Psychological Reports, 1991, 68, 71-93.

@ Psychological Reports 1991

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GERALD W. GRUMET Rochesier General Hospital Summary.-This essay relates many of the unwelcome features of modern life to the increasing influence of obsessional personality traits. This influence is becoming more pronounced as civilization advances and comes to be increasingly reliant upon depersonalized mechanical and commercial systems. The result has been a glut of unwanted information, an exaggerated reliance upon computing and numbers, an overgrowth of bureaucracy, a dlscardulg of intuitive wisdom in favor of calculative reasoning, a loss of simplicity, a jargonized language, and ultimately, the degradation of human relationships and of human beings themselves. "He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine . . ." -Chuang-Tzu Chinese Sage, 4th Century B.C.

As the world advances in complexity simple personal relationships, customs, and common sense judgments have been replaced by large-scale data handling systems, impersonal regulations and standardized procedures. Within advanced societies character traits have come to flourish which accommodate the new technical systems, emphasizing stereotyped operational and categorical thinking patterns. Conversely, new technical systems are developed that reflect the complexity and the rigidity of operational thinkers. This is a kinship based on mechanisms of projection and introjection between man and machine. An historical triumph of the obsessional character has occurred because operational intellects readily lend themselves to the broad, cumulative developments of science and technology, while those with primarily intuitive intellects and expressionistic or emotional character styles are relegated to the sidelines, showing their superiority in the restricted forums of the arts, entertainment, teaching, and sirmlar "human" endeavors. Consider, for example, how playwriting has advanced since Shakespeare's time when compared to the obvious developments in science, communications or transportation. I n the writer's view, many of the negative features of modern life-usually ascribed to "bureaucracy," "governmental inefficiency" or "red tapen-can be laid at the doorstep of obsessional thinkers. I n present day America, witness the long lines at government license bureaus or welfare 'Address corres ondence to G. W. Grumet, M.D., Department of Psychiatry, Rochester General EIospit$ 1425 Portland Avenue, Rochester, NY 14621.

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agencies, the sluggish court calendars, the languid processing of administrative paperwork, the time-wasting pedantic rituals of politicians, the needlessly complex procedures for simple operations like paying one's income tax, the mind-numbing procedural manuals of many disciplines, and the stylized corporate ceremonies focused on meetings and memorandum exchanges. I will attempt to show that many of these afflictions share a similar origin: the obsessional character.

Definition of Terms Attention has recently been focused on the "obsessive-compulsive disorder" (OCD), formerly called "obsessional neurosis" or "obsessive-compulsive neurosis" which is a neurotic disorder afflicting about 2.5% of the population (Karno, Golding, Sorenson, & Burnam, 1988) and is typically characterized by intrusive, ego-alien thoughts or impulses accompanied by feelings of anxious dread and characteristic rituals of cleaning or checking recognized by the sufferer as absurd (Nemiah & Uhde, 1989). Recent work has suggested that this disorder is the result of neurophysiological derangements which disrupt the harmony between the caudate nuclei and frontal lobes of the brain, releasing fixed-action behavior patterns associated with survival, i.e., washing, cleaning, grooming, checking, avoiding contaminants, etc. (Rapoport, 1789). That OCD sufferers have a physical affliction of the central nervous system is evidenced by the frequent coexistence of "soft" neurological signs as well as its association with Sydenham's Chorea, Tourette's Syndrome, encephalitis, and head trauma (Hollander, Schiffman, Cohen, et al., 1990). This "disordered" compulsivity differs from the "normal" compulsivity that falls under the diagnostic rubric of obsessional character "type" or obsessional character "traits" (Pitman & Jenike, 1989). This state, also called the "anal character" or the obsessive or compulsive personality, concerns us here. These are people for whom obsessional character defenses are ego-syntonic and functional. These are cautious, deliberate, rational people demonstrating a high degree of orderliness, punctuality, emotional restraint, and predictable behavior-traits that are almost fetishized in corporate America. Their contributions to civilization cannot be overestimated. As Nemiah and Uhde (1989) note, ". . . society owes much of its stability and its efficiency to its more obsessional members," while Salzman (1980) adds, ". . . the adaptive function of such behavior has come to be recognized and acknowledged as being of great utilitarian value in a culture that honors productivity and the work ethic." In 1908, Sigmund Freud (190811959) described the "anal character," and this description has withstood the test of time in that subsequent statistical evaluations demonstrate that obsessional traits tend to cluster together in a syndrome (Beloff, 1957). Freud's "anal triad" (orderliness, obstinacy, parsimony) has been complemented by a plethora of other compulsive traits

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that are no strangers to modern bureaucracy-procrastination, quasi-sadism, pedantry, a tendency toward retentiveness and collecting, feelings of superiority, a desire to dominate, lack of warmth or spontaneity, a proclivity toward rituals, a stilted, duty-bound orientation, and a tendency to focus on minute detail (Beloff, 1957; Monroe, 1974; Pollak, 1979; Shapiro, 1965). Salzman (1988) noted that the need for control is central, protecting the obsessional person from both uncertainties and dangers of the outside world and from his own hostile or tender emotions. This is echoed by Erich Fromm (1949) who described the anal character as "living in a fortified position" and for whom isolation spells security while love, closeness, or intimacy spell danger.

