Villy Sørenson, Tutelary Tales 1-24 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988); Stanley Hauerwas, "Self-Deception and Autobiography: Reflections on Speer's Inside the Third Reich," in Truthfulness & Tragedy 82-98 (1977); "The Allegory of the Cave," in Plato, The Republic, Book VII (Jowett transl.), "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs," in Tobias Wolff, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs 123-135 (1981)

(1) Stanley Hauerwas argues that "our ability to know what we are up to and live authentically depends on our capacity to avoid self-deception." [82]. "We cannot hope to avoid an inveterate tendency to self-deception," Hauerwas warns, "unless we work at developing the skills required to articulate the shape of our individual and social engagements, or forms of life." [83]

We assume we are conscious of what we are doing, of the kind of moral stances we take, and the moral lives we have set out to live. Hauerwas questions this assumption. "Contrary to our dominant presumptions," says Hauerwas, "we are seldom conscious of what we are doing or who we are. . . . We profess sincerity and normally try to abide by that profession, yet we neglect to acquire the very skills which will test that profession of sincerity against our current performance." [82] Self-deception is possible because "[c]onventional descriptions of our actions are readily available, and . . . normally dispense us from spelling things out any further." [85]

There is no small amount of courage involved in confronting self-deception and the effect it has on our lives and on those who depend on our services.

(i) Hauerwas claims that it requires skills to avoid self-deception. What kind of skills do you think he has in mind?

(ii) Consider Hauerwas's description of the kind of efforts involved in reducing self-deception:

"To become explicitly conscious of one's situation . . . demands that one rehearse what one is doing." We become conscious or our actions when we "spell things out." [85]

"The art of autobiography offers the best illustration of how to recheck and test the adequacy of the central story and image we have of our lives." [96]

Hauerwas goes on to identify the following "skills" needed to avoid self-deception:

"a practiced eye and ear for the basic images and stories that provide our actions with direction and our lives with a sense." [82]. Hauerwas argues that the skills we need are found in the images and stories "which can empower . . . insights to shape our lives." [95]. "Our basic stories and images determine what we discover, but . . . we insist on describing our engagements with an image that misleads us." [96].

We need a story that "enable[s] us to discriminate within . . . roles the behavior that can easily entrap and blind us." [88]

What other skills might we identify to add to those suggested by Hauerwas?

(2) Confronting self-deception can be difficult and painful. Hauerwas points out that, "To bring certain things to consciousness requires the moral stamina to endure the pain that such explicit knowledge cannot help but bring." [85]. Most of us don't willingly undergo pain that can be avoided; it takes courage to undergo such pain. "To free ourselves from internal blindness we may have to learn to distrust ourselves in painful ways, ways that destroy certain kinds of happiness forever." [Robert Lloyd, Images of Survival 34 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1973)]

(3) Hauerwas identifies the roles we take on as an obstacle to getting beyond self-deception.

Societal roles provide a ready vehicle for self-deception, since we can easily identify with them without any need to spell out what we are doing. The role is accepted into our identity. It may define our identity in the measure that we feel committed to live out and defend our identification with it. In the narrow confines of a job and of corporate loyalty, such an individual can easily be caricatured as a "company man," and come under a simple censure of establishment myopia. Where the description is more exalted and vocational, however, the opportunity for deceiving oneself increases. A man may think of himself as a public servant concerned with the public good. Even though he may be party to decisions which compromise the public good, he has a great deal invested in continuing to describe them as contributing to the public good. To call certain decisions he makes by their proper name would require too painful a readjustment in his primary identification of himself as a public servant. Thus out deceit can be a function of wanting to think of ourselves as honest persons. [87].

[W]e will remain subject to those propensities which lead to a state of self-deception as long as we feel ourselves to be constituted either by the conventional roles we have assumed or by the level of awareness we have been able to articulate. [88]

What particular aspects of the lawyer role make self-deception possible?

(4) We have still another problem, according to Hauerwas, with "illusions of the past" which we have "unsuspectingly inherited." [95]. What illusions have you "inherited" that might put you in danger of self-deception?

Hauerwas argues that we adopt a "master image" that gets "embodied in our character" and this image makes it difficult to "step-back" and inquire into our actions. [95]. Can you identify such an image in your own life?

(5) The need for order "presses us to forge a unity before we have discovered one adequate to our situation." [96]. How is this need for order satisfied (and frustrated) in legal education?

