No More Learning

We also recognize the great variation in interpretations of reality, especially in relationship to the "psychological realities" of individual patients. And we extend the concept of reality to suggest something on the order of the way things are, as opposed to the way that the patient imagines them to be. In fact, we regard the therapeutic relationship as a means of enhancing the patient's reality-testing, of helping him to recognize his own distortions.
All of these usages have validity; but the therapist's notion of reality is nonetheless highly colored by his own ideological convic- tions about such matters as psychological health and illness, social conformity and rebelliousness, commitment and detachment, and especially about what constitutes wise or mature attitudes and be- havior. Moreover, it is precisely these issues--and their relationship to problems of personal identity--which trouble patients in psycho- therapy in America today, rather than the more clear-cut symptom neuroses described during the earlier days of psychoanalysis. This means consequently that unless the therapist can sort out his own reality prejudices, he may inadvertently transmit his personal ideologies within the treatment situation and require a successful implant upon the patient as a criterion for cure. Since ideological convictions about all of these matters are never absent, and indeed are necessary for any constructive change in therapy, they are better openly discussed as a part of the therapeutic process, and discussed in a manner that allows for their subjectivity and tenta- tiveness. To do this requires the view that reality is both definite
(in relationship to external events), and highly relative (in relation- ship to any observer's interpretation of such events).
Concerning milieu therapy, I have already mentioned thought reform's demonstration of the tremendous influence which a partic- ular milieu--and the psychological themes contained therein--can
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bring to bear upon the individual person. This has great importance for psychiatric practice in a variety of ways, but I shall limit myself here to mentioning the harmful effects of environments that are "extremist" in regard to the magnitude of stimuli which they offer. At one pole is the deprived milieu--the milieu of "sensory depriva- tion"21--in which stimuli are so sparse as to be insufficient for the maintenance within the individual person of a reasonable degree of interest in and responsiveness toward his surroundings. Such an environment has been created under experimental condi- tions, and it produces patterns of boredom, restlessness, stimulus- hunger, extensive day-dreaming, loss of organized thinking, hyno- gogic states, and a variety of hallucinatory experiences. The rough equivalent of a deprived milieu within a psychiatric environment is the old-fashioned back ward in which patients sat about (and un- fortunately still sit about) aimlessly, with little or no challenge or activity-evoking stimuli from their external surroundings. The op- posite pole is the milieu of ideological totalism, in which the in- dividual is bombarded with stimuli to the point of suffocation. The counterpart of this kind of environment within a psychiatric hos- pital would be (again speaking very roughly) the "total push" ap- proaches adopted during the recent past by many institutions as a reaction against the stagnancy of the back wards atmosphere. While this was a definite improvement, it sometimes led to ac- tivity for activity's sake; a revealing comment on this was made to me by a schizophrenic patient after a few weeks' exposure to total push: "Gee, Doc, I wish I had a minute to sit down and think. "
There is a certain similarity in these two types of extreme en- vironments: both are overcontrolled milieux, and both interfere with the variety and balance of environmental stimuli required for optimal psychological function. Both are thus ultimately "de- prived," although we cannot say (as has sometimes been suggested) that the milieu of sensory deprivation is an experimental model for thought reform.
Psychiatric hospitals have learned to avoid both extremes, and to develop programs and activities which offer a better balance between individual and milieu, so that the patient is neither overwhelmed by external stimuli nor so cut off from them that he is thrown back entirely upon his already malfunctioning internal life. Recent workers have stressed both socialization and individual creativity,
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the increase of "open" (unlocked) wards, and the therapeutic com- munity. They have advocated patient participation in the planning of hospital programs, a balance between ordered and spontaneous activities, and finally, an avoidance of the identity of permanent patienthood through emphasizing the patient's connections with and educational preparation for--rather than his medical isolation from--the outside world. 22
Finally, thought reform also has sobering implications for psy- chiatric theory. Despite contrivances and crudities, Chinese Com- munist theory about the "class character of man" was made opera- tive and--at least to a certain extent--could be shown to "work. " Theories have an irrepressible tendency to confirm themselves, especially when one deals with human beings; in Alfred North Whitehead's phrase, "the idea is a prophecy which procures its own fulfillment. " This does not mean that we need despair and give up theorizing entirely (I certainly have shown no such tend- ency in this book); but it does suggest that psychiatrists can learn from physical scientists to look on theory not as a permanent and unalterable structure but rather as a useful and relatively valid means of ordering the data of experience within the framework of existing knowledge. Everyone of course recognizes this about theory--except when it comes to his theoretical beliefs.
Similarly, thought reform should make us somewhat cautious about those claims to "unification" of the behavioral sciences which imply an ultimate monopoly of one approach or an ultimate ideal of incontrovertible truth. A plunge into this kind of theoretical closure would be but another example of an intolerance for con- fusion driving us into the seductive embrace of totalism. I do not suggest that we can afford to rest content or cease being critical of faulty and ill-conceived theory and research; nor is there any doubt about our need for greater unity in our knowledge of man. But thought reform illustrates (and scientific experience strongly af- firms) the importance of remaining open to knowledge from all sources, even (or especially) the most unlikely. I am convinced that we need new approaches to psychiatric theorizing based upon humanized notions of style, pattern7 and configuration in the inter- play of internal and external psychological forces, rather than upon the more simplistic cause-and-effect mechanical images of nine- teenth-century physics now so widely employed. Such new ap-
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preaches seem to be necessary if we are to learn more about the nature of man's emotional involvement in his changing physical environment, the ways in which he is himself undergoing change, and the relationship of this change to psychological health and disease, and to the realization of human potentialities. They will require outlooks which are the very antithesis of totalism: a subtle and flexible historical perspective beyond that of the individual life- history, a certain degree of boldness in the application of dis- ciplined imagination, and a willingness to risk being wrong--or to expose (in Riesman's term) the "nerve of failure. "
Religion, Political Religion, and Science
I have already suggested that thought reform bears many re- semblances to practices of organized religion, and to various kinds of religious re-education. Indeed, most of the psychological themes of ideological totalism can be found somewhere in the Judeo- Christian tradition, however indirect any such theological in- fluences may have been in the development of thought reform itself. These totalist tendencies have usually been related either to the theocratic search for heresy or to patterns of revitalizing enthusiasm--or (as in thought reform) to both.
