Abstract
I enjoy David Brooks’s columns in the New York Times and his work as a commentator on PBS’s Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and looked forward to reading his book on the “amazing insights” into unconscious mental life that aren’t yet “having a sufficient impact on the wider culture” (p. 377). Analysts have no doubt that popular discourse on the mind, particularly the unconscious mind, needs rebooting. While psychoanalysis first, and neuroscience later, have made the facts of the unconscious mind inescapable, in public perception brain wiring and chemistry have essentially replaced consideration of the mind, unconscious or otherwise.
Brooks’s goals in The Social Animal are first to “illustrate how . . . conscious and unconscious minds interact,” second to “describe how . . . [brain] research influences the way we understand human nature,” and third to “draw out the social, political, and moral implications of these findings . . .” (pp. xii–xiii). The book, true to its is title, seems less about the interaction of conscious and unconscious and more about our attachments and interconnectedness, the social ramifications of those human bonds, and the political and cultural institutions that should reflect and support them. In other words, from an analyst’s point of view, Brooks’s book is less about the interplay of unconscious and conscious in all its complexity and more about our society and its institutions.
Nonetheless, to take up Brooks’s view of the unconscious, he describes it as not “merely . . . primitive” but also as “a place where spiritual states arise and dance from soul to soul,” where the “wisdom of the ages” is collected, and where “the soul of the species” resides. While the unconscious may be “impulsive, emotional, sensitive, and unpredictable . . . it can be brilliant”; moreover, it is “capable of processing blizzards of data and making daring creative leaps.” Most of all, “it is wonderfully gregarious. Your unconscious, that inner extrovert, wants you to reach outward and connect. . . . It longs and pushes for love . . .” (pp. xvii–xviii). Psychoanalysts can largely agree with that description as far as it goes. In fact, we count on the propensity of the unconscious to connect and create, yet the flesh-and-blood, conflicted unconscious mind may also be at the same time rigid, isolating, and destructive.
My reservations aside, Brooks’s romantic view of the unconscious suits his laudable purpose of inspiring a new kind of investment in human capital and institutions. To him, big social and governmental policies have failed because of “reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. . . . And they will continue to fail unless . . . knowledge about our true makeup is integrated more fully into . . . public policy, unless the enchanted story is told along with the prosaic one” (p. xv). In the author’s view, because of reductionistic, linear reasoning, consciousness, rationality, and self-interest have wrongly been given preeminence in cultural, political, and economic thinking. “The problem with this [reductionistic, linear] approach is that it has trouble explaining dynamic complexity, the essential feature of a human being, a culture, or a society . . .” (p. 109). That dynamic complexity requires recognition of the essential elements of human connectedness: “People are born into relationships . . . and those relationships create people. . . . a brain is something that is contained within a single skull. A mind only exists within a network. It is the result of interaction between brains, and it is important not to confuse brains with minds” (p. 43).
To put names on human interconnectedness, Brooks creates two major characters—Harold and Erica. While Brooks is a great commentator and columnist, he is not a great novelist, and these characters are two-dimensional vehicles for his morals and lessons. Harold is a child of the middle class, but his future wife Erica is the child of an Hispanic father who abandons his family and a Chinese mother who is a drug abuser. It turns out that one of Brooks’s major ideas is about a different kind of education, especially for kids from less fortunate families, that recognizes the crucial role of emotional engagement and cultural networks: “it is not one crucial moment that shapes a character. . . . Character emerges gradually out of the mysterious interplay of a million little good influences. This model emphasizes the power of community to shape character. . . . It also emphasizes the power of small and repetitive action to rewire the fundamental mechanisms of the brain” (p. 128).
To illustrate, Brooks creates an idealized “Academy” for Erica, one designed to “fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child. . . . But if you can surround a person with a new culture, a different web of relationships, then they will absorb new habits of thought and behaviors in ways you will never be able to measure or understand. . . . their school [the Academy] would not just be a bunch of classrooms where math and English were taught. It would also be a neighborhood and a family . . .” (pp. 111–112).
