A Proposed Methodology to Save Humankind from Self-Destruction

Review of Alice Lombardo Maher’s Catalysis: A Recipe to Slow Down or Abort: Humankind’s Leap to War (New York: IPBooks, 2018), ISBN 978-1732053397, 120 pages, paperback, $15.00.

Alice Maher brings to her work as a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist an epistemology with a love of subjectivity unattached to the world as it is and a love of human minds playing in a universe of newly minted thoughts, images, and feelings. Then it dawned on her: this love affair with the mind’s inventiveness might be key to saving our species from killing itself through war.

The Challenge at Hand: Identity, Hardwiring, and War

The author writes: “It’s human nature to sacrifice our lives before we will sacrifice our identities and our beliefs” (101). Those beliefs are the means by which our hardwiring manages life. Anything threatening those beliefs threaten our hardwiring itself, triggering powerful reactions—anger, dread, and the impulse to eradicate the threat. She says this is our nature, but it’s also our problem. As a species we need to invent something else to do at moments when difference is so triggering. What that something else is remains to be invented. She says that invention and its widespread use is the next evolutionary step for our species, a step we must consciously choose to take.

In her view, we don’t yet know what that “something else” is, but we know something about its nature: it centers on language and thinking. We need an emotion-handling language/thought-process that can manage the intense threat-responses awakened by difference such that we don’t attack. While we don’t have the neu-

Page 214

rological wiring in place to do this now, we can change our “wiring” thanks to neuroplasticity—but only with extensive practice. Re-wiring is built on repetition, but the question is, repetition of what? Most of the book is an answer to that question.

This is a short book, and the author moves quickly through the foundations of her answer. Rather than confront clashing beliefs head-on, she advises, shifting the conversation to less charged ground and giving a wealth of examples of how to do this. The book is filled with examples of taking hotly contested issues all too familiar today and exploring how to approach them.

We differ, she continues, not just because of our histories and cultures, but because we differ in cognitive styles, in how we experience the world, make sense of it, and express that sense to others. Given different cognitive styles, the other person/side makes no sense to us and we make no sense to them because we don’t make sense in the same way.

What is it like to be in the middle of such an encounter with someone when you don’t “get” each other? The author shares an experience of hers when it seemed like a relationship built around this process was racing toward a very dead end. She describes the other person struggling “to hold on to his thinking style… around which his thoughts, his life’s work and his self-esteem were organized” (93). Such are the stakes over which our hardwiring becomes heated. The author does not say so, but I find her story alerts readers to the emotionally charged terrain they may encounter while applying this approach to conflict: transference reactions, idealizing, dependence, vulnerability, and the sense that life can feel at stake, the reality others may not get you, and wherein liberation lies. She has advice for negotiating that terrain with others: “You don’t have to pretend to understand, you just have to communicate that they’re potentially understandable and worth making the effort” (78).

Differing from Freud

Dr. Maher cites a letter from Einstein to Freud asking for insight into ending war; Freud responded it’s not possible because war is part of our instinctual nature. Only a few—like himself and Einstein—are different. Dr. Maher responds that if those two men can challenge their nature, so can the rest of us. In Maher’s view, Freud also overemphasized the importance of mourning. Psychoanalysis, she tells us, pursues the ability to mourn. For her, by con-

Page 215

trast, analysis is about discovering a richer way of seeing and participating in life.

I also found myself thinking that if the world is to pivot from its war-filled days to a war-free future, which attitude will move us there: feeling the painfulness of the past with its wars or excitement about making the leap into something better? I would answer both. She does not take up the question.

The World Out There

This book is about transforming the world, and I personally would like to have seen more of that world here. What about, for instance, entrenched hatred, viciousness, and the readiness to murder? The author briefly alludes to this and says discovering how to use these methods with truly dangerous people is for those who’ve progressed farther on the journey than we have today.

The book also does not evoke the vast array of cultures around the world. So is Catalysis an embodiment of western assumptions about change, just another cultural answer amid a world of equally valid answers? Or is it a meta-insight into what they all have in common? As someone who studies global matters, I find it a bit of both. In my view, if this approach helps often but not absolutely everywhere, I would still judge it an invaluable contribution.

I would, however, have liked a nod to the many people around the planet working to advance the transformation she summons us to, in conflict resolution, restorative justice, peace-making, peace education, and psychotherapy in the West, and in myriad non-Western practices. There are eight billion of us not doing difference well.

Becoming the Way of the World

Her suggestions parallel the psychoanalytic journey from acting out to words and reflection, from believing ideas and feelings tell us how reality is to realizing everyone’s ideas and feelings come from somewhere and are there for a reason. Differences can turn into shared exploration. But how do such methods make it out of the analytic office to become the way of the world? She offers two answers. The first is educating the next generation in this way of thinking; she describes an “emotional literacy curriculum” that she and colleagues have tested out with middle school students and shows how it can be modified to suit students from kindergarten to college. The second answer is through welcoming collaborators to help develop these ideas into a movement. She invites readers to

Page 216

three websites, projects she’s launched, to consider joining in creating the “something else to do” that will end war. I find this book a daring counter-offer to a world too given to giving up on what can yet be.

Page 217