Social movements are social structures and not just sets of ideas. The three strands of any social movement can be reduced to variations on a structural feature of social movements. That feature is the role of the elite. Marxists wondered whether the vanguard served as educators of a working class destined to wrest history from the grasp of their oppressors, or as leadership cadres for democratic parties, or as the dictatorship of the proletariat. The psychoanalytic movement provides a similar trinity of roles for its elite, each of these anchored in one of the three strands a social movement generates.
The role for the therapist in the orthodox version of psychoanalysis is akin to the role of the revolutionary in the conflict intensification method of creating social change. The therapist serves as a light to some few and a beacon to all the rest. That is because the therapist is not a mere technician, like a computer repairman, who just delivers the treatment. Rather, his very presence, even if he remains silent, is to act as a point of emotional cathexis whereby the patient transfers to the therapist his sexual feelings as well as the way he conducts himself in other relationships. A recording device cannot replace the psychoanalyst. The therapist is crucial as the one who leads the patient back and forth between an outer world and an inner world that are very different from one another. This method of treatment does not come cheap because it is so labor intensive. A patient has to relive their past life even if in somewhat abbreviated time. The numbers of patients who can go through the process of psychoanalysis are few because the process is psychologically grueling as well as expensive and time consuming. Moreover, one must be up to the psychological and intellectual demands made on the patient by the cure. A patient has to be glib and self aware.
And so it is no wonder that psychoanalysis has been far more influential as a body of literature than as a mechanism of treatment. It reaches more people that way and, anyway, the leverage provided by treatment to improve the lives of patients may not be much greater than the leverage provided by reading Freud. For the most part, psychoanalysis serves as a set of cultural metaphors that explain why it is so difficult to come to terms with one's psyche, why psyches are in general so benighted. Early psychoanalysts were a fraternity of medically trained practitioners who had become convinced that a talking cure was the way to deal with the kinds of psychological symptoms presented to them by their patients. People treat Freud as a moralist rather than as someone beyond morality in that they adopt Freud's own stoical vision that to know of one's pain is not necessarily to alleviate it, but only to learn what must be borne as the result of personal history and the human condition.
The organizational role played by the elite in the conflict reduction version of psychoanalysis is to lead people towards a stronger sense of self. The elite is not limited to those trained in psychoanalysis but includes all of those wise heads who can bring out the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses of the less experienced and less sensitive and are in a position to play such avuncular roles. Training in the right doctrine is less important than character. The therapist or therapist surrogate is able to make use of any of a number of frameworks to impart good judgment about how one is to make use of the opportunities of the world to satisfy the needs of one's own particular soul. Priests and rabbis and ministers, far from being the perpetrators of illusion, can understand the souls of people, as can a beloved physician or a wise teacher, even if that is not the role for which a person is trained or hired. The therapist is a counselor who, for one reason or another, has learned the ways of the world and can intrude into a person’s life so that the person can cope with other aspects of life. The therapist is still, however, morally neutral in being separated from the rest of the roles in a person’s life. The cooperative therapist is not an employer of the person nor engaged in supportive pillow talk. But that person can be the neighborhood bartender who has listened to everybody’s problems and answered with a discerning remark and comforting tone. There are enough of these people so that everyone can find a spiritual advisor.
Some of those who are in occupations that provide some broadly defined manner of therapy may have first class characters and plenty of training, but the idea underlying accommodation is that the role can be played by a great number of people because the only thing required to play the role successfully is an empathetic character. Those with authority who exercise that authority in a humane manner and who exhibit the kinds of emotions that will let their subordinates develop their own sense of authority are doing no more than applying general principles of sound human relations that every right thinking person can appreciate. And so any modern elementary school teacher can be required to lead students in exercises in value clarification or conflict resolution under the pretense that this prepares them for learning rather than for life in general. Not much is expected from these exercises except the enhancement of self esteem and the diffusion of the idea that there are practical solutions for the uncoupling of emotional knots. Every social worker who counsels a nursing home patient or an applicant for welfare is supposed to provide some reinforcement for the idea that clients are able to meet the challenges that life and society have placed before them.
