Having Politics
A conversation with writer Lily Scherlis
You have probably already read an essay by Lily Scherlis and been hypnotized by her exacting, magnetic prose. Scherlis is a scholar of pop psychology with viral essays on boundaries, group dynamics, and therapy at large. As an acolyte of psychoanalysis and other similar modalities, I’ve found her to be a clear voice with an excellent bullshit detector. Her work has appeared in Parapraxis, N+1, The Drift, Harper’s, and elsewhere. (These are all, by the way, great magazines to subscribe to.) You should read her entire body of work and then come back to read a short conversation between the two of us. Her forthcoming book, People Skills, is on the way.
“Group relations is essentially a petri dish, as if you could take a sample of the swamp and model group behavior in vitro,” Scherlis wrote in a moving essay for N+1 about difference and Bion. Perhaps in a small way, this conversation can offer a similar lens on the “experimental enclosure.”
Okay, I have to ask. Do you advocate for any particular kinds of therapy having studied so much of pop psychology and group relations? Or do you feel agnostic?
I long to live in a world where everyone can try whatever therapy they want, including the labor- and time-intensive ones like psychoanalysis, rather than getting shunted into more cost-effective or “efficient” methods. Different personalities are organized differently and need different tools! I don’t like when people take a purity mindset here. It’s almost a cliche to cite the empirical data that shows that efficacy has much more to do with the working relationship between patient and clinician (and, well, clinical skill). Right now I’m a training case for a psychoanalyst in formation, which I highly recommend as an affordable way to get on the couch, if you live in a place where this is an option. (Or you might check out the Psychosocial Foundation’s telephonic clinic.) If I’m being deadly honest, I will confess that I experimented with IFS at one point and liked it a lot, even if the framework is a kind of manic overinterpretation of object relations (IMO it should definitely not be used in carceral institutional settings). Something I haven’t done that I think more people should really consider is analytically informed group therapy. It’s more affordable and, hokey or scary as it might sound, I think it has some major clinical advantages over dyadic therapy if you find a good group.
Your work often incorporates a strong political bend, a material analysis of the conditions of psychology. How do you think politics play a role in your criticism and essays?
Pop psychology is folk ethics: what should I be like? How should we treat each other? But no one knows that these questions are actually up for debate in the terms we use to describe ourselves and one another—that pop psychology is not merely a descriptive inquiry into how we apply Hard Pure Science to the mind, but prototypes of social norms jockeying for public belief. It’s like unspoken moral parameters are being determined by a constant poll that no one knows they’re taking. Even though ethics and politics are not the same thing: “the humanist’s mistake is to suppose that politics is just lots and lots of ethics,” writes Andrea Long Chu—ethical norms really affect how we go about political struggle.
I also think once you start seeing all the resonances between material and political-economic developments and cultural developments, you can’t look away. To put it in grad school terms, historicizing stuff that no one realizes they should historicize is a crazy rush, in the way that having a paranoid hunch confirmed can be deeply pleasurable even as it’s horrifying.
On the one hand, people deal with world events on the terrain of pop psychology without really knowing it, processing and making sense of them by adopting norms around things that feel more in control, like their bodies and minds and relationships. On the other, it sounds nuts, but I think things happen in the world because of pop psychology. Moving from small to big, media relentlessly personifies what’s nebulous in order to make sense of it too. If you listen to the wording Trump and others talk about geopolitics like it’s an allegorical play where all the countries are characters. This is also how soooo many people talk about Israel and Palestine. Nation-states just aren’t people. I don’t think it’s grandiose to think that there’s some conceptual spillage in both directions.
How did you decide to write about “soft skills” and how do you see its relationship to AI optimism? I thought that was a fascinating part of your article in Harper’s.
When I was growing up I was contantly told by random authority figures that emotional intelligence and social skills were more important than IQ, which is, well, not untrue, but I think it made me a much more socially anxious child than I needed to be. When everyone was talking about the loneliness epidemic and feeling socially “rusty” after shelter-in-place, I had to wonder if the idea that socializing is a skill cuts both ways. On the one hand, it makes it learnable; on the other, it makes other people something you can be bad at.
