PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

# **Complicities**

# A theory for subjectivity in the psychological humanities

# **Natasha Distiller**

## Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology

#### **Series Editor**

Thomas Teo Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON, Canada

Palgrave Studies in the Teory and History of Psychology publishes scholarly books that use historical and theoretical methods to critically examine the historical development and contemporary status of psychological concepts, methods, research, theories, and interventions. Books in this series are characterised by one, or a combination of, the following: (a) an emphasis on the concrete particulars of psychologists' scientifc and professional practices, together with a critical examination of the assumptions that attend their use; (b) expanding the horizon of the discipline to include more interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work performed by researchers and practitioners inside and outside of the discipline, increasing the knowledge created by the psychological humanities; (c) "doing justice" to the persons, communities, marginalized and oppressed people, or to academic ideas such as science or objectivity, or to critical concepts such social justice, resistance, agency, power, and democratic research. Tese examinations are anchored in clear, accessible descriptions of what psychologists do and believe about their activities. All the books in the series share the aim of advancing the scientifc and professional practices of psychology and psychologists, even as they ofer probing and detailed questioning and critical reconstructions of these practices. Te series welcomes proposals for edited and authored works, in the form of full-length monographs or Palgrave Pivots; contact<EMAIL_ADDRESS>for further information.

#### **Serimes Editor:**

Tomas Teo is Professor of Psychology at York University, Canada.

#### **Series Editorial Board:**

Alex Gillespie, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK; Suzanne R. Kirschner, College of the Holy Cross, USA; Annette Mülberger, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain; Lisa M. Osbeck, University of West Georgia, USA; Peter Raggatt, James Cook University, Australia; Alexandra Rutherford ,York University, Canada.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14576

# Natasha Distiller Complicities

A theory for subjectivity in the psychological humanities

Natasha Distiller Gender and Women Studies University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-79674-7 ISBN 978-3-030-79675-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79675-4

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*"Seeking innocence is a distraction of the highest order to critical thought" (Imani Perry,* Vexy Ting *2018, p. 102).*

# **Preface**

Tis book has been challenging to write. It is interdisciplinary to its core, a product of my own journey through knowledge collections that span literary studies, a range of critical, cultural and political theories, and psychology and psychotherapy. My hope is that it synthesizes its informing discourses clearly for those who are new to some of them, and interestingly for those who are not.

Te title of this book was originally, and probably rather grandiosely, *Complicities: A Model for Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century*. About halfway through writing it, I realized I was not, in fact, ofering the reader a model for anything. "Model" suggests something that can be followed, a series of principles and actions that can be laid out and pursued as with an instruction manual. I changed the title to "theory," which more accurately captures what I am doing here: ofering a way to think about human subjectivity that can be useful to critical psychologists and practicing psychotherapists if they are convinced that the humanities-style approach I detail is worthwhile. My colleague in the Beatrice Bain Research Group of the Gender and Women's Studies Department at the University of California Berkeley, Robin Clark, assessing the frst part of the manuscript, declared it a manifesto, and that is perhaps the most accurate descriptor of all. Tis book is a summary of everything I have learned as I traversed disciplines. It aims to capture what I have learned accordingly, and how I think about what it means to be human—a concern both of literature, my frst home, and psychotherapy, my second. So ultimately, this book may be ofering a philosophy, a way of thinking that encodes a set of beliefs about the world and how it could be.

Tis may well be informative to critical psychologists and others concerned with social justice, feminism, decolonialism and other theories of human being. But how does it apply to therapeutic practice? In the fnal chapter, I ofer some suggestions. I apply my theory to the modalities I use with clients, and hope to open up possibilities for doing, as well as thinking about, psychotherapy.

Tere are no case studies. I know providing some might well help to ground the more theoretical moments, especially in the frst chapter. Tis is why there are no case studies: I have come to believe that it is a form of making use of clients in a way that does not feel congruent with my therapeutic philosophy. I consider each therapeutic relationship an invitation to a unique journey with someone. When the relationship goes well, the connection is special. I might even use the word sacred, although that will be the most spiritual this theoretical book will get. It does not feel right to me to share this journey for the purposes of my own gain. I learned this from a client whose journey I hold very close to my heart. I want to honor that lesson, and all my clients' sacred sharings. Instead, where appropriate, I will talk about my own journey. I hope this functions to ground some of the ideas.

Tis book, then, is unashamedly theoretical, although it does also aim to be accessible. For readers not used to the tone and jargon of critical theory, I hope the parts that require more from you are made up for by the illustrations and applications that come up from the third chapter and are the focus of the last chapter.

I would like to take a moment to address the choice of the notion of complicity to capture what I am trying to say. Complicity has a negative connotation. It suggests that one is guilty of collaborating with a wrong. In a sense, that is the point: As I will argue in detail, the term is meant to invoke the idea that we subjects of Western modernity are none of us unimplicated in the systems of oppression whose historical trajectories I account for in this book. It suggests that to be human is to be made by, participants in, resistors to, and benefciaries of, the systems and institutions that we cannot help but inherit. Some sufer more, but no one of us is better than the other, a theoretical statement that will be fully explored in the course of the book. But another argument of this book is that binary thinking has to go if we want to improve things. Terefore, the binary innocent/guilty is not a helpful way to approach the idea of complicity. It keeps us in the realm of good/bad, self/other, right/wrong. If *Complicities* argues anything, it argues that we have to think about ourselves and each other in more complicated terms. Tis is how we fnally exceed the terms that Western Enlightenment and then colonial processes, as consolidated in the psy disciplines as one of the technologies of modern subjectivity, have given us.

One last set of explanations about style choices: I have used the uppercased adjective Black to denote people of African descent. I do this to acknowledge that the specifc history of oppression African people have sufered, because of the historical forces I detail in this book, has created specifc material and identity outcomes for Black people. I have not used the uppercase for other descriptors of racialized groups indicated with reference to color. White supremacist groups sometimes capitalize white, a usage I have no intention of sharing. I wish to avoid the implication that white people share a history which outcome has been the need for a shared identity of solidarity. I do think, as I detail in this book, that until a majority of white people accept that whiteness is also a racialized construction, we cannot get very far in the project of racial justice. "Brown" is too general a term, used for many groups of people, to indicate specifc, shared histories or identities.

I use the pronoun "he" to describe the subject of Western epistemology and personhood. When I use "he" to talk about the subject of the West, it is deliberate. As I argue in the book, the human subject of Western thought is, in the frst place, male. So my "hes" are not thoughtless sexist throwbacks, and they do not occur everywhere. I hope the reader will bear with me on this, and allow the assertion implicit in the gendering of the Western liberal subject. I hope the book's argument of this position convinces you.

Te frst two chapters provide, broadly, the larger theoretical outlines for the argument. Tey address the necessity for an interdisciplinary mode, a psychological humanities; account for the emergence of psychology and its associated disciplines as part of a specifc Western episteme; and locate the liberalism and whiteness of dominant subjects of Western culture against which human being has been forced to articulate itself in the places made, or afected, by Western systems of thought, economy, politics and meaning, including the psy disciplines. Te third chapter focuses on race, the fourth on gender, sex and sexuality, the ffth on American public youth culture in the age of social media and the last chapter on how this all might afect psychotherapy practice. I hope this book's ambitious heart speaks to yours.

Berkeley, CA Natasha Distiller

# **Acknowledgments**

Tis book was made possible by the support and encouragement of Glen Retief and John Holmes. Two smarter, kinder midwives could not be hoped for.

I am grateful to my colleagues who agreed to read and comment on portions of the manuscript: David Azul, Robin Clark and Sara Tornton. My thanks also to the Palgrave reviewers, whose feedback helped improve the manuscript. Tis project was supported in part by the Beatrice Bain Research Group, University of California, Berkeley, and I thank the Department of Gender and Women Studies there, with whom I was a Beatrice Bain Research Scholar for the fnal part of this book's writing. Laura Nelson was a compassionate and generous chair and a great help to me. Sandra Young, Deborah Posel and Mel Y. Chen continue to ofer me their professional support, and I am grateful for their time. A very big thank you to Hannah Hanson, who under the auspices of UC Berkeley's URAP program was a marvelous research assistant. Without her help, this project would have taken longer to complete. Erin Harrell ofered support that was both personal and professional, and that made a diference.

My thanks to Stephanie Allais for taking care of my soul, and to Finn Gratton for being such a good friend. Lisa Retief took care of a lot of logistics to enable me to work, and continues to do so. My clients have allowed me to accompany them, and each journey has been a privilege to participate in.

Tis book, as with all things I do, is for Jesse and Lee, my most precious complicit relationships.

# **Praise for** *Complicities*

"Tis is the kind of writing—I hope—members of allied health and medical disciplines have been waiting for, irrespective of whether they focus explicitly on providing support for the psychological aspects of human being or whether they work in felds that intersect with mental health practice.

*Complicities* ofers a gentle, generous, highly knowledgeable, and accessible introduction to and application of transdisciplinarity at its best. Using arguments, ideas and theories from the critical humanities and cutting-edge approaches to neurobiology and psychotherapy, Natasha Distiller invites the reader into a world in which diversity and complexity are openly at play and the taken-for-granted is given a chance to dissolve. Guided by the author's carefully selected and convincingly elaborated gestures towards diverse knowledges, binary distinctions between e.g., self and other, mind and body, individual and context, power and oppression, clinician and client, clinical and everyday encounters, therapy and advocacy, are slowly replaced with a third space in which human being has always already been understood and practiced as intersubjectivity, relationality, mutuality, and being-with. Tis third space, which corresponds to the complicit mindset and the notion and practice of complicity as the only way in which we can live a human life, ofers an alternative to the injustices and sufering that result from a rigid adherence to binary disciplinary, colonial, scientifc, and capitalist regimes.

*Complicities* can be read as a guide to be (human and a professional) which allows us to drop the relentless but familiar fght for the upper hand position in all our relations (e.g., as expert, objective observer, a person who owns what is morally good and true) in favour of nurturing a non-judgmental stance towards human lives being with each other in the world. If we learn to acknowledge and accept our imperfection, vulnerability, and complicity as human beings, we can, so the book suggests, truly connect with each other and develop and maintain healing relationships.

Reading the book once is not enough. It leaves the reader with the desire to start all over again, for another go at engaging with the diverse dimensions and implications of the notion and practice of complicity."

—David Azul, *La Trobe University, Bendigo, Australia*

# **Contents**

#### **Index** 253

# **1**

# **Introduction: The Personal Is Still Political**

Te second wave of feminist activism in the United States gave us the adage, "the personal is political." It allowed women to insist that the difculties they were having were not caused by their personal qualities or individual choices, but were the product of a system that positioned them as women, and structured their lives and the horizon of possibilities for their material and emotional experiences accordingly (see Shaw & Lee, 2015). Te core lesson was (and is) that a person's individual experience is not theirs alone. Teir sense of self is formed within, in relation to, and by, external forces. Feminism began with the understanding that gender is one apparently personal quality that is in fact formed by social factors, and, under patriarchy, in relations of power and oppression.

Naomi Alderman's feminist dystopian fction, *Te Power* (2016), explores the consequences of changing gender dynamics within a system of power. Te book shows what happens when women are given superior physical power over men, and seize the reins of control accordingly. What begins as a satisfying ability to fnally stand up to sexualized brutality becomes a reinscription of more of the same: patriarchal values, where might conveys right, remain in place, even as gender positions are inverted. Merely changing structural positions does not alter the nature of the structure.

Te voice of someone who is most likely god says, at the book's conclusion (Alderman, 2016, p. 360),

I'm giving you the crib sheet right now. Maybe you'll understand it and maybe you won't… Who's bad and who's good? Who persuaded the other one to eat the apple? Who has the power and who's powerless? All of these questions are the wrong questions.

It's more complicated than that, sugar. However complicated you think it is, everything is always more complicated than that… You can't put anyone in a box. Listen, even a *stone* isn't the same as any other stone, so I don't know where you all think you get of labelling *humans* with simple words and thinking you know everything you need.  Tey say: only exceptional people can cross the borders. Te truth is: anyone can cross, everyone has it in them.