Historical Perspective Obsessional traits may antedate man himself, since many of the behavioral patterns followed ritualistically by humans draw a close analogy to the fixed-action patterns of lower animals. Dominance hierarchies and pecking orders, territorial behavior, hoarding, established work roles, elaborate social routines and defensive patterns are widely seen among herds of land animals, flocks of birds, schools of fish, and in insect societies. These are rigid and stereotyped routines of behavior that seem curiously similar to the obsessional person's fixed routines and daily rituals that provide him with an aura of predictability, security, and control amidst a dangerous and unpredictable world. Such rituals have a driven, purposeful and deliberate quality, but are lacking in spontaneity and choice for both the obsessional human and his animal counterparts. Human history has been characterized by an increasing tendency toward the compulsive organization of affairs or what Jacoby (1973) calls "the administered world." As early as the 5th Dynasty of Egypt (2500 to 2350 B.C.) census records indicated that the income and property of every citizen was recorded on centralized records for tax purposes. Since antiquity, systems of production, distribution and consumption, finance, transportation, education, health care, military and governmental activities have all been articulated by increasingly explicit rules and relationships. Seidenberg (1950) notes that a universal tendency to organize "unites, like a great geologic substratum, the endless range and diversity of the social scene under one compelling principle." Some of the most dramatic examples of rigidly organized societies were the &tary bureaucracies of Prussia: Frederick William I, King of Prussia from 1713 to 1740, devised a system with 143 clearly defined ranks from field marshal down to cellar clerk, and some of his rmlitary arrangements have been followed to the present time (Caplow, 1964). His son, Frederick the Great, who served from 1740 to 1786, laid down many basic principles of classical management theory that also survive today: centralized authority, explicit divisions of responsibility and strict discipline -

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(Morgan, 1986). H e was reported to have found the parade-ground behavior of his military guards perfect-except for one flaw. "They breathe," he complained. Presthus (1962) notes that American capitdsm began its formative phase in 1865 following the Civil War. Starting with personalized "owner-operated" enterprises, consolidations and mergers soon occurred, larger bureaucracies developed, and by the 1930s America had become an "organizational society" dominated by big government and big business. A previously agricultural society had become transformed into an industrial society. But, as Naisbitt (1982) notes, in about 1956 a new phase occurred: America's blue-collar industrial workers began to be outnumbered by whte-collar technical, managerial, and clerical workers, a phenomenon that Toffler (1980) calls "the third wave." This has led to our current "postindustrial" or "information" society in which the largest occupational categories consist of information workers-lawyers, doctors, writers, accountants, bankers, brokers, clerks, librarians, secretaries, programmers, technicians, social workers, administrators, managers-all of whose primary efforts involve creating, processing, and distributing information of one sort or another (Naisbitt, 1982). New, sprawling information-intensive bureaucracies have become havens for obsessional personalities, answering their psychological needs on many levels.

Bureaucracy and Obsessionalism: a Dangerous Liaison Anthropologists note that shared elements of behavior and patterns of thought coalesce within a culture to form a "basic," "modal," or "communal" personality (Kardiner, 1939; Linton, 1949; Honigmann, 1954). I n the U.S., the modal personality is based in the marketplace, in the form of what John Dewey (1931) called "the business mind." H e wrote: "Quantification, mechanization and standardization: these are then the marks of the Americanization that is conquering the world . . . they have invaded mind and character, and subdued the soul to their own dye." But this is not a one-way street; sociological studies indicate that the congruence between occupation and personality is achieved by both the selection of job based on personality, as well as a subsequent molding of personality based on the job (Mortimer & Simmons, 1978). I n modern urban America, armies of young managers and bureaucrats assemble each morning in neatly pressed suits, well-groomed and cologned, and arrive by train or in clean, "thriftyH cars to preassigned parking spots so as to begin a scheduled agenda of highly ceremonialized work activities. These neatly dressed, tightly-controlled workers populate the corporate halls of America, and according to Presthus (1962) are animated by a marketing ethic of self-promotion and "mock conviviality ." Whyte (1956) sees "the organization man" as seeking collaboration with others to find meaning in

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life-a "secular faith of belongingnessH-while others emphasize features that more closely parallel the obsessional character: subordination of oneself to the wishes of a superior, compartmentalization of concerns to one's specific area of responsibility, a preference for impersonal or formal relationships, conformity of one's activities to standard rules and regulations, and identification with the organization (Gordon, 1970). All of these features involve the denial of emotions, leading to what has been termed the "machine model" of human behavior (March & Simon, 1967). In this context, personal defensive operations become institutionalized and the bureaucratic organization begins to function as an externalized defense mechanism, protecting the individual by limiting his actions to the familiar and the routine (Diamond, 1984). As Erich Fromm (1941, p. 118) wrote: "The concrete relationship of one individual to another has lost its direct and human character and has assumed a spirit of manipulation and instrumentahty. In all social and personal relations the laws of the market are the rule." A psychiatric listing of obsessional character traits is readily recognizable among corporate employees and bureaucrats: taking pleasure in the details of work such as listing, indexing or cataloging, a fondness for collecting or hoarding, a tendency toward hairsplitting and indecision, problems of overcaution and distrust, an addiction to rules of conduct without much flexibility or creativity, a cold and emotionless personality lacking in charm, and a tremendous capacity for work frequently taking the form of "nonproductive perseverance" (Lazare, Klerman, & Armor, 1966). But the effects of America's bureaucratic automatons are not restricted to the organizations within which they operate; their effects are perceived throughout society. They tend to become ritualistically involved with "sanctified" or "sacred" company ~rocedures (Merton, 1940) that lose their original purposeful anchorage becoming ends in themselves. A single bureaucratic zealot, meticulously pursuing a governmental ordinance or regulation, may burden thousands or even millions of taxpayers, voters, motorists, welfare recipients, health care workers, or other citizens with a paperwork requirement or useless procedural delay. Control over such procedures has allowed bureaucrats to become the "ruling servants" of society (Strauss, 1961). This is especially pronounced in government bureaucracies that have evolved such complex and "ossified" procedures that only long-term career officials are able to master the labyrinthine systems. Transient executives are often unable to develop sufficient familiarity with their organizations to achieve control over them. The result is that many decisions flow up the bureaucratic pyramid, leaving the organization able to address little beyond routine matters and its own metabolic needs. The quagmire of rules, regulations and procedures that has enveloped virtually every modern commercial or governmental organization is due

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partly to the "linear logic" and "add-on" mentality of the obsessional character with its corresponding failure to perceive the Gestalt or the "gist" of a problem and thereby reduce it to its simplest form. The result has been a problem of information overload and a profusion of paperwork-the "white plague" of modern society.