Hauerwas provides an exceptionally clear-head assessment of how self-deception helps us establish and maintain a sense of idenity and order:

Each of us needs to establish some sense of identity and unity in order to give coherence to the multifariousness of our history as uniquely ours and as constitutive of the self. Self-deception can accompany this need for unity, as we systematically delude ourselves in order to maintain the story that has hitherto assured our identity. We hesitate to spell out certain engagements when spelling them out would jeopardize the set of avowals we have made about ourselves. [87]

In summary, self-deception results from an expedient policy of refusing to spell out our engagements in order to preserve the particular identity we have achieved. [88]

(6) Hauerwas claims that being a human being "requires stories and images a good deal richer than professional ones [making specific reference here to Albert Speer's professional image of himself as an architect], if we are to be equipped to deal with the powers of this world." [93]. "The extent of our self-deception correlates with the type of story we hold about who and what we are." [88] [James R. Elkins, Introduction to Story]

(i) How do the stories we tell ourselves about law and about lawyers involve self-deception?

(ii) Consider Christopher Lash's observation that: "One reason people no longer see themselves as the subject of a narrative is that they no longer see themselves as subjects at all but rather as the victims of circumstance; and this feeling of being acted on by uncontrollable external forces prompts another mode of moral armament, a withdrawal from the beleaguered self into the person of a detached, bemused, ironic observer. The sense that it isn't happening to me helps to protect me against pain and also to control expressions of outrage or rebellion that would only provoke my captors into further tortures." [Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times 96 (1984)] [In Defense of Irony]

Hauerwas concludes, drawing on Speer's autobiography, that we should take notice and be forewarned of the dangers of "people who think they need no story or skills beyond their profession." [94]. "Such people are open to manipulation by anyone who offers them a compelling vision of how that skill can be used. We all require a sense of worth, a sense of place in the human enterprise, and the person with no story beyond his or her role yearns to be so placed by another." [ 94]. The problem of self-deception, argues Hauerwas, is more likely in the case of "those who feel they need no images and symbols beyond those offered by conventional roles to give coherence to their lives." [95]

"Our ability to 'step-back' from our deceptions is dependent on the dominant story, the master image, that we have embodied in our character." [95]

"Our basic stories and images determine what we discover, but often . . . we insist on describing our engagements with an image that misleads us. To the extent that we cannot make anything of what we are doing, we fail to make our lives into anything. [96]

(7) Hauerwas argues that Speer "symbolizes a type which is becoming increasingly important in all belligerent countries: the pure technician, the classless bright young man without background, with no other original aim than to make his way in the world and no other means than his technical and managerial ability." [94]. Do you find anything like Hauerwas's "pure technician" in law school? Does this brief description remind you of Robert Service, the young lawyer, we encountered in Louis Auchincloss's Diary of a Yuppie?

(8) Thomas Shaffer has noted that "[c]ommunities [such as the legal profession] carry their heroes' point of view, but communities also deceive themselves and train their young in the skills of self-deception." [Thomas Shaffer, The Moral Theology of Atticus Finch, 42 U. Pitts. L. Rev. 181, 209 (1981)]. And so "a community needs to commission someone to tell it the truth." [215]

(i) How do the communities in which we live and work induce self-deception? [Moral Traditions and Communities] [Notes on Community] [Community and Moral Traditions] [A Story about Community]

(ii) Alienation, according to Stanley Rosenberg and Bernard Bergan, works in two distinctly different ways. "The predominant modality is to plunge into culture, to become an imago that eschews being a self. In taking this path, the self joins forces with others equally desperate, others who reinforce the bad faith one is enacting." [Stanley Rosenberg and Bernard Bergen, The Cold Fire: Alienation and the Myth of Culture 95 (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1976)]

Rosenberg and Bergen suggest that alienation is a mood, a set of perceptions, a image of reality, a way of looking at the world. "The experience of alienation can no longer be considered the exclusive property of the artist or the outsider. The sense of disease with the self and with culture has filtered into the everyday lives of ordinary people." [45]. "Climbing the social hierarchy confronts the self with the delusive quality" of our expectations. [29]

"One takes a part in the collective drama primed for accomplishment, primed for a transformation or birth of 'self.' Instead, the actor is rewarded with the experience of himself as shoddy, corrupt, deteriorating without moving anywhere." [24]

"Social mobility, then, or any form of 'striving' as defined by culture, leads only to confrontation with one's own fantasies. Striving, adaptation, and conformity are pursued on the basis of faith: faith that 'becoming' some other persona in culture will make one feel alive and whole." [25]

(9) A letter written by Professor Elkins to a student troubled by what he saw going on in a legal ethics class:

