5 ..7
Based on what I have said so far, I might have given the impression that a behavioural control system will fail in the field of psychotherapy, because of the typical characteristics of our job, but that it might be feasible in other instances. This is not the case, on the contrary. As I said in my introduction, it has to do with something that goes much further than the field of psychotherapy. This need for external control, evaluation and assessment is everywhere. To give you an example: unfortunately enough, I am the head of a university department. There used to be a time that people in my position were paid to read and study and to teach what they had read and studied. Today a big part of my time goes into management, including the obligatory performance and evaluation interviews and the filling in of reports in a standardized manner. I am myself controlled in the same way by a controller above me who is in his turn controlled by yet another controller.
The net result of such a system is an ever growing anonymous bureaucracy in combination with ever growing levels of distrust. This is an infernal spiral, because the system creates its own transgressions. To put it in clinical jargon: a focus on a behavioural control will shift very soon from an obsessive compulsive to a paranoid system. How many cameras do we need in the streets? And why should we limit cameras to the street, we’d better put them in the class rooms and the offices as well. And doesn’t the ever raising threat of terrorism oblige us to put them even in private homes? Etc.
In this way, the world is turned into a generalized panopticon. Every added level of control aggravates the original problem: there is a growing lack of trust in the others, we can’t run up “the usual suspects” anymore because everybody is suspected. This is without any doubt THE contemporary problem: the loss of ethics, and behavioural control isn’t the answer to that kind of loss, as it is a consequence of it.
If we want to do something about this loss, we have to look for the causes. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this cause can be summarized as the disappearance of the big Other, as an abstract denomination for the symbolic order that contains shared meanings, ideals, obligations etc. Based on this big Other, every subject acquires two very important things: his identity and his conscience. In Freudian terms: his ego and his super-ego. In contemporary scientific lingo, it is said that identity development and affect regulation are the combined result of mirroring processes. But of course, there has to be somebody to provide that mirror, and this is no longer the case.