Obsessional Pollution and Information Overload I t is unfair to lay blame for all information overload at the feet of obsessional thinkers, since explosive developments in communications, science and technology have in themselves led to a profusion of information, prompting some persons to struggle to remain informed through heroic ingestions of data or "information bulernia" (Wurman, 1989). But this is precisely why the effects of needless data proliferation have been so damaging. Warren Bennis (1976), a former university president, reported that he was deluged with 150 daily letters requiring a response, which undermined his ability to perform his job. H e estimated that in 1976 there was 10 million times as much communication as there was a century earlier. I n 1988, U.S. citizens received an average of 656 pieces of mail annually per capita, although the city of Hartford, Connecticut led the nation with 8,383 annual pieces of mail for every man, woman and child (Wright, 1989, p. 138). I t is estimated that the average U.S. citizen is bombarded with 1,600 commercial messages daily, of which about 80 are consciously noticed. High executives are likewise inundated with information: during Dean Rusk's eight-year tenure as U.S. Secretary of State (1961-1969) 2,100,000 cables left the State Department bearing his signature (Klapp, 1986). A tidal wave of information has also been produced in the scientific disciplines. In 1665 the first scientific journal began; by 1800 there were 100 journals; by 1900 there were 10,000. The number of scientific journals estimated for the year 2000 is about 100,000 (Mumford, 1976). Dr. Ernilio Segre, a Nobel Laureate in physics, stated, "On K-mesons alone, to wade through aII the papers is an impossibility" (Toffler, 1970, p. 140). A simple personal example reveals how needless and confusing information pollutes our psychic environment. The University of Rochester library, where much of the material for this essay was obtained, has two main buildings: an older 12-story unit and a newer 6-story unit. Simplicity suggests that floors on the first unit could be numbered 1 through 12, while the second unit numbered perhaps in Roman numerals I through VI to differentiate the two. Unfortunately, the 12 stories of the first unit were labelled as follows from bottom to top: G100, Gloom, 100, loom, 200, Zoom, 300, 300111, 400, 400m, 500, 500m. The six floors of the second unit, inexplicably, bear the labels, from bottom to top: B, A, G, 1, 2, 3. Presumably there are some h d d e n meanings in these eccentric designations, but it is of little

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comfort to the multitudes of incoming freshmen students who are seen staring perplexedly at the "Stack Directory" signs in the autumn of each year. An inability to rescue the "gist" or the "essence" of a simple idea from its background noise is a characteristic falling of obsessional thinkers. Consider, for example, how the U.S. Public Health Law (1989) defines a "person": " 'Person' includes any natural person, partnership, association, joint venture, trust, public or private corporation, or state or local government agency." Similarly, in language convoluted almost beyond recognition, the Federal Government's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) approved the following description of an "exit" as: "that portion of a means of egress which is separated from all other spaces of the building or structure by construction or equipment as required in this subpart to provide a protected way of travel to the exit discharge . . ." (Goldwater, 1976, pp. 165-166). It is fair to say that such explanations confuse rather than clarify. The same holds true for the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), which strings together a dozen prepositional phrases in its failed attempt to define "active psychiatric treatment": "the implementation of an individualized plan of care developed under and supervised by a physician, provided by a physician and other qualified mental health professionals, that prescribe specific therapies and activities for the treatment of persons who are experiencing an acute episode of severe mental illness which necessitates supervision by trained mental health personnel." The obsessional character's inability to extract the holistic Gestalt from an idea and thereby reduce it to its simplest workable basis conspires with a linear "add-on" mentality and a catharsis of the trivial to produce the proliferation of bureaucratic memoranda so common to government agencies. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took more than 10 years to develop standards to identify peanut butter (Pedersen, 1975), and this same agency required that a pharmaceutical company wishing to market an arthritis drug submit 200,000 pages of application paperwork weighing 2,038 Ibs. (Wood, 1976). Some bureaucratic excesses would be comical were they not so burdensome. During World War 11, the New York State Board of Economic Warfare established a business group to import vegetable oils. I t was called the E.G.F.V.O.F.0.B.M.-The Emergency Group for Foreign Vegetable Oils, Fats, and Oil-Bearing Materials (Suhvan, 1944). It is reasonable to suggest that information and understanding are related on a curvhnear, inverted-U basis: as information is received understanding is enhanced up to a point, and thereafter begins to decline as sensory overload and confusion set in. This relationship exists for physiological responses in the cerebellar Purkinje cells where impulses can drive output until a rate of about 180 signals per second is reached, but if the rate is further increased to 280 signals per second, output declines to 30 impulses per

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second (Granit & Phillips, 1956). The same relationship exists for pianists who attempt to play at great speed: performance increases up to about 10 notes per second and thereafter deteriorates rapidly as confusion sets in (Quastler & Wulff, 1955). These neural overload phenomena also seem to hold true for broader questions of judgment and decision-making in which vast amounts of complex data must be assessed under pressure of time, as occurs in military crises. In 1968 an American spy s h p was seized by North Korea and U.S. officials scrambled to review their options of response. It is reported that one senior official had three hours to review 76 military options that required sifting through a volume of materials the size of a Sears Roebuck catalogue (Toffler, 1980). A similar phenomenon occurred in America's failure to anticipate the bombing of Pearl Harbor: a global, overall sense of the deteriorating situation was lost amidst the "background noise" of useless information, rumors, military transmissions and diplomatic cables. After an exhaustive study, Wohlstetter (1962, p. 387) concluded that we failed to anticipate Japan's attack "not for want of the relevant materials, but because of a plethora of irrelevant ones." Under less pressured circumstances of political decision-making, the required multiple exchanges of information often hamper the legislative process. For example, a question of water resources may involve the Department of the Interior, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Power Comrnission, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Department of Transportation, several state governments, and assorted environmental, agricultural, recreational, mining, and timber lobbying groups. Even minor efforts to overload the system with irrelevancies or to obstruct negotiations become magnified geometrically during the process of information exchange and can quickly bring the legislative process to gridlock. Obsessional Pollution by Gimmickry Since the Remington Rand Company installed its first UNIVAC computer in 1951, a continuous proliferation of various new information technologies and electronic gadgets has occurred, providing a haven for the operational rituals and instrumental proclivities of obsessional persons. Not only has the marketplace been flooded with many new electronic appliances but in the process, simple traditional devices have been complicated almost beyond recognition. The writer encountered a telephone in a hotel room whch, in addition to the required buttons for selecting a number, had additional buttons labelled, "MEMO," "PROG," "PAUSE SAVE," "REDIAL," "SP-PHONE," "HOLD," "MUTE," "FLASH," "#," "*," plus small lights labelled "MIC" and "MUTE/MEMORY." Another telephone had buttons marked "AUTO," "PAUSE," "DIRECT CALL M I , M2, M3," switches labelled "MEMORY PROGRAM SET," "PULSE TONE," and a light