Brooks has a passion for education but a bone to pick with measured IQ: “The reality is that intelligence is a piece of mental ability, but it is not the most important piece. People who score well on IQ tests are good at logical, linear, and computational tasks. But to excel in the real world, intelligence has to be nestled in certain character traits and dispositions” (p. 166). Beyond IQ and certainly beyond book learning, Erica uses the Academy to assimilate what Brooks considers priceless social and relationship skills including, especially, self-control. Self-control allows her to effectively use her native intelligence to advance through a consulting business, a palace revolt against a double-talking tech company CEO who mistakes IQ for wisdom, and a campaign manager position on a presidential campaign, finally reaching the White House. While the ascents of Erica (to the White House senior staff) and Harold (to a think tank) seem contrived, it is actually in this phase of the book that Brooks is most credible. He may have a romantic view of the unconscious, but one can see he has a hard-headed view of Washington’s foibles.
In my view, Brooks’s most important point is about our less-than-civil society. His views are sufficiently important to warrant quoting at length. “Without a healthy social fabric, politics becomes polarized. . . . Both [parties] . . . neglected and ignored the intermediary institutions of civil life. In socially depleted nations, . . . people began to form their personal identities around their political faction. They had nothing else to latch on to. Politicians and media polemicists took advantage of the psychic vacuum and turned parties into cults, demanding and rewarding complete loyalty to the tribe. Once politics became a contest pitting one identity group against another, it was no longer possible to compromise. . . . Amidst this partisan ugliness, public trust in government and political institutions collapsed. . . . Instead of being bound by fraternal bonds, and occasionally responding to a call for joint sacrifice, a cynical . . . mentality prevails. . . . The result is skyrocketing public debt and a public unwilling to accept the sacrifice of either tax increases or spending cuts. . . . Without social trust, the political system devolves into a brutal shoving match” (pp. 318–319). Given the unseemly partisanship in Washington, Brooks seems right on the mark. (Of course, the deplorable self-serving cynicism, venality, narcissism, and tribalism also have unconscious roots.)
Brooks’s prescription for this malaise is a kind of activist governmental rejuvenation: “it was time to revive that limited but energetic government tradition. . . . moral and social capital . . . needed to be rebuilt . . . [in] a Hamiltonian approach that offered second-generation human capital policies” (pp. 334–335). In Brooks’s view, “the fracturing of unconscious bonds was at the root of many social problems and . . . government could act to repair this tear in the social fabric” (p. 323) because “government could, to some extent, nurture settings that serve as nurseries for fraternal relationships. It could influence the spirit of the citizenry” (p. 322).
Beyond the socio-political-cultural realm, toward the end of the book the author’s romantic view of the unconscious leads to a flirtation with transcendence. As Harold is dying, he comes to see his conscious self as a servant to the “hidden kingdom” of his unconscious that “existed to nourish, edit, restrain, attend, refine, and deepen the soul within” (p. 373). What we call “antiseptically” the unconscious “was the core of him. . . . people see life primarily as a chess match played by reasoning machines. Harold saw life as a neverending interpenetration of souls” (p. 376). On the day of Harold’s death, he realized that “there was something alive in . . . [him as a] boy that was still alive within him now. There was a certain essence . . . Harold chose to call his soul. He supposed that this essence was manifested in neurons and synapses. . . . since the brain is the record of the feelings of a life, he had slowly accreted new neural connections in his head . . . formed by emotions. The brain was physical meat, but out of the billions of energy pulses emerged spirit and soul. There must be some supreme creative energy . . . that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there” (p. 372). As Brooks struggled to describe the search for meaning at the end of life, I yearned to see some reference to Erik Erikson’s beautiful essay “Integrity versus Despair.” It would have helped ground the narrative.
In summary, I am pleased and disappointed with The Social Animal. I am pleased that Brooks has tried to bring the nonlinear, nonrationalist part of the human being into the cultural discourse and that he emphasizes investment in human and cultural capital. I find it refreshing, and even hopeful, that such a keen observer of the body politic calls for an educated, humanist, governmental activism. I am disappointed at his disregard of psychoanalysis, which alone and in the face of much opposition, had recognized and insisted on the unconscious mind until joined by neuroscience. Brooks admits he may not have done justice to neuroscience, but he also has not done justice to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has no entry in the book’s index, and Freud, the discoverer of the unconscious, is mentioned only a few times in trivial contexts. Brooks may have wished to avoid the clinical side of psychoanalysis, but I don’t think one can overlook how significant it is in the history of ideas that psychoanalysis revealed and characterized the unconscious simply by listening carefully to people. To me that is one of the most powerful statements of the essential humanity of the unconscious.
Lastly, there is also a lesson for psychoanalysis. If an educated and cultivated layman feels he can discuss the unconscious with only the most passing of nods to psychoanalysis, we clearly have much to do in the realm of public education.