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Cultural Psychology of the Middle East
Gary S. Gregg
Oxford University Press, 2005
Chapter 9: Adulthood [excerpts]
Summary
Western theories of adult development appear to have limited applicability to MENA societies. While little research has been conducted specifically on development, four key issues emerge from studies of adults. First, MENA psychologists have adapted Western measures of several important personality traits (specifically intraversion-extraversion, neuroticism, and the “Big Five” traits), and also found evidence that anxiety levels are higher in MENA than in Western and some other developing societies.
Second, while little studied, the individualism vs. collectivism of MENA societies emerges as an important topic of discussion, especially since they are assumed to be “collectivist.” Cross-cultural psychologists have come to regard this as perhaps the central dimension on which the world’s cultures vary, with Westerners being more “egocentric” and non-Westerners more “sociocentric” in their social relationships and selves. Several Asian and Indian psychologists have criticized the validity of this continuum, and collected data showing that Japanese, Koreans, and Indians possess both types of self-representations, and can call either into play according to circumstance. Kagitcibasi and Joseph similarly argue that MENA societies cannot be termed “collectivist,” but that they foster forms of “connectivity” or “interrelatedness” in some spheres of life and individualism in others.
Third, studies of MENA women show that they often acquire a good deal of power and prestige in mid- and later- life. These accounts parallel David Guttman’s theory that many cultures script a kind of gender reversal in mid-life, in which men reintegrate “feminine” characteristics they suppressed in order to play strongly-masculine roles in their teens and twenties, while women similarly reintegrate “masculine” qualities they suppressed during the same period to emphasize feminine-nurturant characters. While “gender reversal” is not an appropriate term, MENA cultures do appear to foster a shift in gender roles that can enlarge men’s and women’s interaction styles and self-conceptions.
The fourth topic – crucial to development throughout the life-span – consists of Arab scholars’ analyses of the psychological effects of economic underdevelopment and political subjugation prevailing in many MENA societies. These writings began with Hamid Ammar’s essays on traditional and modern personality styles in Egypt, and multiplied as part of the widespread “self-critique” set off by the 1967 “Six Days’” war. Several of these scholars – including Mustafa Hijazi, Ali Zayour, and Hisham Sharabi – emphasize the role that oppressive rule has played over centuries in shaping culture, family organization, and psychological functioning. These writers believe that the humiliation, insecurity, and fear that some regimes deliberately create undermine both societal and psychological development by causing people to (a) retreat to the protection of traditional-appearing social groups, (b) adopt magical and superstitious methods of protecting themselves and influencing their conditions, (c) turn to violence in cathartic attempts to overcome humiliation, and (d) identify with the aggressor, internalizing the Leader’s, the Party’s or the secret police’s surveillance, and adopting authoritarian styles in their familial and occupational relationships. Western psychology knows little about these processes, and I end by suggesting that the theory of societal development proposed Amartya Sen (and adopted by the authors of the 2002 U.N. Arab Human Development Report), combined with philosopher Axel Honeth’s theory of societal effects on personal trust, identity, and self-regard, could provide a framework for investigating what Hijazi terms the “psychology of subjugation.”
<1> Towards a Psychology of Underdevelopment
As I have described throughout this book, MENA societies are both “becoming modern” and “underdeveloping.” Increasing numbers of educated city-dwellers enjoy comfortable life-styles and cosmopolitan cultures, but the majority of families live in conditions of economic and political underdevelopment. With per capital GDP at 14% of the OECD countries (and lower in the non-oil states), most people are poor, and about 1/3 live in “absolute poverty.” In many nations oppressive regimes rule with intimidation and violence. The 2002 Arab Human Development Report begins by pointing out that, “The wave of democracy that transformed governance in most of Latin America and East Asia in the 1980s and Eastern Europe and much of Central Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s has barely reached the Arab States.”[1] It also shows MENA to score much lower on indices of “freedom” and “voice and accountability” than any other region on the globe. This has important psychological consequences, about which Western psychology knows alarmingly little.
The Enlightenment architects of the West’s liberal democracies believed that civil rights and political participation were essential to individual “pursuits of happiness.” Western social critics have shared this view, indicting the class system, the “fetishism of commodities,” the “iron cage” of bureaucracy, the “anomie” of dis-integrated communities, and the “one dimensional” world of media-driven consumerism – which deny individuals the social and political opportunities they need to fully develop their personalities. Nazism forced these issues onto psychologists’ agendas, and in the 20 years after World War II researchers carried out classic studies of the authoritarian personality, ethnic prejudice, dogmatism, and social conformity. Scholars from various disciplines sought to define the “open-minded” or “democratic” personality and to study the conditions promoting its development. Interest in these topics then waned, and during the last 30 years political and economic influences on psychological development have all but disappeared from professional journals and textbooks.
