The Seduction of Othering
A driver cuts you off at an intersection. You check their license plate and mutter, “Oh of course. They’re from [whatever state]. They’re all lousy drivers there.”
It’s a harmless way to let off steam, right? We’ve all been there. But that way of letting off steam contains the seeds of something far less benign: the tendency to separate ourselves from people who we see as “other,” that is, not only as different from us, but somehow “lesser” or worse than us. Because under the simple, semi-joking lumping of all people from a certain state together as bad drivers lies the implied belief that you, being from your own state, would never, ever behave in that way.
According to psychologist Glenn Geher, professor at SUNY New Paltz and author of numerous books, including Evolutionary Psychology 101, “othering” captures the belief that not only is that other outside our group, but also that they — and all members of their “group” — have traits that we don’t share and that make them undesirable. An attempt to undo othering is at the heart of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. But it’s important to remember that, as psychoanalyst, author and public speaker Nancy McWilliams pointed out in an article written almost ten years ago, everyone is capable of engaging in this behavior, no matter what our political beliefs, religion, ethnicity, race, or gender.
From the perspective of human dynamics, telling ourselves that someone else is acting in a way that we would never act, feeling things we would never feel, and representing qualities that we do not have, “othering,” is one of the ways we protect ourselves from feeling bad about our own less-than-admirable traits. This is an unconscious process called projection, in which we tell ourselves, “I don’t feel that way, he/she/they feel that way.” McWilliams tells us that this common psychological activity helps us develop an identity, a sense of who we are, when we are young; but as we get older, it can create serious problems in both our personal and our work lives.
For instance, Alice*, a successful professional in her forties, explained that her frequent conflicts with her boss, Mary*, were because Mary was selfish and self-centered. Alice said that Mary had grown up wealthy and all rich people are raised to think of themselves as more important than other people, and therefore that their needs are more important than other people’s needs.
Alice was surprised when I questioned the idea that all rich people were selfish. When I asked her if that meant that anyone who wasn’t rich was never selfish, she laughed and said, “Of course not. That’s not what I meant!” But several times when she complained about Mary she added, “I would never do that to someone else.”
Some of Mary’s behavior sounded selfish to me, but a lot of it sounded more like she simply had a different perspective from Alice. Then one day Alice told me that her own assistant had asked to be reassigned. “She said I’m always criticizing her,” Alice said. I asked if she thought there was any truth to her assistant’s complaint. “Well, she’s young and she doesn’t work very hard, so I’m always pushing her to do more than she wants to,” Alice said. “I guess she hears that as a criticism.” She hesitated for a minute and then added, “She says I’m self-centered. That I don’t ever pay any attention to her needs or to whether I’m giving her too much work to do in a single day.”
Alice heard the echo of her own words about Mary and asked me if I thought there was any truth to her assistant’s complaint. Her willingness to be self-reflective led to an interesting discussion of selfishness. At first, Alice declared that being selfish was all-bad, which was, I thought, the reason she needed to see Mary as part of a group of all-selfish people. It meant that she could be part of a group of unselfish people. But over time, as we opened up the idea that all of us can be selfish sometimes, and that it doesn’t necessarily, in and of itself, mean that we’re bad or unlovable, Alice began to explore the realities of her own selfishness.
Psychoanalysts have long believed that one of the paths to emotional well-being and self-satisfaction is taking ownership of these projected emotions. We are none of us all good, but a mix of different, not always likable feelings. Recognizing that we, like all people, are such a mixture makes us more likely to accept and even like ourselves, with all of our imperfections. And it makes it possible to accept and like others, even when they are different from us.
Virginia Goldner, a psychoanalyst, author, professor at NYU, and the Founding Editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality has noted that “othering” makes it hard to recognize the nuances of many of the political and relational struggles that we currently face. Each time that we project all of the “bad” onto a group outside ourselves, so that we can feel like we are “good,” we lose the possibility of making genuine, growth-enhancing connections.
But complicating matters, if we see ourselves as all-bad and see the “other” as all-good, the damage is still bad. In this formulation as well, we are still failing to recognize the mixture of traits, good, bad, and many places in between, that make us all what the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan called “more human than not.”
This othering process is not, of course, just a problem of individual psyches and othering people in our immediate, personal world. Clearly, the divisiveness captured in the United States during this election year and now during the final weeks leading up to the election, is all about othering. Conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans all feel “othered” and are simultaneously working hard to “other” one another.
There are those who are trying to undo this dangerous stance on both sides. The NY Times has reviewed several books that look at these issues. Braver Angels , an impressive group with a rapidly increasing membership, was formed with the specific goal of trying to help those with opposing and conflicting political beliefs find ways to talk to one another, moving away from othering and closer to mutual recognition. And the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley is bringing together leading researchers across disciplines to address societal issues of equity, inclusion, and diversity.
Ending “othering” is a two-pronged process. As we address our own projected feelings, we no longer need to disown them and see them as belonging to someone else. This is what happened for Alice.
As Alice began to recognize her own selfishness, she also began to understand that it had both good and bad aspects, none of which turned her into a terrible or a wonderful person. She no longer needed to project the trait outward onto other people, dividing the world into good and bad people. With this knowledge and understanding, Alice’s work issues began to resolve. She and Mary started collaborating successfully on several new and important projects. And her assistant, who had remained with her, gave her a glowing review at the end of the year.
*names and identifying info changed to protect privacy
Copyright@fdbarth2020
References:
Geher, G. (2014). Evolutionary Psychology 101. New York: Springer.
Vora, D., Martin, L., Fitzsimmons, S.R. et al. Multiculturalism within individuals: A review, critique, and agenda for future research. J Int Bus Stud 50, 499–524 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41267-018-0191-3
Virginia Goldner (2020) Pleasure Can Hurt: The Erotic Politics of Sexual
Coercion, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 30:3, 239–250, DOI: 10.1080/10481885.2020.1744963
McWilliams, N. (2010). Paranoia and Political Leadership. Psychoanal. Rev., 97(2):239–261.
