The Blue Monkey Review

Michel Foucault and The History of Sexuality

Before the Nazi occupation, Edmund Bergler was one of the leading psychoanalysts in Austria. He had studied with Sigmund Freud and at that time was assistant director of the Psychoanalytic Clinic in Vienna. Later he would immigrate to the United States and assume an important role in maintaining Freudian orthodoxy in the New World. In a 1937 article on “The Present Situation in the Genetic Investigation of Homosexuality” [Marriage and Hygiene 4: 16-29] Bergler provided a short account of five homosexuals convicted under Austria’s sodomy laws. The court offered the five men the choice of undergoing treatment to cure their homosexual drives or go to prison. One of the men chose treatment but disappeared soon after it began. The other four chose prison. On the face of it, this story is a testament to the satisfaction that these men must have taken in their homosexual lives. But for Bergler, the story (amazingly) supported his view that “there are no happy homosexuals.” Bergler claimed that guilt drove these men to atone for their wrongdoing. Through a long career, Bergler maintained his view of homosexuals as unhappy “injustice collectors” who provoked conflicts that they could then claim as persecution for their homosexuality.

In the early twentieth century a majority of psychiatrists and physicians supported the view that homosexuality indicated maladjustment, at best, or, at worst, mental illness. This psychiatric viewpoint can stand as an example of a sexual discourse, a concept developed by French philosopher Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality. Foucault’s idea of discourse stands alongside liberalization and revolution as one of the major theoretical tools used today to understand the history of sexuality. Today Blue Monkey will attempt to explain Foucault’s idea of sexual discourse, and to explore its implications for the history and sexuality. We will return to Dr. Bergler and his psychiatric colleagues.

Continue reading "Sexual Discourses" »

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Last week we took a tour of the idea of liberalization in the 20th century as it applies to sexuality. Clearly, both behavior and attitudes about sex and sexual behavior have changed enormously in the century we just left. Liberalization, however, generally contains an idea of progress, a sense that there is a direction for sexual relations. We can only find directions of change and meanings like progress retrospectively and then retrofit those directions and meanings onto a much more chaotic set of developments. Depending on the timeframe you examine or the point of view you take on any set of changes, you may have a difficult time believing in the liberalization model when you go to bed at night.

Another way of understanding changes in sexuality in the 20th century is through the notion of revolution. This has become a well-established image in historical change, as in “the scientific revolution,” “the industrial revolution,” “the democratic revolutions.” It is also at the heart of Marxist thought, where revolution results from the continual conflicts generated by changes in economic systems and their associated class systems. The analogy with sexuality works fairly well. A set of repressive ideas and systems are challenged by innovators, new ideas, social change, and raw libido until the old sexual system caves in and startling new practices and ideas prevail. We’ve all taken for granted, for most of our lives, that a sexual revolution tore through American society in the 1960s (or thereabouts) that has given us the sexual freedom we enjoy today. Revolution may work as a stand-in for liberalization if you don’t feel you can abandon it entirely. Rather than a steady progression from repression to freedom you can see repression wrecked by the forces of sexual revolution, resulting in the freer standards and actions that most of us (except parents) agree make life better. So, if we want to think seriously about sex in the 20th century, we have to look at revolution.

Continue reading "Sexual Revolutions" »

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Over the weekend that just passed (March 26 to 28) I attended the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH). This year the meeting was held at the Copely Plaza Marriott, in Boston. For me, the trip meant about 20 hours of driving and a small fortune to live in sham luxury at the Copely Marriott (underwritten, in part, by Seotn Hill University). What makes all of this worthwhile, of course, is that I had opportunity to hear panels on topics and issues that represent the latest thinking of some of the leading scholars in American history. Admittedly, sitting through several two-hour panels in a single day left me feeling dazed by the end of the day. When my friend Jim Reed took me to Durgin Square (“Good Yankee Food”) Saturday night, I felt like I needed a drink. Or a couple of drinks.

In general, however, the experience was well worth it and included several conversations with Jim about our developing project. Because we plan to write a book on adolescent sexuality, most of the panels I attended dealt with the history of sexuality. That meant skipping panels on Revolutionary war military tactics, the geography of commodities, American diplomacy in Indian country, and slave narratives. But, in spite of my narrow focus, I still kept running into topics and issues related to the Therapeutic Culture (the TC). Yes, there it was, at the OAH, hovering over almost everything that I did and thought about for the entire weekend. Paper presentations helped me see more clearly connections between therapy and psychometrics and between therapy and social control. And, even more interesting, I learned more than I expected about the link between therapy and eugenics.