During these same decades, anthropologists and political scientists studying Latin America have come to see the violence inflicted by colonial rulers and military regimes as so pervasively shaping some societies that they can be termed “cultures of terror.” A handful of European and American psychologists have assisted their Latin American colleagues in providing therapy to torture victims and relatives of the “disappeared,” and some of their observations may apply to MENA societies as well. In MENA, social scientists have been analyzing the workings of authority, and debating the extent to which “authoritarianism” may have cultural and psychological roots (see Chapter 6). Here I will focus on those who have written on the effects of underdevelopment and tyrannical rule on MENA cultures and psyches.
<2> Tyranny as the Preserver of Tradition
In the 1960s Franz Fanon presciently described new forms of tyranny as the fate of most post-colonial peoples:
In a certain number of underdeveloped countries the parliamentary game is faked from the beginning… The state, which by its strength and discretion ought to inspire confidence and disarm and lull everybody to sleep, on the contrary seeks to impose itself in spectacular fashion. It makes a display, it jostles people and bullies them, thus intimating to the citizen that he is in continual danger.[2]
In his Torture and Modernity, Darious Rejali documents how the Shah’s and then Ayatollah’s regimes in Iran have not continued the traditional forms of grotesque public punishments practiced by their predecessors, but created institutions of surveillance and torture that are distinctively modern in their bureaucratic organization.[3] Three decades ago, Fuad Ajami wrote that the citizenry of many MENA nations, “wish only to be left alone, and they shelter themselves from the capricious will of the state.”[4] In his 1998 Dream Palace of the Arabs he writes about the loss of his generation’s confidence in modernization, and quotes the Iraqi poet Buland Hadari’s despair that the region had been engulfed in an “ocean of terror.”[5]
Reza Shah in Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and perhaps Hafiz Assad in Syria and Israeli forces in the occupied Palestinian territories have created conditions that deserve to be termed “cultures of terror.”[6] Other nations have experienced briefer reigns and lower daily levels of terror, and the wars in Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Algeria have inflicted terror of a prolonged but more diffuse sort. Even many “moderate” regimes curtail freedom of press, assembly, speech and other civil rights, maintain widespread secret police surveillance, and make discrete use of violence and threats. The effects of political terror are amplified in some areas by the nearly-unchecked latitude of local officials and police to use violence and intimidation for corrupt as well as “legitimate” purposes. Police in some countries routinely beat petty criminals upon arrest and sometimes torture them to extract confessions.[7] Western psychologists still lack concepts to describe the corrosive atmosphere of fear this creates.
Ahmad Zaid’s large national survey found Egyptians low in trust and participation in political institutions.[8] Barakat writes of this “alienation” and “powerlessness”:
Arab citizens have been rendered powerless by their exclusion from the processes of conducting their own affairs and by deprivation of their right to active and free participation in political movements. . . The tyranny of the state and the ruler over civil society is a central cause of the condition of alienation felt by so many Arabs.[9]
Sharabi gives special emphasis to the pernicious role of the mukhabarat, the secret police: “Ordinary citizens not only are arbitrarily deprived of some of their basic rights but are the virtual prisoners of the state, the objects of its capricious and ever-present violence.”[10] He believes this forces people to rely on forms of association that undermine the development of civil society: “Isolated, estranged, and suppressed, the individual subject was driven back to the primary social structures -- the family, the ethnic community, the tribe, the religious sect -- for security and for survival.”[11] Hijazi and Hammoudi describe similar processes by which individuals may seek protection from hostile authorities in traditional social groupings, and by which undemocratic regimes may rehabilitate traditional forms of authority and patronage. This is the essence of political underdevelopment: not that traditional social structures stubbornly endure by the force of their momentum, but that deliberately-created fear drives people to re-form them – hence Sharabi’s use of the term neo-patriarchy in contrast to traditional patriarchy.
<2> The Psychology of Subjugation
One of the first and still most frequently cited analyses of the psychology of underdevelopment comes from Lebanese psychotherapist Mustafa Hijazi’s al-takhaluf al-ijtima’i: sikologia al-insan mqahor(Societal Underdevelopment: The Psychology of Subjugation). His term takhaluf can be rendered as either “backwardness” or “underdevelopment,” and he uses it in both senses to refer to more traditional forms of MENA society, to conditions of colonization, and to the post-independence conditions Sharabi terms neo-patriarchy. His central thesis is that the psychology of underdevelopment is the psychology of subjugation, which consists of human weakness before the uncontrollable forces of Nature on one side and before despotic rule on the other. This combination can reign over life in traditional milieus, in the form of floods, droughts, illnesses, and deaths on the one hand, and of rapacious Sultans, Beys, Pashas, and landlords on the other. And it can reign over life in modernizing milieus in the form of poverty and insecurity driven by market forces, and of intimidation by dictators, corrupt officials, and secret police.
Hijazi believes weakness before Nature and tyrants creates psychological injuries at deep levels, undermining the subjugated person’s basic sense of security, efficacy, and self-regard, and evoking pervasive fear and anxiety. As in many cultures, Nature tends to be richly symbolized as a “Mother,” and so weakness before “her” re-evokes the feelings of separation anxiety, maternal neglect, and rejection that accompany even the best mothering. Authorities are symbolized as fathers (especially as they deliberately adopt paternal symbols), and so subjection to despots re-evokes feelings of emasculation experienced in the face of angry, punishing fathers. The subjugated person’s life thus comes to be colored by infantilizing regression to these childhood fears. Above all, because authority is exercised directly, blatantly, and with the intent of humiliating, it combines with weakness before Nature to produce intolerable feelings of shame, embarrassment, sin, and resentment. In response to these wounds to narcissism and potency, people resort to a variety of defensive strategies which give at least temporary illusions of psychological equilibrium.
