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Conventionally, mental conflict has been regarded as at best undesirable, and at worst, pathological. For Freudians, it was the cause and occasion for repression, and for twentieth-century folk psychology as popularized by R. D. Laing and others was epitomized in schizophrenia understood as “split personality” caused by “double binds” resulting from conflicting communications, dissonant cognitions, or contradictory emotions. The root of this kind of thinking was the assumption that the mind—and indeed the brain too—functions, or ought to function, as a unified system without internal contradictions or disharmony. The conscious self in particular was assumed to be a single, simple entity, with any deviation from its intrinsic harmony and cohesiveness being self-evidently pathological.
Certainly, where the presentation of self in everyday life is concerned (to quote the title of a famous book on the subject), unity, harmony, and integrity are crucial, and duplicity, contradiction, and conflict disastrous as far as other people’s confidence and trust in you are concerned. As in advertising products, a person needs to have a good “image” in the eyes of others, and ideally that image should be a consistent, credible and constant one.
Indeed, according to Robert Trivers, such concerns with personal public relations throw an interesting evolutionary light on consciousness. Just as a major business enterprise might want to keep its public relations department ignorant of any wrong-doing on its part so that it could brief the press and public without any risk of giving anything away, so Trivers argues consciousness evolved to fool itself all the better to fool others (to paraphrase the subtitle of his book on the subject). He concludes: “The mind must be structured in a very complex fashion, repeatedly split into public and private portions, with complicated interactions between the subsections.” So even where presentation of self is concerned, and simplicity, integrity, and straightforwardness are at a premium, complexity is the outcome, and the self is anything but unified, harmonious and integrated. On the contrary, Trivers’ insight opens a veritable Pandora’s box of conflict, complication, and contradiction that goes to the very heart of the self seen in a social setting.
In fact, Trivers’ view of consciousness is much the same as the Freudian one. The only real difference is that, whereas Freud’s theory sees repression as defensive and motivated to ward off inner conflict, confusion, and the anxiety it arouses, Trivers’ “simple premise” is “that the primary function of self-deception is offensive” in the sense that it evolved as part of the evolutionary struggle for survival and reproductive success. Indeed, as he points out himself with numerous examples, you could see self-deception in the service of deceiving others as a psychological equivalent of camouflage, mimicry or misleading behavior in animals, such as the well-known broken-wing display where a bird tries to distract a potential predator by acting like an injured bird. But whatever the imagined motivation may be, the result is the same for both Freud and Trivers: compromized consciousness and a divided self, with serious, deleterious consequences for the individual and for their peace of mind.
However, the diametric model and imprinted brain theory make mental conflict neither defensive nor offensive, but normal and inevitable. What else could it be if “anti-correlated,” mutually exclusive networks for mentalistic versus mechanistic cognition are hard-wired into the brain by genes expressing even deeper genetic conflicts built into the very architecture of the higher, cortical brain as opposed to the lower, limbic system? And of course, if this is so, major sets of symptoms and even entire syndromes routinely diagnosed by psychotherapists as pathological, immediately disappear—or at the very least, begin to look much more like the supposed signs and symptoms of imaginary mental illness than real representations of psychopathology.
Indeed, could such pathologizing of fundamentally normal conflicts explain modern imaginary mental illnesses such as multiple personality disorder? After all, why imagine you have to split yourself into two different people to express conflicting personalities when you could much more reasonably accept internal conflict as an inevitable part of having any kind of personality at all? How much better to think of yourself as a detached, independent observer of your own mental conflicts and as the judge and jury in the case of your own disputes with yourself? Certainly, this is the logical outcome of the diametric model as applied to mental conflict and one of its crucial insights for psychotherapy.
And at the very least, it might make people more honest about themselves, and surely that would be a good thing!
