Richard Sennett
The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life
(1970)
[xi]Introduction
During the past decade people of diverse social back- grounds and political opinions have awakened to the need to reconstruct city life. The riots forced mass attention on black poverty, but young people, who came alive in the 196o's after the silence of the previous generation, have developed an interest in cities that is more wide- ranging. For they have sensed in dense city life some pos- sibility of fraternity, some new kind of warmth, that is now understood in the vague term "community."
In large part, the search of young people outside the ghetto for urban community of this sort, for a relatedness and sharing, has been self-defeating. Some people tried to find this relatedness in the black ghetto itself, but the solidarity of the black brothers was bought at the expense of much pain and is not for outside consumption. The blacks told the affuent whites to find the warmth in them- selves. Some people tried to find community by radical- izing the working class, but the working class is not buy- ing a student alliance these days and broke kids' heads when it responded to them at all
So the search for community has come to be a search for some life principle in young people as they are white, affluent, and unhappy with the cocoons their par- ents spun around them. And the process of elimination that has forced this search back to an honest self-analysis has also brought the movement for social and personal renewal to a standstill. What does it mean for a white,
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educated, affluent person to feel a sense of community with other people? People in the suburbs have a sense of togetherness, of possessing an identity, a sense of "we" as a community, but that kind of social cohesion is exactly what most people nurtured in suburbs are seeking to escape. It is freedom of some kind that is included in this vague new ideal of community, but what kind of com- munity freedom is there beyond the freedom from mate- rial want?
Here is obviously no small problem, no little twist in our history. This is the first generation that has lived with both the achievement of affluence as a constant force in life, and the problems of what to do with it. Yet the force of change released in the last decade has come to an impasse precisely because this generation has none of the old hiding places left, cannot pretend to identify itself as a voice of the blacks or the white poor. It is left with the real problem of making a social life out of its own social materials, out of affluence and freedom from the struggle against scarcity and want. And it has no model from the generation that brought the affluence into being, since the willful innocence of the suburbs does not seem to be a satisfying way to sustain a social life, seems in fact to be a voluntary servitude to unruffled ease.
If and when the United States ends its venture in Viet- nam, if people can draw the lesson and end the morass of endless military expenditure, there will be an enormous amount of funds that can, and perhaps economically must, be spent on domestic renewal. The "generation gap will then be posed anew. If we want to end the
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physical depravity of slum housing, slum education, slum health, what should we do: build as we have before, and so induct the blacks and the poor whites into the malaise already felt by the white children of affluence? Increas- ingly, the poor are voicing their objections to that old way; they are saying that the ghetto brownstones are better, in the end, than the marvels of the new housing projects; something essential, also called "community, " is eclipsed by entry into the city forms of affluence as things now stand.
Affluence Across the Revolutionary Line
One of the strangest features of modern community life is that this problem has crossed the revolutionary line. The post-Revolutionary order in Russia and in its more affluent satellites seems exposed to a complex of dangers that were supposed to be stilled in the process of revolu- tionary upheaval. The young in these countries see their parents using affluence in ways they find disturbing; a kind of willful simplicity in the families of bureaucrats and a routinization of the pattern of daily life seem as deadening to young people in Moscow as they do to young people in New York. Again the problem: What does one do with community life when freedom from want has been achieved? The Revolution redistrib- uted wealth, but the fact of Revolution did not deter.
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mine how the eventual affluence was to be taken into a life, what men would dedicate themselves to when they no longer needed to struggle for enough to eat.
Many revolutionary writers have expressed concern about what their societies have to sustain beyond the fact of the old injuries. Their thoughts, like those of young people in our society, have come to focus on what kind of community sharing ought to reign under condi- tions of relative economic plenitude. Men like Herbert Marcuse and Franz Fanon have arrived at a specific an- swer. They believe that the revolutionary passage ought to be an emotional experience that transcends ridding a society of tyrants; it should be an education accustoming men to accept a certain amount of anarchy and disorder in their lives. To change the leaders of a society without changing the amount of disorder that the society will bear is ultimately to have no revolution at all. Marx, in his manuscripts of 1844, understood this; to be free in a post-revolutionary world was, he wrote, to transcend the need for order. Yet in Marx's early work was the dream that economic abundance would itself remove the struc- tural need in society for order. At that time he believed that repressive order grew not merely out of the inequi- table distribution of wealth but also out of the fact that there was not enough to go around. This is why critics like Sartre see in Marx the philosopher of plenitude, of a society that could exist beyond the order produced by economic scarcity.
