Pergamon NmIdm mP\.wM Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 8LLY4, 1994

Copyright0 1994 Elsevirr Science Lrd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved

0732-l 18X/94 S6.W

DIALECTICS AND DEVELOPMENT

Review of Critical Theories of Psychological Development edited by John Broughton. New York: Plenum Press, 1987.

ROBERT KUGELMANN Department of Psychology, University of Dallas, Irving, TX 75062, U.S.A.

Critical Theories of Psychological Development brings together important topics in developmental psychology with ideas and modes of analysis of considerable philosophic sophistication. Since developmental psychology, as Merleau-Ponty (1964) wrote a generation ago, constructs in its theories the ideal pathways for maturation, it participates in the formation of children. It makes children in its image, insofar as developmental theories shape the discourse and practices of child-rearing. So the discipline cannot sustain the pretence of being only an account “from the outside” of children viewed as natural objects. Developmental psychology serves to accommodate children to social norms by naturalizing the social world, as several of the authors in this volume indicate. J. Jacques Voneche, using a broad brush on a large canvas, speaks of “this colonization of childhood” (p. 86) by psychologists, educators, and others, all armed with “specified standards in all fields of activity” (p. 85). Critical Theories of Psychological Development contains a set of essays which collectively demonstrate that developmental psychology can be and should be a dialectical psychology on many levels, not the least of which is a dialectic between our aspirations <for the course of life and an account of what “really” happens. Because psychology deals with human beings, who are social and conscious beings, whose media are discourse and work, description is always prescription.

The essays in this book, based variously on thinkers as diverse as Adorno, Freud, and Lacan, and approaches such as feminism, deconstruction, post- structuralism, and critical theory, engage in hermeneutics of the various age periods across the life span, and theories about them. They provide the reader a ready reference for current critical thought and a multiplicity of critiques of psychology’s status quo. These essays share a common substance, a kind of acid that dissolves the crust of accepted presuppositions about the journey of life. Rather than resolving issues, moreover, they encourage “the endless sequence of raising questions,” as Klaus Riegel wrote (1976, p. 32), which is the essence of dialectical thinking.

Like Mary Watkins’s (1986) recent book on the development of the imaginal or inner dialogues, this volume has the formidable intention of addressing and challenging the very idea of development, especially the singularity of its telos, the atomized masculine individual. Broughton invites readers not to take

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“development” literally (p. xiv). Theories are metaphors, often armed by the power of social institutions. An aim of this volume is to call into question the implicit directions in which children “should” develop, and to propose alternatives, emancipatory and nonindividualistic.

The dominant voice throughout the essays is the Trickster, “the friendliest of gods to men. ” “Trickster” is a general name for a common mythological figure, such as Raven or Coyote of native American myth and Hermes (Mercury) of Classical Greek myth. Hermes was a God of boundaries, roads, crossroads, of anything involving exchange - commerce, thievery, interpretation (hermeneu- tics), humor, and magic. Tricksters rely on cunning and wit to defeat the powerful, aid the weak in the struggles against the strong, and have given humanity various arts, including numbers, writing, and medical lore. Thus Tricksters are vital in myth for the founding of the human community and its cultivation. But they are not law-givers; they work at the margin of law, norm, or

reason. Susan Buck-Morss evokes this figure, by observing that the “trickster. is the prototype of the social critical” (p. 263). The Trickster’s voice rarely finds a place in psychological writing, for even if psychologists are no longer mostly postivists, they still want to build a positive science, and the way of the trickster is, in contrast, the dialectical way of the question.

But as Tricksters found cultures, this quest for questions can have a decidedly utopian cast. Broughton warns of “a certain utopian optimism latent in the very notion of development” (p. 6). Perfection as an ideal has its merits, for it raises our sights. The path to the ideal, however, often leaves the Trickster behind in an attempt to impose the ideal on the real, usually with bloody results. We need our utopias but also the Trickster’s sense to take them with a grain of salt. Utopia seems endemic to critical as well as traditional developmental thought. Jessica Benjamin finds the “decline of the Oedipus complex” a hopeful sign: “We are in a position to face our narcissism, to find more constructive ways to nourish it and to satisfy our utopian longings for self-knowledge and perfection” (p. 242). Buck-Morss speaks of “reciprocity between equals” as being “the utopian promise of language” (p. 266). Utopian thinking fuels the fury that &chard Lichtman has toward the current psychological interest in death and

dying: “A society that exploits and disfigures so many of its members and then counsels acquiescence in the final destruction of their emaciated existence is worthy only of contempt” (p. 147). How to understand the passion of this contempt except in relation to an unrealized ideal of the good life? Utopian hopes without the Trickster’s earthiness leaves the critic blinded by the dazzling light of the ideal. The Trickster promises no more than to change the,joke and

slip the yoke. But the elusiveness of utopias and the terror their realiLations often produce

lead us to the heart of the matter at issue in these essays: ‘[‘he question of the social nature of human nature. Is cooperation native to us or an acquired taste? Are hopes for social harmony - all for one and one for all - compatible with what we are, or are they reigns of terror sporting happy faces as camouflague? “Why was it,” David Ingleby writes in ‘Psychoanalysis and Ideology,’ “that when the conditions for social change seemed ripe [f-or Marxists after World War I, for

