Principles in the Dust

the psychological gems of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"

Sep 25, 2024

The best authors are usually better at psychology than the best psychologists. This is an argument I’ve made before, but recently some readers have asked me to put my money where my mouth is. So, I’d like to give it a shot with John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a story about a family moving from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. (If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend it—and I rarely recommend anything.)

The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, around the same time that Carl Rogers was arguing that therapists ought to be nice to their clients, Abraham Maslow was suggesting that some needs are more urgent than others, and Wilhelm Reich was writing stuff like, “Only the establishment of orgastic potency will result in a decisive change [in the client], economically speaking. As I formulated it once: the analysis, by eliminating the sexual repressions, creates the possibility of a spontaneous organotherapy of the neuroses.”1 To be fair, it was also around this time that B.F. Skinner was publishing his work on behaviorism, which was a genuine breakthrough in our understanding of the antecedents of behavior.2

In contrast to the preceding medley of mostly useless stuff, we have the following gems from what many consider to be Steinbeck’s greatest work. These gems can be appreciated as psychological principles that: 1) had not yet been formalized by psychologists, 2) have not yet been formalized by psychologists, and/or 3) are worked so beautifully into the narrative that even when we distill the principle, a remainder remains.

The Gems

“Well, it makes you mad to hear a guy use big words. ‘Course with a preacher it’s all right because nobody would fool around with a preacher anyway.” (15)

This is from the opening scene in which the story’s protagonist, Tom Joad, hitches a ride with a trucker, who has this to say about a loquacious friend of his.

If the reader squints, they will notice two important principles of human psychology at play. The first is that for many dimensions of life, absolute outcomes are less important than relative ones. But relative to what? Mainly, to what psychologists call a “reference” or “comparison” group. Displays of superiority within the same group, whether the flash of a new watch or the pretentiousness of a ten-dollar word, tend to make others in that group feel less-than, and then angry.

Humans are a bit like crabs in a bucket in this way—they pull each other down so that none can get out—with the caveat that there are different buckets. Curiously, we don’t feel insecurity leading to anger when someone from a clearly-higher social class dons a nice watch—if anything, we are more likely to be impressed. But when someone who grew up down the block from us flashes some new bling, we begin a silent campaign to bring them back to earth.

One important implication of this is that societies benefit when everyone is in the same wagon, even if that wagon sucks. In a scene toward the end of the novel, as the Joads’ are sharing a boxcar with another family—a train wagon, if you will— Steinbeck shows why:

“No need to thank,’” the mother from the other family says to Ma Joad after helping deliver a Joad baby. “Ever’body’s in the same wagon. S’pose we was down. You’d give us a han’.”

“Yes,” Ma said, “we would.” (606)

Now, why can preachers get away with stuff that others can’t? Because they’re in a group/bucket/boxcar of their own. How? Well, in the spiritual sense, because they communicate with God. But in the practical sense, because they can’t take a wife.3

Because neither men nor women are concerned about a preacher’s ulterior motives, his word is trusted; his version of truth reigns supreme. Preachers are granted these and other social benefits as recompense for removing themselves from the basic game of life. Even if a preacher cheated a congregation out of money, my guess is that the backlash would be relatively tame. Because what does a preacher spend money on? He lives in the church, can’t marry, and won’t have any children. Outside of food—which the flock is only too happy to provide—what else is money for?4

“But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.” (52)

The ultimate reason the Joads move to California is the Dust Bowl—there’s too little water in Oklahoma for crops to grow. The proximate reason is that the owners of the land, under pressure from the banks, decide to transition from a sharecropping model to a tractor-farming model. This means the sharecroppers—the families—must move out.

The families are understandably infuriated. They’ve worked the same piece of land for generations. But, as Muley describes above, the architect of their misfortune is absent, unclear, abstract. Muley continues: “Who’s the Shawnee Lan’ and’ Cattle Company? It ain’t nobody. It’s a company.” (65)

In 1965, Noam Chomsky proposed that humans possess a “universal linguistic grammar.” Essentially, the language faculty of the human brain standardizes the languages humans can create. In the passage above, Steinbeck is pressing on the idea that humans have a “universal moral grammar,” too, as Rob recently suggested in an article I would highly recommend (look at me, recommending again…). For instance, just as the sentence “Mary grabbed” prompts us to ask “grabbed what?”, the existence of a crime or victim causes us to seek a perpetrator—even when there isn’t one. This explains why humans throughout history have created many spirits and deities whose sensibilities are routinely offended and whose appeasement is constantly necessary—sometimes even with human sacrifice—to protect against misfortunes we now recognize as either random or outside our control (e.g., natural disasters).5

Now, the people from Sallisaw, Oklahoma know that humans are behind the decision to move them out, so they don’t resort to supernatural explanations. But the inability to put a face or pin a body to the decision—the inability to point a gun at something—drives them nuts in the same way that the sentence “Mary grabbed” would drive them nuts.

