Imagination and Peace: On the Inner Dynamics of Promoting Peace Activism

J o u m l of Social Issues, Vol. 44, NO. 2, 1988, pp . 39-57

Imagination and Peace: On the Inner Dynamics of Promoting Peace Activism

Mary Watkins

The relations between peace activism and the utopian, anticipatory, sympathetic, and compensatory functions of the imagination are explored, and the results of a group process using inner dialogue to help participants understand the dynamics of their relation to peace activism are analyzed. Social action is viewed here as arising in part from a successful negotiation between inner voices that inhibit progressing from the awareness of social problems into action and voices that encourage this integration of awareness and action. A revised group method to facilitate and sustain peace action in one’s life is described, building on both my findings and Elise Boulding’s work on imagining a peaceful future.

Many psychologically minded writers have stressed the importance of imagination in creating a world less imperiled by nuclear weapons, seeing quietism in the face of possible nuclear war as a failure or inadequacy of social or moral imagination (e.g., Boulding, 1983; Fromm, 1981; Lifton, 1981; Mack, 1981; Macy, 1983). How is imagination central to the creation of peace? First, unlike many social problems that can be directly perceived, it is only through imagination that the dimensions of a third world war could possibly be approached, since nothing that has ever taken place-not even the homfic annihilations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-can anticipate it fully. So vast, so even unimaginable it would be. Second, as the Romantics pointed out (Abrams, 1953), the imagination approaches facts in a different manner than reason does. Whereas reason focuses on the general and the abstract, the imagination brings the particular to life-particular scenes with particular characters. In so doing, it moves the heart. The imagination’s path to perceiving nuclear war is not the rhetoric of numbers, technological jargon, and probabilities (which numb one), but rather a focus on specific images and particular losses.

Correspondence regding this article should be addressed to Mary Watkins, 124 Spectacle Pond Road, Littleton, MA 01460.

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0022-4537/88/0600-0039$06.00/1 0 1988 The Society for Ihe Psychological Study of Social Issues

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Also, it is only through imagination that we can entertain the possibility that nuclear weapons could be dismantled in the name of peace, as it has never happened before that a weapon has been made and not used. It requires a utopian imagination, an imagination that does not simply mirror the world but that can create what the Romantics called a heterocosm-another world different from this one-which once alive imaginally , can inspire action.

Imagination has also been seen as critical in breaking down the divisions between one nation and another, in particular between American citizens and those of the U.S.S .R. For through imagination we can escape our bodily limita- tions and identify with others-in this case others who, as Lifton (1981) points out, would be the likely objects of our weapons. Through sympathetic identification we can combat the process of dehumanizing others that occurs when they are seen only from the external point of view.

The spontaneously compensatory aspect of imagination, pointed out by Freud and Jung, is also critical to understanding how imagination can be an active force for peace within the psyche. Imagination brings to our awareness the forgotten, the extruded-ideas undervalued by consciousness or defended against. As Michael Carey (1982) and Robert Lifton (1980) have documented, in spite of our attempts to disregard or minimize the nuclear danger, disturbing, nightmarish imagery does break through in our dreams and thoughts, turning our attention-even if only momentarily-to our desperate situation. In dreams I have collected on nuclear war, the Jewish holocaust is often linked to the nuclear holocaust, breaking down the distinction between Jews and non-Jews. We are all Jews beneath the falling bomb. No one is exempt. There are dreams placing us amid the rubble of something we have loved-a medieval city, the Metropolitan Museum, or a street of our hometown. Dreams where we cannot move and cannot talk while we are dying slowly of radiation sickness, alone and uncom- forted. Such unbidden images need only the sound of an airplane or a twinge of nausea to take root, to unfold.

Imagination’s anticipatory, utopian, sympathetic, and compensatory nature, extends us into the very nuclear world we try to escape from, defend against. In doing so, it awakens an Enlightenment and Romantic idea of the imagination as moral. In that era imagination was held to be the residence of “sympathy,” that is, the capacity to place oneself into other situations and beings in order to experience their reality and feelings.

But there was a strange transformation in this concept of moral imagination (Engell, 1981). An alienation of imagination from moral action occurred, due to the Romantics’ focus on self-realization and self-gratification, and this has pro- foundly influenced our 20th-century view of imagination. In psychoanalysis we no longer find the imagination lauded for its ability to transport us into the world’s concerns and others’ sufferings, but rather condemned for the reverse (Watkins, 1986). Imagination is seen as a preserve of wishes, the self‘s wishes

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that stand in stark contrast to the realities outside and, indeed, that defend us against the harshness of the external world. Work with images within psychology has been almost exclusively focused on improving the self-psychologically, spiritually, physically. It is little wonder that Soviet psychology (Repina, 1971) berates our psychology of imagination as “bourgeois. ”

Our 20th-century psychology has demoralized the imagination through its individualistic focus, its subjectivistic reduction of images of the world’s crisis back into the personal history and intrapsychic dynamics of the patient. In the recent history of the uses of imagination, we find ourselves in the Romantics’ dilemma again-imagination is seen as panacea. We are directed to utilize images to cure cancer, sexual impotence, warts, stress, insecurity, lack of pro- ductivity, and to increase personal power, solve personal history, enhance personal growth. In this tradition, entertaining nuclear images could become just one more exercise in the “growth” arena.