Continue reading "Therapy, Psychometrics, and Eugenics(!)" »

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Several of my blogs this year have dealt with therapy and the therapeutic culture (the TC) in one way or another. A recent e-mail from a regular reader makes it clear that my loose and inexact use of the term therapy has become a cause for concern. One defense I can make is that many people, some historians included, use the term history [i.e., a disciplined study of the past] in wildly meaningless ways. The current administration in Washington has been particularly irresponsible in making claims about something it calls the “lessons of history.” But I suppose that is no excuse for vagueness on my part.

I have no objection to therapy as a practice in the field of mental health. Many people have benefited from therapy or. When I go to therapy, I do it voluntarily and with a clear sense of what I want to gain. The therapist, or counselor, takes a particular role defined by her field of expertise and by the regulations of the therapist’s guild. The therapeutic exchange has the potential to become a search for clear thinking and deeper understanding on one’s self and one’s emotional responses. If you haven’t tried it, I recommend it.

But it isn’t actual therapy that compels me to rant about “therapy.” Rather, it is the saturation of contemporary U.S. culture with terms and metaphors drawn from therapy, and the even deeper alliance of therapeutic notions with consumer capitalism. We should not refer to the rapid proliferation of the therapeutic metaphor as therapy, but as “therapeutisitic.” So, for instance, when a local radio station plays a commercial that explains why I have a problem with my [car / love life / debt management / looks] and in 60 seconds introduces me to simple and certain means of eliminating this blight, I’ve involuntarily experienced a therapeutic moment administered by someone who has no credentials to perform therapy. In fact, it isn’t therapy. It’s therapeutistic. Or when a store manager who has taken a course in customer care soothingly responds to my complaints, and uses communication tools that signal to me that he understands my point of view, he is providing me a therapeutic environment. However, I don’t want a therapeutic environment, and it’s not really a therapeutic environment, because I haven’t sought therapy and the store manager isn’t interested in my mental health. It’s therapeutistic. But, I’m not European and don’t have a degree in post-modernism, so I’ll have to settle for real words. When I write therapy here, or anywhere else, I will leave it to you to decide if I mean therapy per se, therapy qua therapy, actual, genuine therapy, or if I really mean actions, words, or symbols that are simply therapeutistic.

Continue reading "Therapy and the Therapeutistic" »

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Like it or not, most monographs could be rewritten by William Shakespeare then edited by Mark Twain and they still would not sell.
--Elliot J. Gorn

Right now, on most college campuses, faculty struggle to understand and repair what seem like the loss of academic integrity. Like the little Dutch boy trying to stem the leak in the dike, many of us feel like we’re running out of fingers and the water is already around our belts. My colleague Michael Arnzen, in Pedablogue, has posted reflections, with links, on these concerns from a variety of points of view. Plagiarism may, in fact, provide a “teachable moment” in which teachers can explore with students the mysteries of the creation of knowledge. Or, perhaps, we live in an age in which knowledge has become so abundant that it has been de-commodified; that is, it becomes like all goods and services in a Communist utopia, free for the taking whether from learned journals or from the blogosphere. But, even though these notions may intrigue us and help us, as intellectuals, better understand the life of the post-modern mind, when a student hands in a paper that appropriates information and insights and even the more or less exact language of someone else, we have a problem.

Continue reading "Honest Historians, and the Other Kind" »

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Since my ruminations last week on the connection between Christianity and the therapeutic culture (the TC), I haven’t managed to let loose of the issue. I haven’t received what I would call a lot of feedback (by the way, thanks Neha) on that posting, so most of this has gone on inside my head, without the discipline outside views and responses might provide. One reader who e-mailed me (but chose to remain otherwise anonymous) viewed the therapeutic potential of Christianity through the work of John Cobb who sees “the need for radical openness to learning truth and therefore being transformed from any source, any tradition.” In this view, therapy might also become a means of grace. I find this idea appealing, and it certainly fits the post-modern and ecumenical mindset that I’m most comfortable with. But I wonder if this might not assimilate all religions to a therapeutic ideal. Without knowing much more than I do about world religions, I can’t judge if the therapeutic fits them as readily as it seems to fit contemporary Christianity. I think there must be a deeper connection between Christianity and the TC, one that isn’t a matter of contingent convergence. Maybe Christianity didn’t just bump into the TC. Maybe the relationship goes deeper.