Dear David:

You raised a point in your letter about students acquiescing to figures of authority and taking on as their own the "thinking process" of the authority figure. We know that some of peers and colleagues show little interest in thinking for themselves, and acquiesce in the discourse of common currency. But it is not just a matter of what others do, but what we ourselves do. Thinking for oneself is difficult. We forget that we are never independent of categories of thought and rationalizations that are culturally provided to limit our thinking. There is no thinking that is not a part of a social world and a culture. Our thinking (and whatever independence of judgment we might claim for ourselves) are dependent on a world we inhabit with others. Even the urge to be independent, to set ourselves off from others, comes from being with others.

You and I would agree, I assume, that acquiescence to authority, to the thinking of another, is generally viewed in a pejorative light. We have been taught that we must resist authority, stand on our own, be our own person, have our own ideas. The anomaly is that it is authority, some authoritative voice, that teaches us about the dangers of authority, obedience, acquiescence, submission, subjugation.

The horrors perpetrated by "mob" and "mass" thinking are too recent in memory to readily acquiesce in group thinking. Our fear of authority, and the tyranny of those who have power over us is real. Hitler and Nazi Germany are only a generation removed (less in psychological time) and loom large in our thinking about authority and the will to power over others. Slavery, as you pointed out to me, has not (and may never) be forgotten. The story of authority, and our acquiescence and resistance to it, is the story of our inhumanity to each other. And it is authority that dominates, that shows its human face in the intolerance of difference, that makes us leery of authority, political and personal. I understand the fear of authority and see the truth of it. It is a fear of the reality of inhumanity in the exercise of power, and it is also a fear of ourselves, our history as a people.

While authority is often abused and dishonored, it also underlies our social existence, our being in the world with others, those who are stronger, know more, speak better, have seen more, can fix it better, than I or you. All of these "others," who have skills, talents, knowledge, resources do more unavailable or undeveloped in our own lives are authorities for us. In the absence of totality and completeness (beyond reach in a single individual life) there will be relationships grounded in the authority of others. I want to be critical of authority and to celebrate it. Our relationship with authority and to those who exercise it will ever be clouded, messy, and neurotic, unless we take the time to recognize what authority is and how it works.

Richard Sennett's in Authority says: "The bond of authority is built of images of strength and weakness; it is the emotional expression of power." Think about this phrase for a moment. "The bond of authority is built of images of strength and weakness. . . ." When we are unable to recognize the need for authority, to honor it as an essential human bond of social life, then we are bound to be ambivalent about authority, or experience anger in those moments of social interaction when we witness authority in a relationship. Our ambivalence and anger are symptoms, cultural symptoms if you will, of the mess of authority in contemporary life.

"Authority," Sennet says, "is the emotional expression of power." To deny the authority of others is to confuse or deny your own power. Unable to recognize benign authority, an authority that does not seek dehumanizing dominance over another, we give up power or arrogate it to ourselves, all the while suppressing it's emotional valence in our life.

"[A]uthority," Sennet reminds us, "is a bond between people who are unequal. . . ." We are taught, in one fashion or another, that we are all equal, or ought to be equal. Inequality is a measure of social injustice. Equality is an ideal, and a worthy ideal in a just society. It is one thing to make a life fighting for the social ideal of equality, and yet another to make a life in which the ideal of equality confuses fear (of those in authority) and anger (at the intolerance of those in authority) with the reality of benign authority.

When we talk about authority we must also talk about tolerance. Tolerance is a political virtue (much beloved by liberals and conservatives alike, but rarely together) and a personal one. There is both a politics and a psychology of tolerance. On the one hand tolerance looks, on first appearance, to be an unquestionable virtue. But as with any virtue it has a shadow side. Tolerance permits, allows, acquiesces. Is not tolerance implicated in oppression? Tolerance for the dictator, guru, President. Tolerance for the abuser and the abused? Where does tolerance end and action begin? How would, or could, there ever have been a revolution, our own, or anyone else's, with a politics of tolerance?

And on the personal level, how much tolerance remains a virtue? Tolerance for incompetence, then there would be no pull to the moral ideal of competence. Tolerance for shoddiness, then there would be no sense of craft. Tolerance for a prosaic mentality and the imagination withers. Tolerance for crude, limited, partial, provincial thinking (political and personal, and its resulting inhumanity) and there would be no push to learn, no ideal of learning. Tolerance for the reality of what is, and there would be no change.

