Authority and Ideals

I discuss the question of external sources of Authority and Ideals, principally from the perspective of psychoanalytic developmental theory, but also from a socio-political one.

People are looking for answers. You will not run out of clientele if you work in the supply of answers. People have questions ranging from “What is my life for?” right down to “Which colour clothes should I wear?” People so often want to be advised. And we have all seen people be less than discerning when choosing the source of advice.

Photo by Omar Herrera on Unsplash

Advice is commonly expected of consulting a psychotherapist or psychologist. (Many practitioners would disagree with the legitimacy of that expectation, but not all.) If you are expecting advice, you want your advisor be of a certain calibre. So how are you to know? Fortunately, many professions seek to legitimise the practitioners as sources of authority and guidance by means of regulating ownership of the signifiers of legitimacy, from University qualifications to memberships of private institutions or clubs. Whereas I know that my GP has met the requirements of a specific programme of training, I do not necessarily know the same of my astrologer; I’d have to investigate him specifically, for myself. This is properly reassuring to the prospective client of a service, because most of us cannot go about investigating every professional we hope to consult. It is not a bad system, in theory.

If you know (for yourself) that your naturopath is good, you might not care about the signifiers of competence, knowledge, and wisdom, because signifiers can add nothing to the presence of the signified. The weakness of the system shows in the reverse condition: when the qualified practitioner is just not that good. We rightly fear the exceptions to outcome of the universal training regimen. Be it a GP, psychiatrist, or plumber, we all know professionals who are better or worse than their peers. No matter the profession, there are good and bad doctors, good and bad therapists… taxi drivers, everything—even in cases where they had the same training as their colleagues. Most tragic is perhaps the situation where someone persists in a service that they find unhelpful, while telling themselves that it “must” be good, because of the status of the professional, like when a qualified electrician convinces a customer to replace (unnecessarily) her whole house’s wiring. If the profession in question is a therapeutic one, this can be particularly unfortunate, because the patient must gaslight themselves in order to keep their idea of their therapist ideal. In that sense, the patient is dividing up a limited amount of endorsement or ‘credit’ between the practitioner and themselves. But it can get worse. There are cases where bad service/treatment can encourage cycles of even greater endorsement and faith, owing to the fact that people dislike mismatch between their opinions and their behaviour. Enter the theory of Cognitive Dissonance.

A classic study in social psychology suggests that people will endorse (and even promote) something they found useless and boring, so long as they are neither incentivised to make the endorsement, nor rewarded for it (i.e., cognitive dissonance¹). When participants in that study were paid better for the completing a mindlessly long and boring task, the endorsement was less glowing. Here’s the point: The best promotors were the ones who got the least out of the exercise, although they had already sunk some cost. Most relevant to this paper is that people can organise themselves to think highly of something poor by disconnecting from their own lived experience of it. Again, either I trust myself, or I hand my trust over to someone else and align myself with them, against myself. There are other options, but the dichotomy between these two options is abundant.

As a psychotherapist, I’m always interested in hearing people at social functions talk about their experience of my profession. While I often hear people say “you should get my dentist to look at that tooth: he’s the best” or “you should use my electrician: he’s the best” it’s more interesting to me when someone says “you should see my therapist: she’s the best.” It’s nice (and perhaps only correct) that people should get service they regard as “the best”, but when it comes to therapy, thinking extremely highly of your therapist comes with extra considerations. I get a different feeling from an enthusiastic endorsement of a therapist than I do from an enthusiastic endorsement of a gardener. From a psychoanalytic point of view, the prototypical well-analysed patient expectably ends treatment with a balanced opinion of their analyst—balanced in terms of strengths and shortcomings—and has a similarly balanced opinion of psychoanalysis as a mode of treatment. I remember hearing Woody Allen say across many interviews that psychoanalysis was helpful to him, but not as helpful as he had expected it to be. I assume his analyst would have been happy to hear that. But putting all this together, we should probably react with some degree of suspicion when someone at dinner never stops talking (unsolicited) about how great their therapist was². For me, the more trustworthy recommendation might be the one that is offered only upon inquiry. One way to begin to understand this phenomenon is to see it as a question of idealisation. Idealisation is the perception of something as a flawless version of itself. Woody Allen is clearly not idealising psychoanalysis in his statement; while my imaginary therapy-promotor appears to idealise the therapy she got, and probably her therapist too. It’s slightly less about the quality of endorsement, but more about the unsolicited urge to promote. I’ll return to these later.

