As far as his education is concerned, a child does not become social by learning. It must be social in order to learn. (George H. Mead)
Wishful thinking, lies, self-deception, ...
Sigmund Freud can be credited with having co-initiated a large number of important research projects, theoretical developments and social discourses. But if one compares his portrayal of man, as a being dominated by drives, with a quasi static psychic basic structure, with the roughly simultaneous works of William James and George Herbert Mead, one is irritated how precisely such a grotesquely simple caricature of man could become so influential. I am especially disturbed by the Freudian concepts of transference and countertransference. Depending on the perspective and interpretation, in the favorable case they are empathy, in the unfavorable case mechanistic fantasms, indoctrinaire concepts, or empty word shells. Especially astonished at someone who is considered a great psychologist, the considerable lack of empathy visible in his work. Instead of trying to comprehend the insights of his former companions and integrate them into his theories, he wrote to Jung on January 1, 1907: "My tendency is to treat the colleagues in resistance no differently than the sick in the same situation". Since people are particularly vulnerable and manipulable in the area of their sexual identity, it is not surprising that the psychoanalytic societies founded by him sometimes appear in their sect-like tendencies as a model for the many psycho-sects that emerged in the following time. The fact that he denied the considerable influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, and especially Alfred Adler in his late work, gives a deep insight into his character.
There is hardly a topic, about that as much is lied, as that of the lie. If you look for empirical data on the average frequency of lying, you will find a surprisingly wide range of results. Between 3 and 300 times a day people are supposed to lie on average. I don't know of any other empirically measurable parameter whose values diverge so much. The result seems to me to depend to a decisive extent on the willingness to look closely, e.g. I am not aware of any investigation which includes non-verbal lies. Perhaps the actual average frequency is even one order of magnitude bigger. Similarly as a statement can have several different meanings at the same time, a statement in several partial statements as well as on several levels at the same time cannot correspond to the truth. If one overinterprets the Adorno saying "There is no right life in the wrong" for the definition of a lie, then the true statement even becomes an absolute exception. Evolutionary, it has always been an advantage to present oneself in a better light, and to hide handicaps. The intellectual honesty or humility to correctly present the basis of one's own knowledge and convictions has always seemed downright exotic.
The good liar differs from the bad that he has learned to present his lies convincingly and credibly. This requires not only the rapid modification of a multitude of mental representations, but also the unconditional willingness of a lie to let follow by further lies. If the group of people affected by a lie reaches a certain size or the facts concerned a certain number, the complexity becomes cognitively no longer controllable. The lying person loses the overview and the distinction between original and modified mental representations gets lost. A self-deception up to a false memory syndrome is inevitable. Together with these self-deceptions, it is the sweeping moral condemnation of lying that makes it difficult to timely resolve a lie that causes unwanted consequences. Only then do lies develop their occasionally fatal destructive effects. For someone who tries to do without lies, life quickly becomes very complex. For someone who lies exessivly also only completely different. Perhaps the general frequency of lying lies somewhere close to the current socially possible minimum of complexity. Which raises the question of what a society should look like in which it is easier to lie less. In particular, I find the often epidemic-like occurrence of easily avoidable comfort-oriented lies annoying. Often I have no moral problem with the lies, because the motives are much too understandable to me. Nevertheless, I get uncomfortable when I look at the vast number of possible resulting misunderstandings and their consequences. Sociologically, lies could be described as encroaching or defensive actions, since it implies a violation of conversational maxims.
The colours of lies
Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald have in their book "Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People" from 2013 introduced a colour typology of lies that I would like to expand a little. If one follows Immanuel Kant's moral rigorism, it seems to make no sense to distinguish between types of lies, since every lie is morally to condemned. Beyond that, however, one often finds the distinction between white and black lies. Politeness lies that tend to be morally harmless are distinguished here from lies for the purpose of fraud. The principle of lying to a good cause, which is often attempted to justify as a white lie morally, can even be developed to the idea of a mandatory lie. If one tries to apply this black-and-white scheme to empirically observable lies, one quickly comes to the conclusion that most lies lie somewhere in between. Grey comfort lies exist in all possible shades. This differentiated typology of lies can be further extended by asking the reasons and intentions of the lying. Blue lies can be understood as lies that arise from the wish that the said would be true. Red lies, on the other hand, serve to increase one's own attractiveness. In order to make full use of the trichromatic space of our colour perception, I would like to add the type of green lie. This describes religious wishful thinking, e.g. of one's own divine choice or the divine choice of one's own group. When viewed together, wishful thinking plays a decisive role in all lies, in blue in relation to the world, in red in relation on one self and in green in relation to the absolute. In addition, every lie has a certain transparency. Fully opaque lies are conscious in all contexts and consequences, whereas fully transparent lies correspond to unconscious self-deception.