I abhor tyranny, in politics and in personal relations. I take advantage of a life that the tolerance of others makes possible. (My teaching could not take place without tolerance.) And yet, I find our ambivalence about authority, to its emotional and political consequences, troubling. I find tolerance a bit dangerous, not always a virtue. To celebrate authority, in the face of it's inhumanity, to call into question tolerance as an ultimate virtue, is to risk misunderstanding and reawaken old fears. I dislike the thought that these ideas pose a danger when they do not. But the greater danger, I fear, is in the old deepened ruts of our unexamined thinking about authority. Our thinking about authority and about tolerance, and about much else, tend to get into ruts. Only with the danger of misunderstanding do we tap into the potential of breaking free of rutted thoughts. Maybe some of sort can happen to the two of us.

Warm Regards,

[signed Jim Elkins]

What kind of role does authority play in the moral life of the law school, and in the community in which you will practice law? What kind of role should it play? How do we let authority entrap us in self-deception?

A now infamous experiment in social psychology conducted by Stanley Milgram examines the possibilities of independent judgment when authority figures instruct us to do as we are told. [Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (1974)]

Milgram brought unsuspecting persons into a room where they were introduced to a scientist/experimenter. The subject was told that a series of questions would be asked of another individual and if the response was inaccurate or wrong the "subject" would be instructed to "punish" the individual by administering what the subject falsely believed was a shock. During the course of the experiment the subject was instructed to shock the individual with increased amounts of voltage. This is Milgram's description of the experiment: "The focus of the study concerns the amount of electric shock a subject is willing to administer to another person when ordered by an experimenter to give the 'victim' increasingly more severe punishment. The act of administering shock is set in the context a learning experiment, ostensibly designed to study the effect of punishment on memory.... On arrival each subject is paid $4.50. After a general talk by the experimenter, telling how little scientists know about the effect of punishment on memory, subjects are informed that one member of the pair will serve as teacher and one as learner. A rigged drawing is held so that the naive subject is always the teacher, and the accomplice becomes the learner. The learner is taken to an adjacent room and strapped into an 'electric chair.'" Stanley Milgram, 6 Int. J. Psychiatry 259 (1968). Milgram found that most subjects would deliver what they believed to be fatal shocks simply because they were instructed to do so by an someone in "authority."

Is there an analogy between the scientist experimenters in Milgram's experiment issuing directions to administer lethal shock and law teachers who direct law students to suspend ordinary concepts of morality and justice and replace them with an adversarial ethic of lawyering?

(10) Self-deception is the central motif in Seymour Wishman's Confessions of a Criminal Lawyer (New York: Penguin, 1982). The story begins with an incident at a hospital in Newark. Wishman is confronted by an enraged woman shouting epitaphs at him. The woman, Wishman later realizes, was a rape victim in a case in which he had represented the defendant. Wishman had brutally humiliated Mrs. Lewis by his cross-examination in which he suggested she had willingly engaged in sexual intercourse and sodomy with the defendant and his friends. Wishman had every reason to believe his client was lying and that Mrs. Lewis was telling the truth.

Wishman is troubled by the encounter with the screaming Mrs. Lewis and tries to understand her outrage. "Weighing on me more heavily than the possibility that I had helped a guilty man escape punishment was the undeniable fact that I had humiliated the victim--alleged victim--in my cross-examination of her." [6]. Wishman explains, as best he can, how he had come to use his skills in such a destructive way. Wishman's explanation exposes the mechanics of self-deception, what he later calls "posturing" [69] and "the pretension of a personal philosophy." [240]. The reasons he gives for humiliating Mrs. Lewis are a part of a philosophical "cover story" common among lawyers.

How does self-deception work in Seymour Wishman's life?

(11) Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the lawyer protagonist in Albert Camus's The Fall (New York: Vintage, 1956), warns that "it is not enough to accuse yourself in order to clear yourself; otherwise, I would be as innocent as a lamb. One must accuse oneself in a certain way. . . ." [95-96]. How does one go about this business of self-confrontation?

Clamence finds that the "surface" of his virtues "had a less imposing reverse side." [85]. Carl Jung called this "reverse side" the "shadow" (in contrast to the "persona," or mask, presented to the world). The Fall is a story of a man who plays at being virtuous and deceives himself about the character of his virtue.

(i) How can we get beyond the persona to see and understand the "shadow" which accompanies our virtues?

(ii) Have there been moments when you were able to "see through" your rationalizations and get, as did Seymour Wishman, a "chilling glimpse" of yourself? When and how does this happen? What does it happen in the lives of lawyers?

