Know Your Enemy
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Triumph of the Therapeutic (w/ Hannah Zeavin & Alex Colston)
🕑 Added 2023-02-14 01:58:06 +0000 UTCModern conservatives have long asked the following questions: how can we live together without God? Is there any substitute for religion in cohering a moral community? And if not, what can we do to revive the old sacred authority that reason, science, and liberalism have interred?
These were also the questions that preoccupied Philip Rieff (1922-2006), an idiosyncratic sociologist and product of the University of Chicago, whose thought cast a long shadow over right-wing intellectuals, theologians, and other Jeremiahs of the modern condition (like Christopher Lasch and Alasdair MacIntyre). In the two books that made his name — 1959's Freud: Mind of the Moralist and 1966's Triumph of the Therapeutic: The Uses of Faith After Freud — Rieff engages deeply with psychoanalysis, deriving from Sigmund Freud a theory of how culture creates morality and, in turn, why modern culture, with its emphasis on psychological well-being over moral instruction, no longer functions to shape individuals into a community of shared purpose.
Rieff, a secular Jew, remained concerned to the very end of his life with the problem of living in a society without faith, one in which the rudderless self is mediated, most of all, by therapeutic ideas and psychological institutions rather than by religious or political ones. Less sophisticated versions of this conundrum haunt conservative thought to this day — from complaints about "wokeness" as a religion to the right's treatment of sexual and gender transgression as mental pathology.
To help us navigate Rieff, Freud, and the conservative underbelly of psychoanalysis, we're joined by two brilliant thinkers and writers: Hannah Zeavin and Alex Colston. Hannah is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University in the Luddy School of Informatics; Alex is a PhD student at Duquesne in clinical psychology. Most importantly, for our purposes, Hannah and Alex are also the editors of Parapraxis, a new magazine of psychoanalysis on the left. We hope you enjoy this (admittedly, heady) episode. If you do, consider signing up for a new podcast — on psychoanalysis and politics, of all things — hosted by beloved KYE guest Patrick Blanchfield and his partner Abby Kluchin entitled "Ordinary Unhappiness."
Further Reading:
Philip Rieff, Freud: Mind of the Moralist (Viking, 1959)
— The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Harper & Row, 1966)
— Fellow Teachers (Harper & Row, 1973)
Hannah Baer, "Therapy was Never Secular," Jewish Currents, Sept 14, 2022.
Gerald Howard, "Reasons to Believe," Bookforum, Feb 2007.
Blake Smith, "The Secret Life of Philip Rieff." Tablet, Dec 15, 2022.
George Scialabba, "The Curse of Modernity: Rieff's Problem with Freedom," Boston Review, Jul 1, 2007.
Christopher Lasch, "The Saving Remnant," The New Republic, Nov 19, 1990.
Hannah Zeavin, "Composite Case: The fate of the children of psychoanalysis," Parapraxis, Nov 14, 2022.
Alex Colston, "Father," Parapraxis, Nov 21, 2022.
Rod Dreher, "We Live In Rieff World," Mar 1, 2019.
Park MacDougald, "The Importance of Repression," Sept 29, 2021
Comments
Where there’s a Wills there’s a Way
Lukewarm take: he (to me) is one of our minor masters of the takedown footnote
Where there’s a Wills there’s a Way
Marcuse lived with Rieff and Sontag in Chicago for a time during the phase of his composition of Eros and Civilization—for a year or so, ca. 1955 ish
Mark K
Do you all think that Marx presaged "psychological man" with his talk about worker alienation and whatnot? I remember in one of Eric Hoffer's journals he mentioned that Marx was incorrect about workers' feelings when he wrote in the 1840s, but by the 20th century he had become correct (Hoffer was a working man and his fellows often complained about fulfillment, etc). Note: Hoffer's The True Believer is often credited with shocking sociologists out of their Freud-induced trance when it was published in the 50s. Still awaiting his episode!
Dan
Looking forward to future cross over eps with Ordinary Unhappiness. I think what people like about KYE is that it gives people permission to interpret thinkers without said interpretation constituting an endorsement of said thinker. KYE is about being read to have 'that conversation' about that person. And that's okay! Hurray! Matt and Sam are calm enough thinkers to do this task. That being said, I am actually pretty cautious about whether there is an audience actually ready for that conversation about psychoanalysis. It takes a lot to put someone's ideas and personal struggles into context- while not downplaying where they went wrong, and not taking their followers' word on what they were and what they were doing. This is even harder when the area of study is psychoanalysis. Take Jung for instance. I don't think anyone at Parapraxis is ready for that conversation. Someone in these comments already mentioned Lacan too. Good luck with that one. I hope that the spirit of KYE to really situate controversial thinkers and their influence lives on. But as someone who was pro-Freud ep going in, I'm a little more cautious than I was. I think the critical question to start before touching any psychoanalytic thinker is still priming the listener with a firm understanding of what the therapeutic actually is. At any rate- well done and good luck.
