Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Conflict and Change

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These memories, themes and desires are repressed because they are unpleasant or unacceptable ones. Yet they still influence the person, even though they have now become subconscious and the person has no more awareness of them. They continue to influence the person because they influence his beliefs. Any belief that has anxiety attached to it is always difficult to change, since the person does not want to face that anxiety. During the process of change, these subconscious memories, themes and desires are brought into full consciousness (often it is not necessary for the memory to surface so long as its theme does): this process releases and dissipates the accompanying anxiety.[²]

The regular release of anxiety helps to prevent stability, and this lack of stability facilitates psychological change and personal growth. This procedure is not a pleasant process, and gives rise to a rule, which I call the first rule of dynamic psycho-therapy.

First Rule:
In order to make a small, real change in a person’s character, that person has to wade through a great amount of psychological dross and immaturity.

Through insight, the person releases anxiety attached to some aspects of memories, themes or desires that are loaded with guilt, jealousy, vanity or other negative emotions. This insight begins the process of abreaction. Then he finds that he has to wade through a lot of juvenile or immature phantasies and desires in the course of adjusting to the new beliefs and modified attitudes that will now arise. These phantasies and desires are the vehicles for working out the psychological dross. They are the means whereby the jealousy, guilt and other emotional residues are worked through. When the process is complete, the phantasies and desires that have been the subject of abreaction now have little, if any, hold on the person. This enables him to change his beliefs. A subconscious belief can be changed when there are no more distressful states of mind attached to it.

The most familiar phenomena that demonstrate this are the teenager’s rebelliousness (rebelling against personal ties previously cemented through jealousy and guilt) and fascination with ephemera (exploring vanity). The overall process that the person experiences is one of replacing inadequate beliefs (whether immoral, amoral, or even low-grade moral ones) by more adequate, more relevant moral or ethical beliefs.

Behaviour and Character

Changing inadequate beliefs is hard enough; changing inadequate attitudes and character traits is even harder [³]. This is because it is such an unpleasant task. The issue to understand is that most people change and evolve (in terms of their character) so very slowly; in fact they do not evolve very much in a single lifetime.

The reason for this slowness is that the adoption of better ethical standards requires concurrent psychological change. Once the person has reached adulthood, then to change major beliefs (in the sense of making them more ethical) is hard enough; to change major attitudes and basic character traits is much more difficult. This psychological resistance to ethical change exists because people are only willing to learn about themselves so very slowly. Learning about oneself involves realising in what ways one is inadequate or immature, and this learning is a painful process.

A person can stand only so much psychological pain. When the pain limit in a life has been reached then he /she stops learning, and hence stops evolving in that life.

What is often mistaken for psychological change is change of circumstance. Suppose that we are unhappy with our existing situations and relationships. Our basic attitudes will more likely be negative ones rather than positive ones. Then our life changes, for some reason: perhaps a better job, a new house, etc. Our spirits rise and life becomes rosy for a time. When life changes for the better, we think that we have changed for the better too. The self-deception in this view of ourself becomes obvious when circumstances change back to being bad – now we resume our former negative attitudes. Hence little actually changes subjectively in us when external changes occur. All that has happened is that different aspects of our character are called into play when different circumstances are experienced. All that changes is our subconscious bias or prejudices on what attitudes will be appropriate for the situation, not the attitudes themselves.

To appreciate better this difficulty we have to make a separation in the concept of traits. We need to separate behavioural traits from character traits.
When circumstances change then our behaviour usually changes too, but our character traits remain the same. There is always a difference between changing the emphasis on what traits to work with (behavioural change) and actually changing a trait (character change).

In an undeveloped and non-idealistic person, character traits are likely to be the same as behavioural traits (since the person is not likely to have a concept of self that is different from his concept of his social roles). In the process of evolution, as the person begins to acquire a firm sense of individuality, along with cultural sophistication, so character traits and behavioural traits start to diverge.

Most people change very slowly since they prefer stability to instability. They are conservative at heart. Usually it takes a crisis to radically change a person. This crisis can be personal, such as a bereavement, or social-political, such as warfare. The history of mankind shows clearly that each person has many immature, even bad, beliefs and attitudes at the core of his /her being. These need to be replaced by more harmonious ones. Therefore human evolution is conflict-driven, in order to provide the crises from out of which each person can generate better beliefs and attitudes.

Periods of peace and social harmony are rare and represent a time of assimilation of past changes; they are only a “breathing-space” until the next round of conflict ensues. Psychological change produces distress: the greater the change that is needed, the greater is the distress that is felt. And this applies to society as much as it does to the individual person

Confrontation versus Negotiation

As an example of resistance to change, consider the issue of confrontation versus negotiation as a way of handling problems. A common belief is “confrontation is better than negotiation”. The trait that goes with this is “being powerful” (whether in the person or in a nation). The corresponding attitude is “confrontation demonstrates my strength”. Within the arena of politics, this set of psychological factors has been a perennial hallmark of Western nations since recorded history. Only around the beginning of the twentieth century did it begin to change, and change slowly. Confrontation is deeply embedded in Western nations, so to change this belief into a more harmonious one meant that these nations had to go through intense levels of distress.

This change began with the Hague conferences, in 1899 and 1907, whose objectives were to create procedures for international negotiations and to regulate the conditions of modern warfare. The conferences had a limited success, despite their failure to persuade nations to adopt compulsory arbitration in international disputes. Something more powerful was needed, which meant a deeper level of distress for society.

