Can Proteanism be Grounded?

Mumford and Tillich

As I thought about the issue the student raised, I remembered an essay I had read by Lewis Mumford (1964), the humanist and social critic, on the subject of Freud and Jung. He told how each man in lonely isolation—Freud late at night in his study in Vienna, and Jung in his Bollingen tower—spun out the wildly imaginative ideas that were to have such profound impact on the twentieth century and beyond. But at the same time, as Mumford pointed out, each of the two men carried on a relatively conventional life as a dedicated physician who met with patients regularly, had a long and stable marriage and family life, and lived at the same residence for decades.

Jung, while recognizing his Bollingen experience as explorations in psychosis, emphasized that “my family and my profession remained the base to which I could always return, assuring me that I was an actually existing, ordinary person” (Mumford 1964, p. 177). Mumford pointed out that in these commitments as family men, teachers, and physicians, Freud and Jung “kept their hold on reality” (p. 178). That anchoring enabled them to lead something close to a double life in which the very orderliness and stability of their demanding routines, rather than conflicting with their expression of bold imagination, could well have made that expression possible.

I thought also of the views of the theologian Paul Tillich (1952), who was concerned with what he called the “anxiety of nonbeing,” and the search for “the ground of being.” For Tillich, God was the source of this “ground,” and by describing God as a symbolic concept he included a secular perspective. In conversations I had with him, Tillich distinguished between literal interpretations of God and Jesus, which over centuries were disseminated among the relatively uneducated, and the more symbolic interpretations put forth by leading theologians. Tillich described the continuous and varied efforts to overcome the anxiety of nonbeing. This can be understood as the struggle to call forth a stable “ground” of the self that allows for protean change.

Dimensions of Groundedness

Can we, then, speak of grounded proteanism? If so, that groundedness contains individual-psychological, historical, and biological components.

At the individual level, the self can include relatively stable elements existing in tandem with areas of change and transformation. There can be a back-and-forth dynamic between these stable elements and protean explorations.

Proteanism is always bound up with historical circumstances. It emerges in large part from what I have called psychohistorical dislocation: the loss of confidence in larger symbol-systems involving politics, education, religion, and authority in general. This dislocation can be brought about by extensive technological change or by war and social upheaval, in which shapeshifting is required for adaptation and functional behavior.

The biological—one may say evolutionary—dimension of proteanism has to do with symbolization in general as the only means of adult human mentation. As Ernst Cassirer (1944) and Susanne Langer (1942) have told us, we must re-create all that we perceive if we are to perceive anything at all. If we human beings are psychologically incapable of perceiving anything without reconstructing it, we can be said to be neurologically wired for the capacity for continuous change.

Václav Havel’s Extraordinary Proteanism

Here I want to invoke the life and work of Václav Havel, a man who takes us to the far reaches of protean achievement. He exemplifies a remarkable form of proteanism that could succeed only because of its groundedness.

Havel recognized his own proteanism and was a bit mystical about its relationship to something that was basic and lasting, which he referred to as “Being.”

Being has a memory. And thus even my insignificance—as a bourgeois child, a laboratory assistant, a soldier, a stagehand, a playwright, a dissident, a prisoner, a president, a pensioner, a public phenomenon, and a hermit, an alleged hero but secretly a bundle of nerves—will remain here forever or rather not here but somewhere. But not, however, elsewhere, somewhere here [Havel 2007, p. 330].

Havel was denied an ordinary education by the Communist regime because he came from a wealthy bourgeois family, and from his youth developed, according to his biographer, a “life-long perspective as an outcast and rebel” (Zantovsky 2014, p. 4). But at the same time he had a “hypertrophied sense of responsibility that led him to stand his ground and persist in the face of adversity” (p. 1). He did so with great personal discipline and what can only be called courage.

Limited to the educational fringe, Havel first worked as a lab assistant, but managed to connect with a group from the Prague bohemian underworld, where “his loyalties would always remain” (p. 41). That bohemian subculture was part of a larger European absurdist movement deeply influenced by Prague’s own Franz Kafka—so much so that Havel (1990) once declared “I’m . . . secretly persuaded that if Kafka did not exist, and if I were a better writer than I am, I could have written his works myself.” Also influential were Eugène Ionesco, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Havel’s early writing emerged from his intense personal and intellectual involvement with a repertory theater group centered on Jan Werich, one of the great figures of the pre–World War II Czech cultural scene (Zantovsky 2014, p. 59). Ironically, it was his father, rich and bourgeois but also enlightened and open-minded, who helped Havel gain access to that group. As with many innovative absurdists—Ionesco and Camus, for instance—the theater could provide Havel with an active subculture of shared experience. Absurdism could also be supplemented by a variety of international influences, both literary (the writings of Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller) and musical (American jazz and swing).