We cannot accept the claim that imagination is intrinsically moral. For is not imagination as responsible for the building of Auschwitz as it is for the founding of the United Nations; is it not as active in a rape as it is in a moment of sympathetic compassion? With this in mind, we can propose a different notion of moral imagination. Not all imaginings are moral in and of themselves. Some serve to sustain our narcissism and self-centeredness, as psychoanalysis amply shows. Some imaginings, by virtue of their structure, do prompt the moral sense, precisely by their quality of sympathy, of letting us feel realities apart from the self‘s. Others prompt the moral sense through their anticipatory, compensatory, or utopian functions.

The Need for Action

However, if imagination is to be moral, I believe, it must have another component, a component of action. It is not enough for our heart to be stirred by an image-for instance, of a little girl of the Hiroshima bombing, burnt, or- phaned, surrounded by the carnage of everything she has known. That stirring has an implicit movement toward action in it, which must be nurtured and sustained.

Being aware of nuclear war, being able to imagine it and its alternative, is clearly not enough. Awareness is not always enough to motivate action. What keeps us from acting on the images that we have entertained of Hiroshima-from further educating ourselves, talking about nuclear war to our friends, family, and colleagues? What keeps us from joining a group and participating in its activities-not just donating money to quiet a moment of uneasiness? What keeps us from making changes in our lifestyles, in our hierarchy of life priorities, that would support a commitment to action to help avert nuclear war? Can we use imagination to help us understand this barrier in order to encourage action?

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We know from clinical experience that it is often profitable to describe a person as comprised of a number of different characters who interact with one another. In fact, we recognize that much of thought is but a conversation of “voices”-questioning, answering, criticizing, advising, praising, expressing (Watkins, 1986). Our action depends on the orchestration of these voices, on which point of view, which character, is in power at a given moment. Is it a “mothering one” who runs to soothe anxiety, or a “working one” who longs for solitude in which he or she can become absorbed in a project, or a “fun lover” who looks for ways to lighten, amuse, and enjoy? Often a single voice becomes so prevalent on an issue that it seems as though there is no other perspective, no second voice that objects or queries. At such moments, we say one is “identified” with the first voice.

To change habitual action or inaction, the relations between voices must shift. For an example, consider an individual who becomes paralyzed about certain aspects of her work. We may find that within this person’s depression she is the victim of a harsh voice that pinpoints with precision-and expresses with hyperbole-the nuances of inadequacy: “You’re no good at this. You should give it up. It’s a farce to continue.” The person’s ego voice may simply be overwhelmed, agree, and echo this central critical voice, so that it sounds as though there is but one voice, a single point of view.

In order to move from paralysis to action, one must become aware of the process of ‘identification” and thereby regain a standpoint from which to hear the voice and eventually to have a dialogue with it. As one breaks the identification, one begins to take a more active role with respect to the voice-agreeing, disagreeing, acknowledging some criticism, but perhaps arguing for better tim- ing regarding delivery of the criticism (i.e., not at the inception of an action, where it will crush its future, but later, when critical attention to a shallow part or a failure of logic will strengthen the work). How can we use these insights regarding the imagination’s voices to help us move toward action with regard to social problems, such as the prevention of nuclear war?

Lifton (1981) posits that each of us lives a “double life” with regard to nuclear war: One part of us does not want to hear about the possibility, defends itself through a state of psychic numbness, and goes about “business as usual,” while another part understands, and experiences poignantly , that everything precious could be destroyed forever.

If nothing else, the 20th century should have taught us to keep a vigilant eye on the “numb one.” For Wilhelm Reich (1973), the numb one is the person armored against feeling. Being “shut off from immediate contact with nature [and] people” (p. 124), the numb one acts with false pride, concerns himself with superficial appearances, engages in the banal, the ordinary. For Reich, evil is none other than numbness. For Hannah Arendt (1978), a student of the atrocities of our century, evil also takes on an ordinary face, the face of banality. Adolf


Eichmann exemplified this for her. Unlike our usual notions of how evil people would seem, Eichmann was striking only in his “manifest shallowness.” Al- though the “deeds were monstrous,” the doer “was quite ordinary, com- monplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.” He presented himself with “cliches” and “stock phrases,” “adhering to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct.” He was not stupid but “thoughtless” (Arendt, 1978, p. 4). So if evil occurs in this mundane, ordinary way, then it is possible for all of us to perpetuate it--by sins of omission (actions we fail to take)-as well as sins of commission.

In this study, I decided to have people use imagination to get in contact with the numbed part of the self and then to attempt to integrate that part with the one that was able to imagine and feel about nuclear war. I hypothesized that if action could be supported or at least understood by both parts of the self, if both could be taken into account when action was contemplated and planned, then action would be less likely to be undermined or inhibited.

Method

I met with eight small groups of persons containing a total of 50 participants, ranging in age from 17 to 65, and including both individuals who were inactive and those struggling to sustain or increase their antinuclear activism. Each group met once for one to three hours, depending on circumstances. Par- ticipants were told that there are different parts to the self, and that people may have one part of the self that wants to do something about nuclear war and another part that does not want to hear about nuclear war. They were asked to consider the part of themself that did not want to pay attention to the possibility of nuclear war and to imagine this part as a character in a short story or novel. They were to write a description of this character. What was important to him or her, what was the scene or setting of his or her activities? Where did the person live, how did he or she spend or manage a day or want a day to go? Then participants were asked to provide a similar character sketch for the part of themselves that did want to act to avert nuclear war. When they were finished describing this second character, they were asked to imagine the characters meeting. What sort of a dialogue would ensue? That is, the participants were asked to imagine and record a dialogue between the two parts of themselves-to act as playwrights and construct a brief scene in which the two characters met.

