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PARTISAN REVIEW
good, the trainee starts over with the knowledge that real respect for other
human beings involves a respect for human differences. Such a therapist
is
increasingly in a minority, however, as the marketing of self-revelation
appears in encounter groups, "T" groups, and the like. The marketing of
confession has also become one of the main modes of interaction through
which married people experience short-term extramarital affairs, which are
initiated by that classic complaint, "my spouse doesn't understand me."
The market exchange of confession has a particular logic in a society ruled
by the fear that one has no self until one tells another person about it: and
this is the protean man's dilemma.
These are the three conditions of modern personality : it is narcissistic,
protean, and marketable. Together these conditions color our imagination
of social relations which are real, authentic, and moral : there is an insistence
that these relations also be open-people must show themselves to each
other; they must tell the truth, about themselves, and about the strengths
and weaknesses they perceive in others, no matter what. Such psychological
imagination of authentic social life represents a notion of
Gemeinschaft
stripped of all the historical associations Tonnies ftrst gave the word, and
converted into a moral absolute. This notion of
Gemeinschaft
is not only
crude and uncivilized, but also, as a moral interpretation of human rela–
tions, as an expectation of what reality ought
to
be, it has enormous de–
structive power.
One of the destructive aspects of modern
Gemeinschaft
lies in the way
it perverts the experience of conflict.
It
makes people see conflict as an
all-or-nothing contest for personal legitimacy . If you are different from
someone else, and he reacts negatively when you reveal yourself to him, the
conflict appears to you to challenge the very worth of yourself. Once conflict
is escalated
to
the point at which it becomes a question whether it is legiti–
mate to have your own feelings, only two endings are possible: one can
either
try
to overwhelm the other person so that he is no longer different,
or one can abandon
him.
Either way, an ongoing human relationship is
destroyed. An unavoidable difference challenges the narcissistic modality
of seeing the self mirrored in the world. This mode depends on projection
and the sharing of similarity. In conflict, people are faced with a problem
which will not mirror each in the other, which cannot be marketed to the
other. The experience of interpersonal conflict then escalates to the more
