Finding Voice
Quite a few years ago, Carol Gilligan (1982) and her colleagues at the Stone Center in Wellesley Massachusetts wrote about the developmental challenge associated with finding one’s genuine voice—especially as this voice is engaged in connected relationships with other people. While Gilligan is focused particularly on the challenges that women face in finding their voice, I would suggest that this is a developmental challenge, ultimately, for all of us. For me to be truly free, I must find what it is that I truly believe and that I can articulate clearly and in a compelling fashion to other people – particularly in a manner that furthers trust with other people. It is with the “freedom” of honesty that I can establish a deeply trusting and supportive relationship with another person.
Several of Carol Gilligan’s colleagues wrote a book at about the same time that Gilligan was advocating the finding of voice among women. These women (Belenky and others, 1986) offered a powerful account of women who must remain silent because of the constraints placed on them by their society. They asked how these women of silence would come to know anything. Can one engage in the acquisition of knowledge—can one learn—when there is no active verbal engagement with other people? Is a person ever free if they can never speak or engage with other people in knowledge-generating discourse? I would suggest that the answer is “No.” Freedom requires engagement and the creation of shared knowledge. We might even consider interactions with other people to be the basis for not only our sense of self, but also our sense of reality (Brothers, 2001).
Empathy and Shared Reality
The engagement with other people also provides us with the opportunity to gain an accurate sense of how they see reality and how the two of us might construct and act upon a shared reality. All of this required what psychologists call a Theory of Mind—which is the capacity of human beings as they mature to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them. For most of us, at an early age, we come to acknowledge that the other person with whom we are interacting is engaged themselves in complex thinking and reasoning. They have a mind—just as we do. Most importantly, there are specific feelings that arise from their thinking and reasoning. This, in turn, means that we can empathize with them – for we are aware of our own feelings and often have some idea regarding the source of these feelings (and related thoughts). We are ill-prepared to deal with other people if we don’t have a rather elaborate theory of mind regarding these people.
While the development of a theory of mind is usually assumed to be a cognitive task for early childhood, I would propose that this theory often fails us later in life. This theory has to be frequently re-learned and re-engaged as we encounter people who are “different” from us in many ways. It is often hard to create a theory of mind that can be applied to those who are “Others.” Freedom requires that we meet this cognitive (and affective) challenge in a successful manner. In the midst of a highly polarized environment and faced with the challenges and pervasive anxiety (angst) associated with VUCA-Plus, it is tempting (even compelling) to disregard the “Other” as a thinking and feeling person. They become a simple political opponent or a menacing enemy that must be defeated at all costs.
Making use of the insights offered by Wilfred Bion (1961) regarding the basic assumptions we hold about other people, the “Other” becomes an adversary that evokes a fight response (if they are not too strong) or a flight response (if they are very strong). We can combine the perspectives of Bion (a psychoanalyst) and the behavioral scientists by suggesting that Bion’s basic assumptions are deeply held (often unconscious) heuristics that can uncritically guide our actions and smother any formation of a theory of mind regarding the “Other.”