During these group meetings I emphasized coming to know the voices that inhibit peace activism and those that sustain it in order to work against an identification with a single voice and toward a dialogue that allowed movement from an habitual stance of inaction or limited action. The effort was not to eliminate or kill one voice in favor of the other, not to kill off the numb one. (As clinical practice demonstrates, the neglected or repressed voice always reasserts

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itself, often without our awareness.) Also, as we shall see, some of the characters unconcerned about nuclear war can be valuable voices when their area of concern is circumscribed. It was the very tendency to isolate these voices that I was trying to work against. When split apart, each presents itself simplistically, as black and white, polar opposites. Each voice by itself sounds trite, stereotypic, uncompli- cated, unsophisticated. When a dialogue can be sustained, each voice develops and becomes more internally complicated, less dismissive of the other, and thereby less inhibitory (Watkins, 1986).

Results

The participants’ written reports revealed characters, dialogues, and land- scapes with marked similarities to one another. Together, these nicely summa- rize the forces of the imagination that support social activism versus quietism in our lives. Let us begin with their descriptions of the numbed characters-the ones whose eyes skip over the newspaper item dealing with the installation of the MX or of antinuclear protests, who do not want to think or feel about the possibility of nuclear war, who tell us that action is impossible.

The Voices of Denial

It was possible to sort the kinds of numbing figures who arose into six types of voices (not totally discrete), each experienced by 8 or 9 participants-six kinds of presences who benumb us to the reality of social problems and the immediacy of the nuclear danger.

Child. The first kind of numbing presence is the child in us who is not immersed in the daily world of political events, but in the world of play. (Of course, many actual children worry quite directly about nuclear war, but the imaginal child lives apart.) On one extreme is the child in nature, uncorrupted by the evils of society. When asked who inside of him does not want to hear about nuclear war, one 30-year-old man saw a small, gentle, innocent boy, naked and vulnerable to the thoughtless whims of others. He lives in a dark, warm cave on a mountainside in the wilderness, far above the city and society, and far away from the cruelties humans inflict upon their fellows. He avoids others, for contact with them is painful and frustrating. He would rather be alone, living in harmony with nature and himself, allowing others to do what they may.

Another’s child is down by a brook on a bright summer day. She is 11 years old, lean and graceful with long golden hair. She plays with her friends and rides her horse through the meadows. She cannot comprehend what nuclear war means, what it is. She cannot imagine the possibility of her world being de-


stroyed, for everything seems so peaceful, so complete. Reflecting upon this golden child, the woman who entertains her says that it is this innocent child who

blocks me from acting. It is the optimistic inability to comprehend the destruction of my world, the actual horror of the effects of nuclear war. When one part of me thinks it will happen, the child, in all her freshness, says it isn’t possible.

There are other children too: the teenage boy who runs from one baseball game to the next, the spoiled little girl isolated in the world of her own desires, and so on. Interestingly, we see variations of these children in the adult imagi- nary figures who constitute the other types of numbing characters.

Besides the imaginal child’s self-centeredness, absorption in the world of play and pleasure, besides her innocence and naive belief in the continuation and eternity of life, we also find within ourselves the child’s feelings of impotence, inability, and inadequacy. This is the voice that blocks our potential activism by saying, “This problem is too complex, too big for me.” “I don’t know what to do about this; I wouldn’t know where to begin.” “My voice is too small; nobody would hear me.” Each of us has an adult part who knows that, finally, there is no recourse to someone older and wiser to accomplish the things that must be done-that, whether adequate to the task or not, one must try or desired events will never happen. The child within us stills this voice, leaving the tasks for someone older and more experienced to do. In this way, the child’s youthful innocence is potentially lethal, breeding as it does an evasion of responsibility, an evasion of trying to do whatever one can do.

Worker. The second type of numbing character is the worker in us, usually the specialist. For the worker, life is narrowed to the confines of the job. All else is experienced as unwelcome intrusion or interruption. The worker moves very fast and efficiently, absorbed-monomanically-in the task at hand. There are seldom people or family around, but if there are, they are felt as being in the way. The worker’s sense of self is sustained by mastery of a specialized task in a circumscribed world. Let us meet a few of these workers.

A 20-year-old woman, concerned about nuclear war but inactive, imagines in herself a janitor, busily cleaning up the daily messes of everyday life. He is picking up rubbish in the auditorium, and he feels frustrated and angry. He is never there for the show, only afterwards, alone. He wants to be left alone to do his work, but he keeps hearing a voice over the intercom. He looks over his shoulder as though to tell this authority, this voice, to leave him alone, to stop bugging him and let him live his own life.

The janitor is the one who cleans and tidies the mess of our daily life. The cleanup is never a prelude to getting started on a project. He makes a world of tidying the files, emptying the trash, watering the plants, arranging the chairs, balancing the checkbook. His work is never done because he spends each day

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repetitively recleaning, rearranging the same rooms as yesterday. The tidying up gets in the way of new actions. He pulls us to complete what is left unfinished, discourages us from starting something new that could increase the mess and further intrude upon the order he tries to set up.

