Chapter 6

ANXIETY INTERPRETED CULTURALLY

The truth is that all history is important because it is contemporary and nothing is perhaps more so than those hidden parts of the past that still survive without our being aware of their daily impact.

People whose course of life has reached a crisis must confront their collective past as fully as a neurotic patient must unbury his personal life: long-forgotten traumas in history may have a disastrous effect upon millions who remain unaware of them.

—Lewis Mumford, THE CONDITION OF MAN

WE HAVE OBSERVED IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS THAT cultural factors emerge at almost every point in any discussion of anxiety. Whether we are investigating children’s fears, or anxiety in psychosomatic disorders, or anxiety in the various forms of individual neurosis, it is clear that the cultural milieu is always part of the warp and woof of the anxiety experience. In the last chapter we have also noted the rationale for this significance of cultural factors as presented by various investigators. Sullivan, for example, describes the indissoluble interrelation of the individual with his world at every point in development from the cell in utero to the adult interrelated in love and work with the other members of his society. The general importance of cultural factors in anxiety is now so widely admitted that it does not in itself require laboring.

In primitive society, Hallowell demonstrates, the occasions of threat vary from culture to culture, as we all have known. But Hallowell goes on to conclude that the anxiety is a function of the beliefs accepted in the culture superimposed on the actual danger situation.1 This valuable idea can be illustrated in our own culture by the crucial weight accorded the goal of individual competitive ambition. We have seen in the survey of anxiety in the psychosomatic studies of patients with peptic ulcer (the “disease of the striving and ambitious men of Western civilization”) that the anxiety is a function of the needs of men in our society to appear strong, independent, and triumphant in the competitive struggle and to repress their dependent needs. We have seen also in the studies of children’s fears that as children grow older and absorb more of the accepted attitudes of the culture, fears and anxiety related to competitive status increase. Indeed, studies of the worries of school children regularly show the most pronounced anxiety to lie in the area of competitive success, whether in school itself or in work.² Apparently, the weight given the goal of competitive success increases as the individual moves into adulthood: we noted that adults reporting their childhood fears gave a much larger incidence of fears related to competitive success and failure than did the children, which we interpreted as a “reading back” into childhood of the fulcra of fear and anxiety which have become important to them as adults. In my study of anxiety in unmarried mothers reported later in the present book, one might reasonably have expected that the young women’s chief occasions of anxiety would be social disapproval or guilt. But no; the predominant occasion of anxiety reported by the girls was competitive ambition—i.e., whether they would measure up to cultural standards of “success.” The weight placed upon the value of competitive success is so great in our culture and the anxiety occasioned by the possibility of failure to achieve this goal is so prevalent that there is reason for assuming that individual competitive success is both the dominant goal in our culture and the most pervasive occasion for anxiety.

Why is this so? How did individual competitive success become the chief source of anxiety in our culture? Why is the threat of failure to achieve this success so prevalent? These questions obviously cannot be answered by definitions of “normality.” It may be assumed that every individual has normal needs to gain security and acceptance, but this does not explain why in our culture such security is conceived chiefly in competitive terms. And although it may be assumed that every individual has normal needs to expand in his achievement and to increase his capacities and power, why is it that in our society this “normal” ambition takes an individualistic form? Why is it defined chiefly in inverse relation to the community, so that the failure of others has the same relative effect as one’s own success? Discussing the culture of the Comanche Indians, Abram Kardiner points out that there is a great deal of competition, “but it does not interfere with security or with the common goal of the society.”3 It is not hard to see that our contemporary competitiveness is bound to have a destructive effect on the community at every turn. And why does competition in our culture carry such stringent penalties and rewards, so that (as will be indicated presently) the individual’s feeling of value as a human being so regularly depends upon his competitive triumph?

These questions indicate that a goal like competitive individual success cannot be understood as simply an “immutable attribute” of human nature, but must be seen also as a cultural product. It is the expression of a cultural pattern in which there exists a particular confluence of individualism with competitive ambition. This pattern is discernible in our culture from the time of the Renaissance, but it was almost entirely absent in the Middle Ages. The value of individual competitive success, as a prevailing occasion for anxiety, has its particular historical genesis and development, and to this we turn.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE HISTORICAL DIMENSION

The generally accepted statement that the culture conditions anxiety must, therefore, be expanded to read: An individual’s anxiety is conditioned by the fact that he lives in a given culture at a particular point in the historical development of that culture. This brings in the genetic, long-term, developmental background of the patterns which are the occasions of contemporaneous anxiety. In his discussion of “man as the time-binding creature,” Dilthey emphasized the importance of this historical dimension; “Man is a historical being as well as a mammal,” he held, and what is needed is “to relate the total personality to the various manifestations of an historically conditioned personality.”⁴ While there has been broad acceptance in contemporary psychology and psychoanalysis of the importance of cultural factors in the contemporaneous scene, the historical dimension has been largely neglected to date.

But there is an increasing realization on the part of students of anxiety that an investigation of anxiety, as of other aspects of personality in its cultural setting, raises questions which can only be answered in terms of seeing the individual in his historical position. Lawrence K. Frank, writing of the “growing realization among thoughtful people that our culture is sick,” remarks, “the individual striving ushered in at the Renaissance now leads us into error.”⁵ Mannheim describes the problem in terms of the need for a psychology which will be historically relevant as well as socially relevant, a type of psychology “which could explain how particular historical types were derived from the general faculties of man.” He asks, for example, “Why did the Middle Ages and the Renaissance produce entirely different types of men?”⁶ In general terms, the historical is to the man-in-society what the genetic dimension is to man-as-adult. That is to say, the understanding of the historical development of modern man’s character structure is as necessary for an understanding of contemporaneous anxiety as an analysis of childhood factors is to the understanding of the anxiety of a particular adult.