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feminists in the 196Os] people seemed emotionally incapable of accepting a new order”? On this question, there is an implicit battle among the essays. To oversimplify, the essays by Ingleby, Walkerdine, and Elbers stress the nonsocial or perhaps antisocial nature of human being, and those of Harris, Benjamin, Buck-Morss, and (implicitly) Lichtman, its prosocial nature. “Freud” and “Marx” stand as symbols around which the battle rages. The polarity of an unreason that individualizes and a reason that socializes is an organizing principle of the book. Ingleby argues that the “new Freudians” - feminist, Lacanian, critical theorist alike - have not reckoned with “the fundamental dualism of human nature, the opposition between desire and reason, nature and culture, individual and society” (p. 178) inherent in psychoanalysis even when the ideological commit- ments of Freud to bourgeois culture are removed. After discussing the sources of conflict between the individual and society, Ingleby concludes that the idea of primary process survives the ideological critique. Desires are satisified by wishes: that is the essence of a primary process. Because of this, “the human mind is ill- adapted not simply to society but to reality itself’ (p. 196). The primacy of the wish in the depths of consciousness radically individualizes human life: cooperation with others, at this level, is unnecessary, since images satisfy desire. The reasonableness of secondary processes, moreover, ultimately serves this basic unreason. Freudian pessimism about social change is thus not groundless, insofar as primary processes do not require satisfaction in the social order. Psychoanalysis appears thus as neither the apologist for the status quo nor the royal road to emancipation. It serves to reveal the madness in our hearts.

Ed Elbers describes, in ‘Critical Psychology and the Development of Motiva- tion as a Historical Process,’ the work of a West German group headed by Klaus Holzkamp. This group has developed a functional-historical method. The analysis begins with an investigation of the underlying biological stratum of psychological life. The second step of the method acertains how the biological foundation of human existence is transformed by the fact that we live in societies, This second level is abstract but necessary because “if we want to examine how psychological characteristics are influenced and deformed in capitalist conditions, we must first of all have a conception of these characteris- tics” (p. 152). The results of the second step are then applied to the actual historical situation of a people. Elbers presents the theory of motivation developed by Ute Osterkamp, a member of the Holzkamp school. The first level of analysis in this theory reveals that labor is “the basis of life in any society” (p. 154). In the transformation of biological givens by social life, Osterkamp discovers two sets of motivations: productive [“the control of the conditions of life in a wider context” (p. 156)], and sensory-vital [“needs for rectifying physical deficiencies and stress conditions of the body” (p. 156)]. Conflicts in the course of growing up are not inevitable if parents and educators appeal to the child’s productive needs. Conflict between irrational desires and the restrictions of social reality that for psychoanalysis is irremediable for Osterkamp is unneces- sary; cooperation could prevail if social conditions were facilitating, which they are not in capitalist societies. Elbers criticizes Osterkamp’s overemphasis on work

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and cooperation in that it ignores the complexity of affective life. He gives an

illustration of her therapeutic style:

Therapy in the critical-psychological conception is not regarded as a form of treatment, and therapeutic discussions are of minor significance. 011 the contrary, the client is directed toward the normal life situation outside the therapy, and therapy itself is given the function of preparing the ground for the client’s everyday life. (p. 169)

Her stress is on cooperation and collective control, which emphases distinguish Osterkamp’s style from American pragmatic and individualistic therapies. Osterkamp emphasizes encouragement but ignores, to use a line from the poet Delmore Schwartz (Schwartz, 1959), “the hungry beating brutish one” (p. 74).

That the polarity between unreason and reason results from modern industrial society and not from the nature of things is a view shared by Jessica Benjamin in her psychoanalytic hermeneutic of ‘The Decline of the Oedipus Complex. ’ The conflict between the individual and society arose with the Oedipus complex, which embodies the divisions of power in capitalist society under the sway of instrumental reason. She argues that “the oedipal father is the enforcer not of true differentiation but of splitting and polarity” (p. 228). His rule represents “the principle of difference over likeness, activity over intimacy” (p. 230). An alternative development, for which Benjamin sees hopeful signs, would occur with the end of “the entire sexual division of labor” and of “the separation of domestic/personal and productive/public spheres in our society” (1,. 232). Unlike Las& (1979), Benjamin is sanguine about the decline of the Oedipus complex, since it means that dependency and intimacy will no longer be shunted off as inferior needs. Its decline suggests that autonomy and dependence could be affirmed together in the relationships between men and women, and that relations of pure power could be attenuated. Moreover, its decline means that:

We are in a position to think about the dangerous, destructive consequences of investing our omnipotence in rationality that seeks to control the world. (p. 242)

In the new structures of psychological life, creative tension between unity and separation will replace divisiveness and domination.