Alderman slyly skewers sexism—the kind we have in our present world, where women are treated diferently because of the social meanings made of their sexual diference—and also insists that human beings all have the ability to abuse, when the terms of valued personhood are based on who is stronger. Te supernatural voice who sums it up in the extract above makes the point that *Complicities* aims to illustrate and unpack: Tere is a self/other binary at work in the power dynamics of Western social, interpersonal and intrapersonal dynamics. Tis binary has a specifc material history. It is not inevitable. And it creates realities both psychological and material. In deconstructing binary thinking, and the version of the human that results, and by focusing on the messiness and complexity of human interactions in practice, a new model for human being emerges. Tis is a way out of the us and them positions that in the end serve to keep the structure in place.

Te main argument of this book is that to be human means to be complicit in the systems we inherit, and are structured by. Tese systems, in a world which relies on binary thinking, are always systems of power. Tey comprise both symbolic structures like language, apparently natural units like the family, and larger social formations like communities and countries. Tey also include group and individual experiences which are given narrative shape and thus specifc meanings, like history, and like identity. To be complicit means that human being is not an individualized enterprise. Each subject is made through genealogies, histories, inheritances which are by defnition communal, and through their linkages and reactions to, and reliances on, other subjects.

To accept this argument is to see a way out of the current dominant binary thinking that continues to structure most ideas of human subjectivity at work in psychotherapy. Te modern idea of the self as it is espoused through the psy disciplines (psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry and psychoanalysis), a Western technology of knowing, is based on a self/other structure. Such a formulation also maps onto an oppressor/oppressed model for subjectivity, which currently informs much of the liberation work of identity politics. For a social justiceoriented psychotherapy practice, this can be limiting. *Complicities* will fesh out these assertions, concentrating in various chapters on aspects of modern identities important to liberation politics and practices. It will also connect modern identifcation practices to the liberalism that has helped shape the Western subject of psychotherapy, via the discipline of psychology and the work it has done to help construct the modern world. In the fnal chapter, some practices for social justice-oriented psychotherapy will be considered.

Tis work takes place under the rubric of the psychological humanities, which recognizes the conceptual limits of traditional psychological approaches to human being. Tis initial chapter is the most theoretical. Because, as an exploration of the potential of the psychological humanities as an interdiscipline, explored below, I draw on concepts that will be diferently familiar to readers depending on their knowledge base, I considered it important to map out the frames of reference that inform my thinking. Some readers fnd theoretical language alienating, one of the relevant critiques against forms of high theoretical writing that nevertheless claims to be engaged with social justice issues and wants to be relevant to the world. I have done my best to make these ideas both interesting and accessible. If at times they are hard going, I beg your indulgence and assure you they are applied in later chapters.

My starting point, in feminism, locates my work within the group of psychological theories of human being that are concerned with acknowledging and addressing issues of social justice. Feminist therapy followed early feminist insight, born out of consciousness raising groups where women's experiences were validated. It was a practice that began by refusing the normative gender assumptions of the patriarchal authority that had structured the discipline (Rothblum & Cole, 2018; Williams, 1995). It grew to actively value the wisdom and experiences of all othered voices (Brown, 2018). Other psychologies concerned with political and psychic liberation also insist that knowledge is never neutral, that the standpoint of the observer-commentator shapes what they can understand and that institutions create systems of privilege and oppression that defne and afect people along axes of gender, race, class, ablebodiedness, ethnicity, neurodiversity, location, nation and other markers of hierarchy and access. Transnational, postcolonial, indigenous and decolonial perspectives extend the defnition of systems and the understanding of how they work to a global scale. Cultural and hermeneutic awareness has long been a part of the discipline and practice of psychology and psychotherapy, as will be discussed in more detail below. Te acknowledgment that we are not, in fact, independent liberal subjects, free to choose (our identities, our experiences, our relation to ourselves and our access to resources if we just work hard enough), is not at all new.

And yet, in popular culture and in mainstream American political discourse, the modern subject is still the subject of liberalism, free indeed to choose his fate, at best, or fettered by injustice so that he cannot achieve this rhetorically god-given right. In the twenty-frst century, he is neoliberalized into being responsible for ensuring his selfhood is proftable, as I will explain in Chaps. 2 and 5. He is, in the frst place, gendered, classed and raced, although he believes these things do not matter to his ability to succeed. Te discourses and technologies of psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychotherapy have been central to the creation, authorization, dissemination and popularization of this liberal human subject. What we have today, as a result, is a popular idea of what it means to be a person that is saturated with historical meanings and specifc economic processes, presented as natural, and dependent on binary thinking. Tis is true, despite decades of theoretical work in the academy which seeks to deconstruct, interrogate, problematize and locate the relations of power that comprise our institutions and the meanings we make of the world, ourselves and each other.

Te unifed self in search of its correct path, free to make the right or healthy choices to achieve knowledge of itself and thus be a better version of itself, is the model of the self that is still necessary in most versions of the psychotherapy session. Troughout this book, I use the term "psychotherapy"to refer to the practice of counseling undertaken by therapists who may or may not be psychologists: Tey might be licensed professional counselors, marriage and family therapists, or analysts. Such practitioners did not necessarily pass through academic psychology to achieve their licensure. Tey also did not necessarily encounter in much detail any of the more humanities-infected ideas about human being of the last half century. In what follows, I am bringing together for a very broad church ideas about the theory and practice of psychology and psychotherapy, informed by feminist, queer, critical race, postcolonial and decolonial, and cultural studies insights developed most extensively in the academic humanities.

Who am I talking about, and for? On the one hand, a disembodied idea called the human subject. Te statement that to be human means to be implicated in psychic and material structures is a statement intended to be universal. On the other hand, the subject under discussion here is the subject of psychology, which is to say, the subject of Western modernity. Tis subject is not, in theory or practice, universal, although the scientifc subject of psychology can sometimes forget that it is not a collection of neurons and response times, of evolutionary logic and developmental absolutes. Te human being I am invoking is a diverse collective, intended to acknowledge our very real experiential diferences, the ways our systems of power and our institutions name and position people very diferently based on the meanings made of their histories, communities and embodiments. And in so doing, shape (but not determine) their senses of selves. Trough our diferences, through our very diferent investments, profts and losses in the meanings made of our diferences, "we" are connected. Tis is an audacious claim for a middleclass white person to make, and from that standpoint, it is an assertion of privilege. But my voice is also informed by being assigned female at birth and socialized female, by being queer, by being from the global South, by being an immigrant. I am a both-and, which is what I am suggesting the theoretical "we" I invoke should be seen as as well: both universalizing and specifc, looking for a universal connection across humans, and acknowledging of inequality: the historical, structural, invested components which deny the connections across diferent human beings, and the sufering this causes. I say a little more about humanism in Chap. 2, a discussion which also illustrates how an education in the humanities simultaneously enables an awareness of what "we" share, and of how "we" are constructed according to historically invested diferences.

*Complicities* navigates a familiar tension. Tere are liberation theories that want to name systems of power and oppression, and the injustices they cause, in order to advocate for material change in real people's lives and in the experience of their communities. And there are deconstructive theories that, in refusing normative and normativizing defnitions of personhood, citizenship, morality, wellness, subjectivity and so on, have often been accused of working against material change in their focus on the constructed nature of oppressive phenomena. Such tensions have been evident within feminism and queer theory for decades, as I will discuss in more detail in Chap. 4.

It is important to acknowledge the constructed nature of subject positions, in order to make explicit the politics at play and the investments in presenting as natural what are human systems of meaning, made by people through time and space with something at stake. What it means to be female, or black, or disabled, or Jewish, to name a few examples, is, for the purposes of human systems, entirely located in context. I will continually illustrate this claim throughout this book. On the other hand, strategic essentialisms (Danius & Jonsson, 1993) are often necessary for political work, especially in the context of a rights-based system that needs recognizable groups, endorsed by born-that-way arguments, before rights can be conferred (Bonthuys, 2008; Brown, 1995; Butler, 1993). Essentialism also has psychic value, especially in a Western system based on individualism and individuality. If we understand that subjectivity is made from the systems that structure it, and also feeds back into these systems to continue and to change them, then the "problem" of deconstruction verses essentialism falls away and is revealed as another one of the reductive consequences of binary thinking (Fuss, 1989).

### **Binary Thinking**

Binary thinking sets up a relation, presented as natural, between two ideas (people, concepts, identities) that are constructed as reliant on each other's apparently obvious and immutable meanings. Tese meanings are assumed to be opposite and are almost always hierarchical. One half of the binary benefts, materially and-or psychically, in other words, from the relation. Accordingly, that half will work to protect the binary structure. One consequence, explored in more detail in Chap. 4, is the way transgender people are so violently policed for threatening the gender binary (male/female).

Binary thinking has been an important part of systems of Western meaning-making and has helped enable the construction of the neoliberal geopolitical global world order of modernity, which has emerged from nineteenth century colonialism, as will be explored in more detail in Chap. 2. Postcolonial theory, among other lessons, illustrated how binary thinking endorsed colonial thoughts and deeds.

Postcolonial theoreticians pointed out how colonizing discourse, the sense that colonizing cultures made of what they were doing, is constructed around a binary system: self/other; good/bad; white/black; master/slave; male/female; subject/object. Te terms of these related binaries rely on each other. Tey are obviously constructed with a hierarchical logic: It is better to be white, master, male and therefore a subject. It is psychologically better, in that it guarantees a specifc sense of self, and it is better in terms of access to privilege, resources, authority and power. Te disempowered side of the binary, the side of the other/object/slave, is sometimes called the subaltern: the one without the representational and therefore political power in this system (Spivak, 1988). Te subaltern is the necessary other to the colonizing self. Te relationship across the two sides of the binary is not only hierarchical; it is constituting. Te colonizer cannot be a colonizer without a colonized. If we understand this dynamic, we understand what is at stake for the colonizing self in the act of taking power: his very existence. Tis is the oppressor/victim binary, already embedded in a complicity more complex than the us and them of current identity politics can allow.

Binary thinking is reductive. Cohen (2005) has shown how binary thinking cannot accommodate intersectionality. She argued that queer theory set up a new binary, hetero/queer, which also corresponded to bad/good. She pointed out that, because it relied only on sexuality as the oppression it accounted for, this kind of queer theory overlooked the ways in which someone could be heterosexual and still oppressed, and queer and still hold privilege. She gave the examples of poor women of color on welfare, whose heterosexuality did not ft the required, respectable norm; or enslaved people, whose heterosexuality was denied as part of the denial of their humanity.

Since the beginning of feminist theorizing, from the Combahee River Collective (1983), through the works of Lorde (2007) and into the writings of Hill Collins (2015) and the legal scholarship of Crenshaw (1989), among others (see Moraga & Anzaldua, 1983), the fact of intersectionality has been reiterated by feminists of color (see Nash, 2019). It has been taken up, if inadequately, in some branches of psychology (McCormick-Huhn et al., 2019). But this well-known truth, that people are made up of diferent parts that impact each other, tells us that you cannot account for someone's experiences by separating out aspects of their identity, and that context afects how we experience ourselves and others. It also tells us that, because binaries artifcially impose and reduce identities as constructs, we better serve lived experience and the complex work of liberation from oppression by focusing on the ways we are made together, by each other, and by the systems in which we come into being and which we reproduce and change by being in them.