A 30-year-old woman sees another kind of worker character, Holly. Holly runs about frenetically all the time. In her 20s, Holly works as a computer personnel placement consultant for a Boston Beltway firm. She loves everything fast, particularly cars. She lives with her husband and children in a prefabricated three-bedroom suburban ranch-style home, but this is not her life focus. She and her family rush past each other all the time, just as Holly rushes to and from work, and past people on her job. She is excited by the money she is making, the things she is able to buy, the deals she can cut. For Holly, “profit” has utterly lost its original meaning in the Bible and in Spinoza, of profit for the soul (Fromm, 1981, p. xxvi). Holly is the part of us climbing the ladder, moving up, excited by doing well at something, whether or not it means that much to us.

A different kind of worker character is the scholar. This one sits in his library, pouring over leather-bound books, pondering specialized questions for long hours. His house is surrounded by a wall, cutting him off from the hubbub of the city beyond. He wants to be left alone; his project demands it. He works hard at what he does and believes he deserves his remove from the world. He tells us we must not take time from our work for political issues. We must stick to what we do well and leave world problems to others who are meant to work those things out. The importance of our projects and our dedication to them give us special dispensation.

Hermit. The third type of character who numbs us chooses isolation from the world of people and becomes surrounded by nature-most often he or she has “taken to the woods,” which soon become a completed world. There is a dim awareness of outsiders’ concerns about nuclear war, but nature soothes and allays these concerns by its strength, continuity, and massiveness.

A mother of two imagines the numb aspect of herself as a naturalist character, a rugged, individualistic woodsman. He lives alone with his animals in the woods, and guides his life by the signs of nature. It is inconceivable to him that anything or anyone could destroy his world-it is too precious.

Another character is a woman in her mid-30s who has moved to the woods with her children and her husband because she wants to avoid hearing about nuclear war. She has no television or radio, and only slight contact with the townspeople to get supplies. She enjoys her isolation and detachment. She is healthy, hardy, a good caretaker for her children. She hikes in the mountains, farms, and cooks. Her main concerns are to live off the land and enjoy life. She writes everyday for herself on matters that concern her.

So does another character, a very strong and vital man who -lives on an


island in Maine-a character imagined by an activistic professor with a long history of social concern. The only people who come to visit this character are other writers, who leave refreshed by the meeting. He lives very simply, close to the earth and sea.

We know of people in the real world like these characters-back-to-the- land people, individualists who will always struggle with their hermitlike pro- clivities. But closer to home-amid the city as well-we can detect in ourselves a trend to isolation and detachment. It is shown, for instance, in an effort to take comfort in all that is natural (be it health food or flannel sheets), as a refuge against the atrocities and life-defeating technologies of the 20th century.

Suburbanite. This isolation happens in the fourth type of character as well-the suburbanite. The world apart from one’s own bit of neighborhood is a terrain to pass through quickly on the commute, with windows rolled up and doors locked, staying as much as possible on the over- and underpasses of the superhighways.

A 25-year-old graduate student sees a character named Jack building a brick wall. Jack proceeds methodically, one brick and then the next. As the wall gets taller, he sees a bomb blast in the distance. He picks up his supplies and moves to the other side of the wall, continuing to lay bricks. From here we see this wall will surround his patio. He is looking forward to finishing so he can lie down on the chaise lounge with a beer and enjoy the sun with his wife on this gorgeous Saturday.

With their worries about mortgages, taxes, and money-market funds, and their enjoyment of gardens and barbecue pits, the suburban characters typify what is uniform, predictable, and somewhat anonymous or stereotypic about our lives. The suburbanite neither concentrates solely on work nor on hedonistic pleasures, but balances each in a circumscribed existence of family, work, and friends. This is the part of us that does not want to go too deep, does not want to give up the web of expectations upon which our lives hang neatly. It is the part of us that would not want to make a move toward activism if that meant moving out of the secure job, the pleasant home, or the average family. Let us face it, Levittown provides a residence for each of us psychically-pond sitter and urban dweller alike.

Hedonist. The fifth kind of character who does not want to think about nuclear war we will call the hedonist. The hedonist is quite aware of the impend- ing apocalypse, but feeling powerless to avert it, chooses to enjoy the moment. Time is collapsed into a pleasurable present. One is “blissed out” on drugs, or nature, or the aesthetic pleasures of art, music, or literature. This is the voice that says sarcastically that it does not matter what we do (live more frugally, join an antinuke group, give up aspects of professional or family life to devote ourselves

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to social change)-it simply does not matter, because life and the world are going to end anyway. One is reminded of the Germans in Hitler’s bunker, dancing and drinking until the Russians came. The only solution is to live now, to eat a French meal, go to the Caribbean, to make a bundle, and to retire early. “Go ahead, build a hot tub in the basement. The loan will never come due.” These characters embrace Thomas Hobbes’s notion of happiness as the continu- ous progress from one greed to another (Fromm, 1981). Their style of life is the radical hedonism Erich Fromm speaks about, where “the aim of life is happiness, that is, maximum pleasure, defined as the satisfaction of any desire or subjective need a person may feel” (1981, pp. xxv-xxvi). Not only is such hedonism a response to apocalyptic possibilities, but as Fromm points out, it breeds war by establishing classes within and between nations, further dividing the “haves” and the “have-nots.”

Gray Lifer. There is a sixth, somewhat related group of characters, who may be called the gray lifers, because they share the pessimism and sense of impotence of the hedonists. They are confined to the present, not because they enjoy its sweetness, but because the difficulties of daily living chain them to the present. Just surviving occupies their energies. These characters are buried with family and work responsibilities, struggles for money, and the drabness of their jobs and homes. They are depressed, fearful, apathetic, dull. Unlike the workers, they move slowly and do not enjoy their work. To take on thoughts about nuclear war would be one more burden. For some of them, the prospect of nuclear war is actually a relief, a final end to the harshness of daily life.