In the first of these, the theocratic search for heresy, the in- evitable assumption is that the administrators--whether themselves secular or clerical--rule their community and carry out their ideo- logical purifications only as agents of a perfect and omniscient deity. The classical examples are the Inquisition of the middle ages and the treason and anti-Papist trials of sixteenth-century England. Both of these movements were characterized by orgies of false confessions, apparently produced by psychological manipulations of reality, identity, and guilt similar to those of thought reform. Thus the Inquisition created its own witches, much as thought reform created its spies and reactionaries--this despite the fact that Inquisitors were specifically cautioned in one of their "technical manuals" (Malleus Maleficarum or Witches' Hammer) 23 against the undesirable possibility of producing false confessions. And prominent persons in Tudor England, impressed by "the brilliant aura of divinity, the inscrutable light of infallibility which emanated from the royal person" denounced themselves for crimes they had
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never committed. 24 Chinese Confucianism (whether or not one considers it a religion) on the whole avoided such tendencies, al- though it too at times became sensitive to heresy and moved in the direction of totalism; for the most part it created something closer to what Whitehead has termed a "genial orthodoxy," and allowed a considerable amount of personal leeway within the limits of its unchallengeable assumptions (in this respect not unlike some phases of medieval Catholicism).
The second variety of religious totalism, that associated with revitalizing enthusiasm, has been widespread enough: it can be found in the more extreme practices of early Lutheranism and Calvinism,25 in the Chiliastic sects of the middle ages26 and in many post-Reformation fundamentalist and revivalist cults. All of these movements, according to Ronald Knox, reflect the "over- mastering influence" of St. Augustine--even if "exaggerated now from this angle, now from that. " 27 Usually laying great stress upon the dramatic personal conversion experience, while varying in their relative emphasis upon confession and re-education, they have sought to purify man in accordance with a particular vision of Biblical truth or prophecy; as in thought reform, this vision has sometimes been so urgent that men have been physically and psychologically brutalized in its name.
Beyond these theological excesses, thought reform has a more fundamental relationship to religion in general, a relationship noted by almost every priest and minister who has come into contact with it. One Jesuit priest who was studying Chinese indoctrination methods in Hong Kong emphasized to me the following parallels with Christianity: the concept of love (of country, "the people," labor, science, and public property); the concept of hope in the future (through the accomplishments of socialism); faith (in Communist ideology); a deity (the Communist movement); a spirit of martyrdom, of sacrifice and suffering, an aspiration to sainthood; stress upon humility and selflessness; and the stress upon converting theoretical principles into a way of life. (Many secular writers--Bertrand Russell, for instance--have made similar com- parisons. ) Others among my subjects compared thought reform to their own Jesuit training, although they were usually quick to dis- tinguish the two on the basis of ultimate moral purpose. A Protes- tant missionary was struck by its similarity with the Moral Re-
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armament movement in which he had at one time been active-- especially in regard to such things as group manipulation of guilt and planned spontaneity. 28 One or two priests spoke of Com- munism as "nothing but a Christian heresy"--a statement which perhaps says both too much and too little; and few among my subjects, whatever their clerical or secular status, failed to comment upon the "religious" nature of thought reform's emotional in- tensities, moral energies, and exhortative demands.
Keeping in mind thought reform's close relationship to religion, how can we distinguish totalist practice within religious institutions from more balanced forms of spirituality? Rhadakrishnan, the dis- tinguished Indian philosopher and statesman, points to organizing tendencies within religion as the specific danger:
When religion becomes organized, man ceases to be free. It is not God that is worshipped but the group or the authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority and not violation of integrity. 29
I believe we must consider also the prevailing themes within a particular religious milieu. Thus religious totalism can be recognized by the criteria outlined in Chapter 22, and especially by the fol- lowing trends: exaggerated control and manipulation of the in- dividual, the blanketing of the milieu with guilt and shame, the emphasis upon man's hopeless depravity and worthlessness, and upon his need to submit abjectly to a vengeful deity--all within the framework of an exclusive and closed system of ultimate truth.
Contrasting with religious totalism are those religious situations which stress man's worth and his possibilities as well as his limita- tion; his capacity to change as well as the difficulties inherent in bringing about such change; and faith and commitment without the need for either self-negation or condemnation of nonbelievers. These attitudes leave room for emotional and intellectual growth as opposed to static doctrinal repetitions, and a broadened sensi- tivity to the world rather than a retreat into religious embeddedness. Since each of the world's major religions has at one time or an- other demonstrated both of these contrasting tendencies, any particular religious environment must be judged according to its own characteristics. 30
Man is unlikely to give up his need for the sense of awe and devo-
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tion inherent in the religious experience; but there are indications from many parts of the world that organized religion is playing a diminishing role in mediating human change. Religious institu- tions, while highly influential, tend to assume a relatively conserva- tive stance, and political movements, as well as scientific and technological innovations, have become the great regulators of change. During the past century, emotions formerly directed toward organized religion have been expressed in relationship to politics and science. This rechanneling of emotion is not without its dangers; as Camus said, "Politics is not religion, or, if it is, then it is nothing but the Inquisition. " 31 Such political inquisitions occur --as in thought reform--when ideological totalists set up their own theocratic search for heresy.
One example of this variety of totalism in recent American history would be McCarthyism, a bizarre blend of political religion and extreme opportunism. True, this movement never developed the scope or the organization of a full-scale thought reform pro- gram, either during the lifetime of its leader or after his death; yet it had many uncomfortable resemblances, including most of the characteristics of ideological totalism. In particular: the "big ac- cusation" accompanied by "small facts" (like that described by Father Vechten); the quick development of a relationship of guilt between the accused and his environment, along with ruthless exploitation of ostracism and shame; a cult of confession and re- pentance; a stress upon self-betrayal and a bond of betrayal be- tween accusers and accused; the creation of a mythological doctrine (the State Department was being overrun by Communist "subver- sives" who were in turn responsible for "losing China"); and the demand that victims take on a new identity in accordance with this myth. The ostensible purpose of McCarthyism was of course that of fighting Communism; in the end, it not only did great service
to Communism throughout the world, but also became a poor imitation of its declared enemy. Indeed, the focus of so much of McCarthyism's ideological mythology upon China seems more than coincidental. It suggests that the American emotional involvement in that country, based on years of missionary activity and wartime alliance, was so great, and the events of the Communist revolution so far-reaching and unpalatable, that the American public was receptive to a rewriting of history no less distorted than that of
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thought reform's own myth. And among those most actively en- gaged in the McCarthyist movement were many former Com- munists turned anti-Communist--all of which again seems to confirm (at varying levels of politics and individual emotion) the principle that totalism breeds totalism.