What's the diference between complicity and intersectionality? Intersectionality can sometimes be used to endorse identity politics, as it can be read as relying on the reifcation of identity categories in order to make its point. Complicity wants to move us beyond identity politics, in part by challenging the conceptual underpinnings to identity categories. Tis does most emphatically not mean that I am arguing for an apolitical view of what it means to be person. If I am arguing for a kind of humanist vision, it is a humanism that is frst and foremost and always embedded in structural relations of power, since to be human, in this model, is to be complicit in systems. Tis is one of the ways I am suggesting binary thinking is wholly inadequate to any project of the psychological humanities, of which more below. We have to acknowledge the operations of power and privilege, of history and trauma, of who gets to decide and defne who has to be other to the mythical norm (Lorde, 2007). And we have to acknowledge that these operations, as central as they are to the construction of discourses that shape lives and subjectivities and opportunities and violences, are not anywhere near the sum total of what it means to be human. Tese power dynamics are fundamentally human, and they are also limiting of what it really is to be human. Tey structure, and in so doing, constrain. We are not, in fact, ineluctably separated from each other by the diferent ways our lives, experiences and senses of selves are shaped by the structures we inherit, are made by, and go on to perpetuate, challenge or change. As the theories which interrogate the relationship between self and other illustrate, and the insistence these theories enable that we are each dependent on the other, an other, another, we are all complicit in the system (some of these theories are discussed in more detail later in this chapter). We are therefore also all complicit in each other. Not equally, not ahistorically, not to mutual beneft. But nonetheless.

While oppressive systems operate via the construction and violent assertion of artifcial binaries (the apartheid regime's attempt to segregate racial identities is one example, Posel, 2001; heterosexuality's construction of homosexuality is another, Katz, 2007), human being is, and always has been, nonbinary. Cultural, systemic and personal meanings are intertwined. And, as attachment theory and the neuroscience of early childhood development illustrate, an individual's sense of self is thoroughly woven into the senses of selves of other humans on a physical level, as well as an emotional one (Bowlby, 1982; Gerhardt, 2004; Mascolo, 2016; Musholt, 2018; Pyne, 2016; Schore, 2003; Siegel, 2003; Stern, 1985). Branches of academic and applied psychology have long been engaging with this reality, as will be explored in more detail below. Te image of the fold is also sometimes ofered to counter the idea of a self-contained self. Te fold, as we will see below, speaks to the ways the idea of an inside is constituted by the outside.

Tus *Complicities* builds on the by-now-apparent insight that humans are embedded in social contexts, that individual subjectivity is shaped by the structures and forces it inherits, and which it perforce responds to. Structural injustice matters to—and in and on—all of us, because we are all complicit in each other. And injustice makes use of binary thinking to construct realities where some are rendered superior because others are rendered inferior, or dangerous, or both.

Binary thinking limits what is humanly possible. To do our best work as therapists, we beneft from a nonbinary view of what it means to be human. Tis means escaping the model of the individual created for and presented to us by mainstream scientifc psychology, of which more below and in the following chapter.

We ourselves are part of the work of helping our clients. We are intersubjectively complicit, a notion that I will return to throughout this book. How we understand what our clients sufer from will inform what version of healthy selfhood we are helping them toward (e.g., Hardy, 2008 and Duran & Duran, 1995 have argued for creating diagnoses that recognize the damage done by racial oppression). A knowledge of the constructed and invested nature of the psychological self, as well as of its real power as a discourse of knowledge creation, is a necessary component of this process. In order to do this, we need a double vision, a both-and: at the same time as we want to resist the binary thinking upon which the Western subject of psychology has been built, we simultaneously have to continue acknowledging that historical forces have created structures which perpetuate systems of inequality.

Part of the work of seeing the systems of meaning at play here is learning about where they come from. Te modern subject of psychotherapy, as will be explored in more detail in this chapter and the next, is complicit in the emergence of systems of modernity: liberalism, democracy and the individuality they create and police; capitalism and neoliberalism, and the racism and gender politics they create and proft from, as the chapters which follow will explore.

Te self who is the product of the self/other binary is itself an efect of Western history, embedded in culture, economics, politics, gender, race, class, uses of religion, uses and constructions of sexuality, notions of ablebodiedness. Tis means that both the self and the other on which it depends can be understood not only as starting points for power relations, but also as products of them. Rose (1998, p. 188), following Deleuze, ofers the idea of the fold: Te self is an efect of the ways in which the forces of the exterior world "form an inside to which it appears an outside must always make reference." Te illusion of depth, the pleats and cavities it causes, "only exist in relation to the… forces… that sustain them." What this means, Rose (ibid) argues, in relation to the subject created by psychology and its related disciplines, is that the

[S]ubject is assembled… in terms of a problem of "self-mastery": bringing to bear upon oneself—the inside acting upon itself—the power that one brings to bear upon others… [T]he power that is brought to bear upon others is fgured as a power relation between this inside of oneself and this inside of the other.

Te self's experience of itself is reliant not only on its experience of its other, but on a relation of power with that other. Te self/other binary relation is an efect, not only of external, institutional forces providing meanings and allocating resources accordingly, but of the processes of subjectifcation out of which the modern self emerges. Tis specifc binary relation, which in and out of our systems of power maps on the logic of subject/object, is central to Cartesian modernity; it is the "epistemological hallmark of modern thought" (Coelho & Claudio, 2003, p. 194).

But if the self/other relation emerges out of material, systemic and discursive practices that create the self's sense of itself as well as its need for its other, this is in fact another level of complicity. Te binary is artifcial. Te processes that create it rely on rhizomatic relations between selves and structures as well as selves and others. And as we will see shortly, the idea of complicity I am developing relies on the idea that human subjectivity is folded, not split, that we are enfolded by human being into each other.

We are each of us dependent on each other in many ways. Te modern human is subjected by language, by interpersonal neurobiology, by gender and race and age and politics and technology as I explore them later in this book.  Rose's (1998) formulation suggests that the binary is not only false because it constructs immutable relations between positions, identities and bodies it sets up as opposite, at worst, or exclusive to each other, at least. It is also false because its very technologies of possibility belie the fact that the self is reliant on another to be itself. Despite the logic the binary seeks to assert, that the self must abjure the other, the Western self is a self because of its other. Te imperative to power-mastery that has so far accompanied this truth is what is ensured by the structuring of this relation as binary, which is also a denial of the constitutive complicity of human being.

Rose's (1998) model has an additional consequence for understanding the impact of binary thinking on the modern subject's construction. He describes how the psy disciplines have inscribed a modern subject compelled to have interiority, and structured by the psy technologies (theories and schools of thought, research, institutions, practices of counseling, ideas of wellness and mental illness, psychiatric and penalizing incursions into and onto specifc notions of the body, the brain, the soul and so on). Tis subject is told it is free to choose. As part of this process, the subject is to decide on the self it should be: "To be the self *one is* one must not be the self *one is not*—not *that* despised, rejected, or abjected soul. Tus becoming oneself is a recurrent copying that both emulates and difers from other selves" (Rose, 1998, p. 192). Tis suggests that binary thinking can be located in the modern self's relationship with its self, too. In needing abjected other selves to help us pick the right, healthy, self, Rose's (1998) process of subjectifcation articulates an additional role of the binary in helping to internally structure this self. We also see a way the self becomes other to itself, can become its own other, in believing it must improve itself—one of the imperatives of psychotherapy.

Te binary, in other words, goes very deep into the Western subject, as well as making that subject reliant on its others. It is perhaps not surprising that theories which suggest human subjectivity does not operate in practice as it is assumed to by binary thinking have not achieved the status of common sense outside of parts of academia.

# **Complicities**

I develop the idea of the complicit subject from the work of Sanders (2002), who examined apartheid as an exemplary complicity-generating system. He argues, using the fgure of the South African intellectual, that when you are a product of a system, you cannot avoid collaboration with that system, even when you oppose it. He explores how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) sought to make the point that complicity makes us responsible, and that, according to the report published by the Commission, "it is only by recognizing the potential for evil in each one of us that we can take full responsibility for ensuring that such evil will never be repeated" (qtd. in Sanders, 2002, p. 3). Te TRC report wanted to focus its readers' attention not only on the large-scale human rights violations that were patently abusive and wrong, but on the daily workings of life under apartheid that helped perpetuate the larger system in countless little ways.

Te TRC report, Sanders argues (2002, p. 3), is resisting "the intuition that in order to combat evil one must be, or must proclaim oneself to be, untouched by it." Neither Sanders nor the TRC report engages with the question of evil from a psychotherapeutic point of view, which would want to ask where such dark energy comes from. Binary thinking suggests it is human nature to project our inner darkness outward, onto our others (McWilliams 2020). Tinking complicitously suggests a more complex involvement with the systems of power which help create and shape, and then make use of, the desire to control and hurt others. Tinking complicitously disallows a stance of pure resistance, as Sanders (2002) explores. It suggests that in order to resist, we have to acknowledge our involvement in the system.

 Instead of mobilizing the recognition of structural oppression to enable structural change, it reifes the oppressor/oppressed binary, but fips its moral assignations. Once the othered position becomes saturated with a morally righteous victimhood, it becomes nigh impossible to do anything other than reproduce the binary terms of an oppressive system ad nauseam. One consequence is that human being is reduced to structural markers, where we can never exceed the terms given to us for who we can be (see Brown, 1995; Gamson, 1995). Another is that some subjects are reduced to the status of evil, where privilege and ignorance become, not structural consequences, but markers of individual badness (DiAngelo, 2018). Te capacity to engage in structural change is unfortunately and radically foreclosed by this discourse.

McWilliams (2020) ofers an analytic point of view on how uncomplicit thinking entrenches the structural positions which perpetuate oppression. Her account helps illuminate some of the dynamics at play in current progressive discourses. She (McWilliams, 2020, p. 184) says the (here naturalized) human tendency to create a self/other binary is at work when someone feels politically enlightened. Tis is a version of narcissistic entitlement that relies on "a claim of moral authority." Such a position is not only problematic because reliant on the hierarchical thinking of the binary, and an assertion of power over another. It also renders this putatively morally superior woke self particularly vulnerable to shame: "Tat position of framing myself as among the enlightened… sets me up to be hurt and humiliated whenever I am caught out in some prejudice or microaggression, at which point I tend to resort to paranoid-schizoid defenses against such feelings," which results in an inability to own any of one's own badness, and a need to project it onto the other in the form of an assumption about their destructive intent (McWilliams, 2020, p. 184). Tis helps explain the white fragility (DiAngelo, 2018) of liberal, wellintentioned white people. It also accounts for the one-upmanship of cancel culture (brown, 2020; Ross, 2019); Butler (1993, p. 311) asks, "Is it not a sign of despair over public politics when identity becomes its own policy, bringing with it those who would 'police' it from various sides?" brown (2020, p.

Sanders (2002) says that the notion of complicity extends responsibility from one's relationship to specifc unjust systems, or in specifc deeds, to one's responsibility as a human to other humans. Etymologically, complicity indicates "a folded-together-ness… in human-being" (Sanders, 2002, p. 5). Furthermore, suggests Sanders (2002, p. 9), following Derrida, the notion of complicit human being contaminates binary positions, by folding together "oppositional pairs," creating "an ethicopolitical discourse on complicity." Sanders (2002, p. 10) goes on to diferentiate between "complicity in the general sense" and "complicities in the narrow sense," the little, daily, thoroughly enmeshed sense of complicities that I wish to invoke as the notion of human being for which I am advocating. I hope it is clear that this model of complicity is also fundamentally "ethico-political." It is intended to acknowledge, not overlook, the consequences of structural oppression and the material use of diferences in systems of power (the political awareness), while also arguing for a shared human responsibility which is necessary for a better politics (the ethical part).

Te idea of the human subject as made by foldedness, the image of "the basic folded-together-ness of being, of human-being" is also the place "of self and other" (Sanders, 2002, p. 11). In being folded with the other as a condition of human being, complicity is established. And the binary on which self and other structures depend is revealed as actually a relationship of complicity and not a relation of exclusion, opposition and hierarchy.

Sanders (2002, p. 15) also charts how asserting "[a] basic human foldedness" at once functions to deny the commitment to apartness that underlies oppressive systems (like apartheid, literally "apart-ness"), and, in necessarily having to be specifc in each articulation of resistance to oppression, must needs be limited by, defned by, the details of the oppressive moment against which it is speaking. It is both a general appeal to human being, and a necessarily limited, partial, materially and historically specifc one. In this way, the image of the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) superimposes onto the metaphor of the fold. If foldedness challenges the artifcial binary structuring of self and other, the rhizome bespeaks the connections between subjects and structures, within which selves are folded.