(iii) Jean-Baptiste Clamence hears laughter on the Pont des Arts while walking home one evening. One might call it the laughter of memory, the sound that helps Clamence see "where the serious might lie." [86-87]. Imagine it--a sound that awakens memory. How is your own memory to be awaken? To remember is to awaken from the slumber of everyday life. But the memory of what? Of how to be serious, real, authentic, true, ethical? A memory that confronts duplicity and self-deception?

(12) "It is not enough to see nor is it enough to know," Stanley Hauerwas has argued, because "we must know how to say and give expression to what we come to see and know." [Stanley Hauerwas, Truthfulness & Tragedy 95 (1977)]. If we are to develop the skills to say what we are doing and what the world means to us, we must confront silence, our own and that of others.

(i) Some students follow a code of silence in the classroom. How do you reconcile your classroom silence with the fact that lawyers are trained in the skill of oral advocacy? It is, after all, speaking for others that is central to our professional work.

(ii) Are we silent because we believe that ethics is so embedded in our day-to-day decisions and actions that ethics needs no speaking? We do indeed live day-to-day acting on implicit choices about what is right, how we can avoid injustice, and how we can be both a good person and a good lawyer. Is it this ethical "automatic pilot" that keeps us silent?

(iii) Do we associate ethics with some ill-defined, inaccessible, remote part of the self, a part of the self that is speechless?

(iv) Are we silent about ethics because we equate ethics to upbringing, to the personal history that is of a particular childhood?

(v) Are we silent because we think of our morals and ethics as the totality of experience beyond the comprehension of everyday speech?

(vi) Are we silent because we fear what might be revealed?

Our silence about ethics may be a function of what we already know about ethics--that there are widely divergent philosophical views on how a good person will live. It does not take an education in moral philosophy to realize that a conversation about good judgment and how we are to regard our ethics as lawyers will involve disagreement and conflict. It is our disagreements about moral matters, and more significantly, our fear that no rational conversation about them is possible, that discourages ethical talk. The realization that conflict is central to ethics makes our silence functional, albeit dangerous. Anticipating disagreement, disagreement that is often fundamental and irreconcilable, we temper our moral concern and steer away from ethics talk.

(13) There is, Karl Llewellyn reminded us almost fifty years ago, "a brand of lawyer for whom law is making of a livelihood, a competence, a fortune. Law offers means to live, to get ahead. It is so viewed. Such men give their whole selves to it, in this aspect. Coin is their reward. Coin makes it possible to live. Coin is success, coin is prestige, and coin is power. Such lawyers, I take it, reflect rather adequately the standards of our civilization. They have perceived the mainspring of a money economy. They follow single-heartedly on their perception. Coin is, in this society, the measure of a man." [Karl Llewellyn, The Bramble Bush 119 (New York: Oceana Publications, 1951)]

To what extent does life in the realm of "coin" lead to self-deception?

(14) Hauerwas points to unwillingness and lack of time to reflect on our practices and projects as still another obstacle to confronting one's self-deception. [93]. For lawyers who live by the code of the billable hour this can be a major problem. Indeed, one might ask, is it a problem for you even now as a law student? How do we rob ourselves (or let others rob us) of the time we need for introspection and reflection?

The everyday reality of law school can push aside all that lies in it's path. We see this clearly when first year students write about their experience of time in the first semester of law school. Students talk about "not having enough" time, and the way they experience the "endless" tasks of law school.

Classes are the least of my worries. I can cope. Time is the problem. I have so many things to do, all important, in so little time.

I have been putting in more time than I thought I would, but I do not feel that it is more than I am capable of. I don't have the time I would like to have to run or exercise. I feel guilty when I do anything other than study.

Having more time is a fantasy, just as coming to law school in order to simplify my life, is a fantasy. When I think about time, I begin to indulge in self-pity. I think about obstacles I set in my own path. Is this why I choose to raise a child by myself while I am going to law school? I seem to be leading toward an excuse. I feel like I have made great strides toward seriousness and diligence, but still have fallen short. I have come close to living out a monastic life. But still there is my child. I sometimes use her as an excuse. How can I raise a child and still find time to study?

Everything I do seems to be with the thought of not hurting the other person. For example, my sister-in-law asked me to go shopping. I did not want to go, but I did not tell her that. Instead, I thought of her loneliness. My brother works two jobs and is off fishing or hunting most of the time when he is not working. I feel sorry for her. She is always home alone trying to raise an eleven month old son. I did not want to go and did not have the time. I paid for it by staying up late to do my homework and did not get much sleep.