The carnage of World War I achieved this objective by bringing the League of Nations into being, as the second major attempt at international negotiations over a wide range of issues. But the League was still too weak. The carnage of World War II was necessary to transform the League into the United Nations Organisation. However, the UNO is too much hamstrung by America. Perhaps only a future carnage caused by the proliferation of nuclear weapons on the international black-market will give the needed influence to it.

Psychological change is a very slow process. And the different parts of a person’s life do not necessarily change at the same rate. For example, a person may be changing from confrontation to negotiation. He may prefer negotiation within his business, but at home the problems of family life may still be handled by confrontation.

Change and Dialectics

In my perspective on evolution, humanity needs crises. Without crises, humanity stays the same and does not evolve. What provides the conditions for crisis?  The needed conditions are provided by social change and the need to update standards of morality and ethics as new problems arise. An attitude or belief that may be adequate in one social era will usually have become inadequate in a later era. Virtues change gradually over many lifetimes. Some of the virtues of the ancient Greeks, as extolled by Homer, would not be acceptable today.

Social change follows the same path as personal change, but is more dramatic. Societies also dislike change. When a society is static and stable, then it may take a revolution (or conquest by an enemy power) to create needed changes. However, when a society is not stable, as in many late-twentieth-century Western ones, then change can occur without revolution. Which route is followed depends upon the power of entrenched attitudes (within the hierarchy of political or religious authority) that obstructs change.

A person has to wade through much psychological dross as he /she changes. The same necessity applies to social change: new ideas have to be lived through before society can decide which ones are good ideas (and hence are to be retained as the basis of new values) and which are immature (and so are abandoned). It is not always possible to forecast which ideas will eventually be accepted. The reason for this is the dialectical nature of abreaction.

I use the term “dialectics” in the Hegelian sense. It represents a movement of thought through three stages. First there is the opening idea, the thesis; then thought switches to the opposite conception, the antithesis. Finally both stages are blended together in the third stage, the synthesis. In moral ideas, if the thesis is a concept of morality then the antithesis is a concept of immorality. If the thesis represents some badness, the antithesis is that of some goodness. The synthesis is the resolution of the conflict.

The process of abreaction is a dialectical one. Both personal change and social change follow the pattern of abreaction, and so both thereby progress in a dialectical manner.

Social change is dialectical, the content being the new ideas that begin the social catharsis. The ideas affects a person, a society, or a nation in a dialectical way. Dialectics means that the ideas will generate opposition to themselves – this effect is produced by the good and the bad aspects of the ideas, or the thesis and the antithesis. Both the good and the bad aspects of the ideas have to be worked out before the ideas’ usefulness are synthesised and assimilated.

I put these thoughts another way. Every good idea will produce bad effects as well as good ones (for example, the introduction of new technology often results in an increase of misery for the working masses). Every bad idea will produce good effects as well as bad ones (the good effects are correctives aimed at preventing, or ameliorating, more badness). The final synthesis of an idea is the distillation from out of its goodness and badness of the lessons that it teaches.

For example, consider the new ideas that came out of the 1960s hippie movements. Some of these ideas have had a lasting impact on Western ideas about sexuality and sexual identity, whilst other ideas and aspirations have fallen by the wayside.

De-stabilisation

To produce change and evolution in a society, a de-stabilising factor has to be introduced into it in order to generate conflict. This factor has to generate anxiety in each person, in order to be effective. If this factor permeates all levels of that society, then the society can change throughout all its classes. When the factor affects only one class, then we witness class conflict (one class against the other classes) rather than overall social conflict. The traditional, though not very effective, way to change attitudes was periodic warfare. For modern times, the most effective way to change attitudes is to de-stabilise society and all its members. However, this process is a very long-term one. Even in modern societies, inadequate beliefs and attitudes are still too prevalent. Hence the twenty-first century is likely to maintain the present instability of many Western societies. There have been two major de-stabilising factors in modern Western societies.

1). The first de-stabilising factor was free-market economics, also called free-market Darwinism. This has had some very good social effects (such as increasing the range of personal choice and the means of communication), together with a lot of bad social effects.

2). The second de-stabilising factor is the emphasis on examining relationships, whether personal, sexual, business, religious, etc.  Sooner or later most people are confronted with the need to upgrade their relationship skills and resolve their social limitations and weaknesses. This can be very scary.

Factor (1) is still operable, whereas factor (2) began about the 1950s, with the “beat” generation in America, along with its echo in Britain. It has taken about 200 years for economics to achieve its present form, its present strengths and weaknesses. Economically, Western countries have changed enormously during this time period. Transfer this effect to relationships. Who can imagine what the theatre of relationships will be like in 200 years time?

So far I have only considered the Western world. I take a passing glance at the non-Western world. This world is just beginning its immersion into market economics, and will doubtless evolve a different style from Western forms. But this non-Western world has yet to realise that a revolution in relationships awaits it. 

The Western world finds that constant change is de-stabilising, but its heritage of rationality and democracy from the ancient Graeco-Roman world allows it to cope, in a fashion. The non-Western world has a different heritage, one that is less rational and non-democratic. Hence it will cope differently with relationships, but this is in the future. This non-Western world is embarking on a helter-skelter of change, the results of which no Westerner can foresee.

[¹]. I explain themes in my articles on Emotion, on the Home page. [1]

[²]. Anxiety is an emotion and is described in my articles on Emotion on the Home page. [2]

[³]. See the previous articles on Attitudes and Ego Responses and Changing Attitudes. [3]

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