## **The Science of Psychology and the Psychological Humanities**

*Complicities* brings the work of the humanities to the work of psychotherapy. Like the task of articulating a complicit human subjectivity, this is both not a new undertaking, and one that has recently acquired new impetus. It is worth noting that as late as 2019, Marecek was still tracking an uneven application of interdisciplinarity, and feminist, critical and social justice-related concerns in psychology, particularly in the United States.

Psychology as a discipline emerged from philosophy, in the frst instance, and from the medicalization of behaviors, some of which became modern identities, in the second (Adriaens & De Block, 2013; Devonis, 2014; Foucault, 1977; Mascolo, 2016). It has what Rose (1998, p. 41) calls "a long past but a short history." Philosophical questions about the nature of perception, how we know what we know, how we know what is real, why we make sense of the world the way we do, how and why our senses work, where and what our souls are and how or if they infuence what we think, go back to the ancient Greeks. Psychology as a science began in the late nineteenth century, arguably with a lab experiment tracking response times to aural stimuli (Laubscher, 2015). Psychology emerged together with modern medicine and sexology, as the drive to understand, measure, categorize and rank along biological lines became mainstream in a specifc set of political, cultural and economic circumstances. Tese included colonialism, scientifc racism, the consolidation of modern democracies and the early global capitalism implicated in all these; and the invention of the hetero/homo binary along with the consolidation of modern gender and sexual norms (Adriaens & De Block, 2013; Katz, 2007; Saini, 2017; Schiebinger, 2004; Severson & Goodman, 2020; Teo, 2005). Psychology has also always had a metapsychological, critical component (Teo, 2005). Te brief account I provide here will focus on the twentieth century, largely British and American, developments.

Te process of developing psychology into a scientifc feld, apparently capable of accounting accurately for human thought and behavior via measurable experiments, was directly implicated in nineteenth century European colonial racism, in American racism, in misogyny and in ableism (Devonis, 2014; Guthrie, 2004; Kendi, 2016; Rippon, 2019; Saini, 2017; Showalter, 2007; Silberman, 2015; Teo, 2005). Or, as McWilliams (2020, p. 181) puts it, "[O]ur track record is replete with malignant othering, from our early enchantment with the eugenics movement, through our enthusiasm for IQ testing…, to our more recent collusion with torture." Psychology has been used to emphasize diferences rather than connections, in people and groups, what Devonis (2014, p. 113) calls the, "implicit reinforcement of discrimination via method." And as a discipline, psychology has been implicated in the construction of modern categories of normalcy and deviance which often operated along the lines of social diference and operations of social power; "psychology in fact did not solve problems but produced problematizations in which neutral issues were turned into highly problematized objects" (Teo, 2005, p. 144).

As a result, science's apparent objectivity is not only implicated in human cultural and political systems that belie its claims to truth-telling. It is also implicated in the idea that to be a self is something that can be known, tracked and improved upon. I am not suggesting that science is not real, but I am insisting that science cannot ofer us unmediated access to the Lacanian real, the place outside of the symbolic realm within which human subjectivity fnds itself. Biological facts exist; physics has laws; numbers can be counted; but the meanings we make will always be structured by the cultures in which we make them. When claims to the absolute truth of human being continue to be made in the name of a science of behavior, it is high time to push back.

Modern academic psychology has relied on a certain notion of the self as "the primary reality and unit of study" (Jordan 1997, p. 9), in the context of a scientifcally structured discourse. As a result, it has helped develop the modern version of what it means to be human, begun in the Enlightenment. Today, in the West, "to be human is frst of all to be rational individuals, with bodies programed by genetics" (Severson & Goodman, 2020, p. 2). Tese are the consequences: "At the start of the 21st century,… [e]xpressive individualism reigns supreme in various psychological approaches, promoting individuation and autonomy as primary achievements that facilitate health and wellbeing" (Goodman & Freeman, 2015, p. 5). Te colonial inheritances of this psychological discourse of normality remain unspoken within the scientifc frame that endorses it (Adams et al., 2015; Adams et al., 2017; Bhatia, 2020; Maldonado-Torres, 2017; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). Tis is despite strands of psychology, developed in the twentieth century, that are, variously, humanistic and/or based in phenomenological awareness of meaning-making, or infuenced by cultural, political, linguistic, philosophical or psychoanalytic theories. Te humanities ofers even selfrefexive psychological theories the chance to get outside of the limits of psychology's own discursive constraints (Olson, 2012; Papadopoulos, 2008; Teo, 2005; Teo, 2019).

Te psychological humanities (Martin, 2017; Teo, 2017; Teo, 2019) seeks to bring psychology back into more direct and, dare I say it, honest relation to the felds of academic study that focus on the mediated nature of human understanding and meaning-making processes. In 2009, the American Psychological Association asserted that psychology is a natural science (the science of behavior), leading almost immediately to calls to consider psychology a human science instead (Laubscher, 2015, p. 7). Te APA's vision of psychology was one of hypotheses, laboratories, equipment, observation, measurements, experiments and the use of scientifc method to formulate and test objective facts about human behavior. From a humanities point of view, as I have suggested, science is not a way to access unmediated truth, it is a technology of truth creation. And for practicing psychotherapists, our psychological work's ofcial claims to scientifc status—meaning objective, measurable, standardized, manualizable, controllable—cannot hold. "[M]any everyday psychologists know in their hearts that a major realignment of the profession's philosophy of science is desperately needed," Cushman (2019, p. 153) reported, following the audience response to his 2013 address to the APA. As he asserts, "Most of our work as therapists is not the application of universal scientifc truths won during long hours of objective research. Terapy, I think, is not scientifc… it is a kind of moral discourse, and worse yet, one that has political consequences" (Cushman, 2019, p. 79). Richards (2012, p. 347) insists on the inescapably refexive nature of psychology as a discipline; it cannot escape being of the situated humanity it wants to talk about: "Psychology's problem in this respect rests in large part on its desperate aspirations to the status of a natural science in quest of universal laws, and psychologists' own self-images of themselves as this kind of scientist."

One method of engagement with the scientifcation of psychology has been the attempts to assert the scientifc nature of the human part of psychology (Brooke, 2015; Freeman, 2019; Sugarman, 2019), to make the claim that while it may not be a STEM science, it should still be taken seriously as a science and can be called upon to account for itself as such ("physics envy," Held, 2020). Tis is one way to address the anxieties raised in our culture when we argue for psychology's status as contingent, as contingent as the human meanings it seeks to understand. What grounds can it stand on, if its fndings are inevitably relative? Te million dollar question becomes, "Can psychology as a discipline presume to be both truly scientifc and genuinely human?" (Gantt & Williams, 2015, p. 32).

Mascolo (2016) argues that this is the wrong question. Psychology's desire to be considered a science, as it emerged from philosophy, he suggests, has embedded psychology in "methodological fetishism—the privileging of method over theory in the hope that the careful use of scientifc methodology would ultimately lead to psychological knowledge" (Mascolo, 2016, p. 544). He suggests that the discipline's concern to understand human experience by solving the objective/subjective dichotomy, through self-defnition and focus on method, is misplaced. Psychological knowledge emerges from encounters between people, who bring their own already established knowledges of the construct under scrutiny. Tese subjective knowledges also have to have a shared dimension in order to be intelligible to all participants in the psychological enterprise. Te process is not either objective or subjective. (Notably, binary thinking is inadequate to and reductive of the task at hand). In other words, he (Mascolo, 2016, p. 544) says, psychology is an intersubjectively produced knowledge, and therefore "a genuine psychological science must itself rest on intersubjective foundations." We will return to intersubjectivity below, and in future chapters. For now, it is worth noticing that intersubjectivity is ofered here as a solution to the false binary of objective/subjective or science/not science that has helped to structure psychology. He concludes (Mascolo, 2016, p. 553):

A debate over whether a given discipline is or is not a science would seem to be more of a battle about status and prestige than about identifying alternative pathways to reliable knowledge. A better question might be, given its subject matter, how can we study psychological processes in systematic, reliable and useful ways? If such conditions can be satisfed, the question of whether or not disciplinary practices are "scientifc" would be irrelevant.

Implicit in this formulation is a challenge to the meaning of the "scientifc." Why is scientifc method so reifed, why is it endorsed as the best way to achieve knowledge? Mascolo's (2016) exploration of the meaning of the question, "Is psychology a science?" begins by reminding us that psychology emerged from philosophy via the Cartesian separation of mind and body, with the mind being privileged as the seat of rational selfhood. Tis way of thinking has always been gendered, raced and classed.

Gantt and Williams (2015) reiterate that psychology has emerged out of Enlightenment notions of the individualized and rational self. Tey also suggest that the humanistic branches of psychology that developed in the 1960s are "Romantic" (p. 42) and a "retreat into subjectivism" (p. 43), in other words, not available to be scientifc. Tey suggest a third option is necessary, where the study of human meaning can be scientifc, and can also take seriously the centrality of society and context to human being. Tey advocate for a model based on a science of understanding, which gives us access to the living complexities of human meaning. Tey contrast this to the dominant model of scientifc explanation, which, in compartmentalizing and seeking authority over, takes the human out of its project altogether. Te commitment of all of the contributors to this edited collection (Fischer et al., 2015) is to argue for the scientifc validity of an approach to psychology that accommodates social scientifc and humanities insights about human meaning and experience.

Tis project speaks to an ongoing investment in the ability of science to prove things, so that we can rest assured a psychological humanities can still be taken seriously, implicitly by certain people in specifc institutions. Such an investment, needless to say, is still operating within a privileged understanding of the realm of "science" as carrying a truth value that no other discourse can be expected to match, and the assumption that such a truth is both necessary and possible. Tis approach is located on the science side of a science/humanities binary, and limits what the humanities can truly ofer in terms of changing the thinking about the responsibility of science in helping to create the world it goes on to refect, and changing the subject of psychology.

Te question of the humanities' knowledge of things that are not facts (often understood in psychoanalysis, which is more welcoming to literature and other cultural artifacts as sources of human truth) and therefore cannot be grasped through scientifc method is central to the idea that a psychological humanities can expand the boundaries available to psychology:

[T]he main problem from the perspective of the psychological humanities is the degree to which refexivity is able to escape the borders of a given horizon. Clearly this refexivity cannot be conducted alone in a monologue but requires engagement with the *Other* and horizons that are radically diferent from one's own… psychologists need to move beyond the natural sciences in order to understand human mental life. (Teo, 2019, pp. 276–7)

Freeman (2019) ofers the (from a scientifc perspective) radical suggestion that psychology invests more in poetics than in theory. Signifcantly, he calls for psychology to develop a "poetics of the Other." In this formulation, not only is the other conceived of as more important than the self in the understanding of experience (which is not, in certain quarters, a new idea, as will be discussed below), but poetics are elevated over what Freeman (2019, p. 1) calls "theoretics." Freeman's call is to reimagine psychology away from a "scientifc" discursive frame. He advocates for a new kind of psychological thinking, one which takes extremely seriously, even centrally, the wisdom to be gained from "humanizing" (2019, p. 5) the scientifc theorizing on which modern psychology as a discipline is built.

Freeman's project is in part to challenge the defnition of scientifc theory that informs modern psychology's sense of itself. He wants to complicate the idea that the humanist, the poetic, the directly meaningful, is somehow other to the abstraction, deduction and generalizing tendencies of a modern notion of the theoretical. Psychology, he argues, has never been the kind of science it has aspired to be. He argues for the importance of narrative and biography to understanding clinical work (and Martin, 2017 argues for the importance of understanding biography to understand the development of the theories that structure and guide clinical work). Poetry, for Freeman (2019, pp. 9–10), is a place where hidden meaning is revealed, where the world is made visible. Psychologists, he suggests, like artists, share the task of restoring attention to the details of life that habitually slip away from us (see Stern, 2014).

