Aware that therapy, navel-gazing, and self-help books (Justman, 2005; Zerzan, 1994) don’t lead to social change, anarchists are generally suspicious of psychotherapy’s core as well as of humanistic approaches from Western psychology, Eastern philosophy, and New Age mysticism that spawned the human potential movement where much of the work on self and relationships occurs today. Although some forms of humanistic and even New Age thought claim compatibility with social change movements (McLaughlin & Davidson, 2010; Rosenberg, 2004; Satin, 1979), too many participants insist the only way to change the world is to work only on themselves. Capitalists, of course, happily sell us whatever we need to meditate and communicate, practice yoga and Tantra, discover our authentic selves, and wander down our spiritual path of the moment, positive, happy, self-absorbed, and non-threatening. Understandably, thus, anarchists often reject these individualistic solutions and focus instead on more systemic approaches.
Recently I’ve begun exploring groups that go in the other direction: prioritizing personal growth and interpersonal dynamics necessary for creating community. This personally rewarding “participant observation,” as social psychologists might call it, has challenged my own assumptions, stereotypes, and habits and tested my ability to be patient with new language, styles, and ways of looking at myself and the world. Although the groups I’ve come across do not define themselves as anarchist, and thus attract people with various political and apolitical identities, their purposes and methods overlap significantly with anarchist values. Aiming to shake us out of complacency toward new habits, goals, motivations, and emotions, they mirror anarchist calls to re-think things we’ve always taken for granted about human nature and hierarchy, capitalism and materialism, monogamy and sexuality. The goal, at least for some, is not just to focus inward but to create communities less repressive and oppressive, more egalitarian, satisfying, and just.
Efforts that seem potentially useful stress mutual support, study, and exploration rather than individual psychotherapy, self-help, or a guru’s prescription for inner bliss. Network for a New Culture (www.nfnc.org), for example, uses an eclectic, non-dogmatic approach incorporating elements of humanistic psychology, cognitive and gestalt therapy, and Reichian/Jungian analysis as well as varied communication and community-building methods. Exploring links between beliefs and emotions, body and unconscious, self and culture, NFNC creates settings that challenge widespread emotional, behavioral, and sexual assumptions. Some of this exploration follows approaches developed in more explicitly radical intentional communities in Germany (ZEGG,
www.zegg.de) and Portugal (Tamera,
www.tamera.org). Similarly, some psychologists using anarchist frameworks (McWilliams, 1985; Rhodes, 2008 ) incorporate insights from ecopsychology and ecofeminism as well as from Zen, Taoism and other psychologies challenging Western notions of consciousness and reality, self and other (Ornstein, 1972; Rosenberg, 2004). It may be impossible “to re-create personality and thus transform life” or “to create your own reality” (Zerzan, 1994, p. 12), but it is possible to learn skills and create communities that help us act and feel closer to what we imagine is possible.
Gordon (2010) cautions, in a somewhat-related context, that “these practices and lifestyles are in danger of congealing into a self-referential subculture that detracts from other areas of activity (e.g., direct action, propaganda, solidarity work),” but he adds “there is no reason why they should have to come at the expense of these.” Marshall Rosenberg (2004), an early proponent of radical therapy whose Nonviolent Communication method is used in interpersonal and political conflicts, talks of spirituality but acknowledges that spirituality can be reactionary if we get people to just be so calm and accepting and loving that they tolerate the dangerous structures. The spirituality that we need to develop for social change is one that mobilizes us for social change. It doesn’t just enable us to sit there and enjoy the world no matter what. It creates a quality of energy that mobilizes us into action. (pp. 5–6)
I have not yet explored spiritual groups, but it’s worth noting that some anarchists consider non-institutionalized religion compatible with anarchism (e.g., A. Brown, 2007). Kemmerer (2009) points out that “institutionalized religion in every nation tends to support the status quo, but many religious teachings ... support anarchy” (p. 210). Lamborn Wilson (2010) agrees; referring to “various sorts of spiritual anarchism,” he propos[es] that fascist and fundamentalist cults are not to be confused with the non-authoritarian spiritual tendencies represented by neo-shamanism, psychedelic or “entheogenic” spirituality, the American “religion of Nature” according to anarchists like Thoreau, sharing many concerns and mythemes with Green Anarchy and Primitivism, tribalism, ecological resistance, Native American attitudes toward Nature ... even with Rainbow and Burning Man festivalism.... (p. 14)
Lamborn Wilson adds a useful reminder: “[A]ny liberatory belief system, even the most libertarian (or libertine), can be flipped 180 degrees into a rigid dogma.... Conversely, even within the most religious of religions the natural human desire for freedom can carve out secret spaces of resistance” (p. 15).
...
The point isn’t to take humanistic individualist psychotherapy and apply it to heal anarchists ... It is to rescue the truths that are buried in that subjective moment of the dialectic ... and see what is going on there in the psyche as always implicating the social order, internalization of oppression, suppression of the body, etc. Otherwise, we just move to working on ourselves and forget that the state and capitalism and patriarchy etc. are the fundamental issues. And this is where critical psych needs to do its work. (Sloan, personal communication, January 5, 2011)
The risk in using any form of psychology is being diverted from the world outside ourselves. Despite that risk, I believe the exploration is worth it. Many of us would be more effective anarchists as well as more fulfilled human beings if we could counter our culturally determined everyday psychology. As Shukaitis (2008 ) noted, “The social relations we create every day prefigure the world to come, not just in a metaphorical sense, but also quite literally: they truly are the emergence of that other world embodied in the constant motion and interaction of bodies.” (p. 3). There’s much we can learn. We may want a revolution, but as Emma says we want to dance, too.
Paying more attention to the personal and interpersonal also means responding to those who experience mental or emotional distress. We know that they — perhaps we — often struggle in psychiatric systems that are overworked, bureaucratized, medicalized, disinterested, and often inadequate at best. Yet this struggle also takes place with friends and comrades. Dorter (2007) pointed out that although psychiatric survivor movements “ask fundamental questions of what it means to be mad in an insane world,... questions of mental health and mad liberation ... figure little into the work that anarchists collectively focus on, or in the ways we structure ourselves or organize” (p. 8 ).
...
Finally, resistance to anarchism often stems from accepting culturally dominant explanations of human behavior and sometimes from individual satisfaction at successfully navigating societal barriers. Believing that society needs strong leaders, strong laws, and strong cops because human beings are too flawed to survive without them reflects a particular understanding of motivation. A careful reading of mainstream psychology can help counter some of these arguments. The development of a more critical alternative psychology at the interface of individual and community could help us re-imagine what we are capable of creating together.