Feeling Strong: The Achievement of Authentic Power By Ethel S. Person

Reprinted with the permission of The PANY Bulletin

Psychoanalytic Association of New York
Volume 41, Number 1 Spring 2003

Feeling Strong:
The Achievement of Authentic Power
by Ethel S. Person

(2002) New York: William Morrow
Reviewer: Janice S. Lieberman, Ph. D.

“We cannot understand the integration of individuals into families, groups and political structures without reference to dominance and submission, and to hierarchies.” (p.361)

This book consists of a series of psychoanalytically informed commentaries on a subject rarely discussed in the psychoanalytic literature. It is written for the psychologically informed and well-educated lay public and it can be appreciated by psychoanalysts working with today’s patients. Although Person says much about “fantasy”, she certainly knows what “reality” is. She reveals much about herself and her personal life issues around, and perceptions of, power and powerlessness, and in so doing confirms and validates what the reader has most likely observed “in the world out there” but may not have the opportunity to really think about. This is an excellent example (a model for all of us) of how a psychoanalyst highly conversant with the highly abstract theories of the psychoanalytic literature is able to communicate this knowledge to a lay public.

Person, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, has written books on love, sex and gender, fantasy and now power, a sequence that reflects perhaps something about the evolution of our societal concerns. She invokes Machiavelli in the first paragraph and the Mafia Godfather in the second and speculates about our fascination with Tony Soprano. Her range and breadth of knowledge and areas of interest are dazzling, her eclectic choice and unique mix of examples from high and low culture and the clinical situation daring. She reveals what Ethel Person knows and thinks about, what films and plays she has seen and what books she has read. She reveals how close to the center of various power structures she herself is and this enables her to make the observations she makes. Among other power structures she has been head of the Columbia Clinic and an IPA Vice-President. She proves herself to be a keen observer of society and the foibles of social class, of what is “in” and what is “out”. She knows the world outside her office and has learned much from what she hears “from the couch”. She knows “what makes Sammy run” and how “things” run as, for example, she notes about “connections”. They “can move us higher on the surgeon’s waiting list, get us into the right school, give us an introduction that leads to a job, gain us admission to a club, or get us tickets for a basketball game.” (p.295)

Person contrasts “interpersonal power” (to persuade someone else to bend to one’s need) with “personal power” (testing one’s own mastery of the world). The chapter on “power in intimate relations” presents many of the issues analysts work with on a daily basis as she demonstrates how she looks through a “lens” of power to adumbrate the various ways we test one another. She ponders the “intimacy” of public couples such as Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and how their relationship fared despite his many infidelities. I wonder why Person did not use her lens to speculate more about that more timely couple Hillary and Bill Clinton in this regard. She makes too brief mention of their “power imbalance”. But then again they are my personal pet peeve when I myself comment about the curious compromises women have to make to gain public approval and power.

Discussions of “sex, gender, hierarchy and power”, the fact that women today have more power and insist that men shape up, the power of the orgasm, the power of allure and sexual attractiveness and the fact that due to women’s liberation more women are trying to have sexual gratification and more initiate sex are all topics that belong to Person’s area of expertise, but will not seem so very useful to the psychoanalyst, mostly because they are more descriptive than explanatory. Similarly, she underscores the special problems of successful women who have not been socialized in power plays but rather in pleasing others, to their detriment but does not search for deeper etiology. She is writing for the lay reader, rather than a psychoanalyst reader who is usually searching for intrapsychic origins of change in individual behavior within the changing social order.

In the same way, the clinical case examples will seem somewhat unidimensional to the psychoanalyst. I found the most interesting case example to be Person’s own. Her personal history is presented in fragments throughout the book, culminating with a recent fall from a chair she had climbed onto in order to retrieve a book from her bookshelf. She suffered a severely broken leg, that one moment disempowering her for a long time and enabling her to personally understand what she had been writing about. She asked herself, “Where is my sense of authentic power now?” (Ironically her 101 year-old grandfather, the owner of a second hand bookstore, died after a fall from a ladder.) Person’s experiences in her very colorful family obviously enabled her to develop into a woman of great strength and power at a time when professional women were few and their obstacles to individuality often great and sometimes unsurmountable.