I only wish that there were more time in each day; time to talk to classmates, time to talk to professors after class, time to do a little extra research, time to write in my journal, time to relax and rest.

* * * *

One feeling that I've had a lot this first semester of law school is guilt. I have not been doing as much work as I think I should be doing. It is Thanksgiving vacation, and I've brought home all my books so that I can catch up in all my courses. It's already Tuesday, and I've done nothing so far. And I won't do anything at all on Thursday. The story is the same on weekends at school. I start out with intentions to accomplish a lot of work, and in the end never get as much done as I had hoped. Then I feel guilty. I'm always watching a football game when I should be doing contracts or making an outline for a course. The problem with law school is that I can never really ascertain how much work to do without feeling guilty. It seems like there is always more work to do.

It's already Wednesday and another week is flown, blown, gone. It seems ridiculous to use the best years of your life immobile, silent and sitting. You ingest other people's thoughts when your own are ripe for harvest. There is no time for me! All I do is ingest. Prime of life spent huddled in a library carrel. But, I'll be a lawyer, so I go on. Plodding. Slowly. Methodically. Pensively. Purposefully.

I can't believe we have come this far, nor can I believe how far from the end of the semester we are. A day seems like an hour, yet a week seems like a month. No day is long enough, yet each week is too long. Strange, huh?

The pressure of law school has carried over into every other area of my life. There are nights I can't sleep for thinking of all the work I have to do for school. There are days when I have no time for anything but law. Today I'm going Christmas shopping with my mother. This time of year should be a time of happiness and pleasure. But now I feel guilty about spending time in a useless activity like shopping. My goal is to buy what I need for everyone as quickly and efficiently as possible. Now, I am sitting in the car outside the mall writing this. I have become a robot. I measure my time against the balance of work left to be done. I see the day as having time slots and try to mentally fill the spaces with law school requirements, and then if there are any left over, I decide what else can be done.

I feel a lot of pressure. Perhaps the worst pressure is time. I find that I just don't have time to do all that I would like to do in law school or even to do the work as I want to do it. I don't have time, for example, to go off on a tangent and research an idea or point of law referred to in class. I have responsibilities other than law school with my family at home. My priorities have to shift. Law school can't always be #1 on my priority list. Sometimes I get upset at the faculty who don't seem to realize that some of us have multiple responsibilities and can't be expected to spend every waking hour with the exception of meals in the law library as the Dean recommended during orientation. This is totally unrealistic from my position.

This has been the fastest 3 month period of my life.

Contrary to what one might assume, the problem with time is not resolved after that intense first year of law school. Susan, a third year student, writing about conflicts she experienced as a law student, continues to see time as her "biggest conflict."

How to ration out such a scarce commodity? I don't see my parents, brothers, or my grandmother nearly as much as I'd like. When I do, I'm loaded down with books and heavy thoughts. There seems to be so little chance just to be together, with nothing hanging over us. I don't have enough time to be with my husband either. This problem is compounded by his work (he is a lawyer).... My inability to ration out my time in a spontaneous, relaxed manner has always been a problem. I have high-strung, invisible energy. I have always felt that work comes before play--whether it be cleaning the bathroom or reading tomorrow's assignment. I have always had trouble saying, "oh well, so it won't get done." Because I associate my personal life and love relationships with play, they too wait in the background until I hear the voice "spend time with loved ones." I feel I've taken love for granted because I've always had it--from family, friends, and/or my husband. I feel my personal life is more precious to me than a professional life could ever be. I simply must learn to treat it that way. Now that I am pregnant, I worry about rationing time even more. Will I be able to give the child enough time so that he or she feels secure in life? I know I will love it with all my heart. But will that love be enough? I want to work too--will it give the child an emotional problem to be left with a baby sitter every day? I see myself rushing every hour on the hour, taking time only to wipe vomit from my shirt, and drop the child with a middle-aged baby sitter who plunks him or her in front of the T.V. all day. Perhaps I'm being too cynical. I know my obsession with getting everything done. Something will have to give. Even though I want to prove to the world that women are as competent as men, I will never find satisfaction in being successful as men define it. If I follow my own path, I am a failure. If I go the way of the upper middle-class lawyers before me, I am reinforcing a system that is destructive to my sisters.

Rebecca has a similar problem with time and tries to relate her law school experience of time to what she sees happening in the broader culture around her.