We experience this character at those moments when taking up a cause seems too weighty. One is already exhausted, depleted, struggling to meet obli- gations and responsibilities, and now one is asked to go to more meetings, initiate more phone calls and letters, hear more talk of depressing realities. This part of us, burdened down, loses a sense of life’s beauty and value. Upon thinking of nuclear annihilation, it almost reacts, “So what if it happens? No great loss.” The thought of its happening actually confirms one’s sense of life as desperate and unsalvageable.

If I have been successful in describing these characters, the reader should be able to see many of these aspects working in his or her feelings about nuclear war. Further, we can find people who exemplify these voices, who have identified with one or another of them. For instance, there are adults who speak with the naive innocence and optimism of the child (“It will never happen”) or with the child’s inability to deal with the world of grown-ups (“Well, I don’t know anything about politics or nuclear warfare, so I can’t help on this”). There are others who confine themselves to the circumscribed world of their work or who isolate themselves in the security of nature. In therapy one often hears indi-


viduals expressing the viewpoint of the gray lifer, who feel that life is so hard that nuclear devastation would put them out of their misery. Similarly, Weschler (1983), after traveling in Poland, described how Poles looked forward to a nuclear war to solve some of their problems. On the one hand, they magically felt when it happened it would not hit Poland. On the other hand, as one woman put it, “But it’s strange. Things are so bad that people here are almost longing for it.” Longing for devastation!

The Voices of Awareness

Let us turn to the inner characters who are not numb to the possibility of nuclear war, who are aware of it, think of it, and feel about it. Participants were asked to describe that part of themselves as if it were a character in a book: what would that character be like, where would it live, what activities would it be engaged in? Here I found four types of characters, each experienced by 11 to 14 participants.

Sufferer. After meeting this first group of aware characters, we can better understand our own eagerness to identify with the voices of the numbed within us. The first group of the aware are alone, isolated in their despair, opened irreparably to the suffering accompanying nuclear war. In one description, a handsome, blond character is strapped to the surface of a giant golden coin, arms and legs spread wide, stomach torn open. Blood streams down his face because his eyelids have been cut off-condemning him to constant sight, sight without the refuge of sleep or closed eyes. His opened gut has been filled with every disease on earth. The coin turns over and over, as if flipped by some giant hand, beyond the man’s control. Another character wanders blind, alone, crying. His eyes have been burnt blind by the horrific sights of postwar suffering.

In the images of sufferers, children are no longer playing in the meadows and the baseball fields. They are mongoloid, saddened, lost, wounded, or de- formed. No longer do they pursue their own concems and pleasures, for they carry the awareness bred by wounds. In one description, a child would have become what it looked at-a flower if there were one to see-but now in this postwar world she cries and moans, becoming the victims around her. The rest of the children lie dead around a woman who is all alone, filled with anger at this sight of children’s decaying, mangled, and burnt bodies.

These characters are far from numb. They are immersed as victims in the images of destruction, immobilized onlookers to the holocaust. They are passive, overwhelmed by emotion, despairing. We are understandably afraid of this part of ourselves, which, if led to focus on the possibility of nuclear war, would abandon itself to intense feelings of despair and depression. Anticipating this,

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Joanna Macy (1981) and others have provided “despair groups,” groups in which one can contact these emotions and gradually work through them to a stance of action to avert the holocaust. When the despairing voice is repressed, Macy points out, one experiences a numbing of all affects, not just those con- cerning nuclear war.

Enthusiastic Activists. The first desperate group of characters, however, are not the only ones aware of and responsive to the nuclear danger. The second group are enthusiastic activists-young, hip, attractive, very busy people. They are confident, successful at work, enthusiastic about solving social issues; they have “got their heads together.” Living in the city, and surrounded by like- minded souls, they go to the museums and films, enjoying their awareness. There was a surprising uniformity and stereotypicality about the descriptions of these characters, but (unlike the case of the suburban characters described earlier), there was no awareness of this by their imaginers. Listening to these descriptions, one cannot help but feel that the characters’ half-life is very short- limited as they are to youth.

Sacrificial Activists. The third category of aware characters are a quite different group of activists-lonely, depressed, isolated, overworked characters. They, like the gray lifers described earlier, suffer through their responsibilities, without time for enjoyment or for other aspects of life. They have no family or friends. Although at work in the city, they live in such places as a snow-covered mountain, above the tree line, with no shelter. These characters sacrifice themselves, without the reward of certainty of success. They are pessimistic non- escapists. One might expect them to become increasingly depressed, burnt out, angry, and bitter. However, they have a kind of selfless dedication and awareness, a desire to persevere in spite of feelings of failure and inadequacy. Church- man (1981), a student of world hunger, has stated that it is just such an active acceptance of oneself as a failure that is essential for long-term commitment to social action. Those who must succeed all the time cannot take on the tangle of a serious social problem.

Prorecrors. The last class of characters who are aware of the possibility of nuclear war are those who love someone or something in particular, which they wish to protect. For them, the enjoyment of what is loved comes first and motivates feeling and action. The loved objects are generally the presence of nature or children. Within this group of characters we find mothers and teachers. The mothers come from various walks of life, and although activism is not their primary occupation, one senses renewable dedication, since they seem moved by concern for what is treasured.


