Adam Phillips: 'Against Self-Criticism' (with Q&A)

this lecture as you know is called against self criticism the epigraph is from the painter benjamin robert Hayden's diary and it is a man's Liberty is gone the moment he becomes official Lacan famously remarked that there must be something ironic about Christ's injunction to love our neighbor as thyself because actually people hate themselves indeed it seemed rather as if given the way people treat each other they'd always love their neighbors and the way they love themselves that is with a good deal of cruelty and disregard after all Lacan writes the people who follow Christ were not so brilliant LeConte this moment in his lecture is implicitly comparing Freud with Christ many of whose followers in lakhan's view had betrayed Freud's vision and that meant simply that they read him in the wrong way they had in lakhan's view been a failure of interpretation a failure of literary criticism criticism being notably a phrase in a practice that has had rather more staying power than the idea of literary appreciation or celebration literary appreciation with its patron associations has a width of the effete as criticism always implies something more determinedly intelligent and robust indeed in broaching the possibility being in some way against self criticism we have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism and in which the alternatives of celebration and criticism are determined narrowing of the repertoire and we have to begin to imagine styles of relating in which praise and blame on the only currency but in which praise is preferred in which we praise whatever we can lacombe's comparison is itself a suggestive interpretation of at least one element in Christianity Lacan could be understand understood to be saying here that from Freudian point of view Christ's story about love was a cover story a repression of and a self cure for ambivalence in Freud's vision of things we are above all ambivalent animals wherever we hate we love wherever we love we hate if someone can satisfy us they can frustrate us and if someone can frustrate us we always believed they could satisfy us we criticize when we are frustrated or when we're trying to describe our frustration however obliquely and praise wherever we're more satisfied or want to be an ambivalence does not in the Freudian story mean mixed feelings it means opposing feelings ambivalence has to be distinguished from having mixed feelings about someone Charles Rycroft writes in his appropriately entitled a critical dictionary of psychoanalysis as though an uncritical dictionary would be somehow simple-minded quote it refers to an underlying emotional attitude in which the contradictory attitudes derive from a common source and are interdependent whereas mixed feelings may be based on a realistic assessment of the imperfect nature of the object end of quote love and hate are the common source in this view the elemental feelings would literally apprehend the world and they are interdependent in the sense that you can't have one without the other and that they mutually inform each other the way we hate people depends upon the way we love them and vice versa in this story and given these contradictory feelings are our common source they enter enter into everything we do they are the medium in which we do everything we are ambivalent in Freud's view about anything and everything that matters to us indeed ambivalence is the way we recognize that someone or something has become significant to us this means that we are ambivalent about ambivalence about love and hate and sex and pleasure and each other and so on wherever there is an object of desire in this account there is ambivalence but for its insistence about our ambivalence about people as fundamentally ambivalent animals is also his way of saying that we're never quite as obedient as we seem to be that where there is devotion there's always protest where there's trust there suspicion where there is self-hatred guilt there is self-love we may not be able to imagine a life in which we don't spend a large amount of our time criticizing ourselves and others but we should keep in mind that self-love is always in play self-criticism can be our most a most sadomasochistic way of loving ourselves we are never as good as we should be it seems and neither are other people indeed a life without a so-called critical faculty could seem like an idiocy the quite what kind of idiocy is not entirely clear what are we after all but our powers of discrimination our tastes the violence of our preferences our insufficiency is patent that we do need to bear in mind that to feel not good enough is to have already consented to the standard we're being judged by clearly self-criticism and the self as critical are essential to our sense our picture of our so-called selves it often happens Swift wrote that if a lie be believed for only an hour it has done its work and there's no further occasion for it the lie that self-criticism can so easily be the relentless miss naming of the self seems to require endless reiteration and by the same token nothing makes us more critical more confounded more suspicious or appalled or even mildly amused than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless criticism that we should be less impressed by it and start really loving ourselves or at least the self-criticism should cease to have the hold over us that it does one reason for example that we might be less impressed less in all of the part of ourselves that criticized ourselves is that there is one very striking fact about it that I will come back to the self-critical part of ourselves that Freud calls the super-ego is remarkably narrow-minded it has an unusually impoverished vocabulary and it is like all propagandists relentlessly repetitive it doesn't as they say do us justice it is cruelly intimidating lack on rights of the obscene super-ego and it never brings us any news about ourselves there are only ever two or three things we're endlessly accusing ourselves of and they are all too familiar a stuck record as we say but in both senses the super-ego is relative it is the stuck record of the past something they're badly not wrong Beckett's line from worst word ho is exactly what it must not say some thing they are badly not wrong it is in short strikingly unimaginative both about morality and about ourselves the cell selves it insists on diminishing will be to meet this figure socially as it were this accusation Eric tur this earn internal critic this unrelenting fault finder we would think there was something wrong with him he would just be boring and cruel we might think that something terrible had happened to him that he was living in the aftermath in the fallout of some catastrophe and we would be right Hamlet we should remember wanted to catch the conscience of the king and thought the play was where it could be caught the plays the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king for catch the OED has to seize or take hold of to ensnare to deceive to surprise to take to intercept to seize by the senses or intellect to apprehend it also had in the 16th century our modern connotation of to catch out but the term derives originally from