The capacity for historical consciousness is a development of the capacity for self consciousness—i.e., the ability of man to see himself as subject and object at the same time. This approach involves seeing one’s own presuppositions (and the presuppositions of one’s culture) as historically relative, whether those presuppositions are religious or scientific or whether they refer to a general psychological attitude like the high valuation of competitive individualism in our own culture. Some cultural analysts take certain presuppositions from modern science as an absolute base from which to study other historical periods (Kardiner, op cit., does this). But it is manifestly impossible to understand such periods as those of ancient Greece or the Middle Ages without realizing that our own presuppositions are as relative to a point in history—namely, our own—and as much products of history, as were the presuppositions in those periods.

history is made by man. The solution of this seeming contradiction constitutes the field of social psychology. Its task is to show not only how passions, desires, anxieties change and develop as a result of the social process, but also how man’s energies thus shaped into specific forms in their turn become productive forces, molding the social process.7

Since the total historical development of the character structure of modern man is too broad a topic for treatment, I shall limit myself to the one central aspect of that character structure which interests us—namely, competitive individual ambition. And since it is manifestly impossible to treat this problem throughout all ages of Western history, I shall begin with the Renaissance, the formative period of the modern age.⁸ In the Renaissance, our aim will be to show the emergence and extent of individualism, how the individualism became competitive in nature, and the consequences of this competitive individualism for interpersonal isolation and anxiety.

INDIVIDUALISM IN THE RENAISSANCE

The individualistic nature of Western man’s character structure can be seen as a reaction to, and a contrast with, medieval collectivism. The citizen of the Middle Ages “was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation—only through some general category,” in Burckhardt’s words.⁹ Each person theoretically knew his place in the economic structure of the guilds, in the psychological structure of the family and the hierarchy of feudal loyalties, and in the moral and spiritual structure of the church. Emotional expression was channeled communally, the conjunctive emotions in festivals and the aggressive emotions in such movements as the crusades. “All emotions required a rigid system of conventional forms,” Huizinga remarks, “for without them passion and ferocity would have made havoc of life.”¹⁰

But by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Huizinga points out, the hierarchal forms of church and society, previously serving as ways of channeling emotions and experience, had become methods of suppressing individual vitality. The use of symbols was rampant in this period at the end of the Middle Ages, the symbols now having become ends in themselves. They were forms emptied of vital content and divorced from reality. The last century of the Middle Ages was pervaded by feelings of depression, melancholy, skepticism, and much anxiety. This anxiety took the form of excessive dread of death and pervasive fears of devils and sorcerers.¹¹ “One has only to look at pictures like those of Bosch and Grunwald,” remarks Mannheim, “in order to see that the disorganization of the medieval order expressed itself in a general fear and anxiety, the symbolic expression of which was the widespread fear of the devil.”¹² Renaissance individualism is partly to be understood as a reaction against this deteriorated collectivism of the closing phase of medievalism.

The new valuation of the individual and the new conception of the individual’s relation to nature, which were to become the central motifs of the Renaissance, can be seen graphically in the paintings of Giotto. It is between Giotto and his master, Cimabue, that many authorities hold the new age to have begun. Giotto actually lived in the “first Italian Renaissance,” which preceded the main Renaissance.13 In contrast to the symbolic, stiff, frontal figures in medieval painting, Giotto’s figures are presented in three-quarter perspective and are given independent movement. In contrast to the generalized, otherworldly, typed, and therefore often rigid sentiments in preceding painting, Giotto begins to portray individual emotions. He presents the individual sorrow, joy, passion, and surprise of simple people in everyday, concrete situations—a father kissing his daughter, a friend mourning at the grave of the deceased. The delight in natural sentiment carries over into his sympathetic portrayal of animals; and the relish with which he paints trees and rocks foreshadows the new enjoyment of natural forms for their own sakes. Retaining some of the symbolic character of medieval art, Giotto presents at the same time the emerging attitudes which are to characterize the Renaissance, namely the new humanism and the new naturalism.

In contradistinction to the medieval concept of man as a unit in the social organism, the Renaissance viewed the individual as a discrete entity and the social setting as a background against which the individual achieved eminence. The chief difference between Giotto and the Renaissance in full bloom is that for the former the simple individual was valued (the influence of St. Francis upon Giotto is important in this valuation of simple persons); but in the full development of the Renaissance it became the powerful individual who was valued. This phenomenon, which is basic for anxiety-creating patterns in modern culture, we now wish to trace developmentally.

The revolutionary cultural changes and expansion which characterized the Renaissance in almost every area—economic, intellectual, geographic, and political—are too well known to require description. All these cultural changes had a relationship of both cause and effect with the new confidence in the power of the free, autonomous individual. On one hand, the revolutionary changes were based upon the new view of the individual, and on the other the sociological changes placed a premium on the exercise of individual power, initiative, courage, knowledge, and shrewdness. Social motility released the individual from medieval family caste; by courageous action he could now achieve eminence regardless of the level of his birth. The riches available from expanding trade and growing capitalism gave new opportunities for enterprise and reward to the individual who was bold enough to take the risks. The new appreciation of education and learning was both an expression of intellectual freedom and released curiosity; the itinerant student, making the known world his university, is symbolic of the relation of the new learning to freedom of movement. But at the same time knowledge was valued as a means of gaining power. “Only he who has learned everything,” remarked Lorenzo Ghiberti, a Renaissance artist who spoke for his times, “can fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.”14

The political ferment of the Renaissance, when the rule of cities rapidly passed from the hands of one despot to another, likewise placed a premium on the free exercise of power. It was often a case of each man for himself, and the individual of courage and ability could gain and hold a position of eminence.