In tracking the work of the poetic, Freeman (2019) gestures to the work that language does. Tis occurs in the diference between the felt experience of life in the body, and what happens when we humans make sense of experience. In fnding the world through words, the subject experiences its own reality: "Something has been realized, made real; and in this making, the world without may be re-found" (Freeman, 2019, p. 13). It is the unknown, made known and thereby experienced as familiar or remembered, that constitutes the poetic otherness of what it truly means to be human. Tis cannot be captured by theory, Freeman (2019) says. It exceeds attempts to pin it down, to weigh, measure, account for and track it. Te poetic cannot be captured and still be poetic. (Tis reminds me of Kristeva's, 1980 notion of the semiotic). While I appreciate Freeman's valuing of a nonscientifc approach, I prefer a more theorized version of "the poetic," reactive as I am to the suggestion that science has concrete, material theory and the humanities has an untheorized, universal realm of art. Tis is simply a misrepresentation of the highly political, philosophically complex, richly theoretical work done within the discipline of the humanities over the past half century.

Stern (1985) has already ofered an explanation for how language, in bringing the child along developmentally, splits her from her bodily experience, from what she can know of herself, at the same time as it enters her into the world outside herself. Tis underscores Freeman's point that science cannot be a theory of the real because it cannot not leave out the human element of the human experiences it is trying to map; "it is patently unprepared to address the living presence of human reality" (Freeman, 2019, p. 14). Scientifc language cannot capture what the poetic (or perhaps the semiotic, which in Kristeva's, 1980 lexicon is where poetic language comes from) lets us know is there prior to our attempts to impose form on it. "[H]uman reality, understood as presence or phenomenon rather than object, eludes the kind of conceptual—and theoretical—containment science generally seeks… [H]uman reality, as living presence, eludes such entrapment" as the provable experiment or the inventory seeks to impose on what it means to be human (Freeman, 2019, pp. 15–16). If we take seriously that the self is reliant on the other—on an other, on another—to be a self at all, we are in the realm of the poetic, according to Freeman (2019). We are also in the realm of the psychoanalytic unconscious, of attachment theory, of literary psychoanalysis, of interpersonal neurobiology and of a notion of human being as complicitous.

Despite its reliance on scientifc method to validate its work, psychology has never been an exclusively academic enterprise. Its authority is formulated on its espoused relationship between practice and theory about that practice (Devonis, 2014; Rose, 1998). Tis allows its pronouncements on human truths to be apparently evidence-based. Tis, of course, denies the exercises of power that the normative and normativizing energies of psychology have been responsible for (Foucault, 2006; Rose, 1998; Teo, 2005). Authority to know is authority over that which must be known. In the terms of a Western subject that has been shaped by binary logic, what needs to be controlled for is the constituting other.

#### **Self/Other**

Disciplines involved with revealing the construction of racial diference, and working in the felds of gender and sexuality, have amply illustrated, both theoretically and materially, the role of the constituting other for the modern self. Whiteness, straightness, maleness, ablebodiedness and Europeanness have all been shown to need their debased binary other halves in order to be themselves (e.g., de Beauvoir, 1997; Dean, 2001; Fanon, 1967; Katz, 2007; Lorde, 2007; McRuer, 2006; Said, 1979).

Some branches of psychological theory and practice, and especially psychoanalytic thought, have long insisted on the importance of the other to the self/other mode of subject constitution (Benjamin, 1988; Churchill, 2015; Coelho & Claudio, 2003; Dean, 2001; Musholt, 2018). And yet in 2015, Goodman and Freeman's (2015) edited collection on psychology and the other begins with the declaration that "the fgure of the Other is an… underutilized […] vehicle for exploring and reconceptualizing classic psychological… issues" (Goodman & Freeman, 2015, p. 5). Tey (ibid, p. 4) critique modern psychology's construction of "tools and techniques" that "serve… to objectify experience, contain it, render it more… measurable… But in this very objectifcation and containment, they also serve to take us away from what is truly Other." In this critique, we can hear an echo of Freeman's (2019) objections to scientifc theorizing, which by its nature cannot tolerate the unmeasurable, the unknowable, and also considers these things suspicious by virtue of their "Romantic" or, indeed, subjective qualities. Te application of the critical theories of otherness of the last half century seems to have afected psychology very unevenly.

Goodman and Freeman (2015, p. 2) defne the other as everything that is not the self: "namely, the world itself." Both the human subject and the subject of psychology, they say, lose the world when we contain the other. And we contain the other because, in its overwhelming otherness, it threatens the boundaries of the self. Tey characterize the self's relation to the other as necessary: We need it and we reject it. Tey further suggest that this "perpetual dance" is "ubiquitous" and "universal." "But what happens," they (Goodman & Freeman, 2015, pp. 2–3) ask,

[W]hen these idol-making and experience-rending tendencies are paired with a social order, philosophical heritage, and economic system that reinforce the centripetal force of the ego?… In this context, the self… becomes an idol of its own… It may be that we have told a story of ourselves—as modern subjects—that… requires us to live in constricted life-spaces, unable to truly attend to the abundance of the world around us… Tis has left us… ethically depleted, deprived of those existential resources that serve to move us beyond the confnes of the hungry ego.

I am uncertain about the assertion that a self/other binary is a universal structure for humanity, being leery of claiming the authority to make my culture's experience true for all. But what is useful about Goodman and Freeman's (2015) presentation of the work of the (Western, late capitalist, neoliberal) self's relation to its other, is their location of the consequences of this relation in our very specifc present.

If nineteenth century psychology assumed the Victorian, patriarchal and colonial right to make brutal use of its others (Perry, 2018; and see, e.g., the fate of Sarah Baartman, Crais & Scully, 2009; or the scientifc racism espoused by pioneering psychologists, Richards, 2012; Teo, 2005), twentieth century psychology, with the help of feminism, queer theory and critical race studies, noticed this dynamic. For example, Jordan's (2010) feminist approach helped develop the practice of relationalcultural therapy, which challenges the notion and the valorization of the bounded self (see Miller, 1986).  McRuer (2006), in turn, showed heterosexuality's reliance on ablebodiedness, and therefore on the disabled as well as queer other.

McWilliams (2020) details psychoanalytic theory's recognition of the centrality of the other to the modern self, and discusses the idea that we need others to hold the badness we cannot tolerate in ourselves. She identifes four main afects that feed the tendency toward destructive othering: fear, rage, envy and shame. Shame, she (McWilliams, 2020, p. 189) concludes, is above all "the common denominator of most toxic othering." Because shame and the other difcult emotions she identifes are part of being human, she says we cannot prevent ourselves from othering, we can only be vigilant about taking responsibility for what is happening when we do. She (McWilliams, 2020, p. 190) calls this, "the project of owning our own darkness, tolerating the shame it causes, and trying not to project it." Tis version of the self cannot escape a binary formation with its other, a point I will return to in Chap. 3.

What does a notion of the complicit subject bring to this standard version of the Western self? For one, the arguments made in this book about the relationship between the liberal individual self of current mainstream Anglo-American culture, the traditional project of psychotherapy, and current identity politics and the social injustices they seek to address, problematize the assumption that binary thinking is inevitable. To fully embrace the intergenerational, structurally saturated, rhizomatic, enfolded, complicit self is to reject the power dynamics our world currently depends upon and reproduces. Tese power dynamics have been presented to us in various ways as inevitable: by Freud's notion of the destructive drives underpinning "the" human psyche, by the "scientifc" uses of biology to create gender and racial diferences, by capitalism, by colonialism, by neoliberalism, by the assertion that we cannot help but hate and/or fear diference if we are to be human. If we challenge the structuring idea of the binary not as an underlying inevitability of what it means to be human, but as a technology of subjectifcation for the modern human, we open up diferent ways of being human. Tese ways have always existed. And they have been explored in much academic theorizing of the past 50 years or so, if not in mainstream academic (i.e., "scientifc") and popular psychology.

Central to my thinking on this, and to the thinking of many others across disciplines, is the work of Judith Butler. For my purposes here, most directly relevant is *Te Psychic Life of Power* (Butler, 1997), which explores how to become a subject is to become a self within processes of subjection and subordination:

[T]o persist in one's being means to be given over from the start to social terms that are never fully one's own. Te desire to persist in one's own being requires submitting to a world of others… Only by persisting in alterity does one persist in one's "own" being. (1997, p. 28)

Additionally, Butler's work points out the destructive power of socially inscribed norms to police access to the category of recognizable humanity (see Livingston, 2020). Othered groups are rendered socially unintelligible, their lives unlivable, their sufering ungrievable (Butler, 2003; Butler, 2016). Who gets to defne the terms of the system and its performances of proper humanity becomes an important question. As she explores this question, Butler's work ofers a detailed exposition of the fact of human complicity, the interdependence of self and other that systems of inequality violently deny (Butler, 2020).

Butler is most well known for her critiques of gender norms and how their reiterations are forged through repetition into apparent truths, endorsed at the expense of those who cannot or do not ofer the correct performances (Butler, 1999). But her work also allows us to be suspicious of the norms of healthy psychological subjectivity that have been circulated and enacted by the psy disciplines, and the other discourses of modernity that have emerged together with, and complicit in, psychology. What constitutes the performance of a psychologically good enough subject? Who says?

### **The Subject of Psychology**

Teories of the human in psychology are inevitably metapsychological; they make universal claims about human nature. Atwood and Stolorow (1993, p. 3) were arguing in 1979 that modern psychology had fragmented into diferent approaches to the question of subjectivity, each approach presenting itself as "the foundation for a science of man." But, as Atwood and Stolorow (1993, p. 4) point out, the diferent approaches are embedded in their originators' "ideological and conceptual orientations to the problem of what it means to be human," as focalized through their own experiences. Te assumptions about and theories of human subjectivity ofered by the diferent psychological schools of thought tell us more about the lives and subjectivities of their proponents than they do about universal humanity, and complicate psychology's claim to objective scientifc status. Indeed, preempting many of the more recent arguments in favor of a psychological humanities, Atwood and Stolorow (1993) assert that the problem of metapsychology arises from psychology's attempts to be scientifc. Tey (1993, p. 177), in turn, ofer "*a theory of subjectivity itself*… a depth psychology of human experience, purifed of the mechanistic reifcations of classical metapsychology." Teir solution to the problem of subjectivity in trying to understand subjectivity was, of course, intersubjectivity:

[A] feld theory or systems theory… that… seeks to comprehend psychological phenomena not as products of isolated intrapsychic mechanisms, but as forming at the interface of reciprocally interacting subjectivities… From this perspective, the very concept of an individual mind or psyche is itself a psychological product crystallizing from within a nexus of intersubjective relatedness. (Atwood & Stolorow, 1993, p. 178)

Intersubjectivity speaks to one element of the complicities of human being. It is a useful way to help theorize complicity in the therapeutic relationship. Intersubjectivity has a philosophical as well as a psychological tradition (Coelho & Claudio, 2003; Glaveanu, 2019). Tese tend to be divorced from the scientifc branch of psychology, and the idea of intersubjectivity has been most extensively developed in the psy felds by psychoanalysis. Te psychoanalytic intersubjective feld is defned by the notion of the third, although this third space has been variously characterized as clinicians have sought to name the consequences of cultural and psychic complicities. As I will illustrate in Chap. 6, there are a number of therapeutic modalities that ofer ways to apply these ideas in practice.