hunting and fishing clearly it would be a very revealing perhaps overexposing thing to be able to do to be able to catch the conscience of a or the king conscience did not then have simply or solely our modern sense of some kind of internal moral regulation but also meant code in word knowledge and consciousness the dictionary has for sixteen eleven in most thought mind heart to catch the conscience of a king would be to radically expose his most private preoccupations and the words of the dictionary it would be to expose quote the faculty or principle which pronounces upon the moral quality of one's actions or motives these definitions are interesting not least because they raise the question of just how private or in most or intimate conscience is supposed to be and questions about what we should want to know about a king or indeed about any authoritative voice we might wonder for example whether conscience itself has a conscience and so on morality one might think not to mention the religion of state that the king represented would have to be public and yet these definitions can temper with Hamlet intimate the ones morality might also be the most private thing about oneself private from the authority is given that the language of morality was the language of religion and Hamlet was written at a time of considerable religious divisions but also perhaps private in the sense of hidden from the self one might carry a morality live as if a certain morality was true without quite knowing what it was it would be like a morality that had no text to refer to nor even knew perhaps that reference was required an unconscious morality and that is the most extreme the Faculty or principle which pronounces upon the moral qualities of one's actions or motives may have no discernable or remotely popular cultural moorings so in speaking one's mind one might be speaking all sorts of other Minds some recognizable some not Hamlet Brian Cummings wrote in his book mortal thoughts quote far from speaking his mind confronts us with a fragmentary repository of alternative selves and searches within for the limits of being once there is the idea of alternative selves there will be questions about the limits of being about what or who we can take ourselves to be if conscience can be caught like a fish like a criminal it might be part of that fragmented fragmentary repository of alternative selves that are like a troupe of actors if the play is the thing then we can say that it was useful to have a cultural form in which the conscience of a king or indeed of any one conscience itself being like a king could be caught exposed seen to be like a character and therefore thought about and discussed what does the conscience of the king or of anyone actually look like who or what does it resemble what does it where being able to reflect on one's conscience being able to look at the voice of conscience from bearing points of view is itself a radical act one that psychoanalysis would turn into a formal treatment after all if the voice of conscience is not to be obeyed what is to be done with it Freud it's worth remembering uses Hamlet in the interpretation of dreams as among other things a way of understanding the obscene severity of conscience in what seems in retrospect Becht a rather simple picture of a person Freud proposed that we were driven by what worked quickly acculturated biological instincts tempered by controls and prohibitions internalized from the culture through the parents conscience that Freud would later incorporate into his notion of the super-ego was there to protect and prohibit the individual from desires that endangered him or were presumed to in Freud's view we have conscience that we may not perish of the truth the truth of our desire Hamlet was unusually illuminating for Freud because it showed him how conscience worked and how psychoanalytic interpretation worked and how psychoanalysis could itself become part of the voice of conscience that conscience was voracious in its recruitment the loathing which should drive Hamlet on to revenge Freud writes is replaced in him by self-reproach 'as by scruples of conscience which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish end of quote Hamlet in Freud's view turns the murderous aggression he feels towards Claudius against himself conscience is then the consequence of uncompleted revenge originally there were other people we wanted to murder but this was too dangerous so we murder ourselves through self-reproach and we murder ourselves to punish ourselves for having such murderous thoughts and we have to be clear about this for already is using Hamlet to say that conscience is a form of character assassination the character assassination of everyday life we are continually if unconsciously mutilating and deforming our own character indeed so unrelenting is this internal violence in Floyds view that we have no idea what we are like without it we know virtually nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves before we have a chance to see ourselves or to put it differently we can only judge what we recognize ourselves as able to judge what can't be judged can't be seen indeed Freud's way of formulating this shows us how conscience obscures self-knowledge and the intimate intimates that this may be its primary function that the judge self can only be judged but not known that guilt hides the self in the Geiser exposing it and this n allows us to think that is it is complicitous not to stand up - not to contest this internal tyranny by what is only one part a small but loud part of the self so frightened are we by the super-ego that we identify with it we speak on its behalf to avoid antagonizing it so complicity is delegated bullying tragedy is the genre that shows us what is at stake in contesting and abiding by conscience and it's related terms so in this play or rather in one way of seeing this play Hamlet is arguing with his own and other people's consciences with unique eloquence and subtlety Hamlet Freud intimates has such complex self rumination and such relentless self-accusation the two being virtually synonymous because of the violence he's been unable to enact the drama is internalized Hamlet's battling with his conscience not the voice of conscience alone but the voice is called up in Hamlet to contest it is the drama of the play so Hamlet we should notice is a genius of self-reproach because of the dialogues with his conscience he can engage in in this play and in this sense literature might be the thing to catch the conscience the dialogues around and about self-criticism seem like one of the most imaginative things we can do Hamlet captures our imagination because of because of what has captured his imagination and the ways in which it has captured this imagination it is the links between self-criticism and what Brian Cummings called the limits of being that Shakespeare dramatized is in Hamlet indeed it's only because our consciences are as they are are the kind of artifact we have made for ourselves that there is such a thing as tragedy at all though tragedy has been the cultural form in which we've been trying to reveal something not about the real horror of life but about the horror of life lived under the aegis