The Triumph of the Therapeutic

"In The Triumph of the Therapeutic they appear as part of the old order that is being displaced or corroded by the therapeutic. The therapeutic comes in place of faith and any ideas of eternal truths or authorities, and so the idea of duty, like the idea of character, gets undermined. Duty is a kind of repression. It’s a 1966 book and the erudition of it is just daunting. Rieff was a scholar of Freud, and I think he was keen to point out that Freud thought man was sick and not that you could actually make him better. There was a tragic sense to Freud, and that left a place for moral notions. He thought that a person could show courage or cowardice in negotiating the struggle between id and superego, even if the person could never ‘win’ the struggle. Lots of what came after Freud denies that there should be a struggle. Wilhelm Reich, for example, says not to fight instinct, follow it always. No place for duty there. The therapeutic triumphs when the old ways of — call it a faith-based moral order fall away. People have become more private, they manage their own lives to minimize unpleasantness, ideas of sin are replaced by ideas of deficient self-esteem, and so on. I try to trace the ascendancy of the therapeutic in regard to military cowardice. If you were a soldier at Waterloo and you ran or soiled yourself with fear and failed in your duty, then you would be called a coward, and might be punished very severely. I don’t know if they executed any cowards then, but certainly execution of cowards has a long history: from ancient times well into the 20th century. But increasingly in the 20th century such behaviour — bad reactions to fear, or misconduct in battle – are attributed to psychological problems, to the effects of traumatic stress. So now if a soldier has the shakes or runs from an assignment, before judgments are made there must be a medical examination and the typical presumption is ‘oh he’s got post traumatic stress’. This is a very delicate matter, and whenever I talk about this in the book or in person I want to quickly say that I’m not saying that someone who has post traumatic stress is a coward, but that we have different and for the most part better ways of explaining the kind of behaviour that used to be explained — judged — as cowardice. “Fears of cowardice are engrained in the genre of war writing.” You probably know the story of the 306 British soldiers who were executed for cowardice by the British in WWI and were posthumously pardoned in 2006. This was in part because the authorities realised, thanks to a long public campaign, that a lot of these soldiers were clearly suffering from shell shock and that, had they had proper medical examinations, they would have been shown mercy. So there’s the ‘triumph of the therapeutic’: those 306 soldiers who were executed in 1914-18 being pardoned in 2006. Still, a little bit of the impetus for my book was to say that Rieff overstated things somewhat. The therapeutic hasn’t triumphed altogether, for worse and better. For worse because even terms like ‘post-traumatic stress’ regrettably still have a stigma attached to them. For better because if there is never any shame in failing to do your duty because of fear that is out of proportion to the danger you face, then what is duty? what is morality? Mostly my book is an exploration of how cowardice has been thought of. But if I have little bit of a moral project, it’s to salvage or retrieve the idea of cowardice as a useful moral category, part of our ethical vocabulary. Executing somebody who has been accused of cowardice seems to me a terrible thing to do, and the fear of being cowardly has led to all sorts of terrible violence over the course of history. And now we know all these things about how people react to fear and why someone might run from battle. Maybe they’re shell-shocked, maybe the battle itself is crazy. But I’m also trying to argue that there is still a place for a condemnation of cowardice — less and less applicable to war but applicable elsewhere. People still have duties, and when they fail a duty because of excessive fear, because of fear that’s disproportionate to the danger and also disproportionate to their ability to deal with the danger, that should be condemned. Cowardice has this shame attached to it that is still very strong and maybe it can be used to push us to think about what it is we should be doing and why we fear doing it. This is a really interesting question. And let me just ask you, do you think it sounds weird to call a woman a coward? Yeah, but I think it still can be done. And there’s a few instances I point to in the book. There’s that famous line of Emily Brontë, where she says ‘No coward soul is mine | No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere,’ and so back in the 19th century she is using the idea of cowardice as something that could apply to her. Her contempt for cowardice helps drive her faith. The therapeutic and the idea of shell shock and post traumatic stress came out of the recognition that modern war was a different kind of arena and that courage and cowardice don’t make quite the same sorts of sense that they used to in that arena. And it might be that it makes more sense to talk about an un-gendered kind of cowardice and courage in the 21st century. A couple of the reviews of my book have gently complained about it being almost exclusively male, but the story of cowardice is mostly male, so far. Yes, women seem to pay for being courageous unless it’s in the ways that we conventionally allow them to be — ways not so out in the open, domesticated ways. Miller makes the point that we we will not fully credit women with martial courage — Joan of Arc courage — until we also court-martial them for cowardice. But I know of no such court-martials. And did you notice: even in a conversation dedicated to cowardice, you see how courage keeps taking over?"