Conscience, Superego, and Muslims

A few years back, Donald Carveth asserted in his Clio’s Psyche article “Social and Historical Influences on Psychoanalytic Thought” (Vol. 20, No. 3, December 2013, 253-262) that the human conscience is being neglected to our peril. Carveth made a case that our conscience is independent of the superego and is just as important. He invoked Eli Sagan’s “distinction between the superego as an identification with the aggressor, with parental and social authority, and a conscience grounded not in social internalization, but in our earliest experiences of attachment and love, our identification with the nurturer” (261). So Carveth urged that Freud’s psychoanalytic paradigm—the triad of id, ego, and superego—be expanded since “We now need to recognize conscience as a fourth component of the structural theory of the mind in order to more adequately grasp moral conflict between the pseudo-morality internalized from parents and society and the authentic morality, ‘the still small voice,’ that stems from what Winnicott called the ‘true self’ and its attachments and libidinally grounded object relations” (261).

Carveth mentions that “Freud chose to incorporate both conscience and ego ideal into the superego” (261)—so maybe the subordination of conscience in psychoanalytic theory began when Freud thereby denied conscience an independent, autonomous existence? Carveth doesn’t say; rather, his argument is with later theorists like Marcuse and Kohut who, he says, thought that “with the decline of paternal authority the superego had dissolved and an unstructured personality had emerged” (257). Assuming that Marcuse and Kohut followed Freud and viewed the conscience as part of the superego, they presumably thought the conscience too had dissolved with the decline of parental authority.

Anyway, says Carveth, guilt has not disappeared despite these past several generations of permissive childrearing. He thinks guilt has simply been repressed. Even if permissive childrearing has shrunken the superego (or more likely altered it, he says), permissive childrearing hasn’t shrunken or altered the conscience, but has simply helped us ignore it. Definitely, “the still small voice of conscience” was easily ignored—until we learned of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among soldiers returning from war,

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which is frequently grounded, says Carveth, “in ‘moral injury’ arising from obedience to a superego shaped by familial and military authority that led [soldiers] to commit unconscionable acts” (261).

Whatever the status of the superego should or shouldn’t be, I personally agree with Donald Carveth that moral conscience is an autonomous force. I think our capacity for conscience is inherent in human nature and crucial to society’s viability. If the conscience isn’t nurtured and validated more than it has been recently in our society, I think we may soon be in deep trouble due to ever greater acts of hatred.

So, you might ask, if the conscience is so important, what exactly is it? The answers come in two types: (1) the formulaic answers, two of which Immanuel Kant came up with, and (2) the non-formulaic answers, one of which Gandhi pursued for 50 years. Kant’s two answers are the two versions of his categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a moral law without contradiction…” which he also phrased as: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” Both versions appear in Kant’s Groundwork of Metaphysic of Morals (1785).

Gandhi’s answer, unlike Kant’s, wasn’t a formula but a quest. I also think Gandhi’s approach offers more hope, because it prompts us to try using all the resources that might be available, which Gandhi called experimenting, such as in The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927, his autobiography). However, what resources might be available? Here Gandhi took issue with an idea that Western civilization now exemplifies, namely the idea that matter and spirit are separate. Gandhi didn’t want India to follow the path that the West has been following since the 17^th century, the path of ‘de-mystifying’ and ‘desacralizing’ the natural world, the path of objectifying the world and blinding ourselves to the immanence of the sacred. Gandhi presumably never read Kierkegaard but he came to the same conclusion, that truth is subjective. Even though Gandhi often capitalized Truth, what he meant was his truth, the truth that his own experiences and experiments led him to. His truth might not be someone else’s truth. Erik Erikson deals with this in Gandhi’s Truth (1969). Gandhi’s version of conscience isn’t framed as a formula because that might lead to someone else being condemned, someone who might be seeking truth just as sin-

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cerely as himself.

So, no formula. What else is there? Example. The resources we need in order to be a useful example are available in the immanence of the sacred. How can we access them? By trying to help people, to serve them. Catholic moral teachings call this intention. Baptists are on the same track when they try to “live close” by giving service so that the Holy Spirit will then guide them. Somehow, disinterested service awakens our conscience and the still small voice grows louder. But even if one isn’t trying to help others, the resources of sacred immanence are still there in everyone, waiting like a dormant seed—”that of God in every person,” as the Quakers call the conscience.

Gandhi said he sometimes seemed to literally hear a voice telling him what to do in a given situation, but that’s not most people’s experience, although people don’t necessarily talk about such experiences if they have them. Most of us have probably had the feeling, “I know what I have to do” at least a few times in our lives—and if our intention wasn’t selfish, that feeling was probably right.

Further, the conscience is autonomous. It’s not part of the id, superego, or anything else. You can ignore it but it won’t ignore you. A lot of what Donald Carveth calls moral injury among ex-soldiers apparently results from coming under conviction (another Baptist phrase) by their conscience. A superego acquired from our parents or from boot camp doesn’t exempt us from our conscience. Indeed, repressed guilt is still manifesting in clinical work as much as it ever did, says Carveth, and therefore psychoanalysts have been imprudent to drop Freud and Klein’s clinical emphasis on guilt and “intrapsychic conflict” in favor of emphasizing “trauma, deprivation, abuse, and neglect by carers” (256). Carveth links this shift in psychoanalytic emphasis to a decline in our society of guilt as a conscious experience. He goes on to also link guilt’s decline as a conscious experience to our society’s economic transition into a “late capitalist consumer societ[y] promoting oral-narcissistic regression and instinctual release rather than repression” (255). As he further elaborates, “the psychoanalytic retreat from guilt and the superego in favor of a preoccupation with the ‘self’ was a consequence of the economic shift from productive industrial to consumer capitalism and the culture of narcissism it creates. This is a culture of release rather than restriction; a culture hostile to regulations and regulators.” Furthermore, “a culture that tolerates, even en-

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courages, the bending or evasion of rules; a de-moralizing culture hostile to moral critique and to whistleblowers; a culture hostile to conscience” (260).

