What can On the Genealogy of Morals teach us about doing good therapy?
I have recently found myself working through an online series of lectures from Cambridge Professor Raymond Geuss on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The series is billed as being about Nietzsche’s work more broadly, though having watched it, it is now clear the collection is largely a commentary on Nietzsche’s moral philosophy, with particular emphasis on the three essays in On the Genealogy of Morals, than it is about Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre. Geuss is an engaging lecturer and, though clocking in at roughly 7 hours, I would recommend the videos (available on YouTube) to anyone interested in this facet of Nietzsche’s thinking. Particularly in the context of thinking about Nietzsche as a proto-psychologist of sorts, Geuss’ exegesis of the text is incredibly helpful in ordering and structuring the thought of a philosopher who is often prone to writing in a manner that is largely unstructured and deliberately disordered.
There are, to my mind, some obvious take aways that could be used to inform some reflecting within this space about the relationship between Nietzsche’s moral philosophy and the process of doing therapy. Geuss acknowledges some of the structural positions that Nietzsche uses in the text are in some ways precursors to what would later be found in the work of Freud and the psychoanalysts. (Geuss offers his own commentary on the debate as to whether Freud ever read Nietzsche by—in a very Nietzschean manner—taking up the somewhat paradoxical position of declaring “even if he didn’t, he did” given the ubiquity of Nietzsche’s influence on philosophy at the time Freud would have been developing his own ideas about the human psyche.)
But I think there is something that would be interesting to articulate beyond “the obvious” precursors to repression, turning against the self, internalization, and a host of other defenses that take shape throughout the text. What struck me, as I was reflecting on what this lecture might have to say about doing therapy, arose when Geuss began talking about Nietzsche’s interpretation of the role of “the priest” in society. Though before we can make sense of that, it is likely important to provide some basis for understanding the foundation on which that piece of the argument is built. As an editorial note, from here on, as I refer to “Nietzsche” it should be noted that this is an interpretation of Nietzsche that is based on my interpretation of Geuss’ interpretation. Geuss seems to be fairly well-credentialed and respected within the field of academic philosophy, so I feel comfortable working with his interpretations, but given that one of Nietzsche’s specialties in the world of philology was the interpretation of ancient texts, it seemed worth pointing out the degrees of separation involved when I attempt to state something directly about the work of Nietzsche himself. I hope to have an opportunity to revisit the essays in OtGoM soon.
Nietzsche’s text tries to identify an understanding of the ways in which morality develops, particularly the morality he was exposed to at the time he was writing, which was the predominantly Christian setting of Germany in the late 1800s. Nietzsche’s approach was to critique what might be called ascetic idealism by offering something of an inversion of a typical interpretation of the development of morals that went something like this:
- I believe such and such a thing—let’s say truth—to be a virtuous thing for me to uphold
- As such, I believe that I should be truthful in my encounters with you, and you should be truthful in your encounters with me
- Therefore, it must be universally acknowledged that the idea of being truthful is largely a good thing for people to take up as a practice
Nietzsche rejects this kind of proposition as he believed things like customs and values to be largely contingent with relationship to history. What is virtuous to Nietzsche and his contemporaries in Germany in the 1800s, or what might even be true to them, is not necessarily what is virtuous or true to us now reflecting on those ideas in the early 2000s.
Rather, Nietzsche uses the dialectic of the master-slave to determine a much more complex developmental trajectory for morals, which derives from a will to power. This argument relies on several keen philosophical observations. The grossly oversimplified version goes something like this: due to the structural imbalances implicit in the relationship between the master and slave, the slave must find some creative way to deal with the burden of his structurally assigned inferiority with respects to the master. This need leads to a number of features, two of which are 1.) a tendency towards complicitly with the social order in order to atone for a perceived guilt related to one’s own failings within that structural hierarchy and 2.) the need to develop some kind of meaning system which makes sense of the suffering we are experiencing.
