Ethel S. Person - Feeling Strong

W ho has power and how best to achieve and wield it have long been questions about which most of us display a healthy interest. Look on any bestseller list and there you will likely find one or more books on the subject of power. Most of them focus on how to achieve worldly power, giving us detailed instructions in the neo-Machiavellian techniques of dreaming and scheming our way up the corporate or entrepreneurial ladder. The 48 Laws of Power , published in 1998 and reviewed as rules for suits, is a good example of this venerable traditiona collection of prescriptions for attaining and wielding power, as exemplified by some of its most noted practitioners, from Sun Tzu and von Clausewitz to Swifty Lazar and Henry Kissinger.

Then there are the multitudes of books that depict the powerful while not explicitly telling us how to join their ranksthe biographies of great men (and occasional women) of destiny, the stories of extreme ambition brought to success or ruin, pop novels with titles like Total Power and Absolute Control , all the Mafia godfather sagas. Many of these books are nothing more than a kind of dreamy pornography of power, showing it at its most glamorous and dangerous, luring us in.

Not that we need to be lured. Our fascination with power goes back to the ancient myths depicting humankinds struggle to take on the powers, prerogatives, and perks of the godsPrometheus stealing fire from heaven, Hercules performing his twelve labors, Eve persuading Adam to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Indeed, the longing for powerwhether it is acquiring secret knowledge, wresting magical control over our fate, or even securing immortalityis so ancient in our history that its easy to conclude that the longing for power is hot wired into our psyches.

Despite the depth and duration of our interest in power, many of us feel ambivalent if not downright uncomfortable about its pursuit. The whiff of evil we catch when the subject of power is in the air comes from one particular conception of poweras the drive for dominance over other people or, in its most extreme form, as an overriding, often ruthless lust for total command and control. And it is true that this lust for interpersonal power may be extreme and its possession abused. However, dominance over others is not all there is to power. We misunderstand its true nature if we see it only as the assertion of blunt force operative in the lives of othersthe politicians and business leaders who seem to be in charge or the rich and famous who monopolize the headlineswhile failing to acknowledge the central role it plays in everyones life. In the most general way, power can be defined as our ability to produce an effect, to make something that we want to happen actually take place.

Power issues are a part of all of lifes activities and are key to our inner lives as well. As the psychoanalyst Rollo May observed, power is not a theory but an ever-present reality which we must confront, use, enjoy, and struggle with a hundred times a day. Even those who are not gripped by any desire to command or control must, nonetheless, deal with power issues from infancy to old age. We all have a stake in possessing power, using it, understanding it, and negotiating it. This holds true not just in managing or mediating our sex and love lives, our family lives and friendships, and our work relationships with our peers, subordinates, and superiors, but also in seeking to realize our dreams, whether in the pursuit of our ambitions (many of which are solitary rather than joint endeavors), in the expression of our creative impulses, or in our need to identify with or participate in something that takes us beyond our daily lives. The true heart of power is two-chambered; it comprises both our ability to negotiate relationships and our ability to initiate independent goal-oriented activitiestwo different, complementary capacities that I call, respectively, interpersonal power and personal power.

We can see these two aspects of power in even the youngest children. The little boy wants to control his mother; he wants her now , wants her to play with him, to stroke him, to take him out to the park. And to get what he wants, he uses all the ploys at his disposal to persuade her, cajole her, and plead with her. But he also wants to prove to himself and others that he can build a big sand castle without help and climb up the highest sliding board all by himself. In other words, he wants to test and to assert his mastery of his own little world. This latter effort is what I call personal power , distinguishing it from the boys wish to exert interpersonal power , to persuade, influence, or force someone else to bend to his will.

Describing interpersonal power is easier than describing personal power. We are born into a power grid called a family, and it is in that intimate context that we first learn about the power differentials among people. All power relationships, all desires either to dominate or submit, have their psychological roots in the fact that we were once little children with big parents, and their existential roots in our feeling of being small people in an out-of-control big world that we need to be able to tame. Our response to these issues is to want either to be like our parent figures or to charm and disarm themand this is true not just in the intimate realm but also in our work and social lives.

We have all thought about what we need to do in our relationships in order to get our way, and we know what it feels like to submit to someone elses will. We know, too, about power struggles. Minor disagreements can erupt into fierce battles, whether among schoolchildren, in an academic faculty, or in a political party. And we know that when there is a contest for dominance, the outcome depends in some measure on how assertive and aggressive the players are and sometimes on how cunning they are.

We are so accustomed to using power to mean dominance, that depending on who we are and who we are judging, we have a ready-made evaluation which we describe as powerful. Most of us can intuit who holds the power in any given situation. When we make the judgment that someone is powerful, we are generally referring to the strength or clout a person wields in a particular situationclout being the capacity to pull strings, to make things happen. We appear to have software that preconsciously categorizes people as powerful if they are both strong and active. And, depending on who is judging, that designation is either very good or very bad.

There are powerful people and not so powerful people, and given a list, say, of a hundred names, we could probably select the twenty most powerful, the twenty least powerful, and the great middle with some reliability from one rater to the next. In this context, power is inevitably hierarchical. Butand this is the important pointthe list is always subject to change. Some such lists actually existfor example, the yearly list of the most important people in the entertainment industry or the list of the best dressed women. When someone is added to the list, another person is dropped. So, too, in the political world. Bush won his fight to be Presidentnow hes in and Gore is out. And so forth.

The same kind of evaluation can be made among friends and associates. If we know the same people, we would probably come up with lists of the most powerful and least powerful that would not vary much. But this list, too, would be subject to change. Larry has just lost his job, Betty just married a Broadway producer, and Ralph has finally finished his residency at Mount Sinaichanges, changes, changes. If someone in the group wants tickets to a hot new show, Betty suddenly becomes a powerful friend; Ralph can be tapped for medical advice; and Larrywell, perhaps we never thought too much of Larry to begin with. The point, of course, is twofold: power is context-related and were very sensitive to shifts in the winds of power.