The impulse to the free play of ambitious individuality which this state of things communicated was enormous. Capacity might raise the meanest monk to the chair of St. Peter’s, the meanest soldier to the duchy of Milan. Audacity, vigour, unscrupulous crime were the chief requisites for success.¹⁵

Speaking of the violence connected with the expression of individuality in this period, Burckhardt remarks, “The fundamental vice of the character was at the same time a condition of its greatness, namely, excessive individualism. . . . The sight of victorious egoism in others drives him [the individual] to defend his own right by his own arm.”¹⁶

The high valuation of the individual in the Renaissance was not a valuation of persons as such. Rather, as mentioned above, it referred to the strong individual. It was presupposed that the weak could be exploited and manipulated by the strong without remorse or regret. It is important to remember that, though in many respects the Renaissance set the principles which were to be unconsciously assimilated by large segments of modern society in succeeding centuries, it was a movement not of masses of people but of a handful of strong, creative individuals.

Virtu in the Renaissance was conceived largely in terms of courage and other characteristics which made for success. “Success was the standard by which acts were judged; and the man who could help his friends, intimidate his enemies, and carve a way to fortune for himself by any means he chose, was regarded as a hero. Machiavelli’s use of the term ‘virtu’ . . . retains only so much of the Roman ‘virtus’ as is applicable to the courage, intellectual ability, and personal prowess of one who has achieved his purpose, be that what it may.”17 We note here the confluence of individualism and competitiveness. Granted the apotheosis of the strong individual, who regarded the community chiefly as the arena in which he battled for eminence, the concept of success was bound to be competitive. The whole cultural constellation placed a premium on self-realization by means of excelling and triumphing over other persons.

This confidence in the power of the free individual was an entirely conscious attitude on the part of the strong men and women of the Renaissance. Leon Alberti, one of those towering personalities who excelled at everything from gymnastics to mathematics, formulated what may be considered the motto of these strong individuals: “Men can do all things if they will.”¹⁸ But nowhere is the attitude of the Renaissance better articulated than in Pico della Mirandola, who wrote twelve books to prove that man is master of his own fate. In his notable Oration on the dignity of man, he pictures the Creator saying to Adam,

Neither a fixed abode, nor a form in thine own likeness . . . have we given thee. . . . Thou, restrained by no narrow bounds, according to thine own free will, in whose power I have placed thee, shalt define thy nature for thyself. I have set thee midmost in the world, that thence thou mightest the more conveniently survey whatsoever is in the world. Nor have we made thee either heavenly or earthly, mortal or immortal, to the end that thou, being, as it were, thy own free maker and moulder, shouldst fashion thyself in what form may like thee best. Thou shalt have power to decline into the lower or brute creatures. Thou shalt have power to be born into higher, or divine, according to the sentence of thy intellect.

This sweeping conception of man’s power and his vast freedom to move into any realm he chooses—which is to be accomplished by the power of his intellect—is described by Symonds as the “epiphany of the modern spirit.”19 There were no boundaries to human creativity if, as Michelangelo put it, the individual could but “trust himself.” The conscious ideal was l’uomo universale, the fully developed, many-sided individual.

But where is the negative side of this “brave new world”? Our clinical experience teaches us that such confidence must be balanced by some opposing attitudes. In the Renaissance we find, on a less conscious level, beneath this optimism and confidence, an undercurrent of despair with nascent feelings of anxiety. This undercurrent, coming to the surface only toward the end of the Renaissance, can be vividly seen in Michelangelo. Consciously Michelangelo gloried in the individualistic struggle, defiantly accepting the isolation it involved. “I have no friend of any kind, and I do not want any,” he wrote. “Whoever follows others will never go forward, and whoever does not know how to create by his own abilities can gain no profit from the works of other men.”²⁰ There is nothing here of Auden’s insight,

. . . for the ego is a dream

Till a neighbor’s need create it

But in Michelangelo’s paintings can be seen the tension and conflict which were the underlying psychological counterpart of the excessive individualism of the period. His figures on the Sistine ceiling exhibit a continuous restlessness and perturbation. The human form in Michelangelo, Symonds points out, “is turbid with a strange and awful sense of inbreathed agitation.” The men of the Renaissance felt they were renewing the spirit of classical Greece, but the essential difference, Symonds indicates, can be seen in the “sedate serenity” of Phidias contrasted with this agitation in Michelangelo.21

Almost all of Michelangelo’s human beings, powerful and triumphant as they appear at first glance, present on closer inspection the dilated eyes which are a tell-tale sign of anxiety. One would expect an expression of intense apprehension on the faces of the figures in his painting “The Damned Frightened by Their Fall,” but the remarkable point is that the same frightened expression in less intense form is present in the other figures in the Sistine Chapel as well. As if to demonstrate that he is expressing the inner tensions not only of his age but of himself as a member of his age, Michelangelo in his self-portrait paints eyes which are again pronouncedly distended in the way typical of apprehension. By and large the conscious ideal covered over the nascent anxiety in the bulk of the Renaissance artists (vide the harmonious human beings in Raphael). But Michelangelo’s long life carried him beyond the youthful confidence of the Renaissance at its height. By his genius and profundity he brought the goals of his period into actuality to a greater extent than the earlier representatives. Thus he brought the undercurrents of the period into more overt expression. The figures of Michelangelo may be taken as symbols both of the conscious ideal and the psychological undercurrent of the Renaissance—triumphant, strong, fully developed human beings, who are at the same moment tense, agitated, and anxious.