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labelled "MULTI-IND." Added to this is the corruption of other standard devices like "talking typewriters," "intelligent vacuum cleaners," "electronic wallpaper," "smart locks," or even a "smart house" that can talk to you so "you may never feel alone again" (Miles, et a f . , 1988; Roszak, 1986). The obsessional character, armed with these electronic gadgets-like an aggressive person armed with a gun-sees the fullest elaboration of his personality revealed in partnership with a machine. Norbert Wiener called these people "gadget worshippers." But the obsessional person's proclivity for artifact is not limited to things mechanical; there is a vocational dimension as well. The Artifact Professions Many of society's new information workers are locked into indirect labor tasks that are elaborated from sources increasingly estranged from any useful product or service. The writer defines an "artifact worker" as an information worker who produces no tangibly useful product or service and whose work role primarily involves relating to other artifact workers. Von Ward (1981) estimates that 30 to 50% of the work force in a typical federal bureaucracy may be inappropriately utilized through the excessive layering of nonfunctional managers, supervisors, attenders of meetings, liaisoners, staff aides, assistants, messengers, clerical personnel, administrators, payroll and other staff members who write instructions, fill out administrative and personnel forms, maintain work records, audit expense accounts, process performance evaluation reports and perform a limitless number of other peripheral activities. Legions of modern artifact professionals are often counterposed one against the other, each struggling to obstruct or undo his opposite's actions in warfare fought on a paper or electronic battlefield: tax preparer against tax collector, the lobbyist favoring legislation against the one opposed, politician against politician, lawyer against lawyer, regulator against regulated, form-preparer against form-examiner, insurer against insured, reviewer against reviewed. These events echo in large scale the endless see-saw of pro-and-con deliberations that characterize the obsessional character's endless inner debate. I n no profession has the obsessional character's defects been more f d y harnessed than within the practice of law. Stubbornness, delay, recalcitrance, opposition, obfuscation, and information-overload are the mother's mllk of litigation. Stacks of jargonized papers are exchanged-"bills of particulars," "depositions," "service of process," "discovery demands," "certificates of readiness"-in an obsessive ritual that may go on for months or years. O n August 12, 1983 a California mother telephoned police believing that her 2-year-old son had been molested at his nursery school. Seven years later, on August 1, 1990 the last criminal charges were dismissed following the longest and most expensive trial in U.S. history that involved interviews of 400 chil-

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dren, 800 exhibits, 60,000 pages of testimony, and a 15 million dollar cost to taxpayers with no useful return for these efforts (Reinhold, 1990). Another artifact profession deserving special mention is the field of tax accounting. Here, obsessional traits blossom most fully within the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a system of gargantuan unwieldiness and complexity. At the present time, the IRS relies on a conglomerate of 70 different computer systems (Burnham, 1990) and receives about 200 million tax returns annually, of which 2 million are lost, apparently because the various departments within the IRS do not communicate adequately among themselves (Chambliss, 1989). It is estimated that 47% of written information (Coyle, 1990) and one-third of telephoned information (Hershey, 1990) given out by the IRS to taxpayers is incorrect. The system is so impenetrably complex that when 50 professional tax preparers were asked to submit tax returns for an hypothetical family, 40 of them made significant errors and no two returns were alike (Anrig, 1989). Artifact workers have been unleashed in a variety of other modern settings, imposing paperwork burdens and administrative demands on activities that had once rested upon simple personal relationships, common sense, and trust. In the health care field private and government insurance carriers have developed an array of elaborate procedures that function basically to slow down the delivery of care and thereby conserve funds (Grumet, 1989). In U.S. hospitals mounting numbers of insurance reviewers, government regulation-adherence clerks, quality-control and bed-utilization examiners, and other functionaries form a "fifth column" of regulation-compliance workers who review medical findings and treatments in checkhst fashion. Despite good intentions and "just-doing-my-job" apologies, their effect is to reduce the quahty of care by imposing paperwork burdens that remove physicians and nurses from the bedside.