But McCarthyism was not simply a reaction to Communism; it had close connections with specific religious and secular currents in American life. Edward Shils has convincingly demonstrated its relationship to religious fundamentalism and to the demagogic strain of political populism. 32 This relationship suggests that the political inquisition and its related totalist phenomena find fertile soil in a wide variety of social and historical conditions and in virtually any culture. It also reveals the source of one of McCarthy- ism's fatal weaknesses--its antiscientific bias.
As Shils points out, the McCarthyist harassment of scientists within and without the government was not only a reflection of its general mania concerning "security," but also of the fundamen- talist's long-standing distrust of the scientist, and of the dema- gogue's resentment of the intellectual The thought reform move- ment also shows great distrust of the intellectual, but in contrast worships science and scientists. In these extreme attitudes we see a modern shift of the god-devil axis from religion to science.
The god side of the axis (by no means confined to the Com- munist world) is expressed vividly by Michael Polanyi:
. . . just as the three centuries following on the calling of the Apostles sufficed to establish Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Em- pire, so the three centuries after the founding of the Royal Society suf- ficed for science to establish itself as the supreme intellectual authority of the post-Christian age. "It is contrary to religion! "--the objection ruled supreme in the iyth century. "It is unscientific! " is its equivalent in the 2oth. 33
Accompanying this deification is the expectation that science will supply a complete and absolutely accurate mechanistic theory of a closed and totally predictable universe. Modern physics has long disowned this ideal, but it persists in the human sciences--bio- logical, psychological, and social--and is particularly damaging there. Thought reform is its ultimate expression--a mechanized
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image of man within a closed society, and a claim to scientific method in the remaking of man in this image. There is the as- sumption that science--that is, the "social science" of Marxism-- can liberate men from the encumbrances of all past institutions, family ties, social loyalties, professional affiliations, and religious and philosophical commitments: first by exposing these as "un- scientific/* then by demonstrating that they are no longer necessary in a truly "scientific" environment. It is true that this faith in science can produce much that is humane and beneficial: a dis- tinguished British physician, for instance, after his return from a visit to China termed the Chinese Communist Party "probably the best instrument ever devised for cleaning up a slum, for instructing its inhabitants in hygiene and for getting everybody immunized. " 34 But men also require institutions and conventions of varying de- grees of rationality; and thought reform, rather than eliminating such institutions, has established new ones even more encompassing than the old, and a good deal more blinding in relationship to knowledge and truth.
While this god-pole of science seems now to predominate almost everywhere, it is possible that there lurks beneath it more of the devil-pole than might be suspected. For there are also suggestions
(evident in many kinds of literature, including science fiction) of great hostility toward science, hostility beyond the fundamentalist prejudices of McCarthyism. Men resent the power of science to change familiar landscapes and to reshape the world in ways that make them feel less at home in it. Above all, they fear the destruc- tive power of science, its capacity to create weapons which could destroy mankind. Science becomes, if not a disguised devil, at least a vengeful god to be feared beyond all others, and people begin to believe that if only we could be rid of science and scientists the world would be left in peace. God-pole and devil-pole, equally misleading and dangerous in their extremism, may even exist concurrently within the same mind. 35
There are more constructive approaches to science, and there are alternatives to the kinds of totalist imbalance we have described among science, politics, and religion. An extensive discussion of these would be beyond both the scope of this book and my personal capabilities; but I would like to indicate a few of the possibilities
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which have been suggested by scientists themselves.
Albert Einstein, for instance, stressed the need for an equilibrium
between science and nonscientific tradition:
. . . thd scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other . . . the aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capa- ble. . . . Y et it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. . , . To make clear these funda- mental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they can- not be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer, they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and the aspirations and judgments of individuals. 86
Einstein does not claim for science the omnipotence which totalists bestow upon it, nor the authority to dictate or replace the full complex of ideals that men live by.
Indeed, the greatest of scientists have frequently spoken of their own need for faith--or trust--in the order of the universe, of their awe and humility before it, of the inevitable incompleteness of
their understanding of it. Thus, Robert Oppenheimer writes about his profession:
In it we learn, so frequently that we could almost become accustomed to it, how vast is the novelty of the world, and how much even the physi- cal world transcends in delicacy and in balance the limits of man's prior imaginings. We learn that views may be useful and inspiriting although they are not complete. We come to have a great caution in all assertions of totality, of finality or absoluteness. 37
It seems clear that scientific practice should lead one to reject, rather than embrace, totalism of any variety. J. Bronowski carries this view further in his discussion of "the scientific spirit" as a mode of thinking, with its emphasis upon "the creative mind/' the "leap of imagination/' and the "habit of truth"; and its require- ment that "the society of scientists . . . be a democracy [which] can keep alive and grow only by a constant tension between dissent and respect, between independence from the views of others and tolerance for them. " 3S
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Science can advance greatly even in a totalitarian society, but it always requires a special enclave in which there exist speculative freedom and the "habit of truth. " (Genuine science can serve as an escape from philistine sacred science and becomes in such a society one of the few professions in which unhindered creative work is possible. Indeed the attractions of this relatively free and highly-respected enclave within an over-controlled society are in- evitably felt by that society's most talented young men and women, and may have much to do with the impressive scientific progress which has taken place in Russia. )
The ideas of Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Bronowski suggest the possibility of a society in which politics and science coexist neither in total isolation nor in suffocating embrace; in which political bodies help to guide scientifically-based change with sensi- tive concern for the simultaneous altering, elimination, and preser- vation of various traditional institutions; in which science itself is free to explore all aspects of the human and nonhuman realms, while actively resisting anyone's claim to a mechanized absolute: and above all, of a society supporting a variety of clerical and secular approaches to knowledge and to faith, no one of which is permitted to impose upon the others the threats and restrictions of self-acclaimed final truth.