Of the revolutionary writers who saw that this dream of freedom would not arise from the brute fact of redistri- bution, Franz Fanon, the Algerian psychiatrist , has been
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the most explicit in spelling out what kind of community structure is necessary in the post-revolutionary society to achieve the goal of nonroutine life. For Fanon, the freedom inherent in making revolution can only live as long as the revolutionaries remain outside the confines of city life; he believed they must look at the city as a hu- man settlement, a human community, hostile to the force of their own commitment. Fanon believed that the necessity for bureaucracy in a city and the anonymous character of human contacts there were bound, in the end, to destroy the feeling of closeness, of men wanting to share a better, more just life for all. By the same token, these dense places would frighten men into pursuing safe routines where they knew they would not be overwhelmed. They would thus be pushed into private circles of security and eventually lost as revolutionaries.
This anti-urban bias of revolutionary leaders who are disturbed by what has transpired in Russia is deep-seated; it is to be seen in the glorification of the peasantry by Mao Tse-tung and Fidel Castro; it is to be seen in the theorists of guerrilla warfare who are increasingly giv- ing up the cities as "hopeless" places in which to inflame widespread revolutionary ideals.
But the fear of cities displayed by men like Fanon leads itself to a terrible limit on human freedom. Avoiding city life may preserve the ardor of solidarity, but at the cost of enforcing a terrible simplicity, that of the tribe or small village, on the revolutionaries. The price of keeping the revolutionary spirit alive is thus a bondage of its own, a curb on the social diversity present when many different people live together in a dense, urban settlement.
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The urge to avoid routine is gratified, ironically, by mak- ing the social boundaries of life claustrophobic.
Furthermore, the problems of large-scale organization are ignored rather than confronted. Better tribal and in- timate than impersonal and bureaucratic is a formula whose exercise is an admission of impotence to deal with and change bureaucratic structures of themselves. Thus do the theories of the anti-urban revolutionaries come against the same problem now facing the New Left in Western countries: How can the urban-based large-scale bureaucracies be transformed so that better communal lives are possible? It is a question of learning how to use the system of life-producing affluence in order not to be smothered by it.
I think men like Marcuse and Fanon are right when they say there is a need to learn a new context of disorder and diversity; the rules and routines necessary to survive in the face of economic scarcity are now out of place. But I have been moved in my own thinking to probe how dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities can become the tools to teach men to live with this new freedom.
I have had to start with the premise the history of the postwar years taught this generation: communities of abundance open up new possibilities in men for self- imposed tyranny as well as for freedom. To understand the community life of people freed from scarcity requires a sounding of the darker desires of men, desires for safe and secure slavery that people bring into their social relations. Only by probing feelings of this sort, which most men would be loathe to admit to themselves, can
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come clear the quality of desiring freedom and the means of achieving it under conditions of modern affluence.
Unlike writers such as Erich Fromm and Hannah Arendt, who treat the desire for slavery on a broad psycho- logical palette, I have come to believe that this desire, as related to economically abundant community life, has a quite specific form: the line between slavery and freedom in rich communities depends on the character of the tran- sition it is possible for men to make from adolescence to adulthood. The theme of this book is that there appears in adolescence a set of strengths and desires which can lead in themselves to a self-imposed slavery; that the current organization of city communities encourages men to en- slave themselves in adolescent ways; that it is possible to break through this framework to achieve an adulthood whose freedom lies in its acceptance of disorder and painful dislocation; that the passage from adolescence to this new, possible adulthood depends on a structure of experience that can only take place in a dense, uncon- trollable human settlement--in other words, in a city. The book aims to convince its readers of something dis- tasteful now to most: the jungle of the city, its vastness and loneliness, has a positive human value. Indeed, think certain kinds of disorder need to be increased in city life, so that men can pass into a full adulthood and so that, as I hope to show, men will lose their current taste for innocent violence.
Conservative readers may at first feel comfortable with this idea, since it may appear that the ideas and discon- tents of the young can be dismissed as pernicious illu-
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sions, which will disappear when they grow up. But it is precisely because the structure of present affluent com- munity life discounts the release of new strengths and passions in adolescence, as though an early stage of life were not as dignified as a later one, that these feelings cannot be fully expressed and worked through. Thus do these urges toward voluntary slavery remain present and unresolved. Adults in affluent communities are frozen in desires that emerged in their adolescence and that have led them to a fear of the full possibilities of freedom in adulthood. But in the structure of a great city, men can be offered the possibility to move out of this morass; it is in the building of purposely diverse cities that society can provide men the experience of breaking from self- slavery to freedom as adults.
I believe the freedom to accept and to live in disorder represents the goal which this generation has aimed for, vaguely and inchoately, in its search for "community. The attempt I have made to refine and deepen the terms of the search for community is itself too vague and in- choate, I fear, to be a "proof" or a grand theory. I felt the need to question my own conscience, and hope you, the reader, will be moved to do the same.