Means Over Ends Psychiatric descriptions of obsessive personal habits provide examples of the common tendency to fetishize and ritualize behavior that has long since lost any function or purpose: "A patient recorded all his railroad travels from grammar school to high school, listing all the station stops, even when repeating the same trip . . . Another, so instructed by his equally obsessive mother who always worried that he might catch cold, kept his supply of socks in the drawer in carefully separated piles marked 'heavy,' 'light heavy,' 'heavy light,' and 'light' " (Rado, 1974, p. 197). Similar obsessional tendencies are seen in institutions where activities become "mythologized" and "ceremonialized," eventually becoming decoupled from the original purposes of the organization (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), and ultimately, as Lewis Mumford (1957) noted, "process supplants purpose." Rigid procedures that remain unchallenged by organization members are sometimes accompanied by

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unquestioning "groupthink" attitudes (Morgan, 1986). Robert Merton (1940) noted that as procedures become "sanctified" within bureaucracies, goal-displacement occurs and "an instrumental value becomes a terminal value." A common form that this takes within modern, information-intensive bureaucracies is a frenetic quest for data predicated upon the false assumption that more information is always equated with better management. A compulsive collecting of "facts" and relentless efforts to build data bankswhich become ends in themselves-are tendencies widely seen among systems analysts (Hoos, 1972). The final effects of the obsessive emphasis on "means over ends," "form over substance," or "process over purpose" are realized in the common phenomenon of administrative expansion. While this "management-byaddition" principle has been universally criticized (Bennis, 1976), its connection with the obsessional character's retentive nature has not been generally appreciated. Parkinson (1971) noted that in 1914 the British Navy had 542 commissioned vessels which were managed by 4,366 officials and staff. By 1967 there were only 114 commissioned vessels but 33,574 persons to manage them. This led to the comment that Britain had "a magnificent navy on land." Similarly, during the peak of the Vietnam War, America had about 60,000 fighting troops backed up by nearly 500,000 military support personnel. Other large organizations reveal similar administrative overloads. In Denver, Colorado school teachers constitute only 24% of school district employees (Rosecrance, 1990). I n January, 1978 the Rochester Psychiatric Center, a New York State hospital, had 1129 patients and 18 administrators, or 62.7 patients per manager. By March, 1990-a mere dozen years later-there were 493 patients managed by 71 administrators, or 6.9 patients per manager. New, depersonalized job titles had been added like "Director of Institutional Human Resources Management" and "Agency Labor Relations Representative."

Automated People I n removing people from meaningful personalized work roles the boundary between man and machine may become blurred. I t is interesting that some terms like "word processor," "printer," "analyzer," "calculator," or "dishwasher" apply to both people and to machines. What had once been face-to-face communications are now as Uely to be carried computer to computer, answering-maching to answering-machine, memo to memo, or fax machine to fax machine. Some people demonstrate a shocking willingness to discard the human chemistry of relationships in favor of electronic instrumentahty. Some office-of-the-future technologists wrote: "Within the new office culture, persons would follow a discipline of how to communicate via computers. Computer processable symbols could be developed for a smile, laugh, or warm gesture. Then certain keys on a keyboard could be used to

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send the symbol with the text of a message" (Uhlig, Farber, & Bain, 1979). When M.I.T. professor Joseph Weizenbaum (1976) developed an interactive language program that emulated nondirective psychotherapy as an artificial intelligence experiment, he was shocked when some computer devotees seized upon the possibility of replacing human therapists with similar interactive language systems. Apparently viewing psychotherapy as a simple information exchange and failing to appreciate the importance of emotions and human engagement in the therapeutic process, they wrote, "A human therapist can be viewed as an information processor and decision maker with a set of decision rules which are closely linked to short-range and long-range goals . . . it would provide a therapeutic tool which can be made widely available to mental hospitals and psychiatric centers suffering a shortage of therapists . . . several hundred patients an hour could be handled by a computer system . . ." (Colby, Watt, & Gilbert, 1966). Many social critics have warned that we are in danger of becoming amoral functionaries, "inauthentic" or "one-dimensional" people (Becker, 1973) or "living machines" (Reich, 1949). Erich Fromm (1941) complained of our tendency to suppress genuine feelings, to appear cheerful, to smile and to have pleasing personalities especially during business transactions, a phenomenon he called "the commercialization of friendliness." Yablonsky (1972) used the term "robopath" to describe the person who has suppressed h s genuine emotion, spontaneity, and empathy with others to function robotlike in our machine-oriented technocratic society. David Shapiro (1965) gave an example of the obsessional tendency to replace emotion by cognition in a patient's description of the girl he intended to marry: "I must be in love with her-she has all the qualities I want in a wife." H e noted that such persons are never relaxed, unguarded or playful but their behavior is characterized by a "driven" quality and by "a more or less continuous experience of tense deliberateness, a sense of effort, and of trying." Wilhelm Reich (1949) noted that the emphasis on tight control of impulses that characterizes obsessive persons is often revealed in chronic hypertonia of the muscles: "Hence the 'hard,' somewhat maskhke physiognomy of compulsive characters, and their physical awkwardness" (p. 198).

The Data-processing Concept of Thought Paralleling the restricted emotional style of obsessional people is a restricted cognitive style, one that has blossomed in the computer age. Rigid, obsessional character types gravitate readily to the mechanical, step-by-step, formal logic and "procedural thinking" of the computer, or what Roszak (1986) has termed "the data processing model of the mind." H e notes that the flow of real life events is more likely to be a turbulent stream of unplanned, unstructured, fragmentary and dissonant experiences that settle in our memory as a potpourri of vividly-remembered, half-remembered,