Hijazi proposes three “stages” of response to subjugation, but often speaks of these less as stages than as stances or attempts at adaptation a person might adopt. The first is simple subordination wrought by naked force, which produces the most intense and conscious feelings of insufficiency, humiliation, and resentment. This “shame complex” affects everyone, he writes, even the patriarchs and Big Men who subjugate others, as they are in turn subjugated by more powerful ones. The intolerable nature of conscious shame, sin, and anxiety leads to a second psychological strategy, which sets up an internal order of self-subjugation. This is based on repression of the feelings of inferiority, and typically is accomplished by identifying with the authority, projecting the shame and sin onto others (most prominently women), and displacing the resentment as punitive hostility towards sinners. This stage/stance provides a semblance of psychological equilibrium that may last through a lifetime or extend over generations. But it is always an unstable equilibrium which may lead, when individual and social circumstances allow, to rebellion. Here Hijazi cites Fanon at length on the psychologically reparative effects of taking up arms against the oppressor. The subjugated person who conquers his/her fear of death and confronts the tyrant restores a senses of dignity and efficacy.
But Hijazi does not stop the dialectic with the healing effects of violence. At the beginning of revolt, he writes, only a few take up arms, and these become heroes and then leaders to the masses who follow. The heady effects of empowerment and leadership easily lead to narcissistic aggrandizement, and violence comes to have magical self-inflating properties that deflect it from the goal of liberation and give it a life of its own. Heroic leader-follower relations are re-created, daily life comes to be lived in a “clan-like” style, subverting in practice the vision of liberation that first drove the rebels to fight. Hijazi later carried out field studies of militia fighters in the Lebanese civil war, and describes in detail how their violence became “magical” acts of self-reparation via mutilation of victims. He points out that their popular warrior nicknames, composed in the form of “abu”-XXXX (“father of”-XXXX), expressed an unconscious identification with old-style paternal prowess for which these young men apparently yearned. He also found that they took on roles of traditional patriarchs, including arranging marriages.[12] Subjugation forms a total psychological system, he concludes, even generating rebellion that recreates the very forms it initially seeks to destroy. Only different kinds of change, about which he declines to speculate, can transform the self-replicating totality.
Hijazi then describes four main types of defense mechanisms subjugated persons adopt to bear their shame, fear, and rage: (1) withdrawal into self (including dreaming of the glorious past and “dissolving” into family and kin groups); (2) identification with authority; (3) mythic/superstitious control of fate (achieving an illusion of efficacy and security by protecting one’s self from the jinn-s, Satan, and Evil Eye, and by practicing sorcery and fortune-telling); and (4) violence (sometimes directed self-destructively inward, but more often displaced outward, readily taking “paranoid” and “fascist” forms). He argues that the whole symbolic complex by which men dominate women serves as the key equilibrium-restoring mechanism for men, as it creates an illusory dignity of exercising authority, no matter how strongly they themselves may be subjected to the authority of other men. Yet none of these provide a satisfactory equilibrium, and so people typically shift among them according to temperaments and circumstance.
The analyses of psychotherapist Ali Zayour and historian Hichem Djait parallel Hijazi’s in many respects. Zayour terms the no-longer traditional but not modern condition a “deformed” or “degraded” society, and Djait refers to the post-colonial cultural mixture as an incoherent “mongrel” structure. Both criticize traditional forms of family and political authority for instilling feelings of weakness, for blocking individual initiative, and for embedding the individual in a realm of mythical beings, forces, and thinking. “The sultan and the father and the husband and the fqih,” Zayour writes, “add up to a picture of the unified structure, characterized by repression and severity.”[13] Djait especially criticizes the networks of patron-clientage created within new state institutions, reinforcing the “prestige complex” and complementary styles of “ingratiation” he believes have become features the “basic personality.”[14] Both scholars also emphasize the sense of insufficiency inflicted by colonialism, which has continued after independence as the wealthy and powerful West has become the standard of comparison by which Arabs evaluate their lives and selves, and judge them inferior. This does not affect children in the first years of life, Zayour points out, but comes into play in later childhood, gradually deepening the “wounds” to the self inflicted by traditional authorities and setting of off a struggle to recover one’s “standing.” Here Zayour’s analysis also resembles writings by W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Ralph Ellison, and others on the wounds inflicted by racism as minority children come to see themselves negatively in the reflections of whites’ eyes. Like Hijazi (and the writers on racism), he believes this typically leads to a variety of defensive maneuvers, often to blanket rejection of tradition in favor of Western-style modernity, or to reactionary adherence to tradition – both of which subvert efforts to modernize the Arab cultural heritage.