Te notion of the intersubjective third seeks to name what is psychically created between therapist and client when two subjectivities successfully see each other's personhood. Te idea of the intersubjective third aims to theorize what is created between the therapist and each client in a way that acknowledges the unique quality of the relationship. Te third is excessive to the people involved, because it literally exceeds them. It can be thought of as an unconscious creation between them (Gerson, 2004). Jessica Benjamin (2004, p. 7) has defned the intersubjective third, most broadly, as "anything one holds in mind that creates another point of reference outside the dyad." Te third is necessary for each member to get outside of herself, to enable what Benjamin calls mutual recognition between two subjects to happen. Benjamin (2004) describes the third as a fundamental relational principle, which, if surrendered to by the therapist, will enable both therapist and client to move "beyond doer and done to," into a place of reciprocity which undoes the oppressive subject/object dynamic of traditional psychoanalysis, and of a Western world built on binary thinking.

Te third, as an external point of reference outside of the dyad, can encompass a range of forces or ideas, such as the cultural third (Gerson, 2004). Alternatively, the idea of the social third names the imbrications of interpsychic and intrapsychic and cultural forces (Benjamin, 2011; Sehrbrock, 2020), what Sehrbrock (2020, p. 291) calls the presence of "ghosts of collective and systemic agents" in the therapeutic encounter:

[S]ocial thirdness presents a lens that illuminates the socio-political strata of experiences. It crystallizes social meaning that preserves distinctness without collapsing into polarities, extremes, binaries, concretizations of complexity, control, omnipotence, "us versus them," power struggles, splitting, and the phobic hatreds like transphobia, cisgenderism, and lookism, for example. In the context of a therapeutic encounter, social thirdness is both a lens through which clinicians view and understand the therapeutic process and a position from which clinicians engage with their patients. Social thirdness goes beyond the bounds of dyadic intersubjectivity, focusing on the felt experience of the moment in relation to society and the social unconscious… [T]he social third is like the epigenetic infuence of the environment's insignia on the expression of the gene. (Sehrbrock, 2020, pp. 291–292)

Te feld of intersubjectivity recognizes that the self needs its other in relations of intimacy, not domination (Benjamin, 1988; Glaveanu, 2019).

Benjamin's (2004) notion of recognition articulates the necessity of having a space beyond the binary. In her formulation, it is the collapse into complementarity (that binary energy) that causes dependency to become coercive: When two subjects, relating in a binary way, lose sight of the independent subjectivity of the other, and someone is reduced to a relational object. Te binary relation is a relation of power, based on a lack of recognition which causes objectifcation and contempt (McWilliams, 2020).

In addition to an intersubjective approach, other branches of psychology have also been critical of the mainstream model of human subjectivity as properly independent, intrapsychically constituted, teleologically directed and self-controlled. In the twentieth century, the feld paid ever more attention to social context, and to the imbrication of context with the individual (Gough, 2017; Laubscher, 2015; Teo, 2005). Since the second half of the twentieth century, some academic psychologists and psychotherapists have been concerned with hermeneutics, with the ideas of linguistic and social construction, and with the centrality of relationality to human being and to therapy. Tis is sometimes called the postmodern turn (Anderson, 1997; Anderson, 2007; Teo, 2005). Critical psychology has long been engaged with debates about the nature of selfhood, and aware of the embodied and material constitutive practices in which the psy disciplines have been implicated (Hook, 2007; Papadopoulos, 2008; Rose, 1998).

Here are a few more examples that are by no means exhaustive of the work done in this area: From a hermeneutic perspective, Cushman (2019, p. 9), citing himself from 1990, argues for the historically specifc, culturally infuenced and political content of any model of the self, in opposition to mainstream psychology's ahistorical individualistic self: "there is no universal, transhistorical self, only local selves; no universal theory about the self, only local theories." Cushman (2019) insists that psychology is a cultural artifact, its version of the self contingent on its own history and place. Furthermore, he argues that the modern self is empty, a result of the policies and politics of the twentieth century, and, crucially, of the liberal individualism that has shaped them. Te twentyfrst century self, he goes on to suggest, is neoliberally fractured and performative. Tese ideas are taken up in Chaps. 2 and 5.

Brooke (2015, p. 23), from a human science approach, advocates for a vision of the psychological subject as social: "a human science psychology cannot begin with a notion of the self that is taken for granted and selforiginating." Instead, he ofers a model of the human subject as embedded in and formed from language, community, history and an embodied identity.

Slaney (2019) suggests theoretical psychology borrows the idea of intersectionality from critical race and feminist theories in order to articulate its plurality. She wants a framework that emphasizes critical inquiry and critical praxis, that is aware of power relations, privilege and oppression, and the imperatives for social justice. Such a discipline would by defnition be pluralistic, collaborative and interdisciplinary. McCormick-Huhn et al. (2019) provide an example of what a feminist, intersectional, mainstream psychological practice might look like.

In its turn, cultural psychology has been defned as "an interdisciplinary human science" which recognizes the co-constituted relationship between people and between people and their contexts (Shweder, 1990). However, cultural psychology, like certain branches of feminist psychology, and like multicultural or cross-cultural psychologies, has been criticized for not challenging the Western methodological, empiricist foundations of psychology, which do not acknowledge the material relations of power out of which they emerge and which they perpetuate (Richards, 2012; Teo, 2005). Both transnational and postcolonial and now decolonial psychologies are aware of psychology's responsibility in perpetuating raced relations of power that are also geographical and economic (Boonzaier & van Niekerk, 2019; Collins et al., 2019; Duran & Duran, 1995; Held, 2020; Melluish, 2014; Miller & Miller, 2020; Richards, 2012; Teo, 2005).

Narrative Terapy and other postmodern modalities (Anderson, 1997; Freedman & Combs, 1996; Papadopoulos, 2008; Teo, 2005) have taught psychotherapists to think about the meanings made of and by clients, and have enabled us to learn about the harm done by oppressive systems and the discourses they perpetuate. But almost by defnition, we still work with the ideas about the client-as-subject which Rose (1998) points out the psy disciplines have helped create: that they are in search of more authentic personhood, more accurate meanings, greater authenticity. And that they are free to do so, indeed, compelled to do so: it is a sign of their healthy leanings, their personal responsibility and their move toward being better.

So while a critical eye on psychology's meanings and practices has been a part of the discipline, this has not tended to substantially impact the common-sense authority of the psychologized subject, the modern liberal subject of the therapy room and of popular discourses of choice. Fine's (2014) critique of social psychology's engagement with gender diference, including how these often problematic experiments are disseminated in the popular press, gives one example of this. As psychology became disciplinized in the nineteenth century, it participated in alliances with other scientifc regimes to establish ways of measuring, knowing, validating, testing and normalizing. What emerges from Rose's (1998, p. 60, 62–65) account of this process is just how woven into modern everyday thought, common sense reality, the subject of psychology is, as a result of this historical process:

To educate a child, to reform a delinquent, to cure a hysteric, to raise a baby, to administer an army, to run a factory—it is not so much that these activities entail the utilization of psychological theories and techniques than that there is a constitutive relation between the character of what will count as an adequate psychological theory or argument and the processes by which a kind of psychological visibility may be accorded to these domains…. [R]eality becomes ordered according to a psychological taxonomy…

Rose (1998) denotes this a "*techne*" that uses a way of thinking about political power, the creation of authority and authorities, and an ethical requirement to self-knowledge and self-improvement that shapes who we think we are and what we think we should be doing with our lives.

And in 2020, Severson and Goodman were still asserting that Western psychology is failing to locate the human being in context, because of a philosophical focus on the individual and an attempt to mimic the natural sciences (as though these disciplines were not, themselves, saturated with human culture, see Rippon, 2019; Schiebinger, 2004). Severson & Goodman (2020, p. 2) decry the "catastrophic failure to think about human beings as fundamentally social, relational, ethical, historical creatures." Tey critique the development of a scientifc rationalism, a belief in the constructs of objective truth, rationality, individualism, as wholly inadequate to account for the intergenerational transmission of trauma, sufering and injustice. Tey insist, "to be human is frst to be embedded in society, to exist in porous and complex social and ethical relationships" (ibid). What is remarkable about this statement is not its refusal of traditional psychology's "scientifc" stance, and its concomitant focus on the individual, the histories of which we have been exploring at length. What is remarkable is that it is asserted in 2020 as a revolutionary statement, as part of a project of leveraging psychology for social justice. Despite decades of theory, in other words, the liberal subject of objective experience and scientifc inquiry is still very much the center of psychological meaning.

Tus psychology can be said to be a technique of subjectifcation still. It is a way of thinking about what it means to be human that creates systems of power, through defning normalcy and deviance (Hook, 2007; Rose, 1998; Sugarman, 2019). It has helped to create an idea of human subjectivity that is self-enclosed and individualized, with the freedom of choice to decide who to be and how to be better. Tis subject is by defnition liberal, and a democratic citizen of the West. Te implications of these positionalities will be explored in more detail in Chap. 2, and linked to processes of racialization and gendering in Chaps. 3 and 4, respectively. Te latest iteration, post-internet, is the topic of Chap. 5.

Psychology has enormous constitutive power to underwrite a version of reality that entrenches binary thinking, a subject who is based on its other in a culture where institutions shape access to both resources and meanings, and to who can be considered a viable subject or correctly human. What is at stake when we ask psychology to change, to put into practice—in the psychotherapy room, in the pages of newspapers and magazines, as well as in the classroom and academy—the insights that critical psychology has taken from the humanities, is the enablement of new ways of understanding how we might be subjects in relation to each other. In such a world, there is no need to account for a gay gene or the etiology of transness in in-utero hormone exposure. Tere is no need to invest in the artifcial construction of diferent human races. Te logic that underpins structural inequality is revealed as a regime of truth, a construct to enable material gain for the "normal" or normative. And, equally important to my argument, it also means that those who have been constructed as the constitutive other, those whose lives and psyches have been used to enable dominant alliances of the norm, are also obliged to fnd additional forms of activism. It is not enough to demand or even achieve access to the master's tools. And advocating for revolution, for a complete change, a wiping clean of the slate, is impossible, as the idea of the complicit subject suggests—we are never free to escape where we came from, the terms of how we were made. Social justice change has to be able to hold the complexity of the human, which is not and has never been, binary.

#### **Conclusion**

Over two decades ago, as we have seen, Rose (1998) argued that the concept and the ethics of the idea of the modern individual, free to choose his fate, was a discursive construction linked both to the emergence of liberal democracies and to the psy disciplines. He traced the genealogy of this regime of the self, using, as this language suggests, Foucaultian ideas and other theories concerned with deconstruction, discourse and destabilization of the apparently natural and common-sensical. His project was taken up by Hook (2007, p. 8), who also uses Foucault's (1977) idea of disciplinarity to argue that what he calls "a psychological individuality" is central to the emergence of modern ideas, including political systems. Tis work emerged from the feminist-informed, queering turn in the humanities of the 1980s and 1990s, as is evident in Rose's (1998, pp. 3–10) account of the academic trajectory underpinning his essays. Despite the intervening decades, psychotherapeutic practice (and many of the institutions that teach and accredit it) has not signifcantly metabolized the interdisciplinary ideas articulated in 1998 for the discipline of psychology by Rose. Indeed, in 2017, Teo was arguing for the need to include the thinking developed in humanities-based subjects into psychology, and again, in 2019. If Rose's (1998, pp. 1–2) objective was to "question some of our contemporary certainties about the kinds of people we take ourselves to be, to help develop ways in which we might begin to think ourselves otherwise," then my purpose in this book is to argue that this work, so old school by now in the humanities, still needs to be applied to psychotherapeutic practice.

Te modern version of the self has been invented through a historical process. It is a macrostructural process, not an individual one. Tis historical process has everything to do with systems of power and exploitation. Tese include the economic changes of the industrial revolution and the neoliberal structures that have emerged from the globalization enabled by colonialism, to access to political power and the institutions that enable this access. Te mapping of this process is the topic of Chap. 2. And at the same time, all this actual work in the world would not be possible without symbolic structures, without language and the stories it tells us about who is human, who is deserving, who is deviant and so on.