PART ONE
═══🙡═══A New Puritanism
[3]CHAPTER ONE
═══🙡═══Purified Identity
IN 1929 ANDRÉ MALRAUX PUBLISHED HIS FIRST NOVEL, The Conquerors, a story of the leaders of the Chinese Revolution of 1925. Malraux's American publisher has written of this book, "It was indeed the first modern novel in which the raw material of politics was subordinated to the real subject matter: the characters' search for the meaning of their lives.' » The real subject matter was what we would now call the psychology of their struggle, the passions leading them to revolution.
At the center of this novel lies a clash between two kinds of leaders. Borodin and Garine are Russian revolu- tionaries in China guiding the native revolutionary cadres; Hong is a young Chinese who is an anarchist, originally part of the Borodin-Garine groups, but who later comes into bitter conflict with them.
Borodin and Garine are Marxist revolutionaries, but they are not ideologues. The struggle they are waging is in terms of concrete events and specific people, so that their philosophies of right bend, and are transformed by, the
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specific processes of revolution they experience. Borodin and Garine are not merely "tacticians"; they fight for a reason, for a cause, but that cause is not impervious to the unique, unclassifiable events the revolution spawns.
Hong, their eventual enemy, is an anarchist, yet curi- ously much more rigid than they are. His sense of what is the right thing to do, what is "correct. " flies in the face of the facts of the revolution; Hong is unwilling to bend, he cannot submit himself to the chaos of events in order to act, he cannot yield himself and his commitment to the test of conflicting experiences in the actual struggle. In- stead, Hong must put himself in such a position that he seems to stand above the chaos, to be safe while the others are troubled, to be willfully immune when Garine and Borodin have the courage to be self-doubting and confused.
Certainly the drama Malraux fashioned out of these men's lives--a drama based on real persons--comes from their exceptional strengths at a special historic moment. Yet what makes these revolutionaries worth exploring is not simply their distinctiveness. Malraux distilled into the character of a man like Hong the essence of certain mo- tives for action that guide less exceptional, weaker men in their everyday affairs. It is this hidden affinity with the routine world that makes Hong so startling and the forces animating him so important.
The feelings of young doctors about to start their careers as psychiatrists seem as distant in tone and temper from the emotions of revolutionary leaders battling in China as can be imagined. Therefore it might be worth-
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while to look at ways the two groups of men can be guided by a common set of desires.
Recently two American researchers, Daniel Levenson and Myron Sharaf, did a study of a peculiar phenomenon among these young doctors. This was the tendency shown by many beginning psychiatrists to think of themselves as little gods, sitting in judgment on their patients and slightly contemptuous of them. The attitude, which Leven- son and Sharaf called the psychiatrists' omnipotence de- sire, is of course not universal, but it is frequently to be found among newly practicing therapists.
In the process of their research Levenson and Sharaf concluded that this little-god complex occurred partially out of a great fear these new practitioners had that they might be hurt by becoming involved with the problems of their patients, involved in a painful way so deeply that their own sense of themselves would dissolve. The atti- tude of sitting in judgment from afar, with its hidden trace of contempt, was how these new doctors defended themselves from this fear, drew a line in advance for themselves as to who they were and the relation in which they stood to their patients.
Both Hong, the young revolutionary, and these young doctors have exerted a peculiar kind of strength--a power to cut themselves off from the world around them, to make themselves distant, and perhaps lonely, by defining themselves in a rigid way. This fixed self-definition gives them a strong weapon against the outside world. They prevent a pliant traffic between themselves and men around them and so acquire a certain immunity to the
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pain of conflicting and tangled events that might other- wise confuse and perhaps even overwhelm them. In Hong, this defense against confusion through a rigid self-image is used to fend off the dissonance spawned by revolutionary upheaval. By making himself immutably fixed in purpose and act, Hong can transcend the experi- ences of horror, of guilt over killing, of sheer nerve-wrack- ing tension that his comrades feel in their battles with the police and the city populace. In the young doctors, this defense against confusion through a rigid self-image fends off being engulfed by the enormity of their patients pain, a pain whose sickness lies in part in the very fact that the patients have no way to control it. For both the revolu- tionary and the doctors, the threat of being overwhelmed by difficult social interactions is dealt with by fixing a self-image in advance, by making oneself a fixed object rather than an open person liable to be touched by a social situation.
The sense of time involved in these acts of self-defense is more complicated than it might first appear. A peculiar behavior pattern among certain city planners, seemingly remote from either of these two situations, shows what this complexity is.
