Why It Is Good to Be Good: Ethics, Kohut’s Self Psychology, and Modern Society PDF
Preview Why It Is Good to Be Good: Ethics, Kohut’s Self Psychology, and Modern Society
Why It Is Good to Be Good Why It Is Good to Be Good Ethics, Kohut’s Self Psychology, and Modern Society John H. Riker jason aronson Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK Published by Jason Aronson An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Jason Aronson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval sys- tems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Riker, John H., 1943– Why it is good to be good : ethics, Kohut's self psychology, and modern society / John H. Riker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-7657-0790-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7657-0792-5 (electronic) 1. Ethics. 2. Self psychology. 3. Psychology and philosophy. 4. Kohut, Heinz. I. Title. BJ45.R55 2010 170—dc22 2010021380 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America To David Terman and the Chicago Self Psychologists Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv 1 The Moral Problem of Modernity 1 2 Kohut’s Theory of the Self 23 3 Kohut and the Philosophic Tradition 47 4 A New Metapsychology: Freud, Aristotle, Heidegger, and Kohut 69 5 Why It Is Good to Be Good 99 6 A Self Psychological Vision of Ethical Life 115 7 Self Psychology and Modernity: Actualizing the Self in the Era of Desire 131 8 Social Transformations 151 Bibliography 169 Index 173 About the Author 177 vii Preface The aim of this book is to provide a compelling answer to the question of why persons living in modern society should want to adopt an ethical way of being in the world. Insofar as modernity has defined ethics as a set of constraints on the pursuit of personal pleasures and has rejected the author- ity of religious institutions, metaphysics, and teleological views of human nature, it has not been able to coherently explain why human beings should want to be ethical when their perceived self-interests conflict with what is morally right. This failure of modernity to provide good reasons for being moral has in large part been responsible for the epidemic of cheating that has shaken our economic and social institutions to their cores, the danger- ous rise of religious fundamentalism, and the debilitating senselessness in the lives of liberal persons who are good but who cannot explain why. I hope to show that by shifting our concept of human nature to one that is based in recent discoveries about the self in the psychoanalytic tradition, we can not only have compelling reasons for becoming ethical persons but also construct a much richer and more inclusive vision of what constitutes ethical life than has been previously available. The key to my argument lies in the psychoanalytic theory of the self developed by Heinz Kohut in the later part of the twentieth century. Kohut’s work is largely unknown outside of psychoanalytic circles, but many consider his work to be the most important development in psycho- analytic theory since Freud. The difference between the two thinkers in a nutshell is that Freud thought that the fundamental task of psychological life is the management of the libidinal and aggressive drives within the confines of a social order, while for Kohut the major task of psychological life is the development of a core self. For Kohut, the self is a dynamically structured process that is largely unconscious, comes into existence through a tenuous developmental process, and is fragile. From birth to death we need others who can perform self functions when we are unable to, others whom Kohut calls selfobjects. This combination of the need to ix
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