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CULTURE CHANGE, SYMBOLIC OBJECT LOSS, AND RESTITUTIONAL PROCESS
By Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.
Introduction: The Awareness of Separation, Loss, and Death
It could be said that the principal function of human psychology is to come to terms with human biology. With each generation, we begin our careers in the uterine environment, one optimally protected by a loving yet imperfect familial and social environment. Initially, the mother's body, the social topography of kin and neighbors, the animate and inanimate physical environment, are not experienced as distinct objects in the world with a life and needs of their own: they are the world. They are one's earliest psychogeography. One experiences them as though they were an intrinsic, even if distal, part of the self; just as limbs are extensions of intentionality, these yet indistinct objects are extensions of boundary and need.
Sometimes insidiously, sometimes abruptly, hastened by walking and talking, one dimly begins to perceive that the world is distinct from the self. Long before one is cast out of preoedipal “Eden” by the demands of the Oedipal father for exclusive possession of mother's sexuality, one suffers the blessing and curse of self-awareness. One becomes self-exiled. The world is forever after beyond the self: equated with the tragic hammer-blows of separation, loss, and death.
Over the course of human history universally, one enterprise that has occupied much time and energy has been the denial, reversal, and undoing of this catastrophic realization. In large measure, men and women in groups of all types (from venerable “cultures” to ad hoc “groups”) use one another and perceive the group “itself” restitutionally.
Death and nature stand stupefied before culture: in culture, we know that our Redeemer liveth, for it is culture that redeems us from reality. Whether one piously worships putative ancestors, tenderly tends parental graves, fearfully awaits the ghosts of the family dead, or dreads possession by, or illness due to, the spirit of a wronged kinsman, one still “has” them in various guises as introjects. The dead are not “really” lost; there is no final separation; it is reality that is relegated to illusion!
Yet, even the alleged unity, cohesiveness, and continuity of culture are themselves a cherished illusion—or perhaps I should say delusion, for it is a false belief toward which one acts as though it must be true. Mutable reality intrudes upon immutable wish for merger with one's culture. Boundaries can be violated, and as a result once again one is thrust upon renewed awareness of one's distinctness.
Losses of symbols of self and group are heir to losses of early loved ones by separation and death: they reignite separation anxiety and give the lie to cherished illusions of immortality. One thus comes to feel the “shock” of culture change as though it were object loss. One feels disoriented, adrift without moorings or rudder. Where mourning and grief are too painful—that is, too contaminated by aggression and its fantasied consequences to the self—one simply cannot “let go” of the dead or accept personal distinctiveness and mortality.
Cult rejuvenates failed culture. The link with the past is repaired. For the brief moment, the sting of separation, loss, and death is anesthetized. Extrojection plays out the drama of introjects. The world of social and physical reality becomes a species of “transitional phenomena” (Winnicott, 1953), regressively rather than progressively cathected.
This article will not approach depression as denoting strictly a well-internalized conflict in which the individual has identified with the lost or deceased object (or symbol of object-ties). Instead, depression will be used to connote the wide range of responses to separations and losses, those spanning clinical depression and more primitive introjective/projective processes (associated with regression to a mode of relatedness to the world as if it were a form of “transitional phenomena” in Winnicott's sense [1953]). Culture is viewed as a “potential space” (Winnicott, 1967), first between mother and infant, later between child and the world, the contents of which can be benign, persecutory, and so on.
“Depression” in the wider American colloquial or folk sense encompasses experiences of separation, loss, and death together with efforts at the individual and group levels to repair if not restore that which has been lost through symbolic representations. Here culture in the generic sense can be understood to consist largely of efforts at continuous therapy which may or may not be therapeutic (I owe this insight to Lloyd de Mause). Thus conceived, therapy consists of far more than a circumscribed institution of healing, medicine, or religion; it is in fact something taking place at all times and in all settings within a group (even the so-called “economic” sector) to deal with anxieties, conflicts, and ambivalences endemic to the group.
In large measure, dependency, neoteny, helplessness, separation, loss, and death are the “problems” for which men design cultures—not only religions—as (often rigid) “solutions” (Freud, 1927; Róheim, 1943; La Barre, 1959, 1972). Sadly, through culture thus far, men have only succeeded in relocating the problem, rather than in solving it by working it through. Cultural symbolism and ritualization only forever postpone the solution; indeed, they incapacitate men by serving as cozening bromides that narcotize them away from reality.
Consensus is not only our sanity (La Barre, 1971, p. 23) but delusionally reality “itself.” It is little wonder that a questioning of group loyalties is felt as betrayal, one invoking wrath if not persecution. The violation of group boundaries by such questioning is experienced as a severing of emotional symbiotic links and rekindles the depression of which the group has been “cured” by assuring itself of continuity if not permanence, safety if not inviolability. Signal anxiety leads to the extrusion of the noxious question and doubter. In this sense, culture is a profound, if magical, antidepressant, a form of “medication,” so to speak, to which its members become rapidly addicted.
