50 Psychology Classics (31 page)

Though it will never be a household term, transactional analysis does have real value in making us aware of our negative and normally unconscious behavior patterns. Given its “do-it-yourself” nature, the mainstream psychiatric
profession never made much room for its way of seeing, but it has nevertheless become part of the tool bag of psychologists and counselors who need workable techniques to bring about change.

Transactional analysis has even found its way into fiction. James Redfield acknowledged Harris and Berne as crucial influences in writing one of the biggest-selling books of the 1990s,
The Celestine Prophecy
. The “control dramas” that his characters engage in, and seek to be free of, are squarely based on the games and positions of transactional analysis; the survival of the book's characters—and indeed the evolution of the human race—is made dependent on their ability to see beyond these automatic reactions.

Harris was born in Texas. He went to medical school at Temple University in Philadelphia, and in 1942 he began his psychiatry training in Washington DC at St Elizabeth Hospital. He was a US Navy psychiatrist for several years, and was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked. He became chief of the Navy's Psychiatry Branch
.

After the war Harris held a teaching post at the University of Arkansas, and for a period was a senior mental health bureaucrat. He entered private practice as a psychiatrist in Sacramento, California, in 1956, and was a director of the International Transactional Analysis Association
.

“A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.”

“Mass movements are usually accused of doping their followers with hope of the future while cheating them of the enjoyment of the present. Yet to the frustrated the present is irremediably spoiled. Comforts and pleasures cannot make it whole. No real content or comfort can ever arise in their minds but from hope.”

In a nutshell

People allow themselves to be swept up in larger causes in order to be freed of responsibility for their lives, and to escape the banality or misery of the present.

In a similar vein
Nathaniel Branden
The Psychology of Self-Esteem
(p 42)
Viktor Frankl
The Will to Meaning
(p 100)

If you have ever known someone who joined a cult, became a religious convert, or threw themselves into a political movement—and in the process seemed to lose their identity—this book may give you an insight into how that can happen. The work of an amateur—Hoffer's day job was loading and unloading cargo on San Francisco's docks—
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
is a compelling foray into mass movements and their power to shape minds, showing us how spiritual hunger leads people to jettison their old selves in order to become part of something apparently greater and more glorious.

The book had special meaning when published in the wake of the Second World War, given the havoc that a single movement—Nazism—wreaked across Europe, but Hoffer's work is timeless in its observations of the psychology of group identification and why people are so ready and willing to die for a cause. Virtually everything he wrote could be applied to the terrorists and suicide bombers of today. Although a half century old,
The True Believer
could therefore not be more relevant.

Why are mass movements so powerful? Because they are full of fervor, Hoffer suggested. Powerful political movements always have a religious fervor to them. The French Revolution was really a new religion, replacing all the dogma and rituals of the Church with similar ones devoted to the State. The same goes for the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions: “The hammer and sickle and the swastika,” Hoffer observed, “are in a class with the cross.”

Those who make up the ranks of the early stages of a revolutionary movement are looking for some big and total change in their life. Leaders of mass movements know this, and therefore do all they can to “kindle and fan an extravagant hope.” They do not promise gradual, incremental change but a total change in the believer's existence.

People normally join an organization for reasons of self-interest—to advance or benefit themselves in some way. Those who join a revolutionary mass movement, in contrast, do so “to be rid of an unwanted self.” If we are not happy with who we are, in a mass movement this no longer matters, as the self is irrelevant in relation to the larger “holy cause” of the movement. Where before people experienced only frustration and meaninglessness in their individual existence, now they have pride, purpose, confidence, and hope.
“Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves,” Hoffer wrote. Yet this desire to lose a sense of individuality paradoxically brings enormous self-esteem and feelings of worthiness.

Who else is vulnerable to joining a mass movement? In his chapter on potential converts, Hoffer noted that the very poor are not good candidates. They are too satisfied with just surviving to be interested in some grand vision. It is, rather, those who have a bit more, who have had their eyes opened to greater things, who are more likely to get swept up. Hoffer observed: “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less satisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.”

People join mass movements for a sense of belonging and camaraderie, a feeling so often lacking in an economically free and competitive society. They may simply be very bored. Hitler, Hoffer noted, was financed by the wives of some of Germany's great industrialists, whose regular amusements or enthusiasms no longer satisfied. The opportunity to get whipped up in a cause and its great leader is intoxicating, supplanting even reliable distractions such as family and work. Indeed, Hoffer remarked on the curious fact that it is often people with
unlimited
opportunities who are attracted to mass movements.

Finally, a movement will attract those who dislike having to be responsible for their lives. Young Nazis wished to free themselves from the burden of making decisions and slowly constructing an adult existence as their parents had done. Much more alluring were the simple promises of glory in the Third Reich. They were shocked when as losers of the war they were expected to feel responsibility for what had happened, because in their minds it was precisely responsibility that they had given up amid the pageantry of the new regime.

A mass movement's promise of a dramatically better new world enables it to disregard normal moral inhibitions. The holy or glorious end justifies any means, and believers will do horrible things to other humans in the cause of creating their paradise. Hoffer warned us to be very careful “when hopes and dreams are loose in the streets.” They usually precede some kind of disaster.