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mixed and mingled memories and images. Our cognition occurs as a chaotic collection of competing motives and emotions, blurred unconscious forces, impressions, images, associations, memory fragments, sensations, lapses, errors, etc.-a far cry from the neatly packaged, sequential parcels of information apt to be seen on a computer spreadsheet. The natural kinship between obsessional character traits and computing is seen in compulsive programmers, sometimes called "computer bums" or "cyberpunks." Weizenbaum (1976, p. 116) describes, ". . . bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes . . . sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed . . . poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be riveted as a gambler's on the rolling hce." H e notes that computing, like other self-validating systems, often comes to be detached from authentic human experience and becomes lost within its own conceptual framework. Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) note that in computing, holistic experiences are decomposed and transformed into rules-complex ideas are turned into a binary code-and in the process judgment, reasoning, insight and intuition are lost. They believe that intuition is "the core of human intelligence and skill" and suggest that the human mind actually functions more like an holistic imaging dev~cethan a logic machine, comparing at the unconscious level, analogous patterns and prototypical features of the subject at hand with stored patterns and images, rather than rendering judgments based on rules of logic. The triumph of intuition over numerical logic can be demonstrated even in primarily mathematical challenges such as playing chess. I t has been estipossible moves, and mated that a typical chess game has approximately 10LZO even a machine making a million calculations per second would require lo9' years merely to decide on its first move (Shannon, 1950). While "competent" chess players often have a mathematical or analytical orientation, the very few who reach grandmaster level are seldom guided by rules or principles but rely instead on instinct and intuition (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986). Such intuition must, of course, rest upon memories of past play. Rauzino (1982) notes that logical or mechanistic analyses of brain organization collapse at about the seventh or eighth synaptic level because of the sheer number of permutations. H e suggests that the highest cognitive functions are not based on strict logic but on pattern-synthesis, Gestalt-recognition, association, inference, extrapolation, nuance, and imagery-in other words, those functions associated with the right cerebral hemisphere. However, since computer building is a logical and rational operation, Rauzino suggests it was biologically preordained that the first computers would be constructed to emulate left hemisphere functions. Some early efforts are now underway to attempt to remedy this limitation through the development of "fuzzy" computing (Dambrot & Swinbanks, 1989).

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While it is probably oversimplified to identify obsessional thinkers as "left hemisphere" people and creative, intuitive persons as "right hernisphere" people, it is fair to say that the logical, linear thinkers of whom I have been complaining have cognitive traits usually associated with left hemispheric function, while persons of greater creativity often have strong right hemisphere influences. A stark example of this difference was seen in the Los Alamos Laboratory were the first atomic bombs were built. A group of brilliant and eccentric physicists was led by J. Robert Oppenheimer and followed erratic schedules often working in the laboratories until 4 a.m. in unstructured "harmonious anarchy." The over-all commander was General Leslie Groves, a spit-and-polish d t a r y man who ordered his military police to padlock the laboratories at 5 p.m. daily, planned to bugle the physicists out of bed each morning for drill, and attempted to keep each research team ignorant of other teams' activities for security purposes. When the physicists refused to adapt to these rigid standards, the frustrated General is reported to have said, "Here at great expense, the government has assembled the world's largest collection of crackpots." Upon witnessing the first successful atomic test, the mystical Oppenheimer ruminated about an ancient Hindu text in which the god Krishna says, "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds." At the same time, General Groves tersely announced, "This is the end of traditional warfare" (Davis, 1968).

Left Hemisphere Poetry Some further insights into the cognitive processes of obsessional thinkers can be gleaned from their use of language. These idiosyncrasies are best enumerated in tabular fashion. Little originality.-Just as conformity pervades many commercial, military and governmental bureaucracies, so does it pervade the language of obsessional characters. Well-worn phrases are abundant, like "state-of-theart technology," "a proven track record," "investment portfolios," "strategic planning," and so forth. Add-on phraseology.-The obsessional person's linear thinking patterns and retentive impulses often conspire to produce hyphenated phrases like "in-depth knowledge," "on-line computers," "results-oriented individuals" "cutting-edge technology," or the use of slashes to stack together alternate meanings, like "he/she," "and/or," "develop/install/implement new equipment," etc. Equally common are the lengthy legal-type passages in which add-on prepositional phrases are hung like Christmas ornaments. Depersonalization.-Personal terms like "man," "woman" or "person" are frequently replaced in corporate communications with depersonahzed role-focused terms like "individual," "professional," "manager," or "coordinator." These terms are often paired with glib modifiers, e.g., an experienced

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person might be labelled "a seasoned professional," or a college graduate might be called "a degreed individual." Emotional denial.-Closely akin to the use of depersonalized phraseology is a tendency to deny emotions. Military people have well-known phrases like "neutralize the enemy" or "silence the enemy's guns," that sanitize the events of warfare. Sometimes emotions are denied in a glib or "flip" manner as in an advertisement for a medical equipment salesperson: "Do you know the mammography market? . . . Do you want a challenge? . . . If yes, fax your resume and call us immediately . . ." Kinetic metaphors.--The figures of speech used by obsessional persons are not highly abstract, poetic, or reflective but tend to be physical or kinetic in nature reflecting the high-energy, aggressive sports or &tary activities at which hypoemotional, controlled persons typically excel. Corporate advertisements yield phrases like, "We're a leanly-staffed, hands-on group with a proven track record," or "we're a fast-paced, team-oriented group with an aggressive business posture," or "we offer competitive salaries for high-performance sales-achievers." Gestalt failures.--The weakness of obsessional persons to register Gestalt insights and concepts is often compensated by efforts to evoke images of intellectual power through superficially abstracted phraseology. Frequently this takes the form of concatenated jargon or "bureaubabble." High pay becomes "an aggressive compensation package," a company car becomes "a company-provided automobile package," many responsibilities becomes "a multifunctional position," while the ability to solve problems is transmogrified into "a proven ability to escalate problems to resolution." The Cult of Numbers The linear, left-hemisphere cognition of obsessional persons finds itself most at home with numbers. The scramble to collect numerical data provides a convenient way to sidestep the complicated tasks of developing a genuine conceptual understanding of what is being studled, and also allows the obsessional person-who is frequently indecisive-a means to avoid making subjective personal decisions. Shapiro (1981, p. 88) notes, ". . . he may try to recast a problem of personal choice into an objective, technical problem with an objective, correct solution." Statistics are viewed by some as the single legitimate path to truth, and many a weak argument is bolstered by an august repertoire of numerical data. This tendency conspires with the impressive capabilities of modern computers to place an exaggerated focus on things easily categorized or quantified. Roszak (1986) notes that a cultlike mystique surrounds the computer which carries with it a "mysterious, oracular character" and lends an ill-deserved aura of absolute credibility to any computer-based calculations. For the obsessional mind, electronic images and

