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Thinking Hot Thoughts: “The Secret” as Manic Defense

September 12, 2010 by Wes Alwan 13 Comments

In its current issue The New Yorker profiles Rhonda Byrne, the author of the Oprah Winfrey-endorsed "The Secret," the book that "urges readers to rid themselves of illness through 'harmonious thoughts,' to attract love by loving themselves, and to express gratitude for what they want before they get it." There is a "law of attraction, which decrees that thoughts have physical power, and that thinking about something is the way to get it." And in a phrase reminiscent of both post-modernism and the Bush administration: “You are the only one who creates your reality ....”

Unfortunately, these affirmations have not worked so well for Byrne's colleagues, one of whom parted ways with her in a financial dispute and another who was charged with manslaughter after he led a sweat-lodge ceremony in which three people died. Apparently they thought overly hot thoughts.

The upcoming sequel to "The Secret" is "The Power" (not to be confused with what I assume is a Jersey Shore character), in which we are "meant to have an amazing life" buying Byrne's books: "Byrne’s doctrine is ruthlessly simple, and efficient, too: it promises to collapse thousands of years of faith and science into a single thought." The profile treats all of this as a new-agey version of America's general history of optimism, especially as expressed in Emerson's combination of philosophy and self-help. Emerson inspired the "New Thought" movement, which in turn inspired Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science.

As an antidote, Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America:

argues that “positive thinking has made itself useful as an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy,” and she blames overly optimistic thinking for much of what alarms her about this country: the recent housing bubble, the protracted wars, the failure to take climate change seriously, and even Americans’ mediocre performance on a barrage of international happiness tests. She worries that our single-minded obsession with happiness is, contrary to the law of attraction, making us sad

While New Thought was actually progressive in its leanings, its successors -- including "The Secret" -- leave little place for talking about what Marx called the ideology of the bourgeoisie.

Psychoanalysts have a name for the positive thinking movement: it's called the "manic defense." This isn't the full-blown manic depression (now "bipolar disorder") of DSMV fame. Rather's its an avoidance of the inevitable mourning (and associated guilt) involved in a realization that we can't have it all. Which is to say, no satisfactions and accomplishments are going to bring back mama. As Neil Altman puts it in Manic Society: Toward the Depressive Position, it is "characterized by clinging to a sense of omnipotence, denial of psychic reality, an associated flight into action as opposed to thought, and massive projective identification." And Ehrenreich is right to think that there are profound social consequences to this defense. Altman describes the social manifestations of each aspect of the manic defense (I don't entirely agree with what follows, but I think there are grains of truth):

  • Omnipotence, the social manifestation of which is the pursuit of wealth and success as keys to immortality, absolute freedom, security, happiness, etc.
  • Projective Identification: Socially, "the creation and maintenance of an impoverished, left behind group of people in our society serves functions for the American psyche analogous to the function of projective identification on an individual level"; impoverished groups are collective internal objects, experienced as other, demonized, and ignored to the point that they are induced to confirm prejudicial stereotypes. Mainstream Americans can then disavow such qualities, make marginalized groups containers for "the suffering, the sense of limitation, constraint, and vulnerability that tend to be disavowed by middle-class Americans."
  • Splitting: Separating what is hated and loved so the former never damages the latter: manifested socially in dehumanization. This denial of guilt is most dangerous in nationalism and other group identifications, which percolate downwards (and unconsciously) into individual relationships. And generally, one's relationship to internal objects is influenced both by culture and early family development.

I think the manic defense is also implicated in the inane hybrids of science and amateur philosophy that some popularizers of science see as an easy replacement for the actual discipline of philosophical thinking. (I can't help think that self help, new age-ism, and the positive thinking are what the general public thinks of when they hear the phrase "metaphysical thinking," used by Oprah to describe Byrne's work). The actual discipline of philosophy is difficult -- as Socrates puts it, a form of "dying," a very gradual mourning of the fact that we can know only that we don't know. This implies that the human condition will inevitably involve a striving for something we can't ever have or return to except by death itself (a return to the primordial condition of complete fusion with a maternal object, absolute satisfaction). That ongoing striving -- which involves a tolerance for our desire, our "lack" (to use Lacan's word -- apologies) is worthwhile, but not in line with the kind of optimism that would deliver us from philosophical problems with short sharp shock of science, a kind of philosophical electroshock therapy (or perhaps just Cognitive Behavioral therapy -- also meant to be quick and easy). In fact, what psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called the "depressive position" is the goal of therapy: not positive thoughts and a disavowal of everything bad in life, but a tolerance for the fact that things are generally alloyed with both good and bad. Contra Sam Harris, science is not going to deliver up Ethics' head on a silver platter. And contra Stephen Hawking, philosophy itself will not die any more than dying itself will die.

That's why, whether you get thyself to a psychoanalyst or spend a lot of time thinking about philosophy, you're not going to be able to live out the fantasy of being an ultra-pragmatic American Pioneer, on the track of inevitable progress towards the big rock candy mountains. If you want to live in that utopia, then neither of these pursuits is for you. They will not disclose to you "The Secret."