The position of seeking advice, truth, and guidance from an authority figure, guru, or ‘expert’ has a specific significance in psychoanalytic developmental theory (especially the psychoanalytic psychology of the self³). It posits that there needs to be some degree of idealisation of the authority for them to function in that role. And yet, while therapy is no exception to this expectable reaction, it is very different in the sense that it is organised around investigation that idealisation, for the purpose of digesting it into other features of mental health. In other words, when the plumber’s client idealises him, he is content; but when the psychoanalyst’s patient idealises her, she would feel that her job is not yet complete. The part of the therapy that has yet to come is relevant to the process of how many people gain deep and lasting benefit from psychotherapy over time. It belongs to a trajectory of development that begins with an infant (literally) needing a parent for affect regulation, all the way up to an adult with internalised systems of goals and ideals that make him less flappable in the face of criticism or derision from people in the personal or professional realms. When the trajectory is more or less completed, the Self Psychologists would tell us to expect an adult with a sense of meaningfulness in life, a capacity for enthusiasm, a zest for living, and an absence of over-seeking external validation for life decisions.

Let’s look at this trajectory in greater detail and consider how it relates to the phenomenon of idealising a service provider.

Psychology from the inside—(here comes a section on theory)

The psychological components of this healthy adult described above start life in the infant in an almost unrecognisable form. They are thought to originate in preverbal aspects of intrauterine experience, in which we (can only) theorise that a state of perfection and self-subsistence obtains. During infancy, this sense of perfection first expresses as a requirement for the presence of the parents as outsourced affect-regulators, until the ability to regulate affect (including to self-soothe) becomes possible developmentally. This stage is less central to the present essay, but the next is crux. This same outsourcing begins by early childhood to take the form of a need to look up to someone, to see the parent as a source of idealised calm and strength and (later) knowledge and wisdom. Let’s pause over that for a moment: Parts of the mature psyche (e.g., a zest for life), are not simply enfolded at birth and unfolded across maturation; instead they come in a form that requires a relationship with another for them to unfold at all. Experiences of perfection and flawlessness must be projected onto a parent as a first step, and only then gradually brought back to the self and internalised, slowly over time. This slow internalisation must take place smoothly, otherwise the projections of externalised perfection won’t turn into the internalised states of mental health described above, including a confident investment in one’s own values and ideals.

Remember it’s a projection. We don’t idealise our parents because they are perfect. We idealise them because we have to use them to bring out these images of perfection that are the stem cells of future mental health; they cannot be accessed excepted via projection and re-internalisation. Once the projection of perfection onto the parent is in place, we can then begin to take it back into the Self via the slow and gentle process of suffering mild disappointments in our non-perfect parents; hopefully, we are confronted with their flaws gradually as we mature, and we see them fail us (and we have emotional reactions to it). The Self Psychologists tell us that at every point of mild disappointment, there is an opportunity for the child to take back into herself a piece of that which was projected. It requires these disappointments for the projections to be converted into useable parts of the Self. If never projected, or if the projection fails for any other reason, then the taking-back is impossible. And, again, what is taken back is not perfection itself (i.e., the child doesn’t respond to a parent’s failings by thinking himself perfect instead), what is taken back is the raw units of idealisation itself, which are now available to be directed at goals and ideals instead of people (i.e., the inner presence of a fragment of what was formerly sought without). Original (infantile) perfection has to be sent out to a parent and then taken back for it to transform into a piece of psychological maturity. At that point in the process, the thing taken back is a building block for healthy self-esteem, the (aforementioned) capacity for enthusiasm and zest for one’s work and for life in general, and the capacity to be able to experience life as meaningful. (A note on ethics: We usually value this internalisation in our culture, because one important aspect of having internalised values is that they make you behave ethically when nobody is watching, because you are guided and held accountable to yourself. From that perspective, the parents in childhood, and the police in adulthood are external stand-ins for what has not yet become present internally. We are reminded of Rousseau: Obedience to the law one has written for oneself: that is freedom.)

I want to highlight a few aspects of this internalisation process in normal psychological development. First, the parent is not irrelevant; how the parent responds to the child’s idealisation is essential. The projection of perfection comes from the child, but the behaviour in response comes from the (actual) parent themselves. The actual (flawed) responses of the parent can be gauged in terms of just how disappointing they are of the idealised image. If the (actual) behaviour of the (actual) parents stays only mildly (or gradually) disappointing of the projections, then the process of development is secured. Mild disappointments enable the stable structure of the child’s Self to be constructed, one brick at a time. On the contrary, the process goes awry when the disappointments are of a traumatic degree, where the gap between reality and (projected) perfection is too big for a child’s psyche to bridge usefully. Too many traumatic disappointments, and the image of perfection doesn’t get taken-back and digested into character strengths about the Self, instead the image of perfection gets saved for future projection, and future attempts to reignite the unfinished process. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy seeks to take up the unfinished childhood process, but in order to complete it in therapy (unlike say a cult-leader who might happily take up the unfinished childhood process in order to keep the person stuck in the role of disciple). Absent the fulfilment of that developmental process, the grown-up child is often left with a projection of perfection, just looking for the right projection screen.