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spreadsheet projections provide the comforting illusion of understanding and control amidst a chaotic world. Ida Hoos (1972) notes that the "soft" sciences (sociology, psychology, economics) have become increasingly preoccupied with quantification and have made the computer the keystone of research activities so as to lay claim to the same scientific respectability enjoyed by mathematics and physics. This is seen in "systems analysis" or "the systems approach," an d-defined collection of techniques that aim to quantify human affairs with the same degree of precision that one finds in engineering. But, as Hoos noted, electrical, mechanical, thermal and fluid systems behave in measurable ways quite unlike the disorderly chaos of human affairs. Thus, complex social problems of urban renewal, crime control and welfare reform d o not readily lend themselves to structured technical or mathematical analyses. She notes that many educational and governmental institutions are becoming "counting houses" with elaborate electronic data-processing equipment, systems studies, data banks and "information experts" that may serve to camouflage the poverty of underlying conceptualizations. Systems experts are fast becoming the wizards, sorcerers, and alchemists of the modern world. Public officials are increasingly using systems analysts and consultants from outside institutes and "think tanks" as a ploy to evade personal responsibility for politically unpopular decisions (Hoos, 1972). An example of misguided numerical expertise is provided by the Vietnam War where military leaders focused on easily quantifiable phenomena-body counts, numbers of sorties flown, tonnage of bombs dropped, etc.-lending a pretense of control and an aura of success to the failing war effort, while ignoring deeper issues of morahty, politics and national resolve. One senior official remarked, "It was a bookkeeper's war" (Garson, 1988, p. 251).

The Computer as Idiot Savant Military technology provides dramatic examples of both the triumphs and blunders of computer science, as the magnificent achievements of space exploration are counterbalanced by some equally dramatic failures. One such case was the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, engineered to detect incoming missiles through the electronic sensing of reflected energy. When moonbeams triggered an "incoming ballistic missiles" alert, only a fortunate lack of confidence in the newly-deployed system prevented the U.S. from launching a counterstrike (Licklider, 1969). A similar situation arose during the Vietnam War when electronic sensors placed along the H o Chi Minh Trail to detect Communist infiltrators proved unable to differentiate between enemy soldiers and apes indigenous to the region (Garson, 1988). These are not isolated examples, since no computer system currently available can be programmed to reason. The high-technology systems used to analyze radar and satellite data are so complicated that during 1979 and early 1980 3,703 -

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false indicators of a Soviet attack on North America were reported, including a few "serious" false alarms (Siege1 & Markoff, 1985). Obsessional yearnings for perfection in the operation of large-scale computer programs are seldom realized, despite a frequently misplaced confidence that such is the case. Even the best computer programmers produce about 3 errors for every 1OOO lines of written code. Thus, a new jet airliner using software systems that operate with over 5 million lines of programmed code can be estimated to harbor as many as 15,000 undetected errors (McIntyre, 1990). Errors aside, some high-technology systems like nuclear power plants or advanced design aircraft achieve a level of complexity that outstrips the sophistication of those called upon to operate, repair and maintain them (Naisbitt, 1982). Weizenbaum (1976) notes that complex computer systems are sometimes designed by shifting teams of programmers over periods of years, with some systems becoming so complicated and richly elaborated that no single person or small group can comprehend them. The variables of interaction may be so complicated that outcomes become uncertain, especially if the program has been altered or repaired with ad hoc patchwork amendments whose final impact on the total system is unknown. I n this manner, programs may "drift away" from their intended purposes. Computer files d o not lend themselves to being browsed or corrected for errors, and incorrect data, once entered into a system, are hard to identify and correct. Laudon (1986) estimated that among U.S. state computerized criminal history systems 50 to 90% of the records are inaccurate, incomplete or ambiguous. Some large scale data collection projects like the 1980 U.S. census generate absurd results such as 3 million persons having their gender chosen by computer, uncovering a population of teenaged widows, or discovering a 112-year-old couple living with their 109-year-old son (Gleick, 1990). Social critic Bertram Gross (1970) has suggested that our compulsive tendency to collect "indigestible mountains of isolated facts" paired with a declining interest in true wisdom and understanding is leading to "a new ignorance explosion." H e fears that postindustrial America is developing into a faceless, technocratic, "managed" society dominated by vast industrial, police, communications and welfare bureaucracies, a phenomenon which he terms "friendly fascism."

The Totalitarian Connection The futuristic nightmare of a depersonalized, technologically-advanced world controlled by super computers, robots or totalitarians has been a theme of science fact and fiction writers for decades. Computers and other information technologies amplify man's preexistent dehumanized tendencies by replacing personal relationships with mechanical systems. Obsessional character traits of exacting efficiency, authoritarian control, and lack of humor or

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emotion are especially pronounced in military settings. Here we see indoctrination rituals, drills, musters, inspections, field exercises and ceremonies, as well as formalities of deferential salutes to superior officers, stylized uniforms, and a special occupational vocabulary. These mannerisms serve to routinize and automatize the dangerous and unpredictable events of warfare, lending a pretense of control over the uncontrollable. Unfortunately, such systems also tend to neutralize ethical awareness and to depersonalize the participants. As one Nazi theorist noted, ". . . not only is the individual inferior to the state, he has no right to exist" (Mowshowitz, 1976). I t is no surprise that obsessional personalities, bureaucrats, and totalitarians are comfortable bedfellows. Lewis Mumford (1976) labelled massmurderer Adolf Eichmann as the archetypal hero of an automated society: ". . . the correct functionary, the perfect bureaucrat, proud to the end that he never allowed a moral scruple or a human sentiment to keep him from carrying out the orders that came from above." His last words, before he was hanged on May 31, 1962 were: "I had to obey the rules of war and my flag" (Hausner, 1966). A similar example of bureaucratic amorality is provided by Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister of Armaments and War, who was described as "an administrative genius" and whose innovative management techniques allowed Germany to triple its output of armaments between 1941 and 1944. H e stated, "The people who were deprived of their jobs, who were hounded from the professions, whose property was confiscated and who were finally dragged off to the concentration camps, gradually became abstractions to me . . . I did not hate them, I was indifferent to them" (Singer & Wooten, 1976, p. 82). Stanley Milgram (1974), in his famous "Obedience to Authority3' study, suggested that humans are genetically scripted to fall into hierarchies of authority, analogous to the pecking orders of animals, as such groups provide harmony and stability to its members. A characteristic feature of human hierarchies is an obedience to those in authority-"the agentic stateH-where one views oneself as merely an agent of authority and is thereby absolved of moral responsibility for one's actions. This phenomenon is characteristic of military settings but also exists in the innumerable mindless cruelties perpetrated by civilian bureaucrats. One example is the case of Bernt Balchen, a Norwegian pilot who declared his intention to apply for American citizenship in 1927. His application was denied because he had not fulfilled the Bureau of Naturalization's requirement of 5 years' continuous residence in the United States: he left the country in 1929 to fly over the South Pole as a member of Admiral Byrd's expedition, and during this time was technically out of the country. The fact that he had piloted the first flight over the South Pole in an heroic American expedition made no impression on the Naturalization Service bureaucrats (Merton, 1940).