of a certain kind of conscience self-criticism is nothing if it is not the defining and usually the over defining of the limits of being but ironically if that's the right word the limits of being are announced and enforced before so called being has had much of a chance to speak for itself the Freudian super-ego is the limit that forbids you to discover your own limits it is pre-emptive in its restrictive Mnet's conversation with himself and others about conscience allows him to speak in ways no one had quite spoken before it is then of some interest I think that Freud chooses Hamlet to start really thinking about conscience and that thinking about conscience requires thinking about tragedy there is it dawns on Freud something we may need to be freed from after interpreting Hamlet's apparent procrastinations in the play with the newfound authority of the newfound psychoanalyst Freud then needs to add something by way of qualification that is at once itself a loophole and a limit but just as all neurotic symptoms Freud writes and for that matter dreams are capable of being over interpreted and indeed need to be if they are to be fully understood so all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single impulse in the poet's mind and are open to more than a single interpretation end of quote it is as though Freud's guilt about his own aggression in asserting his interpretation of what he calls the deepest layers in Hamlet his claim to sovereignty over the text and the character of Hamlet leads him to open up the play having closed it down the Freudian super-ego always has a sovereign interpretation of the person's behavior we consent to the supriya's interpretation we believe our self approaches are true we are over impressed without noticing that that is what we are being you can only understand anything that matters Freud says dreams neurotic symptoms people literature by over interpreting it by seeing it from different aspects as the product of multiple impulses over interpretation here means not settling for one interpretation however apparently compelling it is indeed the implication is and here is Freud's ongoing suspicion i ambivalence about psychoanalysis the implication is that the more persuasive the more compelling the more authority of the interpretation is the less credible it is or should be it might be the violent attempt to presume to set a limit where no limit can be said if one interpretation explained Hamlet we wouldn't need Hamlet anymore as a play would have been murdered so Authority wants to replace the world with itself authority is there to tell us what we should enjoy so over interpretation then means not being stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by it means assuming that to believe one interpretation is to radically misunderstand the object one is interpreting and interpretation itself tragic heroes always under interpret always emperors of one idea indeed the tragic hero in the guise of collaboration is always the enemy of what Freud calls and calls for over interpretation Hamlet we could say is a great over interpreter of his experience and it is this the sheer range and complexity of his thoughts an interest in his thought from different aspects that makes him such an unusual so-called tragic hero and that gives Hamlet I think its unique status Emerson was distinguished Santayana wrote not only by what he knew by the number of ways he had of knowing it fraud was beginning to fear this moment interpreting dreams when he was writing about Hamlet and rightly as it turned out that psychoanalysis could be undistinguished if it had only one way of knowing what it thought it knew restoring on Freud at this moment interpreting dreams prompted by his reading of Hamlet that psychoanalysis at its worst could be a method of under interpretation and to take that seriously was to take the limits of psychoanalysis seriously and indeed the limits of any description of human nature that organizes itself around one essential metaphor comparing Hamlet with the second it readings of Hamlet as an oedipal crisis would soon more than confirm Freud's misgivings about the uses and misuses of psychoanalysis indeed it confirms dealers and guitarists pointed anti Oedipus that the function of the Oedipus myth and psychoanalysis is paradoxically often to restore law and order to contain within a culturally prestigious classical myth the unpredictable prodigal desires that Freud had unleashed so there is Cummings distinction between the notion of Hamlet speaking is mind as opposed to speaking a fragmentary repository of alternative selves and there is Freud's authoritative psycho ending interpretation of Hamlet highly qualified by a subsequent promotion of over-interpretation and Shakespeare's and Hamlet's troupe of actors who will perform a play that will be the thing to catch the conscience of a king and there is of course Hamlet's question in the famous soliloquy in which Hamlet tells us something about suicide and something about death and something about all the unknown and unknowable future experiences the death also represents and he does this by telling us something about conscience or rather two things about conscience the first quarter of hat quarter of Hamlet has quote thus conscience does make cowards of us all while the second quarter has thus conscience does make cowards if conscience makes cowards of us all then we're all in the same boat that's just the way it is if conscience makes cowards we can more easily wonder what else it might be able to make either way and they are clearly different conscience makes something of us it is a maker if not of selves then of something about ourselves it is an internal artist of a kind for it will say that the super-ego that as we shall see as both similar to and different from conscience is something we make that then in turn makes us into something into certain kinds of people just to say Frankenstein's monster makes Frankenstein into something that he wasn't before he made the monster the super-ego I want to say after Freud casts us as certain kinds of character it is it as it were tells us who we really are it is an essentialist it claims to know us in a way that no one else including ourselves can ever do and like a mad God it is omniscient it behaves as if it can predict the future by claiming to know the consequences of our actions when we know in a more imaginative part of ourselves that most actions are morally equivocal and change over time in our estimation and apparently no apparently self-destructive act is ever only self-destructive no good is purely and simply that it is the sovereign interpreter and it forbids what Freud calls usefully over interpretation the phrase making us wonder what the standard of proper or sufficient interpretation might be if this second reading is over interpretation and over interpretation is required what is the norm and what kind of norm is it if this excess is necessary the super-ego tells us what we take to be the truth about ourselves self-criticism that is to say is none forbidden pleasure we seem to relish the way it makes us suffer it gives and is given and forbidden pleasure a bad name unfitting pleasures are always the pleasures we don't particularly