It is significant that the undercurrent of tension and despair is to be found in those persons who, like Michelangelo, actually were successful in the individualistic struggle. Thus the nascent anxiety is not due to any frustration of the goal of individual success. Rather, I submit, it is due to the state of psychological isolation and the lack of the positive value of community, both results of excessive individualism.

These two characteristics of the strong individuals of the Renaissance are described by Fromm: “It seems that the new freedom brought two things to them: an increased feeling of strength and at the same time an increased isolation, doubt, scepticism, and—resulting from all these—anxiety.”22 An outstanding symptom of the psychological undercurrent was the “morbid craving for fame,” as Burckhardt phrases it. Sometimes the driving desire for fame was so great that the individual committed assassination or other flagrantly antisocial acts in the hope that he might thereby be remembered by posterity.²³ This bespeaks considerable isolation and frustration in the individual’s relatedness to others and a powerful need to gain some recognition from one’s fellows even by way of aggression against them. Whether one was remembered for villainous or constructive deeds seems not to have been the point. This suggests an aspect of individualism which is present in competitive economic striving of the present day—namely, that aggression against one’s fellows is accepted as the way to gain recognition from them. This reminds us of the fact that an isolated child will commit delinquencies in order to gain at least an inverted form of concern and recognition.

The competitive individualistic ambition had important psychological repercussions on the individual’s relation to himself. By an understandable psychological process, a person’s attitudes toward others become his attitudes toward himself. Alienation from others leads sooner or later to self-alienation. As a result of the manipulation of others for purposes of increasing wealth and power (as exemplified in the nobles and burghers), the “successful individual’s relation to his own self, his sense of security and confidence were poisoned too. His own self became as much an object of manipulation to him as other persons had become.”²⁴ Moreover the individual’s own self-valuation depended upon his achieving competitive success. In the unconditioned weight then given success—“unconditioned” in the sense that both one’s social esteem and one’s self-esteem depended upon it—we see the beginnings of the stringent drive for competitive success which characterizes contemporaneous individuals. Kardiner describes the problem this sets for modern man:

The anxieties of Western man are therefore concerned with success as a form of self-realization in the same way that salvation was in the Middle Ages. But in comparison with the individual who merely sought salvation, the psychological task for modern man is much more arduous. It is a responsibility, and failure brings with it less social censure and contempt than it does self-contempt, a feeling of inferiority and hopelessness. Success is a goal without a satiation point, and the desire for it, instead of abating, increases with achievement. The use made of success is largely power over others.25

As an explanation for the emergence of the new concern for individual success, Kardiner emphasizes the shift from the “other-world,” post-mortem rewards and punishments of the Middle Ages to the concern in the Renaissance with rewards and punishments here and now. I agree that the Renaissance was marked by a new appreciation of the values and possibilities for satisfactions in the present world. This is evidenced as far back as Boccaccio and in the humanism and naturalism appearing in Giotto. But what impresses me is that whereas rewards in the Middle Ages were gained by virtue of one’s participation in a corporate body—family, feudal group, or church—the rewards in the Renaissance always were gained by virtue of the striving of the separated individual in competition with his group. The driving desire for fame in the Renaissance is a seeking of post-mortem reward in the present world. But what is significant is the highly individualistic character of this reward: one gains fame, or remembrance by posterity, by excelling, standing out from one’s fellows.

Kardiner’s viewpoint is that the post-mortem rewards and punishments of medieval ecclesiasticism kept aggressions under control and gave validation to the self. As the power of post-mortem rewards and punishments diminished, there developed an increasing emphasis on rewards here and now and an increased concern for social well-being (prestige, success). The self, no longer validated by post-mortem rewards, then found validation in present success. In my judgment, Kardiner’s point is partially accurate—specifically in the new concern for present rewards in the Renaissance and the modern development since. But the distinction between when rewards and punishments are received—post-mortem in the Middle Ages or here and now in the modern period—easily lends itself to oversimplification, and covers only one aspect of a complex picture. For one example, Boccaccio lauds the pursuit of present satisfactions, in the spirit of the Renaissance; but he also holds that a suprapersonal force, fortuna, seeks to block man in his pursuit of pleasure. The important point, however, is that Boccaccio holds that the bold individual has the power to outwit fortuna. It is this confidence that rewards are gained through individual power which strikes me as the essential characteristic of the Renaissance. To approach the same problems from a different angle: the tendency to make the distinction between post-mortem and present rewards central as an explanation of the modern concern with success is an oversimplification in the respect that post-mortem religious rewards were presupposed throughout most of the modern period. Immortality was not widely questioned until the nineteenth century (Tillich). But again, the significant aspect of the modern period is not when the rewards are received, but the relation between rewards and the individual’s own striving. The good deeds for which one was rewarded in immortality were the same deeds as made for individual economic success, namely industrious work and conforming to bourgeois morality.

