On Balance by Adam Phillips

Author:Adam Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429979061
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

III

The Perfectionist

O great and wonderful happiness of man! It is given to him to have that which he desires, and to be that which he wills.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,

Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486)

They are called perfectionists, and this is often how they describe themselves. And it is never clear whether this is a boast (‘my standards are so high and my talents so extraordinary’) or a kind of regret (‘my life is tyrannized by this neurotic obsession’). Either way, and it is usually both, depending on the person’s mood, there is some demand that has to be met, some rules, however obscure, to be followed; scruples or principles that cannot be set aside. As a patient the perfectionist – whether he is an artist or a bureaucrat, a lawyer or a chemist – is never merely an obsessional person. No one knows better than the perfectionist the resistances in his chosen medium, the way it can baffle his desire, and liberate it beyond his wildest dreams. No one knows more than the perfectionist about his own abjection, his own unrelenting incapacity to be as good as he should be. And so the perfectionist often assumes – like his counterpart, the so-called pervert – that to be cured of his symptom would be to lose his life; his disdain for the people who care rather less – for the parts of himself that have dispensed with this tyrannical ambition – is often chilling. The Perfectibility of Man, that great Renaissance and Enlightenment project, may be everywhere ironized today, but the perfectionists are still with us, with their ambivalent complaint. For the perfectionist, to be ‘good enough’ is to be no good. For the perfectionist, for example, there could be no such thing as a good-enough mother.

What the perfectionist knows about, what the perfectionist is trying to ward off as both knowledge and experience is, in Winnicott’s language, catastrophic disillusionment (the nothing that comes from not being all). The perfectionist knows that there is incapacity, insufficiency, incompetence – but it must not be in him. Or, rather, because it is in him all the time – whose potential for self-hatred is greater than the perfectionist’s? – he must work against it. Just as most mothers know that there is no such thing as the perfect mother, but most mothers want to be much more than good enough; similarly, all perfectionists realize that perfection is not possible. They are the victims par excellence of an unrealistically intractable ego-ideal; and they are knowingly the victims of this impossible project, which is part of their torment (for these people it is a rationalization to say that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive). Their incapacity is, by definition, the problem; that it could be a solution to anything – or even a kind of strength or resource – is virtually unimaginable.

Our gods are never resourceless. ‘What is God?’ the catechism asks: ‘God is the Supreme Spirit, Who alone exists of Himself, and is infinite in all perfections.

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