Person shows how aggression contaminates power and uses the term sadomasochism to show that “the purest sadism is generally laced with masochism and masochism with sadism.” (p.155) She chronicles a range of S-M practices in our society and as they appear in literature, fiction and non-fiction:

“In thinking about sexual sadomasochism, one does well to consider the extent to which issues of real power are effectively neutralized at the threshold of the encounter, because what happens then determines in large part whether what follows will be safe, sane and consensual or whether it will be contaminated in a way that allows aggression and victory to enter in.” (p.168)

S-M is very complex and exists in many varieties. The French psychoanalyst Marie-France Hirigoyen, for example, describes the seducer as praising and exciting his victim then slowly withdrawing love and praise while criticizing her. (Therefore the relationship can only be described as sadomasochistic when the second stage is reached.) Person notes that some play both roles in different relationships (a man can be dominant in the office and masochistic with his wife), that S-M sexual enactments may not implicate sadomasochism in the overall relationship and that S-M relationships are not fantasies of power but rather perversions of power in which there is no play or gratification.

An extraordinarily creative person herself, the author finds power in the creative act, in the two-way traffic between conscious and unconscious, the process by which one arrives at insight, like a child at play: “What greater power can there be than to create your own world—or to add significantly to the already existing one?” (p.264)

Creativity can be negatively impacted by others’ critique or positively by the thought of the other, the audience. One needs the fuel of another’s support during the creative process. She cites Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso, Edith Wharton, Thomas Wolfe as prime examples of power gained not just personally, but interpersonally.

The chapter entitled “Transcendence: The Godfather Fantasy” is based on a recent Plenary address given by Person at the the American Psychoanalytic Association and was the stimulus for her writing this book as well as a heated debate on the JAPA Online discussion series in December, 2002. Person presents her ideas in simple terms:

Our attempts to establish meaning in our lives as we face our own mortality lead some to seek religion and some not. She observes three strategies: 1. to seek the godhead 2. to make a mere mortal into a God 3. to have a Godfather fantasy (with a nod to Mario Puzo!): to become a godfather figure yourself or to seek the protection of one, or both.

She writes: “Seizing the godhead, on the one hand, and submission to God, on the other—embody two antithetic tendencies … the first to resist and to assert the self, the second to submit. It is as if transcendence can be had by taking one or the other to some ultimate limit while excluding the opposite tendency.” (p.313)

Examples given range from the submission to Christ in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov to Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. We vicariously identify with Don Corleone and in attaching to him become powerful in a transcendent way so as to go beyond the limits of right and wrong. Person analyzes his “connections” and his family structure and his psychological power.

It is ironic that the field of psychoanalysis, born and bred in power politics, and continually re-defined by power politics should have no theory about the need for power. Power has been “marginalized”. Person’s commentary on the “drive” for power should be of most interest to a psychoanalytic audience. The topic was also brought up on the previously mentioned JAPA online discussion group. Person sees the form and shape of drive as always interacting with and modified by culture: She writes :

“With such further social and scientific changes as will undoubtedly take place, we should expect that the shaping and expression of our drives—which are in fact the fundamental material of the Freudian unconscious—may surface in ever new incarnations.

“Although unconscious impulses and wishes may sometimes emerge and swamp conscious ones, they in turn bear the imprint of the preconscious and conscious attitudes and beliefs that permeate an ever-changing Zeitgeist. The traffic between culture and psyche is always two-way, if not round-trip.” (p.154)

The power motive has been typically regarded as a relatively minor component of aggression or narcissism or as a derivative of infantile fantasies of omnipotence. Person sees it the other way around: aggression is activated when power is thwarted. Power is very much part of what goes on between patient and analyst. Person muses over Freud’s having experienced his own father as powerless and himself as powerless vis a vis Viennese antisemitism. Nevertheless he later on exerted tremendous power and knowledge of power plays in his disputes with Adler and many others. She likens Freud himself to the leader he described in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”: “… a leader possessed of indefatigable purpose, gripped by his faith in an idea, and so powerfully persuasive that he could impose his idea on ‘an obedient herd’—at least once the heretics had been ‘purged’.” (p.354).

She views power as a desire or drive (instinct). It is: “an innate force that moves us toward self-control, self-mastery and mastery of the external world, on the one hand, and interpersonal power on the other (whether through the powers of the strong or the powers of the weak) … power as a natural force is analogous to sex, bonding, and aggression in its central importance in our lives.” (p.361)

The description on the book jacket promises that: “Person shows how we can achieve authentic power.” I did not come away with that impression. I had instead the impression that some people have it and some do not. At the beginning of the book Person confesses that she believes that the power drive is initially hard-wired. Reading about the powerful and the powerless and power in its myriad forms will not teach a person how to feel powerful and authentic. Hopefully, psychoanalysis will!