I have used the term “nascent” anxiety in the Renaissance because the consequences of the individualistic pattern in overt, conscious anxiety were largely avoided at the time. Anxiety is discernible in the Renaissance chiefly in symptomatic form. We have seen in the case of Michelangelo that, although he defiantly admitted isolation, he made no conscious admission of anxiety. In this respect there is a sharp difference between the isolated individuals of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who, like Kierkegaard, were consciously aware of the anxiety resulting from individual isolation. The great expansiveness of the period caused the full implications of interpersonal isolation to be evaded and consequently the full impact of conscious anxiety was avoided. New areas were always available into which the individual could direct his striving if he were frustrated at any one point. This is one way of emphasizing that it was the beginning, rather than the end, of a historical period.

COMPETITIVE INDIVIDUALISM IN WORK AND WEALTH

The competitive tendencies of the individual in our society have been greatly abetted and reinforced by economic developments since the Renaissance. The breakdown of the medieval guild (in which competition was impossible) opened the door for intensive individual economic competition. This is a central characteristic of modern capitalism and industrialism. Hence it is particularly important to inquire how individual competitive ambition in modern man’s character structure is intertwined with these economic developments. We will here follow Richard Tawney’s discussion of economic developments in the centuries since the Renaissance, with particular reference to the psychological implications of industrialism and capitalism. In this section we are concerned with the application and working out of the principles which we have described in their emergent form in the Renaissance.

Modern industrialism and capitalism were conditioned by many factors, but on the psychological side the new view of the power of the free individual was of central importance. The rationale for modern industrialism and capitalism was given by the emphasis on the “right” of the individual to amass wealth and employ it as power. Tawney points out that the individual’s self-interest and “natural instinct” for aggrandizement were apotheosized as the accepted economic motivations. Industrialism, especially in the last two centuries, is based upon “the repudiation of any authority [such as social value and function] superior to individual reason.”26 This “left men free to follow their own interests or ambitions or appetites, untrammeled by subordination to any common center of allegiance.”²⁷ In this respect modern “industrialism is the perversion of individualism.”²⁸

This “economic egotism,” as Tawney calls it, was based on the assumption that the free pursuit of individual self-interest would automatically lead to economic harmony in society at large. This assumption served to allay anxieties arising from the intrasocial isolation and hostility in economic competition. The competitive individual could believe that the community was enhanced by his strivings for aggrandizement. During the major part of the modern period this assumption was pragmatically true. It was dramatically substantiated in the respect that the growth of industrialism did greatly increase the means of satisfying everyone’s material needs. But in other respects, especially in the later development of monopoly capitalism, the individualistic economic developments here discussed were to have a damaging and disintegrative effect upon the individual’s relation to himself, as well as to his fellow men.

The full psychological implications and results of economic individualism were not to emerge until the middle of the nineteenth century. One of the psychological results of industrialism, especially in its recent phases, is that for the majority of people work has lost its intrinsic meaning. Work has become a “job,” in which the criterion of value is not the productive activity itself but the relatively fortuitous results of labor—wages or salary. This shifts the basis of both social esteem and self-esteem from the creative activity itself (the satisfactions from which genuinely increase the individual’s feeling of self-strength and thereby realistically decrease anxiety) to the acquisition of wealth.

The value placed highest in the industrial system is the aggrandizement of wealth. Thus another of the psychological results of industrialism is that wealth becomes the accepted criterion of prestige and success, “the foundation of public esteem,” in Tawney’s phrase. The aggrandizement of wealth is by its very nature competitive; success consists of having more wealth than one’s neighbors; others going down the scale is the same as one’s self going up. Tawney sees from the psychological viewpoint—namely, that success defined as the acquisition of wealth involves a vicious circle. One can never be certain one’s neighbors and competitors will not gain more wealth; one can never be sure one has attained a position of unassailable security, and hence one is driven by the need always to increase his wealth. In their chapter “Why do they work so hard?” the Lynds, in their first study of Middletown, note that “both business men and working men seem to be running for dear life in this business of making the money they earn keep pace with the even more rapid growth of their subjective wants.”29 It is fair to infer that these “subjective wants” are largely competitive in motivation—i.e., “keeping up with the Joneses.”

It is important to note that the acquisition of wealth, as the accepted standard of success, does not refer to increasing material goods for sustenance purposes, or even for the purpose of increasing enjoyment. It refers rather to wealth as a sign of individual power, a proof of achievement and self-worth.

Modern economic individualism, though based on belief in the power of the free individual, has resulted in the phenomenon that increasingly larger numbers of people have to work on the property (capital) of a few powerful owners. It is not surprising that such a situation should lead to widespread insecurity, for not only is the individual faced with a criterion of success over which he has only partial control but also his opportunities for a job are in considerable measure out of his control. Tawney writes that the “need for security is fundamental, and almost the gravest indictment of our civilization is that the mass of mankind are without it.”30 Thus the actual economic developments, particularly in the monopolistic phase of capitalism, work directly against the assumption of freedom for individual endeavor upon which industrialism and capitalism are based.