There is no clear, universal connection between religious belief and “feeling good.” Just as the religious traditions don’t generally advertise themselves as soporifics (“we will deaden your senses to the real pain that you suffer”), they also don’t claim to be the Prozac of the masses. More commonly religions offer some external good in exchange for belief and devotion. I remember a revival preacher telling us that if we tithed, God would pay us back many times over. That’s fairly primitive stuff, but television evangelicals still seem to hammer away at this message. From another perspective, though religion often becomes a motive for justice. Think of the Dalai Lama. Think of Jimmy Carter. Or, belief might be a ticket to a better berth in the life to come. That is the message that I remember best from my childhood training.

There is plenty of evidence that real faith just makes your life worse. The Old Testament prophets faced rejection, scorn, hatred, violence, and imprisonment. No wonder Jonah ran off to sea when he heard God’s call. Or, open the New Testament. After meeting God on the road to Damascus, Paul was torn out of the life he knew as a Pharisee and sent wandering and preaching all over the Roman world. He spent the last years of his life in prison pleading to congregations he had planted that they achieve some semblance of decent behavior.

In the therapeutic view of religion, however, the religious plea for justice and the hardness of the life of belief fade away in favor of a practice that should make us good and make us feel good. The Devil, Original Sin, evil all compress into “the problem(s)” of the individual and the path to a productive life that includes a personal relationship with God and interior peace (Oh my Gosh! Are we talking about mental health?) Evangelical Christianity certainly contains an opportunistic spirit that can turn almost any cultural excess to its advantage (Christian rock? Yes, it exists. Christian MTV? I don’t want to know). But I am suggesting that the relationship between Christianity and the therapeutic goes deeper, perhaps to the very core of Christianity. But to explore this, we need to consider Christian origins.

Continue reading "Therapy and Christianity" »

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During a recent meeting of my class “The Era of Civil War and Reconstruction” I introduced the ideas of structure and contingency in history. I used the idea of the “irrepressible conflict” to illustrate the structural side of the argument. William Seward used this phrase in a famous speech in 1858, pointing to the growing evidence that the free and slave states had many opposed claims within the United States and these would inevitably cause the sections to grapple for supremacy. He did not make an irresponsible claim that the two sections must go to war. But some historians since then have taken the term “irrepressible conflict” to stand for the viewpoint that such fundamental issues separated North and South—economic, cultural, social--that an inevitable, and probably violent, clash had to take place sooner or later. To caricature this view, a separation of the sections or a civil war becomes inevitable once the 11 states ratify the Constitution in 1788 and a national government is formed. Probably no one takes that extreme view, but most historians would probably be willing to identify a date between 1788 and 1860 when secession (at least) and war became inevitable.

The other way of viewing history does not necessarily eliminate a point of no return for a civil war. Historians who stress contingency, however, would give far more credit to individual decisions and actions (some malicious, some high minded, some just stupid) that changed the odds or the growing tensions between sections that finally ended in war. The great contemporary Civil War historian James McPherson has used the idea of contingency in his bestselling history, The Battle Cry of Freedom, and also in his study of the battle of Antietam. One of the difficulties of taking contingency into account is that in studying the past, you only have what happened—you don’t have any way of really studying what didn’t happen. That means you must rely on thought experiments. McPherson, in his work on Antietam, asks us to imagine, What would have happened in 1862 if Lee had found McClellan’s orders of battle wrapped around a bunch of cigars rather than the reverse? Thought experiments are always fun and interesting, but unlike history they have no plausible evidence to discipline claims made based on them. But, let’s go there—I can’t resist. Imagine that after he murdered four pro-slavery settlers in Kansas in 1856, John Brown got the kind of therapy he obviously needed and, instead of the megalomaniac psychosis that drove him to lead the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, that he remained locked up in a state mental hospital. Absent the raid on Harper’s Ferry, maybe southerners would have felt less paranoid going into the 1860 elections; absent Brown’s (fair) trial and execution, maybe northerners would have felt less aggrieved than they did with the martyrdom of Brown. Certainly they would have spared us the composition of “John Brown’s Body.”