want or need to think about we just implicitly take it or granted that each day will bring its necessary quotient of self disappointment that every day we will fail to be as good as we should be but without our being given the resources the language to wonder who or what is setting the pace and where these rather punishing standards come from how can we find out what we think of all this when conscience never lets go the new Arden Hamlet glosses conscience quote some commentators argue that conscience means introspection here rather than a sense of morality certainly the context indicates that Hamlet means fear of punishment after death rather than innate sense of good and bad and a quote the ambiguities i've said between conscious conscience as internment ation and as opposed to conscience as in a morality is integral to the matter at hand the question is whether there is more to our inner worlds than our sense innate or otherwise of good and bad or indeed whether there are multiple or competing or largely unconscious moralities that we live by unwittingly Hamlet makes us wonder if conscience makes us cowards what is conscience like cowardice after all maybe as the dictionary puts it the quote display of ignoble ignoble fear in the face of pain danger or difficulty a coward being quote a pusillanimous person that is someone code wanting firmness of mind mean-spirited cowardice is deemed to be unimpressive inappropriate shameful fear we are cowardly when we're not at our best or as we should be when frightened there are in other words acceptable and unacceptable versions of fearfulness and this means we should be fear in certain ways and fearful of certain objects feel again everything else is subject to cultural norms so if conscience makes cowards it demeans us it's the part of ourselves that humiliates us that makes us in that horrifying phrase ashamed of ourselves but what if it makes the very selves that it encourages us to be ashamed of what if it makes us into humiliated objects by always under interpreting by being so starkly narrow-minded indeed as Pham --let famously tells us sometimes it torments us by stopping us killing ourselves when our lives are actually unbearable it can as Hamlet can quite can't quite say be a kind of torturer even making us go on living when we know in a more imaginative part of ourselves that our lives become intolerable conscience that is to say can seduce us into betraying ourselves indeed in Freud's figure of the super-ego as we shall see it's the part of our mind that makes us lose our minds the moralist that prevents us from evolving a personal a more complex and subtle morality prevents us from finding by experiment say what maybe the limits of our being so enriched of the third says in the final act of the play Oh coward conscience how does our flicked me a radical alternative is being proposed that conscience makes cowards of us all because it is itself cowardly we believe in we identify with the starkly condemned Natori this punitive ly forbidding part of ourselves and yet this supposedly authoritative part of ourselves is itself a coward we are afflicted with its cowardice conscience is intimidating because it is intimidated what we might wonder and this was to be Freud's question is our conscience intimidated by if it is not intimidated by God and how is it and why is it that morality as we've conceived of it is born of intimidation what other kind of morality might there be if it is as Richard says coward conscience then we might have been fearing the wrong object in the wrong way if we've been living by a certain kind of forbidding morality what would an unfitting morality look like we have to imagine not that we are cowardly but that we've been living by the morality of a coward so this - we need to consider that the ferocity of our conscience might be a form of cowardice conscience clearly protests too much there our morality is inspired by fear but what would a morality be or be like that was inspired by desire it would as Hamlet's great soliloquy perhaps suggest be a morality a conscience that had a different relation to the unknown the coward after all always thinks he knows what he fears and knows that he doesn't have the wherewithal to deal with it the coward like Freud's super-ego is in this sense - knowing a coward is a person or rather the Cowardly part of ourselves is like a person who must not have a new experience a character one of Norman Mailer's novel says you learn everything fighting your fear the conscience says this is a fear you can't fight Hamlet is talking about suicide but talking about suicide is a way of talking about experiences one has never really had before quote who would fardels bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life but that the dread of something after death the undiscover'd country from whose Bourn no traveler returns puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of thus conscience does make cowards unless the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought and enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action the undiscovered country from whose Bourn no traveler returns is also the unknown and unknowable future borne reminding us that our relation to the future is also a continual being borne and something we have to find ways of bearing one of the ways we bear the unknown of the future is to treated as though it was in fact the past and as though the past was something we did know about Freud would formalize this idea in his concept of transference we invent new people supposedly on the but on the basis of past familial relationships as if we knew those people and could use that knowledge as reliable guide this fear of death and of the unknowable future the fear that it will be one way or another only punishing as our conscience instructs us makes us cowards there is we should note in this so-called melancholia no expectation that the unknown will either be better than expected or wholly other than the way it can be imagined the native hue of resolution something perhaps more innate the dictionary has natural to a person is then sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought as if to say thinking like this thinking as conscience makes us think is like an illness if there is a pale cast of thought there must be or could be a bright or brilliant or full-blooded cast of thought cast of thought reminding us of the cast of a play and that thoughts might be cast like act as a cast thought as it were in roll thoughts as playing parts thoughts are scripted conscience as scripted can never be out of character and we may never be quite able to work out who wrote the script it's likely in the context and in the moment of the play that Hamlet as the editors Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor say is talking about fear of punishment after death the life after death as conceived by the contested Christianity's that Shakespeare inhabited but Hamlet is also talking about in the context of this play a play acutely self-conscious about its own theatricality how conscience feeds us our lines and whether indeed conscience feeds us our best lines especially given its pale cast of thought talking about conscience though and of course