In a Lacanian hermeneutic of comic books for girls, Valerie Walkerdine analyzes how female adolescents have their subjectivities structured by the stories. The heroines of these comics are academically successful yet passive, helpful and selfless. This analysis is more an assertion than a demonstration that subjectivity is structured, since we are not given insight into the comics from the point of view of the girls themselves. Walkerdine claims that alternative role models who have politically “correct” qualities will not work to alter girls’ self- perception. Counterstereotypes fail because they do not take into account what Lacan calls the phallus:

The fixing of meaning offers certainty and knowledge: the idea that we can

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have control over our loss by knowing the truth. . Lacan uses the term phallus to describe that in which the symbolic is invested. If the child first imagines control through language, then it is the father as imagined guardian of the word -who holds the key to the symbolic order and thus to control. (p. 92)

Revisionist role models pass the phallus to the mother, and since men do not possess this “fraud, ” “but rather perpetually struggle to attain it” (p. 121), the charade continues. The only meaningful alternative, given that “conflicts of desire persist throughout life” (p. 12 l), is deconstruction, “a practice that allows us to take apart the taken-for-granted in the construction of subjectivity and to examine its socially and historically specific character” (p. 122). Through deconstruction, we come to grips with the social construction of a subject and investigate the production of our masculinity and femininity.

This diversity of conclusions about the unreason-reason polarity remains fruitfully unsettled. While all the authors concur that history and society fashion subjectivity, and that the body and its drives also fashion subjectivity, they differ on the possibility of a society that would cultivate human freedom and potential. In our heart of hearts, are we humans antisocial, conflicted, unmalleable, because of our desire for what we can wish? Is our nature, to state it in the older terms of theological discourse, perverted by a flaw that is original? Or, is it that, as the opponents of this view assert, that “man was born free and everywhere he is in chains” (Rousseau, 1967/1762, p. 7)? If the latter is true, then utopias are possible. If the former, they will all fail.

To leave matters in this condition keeps thought locked into the ‘left vs. right’ debate that goes nowhere. Fortunately, the volume points beyond the polarity of reason-unreason as a problem awaiting a solution. In an illuminating discussion of ‘Piaget, Adorno, and Dialectical Operations,’ Buck-Morss interprets the Piagetian theory of cognitive development through Adorno’s critical method and addresses the development of dialectical operations:

If we are concerned with the capacity not merely to think within existing cognitive systems and social systems but beyond them, then the constellation of fantasy, criticism, and disequilibrium that characterizes Adorno’s program might be more relevant than Piaget’s notions for a theory of cognitive development. (p. 254)

She shows with specific examples how young children already participate in dialectical forms, and how in Piaget’s theory, these forms are suppressed in favor of operations congruent with instrumental reason. Buck-Morss suggests Ador- no’s method of “riddle-solving” rather than problem solving (p. 27 1). Dialectical operations play and work with “the nonidentity between thought and reality” (p. 272), and give a new generation a means of “renaming the world” (p. 272). Dialectical operations, embracing humor, irony, metaphor, and above all the interrogative mode, keep us mindful that words and concepts are fallible, that what appears certain has a history, that our ideals are idols. Dialectical thought invokes the Trickster.

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Perceiving things beyond our certainties is tricky business. It requires a measure of reflection. The polarity of unreason and reason demands considera- tion of the dominating form of psychological life in modern societies: the atomized “possessive individual” (MacPherson, 1962; Sampson, 198 1). Most of the authors address psychology’s naturalizing and legitimizing of this social construct. Elbers in reference to Osterkamp’s work discusses a “nonindividual- ized conception of mastery and control” (p. 162) and of autonomy. Adrienne Harris’s critique of the emphasis on infant competence and the image of the infant as “information processor, goal-directed problem solver and communica- tor” (p. 54) indicates the isolation of the infant. Walkerdine addresses the critique of individualism in its masculine character, since the “independent free agent” is male, and she questions whether this kind of autonomy is a desideratum. Broughton, in his introductory essay that places critical develop- mental psychology into its historical and theoretical context, suggests that “the forms of subj_ectivity” that ground psychological investigation by being the sources of “the meaning of experience may well not be individualized in form” (p. 17). The riddle - not the problem - is to refigure psychology without the possessive individual as its inevitable subject and ideal.

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W. J. Arnold (Ed.), Nebuuka .sympoGwn on mo/iuatiorl. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Rousseau, J.-J. (1967). Thr serial contract und discowx on the origin.\ of inequality. New York: Washington Square Press. (Original work published 1762)

Sampson, E. (198 1). Cognitive psychology as ideology. Amrr-icn,l I’.yh&$, 36, 730-743. Schwartz, D. (1959). Srlrcted porms: Summ~pr know/edgP. New York: New Directions. Watkins, M. (1986). Inuisibl~ gue.7t.T: TOP derlrlopnwr~t of imtcgintll dinlogurs. Hillsdale, NJ:

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