But here is what caused me to spend the last five days thinking about this issue. After explaining the difference between structure and contingency, I wrote “irrepressible conflict” on one side of the board and “contingency” on the other and drew a line between them. Then I asked students to walk up to the board and make a mark where they believed they stood on the causation of the Civil War. Of 24 or so students, only two made a mark anywhere near contingency. And the “irrepressible” group had marks crowded so near the other end of the line they were practically on top of each other. I would have called the line a “spectrum,” but with these results there was no true spectrum. Apparently you either believed that the Civil War was inevitable and due to large historical forces, or you didn’t understand the question. Well, this isn’t Pedablogue, so I’m not here to talk about my failures as a teacher. But this decision on the part of my students strikes me as a remarkable feature of contemporary society. If this informal sample means anything, then most of the people you see walking around believe huge forces, perhaps even uncontrollable forces, shape human destiny and perhaps even our individual lives. Yet I wonder if my students would have chosen the “irrepressible” end of things if I had asked them about their own lives? In some sense, structure and contingency confront us all the time. It makes a difference in how we discuss history. It makes a difference in how we think about our lives.

Continue reading "Structure and Contingency" »

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In the words of one expert, “the main reason for doing the operation is that it usually works; it brings results sufficiently successful to make it worthwhile.” The operation in question was the lobotomy, the subject of a very interesting book by Jack D. Pressman, Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (Cambridge, 1998) (Dewey Decimal Call # 616.891 P93). The lukewarm endorsement of psychosurgery seems appalling to us today, when we know that slicing up parts of the brain serves no medical therapeutic good. Even one of its proponents, reflecting on the lack of understanding of brain function, called the lobotomy a “stab in the dark.” Mortality rates for the operation were 1 to 3%, and around 10% of those operated on developed induced epilepsy.

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Posted by at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After last week’s extended rant on love and love-addiction, I thought I had finished, that I had said the last word on love, or at least my last word, or at least my last word for now. But in the week that has followed, the subject kept intruding into my life in unexpected ways. For one, over the weekend I finished reading a short novel by Colombian writer Alvaro Mutis, La Ultima Escala del Tramp Steamer (Espasa, 1999). Although the story doesn’t begin as a novel about passionate love, it turns into one. Mutis concludes that “Los hombres…cambian tan poco, siguen siendo tan ellos mismos, que sólo existe una historia de amor desde el principio de los tiempos, repetida al infinito sin perder su terrible sencillez, su irremediable desventura.” [Partial and poor translation: “…there exists only one love story from the beginning of time that through infinite repetition never loses its terrible simplicity [or “innocence”]…” But other forces also worked on me, drawing me back to the topic of romantic love and its “irremediable desventura.”

Continue reading "Love and Lovesickness 2" »

Posted by at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I had planned to write about love for more than a week. This week, though, as I thought more about the project the Time and the New Yorker that arrived in my mailbox both had texts that seemed valuable. In the end, my ruminations refer most often to the articles in Time. But, my impetus for giving this topic some attention, particularly the connection between love and addiction, goes back a couple of months when a therapist, in fact my therapist, suggested that I look at a book entitled Addicted to Love. I never managed to lay hands on that book, but I have done quite a bit of other reading on afflicted love and even more thinking about it. No, I won't be sharing any of my private life with the world community. I'm sure that's a relief to everyone.

Continue reading "Love and Lovesickness" »

Posted by at 8:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I've been MIA from blogging for a couple of months. I won't bore anyone who has stumbled upon this site with news about my life. Let's just say I find myself in a period of transition. No telling what lifeform I will resemble when it is over. But, for right now, I am making a new year's resolution to blog and blog consistently. I plan to add one short contribution to the blogosphere every week. If you are out there and read this, add grit to my resolve by sending along your comments. For this first full week of the 2004 I've reflected on history, my vocation (along with teaching) and also the main intellectual preoccupation of my life.

Continue reading "The Uses of History" »

Posted by at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The book I reviwed on the free love movement in the 19th century inspired a whole range of reflections. My first book dealt with the same movement, so this recent work made me feel like I was renewing old acquaintance. But, because the work had challenged some of my published ideas, it gave me a chance to change my mind about free love, or at least to think about free love in new ways.

Continue reading "Free Love and Sex Radicals" »

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