Dialogue Between the Voices

What happens when the character who wants to be numb and indifferent to the possibility of nuclear war meets the character who recognizes and feels strongly about the danger? I have found that certain kinds of dialogue between these characters seem destined to fail, end in Stalemate, and result in further isolation of these two sides of ourselves. The most pervasive disaster in dialogue, experienced in half of the cases, was the activistic voice coming on self-right- eously, indignant about the concerns and values of the numb one, unable to listen because of its effort to preach-condescending, sarcastic, dismissive.

One character, a self-confident, enthusiastic activist, stands over the bed of a gray lifer, an exhausted one who is just trying to survive. She is singing exuberantly “Put on a Happy Face,” “What the World Needs Now is Love, Sweet Love,” and “Amazing Grace.” She tries to get the other one up, condemning her for her dull apathetic approach. She does not speak to the depression and the exhaustion, but tries to override them entirely.

Preaching and stalemate can happen the other way around also. The unconcerned character, involved in her pregnancy and back-to-nature existence, tells her activist counterpart that she is making a big mistake doing this peace work. She should be getting married and having a family, but instead she looks dowdy and overworked, and never has any fun. And sometimes there is mutual deroga- tion, back and forth, which leads to a quick “SO long.” Each character lobbies to make the other become like oneself, as though stubbornly sticking to one’s own position might succeed.

We are as familiar with these kinds of dialogue externally as we are internally. In fact, when discussing these modes of interacting, many participants recounted instances of being turned off to causes by the holier-than-thou approach of activists. But now they could feel that tendency inside and see its roots in such things as disgust, frustration, disappointment, and zealousness, and in the fight of the active side not to be submerged by the pessimism, depression, and self-interestedness of the other side.

What kinds of rhetoric did work in these dialogues? What enabled the dialogue to be sustained, to be picked up again in the future, and not to end in further alienation?

In one imagined dialogue, a young mother who has entered the antinuclear movement to help protect her children meets a woman who has moved to the mountains. The latter says, “I find these nuclear issues quite distressing, and my husband and I have moved to the mountains to live our lives in solitude because of this problem.” Instead of derogating her for the escapism, the mother ac- knowledges that she too has thought of doing such a thing, as recently as several months ago. In doing so, she lessens the gap between them, and is then able to share what made her stay-her fears for her children if the MX funding bill

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passes. The woman who has chosen solitude then confides that she does not think people have the power to change such decisions. The mother again empathizes with her point of view:

Mother: You know, I used to feel the same way; but we do have power to act as a whole.

Well, I do vote. But that’s where my action stops. It’s such a hopeless situation to me.

Country Dweller:

At this point, something remarkable happens in the dialogue. The mother recognizes her partner in dialogue. She realizes she had seen her in Washington, D.C., in 1967, speaking against the Vietnam War:

Country Dweller: Yes, that was me. Perhaps . . . you remember that day . . . my friend with

me had been killed that day by the police. That was the end of my radicalism.

There is something amazing about this dialogue. Rather than condemn the country dweller for her escapism, the mother recognizes within herself some of the country dweller’s feelings, and this in turn locates the activist within the escapist one. This move against polarization gives a direction for the dialogue. The former activist cannot just bounce into activity; she has feelings of loss, of powerlessness, and disillusionment to deal with. She could never be a naive activist. She has already seen war.

In these dialogues no other set of characters succeeds in nurturing the movement of the numb character so much as those who identify themselves as mothers or teachers. Their usual tactics are either to find out what their partner in dialogue treasures, and then appeal to their action to protect that, or else to patiently, very slowly, introduce the other to the threat of nuclear war. An example of the latter approach would be someone who begins getting us involved by sharing “a little” reading for us to do-i.e., not demanding that we become instantly involved.

In the failed dialogues the supposedly more “feelingful” character takes the inactive one at face value-as indifferent, uncaring, self-centered-and does not respond to hints of deeper feeling. For instance, one of the previously mentioned numbed characters was a janitor, trying to do his job while a voice over the intercom bothered him. The voice turned out to be the activist character, a determined, powerful, young woman on her way to a rally against nuclear weapons.

Young Janitor: Why don’t you leave me alone? I just want to go on with my work.

Woman: Your’re just going to go about your business and leave the work to us? Janitor: I don’t want to know.


Young Woman: I feel like just walking out on you because there’s no communication. Do I have

to pull you out the door of this auditorium and push you into the middle of the rally’s crowd outside’?

Janitor: I’m doing my work. Can’t you see? And when I come home I want to find meaning. I can’t deal with doing this job and at the same time feeling a pile of jigsaw pieces in my stomach.

Young Woman: You’ve got to put away your other self and be that part who wants to change

things. Janitor: I am too far out of touch with that part. It’s buried under some floor boards deep

inside. He’s pushing to get up, but I don’t want to see him.

Instead of asking about the jigsaw pieces in his stomach or about the character pushing up on the floor boards, the young woman terminates the conversation. She misses the clues that his indifference is not simpleminded, but complex-it is not what it seems. Through his obsessive, repetitive work, he tries unsuccessfully to nail down the floor boards. She need not “walk out on him because there is no communication” or tell him what she would do if she were him, she could simply focus his attention on those floor boards.

In some dialogues it was possible for the activistic one to recognize and draw on the strengths of the other, more removed character. The ability to circumscribe a manageable area in which to work and succeed may be a natural instinct to the numb one, which the activist badly needs in order not to be overwhelmed by the immensity of the problem.