I quote Carveth at length here because his examples sound like themes from the Republican presidential contenders. But before approaching that slippery political slope, I want to agree with Carveth that the American economy has helped cause all this by its growing dependence on consumerism. However, not just “late capitalism” is driving American consumerism, psychology is too. Americans are overconsuming partly because they feel economically vulnerable. Following World War II, with the help of new International Monetary Fund regulations, U.S. based multinational corporations acquired large holdings abroad, including large proportions of the resources and productive facilities of many Third World countries. As of 1946, the investment of U.S. corporations in their foreign subsidiaries stood at only $7.2 billion, but by 1975 it stood at $133 billion.

The corporations often turned their new foreign assets toward producing consumer goods to market in the U.S. and other developed countries. American workers then lost jobs, some good jobs, while American consumers, including those workers, acquired the cheap foreign products that began flooding U.S. markets. Meanwhile, in Third World countries whose resources and labor were being turned so heavily toward producing cheap exports, more and more rural revolutions began breaking out. Yet the world economy kept dividing countries and their people evermore between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ Swelling worldwide media consumption kept making that division harder for the ‘have-nots’ to ignore.

Now some terrorists from “have-not” places are intent on causing mayhem “in the belly of the beast” so to speak, meaning here. More and more of the people who Americans are viewing as “the Other” are viewing Americans as their Other. This doesn’t bode well, especially since the Donald seeking the American presidency isn’t Donald Carveth. Before carefully re-reading Carveth’s 2013 article, I would have assumed Donald Trump’s pronouncements came straight from his id, but maybe they’re straight from his superego? Either way, U.S. democracy may find itself by November 2016 in peril, tottering on the brink of a slippery slope.

Meanwhile, some of us seem to take comfort that Donald

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Trump isn’t the only populist running for the presidency. If Trump is appealing to angry superegos, Bernie Sanders is surely appealing to troubled consciences. If Trump is exonerating ‘haves’ (or simply changing the subject), Sanders is stumping for America’s ‘have-nots,’ who are proliferating. So maybe there’s a chance Bernie Sanders could win the Democratic nomination and then the presidency?

But here I recall what happened when a late friend of mine, a street preacher, accosted George McGovern on a street in Huntington, West Virginia during McGovern’s second presidential attempt in 1984. My friend asked McGovern if he thought anyone could gain the nomination of either major party, Democrat or Republican, without selling his soul. McGovern pondered the question thoughtfully and then answered “No.”

Am I implying Bernie Sanders could only gain the 2016 Democratic Party nomination by selling his soul, i.e. violating his conscience? No, I’m implying Bernie Sanders won’t receive the 2016 Democratic nomination. Hopefully Donald Trump won’t receive the Republican Party nomination, but he might.

Some commentators reassure us that today’s anti-immigrant xenophobia isn’t our country’s first. One erupted in the mid-1850s when the Know Nothings swept all before them for several years. Then during the 1900s came a Red Scare on the heels of each world war. Those episodes gradually blew over as most Americans came to realize they and their loved ones were not actually vulnerable to immigrants or communists. At issue back then were merely “foreign” ideologies (including Catholicism in the 1850s) along with jobs. Today, Americans aren’t afraid Muslims might make millions of converts in the U.S. The kind of fear that’s spreading now isn’t ideological, it’s physical—like the fear on the West Coast during World War II of Japanese Americans.

Today’s media are magnifying it. Donald Trump’s campaign is big news throughout the world, including in the Middle East and North Africa. Brian T. Edwards, who holds a chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University, writes: “I was in Fez [Morocco], lecturing to university students when the news broke that Donald Trump had called for an immediate halt to Muslims entering the U.S.… The exceptional reach and uncontrolled speed with which the worst of our cultural products spread means that the ideas by which America was attractive during the last century are

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no longer reflective of the present one.” He goes on to write, “to young Moroccans—whose country is 99 percent Muslim and long friendly to the U.S.—Trump’s anti-Muslim comments were the latest sign that American culture has become increasingly hateful toward them. The global effects of speech such as Mr. Trump’s are profound here and will be long-lasting.”

Furthermore, Edwards recalls the reactions from his students and a fellow professor: “‘I have a question,’ one female student asked me. ‘Why Islam? Why are Muslims considered the worst by Americans?’ …Another student followed with a related point: ‘Most people in the U.S. have guns. Here in Morocco we don’t have guns. We are peaceful.’ The students nodded and seemed distressed that they might be thought otherwise.” A Moroccan history professor added, “‘What’s distressing is not so much the comments Trump is making, but the response he is getting.… It seems not to be so outrageous to Americans that he might say these things. The response is that it is extreme, but not outrageous.’”

While more and more Americans feel defensive and, yes, xenophobic, more and more of the people who those Americans see as ‘the Other’ are seeing Americans as their ‘Other.’ So it’s hard to envision how a revival of moral conscience could occur in the U.S. Common sense says children and youth would have to be involved; however, American children and youth are kept busy preparing for standardized tests. If moral conscience is to revive in the U.S., children and youth may somehow have to revive it themselves, presumably rejecting standardized tests in the process. The challenge we’re facing will test the parameters of our, and our children’s, moral conscience. Over time, we humans have found ways to follow our consciences and still cooperate with each other as part of large groups. But in today’s emerging global village, can those groups find ways to cooperate in doing good with the rest of the world’s groups? If they can, surely they’ll “hear” their conscience become louder and louder.

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