Muley once again: “‘Got a fella crazy. There wasn’t nobody you could lay for. Lot a the folks just got tired out lookin’ for somepin to be mad at—but not me. I’m mad at all of it.’” (65)

Given the complexity of the modern world, in which our lives are subject to global forces beyond our control and often our understanding, is it possible that many people feel the same as Muley, only more so? That they’re getting screwed by something they can’t get ahold of? What would it be like, then, if someone came along and embodied that anger? How relieving would it be if that person provided a scapegoat—a person or people to shoot at? History, including the present moment, shows us exactly how powerful that can be.

Anyway, the observation that humans spin out of control when there isn’t a tangible agent of their misfortune is the kind that eventually leads a psychologist to uncover some important property of the brain. Too bad Steinbeck was an author.

“Yes, you should talk,” Casy says to Muley. “Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin’ man can talk the murder right out of his mouth an’ not do no murder.” (72)

Obviously, as a therapist, I was going to include this one, because the idea behind it is one of the central tenets of talk therapy. But it remains just that—an idea. Science hasn’t quite figured out, in the 80+ years since Steinbeck’s writing, whether talking about a feeling softens or amplifies its intensity, or whether talking about an action increases or decreases someone’s likelihood of doing it. For example, a counter-point to Casy’s hypothesis is the conclusion of Tony Soprano’s therapist: that therapy has aided and abetted Tony’s manipulative, antisocial tendencies. Tony wasn’t talking murder out of his mouth; he was working on how to do it better.

Which is right?

Steinbeck acknowledges the complexity of this idea by using “sometimes” twice, and although it may be a bit of a stretch, I think he provides a helpful framework later on for thinking through what this question depends on. Basically, it all comes down to reputation.

Later in the story, we learn that “Old Turnbull,” the father of the person Tom kills, has to be talked down from killing Tom when he gets out of jail. Yet Turnbull takes more convincing than most because “they’s Hatfield blood on his mother’s side in o’ Turnbull, an he’s got to live up to it.” (73) If Old Turnbull didn’t have to live up to his reputation, he could let Tom off the hook much easier. I think this gives us insight into whether Muley is more or less likely to kill someone after talking about it. It all comes down to how his threat is received.

If Muley makes big threats and they are taken seriously, then he has in some sense already accomplished what he wanted to accomplish, which was being taken seriously. To see this a bit more clearly, imagine if Muley had threatened to kill a tractor-man, and Tom responded: “You’re all talk.” Then Muley would have to put up or shut up, wouldn’t he? Tom’s response would increase Muley’s chances of following through, whereas the typical response—“Don’t do it, man. It’s not worth it”—would do the opposite, because the threat (really, the threatener) is being shown respect.

Steinbeck masterfully brings this tricky question into the story and, in my opinion, does it as much (if not more) justice than has been done since. He would have been an excellent therapist, but alas, he was an author instead.

“Funny, ain’t it. All the time we was a-movin’ an’ shovin’, I never thought none. An’ now these here folks been nice to me, been awful nice; an’ what’s the first thing I do? I go right back over the sad things—that night Grampa died an’ we buried him. I was all full up of the road, and bumpin’ and movin’, and’ it wasn’t so bad. But now I come out here, an’ it’s worse now.” (440-441)

Only once Ma Joad has safely established her family in California, among decent folks, does she begin to process the trials of the road. When I first read this scene, I immediately thought of how I often get sick after a period of stress, not during. This is called the let-down effect. While stressed, the body produces hormones which boost the immune system, which is left weakened in their wake. Steinbeck is suggesting that there is a psychological equivalent, 50 years before the let-down effect was formally proposed and began to be studied.

If true, the psychological let-down effect would mean—among other things—that people can be fine while going through what seems like a difficult or even traumatic event. It also suggests that we shouldn’t pre-empt the psychological “processing” that occurs after. If we do, we might end up doing a great disservice, a possibility that is strongly supported by studies showing that when people are asked to recall potentially traumatic events after they occur, they are more likely to develop symptoms of PTSD than those who are left alone.6 So much for Freud’s idea of repression, I guess, and an important caveat to the overeager therapist.

“We won’t have no job if it comes too easy” … “We’ll have a job, all right. These goddamn Okies. You got to watch ‘em all the time. Things get a little quiet, we can always stir ‘em up…” (516)

Even if clinical psychology doesn’t know much—a position I have not been shy about—it has enough sense to protect itself, same as the security officers from the quotation above, who are “guarding” one of the camps the Joads are staying at.

Joan Didion has called this tendency to self-preserve “perpetuating the department.” It’s a subset of the principal-agent problem I discussed in Returning to Ivan Illich. The principal-agent problem describes the misalignment of incentives between a person or group (principal) and the representatives (agents) acting on their behalf. In the quote above, the security guards (agents) are supposed to be providing the owner of the camp (principal) protection from the “goddamn Okies.” But if there isn’t any need for protection, then the guards are out of a job—so they’re incentivized to create some. This helps the security guards at the cost of harming the other two parties.

When it comes to mental health, researchers and practitioners (agents) are supposed to provide society (principal) with more happiness, sanity, and resilience. But all too often, clinical psychology creates dependent consumers instead.7 And they do this in the same way as the guards: by inventing problems so they can provide the solution.8

I mean, just look at some of the garbage that is on Psychology Today right now (8/8/24):

It’s undeniable what these titles are doing. They’re trying to sell a problem so that the viewer will click into the article for the solution. But guess what? 99% of the time, the viewer wasn’t thinking of this “problem” before they saw it.