We need not dwell upon the difficulties of achieving such a vision, and during the last half-century the world has, if anything, moved further from it. Nor is the task made simpler by the dramatic transformations which science is helping to promote everywhere, the significance of which is baffling to nonscientists and by no means fully clear to scientists themselves. Yet this vision can provide not only an alternative to totalism but also an approach toward restoring a more favorable balance in the creative-destructive po- tential always inherent within this three-way interplay. If religion, politics, and science can reach such an equilibrium, they will be- come less the objects of extremist emotions and more the rightful agents of three vital tendencies of individual mental life: spirituality, judiciousness, and the mastery of the unknown.
? CHAPTER 24 'OPEN" PERSONAL CHANGE
Nontotalist approaches to re-education can encour-
age an experience of individual change very different from that promoted by thought reform--one characterized by "openness to the world" rather than by personal closure. Not much has been written about the psychology of this open form of per- sonal change, and I will attempt only to suggest some of its features in relationship to the general problem of human change at this historical moment. I do so well aware of the difficulties involved both in formulating such change and in actually achieving it; yet it would seem to me less than responsible to conclude this study in any other way.
Any statement about human change depends upon one's assump- tions concerning the extent to which adult and near-adult people can change. Chinese reformers seem to assume an extreme malle- ability of human character. They go far beyond conventional Marxist-Leninist approaches in their conviction that even those who have been exposed to the most pernicious influences of the "exploiting classes" can "change their class" and personally "turn over. " They look upon human beings, at least implicitly, aswrongly- molded clay, needing only new molds and proper remolding from ideological potters--a remolding process which they themselves are willing to pursue with the hottest of fires and the most suf- focating of kilns. Theirs is the totalist vision of change, what J. L.
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Talmon has called "the sustained and violent effort to make all things new/'1
Psychiatric experience can support no such view. As psychiatrists, we are in fact constantly impressed with the enduring quality of emotional patterns developed during infancy and childhood, and with the difficulties involved in changing these. We are also struck by the importance of certain universals of emotional life--am- bivalent admixtures of love, hate, shame, guilt, striving, and de- pendency. These exist partly outside of conscious awareness, and none can be completely eliminated even by the dramatic type of change which thought reform proposes. It may be, however, that in psychiatry we err in the opposite direction, that we underesti- mate the possibilities for adult change. Thus some psychiatric writing seems to express the ultra-conservative notion that there is nothing new under the sun, that man is so "determined" by his instincts and by the events of his childhood that all suggestion of later change is illusory.
Recent work in the human sciences, however, suggests a middle ground,2 and it is this approach I wish to pursue here. For I be- lieve that change during adult life is real and perpetual; significant change may be extremely difficult to consolidate, but the capacity to change significantly during adult life has become in this his- torical epoch increasingly necessary for emotional survival. Thus, in the individual subjects of this study, important changes occurred during late adolescence and adulthood, although impressivelycon- sistent behavioral patterns remained throughout their lives. And more universally, we find imaginative expression of this capacity to change in the great mythological theme of "death and rebirth," a theme given coercive expression in thought reform.
I wish to describe in rough outline a pattern of personal change, another symbolic form of death and rebirth, parallel to but sig- nificantly different from that imposed by totalist practice. Such a change can occur through more or less formal association with education, religion, therapy, or politics; it can also take place through less structured encounter with new people, new ideas, or new landscapes. We may conveniently envision it within a three- step sequence: confrontation, reordering, and renewal.
By confrontation I mean the combination of inner impulse and external challenge which creates within a person the simultaneous
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recognition of the need and the possibility for change. I stress the element of inner impulse because I believe that there is in man a fundamental urge toward change--a force which propels him in the direction of what is new and unknown--ever battling with his opposing tendency to cling exclusively to what is emotionally familiar. In this sense man is never simply "changed" by external forces, but rather finds his individual impulses toward change acti- vated and manipulated by these forces. Without such inner as- sistance from each individual person, the agencies of change could have little success, and little justification for their existence. Ex- ternal challenge is thus always related to internal urges to know and to master.
This open confrontation causes a questioning of identity rather than thought reform's assault upon identity. It calls forth the most specifically human of faculties--introspection and symboliza- tion--rather than stunting these faculties by use of totalist coercion and dogma. The person so challenged is thrown back upon the re- sources derived from his own past without being thrust into thought reform's regressive stance. He experiences anxiety at the prospect of emerging from the security of existing identities and beliefs, pos- sibly even the severe anxiety of potential nothingness, but not the sense of being annihilated by all-powerful manipulators of anxiety. He feels the guilt and shame of unfulfillment--the "shock of recognition" of neglected personal capacities--but without the virulent self-hatred demanded by the accusatory totalist milieu. He may experience a deep sense of inner and outer disharmony, of un- comfortable personal alienation, but not the antagonistic estrange- ment of thought reform. The rebel who undergoes "a feeling of revulsion at the infringement of his rights,"3 the prospective re- ligious convert who becomes aware of his "divided self,"4 the seeker of psychotherapy who comes to recognize the debilitating nature of his neurosis, the artist who feels himself drawn into a new creative realm, and the ordinary man who at some point questions the pattern of his existence--all of these are examples of confrontation.
To act upon this confrontation is to advance to the next phase, that of reordering; and this means embarking upon the work of re-education and change. As in thought reform, reordering is likely to include a personal "emptying" process--some form of confession
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and exploration of existential guilt--in the service of exposing and altering past emotional patterns. But the personal exposure is dignified by privacy and balance; insights and interpretations are neither coercively publicized nor artificially guided along the nega- tive thought reform channels of self-betrayal and logical dishonor- ing. The involved individual cannot avoid the impact of his nega- tive identity, but he is not forced to view himself as nothing but this most debasing of self-images. In dealing with the harsh realities of his own limitations and of the world outside himself, he is by no means guaranteed a happy ending: he may indeed experience the terror and dread of a true sense of tragedy, but not the humiliating com- mand performance of thought reform's manipulated pseudo-tragedy.
