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Superficiality
In social psychology, superficiality refers to a lack of depth in relationships, conversation and analysis. The principle of "superficiality versus depth" is said to have pervaded Western culture since at least the time of Plato. Social psychology considers that in everyday life, social processing veers between superficiality and a deeper form of processing.
Socrates sought to convince his debaters to turn from the superficiality of a worldview based on the acceptance of convention to the examined life of philosophy, founded (as Plato at least considered) upon the underlying Ideas. For more than two millennia, there was in the Platonic wake a general valorisation of critical thought over the superficial subjectivity that refused deep analysis. The salon style of the Précieuses might for a time affect superficiality, and play with the possibility of treating serious topics in a light-hearted fashion; but the prevailing western consensus firmly rejected elements such as everyday chatter or the changing vagaries of fashion as superficial distractions from a deeper reality.
By contrast, Nietzsche opened the modernist era with a self-conscious praise of superficiality: "What is required is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial – out of profundity!".
His (still) preference for superficiality was however over-shadowed for most of the 20th century by modernism's full subscription to the depth/surface model, and to the privileging of the former over the latter. Frederic Jameson has highlighted four main modernist versions of the belief in a deeper reality - Marxist, psychoanalytic, existential, and semiotic - in each of which reality is understood to be concealed behind an inauthentic surface or façade. Jameson contrast these models sharply with the lack of depth, the ahistoricity, the surface-focus and flatness of the postmodern consciousness, with its new cult of the image and the simulacrum.
In the last third of the 20th century, Lyotard began challenging the Platonic view of a true meaning hidden behind surface as a theatrical world-view, insisting instead that sense manifestations had their own reality which necessarily impacted upon the purely verbal order of intelligibility. Similarly, deconstruction has increasingly sought to undo the depth/surface hierarchy, proposing in ironic style that superficiality is as deep as depth. The result has been the call to abandon the idea that behind appearances there is any ultimate truth to be found; and in consequence the growing postmodern replacement of depth by surface, or by multiple surfaces.
That process of substitution was well under way by the 1990s, when notoriously "surface was depth", and in the new millennium has led to a state of what has been called hypervisibility: everything is on view. In this new era of exposure we are all submerged in what the psychoanalyst Michael Parsons has called "the totalist world where there is a horror of inwardness; everything must be revealed".
If postmodernism's proponents welcomed the way a new transcendence of the surface /depth dichotomy allowed a fuller appreciation of the possibilities of the superficial - the surface consciousness of the now, as opposed to the depths of historical time - critics like J. G. Ballard object that the end-product is a world of "laws without penalties, events without significance, a sun without shadows": of surface without depth. They see postmodern superficiality as a by-product of the false consciousness of global capitalism, where surface distractions, news, and entertainment supersaturate the zapping mind in such a way as to foreclose the possibility of envisioning any critical alternative.
Almost all depth psychologies defy the postmodern to value depth over surface—to aim, in David Cooper's words, for "change from the depths of oneself upwards into the superficies of one's social appearance". Debates may rage over whether to begin analysis at the surface or by way of deep interpretations, but this is essentially a question of timing. Thus for example Jungians would highlight at the start of therapy what they call the persona-restoring phase as an effort to preserve superficiality, but would later optimally see the client moving from the surface to deeper emotion and creativity.
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Superficiality
In social psychology, superficiality refers to a lack of depth in relationships, conversation and analysis. The principle of "superficiality versus depth" is said to have pervaded Western culture since at least the time of Plato. Social psychology considers that in everyday life, social processing veers between superficiality and a deeper form of processing.
Socrates sought to convince his debaters to turn from the superficiality of a worldview based on the acceptance of convention to the examined life of philosophy, founded (as Plato at least considered) upon the underlying Ideas. For more than two millennia, there was in the Platonic wake a general valorisation of critical thought over the superficial subjectivity that refused deep analysis. The salon style of the Précieuses might for a time affect superficiality, and play with the possibility of treating serious topics in a light-hearted fashion; but the prevailing western consensus firmly rejected elements such as everyday chatter or the changing vagaries of fashion as superficial distractions from a deeper reality.
By contrast, Nietzsche opened the modernist era with a self-conscious praise of superficiality: "What is required is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial – out of profundity!".
His (still) preference for superficiality was however over-shadowed for most of the 20th century by modernism's full subscription to the depth/surface model, and to the privileging of the former over the latter. Frederic Jameson has highlighted four main modernist versions of the belief in a deeper reality - Marxist, psychoanalytic, existential, and semiotic - in each of which reality is understood to be concealed behind an inauthentic surface or façade. Jameson contrast these models sharply with the lack of depth, the ahistoricity, the surface-focus and flatness of the postmodern consciousness, with its new cult of the image and the simulacrum.
In the last third of the 20th century, Lyotard began challenging the Platonic view of a true meaning hidden behind surface as a theatrical world-view, insisting instead that sense manifestations had their own reality which necessarily impacted upon the purely verbal order of intelligibility. Similarly, deconstruction has increasingly sought to undo the depth/surface hierarchy, proposing in ironic style that superficiality is as deep as depth. The result has been the call to abandon the idea that behind appearances there is any ultimate truth to be found; and in consequence the growing postmodern replacement of depth by surface, or by multiple surfaces.
That process of substitution was well under way by the 1990s, when notoriously "surface was depth", and in the new millennium has led to a state of what has been called hypervisibility: everything is on view. In this new era of exposure we are all submerged in what the psychoanalyst Michael Parsons has called "the totalist world where there is a horror of inwardness; everything must be revealed".
If postmodernism's proponents welcomed the way a new transcendence of the surface /depth dichotomy allowed a fuller appreciation of the possibilities of the superficial - the surface consciousness of the now, as opposed to the depths of historical time - critics like J. G. Ballard object that the end-product is a world of "laws without penalties, events without significance, a sun without shadows": of surface without depth. They see postmodern superficiality as a by-product of the false consciousness of global capitalism, where surface distractions, news, and entertainment supersaturate the zapping mind in such a way as to foreclose the possibility of envisioning any critical alternative.
Almost all depth psychologies defy the postmodern to value depth over surface—to aim, in David Cooper's words, for "change from the depths of oneself upwards into the superficies of one's social appearance". Debates may rage over whether to begin analysis at the surface or by way of deep interpretations, but this is essentially a question of timing. Thus for example Jungians would highlight at the start of therapy what they call the persona-restoring phase as an effort to preserve superficiality, but would later optimally see the client moving from the surface to deeper emotion and creativity.