Daily Archives: May 24, 2008

THE ANTIGONE COMPLEX

I don’t have a harsh judgment to levy against Hillary Clinton in the aftermath of her answering the question about, implicitly, her tenacity in the face of long odds and about party unity at the end of the process. There’s a reason for my being circumspect.

It’s that the incident takes a specific psychological form and consequently its reasons are psychological.

If someone answers a question you’ve posed to them in a way that promotes your thinking to yourself, “I can’t believe he had the thought, let alone spoke it, and in doing so spiked his own self interest!” it is likely that this answer is affect-laden and its dominant is subjective. In suggesting this, such an answer is against other possible answers, including rational, well-rehearsed answers. (The question Hillary was asked about when she thought the nomination would be decided was not in any way a question from left field.)

More remarkable was when she wrapped up with this:

“Um you know I just I don’t understand it.”

Again, this kind of answer fits into a usual form: one understands why people share the page they’re on together, and, for those that don’t, the question begged is: ‘how do I understand their position?’ In this second aspect, there is an implicit Theory of Mind conundrum; how are other perspectives in other minds to be understood? There’s nothing about those who disagree with Hillary–about her remaining in the race–that is hard to understand, so she gives away something at work in her depths in pretending she doesn’t understand.

A question is: How could she have answered and met the twin objectives, one, to justify her remaining in the race against diminishing odds, and, two, to support confidence in party unity irrespective of who should become the nominee?

The psychological question then is: what are the types of internal psychic (or cognitive factors,) that will tend to diminish a person’s ability to firstly stand outside the mystique of their subjective perspective and secondly respond with enough objectivity to meet objective-type goals?

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Filed under analytic(al) psychology