If you think about what a “soft skill” really is, in the context of historical definitions of skill in labor contexts, to have “soft skills” is to be a human that can skillfully operate other humans (i.e., manage them). Around the time LLMs became publicly available, business media seemed to erupt into a panic over a so-called “crisis of soft skills.” Meanwhile, LinkedIn reports were insisting that soft skills were more important than ever, “key sites of growth,” and so on, partly because human interaction felt like the most obvious activity that AI couldn’t automate into obsolescence. (Of course, now plenty of people are finding chat more pleasing to talk to than other humans.) Soft skills were a kind of human preserve for managerial types, which meant there could never be enough of them. I argued that people were displacing a lot of fear—about technological change but also about geopolitics—onto the “crisis” of soft skills, turning an abstract idea called “soft skills” into a kind of corporate messiah. Some of the more bonkers AI-optimistic social scientists were publishing peer-reviewed papers that made claims that improving our soft skills “will enable artificial intelligence and robots to use human brain capacity and creativity to boost process efficiency” and advocating “a strategic approach incorporating the perfect human partner and Cobots (collaborative robots) with human resources.” I was interested in how much attention “soft skills” were getting in these contexts while the labor of care workers gets socially devalued as unskilled.
Writing about protests and encampments alongside therapy and group dynamics is fascinating to me. It’s something hannah baer has done a lot as well. I’m curious about the impulse to compare and contrast the two. On the one hand there seems obvious overlap and echoes and on the other hand they seem to operate in very different registers. Maybe there’s something about utility or usefulness in both modes? Or “having a role?”
This is a really interesting question that’s very dear to me. I should say I am a random layperson who’s very lucky to get to hang out with a bunch of skilled clinicians like hannah baer, whom I love thinking with. We’re both in a working group oriented around this question, among others. Many of us would start by noting the very long history of the clinic as a site of political work and struggle. Beyond and before group relations, clinicians like Fanon and Tosquelles helped radically reinvent institutions; meanwhile, protests and encampments tend to devise inventive care infrastructures. I guess ideally they’re two sites where people are working hard on the question of how people can survive the historical and political present. Of course, a lot of therapeutic settings forget the “historical and political” part, or have been reduced to mere nodes on a circuit of institutions that shunts psychotic people from one inadequate holding place to another.
Clinical and political settings are almost always set at odds: so many of the magazine essays I see on self-help and therapy are still rehearsing updated versions of a reductive (and kinda trad) argument: stop focusing on fixing yourself and go to a protest!
Anyway, I think this advice is dumb, or at least not useful. If people are neurotically fixated on their deficiencies, sure, it’s partly because the powers that be wants to turn us into self-obsessed sheeple, but it’s also because staying attuned to the world is a lot to bear.
For me, “having politics” is about getting intimate with this question: how is my silly little psychic life bound up in a totality of massive systems that seem to wholly transcend me; how is my life tangled up in the lives of faraway others? Some people are forced by circumstance to confront all too obvious answers to this question. Others find very acrobatic ways to avoid asking it. Indeed, if you can avoid the question, it takes a lot to keep thinking about it without totally losing your mind or psychically abandoning yourself and your immediate relationships. If something horrific happens that you cannot look away from—a genocide, a slew of federal abductions, a war—too often we find ourselves self-abandoning in the face of it, choosing one scale to focus on. This can be therapeutic in its own way—as you suggest, feeling genuinely useful is everything. It’s healing to have a meaningful role in a meaningful project (which is what the famous theorist of groups W. R. Bion tried to provide as a form of treatment in WWII psychiatric hospitals). But when it involves wholly losing track of your individual experience, it can be a form of spiritual bypass—a recipe for burnout. There’s this principle in some schools of somatics that as you grow you become able to hold wider and wider scales of existence in the field of your intuitive, somatic awareness. I think there’s a difference between this multiscale awareness and self-abandoning out of political rage. Being able to hold multiple scales in mind without becoming psychotic requires real psychic resources. This is one reason I go to therapy.
Church Bulletin
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Yayyyy two brilliant minds