Unforbidden Pleasures by Adam Phillips

Author:Adam Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780374712716
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

III

Like all unforbidden pleasures, self-criticism, or self-reproach, is always available and accessible. What needs to be understood is: why is it unforbidden, and why is it a pleasure? And, following on from this, how has it come about that we are so bewitched by our self-hatred, so impressed and credulous in the face of our self-criticism, as unimaginative as it usually is? And why is it akin to a judgement without a jury? A jury, after all, represents some kind of consensus as an alternative to autocracy (when Algernon Sidney wrote in his posthumously published 1698 Discourses Concerning Government that ‘the strength of every judgment consists in the verdict of these juries, which the judges do not give, but pronounce or declare’, he was making the figure of a judge a spokesperson for a diversity of voices, not a sovereign authority). I want to suggest that guilt – apparently legitimated self-hatred – can also be a refuge. That we need to be able to tell the difference between useful forms of responsibility taken for acts committed, and the evasions of self-contempt (shame is as much about being exposed as about what is exposed). An orgy of self-criticism is always preferable to the other, more daunting, more pleasurable, engagements (or arguments: this doesn’t mean that no one is ever culpable; it means that culpability will always be more complicated than it looks; guilt is always underinterpreted). And that self-criticism, when it isn’t useful in the way any self-correcting approach can be, is self-hypnosis. It is judgement as spell, or curse, not as conversation; it is an order, not a negotiation; it is dogma, not overinterpretation. Psychoanalysis, that is to say, sets itself the task of wanting to have a conversation with someone who, because he knows what a conversation is, is determinedly never going to have one. The superego is both a figure for the supreme narcissist, and is itself a supreme narcissist. Like the referee in football, the superego is always right, even when he is wrong.

The Freudian superego is a boring and vicious soliloquist with an audience of one. Because the superego, in Freud’s view, is a made-up voice – a made-up part – it has a history. Freud sets himself the task of tracing this history with a view to modifying it. And in order to do this he has to create a genealogy that begins with the more traditional, non-secular idea of conscience. Separating out conscience from his new, apparently secular, concept of the superego involves Freud in all the contradictions attendant on unravelling one’s history. To put it as simply as possible, Freud’s parents, Freud’s forebears, like most of the people living in fin de siècle Vienna, probably thought of themselves as having consciences; and whatever else they felt about these consciences they were the more or less acknowledged legacy of a religious past, a cultural inheritance. Their consciences were one of the signs of the traditions they belonged to; their more or less shared assumptions about what to do when.

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