The third kind of intervention role is even less exclusive and it is characteristic of the adaptive school of psychoanalysis. Befitting its view that successful intervention in the healing of the psyche demands neither great expertise nor particularly fine character, there are any number of people who can provide the empathy and concern that will improve the ability of people to cope with their social lives. People are recruited to an occupation that includes intervention rather than recruited to an occupation that requires belief in the scientific adequacy of psychoanalysis or that provides an occasion for people with good insights into the needs of others to make use of those insights. The number within the elite becomes very large. It includes older people, human resource managers, football coaches and even first grade teachers, who carry the authority of being like the first grade teacher that you had even if you are now a doctor or a lawyer. Indeed, any person who has the prestige of holding a position that is in some sense superior to that of the “patient” is in a position to give advice, the truth of which is seen in the fact that the advice is constantly rebuffed, and so shows the recipient of the advice to be too callow or withdrawn or troubled to appreciate it—until such time as the recipient can appreciate it, as happens when the drunkard has reached bottom or the lackadaisical student realizes that his father was right in suggesting he do his homework, though that does not mean a young man coming out of his doldrums will give credit to the wisdom of his father. The world is full of some very large number of such mentors because everyone encounters some people who are in superior positions who also have managed to gain enough sense of the world so that they can act as confessors and confidants. Moreover, the role is sufficiently satisfying that superiors who are good at performing that adjunctive role are likely to do so even if that role is not part of their job description as dissertation advisor or supervisor of junior attorneys in a law firm.
It is not too much to say that the history of the psychoanalytic movement has been the institutionalization of watered down versions of the primal Freudian doctrine. The therapeutic elite expanded from a small well trained cadre of doctors to anyone with a degree in elementary education. The expanded elite engages not merely in treating the few for extreme illnesses but adjusts the majority of the population to its lot in life by explaining why actions that serve immediate psychological needs do not serve long term social needs. The message is still in the story of the disparity and alignment of a personal to a social history, but the message has lost its oomph. It is no longer a radical, soul searing message but an ordinary one, part of what it means to grow up in public, and so has become routine not just in content and delivery but also as an experience. That is because its essential paradox lost its power when sexuality became part of social life rather than something that could not be discussed in social life. What was left was a set of ideologies that promised one or another version of self-improvement.
For all three of these possibilities inherent in any social movement, Christianity supplies the model and the origin point. There may have been rebellions before Christianity, in that Moses and Spartacus wanted to liberate their people from slavery, but Christianity is out to solve a social problem, even if it is one of its own making: how can people be transformed so they might live in a better world, either metaphysical or the one whose imperfect form they presently inhabit. Christianity, moreover, is not just a religion but also a social movement in that it gives rise to any number of changes that have become identified with the Western World. These include modernization, the scientific and democratic revolutions, and secularization. These changes come about because Christianity incorporates the possibility of change. It does so because it posits ways in which history will or will not embody God’s purposes not merely as a failing away from or a living up to ideals, but because historical processes embody God’s will. History becomes the successive modification of a plan, and believers in this plan can always note where the plan went awry and how it is to be restored. History becomes a battleground for a claim of meaning, rather than a sphere of activity where failures have already been accounted for. If Christianity is a historical movement, in this special sense, it is also a movement in that it involves the organized mobilization of large numbers of people to bring about social change, and so is heir to all of the problems of organizing a movement. The three key strands of any social movement are the same as those of the three key heresies in Christianity, and so it is fair to know these strands by their generic titles.
All three of these heresies prospered in late Antiquity. Arianism was the idea that Jesus was just another one of the gods, a creature of God the Father, rather than coterminous with Him. In that event, Jesus was something more than a man but not much more, and so the idea that God has manifested Himself within the world at a particular time and place is reduced to the idea that anything can be a manifestation of God, and so there is not much difference between a world in which God has intervened and a world in which He has not intervened. The world is the way the atheists say it looks, except that one has a metaphor that allows treating some natural manifestations-- sunsets, or heroes, or political victories-- as exhibiting the immanence of God.
The second generic heresy is Manichaeism, which suggests that the heavens in which God struggles against the forces of evil is so distant from the plane on which ordinary history exists that the battle is one which we watch from the sidelines. In that case, there is not much we can do about the battle, and so secular history and religious history have very little to do with one another, which is clearly heretical to the idea that God cares about whether we as individuals carry out his commandments and our own role, which the Bible and Augustine place at the center of history.
The third generic heresy is Donatism, which originally seemed a minor issue of church organization. The question is whether the sacraments are efficacious if the priests who administer them are not themselves in a state of grace. But if that were necessary, no one could be certain that the sacraments they received were valid, for what parishioner can look into a priest’s soul? A Church has to rationalize its procedures enough so that, as in any bureaucracy, a subordinate knows when an order from a superior needs to be obeyed. But there is more to it than that. If the priesthood has to be saved, then every man has to be his own judge, deciding what is in his own consciousness that makes his avowal of his salvation valid. Salvation is a matter of the spirit rather than the sacrament. It is no wonder, then, that the Protestant heresy has been described as simply a successful revival of Donatism.
