Despite our knowing how complex it is to even persuade ourselves to change, let alone our clients, if we work in mental health, it’s often still the first impulse to provide information, or a helpful explanation of why X will be so much better if only Y happens. Facing the contradictions and complexity of embodied existence, we often cling to the simplicity of a logical explanation. We can thank psychoanalysis, then, for teaching us how squirrely the mind can be when it’s confronted with information or arguments about how it should change, when it doesn’t want to.
These concepts help us understand how even the most moral argument, or the most earnest appeal, or the most thoroughly fact-checked research cannot make it through the thicket of our defenses.
What’s less discussed in mental health is the complex interaction between our individual defenses and the ways the larger structures that shape and consolidate the dominant culture work together to make change appear much more difficult than it actually is.
Structures, and the ideologies that animate them, shape what counts as normal, usual, or valued by the dominant culture. One way these structures work is to make us believe that there are certain areas of the social order, certain aspects of being, that are fully outside our control as individuals, or so entrenched in the culture—so much the “accepted consensus”—that the idea of speaking about them as if they can change can elicit shame or disbelief, even in those who desperately want the change to occur.
Ideology works by recirculating the idea that the social consensus is infallible and that to be granted the safety of participation in the dominant culture there are certain ideas, certain changes that cannot be said aloud, or that will be treated as absurd, or idealistic, or simply dismissed without comment.
I was struck, recently, by a study in Nature whose authors shared that “We find a form of pluralistic ignorance that we describe as a false social reality: a near universal perception of public opinion that is the opposite of true public sentiment. Specifically, 80–90% of Americans underestimate the prevalence of support for major climate change mitigation policies and climate concern. While 66–80% Americans support these policies, Americans estimate the prevalence to only be between 37–43% on average.” (italics in the original).
How many other issues are suffering from this same false social reality? How many changes that we now celebrate as evidence of our culture’s ethics, or generosity, or willingness to confront our history, were once regarded as threatening and absurd?
What psychoanalysis and structural analysis give us, in these concepts about how change happens or is prevented from happening, are ways to talk about power. We can “know,” in our bodies, or in our minds, that we need to change. But whether we believe we can act, and what we think will happen to us if we do, is inseparable not only from our lived experience, but also our conceptualizations of power.