This is where the role of the priest comes in for Nietzsche. Per his evaluation, the priests play a dual role in finding some set of responses to this ongoing suffering vis-à-vis the structures of societal oppression in which the slave exists. The first is through the ritualized processes involved in religion: prayer, incantation, confession, etc. These provide some mechanism which, per Nietzsche, are engaging enough to numb one’s sensibilities towards one’s own suffering. The second feature of the priest is to create the structures of meaning, which, in the institutional setting of religion, goes something like “You are suffering because you are a sinner. You are evil and your evil takes the expression of a weak form of the very evils you have ascribed to the masters. And so, you are suffering because you are in fact too strong and must turn your will against itself to gain some control over your evil impulses.” Nietzsche then goes on to trace the degenerative effects of this which are, again briefly: slave responds to the narrative of “I am a slave because I am a sinner” —> to resolve this conflict, they turn their aggression against themselves and limit their own vitality —> they in turn actually end up making themselves weaker —> which means they suffer even more and must begin the whole cycle all over again in an ever deteriorating spiral.
So that’s in a brief sense what’s happening with the argument. What does this portend for the role of the therapist and what it might mean to do good therapy? There’s something incredibly modern about Nietzsche’s argument. Notably, in that its eventual result is something Nietzsche variously refers to as decadence, lack of vitality, and nihilism. That the masses will get just enough of what they need to keep the same cycles operating, to perpetuate anything other than change. A phenomenon that I think can occur on both the individual and the societal level.
I am inclined to believe that there is a way of doing therapy that lends itself to this very process. That if we replace “priest” with “therapist”, “sinner” with “client”, and “rituals” with “coping skills and strategies”, the discipline of therapy runs the risk of maintaining the cycles of oppression it’s job should be to dismantle. Though it’s easy to single out the various cognitive and behavioral therapies as especially emblematic of this, I don’t know that any orientation is necessarily immune from it. And for good reason. We as helping professionals are going to be inclined to place a premium on care and trying to help our clients cope. But the underlying principles by which we conceptualize the idea of coping are important, and I think we are right to be skeptical or cynical towards any methodology that tries to assuage rather than recognize pain as a potential catalyst for change, for upending a broken system. There’s an argument to made here about ideology (and maybe I’ll make that in another post) but it’s important that as you, reader, are reading this that you not just read it as “the things which I think are bad are poisoning the system and inducing feelings of ennui and apathy on the cultural level”, but as “How are the frameworks in which I participate actually reinforcing the very mechanisms I profess to want to divest of their power?”
Good therapy should be subversive. Not subversive to our clients, but subversive to the ideological and systemic structures (intrapsychic, familial, cultural, poltical, etc.) in which they operate. I will try to offer one possible solution, connected to something Geuss mentions early in the lecture series. In his being interested in the idea that philosophy was contingent and historical, Nietzsche was often critical of the ways in which philosophical movements and ideas were more embedded in an extant way of thinking than was let on by those doing the thinking. That there was an enormous blind spot for most philosophers in how they came to focus on the things that it was they chose to focus on. And so Nietzsche’s reaction to this was to suggest that the role of good philosophy is not in the generation of more refined and sophisticated arguments, but should be evaluated, rather, on the degree to which the philosopher is able to uncover new questions.
It seems, then, that as therapists, to truly be participants in the task of helping our clients engage in their lives anew, we should first task ourselves with developing the capacity to ask new questions. To interrogate and deconstruct not just that which the client is bringing into the session, but our own biases and presumptions, and how what we are bringing to the interaction overlaps with that which the client is bringing. The possibility for newness cannot be singularly undertaken in any good therapy. That is, it cannot be taken up by the client alone. We must recognize and resist the temptation to embody the role of an uncritical authority imposed on us by the client and various cultural forces (use whatever language you like – the Master, the parentified object, The Subject Supposed to Know, etc). Only then do we stand the chance of helping the client breakout of the repetitious cycles and patterns that become the work of the therapy, embracing a critically understood authority that is shared with them, not intellectually but in the actual embodied and affective parameters of the therapeutic encounter, bringing them into a new way of being. A new ethic about what it might mean to allow themselves to live their life well.