Any social movement distinguishes itself from the world it wants to change, the world as it seems, and so there is a question of how to relate the world as it is to the world as it seems. If that relationship is so remote that there seems little chance or ability for the world as it is to affect the world that really is, or visa versa, then the doctrine has fallen into the Manichean heresy. There is a war between Good and Evil, between God and the Devil, and humans are bystanders of this war, little more than the tools of the forces that control them. This is the doctrine that yields a conflict intensification model of social problems. You can imprison the criminals so as to punish them for their nature.
If that relationship is so close that there is no significant difference between the elite or esoteric or refined point of view and the mass, common or naive point of view, then the doctrine has fallen into the Arian heresy, which is defined in religious terms as the doctrine that Christ is among the created rather than co-terminus with God, in which case the world is the way it appears to be, God’s most significant intervention into it no different from the arrival of any other wise man or human invention. This is the conflict reduction and elimination model of social problems because people are capable of impacting their fates without supernatural intervention except as God serves as a regulative ideal and Jesus as a moral role model. It is the world of Unitarians and Mormons and Reform Jews and Liberation theologians. You can imprison the criminal so as to rehabilitate the criminal.
If the relationship between the saved and the unsaved is unstable in that a person does not know by what signs the person can know they are among the saved, there being great difficulty in deciding if one is hearing the revealed or true voice, then the doctrine has fallen into the Donatist heresy which, technically speaking, is about whether a priest has been properly empowered so that you can rely on his administration of the sacraments. Protestantism can be regarded as Donatism that spins itself off as a separate religion: any preacher relying only on his own self-asserted bona fides, just as every congregant decides for himself or herself whether God has opened their hearts and so allowed them to think of themselves as having become one of the saved. This is the conflict control model. If you take care of one adverse set of social consequences to a social practice, something else will show up that needs to be addressed. You can imprison the criminal to keep him out of the way so that he cannot commit a crime for the duration of his incarceration. Some social programs work and some do not, just as some souls go wrong while others do not.
Orthodox Freudians are Manicheans because there is such a gap between id and superego that only the power of the therapist can allow people some respite in the battle between the two. Ego psychologists are Donatists because they think some selves can be reconstructed in this world of soul making, and whether that can be done depends on good therapists rather than the therapist being a god-like figure removed from the direct view of the patient, as is the case with the most Orthodox of Freudians. These ego therapists help patients to cope with experiences not far below the surface, but rather felt well enough to become subject to self-awareness and therefore to conscious control. Adaptive psychoanalysis, for its part, engages in Arianism. People are close enough to their feelings that all it takes is a bit of sympathetic hectoring to get people to come to terms with themselves. Therapy is the instruction in coping mechanisms rather than, as it is in Orthodox psychoanalysis, the re-experience of a trauma so as to expunge it because this time it is experienced by an adult with better mechanisms for coping with a challenge.
The centrality of the role of the elite within a social movement applies to Christianity as it does to other social movements. The elite can serve as keepers of some secret knowledge about how the real world is very different from the apparent world. The real world will be known only after the success of the social movement, which may be very long in the future, and so most followers may have only a limited glimmering of what is happening in the war between what is and what might be. The priest has the knowledge of and the powers of that future kingdom. The harsh version of that version of Christianity makes Roman Catholicism a kind of Manichaeism, even if there are softer versions of Roman Catholicism that emphasize that people aren’t all that bad in that they prefer to follow good sense and good theology should make good sense. That division between hard and soft Christianity is at the heart of the current battle between the bishops and the nuns.
A second view is that the Arian elite serve as the everyday practitioners who provide easy access to the virtues of the real world to those who live in the apparent world. Heaven has already arrived, if the patient or the believer will bother to learn that fact. Smell the roses. Enjoy your marriage, and that can happen if you stop being a spoilsport. The sermon is a species of happy talk, not a reminder of your personal sinfulness and the depravity of humankind. Whatever his denomination, Norman Vincent Peale was a practitioner of Arianism.
And the third view is that the elite can serve, as it does for Donatists, as a collection of all of those who have some glimmering of what to do to achieve the rewards of the world as it really is, but where it is uncertain which of these elite really possess the truth, the keys to the kingdom. Who knows which of the treatment modalities that are available in modern psychological therapy is the proper one for any particular patient? Billy Graham, for all his popularity, preached a rather dark vision of humanity, but salvation was available if you just took the elevator down to the ground floor so you could get referred to a church congregation convenient to where you lived.