Attention Seeking by Adam Phillips

Author:Adam Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241986738
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

‘The masculine and feminine dispositions are already easily recognisable in childhood,’ he continues. ‘The development of the inhibitions of sexuality (shame, disgust, pity, etc.) take place in little girls earlier and in the face of less resistance than in boys.’ And then by way of summary and conclusion, he writes: ‘Among the forces restricting the direction taken by the sexual instinct we laid emphasis upon shame, disgust, pity and the structures of morality and authority erected by society.’ I cite all these somewhat tediously repetitive examples as a way of asking a question, Freud having alerted us to the provocation of insistent repetition. What is Freud saying, and why does he keep saying it? What are his formulations a shameful relation to?

As I say, shame for Freud is in a category with disgust, pity, aesthetic and moral ideals, the structures of morality and authority erected by society. It is, like them, a form of attention, at once coerced and coercive; it, as it were, makes us see things in a particular way. We could say it is the kind of attention we use when we want to mortify ourselves; each form of attention being a way of getting to a certain kind of experience. Disgust and pity, aesthetic and moral ideals are all described by Freud as forces, ‘mental forces’, that dam and inhibit and restrict and impede and obstruct the sexual instinct, and what he calls its flow and direction; they are ‘resistances’ to sexuality. Everything in his argument is reactive to sexuality; everything is a way of coping with desire (a failing or a ‘refusing’, in D. A. Miller’s language; or a kind of sham). The excessively sexually repressed, the hysterics, require more inhibitions like shame to keep them safe from desire. Children, unlike the hysterics, are ‘essentially without shame’, which means they enjoy exposing their bodies, and particularly their genitals; and are easily and pleasurably curious about other people’s genitals (so shame is also an inhibitor of that essential ingredient of sexuality, curiosity; it is a form of attention that forecloses attention; the saboteur of curiosity, both about itself and about what it has made us ashamed of). And one of the supposedly essential differences between boys and girls, observable in childhood according to Freud, is that the sexuality of girls is inhibited earlier and with less resistance than that of boys. Shame, like all the other resistances to sexuality, is deemed to be a developmental achievement, a prerequisite of acculturation. For Freud, then, it is one of those essential ‘forces’ without which sexuality would flow more freely, and so more disruptively, and thereby endanger the individual and his culture. Sex requires shame just as water, from some people’s point of view, needs to be dammed (the pun is only in English). Without the achievement of shame, it is implied, we might go on exposing our bodies and so our genitals and being wholeheartedly curious about other people’s (or, we might say, about other people). Or at least we would certainly be tempted to.

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