By: Wes Alwan

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Filed Under: Misc. Philosophical Musings Tagged With: melanie klein, philosophy blog, psychoanalysis, scientism, the secret

Comments

  1. Archibald says

    September 12, 2010 at 6:09 pm

    The “big” rock candy mountains — a bum’s paradise, no work, pragmatism, religion, morality, or progress at all. Maybe some hedonism for philosophy. Nothing Oprah or the daytime TV utopians would like (eeeww, dirty socks):

    In the Big Rock C…andy Mountains, you never change your socks
    And little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocks
    The brakemen have to tip their hats and the railroad bulls are blind
    There’s a lake of stew and of whiskey too
    And you can paddle all around ’em in a big canoe
    In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

    …

    Where they hung the jerk that invented work
    In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

    Reply
  2. Wes Alwan says

    September 12, 2010 at 6:18 pm

    Thanks for the correction, and I’m gratified you got to the end.

    Reply
  3. Archibald says

    September 12, 2010 at 7:01 pm

    Oh snap! Well, I only responded to the closing flourish because I have just that much of an attention span. And I agree with all the stuff about The Secret, and can’t add anything clever (except the denial that I’m clever). Ehrenreich is good.

    A “very gradual mourning of the fact that we can know only that we don’t know”: that may be philosophy’s lesson. Another way to put it: the individual can’t know—all the contingent facts, all the experience of the other, and so on. We get old and die before we achieve satisfaction, as Socrates and Lacan say. And I like the “depressive position” a lot: it’s similar to “turn the other cheek” and “love your enemy” and “go with the flow.” We can’t control an awful lot as individuals; but history (personal and overall [something Hegelian]) marches on and changes us.

    But we’ll just wall off the other intellectual endeavors and let them proceed within their acknowledged limits—except maybe the space opera of quantum physics.

    You’ve said that science has nothing to say about Godspell, so let’s allow that science will produce plenty of good-enough data for a long time, and it will continue to interest us lazy, crazy utopians for a long time.

    Reply
  4. Geoff says

    September 13, 2010 at 4:16 am

    Courtesy of “The Chaser’s War on Everything”
    Aussie satirists’ take on The Secret.

    Viewer warning: Clip may contain broad Australian Accents.

    Reply
  5. Miriam says

    September 13, 2010 at 4:26 am

    As an American who has lived for many years in Germany and the UK, it strikes me that the kind of magical thinking encouraged by “The Secret” and by the idiots who tell cancer patients to be grateful for their illness stems from the sense of disempowerment Americans have brought upon themselves through sheer selfishness.

    Having bought into the somewhat bizarre belief that each of us can shape his or her own individual destiny with little or no help from others, Americans expend furious amounts of energy hoeing their own personal rows, not realizing how lonely and ultimately ineffective this approach often turns out to be, especially when drought hits or the locusts descend, and there is no one prepared to help them through the winter.

    It saddens me that so many Americans, unlike Europeans, cannot see how interdependent they actually are, and that individual thought has the greatest capacity for good not just when it soothes the thinker, but when it translates into positive action in the wider world. Working for social justice in the form of better public infrastructure and better conditions in workplaces and communities is considered a fringe activity in the U.S. Fortunately, self-help is there to pacify the masses into accepting the unnecessary squalor in which they live. Most tragic of all is that so many Americans don’t give a damn about the suffering of others, figuring the poor brought their misfortunes on themselves through their “negative thinking.”

    As long as you can watch Oprah and play the lottery, who cares that you live in a trailer park and have no health insurance? Riches can be yours provided you truly believe. And screw everybody else.

    Reply
    • Wes Alwan says

      September 13, 2010 at 7:40 am

      @Miriam — very nicely put

      Reply
  6. Archibald says

    September 13, 2010 at 9:13 am

    Miriam :
    the unnecessary squalor in which they live.

    Miriam, when you said this, I thought of all kinds of things but trailer parks. Emotional squalor mainly—mean spritedness, on vivid display in old, white, fairly wealthy tea partiers. Cormack McCarthy might write that the land makes us so, but that’s only on the hot dusty frontier. I think in part we’ve been living in a very well furnished security state since the end of WWII. Some combination of an abundance of consumer goods and a deliberate dumbing down of civil discourse.

    Reply
  7. Archibald says

    September 13, 2010 at 9:25 am

    I just watched the Aussie satire — excellent. Those clips from “The Secret” are my only first-hand experience of the stuff. Even more disgusting than I imagined; teaching young kids to sit around on their arses dreaming of things to acquire. It’s just another version of the psychic hotline. Stupid Oprah.

    Reply
  8. Wes Alwan says

    September 13, 2010 at 11:28 am

    @Geoff — hilarious, these guys are great. I love the suffocated cat and the attempts at stealing.

    Reply
  9. Kelly says

    September 17, 2010 at 4:43 pm

    Wes,
    Great post.

    Dave Chappelle’s bit on The Secret:

    Reply
    • Wes Alwan says

      September 17, 2010 at 4:46 pm

      @Kelly — thanks. Love the Chappelle bit.

      Reply
  10. Seth Paskin says

    September 18, 2010 at 12:10 pm

    Geoff :

    Courtesy of “The Chaser’s War on Everything”
    Aussie satirists’ take on The Secret.

    Viewer warning: Clip may contain broad Australian Accents.



    I literally LOL’d. Thanks for introducing me to another set of 7 minute diversions from the misery of life.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. The Duh of Charlie Sheen: getting high off your high horse | The Partially Examined Life | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    March 6, 2011 at 5:10 am

    […] — something inevitably at work in our interest in the news — is a form of manic defense. Our use of this defense does not mean we’re overwhelmed by it in the manner of someone […]

    Reply

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