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Peter D. Kramer and Andrew Solomon

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from: Peter Kramer

The Enduring Principle of Self-Deception

Posted Tuesday, July 10, 2001, at 2:03 PM ET

Andrew,

I spend my afternoons practicing psychotherapy. In terms of its underpinnings, therapy is a mess these days. But one principle seems to endure. People deceive themselves. They know and do not know. They suffer (and enjoy) selective inattention. I work on the principle that for the most part knowing is better--for those who are troubled, and who, with the better part of themselves, want to know.

Perhaps this idea of selective inattention (the phrase is Harry Stack Sullivan's) links your two concerns. My impression is that some successful deception is self-deception, on the part of the person duped. I mean, the wife who had no notion her husband was a spy, the husband who is surprised to learn his wife was a '60s terrorist--was there no hint of a second life? Perhaps not. I have treated children of bigamists, and it seems that the younger generation at least had no reason to imagine dad had a second wife in the next town over. But for the most part, I suspect these circumstances are complex. The sociopath picks his victims wisely; the victim lives with blinders on--and so forth.

As I write these words, I worry about blaming the victim. Some con artists are just damn good actors. Deception is an important mammalian capability.

As for nations--I have trouble with the leap from the intimate to the social. Still, yes, it does seem to me that the pettiness and outright cruelty of countries that deny their history make the argument for free speech. I admire Israel for admitting revisionist history into the history books. But then, the question of who chooses textbooks is a dicey one. Think about Darwin in the Bible Belt, in this country, where citizen-run school boards can't get it right.

Peter

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718
from: Peter Kramer

The Enduring Principle of Self-Deception

Posted Tuesday, July 10, 2001, at 2:03 PM ET
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Peter D. Kramer is a professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of Listening to Prozac and the new novel Spectacular Happiness. Andrew Solomon is the author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (read a "Book Club" discussion of it here) and also of the recently reissued novel A Stone Boat.
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Reader Comments From The Fray

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[Notes from the Fray Editor... or perhaps we should call them footnotes. There was a recommendation for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest here, and a splendid line from Tim Button here: "Footnotes are justifiable in philosophy, but philosophy as a whole is very hard to justify." KC is expecting footnotes to these exchanges. The Fray team would like to recommend Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as having the best footnotes ever. We were glad to see that the poster Shark agreed with us: he is looking like the new star of the "Breakfast Table" (eat your hearts out Neill Hamilton and Amber) with his cutting-edge offer of a Kaus-like Star Poster skipping service. Find it here, on the WillV post below, and here.]


You wrote about anarchists who capture the popular imagination? Obviously, you didn't know about the merry band here in the Fray, a group that perfected popular anarchy long ago. Come join us as those from the left, center, and right are terrorized for intellectual pretensions, grammar and punctuation, and bourgeois status symbols. Your sequel could write itself.

--WillV

(To reply, click here.)


It has been suggested that liberals backing down on their opposition to nuclear power is equivalent to conservatives backing down on the rights of children who cannot yet defend themselves against abortions. I'm not going to bother with the actual debates, but I would like to say that liberals and conservatives alike view the nuclear power question as a balance of risk vs savings. Nuclear power is cheap, plentiful, and the electricity is the same either way. The only questions are these: can the plants be run safely, can the waste be disposed of safely. These are practical concerns, and as the need for power increases, the risks seem less ominous. If we were to suddenly find unlimited sources of sulfer free oil, or a way to cheaply produce reliable solar energy, conservatives would find the risk of nuclear power unpalatable. Nobody opposes nuclear power on moral grounds, everybody has practical concerns.

Abortion, infanticide, pornography, etc: These are moral issues, not practical issues. No conservative would say that he opposes abortion because there are too few babies being produced. Moral issues are fundamentally different from practical concerns.

In any case, conservatives and liberals frequently change their positions on practical issues, as things become palatable or circumstances change. When they start giving up moral positions, there had better have been a revelation, because abandonment of a moral position out of expediency is ... immoral

--Ben Kirkup

(To reply, click here.)

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