Wilhelm Reich, as Berne, saw man at his deepest level to be of “natural sociality and sexuality, spontaneous enjoyment of work and capacity for love.”1 He felt that the repression of this deepest and benign layer of the human being brought forth the “Freudian unconscious” in which sadism, greediness, lasciviousness, envy, and perversion of all kinds dominate. Wilhelm Reich invented the term “sex economy” since he was interested in the political-economic analysis of the neuroses; according to his theory, sexual energy is manipulated for social control reasons. The orgasm, the release of sexual energy, liberates a human system whose sexuality has been oppressed.
“The connection between sexual repression and the authoritarian social order is simple and direct: the child who experienced the suppression of his natural sexuality is permanently maimed in his character development; he inevitably becomes submissive, apprehensive of all authority and completely incapable of rebellion.” In other words, the child develops exactly that character structure which would prevent him from seeking liberation. The first act of suppression prepared the way for every subsequent tyranny. Reich concluded that repression existed not for the sake of moral edification (as traditional religions would have it), nor for the sake of cultural development (as Freud claimed), but simply in order to create the character structure necessary for the preservation of a repressive society.
A great deal of Reich’s writings was an attack against the father-dominated family which he saw as “a factory for authoritarian ideologies.”2 Reich felt that the authoritarian government and economic exploitation of the people were being maintained by the authoritarian family and that the family was an indispensable part of it, which fulfilled its function as a supporter of exploitation by the oppression of sexuality in the young.
Herbert Marcuse is another writer who sees a connection between an oppressive society and people’s unhappiness. According to him, people live according to the performance principle: a way of life imposed on human beings which causes the desexualization of the body and the concentration of eroticism in certain bodily organs such as the mouth, the anus, and the genitals. This progression, which Freud saw as a healthy developmental sequence, is in fact, according to Marcuse, one that results in a reduction of human potential for pleasure. Concentrating pleasure into narrow erogenous zones leads to the production of a shallow, dehumanized, one-dimensional person. Marcuse feels that the concentration of sexual pleasure in the genitals has the purpose of removing pleasure from the rest of the body. In this manner, an oppressive establishment produces people—especially men—who are largely without feelings in their bodies and can be exploited as performing machines by others. “The normal progress to genitality has been organized in such a way that partial impulses and their ‘zones’ were all but desexualized in order to conform to the requirements of a specific social organization…,”1
Thus Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich connect the social and psychological manipulation of human beings by human beings surrounding them —including the family—with an oppressive social order. The following theory about the stroke economy is a similar effort in which it will be proposed that the free exchange of strokes which is equally a human capacity, a human propensity, and a human right has been artificially controlled for the purpose of rearing human beings who will behave in a way which is desirable to a larger social “good,” though not necessarily best for the people themselves. This manipulation of the stroke economy, unwittingly engaged in by the largest proportion of people, has never been understood as being in the service of an established order, so that people have not had an opportunity to evaluate the extent to which control of the stroke economy is to their own advantage and to what extent it is not.
In order to make this point more vivid, imagine that human beings, every human being, were at birth fitted with a mask which controlled the amount of air that was available to them. This mask would at first be left wide open; the child could breathe freely; but at the point at which the child was able to perform certain desired acts the mask would be gradually closed down and only opened for periods of time during which the child did whatever the grownups around it wanted it to do. Imagine, for instance, that a child was prohibited from manipulating his own air valve and that only other people would have control over it, and that the people allowed to control it would be rigorously specified. A situation of this sort could cause people to be quite responsive to the wishes of those who had control over their air supply; if punishment were severe enough, people would not remove their masks even though the mask might be easily removable.
Occasionally, some people would grow tired of their masks and take them off; but these people would be considered character disorders, criminals, foolish, or reckless. People would be quite willing to do considerable work and expend much effort to guarantee a continuous supply of air. Those who did not work and expend such effort would be cut off, would not be permitted to breathe freely, and would not be given enough air to live in an adequate way.
People who openly advocated taking off the masks would justifiably be accused of undermining the very fiber of the society which constructed these masks, for as people removed them they would no longer be responsive to the many expectations and demands on them. Instead, these people would seek selfish, self-satisfying modes of life and relationships which could easily exclude a great deal of activity valued and even needed by a society based on the wearing of such masks. “Mask removers” would be seen as a threat to the society, and would probably be viciously dealt with. In an air-hungry, but otherwise “free-wheeling,” society air substitutes could be sold at high prices and individuals could, for a fee, sell clever circumventions of the anti-breathing rules.