Open versus authoritarian human images
In extreme cases, an open human image means that there can be no psychology of the human, but only a psychology of one human. In the following table, I would like to argue in a roughly simplified way that the authoritarian human images juxtaposed with George Herbert Mead are based on authoritarian basic assumptions that encroach on human beings. They are strongly rooted in mechanistic world views and linear thinking.
(Marx, Engels) Social constructivism (Berger, Luckmann) (Gender Studies (Butler)) |
Psychoanalysis (Freud) |
(Adler) |
Transactionalism (Mead) |
(Watson, Skinner) Comparative psychology (Pawlow, Lorenz) (Sociobiology (Dawkins, Diamond)) |
| Neo-Freudianism (Fromm, Erikson) | ||||
| the human being is the ensemble of social relations |
drive- and affect- controlled (psychodynamic models) |
Striving for validity and sense of community |
human behaviour is based on biological dispositions genuinely social |
human behavior is made up of genetically driven and learned stimulus- response patterns |
| class-antagonisms | repressed sexual conflicts |
nervous character inferiority complex hypersensitivity |
psychological and/or social Dynamics |
dysfunctional or contradictory stimulus- response patterns |
| obscurantistic / psychologistic | open human image | |||
more or less open human image
- Psychophysics (Weber, Fechner), Biopsychology (Wundt, James)
- Gestalt psychology (Lewin, Köhler, Koffka, Wertheimer)
- Activity theory (Vygotsky, Luria, Leontiev)
- Cognitive Developmental psychology (Piaget)
- Cognitive neuroscience
Freudianism
- Analytical psychology (Jung)
- Structural psychoanalysis (Lacan)
- Ego psychology (Anna Freud, Hartmann)
- Self psychology (Kohut, Stern)
- Object relations theory (Klein), Transference focused psychotherapy (Kernberg)
- Attachment theory (Bowlby, Robertson, Ainsworth)
- Mentalization-based treatment (Fonagy)
Humanistic psychotherapy (Maslow) - man is good and society is evil - blocked self-updating tendency as disturbance trigger
- Person-centered therapy (Rogers)
- Positive psychotherapy (Peseschkian)
- Psychodrama (Moreno)
- Gestalt therapy (Fritz-, Laura Perls, Goodman)
- Body psychotherapy (Reich)
- Psychosynthesis (Assagioli)
- Logotherapy (Frankl)
- Daseinsanalysis (Binswanger, Boss)
- Theme-centered interaction (Cohn)
- Transactional analysis (Berne)
- Integrative Therapy (Petzold)
Following the motto: 'It's never too late for a happy childhood', the approaches of humanistic psychotherapy are very sympathetic to me, but from time to time you come across statements that are more than just critical of science. In the self-help movements with their many individualistic and libertarian exaggerations, of which the self-esteem movement 
is only one, it also played and still plays a decisive role. I also miss a more intensive examination of the topics of psychopathy and bullying and, in connection with this, narcissism. In my view, this is due to insufficient consideration of social problems. However, this accusation also applies to the dominant behaviorism-based behavioral therapy approaches. These are said to be able to achieve reliable success, particularly with problems of low complexity, which are also less dependent on the therapist's empathic abilities.
Of course, this list is by no means complete. Family constellations, for example, are missing. In these, experienced participants in particular can often very quickly reveal the constellator's life lies or secrets, thereby helping them to develop clarifying and conflict-resolving strategies. However, there is also the danger that constellation practitioners use the constellation to rehearse or even find new accusations against family members, thereby exacerbating existing conflicts.
All of the human images compiled here are, in their own way, optimistic human images, at least in terms of their approach, and as such are exotic fringe phenomena. Both historically and currently, the religiously influenced pessimistic human images dominate, especially institutionally, which in turn provide the justification for the necessity of extensive control and sanction regimes. In practice, archaic pessimistic human imagee also dominated in real existing socialism, although the official party ideology propagated others. This institutionalized hypocrisy created a breeding ground, or at least a free space, for both folkish ideas and thinking freed from religious pessimism.
I am most convinced by Mead's open human image, according to which man is genuinely social in his essence. This condicio humana developed in interaction with an increase in a neotenous free space, which represents a high degree of indeterminacy, a not-yet-defined and thus a social malleability. Many tasks of ensuring survival could be transferred from the individual to the group. In turn, social logics were internalized by the individuals. Unfortunately, Mead's socio-philosophical point of view is the most uncomfortable of all, since, building on James, it additionally integrates not only biology but also the social sphere into the consideration, and is therefore a minority position. It is much more comfortable in an individualistic way to regard the social sphere as something external to psychology that one does not also want to concern oneself with.