In one dialogue, Billy, a copyboy in a newsroom, is upset about nuclear war, but is not a strong writer or newsmaker. He usually runs manicly from one assignment to the next. He goes to visit the strong, vital man who lives very simply on an island in Maine. This man is not an activist himself, but he is willing to talk with Billy about war when Billy brings it up. He inspires Billy to write a set of relevant columns, and perhaps as importantly, gets Billy to do a little fishing before he goes back to the mainland.

Discussion

This invitation “to do a little fishing” seems critical in some of these dialogues. Particularly the isolated, overworked activist and the despairing one with eyes fixed open could use “a little fishing.” Psychically, fully identifying with these characters would seem to have a very short future. I am reminded of Robert Coles’s (1964) piece on “social struggle and weariness” during the civil rights movement in the South-describing how such isolated and despairing souls would bum out. Battle symptoms of exhaustion, weariness, despair, frustration, and rage would often precede either leaving the movement altogether or becoming “troublesome, bitter, and a source of worry, of unpredictable action, of potential danger to themselves and their ‘cause’ ” (p. 308).

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Indeed, in studying why individuals leave movements like the civil rights movement or the anti-Vietnam peace movement, one finds that the first set of voices have asserted themselves strongly-the ones who want to enjoy the pleasures of a profession, a family, or a more middle-class existence. The individual who leaves the movement is often tired of fighting against “big problems,” where one can never fully succeed, and often feels as though things are worsening despite the devotion of so much time and energy and the sacrifice of so much of what life offers. Such a person may long for the more circumscribed existence of former friends, who can enjoy both pleasures and successes, who can feel effective within a more narrow world. Past research on activists (Coles, 1964; Keniston, 1968; Solomon & Fishman, 1964) would suggest to those who are very active in the antinuclear movement that dialogue with the first set of voices is as critical to sustaining one’s commitment to action over the long haul, as it is to encourage others to begin to be more active.

As Jonathan Schell(l982) points out in his book The Fate ofthe Earth, “As far as we can tell, there will never again be a time when self-extinction is beyond the reach of our species” (p. 55). I believe this fact must shape our activism. That is, peace activism can no longer be largely relegated to periods of tension, war, or possible war. It must be ongoing and ever vigilant, no matter what gains it makes. This means we must nurture a lifelong commitment to action for peace. We know that committing oneself to action is not achieved in a moment, nor achieved once and for all. As in a commitment to another person, one experiences doubt, frustration, despair, depression, seemingly insoluble conflicts of interest. Both the path to becoming more active and the path of sustaining commitment to action require confrontations with the voices of denial, discour- agement, belittlement, and disillusionment-the voices who want the simpler life, the life of pleasure, the life of circumscribed pursuits.

I have suggested that one way of encouraging action is internal dialogue. It is such dialogue that Hannah Arendt (1978) speaks about as a way to overcome the “thoughtlessness” of our own Eichmanns. She reminds us that for Socrates thought was an internal dialogue. In the Hippias Major, Socrates wanted to come to some agreement with the internal voice that cross-examined his actions. By contrast, Hippias avoided this voice by ceasing to think-not opening the dialogue. Arendt speaks to the implication of what Socrates was saying:

the criterion for action will not be the usual rules, recognized by multitudes and agreed upon by society, but whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time has come to think about my deeds and words. (p. 191)

If we follow this logic, an important form of moral imagining would be to open ourselves consciously to the kinds of dialogue about nuclear war that I have described. In doing so, we should allow the various sides to challenge and contradict each other, stick with them as they find a way of living with each other, and most importantly, follow the path of action that their dialogue points to.


Afterword

The results of this initial study in 1983 helped me to reformulate the pro- cedure for imaginative groups so that they would be more likely to stimulate and sustain peace activism and other social action. Since the study described above, I have run groups to promote peace and social action with over 2000 individuals. These groups have ranged in size from 8 to 70 participants, from one hour to two days in length, and have included both participants not engaged in peace action and peace activists searching for ways to sustain their commitment.

In the initial groups studied above, a discussion of the kind of peace action participants could pursue had often followed the imaginal dialogues. I was struck over and over again with how difficult this topic was for participants. Even individuals who up to that point had spoken quite personally and specifically, lapsed into vagueness or described actions others could take, implicitly distanc- ing themselves from direct action. However, those who had imagined their activism to be crucial to preserving what they desired or loved seemed most able to think of relevant and possible actions.

When 1 read Elise Boulding’s work (1983; also see her article in this issue) on imagining a peaceful future, I realized that her exercises, in conjunction with my own, would be likely to bring about more successful dialogues because participants, upon embarking on the imaginal dialogues, would be motivated not principally by fear or an abstract sense of rightness, but by preserving or bringing into being something highly desired, something felt by them to be critical to a peaceful and just future world.