Since culture can never eliminate death, loss, and separation (built as they are into human biology), culturally shared magical thinking must eventually decay and be patched up or revitalized. Symbolic and ritual reassurances are challenged by reality factors—culture change being among the most powerful. Cult, then, arises to offer therapy to declining culture; “successful” cult is not necessarily one whose ego-instruments have best surveyed and triangulated reality. Rather, it is the one which best quells uncertainties sown in childhood and reawakened by culture changes.
The successor culture has, both cross-culturally and historically, been one which reverses separations and losses “better” than the previous one was able to do. Only within the past century, with the emergence and evolution of psychoanalysis, has the vicious cycle of decay and reparation begun to be broken by bona fide resolution. Cultures, then, as attempted solutions to object-loss are manifestly clinical phenomena regarded at a different level from those phenomena which we customarily identify as “clinical” (see La Barre, 1972).
Separation Anxiety, Uprootedness, and the Inability to Mourn
La Barre further challenges:
The question we hold steadily in view here is, What is thinking for, and what does culture do for us? Scientific endeavor is homeostatis-making too. But at what price of further adaptation to the environment is an inner homeostasis purchased? To what culture-evolutionary “specialization” does it commit us? And what proportions of selfcozening Pleasure Principle and disciplined Reality Principle enter into the “solution”? [1971, p. 24].
Bennett (1976) correctly notes that “anticipation” lies at the root of adaptation. But he fails to take into account the compelling power of the intrapsychic and intersubjective environment to conform anticipation to expectation, perception to projection, reality to wish. What does one anticipate with? (See Stein and Hill, 1979) Once world-view merges indistinctively into the world itself, how is one to know that his adaptations are indeed adaptive? More often than not, what appears as adaptation to “change,” represents the reorganization of novelty around the compulsion to repeat (Freud, 1920).
One might suggest, not altogether metaphorically, that what occurs is a reversal of affect: the nativist celebrates rather than mourns. Or better put, he celebrates in order not to mourn. Again, more literally than metaphorically, he seeks to resurrect rather than bury the dead so that they will bless instead of haunt him. The cultist may expect the ancestors literally to return from the dead (e.g., the Melanesian “cargo cults,” the Amerindian “Ghost Dance”), or he simply may seek to exalt their memory in a more internalized, quietistic cult of the dead (or a cult of “living” tradition). One thinks of the daily Hebrew entreaty to God: “Hadesh yamaynu Kekedem”—“Restore our days to those of yore.”
The ambivalence toward (internal) objects from whom one cannot separate is managed by splitting: one's cult-or culture-group represents “good” internal objects, and the outer or new cultural group represents “bad” internal objects. Whereas the mourning process would facilitate both internal and external structural integration, the abortion of mourning leads to internal and external structural “segregation.” Newly externalized symbolic objects represent one's renewed internal object ties. Such symbolic objects can be understood to serve as external representations through which one can perpetuate and “validate” the illusion that the object-relation persists and has not been lost.
Here I follow the lead of Anna Freud and Margaret Mahler rather than John Bowlby: that is, the central issue is not the physical distance itself, but the emotional perception of distance, the intrapsychic representation of personal distinctness or separateness. Mahler writes:
The concept of separation, in this sense, means differentiation of the self from the symbiotic object as an intrapsychic process…. [B]y “separation anxiety” we do not mean the behavioral sequelae and reactions to physical separation from the love object, as John Bowlby has used the term, but rather the gradual yet inevitable intrapsychic sensing of a danger signal anxiety on the part of a small child during the normal separation-individuation process [1968, pp. 220-221].
In a discussion of Turkish individuals uprooted by immigration from the country to the city, Özbek and Volkan note the replacement of the extended family by the “satellite-extended” family in the urban setting (1976, p. 577). The term “satellite state” (Volkan and Corney, 1968) indicates:
… an individual's failure to complete the process of separation-individuation (Mahler, 1963; Mahler and Furer, 1963). It refers also to his establishment of a stable but malignant satellite adaptation; to his fixation on whatever object he substitutes for the central figure of his original struggle with separation-individuation—the mother. The person still not liberated from this object by successful individuation is forced by his dependency to remain near it, and forced by his fear of engulfment to keep it at a psychic distance.
The satellite individual is beyond symbiosis with the object since he can distinguish the representations of his mother from those of his own self, but is not yet a free-standing individual…. The satellite individual feels that to shift out of his fixed orbit is to kill the mother—or to die himself. As a defense against aggression the satellite position becomes inevitable (Volkan and Corney, 1968), a kind of welcome doom [Özbek and Volkan, 1976, pp. 577-578].
The adaptation fashioned by satellite individuals is based upon a new personal or group cult of the past, in which old internal objects are externalized, projectively identified in new objects, and “the past” safely restored—while the individual has in fact achieved some distance from it.