Absurd as this situation may seem, I believe that it is a close analogy to the situation existing with strokes. L stead of masks we have very strict regulations as to how strokes are exchanged. Children are controlled by regulating their stroke input, and grownups work and respond to societal demands in order to get strokes. The population is generally stroke-hungry and a large number of enterprises, such as massage parlors, Esalen, the American Tobacco Company, and General Motors are engaged in selling strokes for their consumers. (“Ginger ale tastes like love,” or, “It’s the real thing (Coke is).”)
Persons who defy the stroke-economy regulations are seen as social deviants and if enough of them band together they are regarded as a threat to the National Security as happened in the late sixties with the long-haired flower children.
Most human beings live in a state of stroke deficit; that is, a situation in which they survive on a less-than-ideal diet of strokes. This stroke deficit can vary from mild to severe. An extreme example of a person’s stroke starvation diet is the case of an alcoholic, by no means unique, who lived in a skid row hotel. By his own account, he received two strokes daily from the clerk at the hotel desk from Tuesday to Sunday and approximately thirty strokes on Monday when he appeared at the alcoholic clinic and exchanged strokes with the receptionist and the nurse administering medication. Once a month, he was treated to a dozen extra super-strokes from the physician who renewed his prescription. His vitality was almost completely sapped and he reminded me of human beings who live on starvation diets of rice. Eventually his stroke-starved state of apathy prevented him from coming to the clinic and later he was found dead in his room.
Experiences of a person in such food- and stroke-starved circumstances are of a completely different order than the experiences of one who is properly fed. This man was little more than an automaton and nothing in his personality could be interpreted as autonomous or self-determined.
Most people, however, live in a less severe form of starvation leading to varying degrees of depression and agitation. People in these circumstances exhibit, instead of the apathy of the severely starved, a form of agitation or “search behavior,” which is also found in the mildly food-starved person or animal.
Because people are forced to live in a state of stroke scarcity, the procur
ement of strokes fills every moment of their waking hours. This is the cause of structure hunger—that need to optimally structure time in social situations for the procurement of a maximum number of strokes.
Also, just as some people have accumulated large sums of money with relatively little effort, so it is that certain people are able to obtain large numbers of strokes in return for little effort; that is, they have established a stroke monopoly in which they are able to accumulate other’s strokes. In the stroke economy, just as is the case with money, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer while the majority have to struggle daily to make ends meet.
Therapists, especially group therapists, are in a position to become stroke monopolists. Wyckoff, later on in this book (Chapter 13), points out how men monopolize women’s strokes. Parents are often interested in monopolizing their children’s strokes. Whoever manages to establish a stroke monopoly profits from it and at the same time perpetuates the general rules of the controlled stroke-economy.
The Stroke Economy Rules
The teaching of the rules of the stroke economy to children constitutes the basic training for Lovelessness. As in all scripting, Lovelessness is based on injunctions and attributions. The injunctions of the stroke economy are:
1. Don’t give strokes if you have them to give. This injunction is self-explanatory. It simply means that people are enjoined against freely giving of their loving feelings.
2. Don’t ask for strokes when you need them. Again, this injunction is self-explanatory, and probably the one that is most thoroughly taught to people.
3. Don’t accept strokes if you want them. This injunction is not as common as the two above. When present it prevents people from accepting the strokes that are given them even when they are wanted.
4. Don’t reject strokes when you don’t want them. Frequently people are given strokes which, for one reason or another, don’t feel good or are not wanted. As an example, women who are “media” beauties, namely those who by some unlucky stroke of chance match the imaginary standard which is promoted by Playboy, have the experience of being constantly stroked for their “beauty.” It is common for such women, especially after many years of receiving these strokes, to begin to resent them. Such women report that it is an unnerving and unpleasant experience to have everyone who relates to them relate primarily and often exclusively on the basis of their looks, which after all are only skin deep. Women who have these feelings rarely, if ever, have permission to reject those strokes. One of the effects of the women’s liberation movement is that it has given such women permission to say, in effect: “I don’t want to hear that I’m beautiful; I know that already. What else can you say about me?” This is an example of permission to reject strokes which are not wanted. Coupled with the permission to ask for the strokes that she wants, a woman might then add: “Why don’t you tell me that I’m smart or powerful?”
Men have a similar problem with strokes praising their strength, responsibility, intelligence, and capacity for hard work. The men’s liberation movement encourages men to reject such strokes and ask instead, “Am I a good man? Am I sensitive? Am I beautiful? Am I lovable?”
5. Don’t give yourself strokes. Self-stroking, or what is called in transactional analysis “bragging,” is enjoined against. Children are taught that “modesty is the best policy” and that self-praise and self-love are in some way sinful, shameful, and wrong.
The above five basic injunctions are the enforcers of the stroke economy which everyone carries around in their heads and which guarantee that people will be stroke-starved. As has been pointed out, chronic stroke starvation is the basis for depression or lovelessness. Later in this book, I will discuss the therapeutic approach to this most frequent form of human unhappiness.