One technique of planning large human settlements developed in the past hundred years has been the device of establishing "projective needs." This means guessing the future physical and social requirements of a com- munity or city and then basing present spending and energy so as to achieve a readiness for the projected future state. In planning schools, beginning students usually argue that people's lives in time are wandering
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and unpredictable, that societies have a history in the sense that they do what was not expected of them, so that this device is misleading. Planning teachers usually reply that of course the projected need would be altered by practical objections in the course of being worked out; the projective-need analysis is a pattern of ideal con- ditions rather than a fixed prescription.
But the facts of planning in the last few years have shown that this disclaimer on the part of planners is some- thing they do not really mean. Professional planners of highways, of redevelopment housing, of inner-city re- newal projects have treated challenges from displaced communities or community groups as a threat to the value of their plans rather than as a natural part of the effort at social reconstruction. Over and over again one can hear in planning circles a fear expressed when the human beings affected by planning changes become even slightly interested in the remedies proposed for their lives. "Interference," "blocking," an "interruption of work" these are the terms by which social challenges or divergences from the planners' projections are inter- preted. What has really happened is that the planners have wanted to take the plan, the projection in advance as more "true" than the historical turns, the unforeseen movements in the real time of human lives.
Why planners should be so inclined to think this way is a subject to be explored in detail later in this book. But the elements of their feelings can be discerned through what has been seen so far. City planning of this sort is the projection of a rigid group self-image similar in its motivation to the rigid individual self-images seen
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in the young revolutionary and in the group of young psy. chiatrists. For in this projected future there lies a way of denying the dissonance and unexpected conflicts of a society's history. This attitude is a means of denying the idea of history, i.e., that a society will come to be different than it expected to be in the past. In this way, a planner at his desk can steel himself against the unknown outside world in the same way that a young doctor steels himself against his fear about the experience of dealing with his patients by playing the little god, distant and removed. For this mechanism of defense to work, then, there is a necessity for a certain kind of millennial thinking, a fear of the sources of human diversity that create history in its true sense.
When this fearful defense against the unknown future becomes regnant in a life, the acceptable future can be conceived only in the same form as the present, as a state of life for an individual or group whose features are rigidly determined and contain no hidden surprises.
Norman Cohn's brilliant book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, investigated the lives of those unusual people and cults in the medieval era whose sense of time was governed in this way. His book concludes with a bold essay linking the sources of modern millenarian move- ments, like the Nazis in Germany, to these patterns of the past. But I think the people Cohn studies are examples of a human phenomenon even more general than Cohn takes them to be. These millenarians have played out in a striking way an endemic pattern of human fear, whose traces can be found in the attitudes of such seemingly rationalistic" people today as young doctors or city
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engineers, or in such anti-religious leaders as the anar. chist Malraux described.
However, the model for what this pattern of fear and self-conception means does come most easily from religion. The process described thus far can be called a search for purity. The effect of this defensive pattern is to create in people a desire for a purification of the terms in which they see themselves in relation to others. The enterprise involved is an attempt to build an image or identity that coheres, is unified, and filters out threats in social experience. Naturally the drives for purification of the self that occur in deeply religious people cannot be "reduced" or simplified so that they are explained simply as a fear of the unknown. But, socially, fear of losing one's identity through outside threats often does play a large element in religious conversions. Michael Walzer's account of the sources of cohesion in the original Puritan community, for example, shows how the turmoil of social change and an unknown future produced among the Puritans a great fear of not knowing who they were. This fear in turn produced in their religious affairs the desire to find an absolute identity, to be fully and finally known to each other as true believers.
The search for purity in more modern, less religious, terms is for someone like the anarchist Hong the desire to create so clear and unambiguous a self-image that he becomes immune to the outside world. The jarring ele- ments in one's social life can be purified out as unreal because they don't fit that articulated object, that self- consciously spelled-out set of beliefs, likes and dislikes, and abilities that one takes to be oneself. In this way, the
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degree to which people feel urged to keep articulating who they are, what they want, and what they feel is almost an index of their fear about their inability to survive in social experience with other men.
The seekers after purity in more religious times seemed revolutionaries to the men around them. The Puritans, or the millenarians of an even earlier era, were impatient with the ills of the temporal world and acted to make it over- or at least the swatches of it they controlled--in their own image. Indeed, today one of the easy clichés about some young revolutionaries is that their desire for purity in the society and in themselves creates the revolutionary drive.
But hidden in this desire to purify one's identity to others and oneself is a conservative tendency. The known in this scheme of identity is so insistently taken as true that new unknowns which don't fit are excluded. Reality cannot be permitted to be other than what is encompassed in one's clearly articulated images of oneself and one's world. The obvious result, then, is that the material for change, change in one's feelings, one's beliefs, one's desires, is greatly weakened in a life because new events or experiences are being measured in terms of how well they correspond to a pre-existent pattern. The advent of unexpected experience is not permitted a reality of its own; the fear involved in the identity process prohibits men from feeling themselves free historical beings. Thus does this passion to create a clear self-identity act to con- serve the known past in the face of the disturbing present. The historical turn, the event or experience that doesn't fit preconceived feelings and one's sense of place, is de-
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fated in its "truth value. » Because of this fear, the more comfortable, the easier dicta of the past are made the final standard of reference.
