Paul Verhaeghe - Says Who?: the struggle for authority in a market-based society

SAYS WHO?

Paul Verhaeghe is professor of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of Ghent in Belgium, and is also in private practice. He is the author of Narcissus in Mourning , Love in a Time of Loneliness , and What about Me?: the struggle for identity in a marked-based society .

Scribe Publications
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Originally published as Autoriteit in Dutch by De Bezige Bij in 2015
First published in English by Scribe in 2017

Copyright Paul Verhaeghe 2015
Translation copyright David Shaw 2017

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.

9781925322231 (ANZ edition)
9781911344445 (UK edition)
9781925548358 (e-book)

A CiP record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library

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Contents

By way of an introduction

One of my earliest memories: I was playing outside, where a new windowpane stood up against the wall of my fathers workshop. I broke the glass, and cried and cried, afraid of my daddys anger. When he came home, he wasnt angry at all. That memory remains with me to this day, especially my surprise. Why was I so dreadfully afraid? There was no reason for it. My father was a kind man who rarely hit us. Why did I turn him into the bogeyman he had never been?

I was 30; my son broke a pane of glass in my newly built greenhouse. I was so angry that I shook him hard. Regret. And shame.

Secondary school, iron discipline. The boarding-school prefect systematically picks out the weaker boys for public humiliation. Everyone knows it. Everyone is angry about it. Everyone feels powerless to stop it.

Many years later. Our faculty board is chaired by someone who holds both power and authority and is not at all afraid to use them. To be fair, I must add that he uses that combination for the good of the faculty. During a meeting, he really takes our colleague X to task. Colleague X is in charge of the library, and nothing there has been running as it should for quite some time. Everyone knows about it, and everyone knows the reason: a certain librarian with a permanent employment contract who cant be fired for love nor money, and who likes nothing better than to throw a spanner in the works at every turn. There is nothing colleague X can do about it. Getting angry, I brusquely barge into the conversation thinking of those years at boarding school, the powerlessness back then, but not now and voice my disagreement, saying that if colleague X is to be held responsible for the library situation, he must be given the necessary powers to deal with it. If he cant be given that power, then he should not be given the blame. After the meeting, he walks up beside me, puts his hand on my shoulder for a moment, and walks on without saying a word.

When I was a doctoral student, at a discussion between assistants and The Prof. For various reasons, I was in the professors bad books at the time. During the discussion, I brought up a point I was particularly convinced of. When it was simply brushed off, I repeated it, adding that the point was being dismissed simply because I was the one making it.

Years later, I was to have the opposite experience: attention being paid to things I said simply because they came from me, not because they were right.

My first faculty board meeting as a very young professor. I am as proud as punch, and think I need to join in the discussions loudly and stridently. After the meeting, a senior professor approaches me and says, quasi-casually, Can I give you a little piece of advice, as a colleague? At the next few meetings, try to focus on listening, and wait a few months before you speak up yourself. The man has authority in my eyes, so I listen to what he is saying when I was a student, he was one of the few professors who took their teaching duties seriously. During the next meeting, I realise that my pushy behaviour at the last one was both naive and stupid. Lack of self-knowledge. I am sure to keep my mouth shut for the next six months.

Twenty-five years later, I and my field of study are attacked in the newspaper De Standaard . A very young postdoctoral researcher at a different faculty is the chief voice in criticising our research. There are so many errors in his criticism that, for the first time, my department gains the backing of the entire faculty. One of my colleagues asks himself out loud, Is there no one who can protect that boy from himself?

At the ceremony for graduating students, called the proclamation ceremony, in the great hall of the university, a former student, now a young colleague of mine, came over for a chat. She thanked me for my lectures and said, You always have authority in the eyes of your students because you dont make use of your power. I nodded politely, finding it well-said, and gave it no further thought. At that moment, she was the more intelligent of the two of us. Power is not the same as authority. I would not come to understand that until much later.

One

Identity and Authority

In my book What about Me? , I described our identity as a construction that continues to evolve throughout our lives. The decision to focus on the issue of identity was entirely due to the nature of my work, both as a university professor of clinical psychology and as a practising psychotherapist. In the years prior to writing that book, I found myself having to dedicate more and more time in my lectures on psychodiagnostics to so-called personality disorders that is, problems with identity. But what was the cause of this sudden increase? In my practice, I encountered more and more people who were struggling with the kinds of existential issues that had previously cropped up much less often. Furthermore, I soon realised that those problems went far beyond the scope of my field and that they affected all areas of society, particularly school and the workplace. I found the explanation in societal changes that have given a new meaning to our identity. A meaning that makes many people unhappy.

In summary, my argument was as follows. Identity is a process of construction that unfolds in the same way all over the world, but its contents can vary extremely widely. This explains why different societies bring different problems to the consulting room.

The construction of identity is easily described. Our identity comes about by means of two very different, even opposing processes. I like to use the term identification to describe the first, because it comes from the same linguistic root as the word identity. Another term for this process is mirroring. Right from birth, our environment and the people around us (starting with our parents) continuously present us with words and images, which we adopt. These are the building blocks with which we construct our identity. This predominantly social process explains why people who grow up in the same society are more alike than they realise. Literally, idem , the Latin word at the root of both identity and identification, means the same. Without being aware of it most of the time, we are all looking in the same mirror.

The second process, separation, is the opposite. Even from a very early age, we reject a number of things that are imposed on us by our environment, wanting to make our own choices. This process is more widely known than the first, and with good reason. Separation is typical of two periods in our lives that often cause parents to ask themselves why they ever thought having children was a good idea. Toddlers learn two words very early: me and no, which they like to combine with each other as often as possible. Known as the terrible twos, this phase sees its sequel in puberty, when adolescents test the boundaries by overstepping them as much as possible, and set out on a quest for identification models that are particularly objectionable to their parents.