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JOHN H. GAGNON
to larger numbers of people, I suspect that we are about to regress to
an earlier stage in our treatment of this kind of case.
Dr. Spack, though not a therapist, was for many years a propo–
nent of permissiveness, whatever that may be, in the rearing of chil–
dren. He has lately begun to suggest that children are really searching
for discipline and really want control. Those psychiatrists who think
that what patients really need is more reality contact and less permis–
siveness are expressing the same anxieties over the modern condition
of man. The treatment of schizophrenics is also tending in this direc–
tion, on the theory that the patient needs more punitive relations with
the world to get him back into contact. All of these changes are
indicative of a basic shift in orientation, but it has nothing to do
with actual therapy. I do not think that we can attribute the condi–
tion of youth today to permissive child rearing, since most people
have never even heard of it. In any case, to suggest that people who
have lost the capacity to cope because of the cruel circumstances of
their lives need more punishment flies in the face of reason. Such
theoretical maneuvers are symptoms of the failure of an ideology to
connect with the conditions of modern life, and not a new recipe for
treatment or an attempt at new thinking.
Part of this retreat to outworn formulas is a loss of faith in the
word. Since Marx, there has been a systematic erosion of belief in
the face value of any statement. Kenneth Burke points out the impos–
sibility of a dialogue between a Freudian and a Marxist. In such a
pseudodialogue the reductive Freudian attributes the ideas of the
Marxist to
his
frustrated relation with a father-figure resulting in an
attachment to the party as a substitute. The Marxist dismisses the
explanations of the reductive Freudian as a defense of bourgeois cap–
italism. This kind of simplistic exchange is the culmination of the
tendency to interpret ideas and behavior as forms of ideology: that
is, to find statements interesting not as ideas, but, as Daniel Bell puts
it, as ideas held and used. Burke himself has been part of this move–
ment by proposing such concepts as the vocabulary, rhetoric and
grammar of motives.
As
Daniel Boorstin suggests in a general critique
of the made-up quality of American life, "When truth has been
displaced by believability as the test of statements which dominate
our lives, advertisers' ingenuity is devoted less to discovering facts
than to inventing statements which can be made to seem true."
