } p.CH-TITLE span.dg-dgen { font-size: 1.1em; } /* TEXT-CO used 12 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0040-INTRODUCTION.htmlA middle-aged man is being lashed to a wooden pallet with duct tape by four other men. One of his attackers draws two zeros on his forehead with a marker pen, another presses his genitals against the man’s face, the third sits on him with bare buttocks, and the fourth takes pictures. The group are clearly enjoying themselves. Everything is captured on film, and the victim is even given a copy of the clip ‘to watch at home’.
*/ p.TEXT-CO { margin-top: 2.5625em; } /* TEXT-BODY used 475 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0040-INTRODUCTION.htmlThe scene of the action was an ordinary little factory in a small Belgian town. The man with the camera was a union representative. Quite a few people joined in; nobody tried to intervene. It later turned out that the bullying had been going on for years. In the days after the images were broadcast on television news, victims of similar incidents came forward with their stories. The first reported incident had happened in Wallonia, the French-speaking region of Belgium. But a week later it was the turn of Belgium’s Dutch-speaking community to be shocked when a case of bullying was reported in Flanders. A crane driver working for a steel concern had suffered regular humiliation at the hands of his foreman and the boss of his shift. They pulled his trousers down, scrawled obscenities on his buttocks, and tied him to a jeep and drove him around. Afterwards they posted the clips on YouTube. In the month that followed, bullying remained a hot media item. Various sources revealed surprisingly high figures: 10–15 per cent of employees in Beligium are bullied. This calls for an explanation, and apparently there are plenty of them.
*/ p.TEXT-BODY { text-indent: 1.0em; } /* Endnote-Reference used 50 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0040-INTRODUCTION.htmlA third explanation takes the medical reasoning a step further: it’s a question of human nature, the hidden animal in all of us. The killers in Nazi concentration camps were just ordinary people, and psychological experiments show that almost anyone becomes a sadist under certain conditions.1 Homo homini lupus est — man is a wolf to his fellow man.
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*/ p.SUB-HEAD { font-weight: 600; margin-top: 1.9375em; } p.SUB-HEAD span.dg-dgen { font-size: 1.17em; } /* TEXT-FO--no-space- used 49 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0050-IDENTITY.htmlGnothi seauton, know thyself. This command was inscribed above the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, whose priestess, Pythia, was famous for her prophecies. Since the days when people flocked to consult the Delphic oracle, we have never stopped looking for our own inner core. We may have replaced the priestesses and soothsayers of ancient times with psychologists and, more recently, neuroscientists, but their answers, too, remain unsatisfying. This quest reveals a curious paradox: on the one hand, we cherish the conviction that our self always existed and will always exist; at the same time, we need to consult someone else, preferably an expert, to find out what ‘really’ makes us tick.
*/ p.TEXT-FO--no-space- { } /* dg-Superscript used 27 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0050-IDENTITY.htmlThat we have an eternal, unchanging self is extremely debatable; the fact that we turn to someone else in our search for it is, by contrast, extremely plausible. Our identity is not an immutable core hidden away in the depths of our being. It is, rather, a collection of ideas that the outside world has inscribed on our bodies. Identity is a construction, and that can be proved by something closely resembling a scientific experiment: adoption.* Take an Indian baby from the Rajasthan village of her birth, have her brought up in Amsterdam, and she will acquire the identity of an Amsterdammer. But if you entrust her instead to a couple from Paris, she will become a Parisienne. If, when she grows up, she goes in search of what she thinks of as her roots, she is going to be disillusioned: they simply don’t exist, and in the country of her birth she’s likely to find that she’s just as alien as any other woman from Amsterdam or Paris. More alien, in fact, because her appearance (skin colour, hair) suggests a bond with the local people that isn’t there. We must conclude from this that our psychological identity is shaped by our surroundings. If ‘I’ had grown up in a different culture with parents belonging to that culture, then ‘I’ would have been completely different.
*/ span.dg-Superscript { vertical-align: top; font-size: .6em; } /* FOOTNOTE used 32 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0050-IDENTITY.html* In an ideal scientific experiment, you change a single factor while keeping the rest of the setup as identical as possible. For instance, you take two cuttings of the same tomato plant and cultivate them using two different types of fertiliser. The difference in yield will then be attributable to the fertiliser, not the plant. In the case of adoption, one can compare people who have been taken from the culture of their birth in infancy and brought up elsewhere with peers who remained in the original cultural setting. Differences can then largely be attributed to the culture in question.