I feel like I'm on a treadmill which won't stop. I try to be more efficient and "save time." It never stops. I feel alienated from my husband, home, children, family, pets, and business affairs. Most of all, I feel alienated from myself, my body, my sensuality. These things which are so meaningful to me and valued throughout my life are being pushed aside to become a lawyer. My role as a law student traps me just as my earlier domestic role did. Maybe more so. Now I have to be superwoman. I must be a good student, always prepared, so I'll be a competent lawyer devoted to my clients' welfare; community conscious, informed of world and local affairs; well-read; a loving, caring mother; supportive wife; gourmet cook; spotless housekeeper; gracious hostess; sensitive friend; veterinarian to my pets; payer of bills and taxes; physically fit, beautifully dressed, meticulously groomed, sensual, and sexual. I also should have a job on the side to earn money, get experience, and exhibit competence and ambition. What I really need is time to communicate with myself to figure out what to do about this mess. I need time to answer basic questions: What are my goals? What is the good life? Am I happy? What life style do I want? What is important in life? It's 7 months before graduation and everyone is frantically looking for a job. I feel like a pervert because I have not been interviewing and don't know what I want to do with my life. In the midst of all this goal-seeking and superwoman mania I am getting pissed off. There is a conspiracy in our society. The technological society promoted to free us from drudgery enslaves us. We give up our marriages and our children to strangers, our homes to house cleaners and home decorators. What do we have left? A professional career. Is it worth it? Not to me. I told a woman friend that I really wanted a part-time job. She said she did also but she would not pursue that because it was characteristic of females. Men don't do that. I don't care if it is stigmatizing to work at a professional job part-time. I'm working two full-time jobs now and it's no fun. I'm trying to carve out a little niche of sanity in an insane world. It really frightens me to see people devoting their lives to work. There is an insanity pervading the world. We have been propagandized into believing that we need two cars, a $100,000 house, two color tv's, a microwave, washer and drier, video games, and expensive clothes and jewelry. Home and family have taken a back seat to material success. Who profits from our enslavement? As utility costs and rents soar, and food prices skyrocket, we sink further and further into slavery. We beget children who will have no sense of family, to join the work force..working as slaves of international conglomerate executives so stockholders can increase their profits. Am I paranoid? Are we wasting our youth racing toward plastic goals that will leave us cold and yearning for the warmth of family, friends, home, love?

This struggle with time, finding time, falling behind, not being able to get ahead, has a way of numbing us. (But before it does that, to Rebecca, Susan, it simply "pissed" her off.") Everyday reality becomes pathological when it results in "stories" that cut us off from meaningful experience of time. It is the loss of control over time that leaves our "cover stories" unquestioned. When routines of law school overwhelm us, shut us off from our feelings and our own subjective experience, the story of law school becomes one of pathology and despair.

How does our problem with time lead to self-deception?

Notes

1. Further Reading: Todd S. Sloan, Deciding: Self-Deception in Life Choices (1987); Gardner Murphy, Outgrowing Self-Deception (1975); Collected Fragments

2. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung psychological pioneers, insisted that the way to understand others is to understand ourselves. Freudian and Jungian analysts undergo the same therapy they later undertake with their patients. The doctor (psychiatrist, therapist, counselor) sees the possibility of healing (understanding, listening) in light of his own experience of being healed, understood, heard. Freud and Jung are of continuing relevance to lawyers because they provide a working theory not only of human motivation, but a theory that makes clear the danger of not being more aware of how the unconscious affects our personal and professional lives, and the stories we tell and live. Freud and Jung are of continuing relevance to the lawyer, because lawyers have a need for self-awareness, a need they, resist. Freud and Jung help us see that our lack of self-knowledge and the failure to initiate a program of self-scrutiny is not a failure attributed to mere laziness. (Established beliefs and patterns of thought and interaction are resistant to change, a point on which we can agree without appeal to Freud and Jung.)

Even if the lack of motivation is overcome (and how is it that one overcomes a resistance that is itself unconscious?), there are serious obstacles to self-scrutiny. The difficulty in gaining access to unconscious motivations may prove the undoing of even the most dedicated. The psychoanalytic explanation for the difficulty lies in the "repressive forces" that keep unconscious material unconscious. Psychological repression serves as a watchman who refuses to allow threatening or disturbing impulse from the unconscious into conscious awareness.

