Getting Past Freud

CONSERVATIVES have always had a problem with Freud. Liberals have not. “When I read Freud,” said the playwright, “the scales fell off my eyes.” Conservatives experience Freud as a charlatan; artists experience him as a revelation.

Freud’s psychology may seem to conservative Americans as a sudden, unlooked for outburst from Europe. But his psychology is a natural synthesis of Kant’s conscious ego, Fichte’s creative ego, Hegel’s stage theory of consciousness, and Schopenhauer’s theory of repression. The key link in this chain is Fichte, because he isolates a key component in the development of human knowledge: humans.

How does knowledge come into the world? Descartes thought that knowledge came from the scientist making logical inferences from known, indubitable facts to a necessary theory. But Fichte showed that facts infer nothing. It is the free imaginative act of the scientist that creates a new theory. And that act comes from impulse: “All our thought is founded on our impulses,” he wrote. Living a century after Fichte, could Albert Einstein have developed special relativity without bold leaps of impulse and imagination?

Of course Fichte’s discovery applies not just to scientists but also to artists, writers, and playwrights. In the nineteenth century Fichte’s ideas electrified a whole generation of them. In the twentieth century Freud’s ideas drove the whole artistic culture. Freud taught the young artist to regard his dreams as a holy font of impulse welling up from the unconscious id. And let him beware of repressing the unconscious impulse; that would make his creative soul sick with neurosis.

For the middle-class conservative, this all seemed crazy. Western religion emphasized the importance of commandments and covenants; democratic capitalism demonstrated the primacy of the rule of law, the sanctity of contract, and the value of cooperation and compromise. How could the untrammeled creative ego be reconciled with the rules? Surely it could not. And so conservatives brushed Freud aside.

But rejecting German psychology means going back to the psychology of Locke and Hume. All of that, any German will tell you, ended when Kant awoke from his dogmatic slumber over 200 years ago. Without an answer to the call of Freud conservatives cannot hope to graduate from their successes in politics and economics and start to influence the modern conversations in the arts and the humanities. Conservatives need a psychology that can meet and beat the insights of Fichte and Freud on creativity, an intellectual system that can reconcile conservative rules and tradition with liberal creativity and then go one better.

Fortunately, such a theory already exists. Developed by American psychologist Clare Graves in the 1960s and 1970s, it was published as Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan. It’s a stage theory developed from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and brightened up with a bit of color. (Link here for more details.) Here’s how it tells the story of the American Dream.

America’s immigrants, “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” arrive in the city barely able to function in the new land. They are “impulsive red,” knowing only power and powerlessness. Powerless victims, the impulsive reds spiral downwards until they find salvation in the life of rules, the One True Way, living as “purposeful blue” in the world of the enthusiastic Christian and the respectable middle class. But the children of the middle class want a little adventure. Finding that life in safe suburban Scarsdale a hell they discover that they can change the rules a little and treat life as an adventure. They become “creative orange,” playing the business game or the arts game to win the glittering prizes. But children of inventive entrepreneurs reject the hero’s journey of creativity. They choose instead the inner journey of spirituality and long to cooperate and share rather than create and compete. They become “communitarian greens.” Beyond green, of course is “integral yellow” where the compassionate conservative, shall we say, comprehends all the levels below and understands that each stage “transcends and includes” the ones before it. Above this ridge, of course, new peaks will rise.

The way to understand the power of this system is to put it to work. The enquiring mind might wonder whether it is a good idea for the welfare state to treat everyone as an impulsive red victim. Might not the red victim rise out of squalor to purposeful blue competence with a little tough love, say a time limit on welfare benefits? In the matter of education, might not a red immigrant mother choose a education in blue discipline for her children while the college professor might choose an education to encourage orange creativity and green cultural enrichment? And might we not respect the choice of each?

With a psychology like this conservatives can get past Freud and win the culture war.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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