William Williams
I’m a bit thick in regards to therapy stuff, but found Lacan useful. Do you guys ever look at Lacan, he’s also a conservative “I like Freud bunches” kind of guy. Zizek has made a career out of linking him, Marx and Hegel together… someday I may understand how that all works.
Know Your Enemy
Thanks Dan, our love goes out to you and yours too
Dan Anderson
I live in a small town and my career has been in the building trades. Both of my kids are trans and even though it's a generally lib town, there is a growing reactionary movement here, especially TERFS. Although a lot of the episode is over my head (I don't care, I listen to all of them anyway), thank you for providing a glimpse into what is behind the motivations of this opposition which my family and I are actively battling. Love you guys
Know Your Enemy
Thank you so much, Joshua
Joshua Smith
Is this the ur-KYE episode? It might be. I got a lot from it despite my knowing next-to-nothing about Freud/psychoanalysis. It really does touch on so many of the other topics that have been discussed on the podcast, from the "Anti-Trans Agenda" episode, the conversation about gendered health care workers with Gabriel Winant, to the "God, Death and the Pandemic" episode. The conversation about religion towards the end of the episode particularly resonated with me as someone who is an erstwhile Catholic. Anyway, much food for thought, and thank you for the great episode!
Steven Toussaint
Another incredible episode; can anyone recommend a good history of psychoanalysis, a primer?
Jenna Harmon
Loved this episode, especially following on Hannah’s fantastic article in Dissent last winter on the history of Freud and the gendering of psychological care (“If it’s women’s work, why should we pay for it?”). U Chicago was all over the ep, and it reminded me that I’d love some more institution-focused eps in the future. The Bloom/Bellow ep a while back is kind of a defacto U Chicago one, but I’d love to hear more about it, as well as Duke Law as these powerhouses of conservative intellectualism.
Jerry Callen
Hannah's reference (around 53:40 in the podcast) to "Eliza" snagged on my ears. In the early 1970s I was majoring in computer science and happened upon an implementation (in a computer language called APL) of "Eliza". The actual Eliza program was NOT an "AI therapist", but rather a general purpose framework for creating conversations between a computer and a human user. The framework was controlled by "scripts". The name of the program was a reference to Eliza Doolittle of Pygmalion, the notion being that the program, like Eliza, could be "taught" and improved (by providing more sophisticated scripts). One of the first scripts was "DOCTOR", which was intended as a PARODY of a Rogerian psychotherapist. [Warning: geekage ahead.] Users of pretty much any current release of the GNU Emacs text editor can try this parody by invoking "M-x doctor".
David Glenn
Second, he talked at some length about how, in the late 60s, he tried to wrest control of the Penn sociology department from people he viewed as normie quantitative/empirical types. The year of triumph, in his telling, was 1968, when he lured Erving Goffman from Berkeley and J.P. Nettl from Leeds. "I bided my time, and when I saw the chance to hire bring Goffman from Beserkley [sic] and Nettl from Leeds, I did so. And so the three of us emerged suddenly like monsters from the gloom. We had the department in our hands. But then Nettl died in a plane crash the very first year. It was a terrible blow. He also happened to be my closest friend. The fates were unkind." Can anyone add context to this? All I know about Nettl is that he wrote that long Luxemburg biography.
David Glenn
FWIW, a couple of outtakes from my interview with Rieff in 2005: First (not a huge surprise, but in the KYE vein): "Does anyone still read Robert Nisbet? It seems to me that of all the minds, his was closest to my own. We never had an intellectual interchange."
David Glenn
Really interesting stuff (as always).
Angela
Awesome topic. Love the show
Marshall Crenshaw
KYE releasing a Freud episode as their #69th has to be on purpose... Or is it a Freudian release?
Jon Tabbush
really like that piece! anyway happy to send over some readings if you're into the idea
Know Your Enemy
that's a great idea!! I did some reporting on the Hasidim in upstate NY a few years ago. I'm very interested in the politics / dealignment story that you allude to. https://jewishcurrents.org/welcome-to-lammville (-Sam)
Peter Berard
This ruled hard, thanks all
Know Your Enemy
Grazie! Added it to the episode notes, thanks
Thomas Arnold
Jon Tabbush
Really enjoyed this - just wanted to add an episode idea that I'd really enjoy: Jewish and particularly hasidic conservatism. A Fortress in Brooklyn, which is a history of hasidic Williamsburg, has some fun parts with Father John Neuhaus you may enjoy, and more broadly, I think the hasidic turn to the republican party is an underdiscussed stage in the white ethnic political transition of the 60s onwards. A different interesting perspective on neocon concerns about race too. Thanks for everything you do!
