Reductionism and Conscientious Politics (response article)

James William Anderson claims that “art has a deeply personal aspect that is at the heart of its creation,” and that the “artist struggles with a conflict and expresses that conflict in the work.” He views Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as simultaneously speaking to political issues and stemming from a personal concern. Anderson goes on to claim that “one’s political stance also stems fundamentally from personal concerns.” Like the playwright himself, he sees Miller’s “leveling impulse,” his “siding with oppressed people,” as a defensive evasion of his guilt over his ambition and competitive aggression towards his father and brother. Miller felt he had dodged the guilt arising from oedipal victories by identifying with the oppressed. Anderson writes:

The implication is there is a double function to his identification with the downtrodden. First, it enables him to expose the wickedness of the rulers, thus justifying his right to compete with and outdo them. Second, it offers him a way of denying that he is surpassing his elders; he is not portraying himself as being better than others but rather as being one of the common people. Miller further notes that, at the same time as he took this position, he relentlessly pursued his goal of accomplishment. He declared his “equality with the least of the citizenry,” he noted, “while in the real world working day and night to achieve what glory and superiority my art might win me.”

Anderson insists, “All of this is not to invalidate an artist’s political position. It’s being fueled by personal motives does not give evidence that the position is either right or wrong; that is a separate matter.”

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That’s true. It is a fallacy—the ad hominem fallacy—to hold that the motives for a person’s beliefs either validate or invalidate them: their validity must be established on other grounds. But in correctly making this point, Anderson evades a more serious issue, that of psychological reductionism. He views Miller’s politics, his “leveling impulse” and his “siding with oppressed people,” as “stemming from a personal concern” and proceeds to identify, as does the psychoanalyzed Miller himself, the personal concern involved as his oedipal rivalry and guilt. But what about Miller’s other operative personal concerns? What about his conscience? Are oedipal concerns our only concerns? Can’t one identify with the oppressed both out of guilt and out of what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called “pity” or “fellow-feeling”?

In my view we must resist the psychological reductionism that tends to negate the basic psychoanalytic principles of “overdetermination” and “multiple function”; our beliefs and actions have multiple causes and serve multiple functions. As what Freud called a “compromise formation,” a blend, alloy, or compound, Miller’s political stance, like yours and mine, was shaped not only by the id (oedipal aggression) and superego (oedipal guilt) but also by the ego (rational thought and deliberation)—and also by what the psychohistorian Eli Sagan distinguished as a conscience irreducible to superego. Whereas the latter is grounded in identification with the aggressor and entails aggression retroflected away from the rival and back against the self under threat of castration, the former is grounded in identification with the nurturer and expresses itself in acts of conscientious concern.

Any truly scientific psychoanalytic approach to politics must be prepared to study the various ways and degrees to which political commitments are shaped by such conflicting motives. Any psychoanalytic approach to left-wing politics that reduces it to oedipal aggression and guilt and ignores the creative, conscientious concern that may also motivate it to varying degrees amounts to little more than bourgeois ideology.

I find it sad to think that Arthur Miller’s personal analysis might have strengthened his superego and intensified his guilt rather than achieving what Franz Alexander, Sandor Ferenczi, and Eli Sagan felt its proper aim should be; namely, the elimination of the superego in favor of the conscience. Unlike the superego, the

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conscience is motivated by love rather than hate. A conscientious politics will necessarily be a politics of love that displays a “leveling impulse” and that “sides with oppressed people,” whatever additional motivating factors may to varying degrees also be at work.

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