The attitudes of the young revolutionary, the young doctors, and the planners are thus bound together by one truly reactionary force: experience over the course of time is subjected to a purification process, so that the threatening or painful dissonances are warded off to preserve intact a clear and articulated image of oneself and one's place in the world. Experience is being purified by having the dissonances interpreted as less real than the consonances with what is known.
This, in crude outline, is how I believe the desire for purity can dominate the acts of people no longer en- meshed in the substantive problems of religion. Social- psychological thinking in the past decades has tried to understand ideas such as this in what are called "life- cycle," or developmental, terms. This approach is unlike that of the pioneer social-psychological thinkers. Freud, for example, treated the psychic processes of men as all in germ at the moment of birth; the instinctualists work- ing on physiological problems believed set instincts in- nate to the organism played themselves out in changing recombination over the course of a lifetime. The newer social-psychological thinking is typified in psychoanalysis by men like Erik Erikson and pervades such movements of thought in the last twenty years as existential psycho- therapy. These newer schools attempt to see how psychic materials, not just psychological problems, are generated during the course of a human lifetime; they are searching for ways to find how men create their psychologies. The
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new wave of psychological thinking rejects the idea that men are assigned their motives by such abstractions as "human nature" or "innate drives."
I believe that the peculiar desire for purity I have sketched so far is an emotion created at a specific point in men's lives. Of course it is true that human beings of all ages, from the infant to the old man about to die, have fears about the unknown. But it is no less true that the way human beings want to deal with fears and the powers men have to deal with them change radically in kind over the course of a lifetime. The peculiar re- sponse to fear of the unknown that leads to this search for a purification of one's relations with the social world is inaugurated, I believe, in adolescence. To understand this modern purity ritual, it is necessary to know some- thing about the way the late-adolescent stage of life creates devices to handle disorder or painful threats.
The Emergence of Purified Identity Were one to follow the wisdom of the contemporary press, the group of adolescents who would seem under the sway of this need for a rigid identity would be the young in revolt. Yet the young people whom the press labels as student leaders are actually deviants from the real body of student unrest. These newspaper-created "student rebels" are ideologues, whose political ideas are a throwback to the primitive formulas of the 1930's.
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A great body of the young are disaffected, to be sure, but their alienation is much more courageous, precisely because they have, in my experience, the integrity to be confused about what they want for themselves. Perhaps because these young people are trying to construct a de- cent life for themselves without the old, easy guides, the simplicity entailed in press reporting must ignore them. But in good studies, such as those by Jack Newfield or Kenneth Keniston, the reader can only be struck by how few are under the sway of the "new fascism, as the press calls it, or under the sway of Progressive Labor Party dogma. Rather, these affluent radicals are experiment- ers with themselves, and so are willing to experience pain- ful confusion even in the face of their radical commit. ment.
No, the obvious comparison is too narrow and too easy. The examples of purified identity cited before reveal, in an extreme form, something nascent in more ordinary adolescent life. Adolescence is commonly thought to be a period of wandering and exploration; children become men and women sexually, the shelter of the home for a majority of the young is left behind, the capacity and the desire to act as newly independent beings grows strong. With this enlarging of human horizons in ado- lescence, it must surely seem inappropriate to see born at the same stage of life those tactics of evasion and avoidance of unknown, painful experiences that give rise to the desire for purity and coherence. Yet certain puzzles in ordinary adolescent behavior can be explained in no other way.
One of these puzzles is the high number of young
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people at the point of entering college who fasten on a choice of career without giving themselves a chance to explore alternatives. One study estimates that about three out of every five entering college students choose careers for themselves before having any experience or knowl edge of their future pursuits; the striking thing is that relatively few of these students break their initial choice. In talking to students who have so committed themselves, one feels the intense desire many of them have to move out on their own; yet something hidden in themselves, something they can't vocalize, chains them back. In American and English schools, the chains are in part created by their teachers, whose concern for professional work encourages the young to remain in fear of their own power to wander: better solid, if dull, than vital messy, and a dilettante. But many young people in choos ing a life work also chain themselves voluntarily. Many don't want to wander; they want to be sure of what they are doing in advance of doing it.