In Havel’s first and perhaps most important play, The Garden Party, he was already mocking the absurdity of the Communist regime in his depiction of the Departments of “Inauguration” and “Liquidation.” His main character expresses what can be called “mad proteanism”—total malleability of the self in response to ceaseless political manipulation:

What a rich thing is man, how complicated, changeable, and multiform—there’s no word, no sentence, no book, nothing that could describe and contain him in his whole extent. In man there is nothing permanent, eternal, absolute, man is a continuous change—a change with a proud ring to it, of course! [Havel 1994, p. 50].

That manipulation extends to anything having to do with truth: “Today the time of static and unchangeable categories has past, the time when A was only A and B always only B is gone; today we all know very well that A may be often B as well as A; that B may just as well be A; that B may be B, but equally it may be A or C . . .” (p. 50).

Reexamining Proteanism

Through this lens of grounded proteanism, I can better understand my findings in past research with diverse groups of people.

Japanese university students I interviewed during the 1960s could undergo impressively shifting identity fragments. The same student, over the course of a few years, could follow a sequence that might include wartime Emperor worship, postwar obedience to the requirements of a structured hierarchical society, American identification during a “democracy boom,” Japanese versions of radical Maoism, involvement with large corporations as a “machine for capitalism,” hedonism with heavy drinking and casual sex, embrace of Japanese martial arts such as karate, and rightest postwar versions of Emperor-centeredness. But these identity fragments took shape in relation to the changing but still engulfing influence of the Japanese family, which provided grounding that enabled protean experimentation. The resulting adult identity tended to be reasonably functional but not without conflict and questions of meaning (Lifton 1970).

In my study of antiwar Vietnam veterans in the 1970s, I found many of them to undergo changes that occurred quite rapidly—in a matter of months or even weeks. These had to do not only with the reversal of their attitude toward a war they had originally supported but also with their behavior with girlfriends, wives, and family members, and in their overall sense of maleness. While these changes might be partial and ambivalent, they could be surprisingly lasting and life-altering. The grounding required had at least two important sources. One was in the newly formed and highly intense group connection of what I came to call “antiwar warriors”; the other related source of support was their embrace of various elements of the peace movement, which was then (the late 1960s and early 1970s) enormously intense for their generation. Though some were greeted less than enthusiastically because of their participation in the war, they were mostly celebrated by other war opponents and by large numbers of Americans in general. Many antiwar veterans immersed themselves in the music, the life experiments, and the moral and political energies of the peace movement. They in fact lived out the dramatic stance of veterans opposing their own war while it was still in progress. The combination of their own group identity and their connection with a subculture of peacemaking, itself in some flux, nonetheless enabled them to bring elements of structure and grounding to their identities. That could include the special antiwar authority of those who had “been there” (Lifton 1973).

My third example is based not on individual-psychological interviews but on broader social observation and has to do with the country’s shift in recognition of climate-change danger. Over recent decades, many surveys have revealed a dramatic increase in recognition of the reality of global warming, of the part played by human beings in causing it, of the necessity of converting to renewable forms of energy, and of the general threat that climate change poses to the human future. This “climate swerve,” as I have called it, has hardly brought about the political and technical decisions needed to overcome this threat (Lifton 2017). What has been achieved is the mindset necessary to take appropriate action, that achievement itself an expression of protean change. This change could occur only because of relatively stable social commitments to evidence based on science, and to exposure to what are increasingly recognized as climate events: severe flooding, extreme droughts, and fierce “wildfires” affecting many parts of America and the world. Efforts at mitigating action have been hindered by widespread disinformation and residual denial. But most Americans have managed to call forth a combination of prior identity and protean shifts in belief systems to bring about a shared mindset conducive to appropriate climate action.

Here I can speak personally. I am part of that climate swerve. Despite my extensive work on nuclear weapons and their destruction of the human habitat, I was slow to recognize that climate change was an “apocalyptic twin” that could do the same and threaten the human future in equal measure (Lifton 2019, pp. 168–174).

The question arises as to which part of the self becomes protean at a particular moment. A beginning answer is that this depends on compelling historical currents calling for change, and also on differing individual-psychological sources of stability.

More generally, I would conclude that protean malleability, if it is to be sustained, must be accompanied by forms of mental earthiness, what I am here calling grounding. A collective expression of that grounded proteanism could provide the kind of self required now in our vast struggle for the renewal of American society.