Complaining Dialectically: A Discussion of Why I Did Not Much Care for Hollis’s “Hidden Agendas” Chapter

(This is post number two. Post number one is about heavy metal.)

One of my longstanding pet peeves is making the rhetorical moves away from . . . .well . . . . social context, politics, culture. . . whatever one wishes to call being concerned about justice and paying attention to larger contexts. I understand that Hollis’s book is focused on exploring the ways that discussing the Shadow affords us different ways to think about ethics, but I was unhappy with this particular chapter, and it points to a limitation of the book. 

My vague discomfort became a clear complaint when I read the section of the chapter where Hollis discusses domestic violence and stalking. He forgoes discussing misogyny and entitlement, which are the obvious ways, for me, to frame those behaviors, and he instead discusses them as manifestations of a “weak ego” that has an immature relationship with its Shadow: “The more damaged one’s history, or the weaker one’s sense of self, the greater is this narcissistic tendency and the more rigid and controlling the dynamics of the relationship. When we see a relationship gone horribly wrong, when the boyfriend shoes up to shoot his girlfriend, we are seeing weak ego that has succumbed to the archaic message that ‘I will perish if I do not have the Other at my command’” (92-93).

Good lord.

I don’t necessarily think is an inaccurate description, but it seems, to me, to be missing the point by a pretty big margin. One idea that we have introduced to this year is that feminist therapists have sometimes made a distinction between “common couple violence” and “Patriarchal terrorism.” This maps nicely onto a distinction I have long made between “ugly fighting,” which might include cruel words and even physical violence, and “abuse,” which is a deliberate system of manipulation that does not respect the personhood of another person. The degree to which abuse is really consciously “calculated” is not relevant to me. “Ugly fighting” is wrong and possibly dangerous, but it is qualitatively different from abuse. (I will follow Doherty on this one and have a moral opinion. Trying to hurt someone, even if not physically, in a moment of passion is wrong.)

It seems quite clear that Hollis is discussing, in this passage and in the footnote expanding the discussion to include behavior talking, abuse or patriarchal terrorism. (Although those are two different concepts, whichever term the reader prefers is fine in this case.) If I want to understand the thought processes that lead to that kind of behavior, talking about them in terms of gender and social justice makes a lot more sense to me than talking about the Shadow. I simply do not see the value in coming up with complex psychoanalytic riffs on attachment to discuss the most obvious, tangible, and awful manifestations of sexism.

I am reminded of the cretinous "men's rights movement," which is a largely online anti-feminist movement that is mostly bizarre pseudo-Darwinian nonsense and rape apology. I could certainly describe those people using Hollis' framework. One of the lessons I learned in academia is that when one they had better be able to answer the question "what does that afford?"

Here is a good link: http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/

(I am aware that Hollis describes societies and communities as having Shadows and Hollis uses strong moral language throughout the book. I do not mean to suggest that Hollis excuses bad behavior or that he does not consider social context. This chapter just seems like going around your ass to get to your elbow, and it downplays the “political” aspects of sexism. My reservations about psychoanalytic theory really came to the forefront when I was reading the passages quoted above.)

I thought Dohrty’s chapter on Justice which provided some discussion of feminist perspectives might inform therapy, was a lot better. When we recognize the ways that historical inequalities make themselves present in the therapy room, we have the duty to have opinions about what we are seeing, and we have the responsibility to, carefully, suggest our perspectives to our clients. We are not to instruct our clients on right behavior, but to engage them in dialogue that takes ethics, and for me, politics, into account. Doherty writes: “The central distinction between a moralistic therapy and a morally sensitive therapy, between moral pedagogy and moral consultation, is revealed by the therapist’s response when the client disagrees with the therapist’s moral position, perhaps even decides to act counter to the therapist’s suggestion.” (pg. 65).

Of course in situations as dire as the examples Hollis provides we would not continue the moral back and forth that Doherty describes, but Doherty’s more straightforward approach fits those better, for me, also.

I do not have much interest in talking about these guys in terms of the Shadow.

(I am aware that I have framed some of this issues in terms of heterosexual relationships when men are the abusers, which is problematic. I do not mean to suggest that women cannot be abusive, controlling or obsessive, and I do not mean to suggest that these issues are not pertinent to same sex couples. The data about the prevalence of this stuff in different kinds of relationships is a bit fuzzy, as I understand it. I do know there is not much argument that men who abuse women are not the most lethal, and certainly I have run across, in my life, more incidences of men being scary in the ways discussed in the post than women. I do not mean to say that conventional patriarchy is what all domestic violence is about, but the stuff described in the chapter fits that category quite easily.

I should note that I like a lot of what Hollis has to say. When I get testy is when his psychoanalytic frame seems to displace better ways of thinking about a problem. I like the way he talks about unacknowledged desires and fears, and I like the way he talks about the ugly side of collective consciousness. I am not much of a fan of the way he talks about depression or domestic violence.)