Another pattern of purification occurs in a curious limitation on adolescent sexuality. From his study of medieval myths of love, Denis de Rougement has sug- gested that the search for "the" ideal man or woman is a way of avoiding loving real people, since "the" ideal mate is really only a reflection of oneself as one would like to be; it is not another person with a life of his or her own. Yet it is exactly this search for an ideal mate that flowers in adolescent sexuality, that creates its narcissism and homosexual undertow. This search for gods or goddesses to love leads the young so often, as Erik Erikson puts it, to deny the fact of another real person in
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sexual relations. And since another real person is not consciously present, there need not occur the endless, often painful, rebalancing between two people who are present to love each other; perfect love in adolescence suffers no such intrusions. Anna Freud has observed that the conflicts involved in an intimacy are evaded in ado- lescence by a rigid selective process; the young take a painful difference to be a proof that a particular partner is not "the" one.
A third pattern of avoidance the young put on their own powers is more a state of mind than a concrete activity like choosing a career or a partner in love. Yet this state of mind is to me the most marked characteristic of adolescent purity concerns. It is the attempt of the young to create an aura of invulnerable, unemotional competence for themselves. Researches into the inner life of juvenile gangs mention this attitude, but its penumbra in adolescence is much wider than the atti tudes of tough kids. In the desire to be "on top of things," to control something so totally that nothing occurs out- side of one's power, one insulates the experiences one is willing to probe or submit to. In school, for example, it is rare for students to ask each other questions in class, rather than an authority, simply to find something out. Studies of adolescent group life find, instead, a recurrent striving for a "professionalized" expertise in all kinds of activities so that one will not be embarrassed, appear confused, or taken by surprise. But when the dangers of surprise are avoided, there can be no exploration, and so no inner growth.
Indeed, in each of these areas there occurs a voluntary
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limitation on the individual's freedom, in order to evade the very fact of growth--the emergence of unknown, and therefore potentially threatening, experiences in a life, It is in such ordinary events as choosing a career or some- one to love, or in the common attitude of striving for an invulnerable competence, that the self-imposed limita- tions of adolescence reveal a desire to purify identity. In these commonplace events is found a desire to estab- lish a coherent and fixed order of life so that the individ. ual may transcend experiences of pain, of dislocation, of being overwhelmed. The question is why growing young people should do this. Why should the fear of experiencing pain result in this particular kind of defense system? The character of these defenses comes, I believe, from a structure peculiar to the adolescent's growth
Time Scales in Adolescence
It has been said that modern writers on the patterning of human development, like Heinz Hartmann and Erik Erikson, have tried to understand how psychic material is created in the course of a lifetime, rather than revealed, as the older psychoanalytic school would have it. For Erikson, especially, the framing of life stages is not seen as a process where the same psychic material is reworked in different ways over the course of time; Erikson instead envisages a sequence of life crises where new kinds of reality problems, which involve the individual increas-
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ingly in wider social spheres as he matures, bring forth separate and distinctive strengths at different points in a life.
The growth that takes form in adolescence is com- moly thought of as bodily and sexual; despite the work of Freud, it is often difficult for even educated opinion to accept pubescence as a continuation and elaboration of a sexuality already alive in childhood. The distinctive- ness of adolescence occurs on another plane. Writers, including Anna Freud and Peter Blos as well as Erikson and Hartmann, are now trying to understand the kinds of ethical and value-making strengths that seem to grow in distinctive ways during the adolescent phase of life. It is in this area of value-making and value-choosing that the human being during the late phases of adolescence undergoes an important crisis of life.
This crisis entered everyday language as an "identity crisis" (the term was coined by Erikson), and, as is the way of popularized ideas, has lost its specific meaning. Every unhappy child is not having an identity crisis, nor are middle-aged advertising executives who want to be writers. In Erikson's original meaning, the crisis of identity occurs when a young person perceives a conflict between the social materials he can use in his life and his particular ability or desire to use them. A crisis of identity in late adolescence is one of evaluating the rela- tions between the individual's image of himself and his image of the life outside that self. In this way, the crisis of identity is not simply a crisis of "what my personality is like"; it is rather the conscious attempt of the growing human being, for the first time, to formulate rules or
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patterns of the relations between a self-image and an image of the world outside the self.
It is this making of rules to define the relations between an individual's sense of himself and his sense of the social world around him that creates the adolescent's newborn feeling of individuality. The young person is now on his own, because he can finally engage in the activity that in his childhood was the font of parental authority; now he can make ethical rules, "appropriate standards of behav. ior." He has the sexual and intellectual powers to do so; there is only one thing missing, the experience in using these powers. Intolerant of the old parental restraints, anxious to see and understand for himself, he is like a painter with an enormous supply of paints and brushes but no canvas to work on. He has no idea of the use to which he can put the strengths, the materials for life, that he possesses.
