Why It Is Good to Be Good: Ethics, Kohut’s Self Psychology, and Modern Society

194 Pages·2010·1.44 MB·English

by  John H. Riker

Why It Is Good to Be Good

Why It Is Good to Be Good
Ethics, Kohut’s Self Psychology,
and Modern Society
John H. Riker
jason aronson
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Published by Jason Aronson
An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2010 by Jason Aronson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval sys-
tems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who
may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Riker, John H., 1943–
Why it is good to be good : ethics, Kohut's self psychology, and modern society /
John H. Riker.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-7657-0790-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7657-0792-5
(electronic)
1. Ethics. 2. Self psychology. 3. Psychology and philosophy. 4. Kohut, Heinz.
I. Title.
BJ45.R55 2010
170—dc22 2010021380

™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
To David Terman
and
the Chicago Self Psychologists

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
1 The Moral Problem of Modernity 1
2 Kohut’s Theory of the Self 23
3 Kohut and the Philosophic Tradition 47
4 A New Metapsychology: Freud, Aristotle,
Heidegger, and Kohut 69
5 Why It Is Good to Be Good 99
6 A Self Psychological Vision of Ethical Life 115
7 Self Psychology and Modernity: Actualizing
the Self in the Era of Desire 131
8 Social Transformations 151
Bibliography 169
Index 173
About the Author 177
vii

Preface
The aim of this book is to provide a compelling answer to the question of
why persons living in modern society should want to adopt an ethical way
of being in the world. Insofar as modernity has defined ethics as a set of
constraints on the pursuit of personal pleasures and has rejected the author-
ity of religious institutions, metaphysics, and teleological views of human
nature, it has not been able to coherently explain why human beings should
want to be ethical when their perceived self-interests conflict with what is
morally right. This failure of modernity to provide good reasons for being
moral has in large part been responsible for the epidemic of cheating that
has shaken our economic and social institutions to their cores, the danger-
ous rise of religious fundamentalism, and the debilitating senselessness in
the lives of liberal persons who are good but who cannot explain why. I
hope to show that by shifting our concept of human nature to one that is
based in recent discoveries about the self in the psychoanalytic tradition,
we can not only have compelling reasons for becoming ethical persons but
also construct a much richer and more inclusive vision of what constitutes
ethical life than has been previously available.
The key to my argument lies in the psychoanalytic theory of the self
developed by Heinz Kohut in the later part of the twentieth century.
Kohut’s work is largely unknown outside of psychoanalytic circles, but
many consider his work to be the most important development in psycho-
analytic theory since Freud. The difference between the two thinkers in a
nutshell is that Freud thought that the fundamental task of psychological
life is the management of the libidinal and aggressive drives within the
confines of a social order, while for Kohut the major task of psychological
life is the development of a core self. For Kohut, the self is a dynamically
structured process that is largely unconscious, comes into existence
through a tenuous developmental process, and is fragile. From birth to
death we need others who can perform self functions when we are unable
to, others whom Kohut calls selfobjects. This combination of the need to
ix