Symbolic emptying is accompanied by a corresponding absorp- tion of new or refashioned ideas and emotions; this absorption can be accomplished by relatively free learning rather than by the nar- row impositions of a sacred science. This learning requires a measure of personal isolation, and even a temporary refractoriness to alternative influences, but not the hermetic self-sealing of totalism. There is the opportunity to test the personal validity of new ideas, to experiment with new forms of human relationships and creative expression, rather than the demand that all of these be subjugated to prefabricated totalist ideology and language. Through emptying and absorption, the individual (as in thought reform) constantly reinterprets his own past. He cannot reinterpret without ideological bias, without a certain amount of emotional polarization and an overcritical attitude toward his past conditioned by his urge to change; but he can find ways to moderate his judg- ments (through both introspection and outside influences), rather than having them further distorted by the always immoderate, guilt saturated totalist milieu.
The third and final stage consists of a sense of open renewal, contrasting with thought reform's closed form of rebirth. Renewal depends upon the new alignment--the new sense of fit--between personal emotions and personally-held ideas about the world; in other words, on a new interplay between identity and ideology in which both have been changed. Through renewal, the individual can free himself from exaggerated dependencies and experience an "emergence from embeddedness"5 rather than a plunge into a new form of totalist embeddedness. He can accomplish this only by
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viewing his relationships to old authorities as steps along his per- sonal path toward greater independence, not by making the illusory totalist effort to annihilate their inner remnants or deny their existence.
He is free to experience a new or reinforced commitment to an ideal or a cause, but a commitment made autonomously and in the face of alternatives, rather than as a compulsory loyalty as- sociated with a bond of betrayal. Instead of totalism's highly- simplified and distorted pure image approach to knowledge, he may acquire an enlarged receptivity to intellectual and emotional complexities around him.
Nor can this renewal be consolidated by the symbolic submission of a "final confession" or a "final thought summary"; rather, there must be an awareness (whether gradual or sudden) of genuine self-knowledge and a readiness to accept its consequences. These include: a personal responsibility for expres- sions of love and hate, rather than a submission to their legislation by push-button enthusiasm or by ideological command; and a recognition of social identifications beyond the self--free of ideo- logical exclusiveness, and including yet transcending family, pro- fession, culture, and nation.
A person so renewed, instead of being coercively reshaped ac- cording to an imposed ideological myth, will be able to call forth the "submerged metaphor" ? of his own mythologically nourished imagination to further his efforts at self-expression. He will feel himself to be connected with his past, however critical he may be of it, and will not try, in the totalist manner, to cut himself off from it completely. This new harmony, however, cannot afford him total relief from personal conflict and confusion. A certain amount of conflict and confusion are in fact inherent in the enlarged life space which he attains, in contrast to their attempted elimination by totalist constriction. Such renewal, whether achieved through per- sonal search or by guided secular or clerical change, places one in more viable relationship to the universal human experience, or to "the principle of continuous life. " 7
In contrasting this open style of change with the closed thought reform mode, I am admittedly speaking in ideal terms. No such change can proceed entirely unhindered, as closed-system emotional patterns always exist within any person--patterns of regression,
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mistrust, and of incapacitating dependency--which undermine open change at every turn. The three steps I have described are, of course, schematic, since each is likely to be incomplete and all three can occursimultaneously.
Yet open change does occur and has been described. We can see it in the lives of great men: in, for instance, Camus' emer- gence from the "burning and disordered" years of his experiments with totalism (both Communism and nihilism) to become perhaps the most articulate moralist and exponent of autonomous com- mitment in our century. 8 We see it also in what William James described as the "willingness to be" of religious converts and the "states of knowledge" and "states of insight" of Eastern and Western mystics;9 and in what Michael Balint calls the "new be- ginning of love" of successfully treated psychoanalytic patients. 10 We have also observed change of this kind among the subjects of this study, in their casting off the closed influences of thought re- form and undergoinga personal experience of renewal (for example, Father Vechten, Father Luca, George Chen, and Mr. Hu). I would make the further claim that in the completion of every genuinely creative act, and in fact at some time during virtually every adult life, changes of this open variety take place.
Whether a change is open, closed, or something of each, it in- volves the entire person. For this reason I have stressed throughout this study the relationship of personal identity to specific attitudes and values as well as to larger ideologies; and I have used the con- cept of identity as a large configuration rather than a localized subdivision in the mental topography. Similarly, I have spoken little of "persuasion" and much of pressures toward identity change. For I feel that belief and identity are so intimately related that any change in one must affect the other. This means that anyone's approach to ideologies, within his own culture or without, will invariably be strongly influenced by existing group identifications
(or more broadly, by the need to belong), as well as by the ever- present inner struggle for a self-respecting personal definition. Also of great importance is the question of guilt, and especially ex- istential guilt. That which will permit a man to come to terms with his own feeling of limitation and at the same time afford him a sense of group affiliation and personal continuity is that which he will come to believe.
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This psychological interplay is always related to broader historical influences. Problems of identity and belief are likely to become more widespread and intense when individual change is associated with rapid culture change--and during our epoch rapid culture change has become the rule rather than the exception. Thus the changing identity sequence we described for China in Chapter 19 has important meaning for other countries still emerging from traditional individual and social patterns--countries in Asia, the Middle East, parts of Europe, Africa, and South America. Nations in all of these areas have, in widely diverse ways, shared an ethos of filialism and an identity of the filial son. Now mostly in some kind of transitional stage, they show strong evidence of rebellion against filialism and of adopting the identity of the modem student. Highly vocal "youth cultures" are appearing where they had never existed before--young people in great conflict with their parents and with family-oriented customs, demanding self-expres- sion in place of youthful deference, seeking active patterns (or even activism) rather than passive ones, experiencing bitter anger and painful guilt in connection with their rebellion, undergoing considerable confusion in identity, and feeling desperate ideo- logical hunger. This seems to be the individual pattern of culture change within any recently traditional society. And contesting ideologies--nationalism, liberal democracy (or democratic social- ism), and Communism--are also still battling as they did in China.