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A more subtle but not less pervasive totalitarian influence is seen in the many modern employment practices which dehumanize workers. The employment interview of yesteryear is often curtailed and replaced with an assortment of instrumentalities like personality inventories, computer profiles, and polygraph or handwriting analyses. Efforts are also afoot to depersonalize and standardize a variety of jobs to lower costs and increase managerial control over employees. A quiet totalitarianism lurks behind many such techniques, discouraging personal initiative, diversity, human kindness, and trust. Garson (1988) notes that fast-food automation techniques ("hamburger science") have been applied to other less predictable activities like the telephone conversations of airline reservation clerks. The goal is to standardize the dialogue into "conversation modules" and thereby increase efficiency. These conversations are electronically monitored and translated into numerical determinations like the "AHU" ("after hangup") time, the number of seconds after the call that are required to complete the transaction. A Canadian airline allows 16 seconds of AHU time, while a U.S. company allows 13 seconds-all recorded and computerized in Orwellian fashion. Garson notes that complex jobs are studied, broken down into component parts or "rationalized" and turned over to lower paid workers as a series of discrete and routine mechanical tasks. Some social workers have already been "clericalized," or downgraded to "Eligibility Technicians," "Income Maintenance Workers," or "Financial Assistance Workers" and allotted fixed times to perform services, e.g., "add baby-0.3 hours," "authorize burial expenses-0.7 hours," and so forth. I n the process, elements of natural human engagement, discretion, flexibility, kindness, friendship and humor are scrapped in favor of structured, rote functions.

Directions for the Future This essay is not intended to condemn the obsessional components of the human character but merely to restrain them. It has become necessary to do so because advances in society have invited operational cognitive functions to encroach upon intuition, common sense, simple trust, and human compassion. But just as there is a need for both hemispheres of the brain, so is there a need for both calculative and impressionistic thinking patterns. This need has been demonstrated in organizational systems where rigid "mechanistic" management techniques work better in some settings while more flexible "organic" systems seem to work better in others (Burns & Stalker, 1972). I t is also evident in the different communication patterns that exist simultaneously within most organizations: "formal" communications of explicitly stated policy, "subformal" communications like memorandum exchanges, and "personal" communications consisting of private exchanges between employees (Downs, 1967). A problem arises when absolute, rigid

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systems crowd out the informal, free and spontaneous expression of ideas and emotions as occurs within rigid bureaucracies and totalitarian societies. A Naval disbursement officer described how he found himself caught between the formal requirements of the Navy system on one hand and informal "friendship patterns" on the other. H e successfully negotiated a realistic balance between the rules and regulations on one side and hls personal relationships on the other (Turner, 1947). A similar dichotomy of attitudes is evident among psychiatric hospital orderlies who can be divided into "authoritarian" types emphasizing behavioral control, and "humanistic" types who emphasize friendship and understanding (Pine & Levinson, 1957). It is obvious to all who have worked within such settings that both approaches are required. I t has been shown that employees who are freed from excessively rigid hierarchical systems experience higher morale than those locked into such systems (Aiken & Hage, 1966), and are more likely to provide creative solutions to problems (Hoffman & Maier, 1962). Freeing people from rigidlycontrolled, explicit systems and allowing a degree of freedom, uncertainty and subjectivity tends to inspire creativity and imagination. As Rauzino noted (1982, p. 134), ". . . anyone who has read Shakespeare, Eliot, or Joyce can . . . recognize the compelling strength of controlled ambiguity when shaped by gifted minds." We need KO develop a new reverence for common sense, a quality that no machine has yet been able to duplicate. We must also develop a new respect for simplicity, and provide incentives to reduce complicated systems to their reasonably simplest form, to integrate new paperwork requirements into existing systems, to root out rigid, rule-bound people from positions where they are likely to become obstructive, and to permit a respectful questioning of authority. To d o less will permit obsessionalism-a pervasive, unseen, yet controlling influence-to tyrannize us. Stanley Milgram wrote (1974, p. 188), "Men d o become angry; they d o act hatefully and explode in rage against others. But not here. Something far more dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man to abandon his humanity . . . as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures. T h s is a fatal flaw nature has designed into us . . ." As the cartoonist Walt Kelly wrote, "We have met the enemy-and he is us." REFERENCES A ~ E NM., , & HAGE, J. (1966) Organizational alienation: a comparative analysis. American Sociological Review, 31, 497-507. ANRIG,G. (1989) The pros flunk our new tax-return test. Money, 18(3), 110-121. BECKER,E. (1973) The denial of death. New York: The Free Press. BELOFF, H. (1957) The structure and origin of the anal character. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 55, 141-172. BENNIS,W. (1976) The unconsciorrs conspiracy: why leaders can't lead. New York: Amacom.

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Accepted December 31, 1990.