Such a detail-oriented stance subtly rests on an ideology which helps sustain the stated American belief system (and its variants), as an industrial-technological, “scientific” society. It is an ideology–even an epistemology–of overdetail and overcontrol. To assert ideologically that understanding comes only from a closely focused, segmented approach is to presuppose either that there is no coherent totality, or that our human and extra-human totality is inescapably alien to us.
Speaking in critique of Heinz Hartmann’s ideologically discounting of historical analysis in favor ot biologistic, natural-scientific “lawlike”-ness, Kovel (1978/l988) notes that “Hartmann raises a certain ideology to a self-subsisting fact…” (p. 109). Such a phrase is seen here as applicable to many disciplines that place stress on detail-examination and that fetishize natural science’s claimed objectivity.
The concept of ideology has a multifaceted history and a variety of significances. As used here, it is in contradistinction to–but also overlap with–theory; both are attempts to understand and explain the world. Theory does so more self-consciously and rigorously, and it is hoped, more clearly. Ideology is seen here much as Lionel Trilling stated in 1950:
[Ideology is] the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding. (As cited in Bullock and Stalleybrass, 1977, p. 298)
The last element of Trilling’s statement (“… in actuality we have no clear understanding”) is insufficiently dialectical. Rather, the meanings of ideology are distorted–at times to a complete falsification–but also can be plumbed, by radically critical methodology, for clarifications about the society and its manipulations. Because a detail-compelling stance is at least partially ideological, then, it tends to leave its explanatory conventions undisturbed by alternative interpretations, and unacknowledged as even being ideological, and so question-begging,” explanations. Rather, conventions are unanalytically taken by most of this society’s members as immutable, essential reality.
Central to the incorporation of alienation thinking in psychotherapeutic clinical practices is an exploration of why and how this ideological pattern occurs, involving the ideological and methodological interrelationships among notions of conventionality, reality, and practicality. Consideration must be given to the extensive exploration of what Trilling (1950, as cited in Bullock and Stallybrass, 1977) called “various reasons having to do with emotional safety” (p. 298) –especially as related to the solipsistic relationship of conventionality and reality.
Many objections to “alienation” as a characterizing topic are based on a view that it is too general, but here it is seen as a good characterizing term for the prevalent problematics of total American society just because of its general sweep. The idea “alienation” is primary in this essay, then, because (particularly when compared with “narcissism,” “mass society,” and the like) it allows an approach among social, psychological and psychotherapeutic clinical questions that is more dialectical.