Certainly a major task of the human sciences is to relate knowl- edge of specific cultures to existing universal alternatives in the direction of change--and to gain more understanding of the actual process of change in both cultures and individual people. 11 As John Dewey wrote in 1949, "Social 'science' waits upon a grasp of the fact that the only possible stable coordinations are equilibria of movements in respect to one another. . . . Now that practically all things are 'in process/ failure to study the direction in which they are moving constitutes the present . . . disorganization. " 12
In pursuing this problem, we will do well to pay special attention to youth groups, to men and women from sixteen to thirty years old. It is they who most enthusiastically espouse the change- stimulating ideas and ideologies. And there is good reason to believe that in these youth groups we can regularly see, as we saw in China, a culture's experimentations with its own possible future
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courses. I do not wish to imply that these youth group phenomena alone initiate culture change, for there is no denying the im- portance of technological and industrial development, of altered patterns in child-rearing and education, and of new ideologies and social institutions. But I do suggest that youth groups represent a human vanguard in the sense that they are the first and most intense indicators of the kinds of psychological experience and identity shift which will occur subsequently in adult populations throughout a particular society,
Thus, I believe that the developmental phase of late adolescence and early adulthood has special significance for all subsequent per- sonal change. This is the period in which adult identity takes shape, and it is the time of strong enthusiasms, of a marked tend- ency toward emotional polarization, of great ideological receptivity, and of maximum experiential intensity. I suspect that during any adult change it is necessary to revive in some fashion--or else perpetuate--the predominant patterns of this phase of life, perhaps even more than those of the earlier phases of childhood to which psychiatry presently directs so much attention. This is not to minimize the importance of character formation during early life, but rather to suggest that the altering of adult identity depends upon a specific recapturing of much of the emotional tone which prevailed at the time that this adult identity took shape. This view is consistent with William James' association of religious conver- sion with "the ordinary storm and stress and moulting-time of adolescence," and his conviction that "conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual
life of maturity/'13 The "moulting-time" of youth, then, establishes within each man a model for later adult change; and the sudden emergence of youth cultures can similarly provide a social model
(or several alternative models) for later historical change.
All of this has much bearing on the problem of ideological totalism. For the more intense the identity strains and patterns of alienation among the modern students of any country emerging from filialism, the greater the possibility of this group's adopting extremist approaches to the resolution of such strains. In China
these took the form of Communist ideology, and the "therapy" of thought reform. Other countries may respond similarly to the
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attractions of totalism, as a means of achieving rapid economic and technological growth and of simultaneously dealing with identity tasks similar to those described for China: the destruction of traditional filialism, the undermining of Western liberalism, the mopping up of transitional chaos, and the resurrection of filial emotions in the service of a closed mass movement. These countries, insofar as their specific cultural traditions allow, could conceivably also adopt some thought reform-like process for the purpose of carrying out a similar program. In studying patterns of historical change, we should divest ourselves of the psychological illusion that a strong filial tradition is a bulwark against modern ideological totalism (or most specifically, Communism). The opposite seems to be true. It is precisely the desperate urge to sweep away decay- ing yet still powerful filial emotions and institutions that can call forth political totalism.
Nor are post-industrial cultures--including our own "affluent society"--immune from identity strains of equal severity, or from possible attractions to various forms of totalism. In our country, these attractions could stem from a sense of purposelessness, con- fusion, and lack of commitment; of dissatisfaction with the ritualism and roteness created by overorganization of our professional and social spheres (big society and mass society); of mounting evidences of corrupt and irresponsible practice in public life and within com- munication media; and of our relative ineffectually in the face of the gains of ideological rivals (including some envy of their ap- parent totalist efficiency). Again some of the patterns of youth culture may be revealing; and in American youth we encounter-- amidst much quiet conformity--rebellion which concerns itself less with political preoccupations and more with patterns of social nihilism, iconoclastic criticism of existing cultural forms, and an urge for direct and absolute "experience. " Indeed, the Zen Buddhist plunge of the American beatnik has in it some of the same element of total rejection of one's past, in exchange for another's past, as the Chinese intellectual's initial plunge into Western sociopolitical forms.
This is not to say that totalism is by any means the sole (or even most probable) eventuality, either for ourselves or for the transi- tional cultures of which we have spoken. It rather suggests the faltering state of liberal alternatives to totalism, the paucity of
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nontotalist social visions for the future, and the urgent necessity for such visions. It may be that the most fervent of liberal antitotalists --those most confident of their moral stand--are among those intellectuals who have known the most extreme forms of totalism-- among Chinese, Poles, and Hungarians who have spoken out against their regimes. The actions of these groups have an additional significance, for they demonstrate that the open nontotalist mode of existence has been sufficiently experienced to have become part of the broad human consciousness, and is therefore likely to con- tinue to endure everywhere as a viable alternative to totalism. The youth rebellions opposing totalism in Eastern Europe, Russia, and China seem to combine urges toward privacy, personal freedom, and self-expression (frequently manifested by interest in non- Communist literature, art, and jazz music, or by "bourgeois ro- mance*') with patterns of nihilism not too different from those found in the United States and among youths throughout the world.
Surely the craving and the search are universal: man seeks new modes of existence--blending the scientific, the political, the artistic, and the spiritual--which will provide liberal alternatives to totalism along with the sense of feeling meaningfully related to a world whose most constant feature is change. No one can predict from what quarter such a vision, or elements of it, may emerge.
We can be sure that these alternative visions will in part depend upon a more accurate perception of current human transformations --individually, by generations, and in terms of the broader evolu- tionary process. It may be that this knowledge will teach us that we require--as has been suggested in relationship to primitive societies--wholistic configurations of change which take into ac- count all aspects of human life while at the same time permitting a sense of continuity with one's personal past. 14 But perhaps we shall also have to make a more conscious effort to preserve specific elements within our heritage even as so much of it is in the process of being altered. Certainly we must learn to live with a good deal of conflict, confusion, and ferment, and at the same time cultivate the emotional balance of "thought which recognizes limits. "15 By "we" I mean mankind: "the community today is the planet,"10 and it is indeed already beyond that.
In studying thought reform and related expressions of totalism,
? 4 7 ^ THOUGHT REFORM
I have been profoundly impressed with the dangers which face this expanding human community, dangers which arise from man's tendency to symbolize his universe within a suffocating circle of hatred. I have been equally impressed with his ingenuity in break- ing out of that circle, with his physical and emotional resiliency, and with the extraordinary scope of his imaginative faculties at moments when he feels his existence most threatened.
? APPENDIX
A CONFESSION DOCUMENT
The following is the confession of Professor Chin
Yiieh-lin, made during the thought reform campaign of 1951-52, as translated in Current Background, No. 213, Ameri- can Consulate General, Hong Kong, October i, 1952. Professor Chin, who spent a number of years studying in this country, mostly at Harvard University, has been regarded as China's leading authority on formal logic.