Being human means being complicit. In the systems that shape us all, and that privilege some of us over others. In the language that speaks us into being, the ways we learn to say "I" and "you" and "us" and "them." In the histories that predate us and that set the terms for the world we inherit. In the culture that tells us who we each should be according to the bodies we each have, how we should behave, what we should value and how we should express those values, that behavior, our selves. In the families into which we are born, which hone and focalize the systems, the language, the history and the culture that authorize and shape what it means to be a family, and how a family should function. To be human is to be both-and, not either/or. We can never escape the specifcs between us, or the impact of embodiment, and the only way we can be better is to nevertheless allow for a disembodied shared humanness that makes us all possible, and that makes us all responsible for each other. Whether we like it or not.

### **Works Cited**

Brown, L. (2018). *Feminist therapy* (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association.

**Open Access** Tis chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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# **2**

# **Well-Intentioned White People and Other Problems with Liberalism**

Chapter 1 located the notion of the complicit subject within the psychological humanities and the subject of psychology. It argued that the Western notion of human being, which informs the subject of psychology, is based on a binary structure that refects and reproduces oppressive power dynamics. Tis binary relationship encodes and enables psychic and systemic power relations (since the two are complicit in each other). Te power dynamics enabled by binary logic work through refusing the complicit nature of human being in favor of a relationship between self and other that needs, among other things, a liberal subject formation.

A liberal subject is one who requires sameness in his relationships, who cannot truly tolerate diference. He is born from the Enlightenment's valorization of the rational, self-enclosed individual, a mind who can and should know and control himself—and thus, a subject fundamentally alienated from the capacity to handle encounters with the otherness that is central to what it means to be human. He grew in the soil of capitalism, and the gender and race binaries from which it profted. He eventually fragmented under neoliberalism, as the pressures of capitalism in a globalized economy reached ever further into systems and their subjects.

Tis chapter provides more detail about the subject of liberalism and its relationship to relations of power. It tracks the move from liberalism to neoliberalism as political, economic and cultural structures of power that have afected the nature of the Western (and Westernized) subject of psychology. It also summarizes the argument that the psy disciplines, and therefore the subject of psychology, are fundamentally implicated in techniques of liberal subjectifcation. As a consequence, the model of human being on which psychotherapy is built is limited by this history and its efects. Tinking complicitously opens clinicians up to the full potential of intersubjective co-creation with clients, a point which will be fully explored in the fnal chapter. Tis entails a commitment to move away from liberal individualism and its ideas about autonomy. It also entails an awareness of the efects of neoliberalism on twenty-frst century subjects, which is explored in more detail in Chap. 5.

## **Liberalism**

Before coronavirus, before the racial justice protests sparked by the lynching of George Floyd, before the ugly contentions of the 2020 presidential elections, but right in the middle of the maelstrom of Trumpism, I became a U.S. citizen. My citizenship ceremony took place during the government shutdown at the beginning of 2019, which was caused by a battle over the symbol of a pointless, expensive, destructive wall on the southern American border. Outside the Orpheum Teatre in Oakland, landfll in the shape of little plastic American fags made in China were being sold by a range of people, all of whom were not white. Inside the Orpheum, the very nice staf from the Department of Homeland Security, San Francisco branch, went out of their way to let us know that the majority of the 1000 or so people qualifying for citizenship that day were from Mexico (and then China, and then India). Tey told us that we were the best of America, and most welcome here. Teir political subversion in the context of the Trumpocalypse was clear, and I appreciated it.

Tey also got a choir of nice elderly people to sing us, "Tis Land Is Your Land," among other examples of musical Americana. Apparently being inducted into Americanness means being invited to collude with historical amnesia about whose land, exactly, we are on. Tey showed us a carefully curated slide show of images of immigrants of many ethnicities and colors coming to America over the years. Tey told us immigrants built America, again indulging in national amnesia. I felt deeply uncomfortable participating in the celebration of nationalism with these necessary omissions. I also felt the privilege of being granted citizenship at a time when some families were being torn apart for trying to get in to this country. I felt very appreciative of being in a country which allowed government representatives to speak out against the government, and appreciative of how they asserted that America is the people in it, not the people in charge. Tis whole ambivalent event says something, I think, about the liberalism that has built this country and allowed it to continue selling parts of itself for celebrating, while pretending other parts do not exist.

Te whitewashed American fantasy is that anyone can achieve anything here, in this land of opportunity, if he just works hard enough. Each person, this fantasy goes, is free to do his best, and entitled by god, law and ethics to the right to be his individual self, make his individual decisions and own his individual stuf. Te messy American truth is much murkier, since not everyone has equal access to the opportunities to get ahead. It is also complicated by the larger human and ecological truth that we do not, in fact, each stand alone, that we are implicated in each other's choices whether we like it or not. Te exalted ideal of the individual and his rights—the liberal subject, entitled to his land, his guns, his family, his freedom—is not a god-given truth but a construct formed at the cost of a host of others. It also fundamentally disallows the concept of human complicity. Despite even its best intentions, this ferce liberal individualism is profoundly responsible for helping to structure a deeply unequal society, a way of thinking about human being that is inimical to human being (see Davis, 2020). It is part and parcel of systems of oppression, even as it also is deeply committed to discourses of truth, freedom and human happiness.

Liberalism began as both a political and an economic philosophy. It has come to encode the politics of socioeconomic policy as morality. As a political system of thought, it originated in Europe, possibly as far back as the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century, which attempted to limit the monarch's divine right over the individual liberties of the landed gentry. It has thus always been classed. It has come, broadly, to stand for individual rights to, among other things, free will to choose, bodily autonomy and land ownership, none of which can actually be asserted by most individuals in most of the world. Despite what it thinks of itself, there are very real limits to liberalism's claims to universality, to its belief that it encodes values of general human dignity, truth and justice.

Guyatt (2016) has argued that from America's inception, wellintentioned white people recognized that America's founding principle all men are created equal—was incompatible with genocide and slavery. But they could not accept the diferences represented by Native Americans and Africans as equal to their own culture and values. In perhaps the most pernicious blind spot of Western culture, one which arguably builds on a philosophical inability to come to reasonable terms with sexual difference, these early liberal white Americans recognized the humanity of their others but not their innate equality. Tat could only come if and when Tey became more like Us. Tis is the problem with liberalism. Its message is ultimately about the centrality of the whiteness, maleness and classness that birthed it. It looks at others and measures their worth in their willingness to become like itself. It is also terribly, terribly wellintentioned, since it is so obviously the best of what it means to be human that wanting to assimilate others into itself is only a gift, a measure of its generosity. It is a benign Borg. It is bewildered by opposition or resentment from those it wants to help.

It also normalizes the idea that selfhood and ownership are coconstituting. Liberalism, in its insistence on the rights of the individual, encodes capitalist assumptions about the relationship between property and personhood. Part of being a person is the right to own stuf. Tis inevitably translates into maneuvers for economic and social power, to which other meanings of humanity become subject.

My frst understanding of liberalism is through a South African lens. Te terms of the debate are diferent there (see Distiller, 2005). Tere was a Liberal Party for a while, but it died in the face of apartheid (Rich, 1997). Stephen Bantu Biko (1978), a visionary writer and anti-apartheid activist beaten to death by the police in 1977, made it impossible for any progressive South African to be proud of the epithet. A white liberal, according to Biko, was someone who spoke for black people, who did not recognize their agency. White liberals were (are) products and benefciaries of racism who were (are) unable to see their own location in the system and how their well-intentioned actions perpetuate injustice, specifcally, for Biko, racial injustice.

Post apartheid, liberalism and liberal values continued to be highly contested and racialized (Husemeyer, 1997; Johnson & Welsh, 1998). Tis is unsurprising, given the class and race tensions the ideology carries in postcolonial times. Liberal ideals fed colonial discourse, in part by circulating a veneer of morality which stitched individual rights (in formations which beneftted colonizers, like the right to own property, without the acknowledgment of the ownership rights of the people who had been there frst) to democracy and its institutions. In so doing, it bestowed the state with commitments to dignity and freedom that were, in reality, extremely partial (Mehta, 1999).

As Brown (1995, p. 17) points out, the modern Western state is dependent upon liberalism to authorize its apparently "self-generating" functions: "social repairs, economic problem solving, and the management of a mass population." Liberal ideals helped to create the idea of the modern nation state, whose job it is to manage and protect the rights of the apparently free individual members of said nation. But the state, and the liberal ideas it relies upon and helps to produce, creates the individuals it goes on to protect. And this state, these individuals and the rights to which they are entitled by the law created by the state in the name of its individuals, these things have a very specifc history. Perry (2018) has tracked the mutual development of modern patriarchy in the Enlightenment via slavery, colonialism and specifc uses of juridical power. Tis emerging law confated manhood (meaning legally endorsed, raced, personhood) and the right to property, to create subjects and objects of government.

Perry (2018) shows how economic liberalism, which she tracks to the early expansion of European Empire at the start of the Enlightenment, and which was enriched by the early slave trade, was also a political and a philosophical system. Te entire enterprise was enabled by a use of the law to grant ownership rights to those considered people. Tus, economic liberalism is inextricable from "specifcally, the doctrine of personhood [which] entails a system whereby the subject before the state or the law was made into either a patriarch, his liege (woman), or someone outside legal recognition, whether slaves or… 'savages' but whom we can also term 'nonpersons' in the juridical sense" (Perry, 2018, p. 21). She shows how the legal personhood granted the gendered, raced, classed liberal subject of emerging modernity was based on the exclusion of those not aforded the legal recognition of their personhood. Te right to selfdetermination, legally and physically, continues to rely on having access to legally recognized personhood and what Perry calls "political recognition."

Rose (1998) has further detailed how individuality and governmentability go together in modern democracy. He adds Foucault's (1977, 1978) insight that the creation of normativity was a crucial part of this process. He details the role of the psy disciplines in creating this normative individuality, which supplements Perry's (2018) explication of the ways that ideas of legal personhood and the patriarchal order it helped establish extended from the public to the private sphere. Before the advent of the psy disciplines, Perry (2018) shows, liberalism was establishing practices of surveillance that penetrated intimate relations and assigned people (and nonpeople) their proper places in the system. In turn, Rose (1998) shows how normative and individualizing technologies of democracy and the emerging discipline of psychology worked together as the Enlightenment continued and into the twentieth century, as we will see in more detail below.

As we will see, too, in its current incarnation, neoliberalism, the imbrication of liberal individualism and capitalism within neocolonial globalization, has specifc efects on structures and subjectivities. Liberal subjects, formed through the Law and the law—that is, through both symbolic exercises of power and actual juridical decrees and acts—are part of and parceled with modern race and racism, modern gender binaries, modern democracies, industrial and surveillance capitalism, and the idea of the entitled, enabled individual all these constructs need to do their work of domination. Tese ideas are illustrated in the chapters that follow.

Williams (1991) writes lyrically about the modern implications of the marriage of liberalism and capitalism in the American legal system. She says that individual rights, that concept so dear to America's sense of itself and the freedoms on which its righteousness depends, were codifed by the law to be available only to those who could aford them. Notions of privacy, of intimacy, and the human connection upon which both rely, she shows, have been corrupted by the power of the marketplace to commodify human value. Perry's (2018) exposition of the initial legal construction of American personhood as dependent on commodities and commodity values, as well as on gender and race, provides the historical and ideological underpinning for the sociolegal dynamics, Williams (1991) identifes.

Williams (1991) writes about the valuation of property as something concrete that can be held to legal standards in contract law, standards which can in theory also protect people. Instead, she says (Williams, 1991), value has come to accrue to the curated meaning of a thing, the associations and desires conjured up by an advertising industry that evades legal accountability by relying on the creation of ephemera and selling the idea it associates with the thing instead of the thing itself.

Tis language was not available to Williams, but she is talking about the brand. When "masque becomes the basis of our bargains," she says (Williams, 1991, pp. 40–41),

[W]e will create new standards of irrelevance in our lives, reordering social relations in favor of the luxurious—and since few of us can aford real luxury, blind greed becomes the necessary companion… Money refects law and law refects money, unattached to notions of humanity.