the prospect of death gives Hamlet some of his best lines if conscience doesn't always feed us our best lines Hamlet at least suggests talking and writing a bad conscience might conscience in it's all too impoverished vocabulary and it's all too serious and suffocating drama needs to be over interpreted under interpreted it can only be taken on its own terms it can only be propaganda the Supriyo only speaks propaganda by the self which is why it is so boring and so easy to listen to psychoanalysis was to be about whether the super-ego not conscience but akin to it could be changed by read ascription something is unrelenting as our internal soliloquies of self-reproach Freud realized necessitated unusually imaginative read descriptions without such read descriptions and Hamlet of course is one what Brian Cummings calls the fragmentary repository of alternative selves will be silenced the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune may be as nothing compared with the murderous mullings and insinuations and distortions of the super-ego because it is the project of the super-ego as conceived off by Freud to render the individual utterly solipsistic and incapable of exchange so self mortified so loathsome so inadequate so isolated so self-obsessed so boring and bored so guilty that no one could possibly love or desire them the solitary modern individual and his fraud in super-ego a master and a slave in a world of their own who do I fear Richard 3rd Richard the third asks at the end of his play myself there's no one else by like all unfair burden pleasures self-criticism self-reproach is always available and accessible what needs to be understood is why is it so on for bidden and why is it a pleasure and following on from this house it come about that we're so bewitched by our self-hatred so impressed and credulous in the face of our self criticism as unimaginative as it usually is why is it that is to say akin to a judgment without a jury a jury after all represents some kind of consensus as an alternative to autocracy when Alden and Sidney wrote in his discourse concerning government that quote the strength of every judgment consists in the verdict of these juries which the judges do not give that 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 be then a refuge 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 the culpability will always be more complicated than it looks or the move - look that self-criticism when it isn't useful in the way any self-correcting approach can be is self-hypnosis it is judgment a spell or curse not as conversation it is an order not a negotiation it is dogma not over interpretation psychoanalysis that is to say sets itself the task of once you have a conversation with someone call it the super-ego who because he knows what a conversation is is definitely never going to have one the super-ego is a figure for the supreme narcissist and is a supreme narcissist self-reproach is rarely an internal trial by jury the Freudian super-ego is a boring and vicious soliloquized with an audience of one because the super-ego in Freud's view is a made voice are 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 and non secular idea of conscience separating out conscience from his new apparently secular concept of the super-ego involves Freud in all the contradictions attendant on unraveling one's history to put it as simply as possible Freud's parents for its forebears most of the people living in fantasy Acula Vienna probably thought of themselves as having consciences and whatever they felt about these conscience is they were moralistic and more or less ignoring legacy of a religious past they were a cultural inheritance Freud wanted to describe what was in effect the secular heir of these religious and secular eyes religious conscience --is the super-ego we see how one part of the ego fraud rights and mourning of melancholia sets itself over against the other judges it critically and as it were takes it as its object and a quote the mind so to speak splits itself in two and one part sets itself over the other to judge it it takes it as its object that is to say the super-ego treats the ego as though it were an object not a person in other words the super-ego the inner judge radically miss recognizes the ego it treats it for example assert and answer back so it doesn't have a mind of its own it's noticeable how merciless and unsympathetic we can be to ourselves in our self-criticism it is intimated that the ego ourselves as we know ourselves to be is the slave of the super-ego how have we become enslaved to this part of ourselves or rather how and why have we consented what's in it for us or indeed for someone else and in what sense is the super-ego Freud's implied critique of the judeo-christians religions and their God internally there is a judge and a criminal but no jury Annabel Patterson writes in her book early modern liberalism of Alton and Sidney quote that his agenda was to move the reader gradually to understand that the only guarantor against partisan jurisprudence was shared jurisprudence elico frauds agenda in psychoanalysis continuing in this liberal tradition was the attempt to create to experiment with the possibility of shared internal jurisprudence self-criticism might be less jaded and jayden more imaginative and less spiteful more of a conversation the enslaved and judged ego could have more than his judge to appeal to the psychoanalyst would be the patient's ally in this project suggesting juries offering multiple perspectives on under interpreted actions under interpreted that is by the patient himself this of course was not possible at least in quite this way in a monotheistic religion or an absolutist state to whom could the modern individual appeal in the privacy of his own mind to which Freud would answer through the experiment of psychoanalysis there's more to a person more parts more voices more fragmentary alternative selves than the judge and the judged there is in effect a repressed repertoire where judgment is their conversation should be and we can add where there is absolute authority there is the sabotaging of a conversation where there is dogma there is an uncompleted experiment when there is self condemnation it is always more complicated than that mercilessness is cowardice the super-ego lupron shrimp until it's right in their language of psychoanalysis is quote one of the agencies of the personality as described by Freud the super egos role in relation to the ego may be compared to that of a judge or a censor Freud sees conscience self observation and the formation of ideals as functions of the super-ego end of quote it's useful to call the super-ego an agency because it has agency and the complimentary alternatives is like a sensor or a judge speaks of the punitive of the forbidding and the restrictive so paradoxically being forbidden something being forbidden to speak or to act or to think or to desire in certain ways it can be itself a nun forbidden pleasure turning oneself into an object can also be a nun forbidden pleasure the object of censorship and judgment but what is also perplexing and adds insult to injury is that Freud's super-ego because it is more than conscience because it includes this