CRITICIZING MY IDEALISTIC BOURGEOIS PEDAGOGICAL IDEOLOGY
By Chin Yiieh-lin
(Peking Kuang Ming Jih Pao, April 17, 1952)
Bom of a bureaucratic landlord family, I have always led a life of ease and comfort. I went abroad at nineteen and stayed there for eleven years to absorb the way of life and the predilection for pleas- ure of the European and American bourgeoisie. The principal source of my various pleasures lay in the decadent philosophy of the bourgeoisie, and for thirty years I played a game of concepts. I was engrossed in this game of concepts because it was the only way for me to feel happy and free, and to escape from the restric-
473
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tive realities of society, I thus cultivated the habit of running away from realities, despising realities, and leading a life isolated from realities. However, since I still had to live in a society of realities, the only way for me to maintain this life isolated from the realities was to gain certain privileges. I needed those privileges, and I thus fell a victim to the ideology of special privileges.
MY CRUST OF SELFISHNESS
My life in school served to form this outer crust of mine which
can conveniently be divided into three phases:
I. My decadent bourgeois philosophy. While in school, I inces-
santly disseminated the trivialities of metaphysical idealism, in particular the inanities of metaphysical philosophical methods. As I gradually assumed a position of leadership within the Philosophy Department of Tsinghua, all sorts of injuries to the people's enter- prises inevitably resulted as manifested in: ( i ) I obstructed the development of the philosophy of materialistic dialectics in Tsinghua's Philosophy Department. Though I never actually tried to stop the discussion of materialistic dialectics among teachers and students, I nevertheless throttled the development of ma- terialistic dialectics in Tsinghua's Philosophy Department by sub- jecting it to attacks by a circuitous system of philosophical debate. (2) I trained those who concerned themselves only with the game of concepts, were not interested in politics, and were even re- actionary. As for instance, Yin Fu-sheng, one of the reactionary elements for whose training I was responsible, is now serving the Chiang bandits in Taiwan. I was further possessed of the bourgeois viewpoint of the education of the talented. I was thus very much struck by Professor Shen Yiieh-ting's powers in playing the game of concepts. As a result of my evil influence, Professor Shen is even now seriously isolated from the realities. (3) I disseminated the purely technical viewpoint in logic. For twenty years I taught logic to numerous students. All the time, however, I only tried to teach logic from the formalistic viewpoint, as for instance I was only concerned with the correctness of the reasoning without caring about the truthfulness of the premises. My mistaken viewpoint of education for the talented led me to think highly of Wang Hao, who even now is serving the interests of American imperialism by being connected with an American university. (4) I encouraged the
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development of sectarianism within Tsinghua's Philosophy Depart- ment by stressing the highly involved analysis of concepts and the formulation of circuitous systems of philosophy as the most im- portaftt aspects of philosophy. I then thought that the Philosophy Department of Tsinghua was very good in these respects. This sort of sectarianism was inevitably one of the facts which obstructed the regulation of the departments and colleges.
II. My decadent "above-politics" "above-class" "out-of-the- worW", and "above-humanity" philosophy of life. Before the libera- tion, having absolutely no idea of the truth that the human world is created through labor, I mistakenly took the human race to be insignificant and the history of the human race to be but a minor episode in the main stream. I therefore tended to despise the world, and to become above-politics and above-class. My preoccupa- tion with this decadent philosophy of life led^ me to despise administrative work. I consequently tried by all means to minimize my personal affairs and adopted an attitude of absolute indifference toward all things. When I was charged with administrative work after the liberation, my mistaken attitude inevitably resulted in idiotic bureaucratism. Though a member of the University Adminis- tration Committee, I spoke up only once in all its meetings, and I honestly had nothing to talk about; and though the Dean of the College of Arts really had very little to do, what little there was I neglected altogether. For instance, I never seemed to remember that I was actually the Dean of the College of Arts when handling such matters as the resumption of publication of the Tsinghua Journal, the maintenance of proper relationship between the dif- ferent colleges and departments, etc. As Chairman of the Philos- ophy Department, I left the affairs of the department to take care of themselves, and I never bothered to do anything about personnel appointments within the department,
III. My ideology of special privileges. In order to maintain my way of life, I had to have special privileges. I felt the need for these privileges, I enjoyed these privileges, became obsessed by the ideology of special privileges, and I became one of the privileged few of Tsinghua. Though I was privileged, I yet refused to shoulder the ac- companying responsibilities. Thus, while I enjoyed special privileges in Tsinghua, yet I never burdened myself with administrative work.
The three above-mentioned phases constituted the main ingre-
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dients of my crust. The scope of the crust was moreover variable: one crust represented my individual self, one crust the Philosophy Department, while another represented Tsinghua. My personal crust being the "core" of this miniature universe, I accordingly remained completely indifferent to things which had little to do with my personal interests. Whenever the matter in question was in con- flict with my personal crust, I always sallied forth to give battle. As for instance, when the son of Professor Liang Ssu-ch'eng wanted to change his registration from the History Department to the Architecture Department, I, as an old friend of the family who knew him when he was born, tried to help him, in the thought that he was more suited to the study of architecture. Though there are certain strict restrictions in connection with the change of registra- tion from one department to another, yet I made use of my special privileges to work on his behalf which resulted in a series of serious mistakes. This is but one example of a situation which conflicted with my personal crust. I opposed the reform of curriculum be- cause I wanted to maintain the crust of the Philosophy Department in Tsinghua. When the regulation of departments and colleges started in 1950, I was dead against it7 for my most outstanding crust was Tsinghua University. Motivated by departmentalism, sectarianism, and the educational ideology of the bourgeoisie, I was of infinite harm to the program for the regulation of depart- ments and colleges. Had the regulation of departments and col- leges been carried out in 1950, then Tsinghua alone would have turned out another 5,000-6,000 cadres, and a far larger number would have been turned out throughout the country. Incalculable harm has thus been caused the democratic construction program of the entire country. For this I now hate myself beyond measure.
