50 Psychology Classics (22 page)

This is only a bare-bones treatment of
Emotional Blackmail
. The first part, “Understanding the blackmail transaction,” is worth the price of the book alone, but it is in the second that even greater value is to be found. Here Forward goes beyond telling us what blackmail consists of and outlines how to combat and defeat it.

One drawback of the book is that there is no list of sources or bibliography. It would have been interesting to know Forward's influences, or whether her insights are all based on her therapy practice. Her ideas on the emotional makeup and history of the blackmailer echo the work of Karen Horney (see p 156), who wrote about the neurotic tendencies we develop in childhood in order to feel more secure, but erroneously take into adulthood as well.

Forward's books—she also wrote the marvelously titled
Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them
—have helped millions, and
Emotional Blackmail
is a perfect example of how a good self-help book can make a significant contribution to psychology. You finish reading it with a greater appreciation of the complexity of behavior and emotions that can be found within one person. Many of the people quoted in the book say that their partner can be both “the most wonderful, caring person in the world” and a cold-hearted blackmailer thinking only of themselves. The fact is, human nature can accommodate both. But we should never accept blackmail
in our relationships because, even if they survive its stranglehold, the life is slowly squeezed out of them. Don't let this happen to yours.

Susan Forward's career in psychology began when she was a volunteer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Neuropsychiatric Institute. Enrolling as a graduate student, she gained her master's degree in psychiatric social work at UCLA and later her PhD. She has run a private therapy practice for many years, in addition to working with many Southern Californian psychiatric and medical institutions
.

Her first book,
Betrayal of Innocence
(1978), made her an authority on child abuse, followed by
Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them
(1986), and
Toxic Parents
(1989), also a bestseller. Other books include
Obsessive Love, Money Demons,
and
When Your Lover Is a Liar;
the latter and
Emotional Blackmail
were written with Donna Frazier
.

Forward is a well-known media and public speaker, and has been a consulting witness at high-profile court trials. In her role as Nicole Simpson's therapist, she testified at the O. J. Simpson trial
.

“What I term the existential vacuum constitutes a challenge to psychiatry today. Ever more patients complain of a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness, which seems to derive from two facts. Unlike an animal, man is not told by instincts what he must do. And unlike man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions what he should do. Often he does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism), or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).”

In a nutshell

The conscious acceptance of suffering or fate can be transformed into one of our greatest achievements.

In a similar vein
Nathaniel Branden
The Psychology of Self-Esteem
(p 42)

Frankl's most famous work is
Man's Search for Meaning
(see the commentary in
50 Self-Help Classics
), a gripping account of his time in a Nazi concentration camp and of fellow prisoners who either developed a survival mindset or gave up on life. Many readers treasure it as an antidote to the boredom and meaninglessness of modern life.

While that book includes some explanation of Frankl's psychology of meaning—logotherapy (from the Greek
logos
, or meaning)—
The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy
is fully devoted to explaining its tenets and philosophical basis. This makes it a more challenging read, but a highly rewarding one.

Frankl's brand of therapy is sometimes considered, after Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology, to be the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, and
The Will to Meaning
clearly points out the differences between his ideas and those of his compatriots. It also refutes the behaviorist school of psychology and its attempts to reduce human beings to complex products of their environment.

What psychology failed to appreciate, Frankl believed, is the multidimensional nature of human beings. He did not deny that biology or conditioning shapes us, but he also insisted that there is room for free will—to choose to develop certain values or a particular course in life, or to retain our dignity in difficult situations.

Frankl denied that things like love and conscience can be reduced to “conditioned responses” or the result of biological programming. As a neurologist, he actually agreed that substantial aspects of the human can be compared to a computer. However, his point was that we cannot be boiled down to the workings of such a machine. We may have problems relating to the balance of chemicals in our body or mental issues such as agoraphobia, but we have another group of complaints (which he called noogenic) that relate to moral or spiritual conflicts. These cannot by treated by conventional psychiatrists, who may completely miss the point of why a person has come to see them—the patient may get more out of visiting a priest or a rabbi. Could the same profession that would have dismissed Joan of Arc as a schizophrenic, Frankl wondered, be trusted to make judgments on issues such as guilt, conscience, death, and dignity?

Frankl considered his psychology to be existential, but unlike the existentialism of Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre, which is associated with the meaninglessness of life, logotherapy is basically optimistic. Its aim is to convince people that life always has meaning, even if it is not yet clear what that is. We may not discern a meaning in difficult or painful situations until later, when we have grown as a result of what happened.

The greatest human achievement is not success, Frankl said, but facing an unchangeable fate with great courage. A dying woman whom Frankl attended to in hospital, petrified at what was to come, came to realize that her courage in death might be her finest hour. Instead of a “meaningless” early death, she found great meaning in the way she chose to die.

Frankl argued that the “existential vacuum” that people feel is not a neurosis. It is rather something very human, signaling that our will to meaning is alive and well. He quoted the novelist Franz Werfel, “Thirst is the surest proof for the existence of water.”

Frankl once gave a talk in the notorious San Quentin prison. The prisoners loved him because he did not pretend they were all wonderful people or say they were victims of society or their genes. Instead, he recognized them as free and responsible people who had taken decisions that had led them to where they were. He acknowledged the reality of guilt.