traditional form is also in a very limited sense also benign it is the provider and the guardian of what Freud calls are evil ideals the ego ideal LaPlante and pointless right code constitutes a model to which the subject attempts to conform and once again Freud prefers the multiple view each individual he writes is a component part of numerous groups he is bound by ties of identification in many directions and he's built up his ego ideal on the most various models and a quote the ego ideal is both composite made up from many cultural models and influences and divisive it keeps alternative models at bay but it can also sometimes be inclusive in this ambiguity which Freud can never quite resolve he's wondering just how constricted the modern individual really is or has to be in making the ego ideal at its best the ego has over interpreted his culture beginning with the family she's taken whatever she can use from her culture to make up her own ideals for herself whereas the super-ego a sensor or judge Freud believes is simply an internalized version of the prohibiting father a kind of brain washer the father who says the eatable child do as I say not as I do but the super-ego by definition despite for his qualifications under interprets the individuals experience in the Freudian story the father is never imagined if enough about the Sun and so vice versa it is in this sense moralistic rather than moral like all like a malign parent it harms in the guise of protecting it exploits in the guise of providing good guidance in the name of health and safety it creates a life of terror and self estrangement there is a difference that makes all the difference between not doing something out of fear of punishment and not doing something because one believes it is wrong guilts that is to say is not necessarily a good clue to what one values it's only a good clue about what or who one fears not doing something because one will feel guilty if one does it is not necessarily a good reason not to do it morality born of intimidation is immoral psychoanalysis was Freud's attempt to say something new about the police we can see the ways in which Freud is getting the super-ego to do too much work for him it's a sensor a judge a dominating and frustrating father and it carries a blueprint of the kind of person the child should be and therefore should want to be and this reveals something of the difficulty of what Freud is trying to come to terms with the difficulty of going on with the cultural conversation about how we describe so-called inner Authority or individual morality but in each of these multiple functions the ego seems paltry merely the slave the doll the ventriloquist dummy the object of the super-ego superscriptions the super-ego thing and the year the biological drives that drive the individual are also supposed to be as far as as possible the victims the objects of the super-ego censorship and judgment the sheer scale of the forbidden and the forbidding in this system is obscene and yet in this system in this vision of things all this punitive forbidding becomes paradoxically one of our primary unfor biddin pleasures we are by definition forbidden to find all this forbidding forbidden indeed we find ways of getting great deal of pleasure from our restricted nasai in Freud's view has our very own predatory self-criticism become one of our greatest pleasures how's it come about that we so much enjoy the picture of ourselves as objects and as objects of judgment and censorship what is this appetite for confinement for diminishment for unrelenting unforgiving self-criticism and criticism of others and Freud's answer is beguiling ly simple we fear loss of love fear of loss of love means forbidding certain forms of love incestuous level interracial love or same-sex love or so-called prefer sexuality or loving what the parents don't love we need in the first instance the protection and cooperation of our parents in order to survive so a deal is struck or in a different language there is a social contract the child says so to speak to the parents I will be what you need me to be as far as it's possible in exchange for your love and protection not unlike Hobbes the story about sovereignty the protection required for survival is paramount everything must be sacrificed except one's life for this safety is preferred to desire desire a sacrifice for security idiosyncrasy is waylaid but this supposed safety at least in Freud's version comes a considerable cost at the cost in effect of being turned into by being treated as an object it depends upon our being made to feel that we are the kind of creatures that need an excessive amount of critical and condom Natori scrutiny we must be crammed packed with forbidden desires if so much censorship and judgment is required we are encouraged to believe by all the censorship and judgment that forbidden transgressive pleasures are what we really crave that really essentially deep down we are criminals we need to be protected primarily from ourselves from our wayward desires what this regime doesn't allow us to think clearly is that we are crammed packed with unfulfilled desires or that our moral ideals could be anything other than forbidding we cannot easily imagine for example quote the moral ideal being presented as attractive rather than imperative as the 19th century philosopher Henry Sidgwick put it just as the overprotected child believes that the war must be very dangerous and he must be very weak if he requires so much protection and the parents must be very strong if they're able to protect him from all this similarly we've been terrorized by all the censorship and judgment into believing that we are essentially radically antisocial and indeed dangerous to ourselves and others we must be the only animal that lives as though this grandiose absurdity were true thank you anybody would like to ask a question do I was very interested that you were suggesting this possibility of a different or immorality based on desire and I would like to know what what you imagine that could be how might we have this you know there's artists not based on remember either morality it's not based on the forbidden but on undesired or celebration or whatever I too would like to know what that would have known but I can imagine a more or less intimidated life so it seems to me in a way the problem is caught within itself because it may be the reason that we can't easily answer a question like that is because we haven't got the wherewithal to do it because whatever those parts of ourselves are they're undeveloped so to speak or thwarted or simply quelled by such severe internal judgment so that's why it seems to be Psychonauts not only cyclones but Psychonauts is an interesting experiment in this which is if you can in any way modify internal intimidation what do then think and feel and want so they're in a monetary units but in psychoanalytic free association what free association is is persuading a solve is that we don't know the value of what we think and feel before we say it in as it's in the saying of it we might discover that whereas of course the internal judgment the super-ego in its omniscience has already decided in this story what it is permissible for us to say and