The directions that I developed for the groups melded Boulding’s instructions with my own, as indicated in the following brief synopsis. After participants close their eyes and relax, they are told to imagine being in a favorite spot in their home or community, using all their senses. This makes the subsequent images as vivid as possible, and also puts participants in a peaceful place from which they can generalize the feeling of peace to their communities and the world. Next come Boulding’s (this issue) instructions to imagine the world 30 years later, when all nuclear weapons have been dismantled; to imagine the many other desirable changes (political, social, economic, educational, religious, and so on) related to that accomplishment; and to imagine and list the steps necessary in the next 15 years and the next two years to start this process. Following this, participants are told to think about some of the things they can do to help bring this about, and next, to focus on one personal action that is difficult but not impossible, to which they feel some inner resistance. At that point, the characters representing the voices of denial and the voices of awareness are imagined and then described to the group, and the leader discusses with participants how such characters form the.basis for both our inspiration to act on behalf of our world and our resistance to action. Then participants imagine a dialogue, writing out a brief conversation between the two characters, and they share and discuss their

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dialogue with the group or (if time is limited) with a partner in pairs. Finally, at the end of the exercise, participants close their eyes, remember their 30-year images of the world, and those who wish to do so state the actions they hope they will be able to undertake in the next two years. The group can send each other energy or prayer that each person is able to accomplish the wished-for acts. The total time for this exercise is 14 to 3 hours.

In order to lay the groundwork for more successful dialogues between the voices that inhibit and those that encourage our peace action, I have warned participants about the ways in which such dialogues usually get blocked- through polarization, empathic failures, dismissals, or the stereotyping of one’s partner in dialogue. This warning has enabled many more dialogues to reach more deeply into the dynamics inhibiting peace action. I have also learned to warn participants that, while most of us are successful in imagining a utopian future, it is extremely hard to pare this down to steps that each of us can take in the immediate and short-range future. This warning helps to lessen the tendency to project possible actions onto others, thereby disowning one’s own sense of agency and efficacy. By sharing the short-range actions each individual imagined engaging in, groups were nourished by the plethora of possibilities and by a realistic sense of what it is possible to do within the busyness of our day-to-day lives.

Of particular note here were five workshops with 300 psychologists and social workers, where we used these exercises in attempting to understand how we within our profession can move in the present toward peace, and the particular aspects of being psychologists or social workers that mitigate against social action. Many participants reported being pleased to have had a forum in which the kind of therapeutic attention usually reserved for “personal problems” could be given to the chasm or tension that so often exists between our awareness of social problems and the ways in which we live our day-to-day lives. With few exceptions, participants came to feel, although their social action must be in- formed by current events and external pressures, dealing imaginally with the kind of world they would like to bring into existence and examining their inner resistance and motivation to work toward this desired future through concrete steps in the present provided a useful and inspirational foundation for their future actions to promote peace.

Many of these psychologists and social workers expressed that the structure and content of their day-to-day professional life left them alienated from both their original inspiration to work in their field and from acting fully enough on behalf of their social awareness. Clinicians, in particular, felt confined by work that of necessity took on an individualistic and intrapsychic perspective, and was also often restricted to a narrow socioeconomic group. In visions of how to bridge the gap between social awareness and action, participants imagined taking themselves and their skills more into the world (e.g., to schools, prisons, neigh-


borhoods, Soviet exchange programs), bringing social concerns more into their present job (through teaching and research), creating new jobs, and particularly, tithing of time to work on their concerns and visions.

References

Abrams, M. H. (1953). The mirror and the lamp: Romantic theory and the critical tradition. New

Arendt, H. (1978). The life of the mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Boulding, E. (1983). The social imagination and the crisis of human futures: A North American

perspective. Forum for Correspondence and Contact. 13(2), 43-56. Carey, M. J . (1982). Psychological fallout. Bulletin of the Aromic Scientists, 38( I ) , 20-24. Churchman, C. W. (1981, Summer). Lectures presented at the Wright Institute, San Francisco. Coles, R. (1964). Social struggle and weariness. Psychiatry, 27, 305-315. Engell, J . (1981). The creative imagination: Enlightenment to romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Har-

Fromm, E. (1981). To have or to be. New York: Bantam Books. Keniston, K. (1968). The young radicals. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Lifton, R. J. (1980). The broken connection. New York: Simon & SchusteriTouchstone. Lifton, R. J. (1981). Psychological effects of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. In Proceedings of

Harvard Medical School conference, The Medical Consequences of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear War. Cambridge, MA.

Mack, J. (1981). Psychosocial effects of the nuclear arms race. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 37(4), 18-23.

Macy, J. (1981, SummerlFall). Despair work. Evolutionary Blues, pp. 37-47. Macy, J . (1983). Despair and p e r s o d power in the nuclear age. Philadelphia, PA: New Society

Reich, W. (1973). Ether. god and devil. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Repina, T. A. (1971). Development of imagination. In A. Zaporozhets & D. B. Elkonin (Eds.),

Psychology of preschool children. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Solomon, F. , & Fishman, J. R. (1964). Youth and social action. 11: Action and identity formation in

the first student sit-in demonstration. Journal of Socia/ Issues, 20(2), 36-45. Schell, J . (1982). The fate of the earth. New York: Avon Books. Watkins, M. (1986). Invisible guests: The development of imaginal dialogues. Hillsdale, NJ: Analy-

Weschler, L. (1983, April 18). A reporter at large (Poland-Part 11). The New Yorker, pp. 52-103.

York: Norton.

vard University Press.

Publishers.

tic Press.

MARY WATKINS received her Ph.D. in clinical and developmental psychology from Clark University, and studied phenomenological psychology at Duquesne University. She pursued her work on nurturing and sustaining social action while a research associate at Clark, and is presently in private practice in Cambridge and Littleton, Massachusetts. She has authored Waking Dreams (1974) and Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues (1986). In her work with groups, she combines her scholarship on the imaginal process with her interest in the inner dynamics by which social action is inhibited or motivated in one’s life.

Documents

Imagination and Peace: On the Inner Dynamics of Promoting Peace Activism