Thus situations in which a young person must make a judgment relating his sense of himself and his sense of what lies outside him are fraught with enormous anxiety. This anxiety occurs, for example, in choosing to prepare for a career. Someone entering college is "ready" intel- lectually and physically, but not at all "ready" in terms of drawing on the experience of using his powers in a wide variety of situations, to choose what he wants as his peculiar life work. Adolescence is a stage of human growth, in other words, in which the time scales of growth are not in harmony. Sexual, intellectual, and perceptual powers grow at a rate far in advance of the fund of experiences the individual possesses.
Some writers on developmental patterns of children
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and adolescents believe that this imbalance in adolescent scales of growing brings to a head an imbalance existent throughout the early years of childhood. They look at each stage of maturation as marked by a disparity be- tween what the child can do emotionally, physically, and intellectually, and what he has done with his abilities. Yet it would be a mistake to treat the imbalance in adolescence as similar in kind, though more intense, to what has come before. The nature of what adoles- cents can do is essentially different from the nature of what children can do. Sexually, the adolescent finds his power entangled in a web of responsibilities and alle- giances not experienced by the child. The context of the family as shelter is in his power to destroy. The im- balance between the possibilities for experience and the lessons of experience is so severe that to the young person it seems unrelatable to what he has known in the past. The experiences open to him to create his regions of freedom and bondage are, in sum, essentially different from the experiences of freedom and bondage open to the child.
This is the paradox of adolescence and its terrible unease. So much is possible, yet nothing is happening; lifelong decisions must be made, yet there is little life as the young individual has suddenly come to conceive of it, life in which he is independent, for him to draw on in making up his mind.
One response of young people to this newness and the sense of dislocation and painful disorder it entails is to try to explain the future totally, completely, all at once, in order to gain control over the outpouring of new
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life and new possibility. This impulse to explain in advance of experience, to collapse the experienced scale of time, what Anna Freud calls the intellectualization of adolescents, is a defense against pain. It assumes the lessons of experience without undergoing the actual experience itself. This peculiar, conscious response to painful dislocation is what generates in adolescence the tools for purifying identity relations.
The defense against pain by a formal insulation of one's relations to the outside has its roots in the way human beings at a certain stage of development, when they are: unavoidably overwhelmed, as adolescents are, exercise new powers of imagining the rules by which they are related to the world around them. By imagining the meaning of a class of experiences in advance or apart from living them, a young person is freed from having to go through the experience itself to understand its mean- ing. He makes up the meaning in isolation. This sorting mechanism becomes a curse in the identity crisis, when the collapsing of experience in a young person's mind becomes so strong that it works and serves as a stable substitute for the testing of new powers in unknown conditions. If projection of the meaning of experience does work as a stable substitute, then the young person has actually acquired a powerful weapon to prevent any exposure of himself; in other words, he has learned how to insulate himself in advance from experiences that might portend dislocation and disorder.
In this way, the adolescent can sustain a purified picture of his own identity: it is coherent, it is orderly, it is consistent, because he has learned how to exclude
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disorder and painful disruption from conscious con- sideration. In this way, forging a coherent identity, by destroying the intrusion of historical experience, by refusing to let it be anything other than what one wants it to be, dissipates the tension in the unequal time scales of growth during adolescence. The result is a language of experience whose terms appear most strikingly in a social process seldom thought of in relation to adolescence.
We are beginning to see in certain social upheavals a familar and depressing character type, a new leader con- sumed by the desire for a more humane order yet who also reveals a terrible kind of inhumanity, a rigid, insatiable search for a life he can never achieve. The flowering of a pain-transcending, timeless ideal seems to push such leaders to act in ways that contradict the humanity and openness of the specific reforms they espouse.
In the retribution imposed by these revolutionary lead- ers after their ascension to power, the old leaders can be converted into symbols of a whole host of overwhelming forces the new leaders have felt threatened by. In the Reign of Terror in France, the Girondists were trans- formed by the Jacobins into symbols of the old regime, although they were fellow, though more moderate, rev- olutionaries. In Stalin's purges of the 1930's, the cultural revolutionaries of the 1920's were converted into decad- ent representatives of the dying capitalist spirit. (There is a terrible irony in the extermination of these truly creative figures by a man whose artistic tastes were closest to those of the nineteenth-century bourgeois French.)
Why does this retribution operate through the symbol-
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ization of these revolutionaries' enemies? There lies here, I believe, the key to understanding how the purification drives can deal with the immediate world without becom- ing a part of it.
Unlike a poetic symbol, these symbols of retribution and revenge deny the "factness" of the person on whom they are fastened. A poetic symbol suggests to us, through the concreteness of a thing or person, a broader penum- bra of meaning. The symbols of retribution destroy any concrete sense of the thing or person; the man chosen as the symbol of past wrongs has no life of his own in the hearts of his punishers. Through symbolic rhetoric, a millennial leader can strike back at the fact of injury by dealing with the present world without dealing in it. This is the abstractness one senses in the language of men like Robespierre. To get specific would throw into jeopardy the desires that mold a millennial leader.