One notes further that in “culture shock” and “future shock” alike, the “loss of culture” which represents the catastrophic crisis of identity (Erikson, 1963, 1968) is experienced as object-loss. Culture (or “group”) is a fantasized maternal object with which the tribalist feels himself to be inextricably tied and upon which he feels himself to be wholly dependent. Culture is likewise a veritable Mahlerian “dual unity” whose “body” the tribalist does not distinguish from his very selfhood.
It is therefore little wonder that tribalists and anthropologists alike commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness in their conceptualization and phenomenology of culture: for one truly experiences his group to be “superorganic,” that is, transcending the self yet part of the (symbiotic) self (see Stein, 1980a, 1980b).
In this formulation the loss of culture is the fantasized loss of an object-environment that mirrors and embodies the “goodness” upon which one depends. “Culture” experienced as an entity is but one member of a class of what I have called symbolic objects whose psychic function is to represent and perpetuate object relations that have been disrupted by death or other forms of loss.
To this I would also add that whereas to the survivor, the linking object is a tie based upon having been left, to the immigrant or internal immigrant it is based upon having actively left one's original objects and/or original linking objects behind. “…[T]he linking object is a ‘token of triumph’ over loss” (1972, p. 220), a substitute of wish for reality. One maintains a hopeful, all-is-not-lost attitude which amounts both to a freezing of time and its magical reversal. The linking object, like the externalizing defense behind it, “evokes both the impulse to destroy it and the impulse to preserve it” (1972, p. 217). The linking object is “an instrument for the control of expressions of anger arising from separation panic” (1972, p. 221). Successors to “transitional objects” (Winnicott, 1953), “linking objects” represent not an advance toward distinct personal boundaries (as do “transitional objects”), but a retreat (regression) from representational differentiation which has already taken place.
A Metapsychology of Cult and Culture as Linking Phenomena
These above considerations compel us, I believe, to reconsider the issues of what culture is, where it is located, and what it is for. Anthropologists have tended to view cultures almost exclusively in evolutionary-adaptive terms. From a metapsychological viewpoint, the matter is more problematic. Winnicott writes:
My claim is that if there is a need for this double statement, there is also need for a triple one; the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area which is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet inter-related [Winnicott, 1953, p. 90].
Winnicott locates cultural experience in “intermediate areas” between the subjective and objective, outside and inside (1967). Here, not only is the power of transitional objects conveyed by symbols, but symbols also come to be empowered as permanently installed transitional phenomena in the more advanced form of linking phenomena.
The former is part of developmental progression; the latter is a sign of arrest or regression. The former is a language of process; the latter is a language of structure. The shared internal representation of culture (or group) on its sacred or autistic side (La Barre, 1972) consists of a vacillation between modes of self-object (Kohut, 1977) and transitional object (Winnicott, 1953) relatedness. Cult and culture are the externalized membrane of the self.
“Group” is repository, container, and target alike for all unfinished developmental business. Little wonder, then, that when one feels that one's group-identity is under assault, one not only “cures” the resulting depression through a cult of the group (or by joining yet another group and becoming its cultist) but also by a fierce and unrelenting assault against the perceived assailant. Regression from a “depressive” to a “paranoid-schizoid” position releases formidable aggression that is mobilized in the service of the more primitive, fragmented self (see Rochlin, 1973) now wildly extrapolated to the group “itself.”
Another way of putting it is to say that wars solve depressions—an ominous reality of our current psycho-economic depression (see Fornari, 1966/1975). It is little wonder too that identity movements (religious, ethnic, nationalist) manifest expansivist boundary ambitions, both of inclusion and exclusion, as the history of irredentism (literally: the unredeemed), millenarianism, and panismic movements readily attests.
Clinical Issues
Over the past decade at national workshops and conventions on ethnic identity, family medicine, and family therapy, I have encountered what is tantamount to an absolute injunction: “It's not that ‘you can't go home again,’ as the psychoanalysts tried to brainwash us. You can go home again; in fact you must. You really never leave home.” In my current research, I approach the family therapy and family medicine movements in the United States as crisis cults, one of whose organizing fantasies is the rescue and restoration of “the family.”
It appears that the struggle with such powerful and primitive fantasies as incorporation, attachment, and separation has led many family therapists and family physicians (with their attending doctrines and schools) to defend themselves against the transference by rigorously denying or manipulating it. These defenses are institutionalized in therapeutic strategies (e.g., “staying out of the transference,” “coaching” the patient or family, restructuring family relationships by prescribing behavior and defining roles). The cult which is the therapy for the culture (La Barre, 1972, p. 172) offers its symptom-defense (viz., the denial of the importance of representational differentiation and mourning) as therapy.
Anthropology and Culture Shock
In many respects, “advocacy research” and “salvage ethnography” appear to enact Oedipal rescue fantasies whereby the anthropologist attempts to save the violated, despoiled mother (native or traditional culture) from the intrusion, contamination, and pillaging of foreign male offenders (Western civilization, technology, secularization, and so on). This is recognizable to be a common nativist and ethno-nationalist fantasy as well (see Koenigsberg, 1975).
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