One common explanation for inner city youth crime, and the under achievement of Afro-Caribbean and working class youth, is that young people today lack ‘role models’.
Hardly a week goes by without another dire warning in the press. When this post was first written in 2004 there was a Home Office crackdown on ‘anti-social’ behaviour and Home Secretary David Blunkett spoke of ‘feral youth’ roaming the streets. It was argued that the proliferation of single parent families is to blame, as if boys cannot grow up to be responsible members of society without a father to emulate. A hidden assumption, perhaps, is that the father himself will be an example of moral rectitude, social responsibility and psychological integration.
The argument can be embellished. The father having disappeared from the psychical landscape, ‘negative’ role models come flooding in to fill the gap. Thus anyone in the public eye is now regarded as a ‘role model’ whose every move has a determining influence on young people. Gangsta rappers, glamorising violence and misogyny, are thought to be a particularly bad influence on young black men. Strangely enough, the misogyny and violence of James Bond has never been thought to have a similar effect on white youth.
Freud would have been bemused by the notion of ‘role models’ even though it is part of the common currency of political discourse and pop psychology. The fact that most adolescents ‘find their identity’ in defiance and opposition to their parents should be enough to give us pause.
There are many reasons why someone would want to be like someone else, and the concept of role model does not encompass them. I may ‘admire’ someone and want to emulate them or acquire their qualities (fearing overreaching myself); I may ‘love’ someone and want to please them and seek their approval (fearing abandonment); I may envy someone and want to take their place (fearing retribution); or I may fear someone and want to placate them (seeking their protection).
Freud used the concept of ‘identification’ to consider how other people impress themselves on our minds and in a sense become part of us. But for him, the process and the influence was unconscious. The fact that ‘loyalty’, ‘honour’, ‘respect’ and adherence to arbitrary rules are key obligations of youth gang culture – all of them qualities imposed by the paternal instance and regulated by the subtle emotional semantics of the group – might imply that there is too much of the father in their lives rather than too little.
Freud reconciled this paradox by making the bold claim that our identifications are based on ‘abandoned object cathexes’, not current relationships, and that is why they have such powerful effects. The concept of role models turns a three-dimensional process into a one-dimensional one.
If there is a relation between youth crime and absent fathers, how would Freud consider it? Something about the father must be connected to obeying the law – a conjunction synthesised in the concept of the “superego”. For Freud the ‘healthy’ development of the superego – one that is not too harsh and sadistic – arises not because of the father’s guidance as a role model, but because of the father’s function as someone to fear, rebel against, and symbolically ‘kill’. He calls it ‘the heir to the Oedipus complex’ for that reason, and thus ‘it is also the expression of the most powerful impulses and most important libidinal vicissitudes of the id’. The superego arises out of a ‘narrative’ process, an emotional psychodrama: ambivalence – remorse – reconciliation, which in Freud’s account goes back to the killing of the primal father and the origin of society itself.
What then stops us symbolically killing the father – a thing we must do to grow up? There are two possibilities; either the father is too powerful and the danger of rebellion too great; or the father is already half dead – castrated – and needs to be protected and vindicated by the son. (It may come as a surprise to non-psychotherapists how often children act as parents to their parents). In a society in which black men are second class citizens and routinely humiliated by the normal exigencies of living, I will leave you to decide which is the more likely.
Schools question
In what ways can an absent father exert an overbearing influence on a child?
Added 10 August 2011
This week has seen a wave of rioting and looting in the UK. In an effort to explain the unexpected and shocking scenes, one commentator produced an interesting twist on the ‘role model’ theory. ‘Look at the role models these kids have to look up to. MPs fiddling expenses, newspapers hacking phones, police taking bribes to look the other way, large corporations avoiding tax. No wonder they have no moral compass to regulate their behaviour!’
Well?