But, as Tawney points out, the individualistic assumptions are implanted so firmly in our culture that great numbers of people cling to these assumptions despite their contradiction with the reality situation. When anxiety is experienced by members of the middle and lower middle classes, they redouble their efforts to gain security on the basis of the same cultural assumption of individual (property) rights—e.g., saving, investing in property, annuities, etc. Anxiety in members of these classes often becomes an added motivation for their endeavor to defend the individualistic assumptions which are part of the cause of their insecurity.³¹ The “hunger for security is so imperious that those who suffer most from the abuses of property [and the assumptions of individual rights upon which property rights are based] . . . will tolerate and even defend them, for fear lest the knife which trims dead matter should cut into the quick.”³²

Tawney also makes the highly significant point that the revolutions which served to better the conditions of the middle and lower classes (as in the eighteenth century) were based upon the same assumptions as the ruling classes held, namely the sovereignty of individual rights and the derivative assumption of property rights. These revolutions did have valuable results in extending the base of individual rights. But for Tawney they rested on the same fallacious assumption, that individual freedom for aggrandizement is sovereign over social function. This point is of fundamental importance for the question we shall later ask: Is there an essential difference between the revolutions and social changes which have occurred in the previous centuries of the modern period and the revolutions and upheavals which at present confront our contemporaneous culture?

What is lacking in the individualism which has characterized economic developments since the Renaissance is, in Tawney’s view, a sense of the social function of work and property. The individualistic assumption “cannot unite men, for what unites them is the bond of service to a common purpose, and that bond it repudiates, since its very essence is the maintenance of rights irrespective of service.”33 This is in accord with the hypothesis of this book that competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

Tawney gives several explanations for the fact that the contradictions in modern industrial development were largely held in check in the modern period until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One reason was that industrialism seemed capable of infinite expansion. Another reason was that the motivations of hunger and fear on the part of the workers kept the system working with some efficiency. But when it became manifest that capitalism in its monopolistic phases contradicts the very assumptions of individual freedom on which it is based; and when in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the threats of fear and hunger had been mitigated by the growth of the labor unions, the contradictions inherent in individualistic economic development became overt.

FROMM: INDIVIDUAL ISOLATION IN MODERN CULTURE

We now turn to two writers who interpret the psychological and cultural meaning of these developments: Erich Fromm and Abram Kardiner. Fromm’s central concern is with the psychological isolation of modern man which has accompanied the individual freedom emerging at the Renaissance.³⁴ His discussion is particularly cogent in respect to the interrelationship of this isolation with economic developments. He shows that “certain factors in the modern industrial system in general and in its monopolistic phase in particular make for the development of a personality which feels powerless and alone, anxious and insecure.”³⁵ It is self-evident that the experience of isolation is first cousin to anxiety. More specifically, psychological isolation beyond a certain point always results in anxiety. Since the human being develops as an individual in a social matrix, the problem Fromm confronts is how the individual, with his freedom, is able or unable to relate himself to his interpersonal world. This is like Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century, who also saw the problem of anxiety in terms of individuality, freedom, and isolation.

This separation from a world which in comparison with one’s own individual existence is overwhelmingly strong and powerful, and often threatening and dangerous, creates a feeling of powerlessness and anxiety. As long as one was an integral part of that world, unaware of the possibilities and responsibilities of individual action, one did not need to be afraid of it.36

This sense of isolation and concomitant anxiety cannot be tolerated indefinitely. Ideally, one expects the child to develop new and positive relatedness on the basis of his growing strength as an individual, a relatedness which is expressed as he becomes an adult by means of love and productive work. But actually the problem is never solved ideally or simply; individual freedom involves a persistent dialectic at every point of growth. How will the issue be met? By new positive relatedness on one hand, or by surrendering freedom in order to avoid isolation and anxiety; by developing new dependencies, or by the formation of the innumerable compromise solutions which allay anxiety (the “neurotic patterns”) on the other hand? The answer to this will be decisive for the development of personality.

The same dialectic of freedom can be observed on the cultural level. The emergence of individuality at the Renaissance brought freedom from medieval authority and regulation—freedom from ecclesiastical, economic, social, and political restraints. But simultaneously the freedom meant a severing of those ties which had afforded security and the sense of belonging. This severance, in Fromm’s terms, was “bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness and anxiety.”37

The freedom from medieval restraints in the economic area—the freeing of the markets from guild regulation, the lifting of the proscriptions on usury and the accumulation of wealth—was both an expression of the new individualism and a powerful incentive for it. One could now devote one’s self to economic aggrandizement to the extent of one’s abilities (and luck). But this economic freedom involved increasing tendencies toward individual isolation and subjection to new powers. The individual is now

threatened by powerful suprapersonal forces, capital and the market. His relationship to his fellow-men, with everyone a potential competitor, has become hostile and estranged; he is free—that is, alone, isolated, threatened from all sides.³⁸

It is particularly important to observe the effect of these developments on the middle class, not only because this class was to become increasingly dominant in the modern period, but also because there is some reason for hypothesizing that neurotic anxiety in modern culture is especially a middle-class problem. At first chiefly the concern of a few powerful capitalists of the Renaissance, the accumulation of wealth became an increasingly dominant concern of the urban middle classes. In the sixteenth century the middle class was caught between the very rich, who made considerable exhibition of their luxury and power, and the very poor. Though threatened by the rising capitalists, the members of the middle class were concerned with preserving law and order. It might be added that they accepted the assumptions underlying the new capitalism. Hence the hostility which members of the middle class experienced in their threatened situation was not expressed in open rebellion as was the case with the peasants in Central Europe. Middle-class hostility was largely repressed and took the form of indignation and resentment. It is a known phenomenon that repressed hostility generates more anxiety,39 and hence an intrapsychic dynamic served to increase middle-class anxiety.