To the nonbeliever, the self-sacrifice of a martyr, a kamikaze pilot, or a suicide bomber seems totally irrational. However, if our present life is considered worthless, and our belief in the movement is so great, it will not be such a leap to die for it. Before people reach this watershed, Hoffer said, they will have stripped themselves of a sense of their own individuality. Absorbed fully into the collective body, they are no longer the person friends and family once knew, but only the representative of a people, a party, a tribe.

To the true believer, nonbelievers are weak, corrupt, without backbone, or decadent. The perception of their own purity of intent allows them to do anything in the name of that noble intention—including take their own lives. It is this close-mindedness, blindness even, of the true believer that provides their power. If the world is black and white, then action is clear. It is only the open-minded who have to deal with surprises or contradictions.

One of Hoffer's insights was that “what is not” is always a more powerful motivating force than “what is.” While to improve their lot the average person will work on what they already have, the true believer is not satisfied unless they are in the process of building a whole new world. Such a hatred of the present has done terrible damage, but on the other hand the overthrow of many kinds of tyrannies would not have been possible without those who dreamed and schemed for something better, who were willing to spark a bloody revolution in the cause of ideals such as liberty and equality. For better or worse, fanatics have made our world.

The True Believer
is not just about mass movements. It is a work of philosophy with keen insights into human nature and contains almost no unnecessary words or sentences. The book is also a great example of why questions of human motivation and action should never be left to psychologists alone.

Born in New York City in 1902, the son of an immigrant cabinetmaker, Hoffer grew up speaking German and English. At 7 he was blinded as the result of a head injury, and missed out on most of his schooling. At 15, without any surgery, he miraculously regained his sight
.

Both his parents died while he was still in his teens. He inherited $300 and moved to California. Supporting himself as a traveling laborer and gold prospector, Hoffer spent his spare time reading everything from Montaigne to Hitler's
Mein Kampf.
For many years he worked as a longshoreman (or stevedore) in San Francisco, and only ceased manual laboring in 1941
.

The True Believer
brought Hoffer a measure of fame, and he devoted the second half of his life to writing. Other books include
The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms
(1954)
, The Ordeal of Change
(1963)
, The Temper of Our Time
(1967)
, Reflections on the Human Condition
(1973), and
In Our Time
(1976). He also published a journal of life on the waterfront, and an autobiography,
Truth Imagined,
was released after his death. In the year he died, 1983, Hoffer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan
.

“Living with unresolved conflicts involves primarily a devastating
waste of human energies,
occasioned not only by the conflicts themselves but by all the devious attempts to remove them.”

“Sometimes neurotic persons show a curious single-mindedness of purpose: men may sacrifice everything including their own dignity to their ambition; women may want nothing of life but love; parents may devote their entire interest to their children. Such persons give the impression of wholeheartedness. But, as we have shown, they are actually pursuing a mirage which appears to offer a solution of their conflicts. The apparent wholeheartedness is one of desperation rather than of integration.”

In a nutshell

The neurotic tendencies we may have acquired in childhood are no longer necessary—if we leave them behind we can fulfill our potential.

In a similar vein
Alfred Adler
Understanding Human Nature
(p 14)
Anna Freud
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
(p 104)
Melanie Klein
Envy and Gratitude
(p 180)
R. D. Laing
The Divided Self
(p 186)
Abraham Maslow
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
(p 192)
Carl Rogers
On Becoming a Person
(p 238)

Karen Danielsen was in her mid-teens when Sigmund Freud wrote
The Interpretation of Dreams
. She would later be well-known for “feminizing” the male bastion of psychoanalysis, but it took her 35 years before she even published her first book. In between she married, had three children, and obtained a PhD.

Karen Horney (pronounced “Horn-eye”), as she became, broke away from Freud in some important ways. By refuting some of his ideas such as “penis envy” and generally downplaying the supremacy of sexual motivation, she arguably brought more sense to psychoanalysis. In addition, by showing how women were vulnerable to neuroses caused by unreal cultural expectations, she gained the deserved reputation of being the first feminist psychoanalyst.

Horney differed from Freudian dogma by saying that people did not always have to be prisoners of their unconscious minds or pasts. She wanted to find the root cause of psychological issues, but largely considered them a
present
problem that could be healed. Her delineations of neurotic types, so simple and elegant, have been a significant influence on modern therapeutic practice, and her interpersonal approach and emphasis on uncovering the “real self”—with its great potential—were important influences on the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. Finally, Horney wished to make the process of analysis sufficiently understandable that people could analyze themselves. In this she presaged both cognitive therapy and the self-help movement.

Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis
was conceived as a book for the layperson. While trained therapists should handle severe neuroses, Horney also believed that “with untiring effort we can go ourselves a long way towards disentangling our own conflicts.” It is therefore a self-help book, but a very fine one based on 40 years of keen observation of the mind's defenses. You will be a remarkable person indeed if you don't see at least part of yourself in Horney's descriptions of the three neurotic tendencies.