*/ p.FOOTNOTE { margin-left: 0.875em; margin-bottom: .3em; margin-top: .1em; } p.FOOTNOTE span.dg-dgen { font-size: 0.87em; } p.FOOTNOTE-head { text-indent: -0.875em; margin-left: 0.875em; margin-bottom: .7em; margin-top: .1em; } p.FOOTNOTE-head span.dg-dgen { font-size: 0.87em; } p.FOOTNOTE-end { margin-left: 0.875em; margin-bottom: .3em; margin-top: .5em; } p.FOOTNOTE-end span.dg-dgen { font-size: 0.87em; } /* dg-SmallCaps used 62 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0050-IDENTITY.htmlThese two fundamental tendencies would seem to be typical of every living being: we want to be part of the greater whole, and at the same time we long for independence. As far back as the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher Empedocles wrote of two elemental powers that held universal sway: Philia, Love, and Neikos, Strife. Freud saw these as two primal urges: the life instinct, Eros, which seeks to dissolve in love, and the death drive, Thanatos, which aggressively seeks separation. Sameness and difference, in other words.
*/ span.dg-SmallCaps { text-transform: lowercase; font-variant: small-caps; } /* dg-SemiboldItalic used 1 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0080-THEESSENCEOFIDENTITY.htmlDo ut des and an eye for an eye
*/ span.dg-SemiboldItalic { font-style: italic; } /* QUOTE-SINGLE used 7 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0080-THEESSENCEOFIDENTITY.htmlThe instincts which were formerly suppressed remain suppressed; but the same effect is produced in a different way. Analysis replaces the process of repression, which is an automatic and excessive one, by a temperate and purposeful control on the part of the highest agencies of the mind. In a word, analysis replaces repression by condemnation.4
*/ p.QUOTE-SINGLE { margin-top: 1.0em; margin-right: 1.0em; margin-bottom: 1.0em; margin-left: 1.0em; } p.QUOTE-SINGLE span.dg-dgen { font-size: 0.83em; } /* st used 10 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0110-IDENTITYPOWERLESSPERFECTIBILITY.htmlA neo-liberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning that responsibility lies entirely with the individual, and that authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. Nil volentibus arduum, nothing is too hard for those who really want it. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. And if we’re going to be quoting Latin, how about Vocavit servos suos (‘He called his slaves’) — the sentence with which, in the Vulgate translation of the Bible, the Evangelist Matthew starts his meritocratic parable about the talents.
*/ span.st { } /* st-dg-Italic used 1 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0110-IDENTITYPOWERLESSPERFECTIBILITY.htmlHow does the new ethics measure up ethically? The question itself shows the circular nature of the issue. We don’t have an objective yardstick for measuring different ethical systems. The fact is that many people, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, are all for neo-liberal ethics, especially the heroic version presented in Atlas Shrugged. It’s not for nothing that this novel by Ayn Rand is the bestselling book in the United States after the Bible. Her way of thinking tied into an American tradition. At the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1926, a display would light up every 15 seconds, telling the visitor that yet another hundred dollars of his (or sometimes, her) money had been spent on care for people with ‘bad heredity, including the insane, feebleminded, criminals, and other defectives’.11 Note the juxtaposition.
*/ span.st-dg-Italic { font-style: italic; } /* dg-SmallCapsItalic used 4 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0120-THENEWDISORDERSRANKANDYANK.htmlThings look even worse when you compare the DSM with its competitor, the ICD (International Classification of Diseases), published by the World Health Organisation. A diagnosis based on the DSM produces twice as many children with ADHD compared to a diagnosis based on the ICD, purely because the ICD groups symptoms differently. The ICD requires children to exhibit both impaired attention and hyperactivity; for the DSM, one of the two is sufficient. So the decision to use a particular handbook will determine whether or not your child has a disorder and — don’t forget — whether he or she needs medication. Scientifically speaking, this is bizarre, to put it mildly. Moreover, the criteria change every now and then, invariably being expanded, so that the category in question becomes increasingly blurred, and more and more people are prescribed medication. Autism is the clearest example of this kind of blurring.
*/ span.dg-SmallCapsItalic { font-style: italic; text-transform: lowercase; font-variant: small-caps; } /* QUOTE-FIRST used 1 times, e.g. WhataboutMe-0120-THENEWDISORDERSRANKANDYANK.htmlThe putative diagnoses presented in DSM-V are clearly based largely on social norms, with ‘symptoms’ that all rely on subjective judgements, with little confirmatory physical ‘signs’ or evidence of biological causation. The criteria are not value-free, but rather reflect current normative social expectations … We are also concerned that systems such as this are based on identifying problems as located within individuals.
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