One means of allaying anxiety is frantic activity.⁴⁰ The anxiety arising out of the dilemma of powerlessness in the face of suprapersonal economic forces on one hand, but theoretical belief in the efficacy of individual effort on the other, was symptomized partly by excessive activism. Indeed, the great emphasis in the sixteenth and subsequent centuries on work had as one of its psychodynamics the allaying of anxiety. Work became a virtue in itself, quite apart from the creative and social values emerging from work. (In Calvinism, successful work, though not a means of gaining salvation, is a visible sign that one is among the chosen.) A high valuation on the importance of time and regularity accompanied this emphasis on work. “The drive for relentless work,” Fromm writes of the sixteenth century, “was one of the fundamental productive forces, no less important for the development of our industrial system than steam and electricity.”⁴¹

Anxiety and the Market Place

The consequences of these developments for the character structure of Western man are, of course, profound. Since the values of the market were the highest criteria, persons also became valued as commodities which could be bought and sold. A person’s worth is then his salable market value, whether it is skill or “personality” that is up for sale. This commercial valuing (or, more accurately, devaluing) of persons and its consequences in our culture has been vividly and penetratingly described by W. H. Auden in his poem, The Age of Anxiety. When a young man in that poem wonders whether he can find a useful vocation, another character answers:

To obey his buyer. . . .42

The market value, then, becomes the individual’s valuation of himself, so that self-confidence and “self-feeling” (one’s experience of identity with one’s self) are largely reflections of what others think of one, in this case the “others” being those who represent the market. Thus contemporary economic processes have contributed not only to an alienation of man from man, but likewise to “self-alienation”—an alienation of the individual from himself. Feelings of isolation and anxiety consequently occur not only because the individual is set in competition with his fellows, but also because he is thrown into conflict about his inner valuation of himself. As Fromm very well summarizes the point:

Since modern man experiences himself both as the seller and as the commodity to be sold on the market, his self-esteem depends on conditions beyond his control. If he is “successful,” he is valuable; if he is not, he is worthless. The degree of insecurity which results from this orientation can hardly be overestimated. If one feels that one’s own value is not constituted primarily by the human qualities one possesses, but by one’s success on a competitive market with ever-changing conditions, one’s self-esteem is bound to be shaky and in constant need of confirmation by others.⁴³

In such a situation one is driven to strive relentlessly for “success”; this is the chief way to validate one’s self and to allay anxiety. And any failure in the competitive struggle is a threat to the quasi-esteem for one’s self—which, quasi though it be, is all one has in such a situation. This obviously leads to powerful feelings of helplessness and inferiority.

Mechanisms of Escape

It is to be expected that certain “mechanisms of escape” from the situation of isolation and anxiety should have developed. The mechanism most frequently employed in our culture, Fromm believes, is that of automation conformity. An individual “adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be.”⁴⁴ This conformity proceeds on the assumption that the “person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more.”⁴⁵ Such conformity can be understood again in terms of Fromm’s idea of the dialectical nature of freedom. There has been much progress in our culture in regard to the negative aspect of freedom, e.g., freedom from outward authority over individual belief, faith, opinion, but this has resulted to a great extent in a psychological and spiritual vacuum. Since the isolation involved in mere freedom from authority cannot long be maintained, there develop new inner substitutes for the rejected authority, which Fromm terms the “anonymous authorities” like public opinion and common sense.

One phase of modern freedom has been the right of each individual to worship as he chooses. But, adds Fromm, “we do not sufficiently recognize that while it is a victory against those powers of Church and State which did not allow man to worship according to his own conscience, the modern individual has lost to a great extent the inner capacity to have faith in anything which is not provable by the methods of the natural sciences.”46 The “inner restraints, compulsions, fears” which fill the vacuum left by mere negative freedom provide strong motivations for automaton conformity. Though this conformity is acquired by the individual as a means of avoiding isolation and anxiety, it actually works the other way: the individual conforms at the price of renouncing his autonomous strength, and hence he becomes more helpless, powerless, and insecure.

Other mechanisms of escape from individual isolation which Fromm describes are sado-masochism and destructiveness. Though sadism and masochism may have as one of their expressions the desire to inflict pain or have pain inflicted on one’s self, they are more basically forms of symbiosis in which an individual endeavors to overcome isolation by becoming absorbed in the existence of another person or persons. “The different forms which the masochistic strivings assume have one aim: to get rid of the individual self, to lose one’s self; in other words, to get rid of the burden of freedom.”⁴⁷ In masochism we also find the individual endeavoring to compensate for helplessness by becoming part of the “bigger” power. Destructiveness—a phenomenon much evidenced in recent sociopolitical developments like fascism—is likewise related to the need to escape from unbearable feelings of powerlessness and isolation. The rationale for this can be seen in the relation of anxiety (in this context, anxiety arising from isolation) to hostility. Anxiety creates hostility, as we pointed out earlier; and destructiveness is one of the overt forms of this hostility.

Fascism was a complex socioeconomic phenomenon, but certainly on its psychological side it could not be understood without reference to anxiety. Of particular importance are these phases of anxiety—namely, the feelings of isolation, insignificance, and powerlessness of the individual. It is accepted that fascism began chiefly as a lower-middle-class phenomenon. In analyzing the origins of the German form of fascism, Fromm described the powerlessness experienced especially by the middle class after World War I and after the depression of 1929. “The vast majority of the population was seized with the feeling of individual insignificance and powerlessness which we have described as typical for monopolistic capitalism in general.”48 This class was not only economically, but also psychologically, insecure; it had lost its previous centers of authority, the monarchy and the family. The fascist authoritarianism, characterized by sado-masochism and destructiveness, had a function which is comparable psychologically to a neurotic symptom—namely, fascism compensated for powerlessness and individual isolation and protected the individual from the anxiety-creating situations.⁴⁹ If one can compare fascism to a neurotic symptom, it can be said that fascism is a neurotic form of community.