Tis is also, not coincidentally, an accurate description of how slavery worked. And slavery is surely the institution which most exposes the investments and limits of a system of thought that wants to declare itself for universal human dignity and rights, thus authorizing its own goodness, while also encoding the right to individual proft as part of what it entitles itself to (see Kendi, 2016). Te silently raced component of modern liberalism, and its tendency to not know this, is refected here.

Williams (1991, pp. 71–71) also writes about liberal good intention. She describes a group of white real-estate developers who are considering entering a church in Harlem during an Easter Sunday service to observe the "show" during a walking tour:

I wondered what would happen if a group of blue-jeaned blacks were to walk uninvited into a synagogue on Passover…—just to peer, not to pray… Yet the aspect of disrespect, intrusion, seemed irrelevant to this welleducated, afable group of people. Tey defected my observation with comments like… "Tere's no harm intended." As well-intentioned as they were, I was left with the impression that no one existed for them who could not be governed by their intentions.

She adds (Williams, 1991, p. 72), "To live so completely impervious to one's own impact on others is a fragile privilege"—and indeed, fragility is the right frame. It partly explains the defensiveness of well-intentioned white people, in DiAngelo's (2018) term, white fragility. When one's sense of self is based on one's unconscious superiority over the other, wrapped up in one's sense of oneself as therefore obviously a good person, what is at stake when one's intentions are challenged is one's moral goodness. Te beneft, the proft accrued from such a positionality of wellintentioned selfhood, for whom the world's goods and meanings are assumed to rightfully exist, is both material and emotional. Both are diffcult to give up.

One result is that structures and systems—the law is one of them which convey rights on the basis of who can be admitted to the realm of the human (Perry, 2018), continue to mete out standards of inclusion through respectability and recognizability (Butler, 2003). Tis conficts with any true accommodation of diference, externally, in terms of social structures, and internally, in terms of psychic relations. Liberalism, despite its stated best intentions to accommodate everyone, encodes normativity. It cannot see equally valuable shared humanity across diference.

## **A Note on the Idea of the Universally Human**

If there is one thing my career as a professor of Shakespeare studies taught me, it was to be wary of claims to universal humanity. Shakespeare's texts continue to be sold as valuable because of their "universal themes." Te very specifc material history behind the selection of Shakespeare as the embodiment of the best of humanity is necessarily excluded from this messaging. Tere is concerted colonial education policy, linked to a political agenda of "civilization" and cultural conquest, behind the insistence that England's writer has this kind of moral authority over us all. All good literature, arguably, will make use of universal human themes. But it speaks to structural politics that Chinua Achebe's *Tings Fall Apart* is made to be an African author speaking to local conditions, for example, where Shakespeare's work, equally embedded in local events, becomes "universal" (Distiller, 2004; Dollimore & Sinfeld, 1985; Hawkes, 1992; Holderness, 1988).

Te branding of Shakespeare also has an editorial history which is implicated, as all human systems of meaning-making must be, in cultural politics. Just one example is the ways the same-sex eroticism of the sonnets was rewritten by editors, or explained away, while their vicious misogyny was endorsed (Booth, 2000; Duncan Jones, 1997; Fineman, 1986; Halpern, 2002). Tere is a vast and fascinating academic literature on all these topics: on the construction of Shakespeare's universality via British class and colonial policies; on the editorial history of the works, which helped to invent the idea of the individual genius author out of local writing practices that were much more collaborative and porous; on editorial interpretations and how they built the content for the idea of the universally human; and about how all this played itself out in education systems across the globe during and after high colonialism (e.g., Bristol, 1990; Cloud, 1991; De Grazia, 1991; Distiller, 2009; Erickson, 1991; Howard & O'Conner, 1987; Joughin, 1997; Loomba, 2002; Marcus, 1996; Taylor, 1989). Te political nature of any claim to universality is inescapable to a student of these felds.

And yet the European liberalism that emerged in the Enlightenment believed itself to stand for the best in all of us, with the quiet arrogance of a certain kind of white supremacist Christianity. I have often wondered if it is connected to the Ancient Greeks' arrogance: their designation for their outsiders, "barbarians," meant those who did not have language, and therefore culture, because they did not speak Greek (see Mannarini & Salvatore, 2020 for a discussion of the entanglement of citizenship and otherness). Tis assumption of one's own centrality seems to have carried over into many other aspects of the West's sense of itself, and been a very valuable tool in justifying the work of colonialism. In the world that colonialism made, a certain use of the language of universal human rights has been deployed by neoliberalism to further entrench global economic systemic inequality (Harvey, 2007).

Te idea of some universal humanity that we all share, in other words, has all too often been a tool of power and exploitation. Te key question, in the face of the very many diferences in cultures that a melting pot theory tends to want to not just wish away, but homogenize into the dominant norm, is: who decides? Whose terms for the apparently universal get to defne the idea of the human?

As a result of having been a scholar of English Literature in a postcolony like South Africa, I remain profoundly skeptical of any claims to universality. At the same time, I am arguing for a way to conceptualize something we humans all share, something I am calling complicity. Tis is my attempt to articulate how, being made in systems of power, as we all are, and having very diferent and unequal lives as a result, as we do, we nevertheless share a human connectedness. Tis argument is not the same as a statement of support for a universal humanism.

To be human means to be limited and shaped by the world we have no choice but to enter, the world that makes us. Freud (1973) conceptualized this in terms of the Oedipus complex, where every child must submit to an absolute authority and agree to have his or her (those were his gender options) desire directed by what is socially acceptable. Tis is another way to theorize the operation of normativity in Western modernity.

After Freud's Oedipus, being a person means having to live with deferred desire. Freud's Oedipus assumes that each subject requires the mother-as-object from which to be forced to separate; the other who can never be had but who is necessary to the self's self-constitution. Tis is one way to authorize a self/other relation. It depends on treating the (m)other as object (Benjamin, 1988). Te child's desire, in this model, is to possess her (Freud understood heterosex to be intrinsically about violent male domination and possession of women, see Distiller, 2011; Freud, 1950; Freud, 1946). But the child's desire is blocked because only the father may have her, in a psychic universalization and justifcation of what is actually a specifc value system: monogamous, heterosexual, Judeo-Christian marriage. In this system, human relations are linked to ownership of property, of mothers as property, of children as property and as the conduits of property through inheritance.

Te ownership of women's bodies and therefore of female sexuality is a lynchpin of this system (Rubin, 1975; Saini, 2017; Schiebinger, 2004). Because the system is a system of domination in and through which a child of the West must fnd their subjectivity, the child must learn to accept the loss of the mother who belongs to another, who is the father's. Tis psychic loss is enforced through the threat of violence, according to Freud: the threat of castration. In Freud's world view, the threat of castration is embodied in the female. She is the sign, for the boy, of what can happen if you do not obey. For the girl, her body, which lacks the signifer of personhood, is something she must come to terms with in order to accept her proper place (Distiller, 2011). While this is not an accurate description of what it invariably is or should meant to be human, to come into subjectivity, it is an excellent description of the gendered rules of our culture, of the patriarchal, capitalist, colonizing Western world Freud assumed was the whole world.

Freud (1950) told us it was human nature to dominate. He said children want to possess their mothers, and that it is only by submitting to the father's prior claim that they could learn their appropriate place. He said ownership is a foundational element of subjectivity. He told us not only that hierarchy is natural and inevitable, but also that structural power was appropriately male and heterosexual, and implicitly classed and raced through his deployment, throughout his writing, of the fgures of "primitives" and the "lower classes" as developmentally akin to children and women. Here is one of the places we see claims to universal meanings reveal their structural embeddedness. So while one answer to the question of why this culture has tended to make the sense it has of diference is, "human nature," I want to continually challenge the politics of that claim. If there is a meaning to "human nature," it is that we are complicit in each other, in all the struggles and power grabs and attempts to cope in this world we have made for ourselves and for each other.

Freud's binary model of subjectivity, which sees the subject as constituted by its diference from the (m)other, enables a liberal politics. Tis is a politics which facilitated the ideology of imperialism and the practices of colonialism, which is built on misogyny and sexism, and which continues to facilitate the violence, hypocrisies and smugness of white supremacism. It is born from and perpetuates the logic of capitalism as survival of the fttest.

Tere are other options. Dean (2001) suggests that, instead of developing a theory of the subject based on the self's relation to its other, which is a theory which relies on the binary structuring of diference (and, I add, therefore domination) as its starting point, we should start with an acknowledgment of the way otherness structures our internal relations. To see the self as emerging from the self/other relation is to see it as dependent on its diference from an/other in order to know (or construct) itself. But if I see my own internal unknowability, signifed by the unconscious, as the condition of my selfhood, then I am in the realm of my own otherness. I also cannot claim to ever know myself, and therefore to be unitary, and must give up all certainties based on this illusory knowledge.

Tis undermines the authority of the liberal individualistic self. It has a fundamentally diferent logic to the system of othering on which our current world order depends. Tis dependence is psychological, economic, political and social. If we recognize that we are always other to ourselves, that the "self" on which the self/other formulation depends is in fact inevitably alienated from itself, we approach a diferent ethics, Dean (2001) suggests. Tis way of thinking about otherness—as within the self—also exposes the binary as a construct. Dean's ethics of selfotherness entails granting recognition to the other despite not being able to see what is familiar and knowable in him, her or them (see Glaveanu, 2019). A liberal morality, on the other hand, demands intelligibility before it will confer humanity. It is thus a coercive, normative politics which reproduces its own terms even as it thinks it is making space for an other.

Dean's is a Lacanian perspective which describes human subjectivity as always already split from itself as a condition of its being (directed away from its desire as it is by the Law of the Father; think of Freud's Oedipus). Freud, of course, is the one whose theorizing of the unconscious makes Lacan's split subject possible. In Freud's own terms, we are all constituted from a loss we cannot know: the loss, in Freud's terms, of the mother we are never allowed to have because she belongs to the Father. But Freud's terms want to convey security through conveying power. Instead, we could consider the ways we are other to ourselves and see what it takes to tolerate the uncertainty this knowledge brings. It is worth noting that a model of psychology as a science, which tests theories based on measurable outcomes to arrive at objective facts, cannot tolerate this kind of radical uncertainty of meaning.

Making room for what we do not know, for the idea that we might be constituted by things we cannot ever really understand, means we also have to let go of the refexive defense to fnd certainty by hardening our identities. Te retreat into self-certainty (ego, if you like) always comes, Freud's formulation suggests, at the cost of another's subjectivity. It requires the other as object. (Te tragedy of identity politics is that, in making space for the other to take back her personhood, to speak in her own voice and to object to her objectifcation, it has ended up reproducing the system that it wishes to change. If the position of other becomes a place of certainty, it becomes an identity that requires an oppressor. I say more about this in Chap. 6.)

Glaveanu (2019, p. 454) suggests we start with our own otherness in order to prevent an appropriation of the other in the desire to render her into a "self-like structure":

Starting from the other means recognizing that we are born into a world of others… and that we, ourselves, are other to them. "Being other" is a primary type of human experience with extremely important developmental consequences, particularly if one resists the temptation to destroy the other… or internalize it.

Tis is a second way to approach otherness in a nonhierarchical manner. We are not only other to ourselves, as Freud's unconscious could have fully taught him if he had not been making meaning from within a binary structure. We are also always others' others. We are complicit in each other's psychic otherness that helps constitute the self, as well as in the material structures and histories that shape subjectivities, and in the discourses that refect and reproduce these structures and the subjectivities they need. If there is anything universally human, it is this always socially, historically and culturally shaped fact.

Blatant racism, sexism, homo- or trans-phobia and classism are not pretending to inclusivity. Tese isms are clear about their use of the others they create to shore up their sense of selves. Liberalism's good intentions, its denial of the ways it uses the current system to reinscribe itself as the central subject, is what makes it such a frustrating ideology for its progressive opponents. In the efects of its intentions, liberalism is also alike to the notion of human being endorsed by psychology (see Sugarman, 2019).

## **The Liberal Subject of Psychology**