The ongoing opening for an idealised other to fill the gap in the Self is a situation I think we have all seen. It can be found in people who run from guru to guru, or from expert to expert, book to book, etc… and they usually want to tell us how the one they are onto at this very minute is the “real” one …until the inevitable disappointment leads them to abandon it for a new (and better) one. Psychotherapy can help the person to make good use of the disappointments (by reigniting the paused developmental process). But until then, the person will always want to look to someone else to tell them what to do, to tell them what is right, to embody values and ideals. In this sense, that perennial outsourcing of to yet another to tell us what is right can belong to this specific trajectory of developmental psychology.

Inside of psychoanalysis, the position of requiring an idealised other is not to be scoffed at. The Self is equally complete whether i) the idealisable other is available in the form it is needed, or ii) the Self has introjected sufficient structure that the person can look within for values and ideals. There is no moral judgment on these different forms. So while there is “nothing wrong” or nothing amiss psychologically where the person seeks an idealised other to whom they look up and go to for guidance (e.g., in religious affiliations), there might be something very wrong with that configuration from a moral or political point of view: If a President idealises the leader of a foreign country, the psychological system might be functioning very adequately, yet the political significance would be disastrous. This is looking at the problem from outside of psychology.

Psychology from the outside

I have spoken of internalised values and ideals as a position of psychological maturity, and a result of either healthy psychological development or belated development completed in psychotherapy. But again, there are “external” perspectives on that position within the society that are influenced by moral and cultural values. We want people to behave ethically on account of their internal resources, not just because of the threat of punishment. But on the flip-side, there’s also an opposing position that is perhaps especially present in the Australian culture: The thought of a person with very internalised goals and ideals often triggers in others the fear of implying a dangerously rogue approach to civilised life, and a lack of calibration with anyone else. We fear self-reinforcing cycles of narcissistic certainty in such people. Don’t we want people to remain in need of institutions for instructions on how to behave and what to believe? In truth, I hope not. But a good balance of the two is worth pursuing despite being difficult to define and to describe. Let’s try.

At first blush it’s easy to see how having internalised ideals could mean an isolation from consultation and conversation. But it takes only a moment’s pause equally to see that while it could, it needn’t. Frank might have his own ideas about what to strive for in a good life, but also seek and consider other people’s opinions on the matter. The word ‘consider’ might be the most important one in that last sentence—I think the decisive factor is a functional one, namely, whether we are seeking external sources of affirmation i) to fill a lack or a negligence in ourselves, or ii) to engage somebody in a dialogue with our internal position. Dialogue, not monologue; dialogue is not possible without the first person voice. Without the presence of the internal position, the function of the external sources is up for grabs. The serious risk is that external sources (of authority) will be assigned a correctness de facto; I see that happen at a deeply-disquieting frequently in our society. I see often how people defer in a lazy fashion to voices of authority on the basis of signifiers of correctness, not because they are open to opinions from respected others, but because they have not paused to identify (before, during, or after consultation) exactly what they themselves think. The position of correct balance should be a more nuanced one. Arguably, I should take seriously my GP’s opinion on my health and its treatment, especially if I’m not medically-trained myself, but that is different from abdicating the very position of ultimate responsibility for my own health, from which position my GP might be one of many valued opinions I may consult. I should consult; I should listen; I should contemplate; it just means that I don’t hand her the steering wheel.

So the extreme positions of either i) overvaluing your own opinion and being oblivious to your own faults, or ii) overvaluing the opinion of anyone who is wearing the hat with the right badge (cf. “High Ground”, [2020]) make a clear pair of dangers to be avoided⁴. Sounds like overvaluation itself is the problem, which is what makes things so complicated when we consider the developmentally necessary role of overvaluation, of idealisation. But how would we know when we are overvaluing? How do I know that I really have the best surgeon in the city, or the best GP, or the best psychotherapist? The difficulty lies in the question of whether we have sufficient trust in ourself, in our own (true) thoughts and beliefs, and presence with our own true feelings. Absent those, the quest to find a guru could be fraught. Because if you don’t know how to trust yourself in the first place, you have nothing to help you distinguish between benevolent versus malevolent authorities. If you can’t trust yourself, how could you even know whom else to trust? Remembering that while the world is full of people who are ready to tell you how to live if only you’ll let them, nobody will guarantee you their advice on how you should lead your life. Your life remains yours.

1. Festinger L., (1957) A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

2. This is less of a bad sign at certain points during a good psychotherapy than it might be as an overall position on a completed treatment.

3. I refer here to classical Self Psychology, e.g., Kohut H., (2009 [1973]) The Analysis of the Self, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, and Kohut H., (2004) How Does Analysis Cure?, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

4. I couldn’t bring myself to make a Scylla and Charybdis reference in the body of the essay.