think and feel so I think the so-called method of free associate Association is their attempt to loosen this up to find out what you might say insofar as you're able to suspend these judgments and I think what it does is it puts a great onus on the listener it means the jokes only as good as its listener so that you're dependent upon the person you're talking to not colluding with the internal authorities so if you say something that it feels inadmissible and the other person calls the police you're in trouble and psychoanalysis isn't there is an attempt not to call the police and I'm not a not with a view to being immoral or breaking and some sort of special exciting way but finding out what else might happen then if you don't call the police and it's an experiment it's not as though it promises a better life but it might do and I think you know the point it's like what rôti said Noemi which is that we didn't say this bit but that something is a symptom because it doesn't get us the life we want it's only problems against a life we want so the question is how free are we internally to think about what a life might be that we would want well it's very hard to do that if you've got a bully staring you in the face and I can't answer your question could I'm going to just speak up on that a little bit further and take you back to the late 60s in my coozer and trying to build bridges between Marxism and psychoanalysis and surely that late 60s Mormon was an attempt to open up and to overthrow and to explore desire with all kinds of positive and negative consequences that were no living with could you see something about that well I think that's true I don't I'm not knowledgeable after you answer your question detail but certainly I mean one dimensional man and Norman O'Brien's life Gans death and all that and Lange and all those things I think where it was a moment culturally when there were some people who were beginning to think that if psychoanalysis wasn't a sort of sophisticated form of adaptation what else could it be and what else is it would it be possible for us to feel if we weren't under the scrutiny under the intimidation of authoritative voice is telling us what we should enjoy and though enjoyment became the real issue and I think one of the good bits of Lacanian analysis is its emphasis on enabling somebody to find out where their real enjoyment might be of course the problem with it there's novice moral problem with us which is they're really enjoying maybe something that some of us don't really like but nevertheless it would seem to be it might be useful and but this too is experimental to have a place in the culture where you can at least consider what your real enjoyment might be opposed to only having to dream it or close down become depressed and narrow-minded but I think since that moment there's been very very little that I know of except in France I mean de leurs and guitar e and de leurs himself is clearly trying to show us I mean it de leurs has an interview somewhere something like the analyst is the one person you can't talk to because he always already knows what you're talking about say well that's there's a truth in that obviously so it's you can only go as far as your analysts conscience lets you and that's why there's got to be degree of mutuality in the process thank you for a fascinating lecture and I I just want to take up with the last person or the last but one asked and I wonder whether today given the kind of world that we live in with with the pornos fear and and a great children being the children of permissive parents and so on whether there's a way as some have said that in fact super you're now puts out injunctions to us to enjoy and that sexual drives desire are now things that we are forced to undertake by this rather authoritative super-ego I mean has there been a topsy-turvy since Freud's day well I think that's what I mean when I talked about the super-ego is voracious in its recruitments because one of the most pernicious things about this whatever it is is that it can it can it can be recruited in very very damaging ways I mean the tyrannical injunction enjoy yourself is obviously paralyzing the problem is is the idea of injunction because the super-ego gives injunctions it tells you what you should want love and joy etc well the attempt in this paper and in this trips I can also bits of psychoanalysis is to say if people don't give each other orders what could they do given that in certain in child-rearing there has to be a certain amount of ordering going on but it seems to be very much about the way in which we are acculturate acculturated to preempt each other's thoughts and feelings and I think that what we should be suspicious of or what we should least be able to discuss is anything that smacks of an injunction where after we all have a conversation we can in which we can decide whether that's a really good injunction or not but I think anything that demands enjoyment is the problem going back to your own talk could you tie in or say something about Freud's idea of criminals from a sense of guilt does where does that fit in does it fit in I've never quite understood it well one of the ways it fits in is it's a simple idea a way I think which is that when one is guilty about something but unconscious of that one seeks out a crime to locate what one feels guilty about and is a is a poor criminal and intends to get caught so one can have the requisite punishment so that what we're suffering from is our guilt not our enacted criminality so the risk of being made I mean it so this is one of the ironies of this system is that the more guilty the super-ego makes us the more violent we are because we require more and more and more punishment and we require more and more and more more intelligibility because we have a feeling of unease and we don't know what it's about well once I've committed my crime at least I've localized it I've organized it back there you talked about Hamlet and then Annabelle Patterson talking about Sydney and liberal ideas I wonder how far you saw there being some kind of historical moment at which things have changed or whether these are just texts that you thought you find interesting to talk about things that you think hold more generally it is the second but I wish it could be the first because I just read things that interest me and if they seem relevant pertinent I put them in but if I was more knowledgeable and more scholarly I'd work this out differently and I'm not a psychoanalyst and so I'm speaking from a certain amount of ignorance here but um I was hearing a great deal of conflation between conscience and the super-ego and I was thinking that conscience would counteract the super-ego if that makes any sort of sense no I mean that's certainly I think that and I think I mentioned it but you're right it's misleading to conflate these two terms because when Freud's talk about the super-ego he's mostly talked about something much more punitive and severe as you could think of conscience as the guardian of our better selves so that as you were a good conscience yeah in a certain sense might be precisely the part of oneself that holds the things that one values most what that doesn't get round though is