In this annihilation of the present through a special kind of metaphor, such leaders teach something about the outcome of more ordinary men's desire for purified experience. In ordinary lives, the desire for purity, emerging in adolescence, can lead to a language that similarly does away with the "factness" of new people or new experiences. This occurs most elementally and innocently in the patois of adolescents, now a murky combination of white hipsterese and black soul talk: if forty different things are just "a groove, does any of them have a character of its own? But the same process is at work in deeper metaphors of meaning: the framing of an ideal boy or girl is a way of defending against the uniqueness, which is to say the reality, of each boy or
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girl an adolescent meets, by measuring the real people against the ideal person the adolescent has already decided to be the best for him.
That writers like Blos and Erikson notice an absorption in the oneness of self by adolescents is, again, if we fol- low the clues from some revolutionary behavior, not surprising. For by turning one's energies to an ideal of oneness, the enemies of purity, the disjointed, confusing experiences of interaction in the everyday world, can be dismissed as of lesser importance, and the young person can, like Malraux's character Hong, imagine himself strong because he refuses to let himself be challenged
All too often in the past, psychologists and psychiatrists have treated emotional health as a strength diametrically opposed to emotional "disease"—which was taken to be essentially a form of human weakness. The present generation of practitioners is becoming aware of how much emotional "diseases" can be a product of human strengths, strengths that come to be misused in a life, rather than being absent or weakened.
The adolescent configuration described here is such a strength. The young person gains a tool for making a response to the imbalance of his scales of growth. Rather than passively suffering, he brings into being a means for rationalizing and acting as an independent being in a strange milieu. What I intend to show is not that this strength is innately bad or "unhealthy," but rather that it is extremely dangerous if it remains fixed in a person's life, if it meets no challenge and becomes a permanent modality. If there is no movement beyond this initial pattern of identity forging, a terrible paradox is created.
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Men can abandon any attempts at personal experiment out of the conviction that they already know what any experiment with their own lives will lead to. For making things coherent means imagining they are known and understood by the simple act of an individual's will. Thus the principle of security and regularity comes to be enshrined, through the willful illusion that the young person, or the older person who carries the scar from his youth, has somehow already tested all possibilities open to him. In this way, the forces behind purification, forces of fear, lead the young person to enter adult life in a state of bondage to security, in a self-imposed illusion of knowledge about the outcome of experiences he has never had.
The Desire for Purity, Seen as an Illness
Psychologists tend to view the forces creating this desire for purity, when it becomes totally fixed and dominant in a life, as a form of emotional illness. These forces can affect the way in which people punish themselves for things they feel guilty about. In trying to get a hold on a painful experience for which a man feels guilt, without having to accept it as real, without having to feel its sting, it is common for people to try to disembody the situa- tion through a general metaphor of personal failure or sinfulness. For it is much easier to say that I am a sinner, to make it a transcendent proposition, than to say I hurt
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this man at this time and place. Thus out of the dynamics of self-purification may come an overwhelming, yet at bottom comforting, sense of guilt that destroys a man's capacity to deal with concreteness in the world. This is a pathological condition, in that it justifies a man in re- maining passive in the face of everyday situations and problems, passive as well toward the effects of his actions on other people. Whatever evil he causes he can com- fortably tolerate because he postulates himself as a ter- rible sinner.
But what has not been explored before about the desires for purified experience in adolescence is how they come to be expressed as a community phenomenon. That the adolescent process of making an identity of coherence has a social character can be seen in such areas as ado- lescent career choice, sexual identity, and the pretensions of emotionless competence. But a communal structure that is built out of desires for purity in adolescence means something more: when the purification desires of a large number of people succeed and become dominant in their lives, it would be only natural for these men to try to mold society in their own image, so that the structure of society would be organized to encourage and to codify this pe- culiar escape from painful disorder.
To assume the meanings of experience without the threat of actively experiencing-_there is nothing so unique about this development in adolescence that its fruits are to be seen only in people who are deviants. Rather, as I shall now try to show, this twisted strength in the cycle of human growth has found its strongest ex- pression today in the ways affluent communities organize
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repression. For it is the social structure of modern urban communities of affluence that not only prolongs this ado- lescent pattern of avoidance, but also subsequently works to freeze adult lives in the same pattern, so that men are continually led to imagine meanings about all manner of experience they are afraid to have. The "pathology" here is that, by codifying the desire for coherence in affluent communal life, men have found the means to impose a voluntary slavery upon themselves. It is this slavery their more sensitive children now are fleeing, it is this narrow- ness by choice that is prompting the young to search for a new kind of community life.