“People needs—to help,” Sairy Wilson says earlier in the novel. (192) This is as true now as it was then. Most of my colleagues “perpetuate the department” even though they only want to help. But the problem is bigger than them. To solve it, we need third parties with different incentives to look at the big picture and share what they see.9 That is why books like Bad Therapy are so valuable. Oh, and The Grapes of Wrath, which highlighted this dynamic nearly a century earlier.

What Remains

Undoubtedly, I have removed some magic, wisdom, and emotion from these gems by extracting them from the story’s narrative and isolating their most important psychological element. I would only do such a thing—I would only tell what is already beautifully shown—for a good reason. In this case, to show how much of human psychology has already been described by great authors and artists, while scientific proofs for these insights lag significantly behind.

Even my supervisor—someone wholly dedicated to the practice of psychotherapy—advises aspiring therapists to turn to novels, operas, and plays to sharpen their insight and expand their empathy. He often shares this advice in his office, which is adorned with paintings. I likewise encourage the reader to seek humanity’s secrets in art, at least until they can be found in science.

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References

Steinbeck, J. (1939). The Grapes of Wrath. Penguin.

Honorable Mentions

Here are some other quotes from the novel that touch on important themes we’ve discussed at Living Fossils:

“When Grampa was havin’ the most fun, he come clostest to gettin’ kil’t.’” (281)—The higher the risk, the higher the potential reward…which perhaps explains why young people risk more, socially or otherwise: there’s a longer runway for their reward to pay off.
“We had a bath ever’ day here. Never was so clean in my life. Funny thing—use ta be I on’y got a bath ever’ week and I never seemed to stink. But now if I don’t get one ever’ day I stink. Wonder if takin’ a bath so often makes that?” (487)—Daily bathing improves outcomes, but not experience. A person is cleaner, but feels less clean.
“He says it makes him feel lonesome out there in the open havin’ to think what to do next.” (36)—This is about a prisoner who finds his freedom overwhelming and wishes to return to the stability of his confinement, where at least he knows his role. Parenthood, anyone?
“Fella can get so he misses the noise of a saw mill.” (36)—The power of adaptation.
“Makes a fella kinda feel—like a little kid, when he can’t fix nothin’.” (201)—The inability of older people to participate in the vital tasks of a community’s way of living, as Tom Wilson expresses in the quote above fixing cars, is an excellent (and tragic) example of evolutionary mismatch.
“They had not grown up in the paradoxes of industry. Their senses were still sharp to the ridiculousness of industrial life.” (385)—Speaking of the paradoxes of industry and technology…
“Jes’ shut up an’ git to work. You ain’t big enough or mean enough to worry God much. An’ I’m gonna give you the back a my han’ if you don’ stop this pickin’ at yourself.” (426)—An expression of tough love, which perhaps teens need more of.
“Funny thing. I wanta buy stuff. Stuff I don’t need…[When it’s] settin’ out there, you jus’ feel like buyin’ it whether you need it or not.” (560)—We evolved for scarcity; we’re surrounded by abundance. That’s why we can’t distinguish between want and need.

Reich, W. (1949). Character analysis (3rd ed.). Orgone Institute Press, p. 14. Italics original. Or how about this: “By eliminating the actual neurosis (stasis neurosis), the somatic core of the neurosis, it also eliminates the psychoneurotic superstructure” (p. 14). What?

It was also around this time that the modern synthesis in biology emerged. So, I guess psychology had a few irons in the fire. But not many.

The fact that Casy, the preacher in the story, has slept with many women is the dilemma he’s wrestling with when readers are first introduced to him. If he’s slept with so many women (and liked it), can he really be in touch with the Holy Spirit?

This scene from The Sopranos explores the tension borne of a priest’s unavailability.

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, for example, many Romans saw this as punishment from the gods for [insert pet transgression].

Apparently, the reason for this is that people who are asked about the event afterwards form a clearer memory of it, similar to how we better remember someone’s name at a party if we ask ourselves what it is a few minutes after hearing it for the first time. This clearer memory leads to a higher likelihood of PTSD for obvious reasons. Much better if you can forget or adaptively warp the memory.

Importantly, these consumers also have the power to agitate for better services. I think we can understand the shift to shorter, more outcomes-based therapeutic approaches—from psychoanalysis to CBT, for example—as responding to consumer demand, at least in part.

A fair counterargument is that people seek therapy when things aren’t going well, meaning there’s no way for the therapist to enter the picture beforehand. Yet many clinical ideas have found their way into the public drinking water. Plenty of clients are motivated to begin therapy because they’ve been convinced they possess some diagnosis or that “everyone can benefit from therapy.” Even if these things are true, it’s also true that a consumer has been created where previously there was not.

The main reason I am able to be somewhat critical toward clinical psychology is that I could change careers if I wished (I don’t). Most of my colleagues don’t have the luxury of shooting themselves in the foot.