Frankl was fond of saying that a Statue of Responsibility should be erected on the West Coast of America, to complement the Statue of Liberty on the East. We live in an age of relativism, which waters down real values and meaning that exists independent of our judgments. But by choosing to be free of such universals, over time we paradoxically hem in our own freedoms.

If you have read
Man's Search for Meaning
you may be surprised to discover that Frankl had an opportunity to avoid the concentration camps. While living in Vienna, because he was a neurologist he was offered a visa to live in America—but it was only for him, not his parents. Knowing the fate that lay in store for them, he could not bring himself to leave.

Each person, he wrote, comes into life with a unique set of potential meanings to fulfill. It is up to us whether we decide to grasp these meanings and accept them, or try to avoid them. There is no ultimate “meaning of life,” only individual meanings of the lives of individual people. To ask “What is the meaning of life?” makes no sense unless we ask it of our own life and our own set of issues and challenges. This uniqueness of meaning is called conscience.

At the end of
The Will to Meaning
, Frankl asked the obvious question: If logotherapy is all about meaning, what distinguishes it from religion? His answer was that religion is by nature about salvation, whereas logotherapy is about mental health.

Notwithstanding this distinction, a spiritual faith in ultimate meaning underlay his form of psychology, which instantly marked it as suspect in many people's eyes. Yet Frankl was a doctor of neurology and of psychiatry, and had survived two concentration camps. He was not a mystic or a dreamer. That human beings have a will to meaning cannot be denied, even if we doubt that life itself has some ultimate meaning.

While Freud wrote of the drive toward pleasure or sex, and Adler of a drive toward power, Frankl believed that the human will to meaning was at least as strong a force in making us into who we are. While we are pushed by drives, we are
pulled
by meaning, and though he did not deny that biology or conditioning shaped us, he also insisted that there was room for free will—to choose to develop certain values or a particular course in life, or to retain our dignity in difficult situations. For Frankl, if psychology was to achieve anything, it had to take account of this will to meaning as much as it did the pleasure or power instinct.

Born in Vienna in 1905, Frankl studied medicine at the University of Vienna, where he received his MD and PhD. During the 1930s he worked in the suicide department of the General Hospital in Vienna, and built up a private psychiatry practice. From 1940–42 he was head of neurology at the Rothschild Hospital
.

In 1942, Frankl, his parents, and his wife Tilly were sent to a concentration camp, initially Theresienstadt. The rest of the family did not survive, but Frankl was freed from Dachau in 1945 by the advancing US Army
.

Returning to Vienna after the war, Frankl wrote
Man's Search for Meaning
and was appointed to head the Vienna Neurological Policlinic, a post he held until 1971. He received 29 honorary doctorates, and was a visiting professor at Harvard and other US universities and at the University of Vienna Medical School
.

His other books include
The Doctor and Soul
(1965),
The Unheard Cry for Meaning
(1985), and
The Unconscious God
(1985). Frankl died in 1997, in the same week as Mother Teresa and Princess Diana
.

“In all these situations of conflict the ego is seeking to repudiate a part of its own id. Thus the institution which sets up the defence and the invading force which is warded off are always the same; the variable factors are the motives which impel the ego to resort to defensive measures. Ultimately all such measures are designed to secure the ego and to save it from experiencing ‘pain.'
”

“My patient was an exceptionally pretty and charming girl and already played a part in her social circle, but in spite of this she was tormented with a frantic jealousy of a sister who was still only a child. At puberty the patient gave up all her former interests and was thenceforth actuated by a single desire—to win the admiration and love of the boys and men who were her friends.”

In a nutshell

We do just about anything to avoid pain and preserve a sense of self, and this compulsion often results in us creating psychological defenses.

In a similar vein
Alfred Adler
Understanding Human Nature
(p 14)
Eric Berne
Games People Play
(p 26)
Sigmund Freud
The Interpretation of Dreams
(p 110)
Karen Horney
Our Inner Conflicts
(p 156)
V. S. Ramachandran
Phantoms in the Brain
(p 232)

Anna Freud was the youngest of her father Sigmund's six children, and the only one to become a well-known psychologist in her own right. By the age of 14 she had read his books and was intent on following in his footsteps, and though inevitably tagged “Daddy's girl,” in fact she was a pioneer in two important areas: ego psychology and child psychoanalysis.

While Sigmund famously focused on the unconscious (the id), Anna made the ego seem more important, particularly in respect of therapy and psychoanalysis. Her work looked at how exactly the ego, id, and superego interacted, and it was through this understanding that she was able to explore the concept of psychological defense mechanisms. In her work with children and adolescents, she demonstrated to her father why they were quite different to adults in terms of psychoanalytical practice.

The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
is her best-known work. Although it presumes that the reader has some familiarity with psychoanalytical terms, laypeople can still read the book and it contains interesting case studies to spice up the theory. She used many classic Freudian terms such as “hatred of the mother,” “penis envy,” and “castration anxiety,” which contemporary readers will take with a grain of salt. Yet behind these notions is a compelling explanation of why some people act as they do, and despite much debunking of Freudian psychology in recent years, Anna Freud's explanation of how defense mechanisms come about and their function is convincing.