In criticism of Fromm, my main point is that he underestimates the biological side of human development or gives it only lip service. An example of this is his statement, “Man’s nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product. . . .” I find myself responding, “No, man’s nature and passions and anxiety are not produced by culture, but are the products of both biological equipment, which is the source of the capacities for human aggression, hostility, anxiety, etc., and culture, which directs and mitigates the expression of these given capacities.” In this sense the critics of Fromm (chiefly Marcuse) are right in branding him a revisionist. But these points should not obscure the fact that his early books represent a seminally important contribution and had an influence on American thinking equivalent to their importance. Hence, I refer in the above pages chiefly to Escape from Freedom. Man for Himself, though derivative from Heidegger, also seems to me to be a genuine contribution, and is used partially in the references above.

KARDINER: WESTERN MAN’S GROWTH PATTERN

Kardiner’s psychodynamic analysis of Plainville, an American Midwestern rural village, and his outline of the psychological growth pattern of Western man, furnish an approach to the problem of the cultural sources of modern anxiety different from Fromm’s. Kardiner’s focus is on the basic personality structure of Western man, which he feels has changed very little in the last 2,000 years, whereas Fromm’s concern is with the particular character structure of Western man in the modern period. Using Plainville as his base, Kardiner outlines the personality growth pattern out of which anxiety arises, and he briefly suggests how this growth pattern and its anxieties are manifested in the historical development of Western man.⁵⁰

In Plainville Kardiner finds a great deal of anxiety and much intrasocial hostility. Social-prestige goals are dominant among the citizens. In the competition for achieving these goals the individual person finds his self-validation on the one hand or his loss of self-esteem and feelings of inferiority and failure on the other. How the social-prestige goals become dominant, why the striving for them is characterized by such compulsive competitiveness, and how anxiety and hostility are thereby aroused are questions Kardiner asks. Answering, then, requires some explanation of the psychological growth pattern of the individual in Plainville.

The pattern of individual growth in Plainville and in Western man, Kardiner extrapolates, is characterized, first of all by a strong affective relation with the mother. Compared to primitive cultures, the maternal care, affective satisfaction, and protection given the baby in Plainville are very good. This lays the groundwork in the child for a high valuation of himself. Such good early affective development makes for the building of both a strong ego and a strong superego, which involves idealization of parents. Though this close affective relationship with the mother may open the way for passivity and excessive affective dependence on the part of the individual as he confronts later crises, its effect is normally very constructive in that it lays a solid base for personality development.

How do the particular occasions of anxiety in Plainville and in Western man, such as anxiety related to success, competition for social prestige, and so forth, arise out of this growth pattern? Kardiner, like Tawney and Fromm earlier, is concerned about the great importance given to success.

[The] socially approved goal of success is made the vehicle of compensation for all other shortcomings in pleasure and relaxor functions. As long as the individual can pretend to some goal of success or security, he can claim some self-esteem.51

The extensive capacities for self-expression which the personality in such a culture has developed are channeled in the direction of achieving social prestige, or wealth as a symbol of prestige. “The struggle for success becomes such a powerful force because it is the equivalent of self-preservation and self-esteem.”⁵² The personality produced by the above growth pattern has strong needs for validation of his self-esteem and at the same time experiences considerable frustration of that self-esteem. Hence it is understandable that, whenever anxiety arises in a person in such a culture, his tendency would be to endeavor to allay the anxiety and re-establish his self-esteem by striving for new success.

The intrasocial hostility is also an added motivation for competitive striving. Kardiner describes this intrasocial hostility as again arising chiefly from blocked pleasure drives. The hostility tends to be self-increasing in the society, since when one is prohibited from pleasures himself, he joins with the group in prohibiting others (e.g., gossip). The intrasocial hostility can then be expressed in socially approved aggressive competition, generally in competitive work. But such hostility and aggression prevent the individual from establishing friendly relations with his fellows, and hence his feeling of isolation tends to increase. The personality in Plainville and in Western society generally has a firm base set for community, and strong needs for community, by virtue of the good early affective relationships. The adult citizen joins the Rotary Club, the Lions, or the Optimists. But community tends to be blocked by these other factors in the constellation, we have seen—e.g., the intrasocial hostility leading to aggression and competition.

How did competitive social prestige emerge as the dominant goal in the historical trajectory of Western man? As we remarked above, Kardiner holds that there has been very little change in the basic personality structure of Western man from the time of Job and Sophocles to the modern citizen of New York. The good early parental care, the subsequent extensive taboos and systems of impulse control, and the hostility and aggression arising from these taboos and control have been fairly constant throughout Western history, according to Kardiner. There has normally been a strong system of parental obedience, with rewards and punishments to keep the system of taboos and concomitant aggressions under control. Kardiner’s view is that this control was maintained in the Middle Ages by the immobile family constellation, by the protection and power of the lord in feudalism, and by the religious system of post-mortem rewards and punishments. Obedience could be obtained and anxiety allayed by family, feudal lord, and church.