MY POLITICAL A TTITUDE
My crust is based on the past prevailing economic social founda- tion, that is, the capitalistic social system. In order to protect this crust, I had to give my political support to the old system of democ- racy. As a confirmed individualistic liberal, I have always based my political attitude upon this point of view. Only now have I realized that fact that the old democracy is but the dictatorship of the bourgeois class, and the so-called individual freedom is but the "freedom" for the bourgeoisie to exploit and oppress the laboring
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people. My numerous criminal deeds of the past should thus be attributed to my acceptance of individual liberalism.
With regard to my attitude toward American imperialism, as a result of long years of studying in America, the evil influences of bourgeois education, my large number of American friends, and my constant contact with Americans, I became instilled with pro- American thoughts which prevented me from realizing American imperialism's plots of aggression against China during the past hundred years, and turned me into an unconscious instrument of American imperialistic cultural aggression. I cried bitterly over the Twenty-one Demands, but took no notice of the Sino-American Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation. While I was highly indignant at the time of the Tsinan Incident during the Northern Expedition, and was all for resisting Japan when the Muk- den incident and the Luguochiao Incident took place, I never- theless remained blind to the misdeeds of American soldiers in China. In 1943 I was one of the Chinese professors who went to America on the invitation of the American State Department. There, totally deprived of my national standpoint as a result of my pro-American thoughts, I even tried to persuade the American State Department to force bandit Chiang to practice democracy.
With regard to my attitude toward the Soviet Union, in always looking at the USSR from the viewpoint of old democracy, I consistently distorted and slandered the Soviet Union, and right up to the liberation I thought that individual "freedom" does not exist in the Soviet Union. I considered both the October Revolu- tion and the purges within the Party to be "going too far," and that the Soviet Union made use of the Communist Party in other countries to interfere in their internal affairs. All these ideas were of course mistaken and reactionary. My principal mistake lay in thinking of the Soviet Union as devoid of individual freedom. At that time, in failing to take the October Revolution as an epoch- making great event of history, I only tried to antagonize the Soviet Union on the basis of my individual liberal pro-America ideology. It was only after the liberation that I succeeded gradually in gain- ing an understanding of true freedom, and thus to change my at- titude toward the Soviet Union.
With regard to student movements, I nearly always maintained a negative and double-faced attitude toward all the student move-
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ments I came across in my teaching career. On the one hand I "loathed" the Kuomintang of the Chiang bandits, while on the other hand I opposed the Communist Party of China. I say "loathed" advisedly, because I never tried to oppose them by any positive effort. Before I left for America in 1943, I had to go through five days of Kuomintang training in Chungking before I could get my passport, and had to write a short essay of two hundred words on the advisability for local officials to visit the central govern- ment. This was really a shame. Though I honestly loathed the Kuomintang, this was not what mattered. The important thing was that I opposed the Chinese Communists. This dualism in my make- up was best shown at the time of the December First Incident [a student movement which took place in 1945 in Kunming]. Though I was highly enthusiastic at the start of the movement, when I followed the footsteps of the progressive elements, I later lost my interest and finally I stood for the resumption of class. This was because I opposed the Communists. Soon after the end of the movement I quarreled with Professor Chang Hsi-jo and I told him in the sternest manner and in tears that, "It is you people who made such a mess of China. After depriving China of 'freedom/ it will take I don't know how many years to have it restored/'
As viewed from the three above-mentioned aspects, my political attitude was truly intolerable. How was it possible that though early in life I loved my country and wanted to save her from the fate of partition, yet I turned out to be such a fool later? On this point I have to charge the American imperialists who made use of a mission school, that is, Tsinghua College, and of the education I received while in America, to turn me into an instrument of Amer- ican imperialistic cultural aggression, deprived me of my national standpoint, prevented me from making a distinction between our friends and our enemies, and led me to do things detrimental to the people.
MY IDEOLOGICAL CHANGE
My preliminary understanding of the People's Liberation Army and the Communist Party. The miracles of the People's Liberation Army demanded my whole-hearted respect. I never thought such discipline possible, and they love the people so much. In the early days after the liberation, I was highly moved by an episode involv-
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ing the son of my maid Liu. When her son, who was working in a certain factory, misbehaved himself, certain soldiers of the PLA stationed in that factory tried to reform him by education. When this failed, two comrades of the PLA approached Liu to request her to go and reform her son. In the end, the two soldiers treated the mother to a meal and finally saw her home. I consider such a fighting force as unique in history. In the spring of 1949, I was fortunate enough to have the chance to listen to a series of reports rendered by various senior Party cadres. There attitude was so very honest and sincere and they were always prepared to practice what they preach. Though all occupying senior positions within the Party, they yet were always ready to admit their mistakes publicly before the masses. Such a party I consider unprecedented in China. However, this kind of recognition was only the preliminary stage of cognition through emotion, something within the capability of all Chinese.
My change in philosophical ideology. Generally speaking this change can be divided into three periods. During the first period, I was still unable to link up the actualities of the revolution with Marxism-Leninism. Though I had already acquired a preliminary understanding of the Communist Party and the PLA, yet this did not mean that I was ready to accept materialistic dialectics and historical dialectics. When Comrade Ai Ssu-ch'i lectured in Tsing- hua, I even tried to argue with him. Starting from the months of March and April 1949, I began to attend various meetings for the exchange of philosophical opinions. Even at that time I still held two mistaken points of view: in the first place I still looked upon materialistic dialectics and the old philosophy as equals, and, under the illusion that our Communist comrades were ignorant of the old philosophy, had the wish to initiate them in the mysteries of old philosophy; in the second place, in the mistaken idea that materialistic dialectics and historical dialectics were not well sys- tematized, I thought of putting them to order by means of my trivial system of analysis. My unbelievable arrogance and ignorance was the result of the fact that I was still looking at materialistic dialectics on the basis of the old philosophy. As I took part in the first attempt at curriculum reform in the above mentioned spirit, naturally nothing was accomplished. The Philosophy Department was thus prevented from making any progress.
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The second period lasted roughly from the start of the second attempt at curriculum reform in 1950 to the spring of 1951. From the very start of this period I had already accepted the leading posi- tion of materialistic dialectics, and rectified my two above-men- tioned mistakes. I then considered materialistic dialectics as a piece of red string linking up all different branches of knowledge. Yet, though I admitted its importance in an abstract fashion, my real interests were still focused on philosophy, as one of the branches of knowledge linked up by materialistic dialectics.