The Sweat Drips Down My Balls: Positive Psychology and Abjection
1998 was a big year for Martin Seligman. He was made President of the American Psychological Association which, as he was a psychologist, was a high honour, not a clerical error. He gave an address that focused on “two areas in which psychology of the late 20th century has not played a large enough role in making the lives of people better”
Firstly, “the 20th century's shameful legacy of ethnic conflict” and
Secondly, “a reoriented science that emphasizes the understanding and building of the most positive qualities of an individual: optimism, courage, work ethic, future mindedness, interpersonal skill, the capacity for pleasure and insight, and social responsibility”
Or more pithily “positive psychology”. As regards the first, he proposed that psychologists might “understand, predict, and even prevent such tragedies” - basically bring about world peace. On reflection, it was a very 90s speech. Both in dealing with the tragedies of the day (e.g. Kosovo) and also in the ridiculous optimistism. Whether he was more optimistic about world peace or positive psychology is our topic for today.
As someone who lives with mental illness, Seligman’s statement that psychology had been focused “too much toward the important, but not all important, area of curing mental illness” is not relatable. Our understanding of common mental illnesses is rudimentary and our treatments haphazard and under-researched. Now I would partly agree with him. There should be more to psychology than the study of psychopathology. We study human anatomy and physiology and many elements of the healthy. At the same time, Seligman seems eager for psychology to take on the burdens of morality - “We can articulate a vision of the good life that is empirically sound and, at the same time, understandable and attractive. We can show the world what actions lead to well being, to positive individuals, to flourishing communities, and to a just society”. It’s psychology making world peace happen again.
He may have bitten off more than he can chew.
Positive psychology has proved to be popular. It aligns nicely with the rhetoric of “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative”, hustle culture, productivity, optimisation, and performative positivity that dominates our social media streams. It is particularly popular with corporate HR departments. We want people to be positive. Everything is awesome!!!
So how does Seligman’s bright, shiny vision account for the strange pull that dark things have on us? The first example I want to talk about is The Stooges “I Wanna Be Your Dog”. This is the sound of someone submitting and debasing themselves for someone else. They know it’s bad - “so messed up” but that doesn’t stop them “I want you here”. The music captures Iggy’s giddy descent. The most rock n roll thing is the insistent piano chord hammering away in the background - a beat down. People’s desires are not always (rarely?) noble. And yet they are powerful and compelling. Do we abandon those emotions because they are not the positive, correct ones that we are supposed to have?
A very similar track is Lil Jon’s “Get Low”. Unlike other MCs who present as regal models of control (Jay-Z, Biggie), Lil Jon has already lost it. “The club owner say I need to calm down, Security guards go to sweatin' me now”. The personification of “goblin mode”, Lil Jon is an id rampaging through the strip club. Yes, this track objectifies women, but its men don’t come out of it well. The 808 pops and bass noise position Atlanta somewhere between Miami Bounce and Belgium Ardkore. I can’t make the case that this is ennobling art but I can’t deny its power either.
Positive psychology’s soundtrack is perhaps mid-80s U2 - a cowboy-booted Capser David Friedrich standing on a mountain, gazing into the sublime. Or some new age muzak piped into the meditation class. These are valid human emotions. We can be positive. But positive psychology does not have a lot to say about lust, rage, envy, misery, greed, fear except as things to be controlled and eliminated. It doesn’t explain why we prefer demagogues to technocrats. Why sometimes the filth feels so inviting.
There is another tradition in psychology that has more to say about this. Psychoanalysis starts from the assumption that we are estranged from ourselves. That our basic drives are Sex and Death and that our civilisational achievements are dependent on our repression and denial of them. But that repression is, at best, partial.
Like most things about it, the origins of psychoanalysis are paradoxical, incomplete and twisted (as humans are). Freud was a Viennese doctor and intellectual who created a strange brew of science, conjecture, and myth. Having slept through many arguments about the epistemological status of psychoanalysis, it is clear to me that many of its claims about the fundamentals of human nature - penis envy, the Oedipus Complex - are poetic expressions at best and crass nonsense at worst. However, at its core is a view of human nature as driven by our least admired impulses and our attempts to ride those desires as though we are on wild horses fleeing from a forest fire.
“Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them.”
One psychoanalytic practitioner that is perhaps useful for understanding the challenges posed (and curses thrown) by Iggy and Lil is Julia Kristeva. A follower of noted analyst and writer-that-I-will-never-read Jacques Lacan, Kristeva wrote an essay called The Powers of Horror. It soils psychoanalysis, anthropology, and literary criticism in a sordid melange of investigation and fascination. For Kristeva, the abject is linked to the feminine. Women embody the revolting fluids of the body that we (and especially men) must suppress. Women ooze. But then everything oozes when you look at it closely enough. So we don’t.
Half the book is devoted to Celine. Not the Quebecoise chanteuse whose heart will gone on nor the purveyor of expensive handbags, Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a stylistically brazen novelist and a virulent anti-semite (in a “Hitler had the right idea” kinda way). Little known in the Anglosphere, Celine was a cause célèbre in France. Yes, he’s a bad boy but if that was all he was, he wouldn’t be worth it. Kristeva finds something sublime in his muck.
“We are thrown into a strange state when reading Celine. What is involved goes beyond the content of the novels, the style of the writing, the author's biography or his indefensible political stands (fascist, anti-semitic); the true "miracle" of Celine resides in the very experience of one's reading—it is fascinating, mysterious, intimately nocturnal, and liberating by means of a laughter without complacency yet complicitous.”
For Kristeva, psychology (or whatever she is doing) is not about saving the world but living in it. It is about understanding why we are the way we are, not the way we wish we were. At its most urgent and stained, psychoanalysis provides a counterbalance to the giddy utopianism of positive psychology that shuns gazing into shadows in case it is swallowed by them.
Perhaps we should look into the shadows from time to time.
Bonus points if you can guess the prompt I used with Stable Diffusion to generate this image.