Finding the Roots of Altruism in Self and Society

I want to believe that altruism comes from a natural inner wellspring of goodness and integrity. But in my analytic head and my heart, I wonder if it’s like so many other human attributes: the outgrowth of the influences that build the psyche. Certainly, upbringing plays a key role, but so does family history, the ghosts and unconscious adaptations of early life that are handed down from generation to generation. The factors that go into becoming altruistic are as individual and overdetermined as they are for any other character trait.

Although I hesitate to focus a paper on my altruism, I recognize the sources of what makes me a good friend as well as a caregiver to family, friends, and animals. So I will use this as my starting point. I believe my altruism has its deepest roots in a mother who was often loving and caregiving when I was quite young. She delighted in making me happy, was thoughtful in picking out gifts, and indulged my love of chocolate. In that way, she was a great role model and I believe my passion for helping and giving to others is a way that I identified with the best part of my mother. I also internalized the good enough mother she was capable of being.

I revel in the joy I can bring others. I have knit nearly 90 scarves and baby blankets for family, friends, co-workers, and charity auctions. I love cooking for people, feeding them, and watching them enjoy my food. I am generous with my time, volunteering many hours at the institute where I trained and taking care of neighbors’ plants and cats. I pick up the check at dinner for friends who

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are on limited incomes, willing to help people in need. Apparently, I have been like this since childhood; a friend from elementary school told me just a few years ago that I was always offering to help friends when I was eight and nine years old. I can’t help but believe that my kindness, which has brought me friendship, admiration, and love, has much more defensive and manipulative (words that seem at odds with altruism) origins. I fear I am buying safety and love.

My parents were difficult, angry, depressed, withholding people, having grown up with family dynamics complicated by the Holocaust in my father’s case and living amid a war zone in my mother’s. As I left early childhood and moved through latency, adolescence, and into adulthood, I was an unhappy child and I remember not being able to do anything right or good enough. Of course; my parents were raging, grieving, and desperate to control the uncontrollable. I remember wanting so badly to win approval that was rarely forthcoming. Neither of my parents could give it freely.

But when I did sense, or when they actually told me, that I had done well, it was an almost euphoric moment. I felt a sense of self-worth that was fleeting but wonderful. I felt a connection to my parent or parents that was precious. During those moments, I was whole, I was OK, I was safe.

Since the early days of my analytic training, which I began 25 years ago, I have been fascinated by the dynamics of masochism. The beginning can be found in the inherent power imbalance between parent and child. The toddler and Oedipal child, having relinquished the omnipotence of infancy, learns that they must sacrifice to win their parents’ approval—and it feels to a child that it is how they must win their parents’ love. It is a bargain, a quid pro quo in the healthiest of parent-child relationships. This is not a negative—this dynamic plays out beautifully in the give-and-take of any good loving, caring relationship. But bring in the sadly too frequent dynamic of conditional love and the power imbalance grows. So does the possibility for a masochistic personality organization, when a parent withholds love and approval, threatens abandonment, or actually does abandon the child. The result may be a child who is willing to sacrifice self, happiness, and possessions in return for love, acceptance, and attachment.

When I think about my willingness to take on work by do-

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ing things for friends, co-workers, and acquaintances, I am aware that there are times when I say yes although I really don’t want to. When I reflect on those moments, I realize I have been seeking at least a connection, if not also approval and, if it’s someone close to me, love. But there is more—I feel I am supposed to make the other person or people happy. They become my responsibility in much the same way I felt responsible for my parents. I feel I should do whatever it is in the moment someone wants—or what I feel I should offer.

The payoff for me is feeling happiness, satisfaction, connection, and safety, or even euphoria. I am seen as kind-hearted, generous, loving, caring, charitable, and helpful. I am considered a great friend, stepmother, grandmother, employee, co-worker, colleague, and neighbor. I have become a solid, empathic psychoanalyst.

There are also the many times when I decide to do something charitable, which of course is part of altruism, when I am not making a connection with a person or a group of people. This is almost always in the form of donations to organizations; I believe it’s the right thing to do. In those moments, I believe I am again sacrificing in the service of being a mensch (a person of integrity). But even as I see these positive attributes in myself, I do feel there’s also a somewhat darker side to my altruism. On a deep level, it can operate as a reaction formation against the emotions that my parents found unacceptable: hate, anger, rage, and envy.

I realize that all I have described within myself places me alongside many humane and human people. Those who do missionary or pastoral work, or who sacrifice the possibility of big salaries by working for non-profits or by teaching, are driven by someone else’s needs. Sacrifice is highly valued in many if not most cultures—it plays an important role in both the Old and New Testaments. Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac to show his obedience to God, who is the ultimate parental figure. Martyrs, most notably Jesus, are worshipped and seen as examples to live by. The quid pro quo for many is the promise of an afterlife. Judaism calls for tzadakeh (charity) and mitzvoht (good deeds). There are fasts in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.

But there is also the same dark side that I have seen in myself—such as in the robber barons of the 19^th century—where there have been people who did great altruistic deeds with money earned

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through greed or even crime.

This leads me to wonder, what about people who don’t give or help? Do they have little or nothing to give? What are the dynamics that put them either in an uncaring psychic state or one that has them withholding what they might give to others? Analysts who have worked with people like this, and there are many, understand the dynamics that lead them to say “no.” Sometimes the dynamics can be similar to those that I’ve described in my family, but for completely individual reasons, these children unconsciously chose a very different way of processing and defending against them.

I understand that this paper may have reduced altruism to a set of neurotic symptoms. Yet I do on an intellectual level believe in altruism. We need and must help and be good to other humans, animals, and the world. An utter lack of altruism, and the presence of its opposites, as in greed, avarice, and contempt, threaten to destroy our climate and earth.

I believe there might also be biological forces at work in altruism. Consider the communities of animals that work together to survive; a beehive, for example, is a marvelous system of work done for the greater good. Researchers have found great empathy among elephants, who will help each other when they’re in pain or distress. There is a human version: the Good Samaritan often doesn’t think before putting their own life in danger to help someone else.

Sometimes people have asked me why I’ve done something good—why I went to help a co-worker who was in insulin shock, why I took on teaching two classes when I was already juggling two jobs and more. My honest, albeit conscious, answer, is: we do what needs to be done. The unconscious answer is far more complex.

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