24 Feb THE FLATTENED SELF AND RADICAL FAILURE: RELATIONAL, CONTEXTUAL PSYCHOTHERAPY AS POLITICAL RESISTANCE

Social media has increased global connectivity and created a super social online world. However, while technology has increased the speed and volume of communication, it has also compressed personal and interpersonal expression. Images are flattened by screens and writing is abbreviated by character limits. Forced brevity diminishes nuance and creates a condition for increased polarization. Being hyper social is not necessarily very relational and being politically vocal online is not necessarily equivalent to being politically active. Relational psychotherapy can be a space for becoming more relationally skillful and developing one’s embodied political ethos.

In Philip Cushman’s (2015) article, “Relational Psychoanalysis as Political Resistance” he focused on the contemporaneous sociological phenomenon of what he called, “the flattened multiple self” and defined it:

 “A way of being that has diverged sharply from the emphasis on interiority and the valorization of “authenticity” of the modern era. Thus it emerges as a self that is thin or superficial and valorizes flexibility and shape shifting. This new self is preoccupied with consuming for the sake of creating and presenting identities in order to fend off danger or attract others.” (p. 426)

Through Cushman’s description one might recognize that they are also regularly engaging with flattened multiple selves, as flattened versions of themself, in the flattened spaces of social media.

Cushman (2015) provided a basic socioeconomic history of the development of the flattened multiple self, which led to the creation of flattened social online spaces.

“Over the course of the 20th century, the economy moved from a focus on production to one of consumption and from an emphasis on physical labor to one of salesmanship; important personality characteristics shifted from Victorian “character” to Roaring Twenties “personality” and more recently to communicative (i.e., relational) expertise.” (p. 428)  

Food porn, travel porn, spiritual authority, political commentary, anyone can claim to be an expert and craft themselves into the star of their own social media account. The nature, or rather, the design of the social media medium is also paradoxically antisocial, hardly dialogical or a space for critical discourse. It is a medium that facilitates consumption and celebrates consumerism through the creation of countless folk celebrities, so called “influencers.” The universal currency in the marketplace of social media is human attention.

The developmental process of the flattened-multiple public persona is also driven by attention. One’s own social media account provides a distorted self-reflection, an image of the self as a product, valued in “likes,” which evidence capturing certain volumes of attention, despite or because of algorithm manipulation.

The flattened multiple self, then, is the self-commodification of one’s own identity. In his essay, Cushman (2015) wrote that the poverty of political engagement in the United States is one outcome of the flattened multiple self, and he proposed that psychotherapists might use relational approaches to support their clients in becoming politically engaged. He proposed:

“Relational psychoanalysis could be interpreted as preparation, or, in its better moments a school, for resistance. This is because its practices can enable a way of being that is honest, self-reflective, critical, humble, curious, compassionate, and respectful of and willing to learn from difference.” (p. 424)

Relational psychotherapeutic approaches are truly radical in the paradigm of flattened multiple self. Through the therapeutic relationship, the client can develop the capacities listed by Cushman (2015) above to become increasingly self-aware and conscious about how social factors impact their personal challenges. Working with a therapist who provides contextual therapy can help clients become cognizant of systems of privileges and oppression (e.g. racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, agism, etc.) within the dominant culture, and bring curiosity to the possibility that the client might also have internalized oppression. Thus, relational psychotherapeutic work could result in the client altering their values and priorities.

Another radical stance against flatness is deliberate failure as an act of resisting the status quo. Jack Halberstam (2011) wrote:

“The Queer Art of Failure dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we currently live. Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” (pp. 2-3)

Claiming unintended failures and intentionally failing both oppose narrow, socially qualified categories of success. Relational psychotherapy can provide a safe place for the deconstruction of the flattened multiple self and support the client to increase their tolerance for the in between and unknown. The relational, contextual therapist can act as an ally for the client, supporting their unique emergence and the reorganization of their authentic self.

“In the process of producing this reality, many other realities, fields of knowledge, and ways of being have been discarded” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 9). Global colonial capitalist patriarchy is failing many. Conscious, purposeful failure can be a subversive, political act that audaciously demands the creation of new possibilities.

“The history of alternative political formations is important because it contests social relations as given and allows us to access traditions of political action that, while not necessarily successful in the sense of becoming dominant, do offer models of contestation, rupture, and discontinuity for the political present. These histories also identify potent avenues of failure, failures that we might build upon in order to counter the logics of success that have emerged from the triumphs of global capitalism.” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 19)

Radical failure could be considered a liberatory practice. When failure is brought into relational space, such as in contextual psychotherapy, the therapist can witness and reflect the client’s differentiation from the dominant culture and encourage the client’s process of becoming unflat, multidimensional, and therefore politically embodied.

Catherine Brooks, 2023

Photo: of the author, 1996

References:

Cushman, P. (2015). Relational psychoanalysis as political resistance. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 51(3), 423-459.

Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Duke University Press