Resistance is not limited to the obstacles thrown in the path of the analyst prying into deep recesses of the patient's mind. (Freud observed that "one hardly comes across a single patient who does not make an attempt at reserving some region or other for himself so as to prevent the treatment from having access to it.") Resistance serves the individual as a censor to avoid conscious awareness of emotional experiences that have been lodged in the unconscious. Freud found that resistance to unconscious material seriously cripples insight and understanding and indicates that an individual's "critical faculty is not an independent function, to be respected as such; it is the tool of his emotional attitudes and is directed by his resistance."

A word more about resistance: Given the intellectual and psychological resistance in the service of repression which censors and blocks unconscious motivations from awareness, it becomes clear that the obstacles to insight through self-scrutiny are extraordinarily difficult to overcome. However, these resistant, protecting, unconscious motivations do not doom the process of self-scrutiny. In fact, it is the appearance of the resistance that signals the existence of that which has been denied, the very thing (thought, feeling) that would, if it could, create a conflict. Therefore, the resistance, rather than posing an insurmountable problem, serves as a indicator that material is being repressed. At this point, in psychotherapy, the resistance itself is pursued.

The first point of this excursion into psychoanalytic theory on resistance is a point about our ability to keep the uses of the lawyer role under the control of the moral self. The point is that self-scrutiny has an emotional complexity that cannot be dissipated through intellectual decision. Conscious effort is not enough. The second point is that self-scrutiny is worthwhile: All of us fear the unconscious; some of us are willing to experience the painful and unsettling awareness of a deeper self. Some of us even believe that digging around in the unconscious is dangerous. The testimony of the experts is that the danger is rarely serious. Karen Horney finds such harm or danger "so rare as to be negligible. Observation in every analysis shows that patients are well able to protect themselves form insights they are not yet able to receive." [Adapted from Thomas Shaffer and James R. Elkins, Legal Interviewing and Counseling (St. Paul, Minnesota: West Publishing Co., 3rd ed., 1997]

3. On the matter of self-deception consider Robert Jay Lifton's work on Nazi doctors. [See: Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986)]. The Nazi doctors at Auschwitz engaged, with other Nazi colleagues, in two principal killing activities. They participated in the selection of incoming Jews who would be sent straight to their death because they were too weak or too young to work in the slave-labor camps and those who were too sick and could no longer work. Their other activity was the perfection and supervision of the most efficient means of killing. These doctors "presided over the murder of the one million victims" at Auschwitz alone. Lifton describes the way the doctors accommodated themselves to the violence by bureaucratizing the killing and by heavy drinking; and a psychological defense he calls "doubling"--the "formation of a second, relatively autonomous self, which enables one to participate in evil." Yet these psychological mechanisms alone, he says, are not a sufficient answer to the question: How could physicians commit these crimes? "In Nazi mass murder we can say that a barrier was removed, a boundary crossed: that boundary between violent imagery and periodic killing of victims (as of Jews in pogroms) on the one hand, and systematic genocide in Auschwitz and elsewhere on the other." "My argument," says Lifton, "is that the medicalization of killing--the imagery of killing in the name of healing--was crucial to that terrible step. At the heart of the Nazi enterprise, then, is the destruction of the boundary between healing and killing. . . . Medical metaphor blended with concrete biomedical ideology in the Nazi sequence from coercive sterilization to direct medical killing to the death camps. The unifying principle of the biomedical ideology was that of a deadly racial disease, the sickness of the Aryan race; the cure, the killing of all Jews."

Lifton's goal in writing the book was to "uncover psychological conditions conducive to evil." "Perhaps the single greatest key to the medical function of the Auschwitz self was the technicizing of everything. That self could divest itself from immediate ethical concerns by concentrating only on the 'purely technical' or 'purely professional'. . . . Demonstrating 'humanity' meant killing with technical efficiency. For the Auschwitz self there is a logical sequence: a doctor's task is to alleviate suffering and to exert a humane influence in any setting. When the setting is one of mass murder, that means calling forth medical and technical skills to diminish the pain of victims. While the logic depends upon a highly technicized view of medical function, the Auschwitz self can grasp at the pseudo-ethical principle of humane killing."

On Self-Respect

The Addictive Personality and the Legal Profession

The Self-Deception of Additive Disease

The Concept of Denial

Authority and Excuses

Leadership and Self-Deception

Deception: A View from the Rationalist Perspective

Illusions of Objectivity

Living a Lie May be Good for You

Real Self-Deception

Self-Deception Bibliography

Stanley Milgram's Experiment

Psychology: Obedience

The Problem of Authority

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt

Albert Speer

Cross-Examination of Albert Speer
at the Nuremburg Trial

Was Albert Speer a Repentant Nazi or a Man in Denial?

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