Read Online The Happiness Industry by William Davies - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: William Davies
Ads: Link
problem, but only because it shows up in the physical brain and body, with calculable costs for governments and health insurers. Generosity and gratitude are urged upon people, but mainly to alleviate theirown mental health problems and private misery. And friendship ties within poor inner-city neighbourhoods have become a topic of government concern, but only to the extent that they mediate epidemics of bad nutrition and costly inactivity. This is all an attempt to grasp the social world without departing from mathematical, individualist psychology. While this may offer genuine medical aid to needy individuals, trying to understand society in purely psychological terms is also a recipe for narcissism. And the man who initiated it was nothing if not a narcissist.
Playing God
In 1893, a four-year-old boy sat on top of a rickety mountain of chairs that he and his friends had stacked on top of each other in the basement of his parentâs house, on the outskirts of Bucharest near the Danube. The boy, Jacob Moreno, was seizing the opportunity of his parentsâ absence to play his favourite game. He was âGodâ, and the other children from his neighbourhood were his âangelsâ. Perched on top of his chair stack, Moreno instructed his angels to start flapping their wings. They obeyed. âWhy donât you fly?â one of the angels then asked him. He agreed, launched himself into the air and within seconds found himself lying on the basement floor with a broken arm.
Morenoâs desire to play God never really deserted him. The idea of humans as individual gods in their own social worlds, creators of themselves and creators of their relationships, animated his work as a psychoanalyst and social psychologist during his adulthood. His 1920 work, The Words of the Father, outlined a frightening humanistic philosophy, where individuals confront situations of infinite possibility, in which the only limiting factorupon their own powers of self-creation is that they exist in social groups. But social groups are also malleable and improvable. Every god needs its angels.
A fantasy of ultimate paternity was an abiding feature of Morenoâs professional conduct, leading him to create some absurd myths surrounding his own originality. This included some outright lies, such as the claim he repeatedly advanced that he was born on board a ship in 1892, of unknown nationality, with an unknown father, when in fact he was born in Bucharest in 1889, the son of a struggling Jewish merchant with Turkish nationality. In later life, he exerted himself in claiming authorship over various concepts and techniques that were circulating in psychology and psychiatry at the time, with particular hostility aimed at the psychologist Kurt Lewin, who he believed was stealing his ideas. For one so interested in studying social relations, Moreno was unusually paranoid and egocentric.
His family moved to Vienna when he was a child, and it was there that he later enrolled to study medicine at university. This enabled him to attend the lectures of Sigmund Freud shortly before the First World War. Moreno was only marginally impressed by the celebrity psychoanalyst. As he left the lecture hall one day in 1914, he accosted him. âWell, Dr. Freud, I start where you leave off,â he told him. âYou meet people in the artificial setting of your office. I meet them on the street and in their homes, in their natural surroundings.â 15 The onset of war provided him with his first opportunity to do just this.
His mixed nationality meant that he was unable to serve in the army, so he took a position as a doctor in refugee camps in Austria-Hungary between 1915 and 1918. Observing those who resided in these camps, Moreno began to consider ways in which their happiness could be influenced through altering theirimmediate social surroundings. Clearly their objective circumstances were a cause of considerable misery, but Moreno believed
Playing God
In 1893, a four-year-old boy sat on top of a rickety mountain of chairs that he and his friends had stacked on top of each other in the basement of his parentâs house, on the outskirts of Bucharest near the Danube. The boy, Jacob Moreno, was seizing the opportunity of his parentsâ absence to play his favourite game. He was âGodâ, and the other children from his neighbourhood were his âangelsâ. Perched on top of his chair stack, Moreno instructed his angels to start flapping their wings. They obeyed. âWhy donât you fly?â one of the angels then asked him. He agreed, launched himself into the air and within seconds found himself lying on the basement floor with a broken arm.
Morenoâs desire to play God never really deserted him. The idea of humans as individual gods in their own social worlds, creators of themselves and creators of their relationships, animated his work as a psychoanalyst and social psychologist during his adulthood. His 1920 work, The Words of the Father, outlined a frightening humanistic philosophy, where individuals confront situations of infinite possibility, in which the only limiting factorupon their own powers of self-creation is that they exist in social groups. But social groups are also malleable and improvable. Every god needs its angels.
A fantasy of ultimate paternity was an abiding feature of Morenoâs professional conduct, leading him to create some absurd myths surrounding his own originality. This included some outright lies, such as the claim he repeatedly advanced that he was born on board a ship in 1892, of unknown nationality, with an unknown father, when in fact he was born in Bucharest in 1889, the son of a struggling Jewish merchant with Turkish nationality. In later life, he exerted himself in claiming authorship over various concepts and techniques that were circulating in psychology and psychiatry at the time, with particular hostility aimed at the psychologist Kurt Lewin, who he believed was stealing his ideas. For one so interested in studying social relations, Moreno was unusually paranoid and egocentric.
His family moved to Vienna when he was a child, and it was there that he later enrolled to study medicine at university. This enabled him to attend the lectures of Sigmund Freud shortly before the First World War. Moreno was only marginally impressed by the celebrity psychoanalyst. As he left the lecture hall one day in 1914, he accosted him. âWell, Dr. Freud, I start where you leave off,â he told him. âYou meet people in the artificial setting of your office. I meet them on the street and in their homes, in their natural surroundings.â 15 The onset of war provided him with his first opportunity to do just this.
His mixed nationality meant that he was unable to serve in the army, so he took a position as a doctor in refugee camps in Austria-Hungary between 1915 and 1918. Observing those who resided in these camps, Moreno began to consider ways in which their happiness could be influenced through altering theirimmediate social surroundings. Clearly their objective circumstances were a cause of considerable misery, but Moreno believed
Similar Books