The free exchange of strokes is severely controlled by parental messages which enforce the stroke economy and are easily demonstrable by “bragging.” If a person is asked to stand up in the middle of the room and brag—that is, make a number of self-praising statements—there almost always is the same response: an immediate reaction of panic. If Jack decides to try bragging, he might feel that it would be immodest or improper to say good things about himself, or that to say good things about himself might be seen as an insult to the others in the room.
Jack may find that he is not aware of many, if any, good things about himself and that he is incapable of using words which imply goodness or worth applied to him. If anyone attempts to supply strokes, he will reject some, most, or all of the strokes with a discount.
If someone says, “You have beautiful skin,” the Parent says, internally, “They haven’t seen you up close.” If someone says, “You have a lovely smile,” the Parent says, “But they haven’t seen you angry.” If a person says, “You’re very intelligent,” then the Parent says, “Yes, but you’re ugly.” Other devices to avoid the acceptance of strokes will be observed, such as: giving token acceptance of the stroke, followed by a shrug so that the stroke will roll off the shoulders instead of “soaking in”; or immediately reciprocating with a counter stroke which essentially says, “I don’t deserve a stroke so I must give one in return.” Another argument against taking strokes is, “These people don’t know you, their strokes have got to be phony.” This, in spite of the fact that everyone may have agreed to give only sincere, genuine strokes.
There are all sorts of taboos operating which prevent the free exchange of strokes: the homosexual taboo prevents stroking between men and men and women and women; the heterosexual taboo prevents stroking between men and women unless they are in a prescribed relationship, either engaged to be married or married; and certain taboos against physical touch prevent stroking between grownups and children unless they are part of a nuclear family, and then only under certain circumstances. In short, the free exchange of strokes is a managed activity, a situation in which the means of satisfaction of a basic need are made unavailable to people.
The end result is that the capacity to love is taken away from people and then directed against them by using it as a reinforcer to bring about desired behavior.
It can be seen from this discussion that a person or group of persons who free themselves from the strictures of the stroke economy will regain control of the means for the satisfaction of a most important need; consequently, they tend to disengage themselves from the larger society. It is because of this that there has been such great panic among law makers and government officials in relation to the youth, drug, and sex culture. The notion that human beings will no longer work or be responsible when they liberate the stroke economy may be quite accurate if work and responsibility is seen as defined by others. However, it is quite another thing to assume that human beings in a free stroke economy will be as inert or vegetable-like as some seemingly fear. The notion that satisfied human beings will not work and will not be responsible has been a basic assumption of a lot of child-rearing. The facts may be quite different, however. It is my assumption, and my experience bears this out, that as they are increasingly satisfied in their stroke needs, human beings will be better able to actually pursue the achievement of harmony with themselves, each other, and nature.
Stroke satisfaction is the antidote to Lovelessness. Banal scripting which results in a Lovelessness script can be overthrown through an understanding and rejection of the stroke economy. How this is done in group therapy will be discussed later in the book (Chapter 22).
9
Basic Training: Training in Mindlessness
Awareness
We are born as ignorant of the workings of nature as the very first cave dweller, and in the few years between birth and maturity we acquire an enormous amount of information and understanding needed to get us around in our complex world.
Human beings have done a great deal to liberate their right to understand, often against much opposition. There have been times in history when people were not permitted to climb mountains, to dissect cadavers, or gaze at themselves in a mirror. Every one of
these activities in search of knowledge has been, at one time or another, severely punished. To understand or investigate the workings of nature has not always been safe. To teach what we learn, especially to children, is still, in some places, definitely unsafe. Teaching about human sexuality or evolution or socialism could still cause a person to lose her or his job in some school systems in the United States.
Scientists have come to understand the workings of chemicals and the inanimate forces of nature in minute detail and are therefore successful in controlling them. We are able to provide every person who wants it with an automobile, yet we don’t understand ourselves at all. We are incapable of even beginning to provide every person with a guaranteed loving relationship even though everyone seems to want that.
I believe that there has been unrelenting pressure through the ages working against the use of our faculties for awareness. Against much resistance we have learned to understand the movements of the stars and planets; we have learned physics and chemistry; we have researched our bodies; and we have come to know much about them.
We are now interested in understanding our psyches, and the psyches of our fellow human beings. I believe that the same pressures against the pursuit of knowledge that existed in Galileo’s and Leonardo da Vinci’s time exist on us now as we pursue knowledge about ourselves and each other.
One of the pressures against self-understanding comes from the medical profession. Psychiatrists, by and large, prevent us from understanding ourselves by telling us we can’t, and discounting those who feel they can without their help.
Scripts People Live Page 14