From: murphyg@Software.Mitel.COM (Gary Murphy)
Newsgroups: sci.psychology,alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: Deconstructing Bullies and Wimps
Date: 28 Sep 92 12:36:23 GMT
Organization: Applications Software II, MITEL Corporation, Kanata, Ontario,
	Canada
In-reply-to: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM's message of 27 Sep 92 16:30:37 GMT

Richard,

I'm rather dissappointed in your posting of Sept 27; looking at your
email path to 'depsych', I'm also unsure if that excuses your
tunnelvision or deepens your negligence.

In your posting you note

   I think I've been working over and over in my mind the
   deconstruction of the major American juvenile narratives -- which,
   when you think of it just about _are_ American narrativity since
   there _is_ _no_ real adult American narrativity in the way that
   English novelists from Thackeray to Fowles created narratives for
   adult Englishmen and French novelists from Stendhal and Flaubert
   to Camus created narratives for adult Frenchmen -- since I was a
   kid and noticed the poor fit between the fictional universe
   described in the narratives and the "real" universe in which I
   lived.

I would hope you might be more imaginative in your use of a library.
What about Sam Sheppard?  What about, dare I say it, William S.
Burroughs?  The authors you do cite, and especially Flaubert, are
riddled with hypocritical oversights, being no more the real life of the
average person of their day that the rules of Chivalry --- the best that
can be said is their historical popularity (in both cases) suggests the
people certainly _wished_ they were true, and I'd challenge the same is
true for American literature, maybe even American prime-time TV.

   As far back as I can remember I've asked myself why there _is_
   narrative.  Why, for example, do we sit in a darkened theater
   watching images flicker on a screen, on in our living rooms
   watching the even thinner images on a television monitor, or
   reading words describing the doings of people who never were.

Instead of asking yourself, why not ask the people who go?  Oh, I'm
sorry, you did show a penchant for Freud.  Go ahead, ask yourself.
While you have yourself on the line, also ask yourself if you have read
Grunbaum's "Foundations" or Karl Popper's "Conjectures".

   More recently I've come to ask myself if
   there is a center or core or narrative engine -- an ur-narrative
   or deep structure or core phantasy underneath the shifting
   "surface" of the phenomenal or evident narrative.

Is there any need?  Try telling someone directly what you think they
should think (like me here ;-) ) --- how successful is it?  Now try
telling the same person a story where a wise person tells Simplissico
the same moral 'truth' with no more supporting evidence.  Which
technique is more likely to provoke a strong negative reaction?

   But depth psychology, particularly Freud's version, especially as
   developed by Melanie Klein and Theodore Reik, does suggest a
   phantasy "engine" at the core of the narrative.  That encounter
   between the bully and the wimp, which is such a poor mirror of
   "reality," does apparently mirror _something_, and that something
   seems to be ...

So it shows our brains can generalize and then generate novel narratives
based on the generalizations being characatured.  What is so amazing
that you must postulate, without basis, some 'engine' peculiar to this
theme? A phantasy engine phantasy engine perhaps?

   I think it is worth noting that these narratives, from _Tom
   Brown's School Days_ down to the latest episodes of _Step by Step_
   or _Home Improvement_, are written by adults.  Even if children
   are the intended receivers and the narrative purports to teach
   some "valuable lesson about life," to quote Homer and Bart
   Simpson, it still came out of the teeming unconscious stew of an
   adult author.  Thus the unathletic wimp is able to defeat a bully
   who became a bully in part because of his superior muscular
   strength. Even if the intended moral of the story is that getting
   mad or really trying or having right on your side will enable you
   to triumph, underneath all that there is the more primal psychic
   drama of one person in combat with another.

If you choose to see it as such (but then Freud always chose correctly
;-)) Why not try to fit at least three alternatives?  Maybe the allegory
of personal combat relieves the writer of finding a vehicle for his
moral teaching?  In the profession, if you ask the writers and it seems
you are reluctant to, they call this "formula writing" because it is
almost guaranteed to evoke the much needed identification of the
consumer with the plot; nearly everyone over the age of one understands
what it is like to be in interpersonal conflict and nearly everyone
likes a story about themselves.

   Whether one takes a psychodynamic view and foregrounds the
   interaction between father and son, or some kind of neo-Darwinian
   ethological view and sees an "instinctual" struggle for position
   and status on the dominance hierarchy of peers, it is probably
   true that we all have a baggage of unconscious phantasy stemming
   from unfulfilled wishes and unrealized fears.  

In Morita therapy they say one choice is psychosis, two is neurosis.  If
the fears are unrealized (un-real-ized) how can you postulate them as
things in themselves?  Why must Freudians always introduce new,
unfounded and untestable (by definition!) constructs?  Baggage indeed!

   It may be that there is no way to start with the
   traditional narrative involving the bully and the wimp and
   creatively resolve it in any way that provides any kind of
   normative guidance, that "valuable lesson about life," or any
   moral or aesthetic balance.

How dreadfully dull!  Are you now postulating that there exists (in
Freudian unreality terms) some story which, if written, would preclude
all neccessity for further stories?  Here's a big secret for you: the
Universe is dynamic!  Yes, it is true!  Two completely contradictory
versions of any tale are possible because the situations were the
lessons are to be applied can be different!  Amazing, isn't it!

Too bad you don't spend more time reading philosophy, you might
encounter Aubrey Lewis or Ernst Nagel.  Even in your own realm (albeit
daringly extended from the Freudian non-viewing view) you might
encounter Garth Wood and begin to worry about the narrowness of the
'insight' approach --- Do you suppose there truly is an 'insight' engine
in the minds of psychologists with a core phantasy underneath, and
which, when faced with the wealth of human experience, withdraws under
pressure of unrealized fears and unresolved desires, insisting instead
to pidgeon-hole imagined observation of analog experiential data into
narrow phantasms of shallow catagory?

BTW, What sayeth your sources on Kurt Vonnegut, Jr?

--
Gary Lawrence Murphy/murphyg@software.mitel.com/mitel!software!murphyg@uunet.ca
 Mitel Corp - 350 Legget Drive, Kanata, Ontario, Canada - (613) 592-2122 x3709
         "If you feel no shyness around the person you love,
            then you are probably not in love." --- Morita
Newsgroups: sci.psychology