the question of whether one values those things most how one came to value them and how much their injunctions and how much their so-called choices exciting the risk is that you can produce a relatively benign past realized version of conscience which sounds good and a horrible thing called a super-ego well I think the risk is that conscience can in a way be a cover story for something quite punitive it doesn't have to be but it could be what while you were talking I started to think about the economy and the problems at the moment of how in some ways we feel quite dominated by people who seem completely bereft of self-criticism who are the financial sector and the super-rich and people who don't pay their taxes and don't seem to mind not paying their taxes and seem to sort of live without morality or super-ego or law and we seem to want to you know for them to at least feel bad when they go to bed at night if not actually end up in prison and they don't seem to and this seems to be a major theme of our current economy and politics and culture right now is there anything you'd say about that is it is that just a misrepresentation of no in terms of how this relates to problems of sort of pathological or seemingly pathological people who have become a kind of preoccupation for us in our economy in our politics I don't know where you are but I agree with you obviously if you if somebody claims to be against self-criticism you'd have to wonder what they're for well I'm not against self-criticism but like everybody else I'm against the wrong kind of self-criticism so clearly there are people that I think should be infinitely more critical themselves but my assumption here is within the terms of the story that one of the worst defenses against the terror of one super-ego is to have no super-ego is to to all intents and purposes dissociated so I can commit all sorts of crimes during the day and sleep perfectly well but I've got a somewhere in my world there are many people I loathe and despise and feel intimidated by now it could be the pathetic weak law-abiding people who think I shouldn't be doing what I'm doing but I don't think there's a real way out of this I just think that people should be educated in school to have certain kinds of conversations in which they might be able to clarify what they care about most because somebody who apparently lives guilt-free is living in a very very dangerous delusion it seems to me more than that I can't say I'm here um I was just thinking about when you were talking about over interpretation and under interpretation and what it would be like if an interpretation was perfect and I was sort of seeing it as I like this is under interpretation and then this is perfect perfect interpretation which is kind of like awful because it's nothing and if you over interpret then it enables this one to kind of come back and have some kind of relationship with this one and I was wondering if that related to the super-ego and the ego and if the ego is strong enough then the super-ego could be bossy and then the ego could kind of I was sort of just wondering about that well I think perfection is a super-ego term and I think that it would be misleading to think there could be a perfect interpretation because the question be perfect from whose point of view you know what what are the criteria I think what Freud is saying is that the risk is under interpretation of which perfect interpretation would be one fantasy in others once I've made my perfect interpretation interpretation has stopped what Freud is saying at his best is when interpretation stops that's when the trouble starts and that's what he means by over interpretation I think what was your phrase when you were talking about whatever was in the middle from under and over you had a funny I can't remember but I think it was something about what what does this tell us about our criteria for sufficient interpretation sufficient thanks for really and stimulating and fascinating talk and it made me wonder about I think kind of having a repertoire our variety of of behaviors are and choices at least and therefore of course a repertoire of things that might be therapeutic is also probably desirable to some people or me at least but I just wondered to what extent you think that the current may be predominance of the NHS funded CBT short brief interventions are perhaps a foreclosing of such a repertoire and are perhaps imposing and you might call omniscient kind of predetermined rationality on us I mean of course a variety is important and it could be very beneficial for some people but do you think there's a over dominance of that type of approach well I think at least people who want quick fixes acknowledge that we haven't got much time and so I think people should try the therapies they're intrigued by obviously I'd prefer psychoanalysis and that's why I do it but I think it would be silly to start saying signals is better than axial it's a different thing I think it's a shame and again it would be like part of what I think I'm talking about if there was a kind of spurious cultural consensus about therapy I mean if anything worked we'd all be doing it there's a little mystery this so in this culture there's an array of possible things you might do if you have a broken leg there's probably more or less universal consensus of what you should do if of a broken heart there isn't so we are we are left with what's available in the culture and it's partly contingent what you know about who you know what education you had your class etc CBT sounds to me very uninteresting but for some people it's really good so it's as good as it is for those people whom it's good um thank you very much for a very stimulating lecture it's it seems to me that one of the things I've been pondering is to what degree the super-ego is written into the psychoanalytic project in the sense that it pathology eise's the individual from the very start the individual is sick therefore wanting failing and needs healing by the grand master and I wonder if you you know I've been very interested in psycho synthesis Robert Roberto so Jolie's work where he takes the notion of a troupe of actors into the individual and the critic can then speak the dialogue can happen in internal dialogue I wanted you if you just speak to this floor within the heart of psychoanalysis and perhaps other possibilities well I think that it's hard to know which we round this isn't it because on the one hand you could think psychoanalysis has created the very object is then going to treat that must be partly true I think that any psychoanalysis any kind of therapy that pathologize is is potentially part of a problem now it's very comforting to feel that somebody actually knows what's wrong with you can tell you and that once they know what's wrong with you they can then work out what you're going to do I think a psychoanalysis and where needs have it both ways of this I think it needs to be genuinely pragmatic in that sense that is to say not it needs to find out why something is a problem for somebody in the first instance not start from the principle that according to some normative developmental cycle we know what it is for things to go wrong in a life so in the second arts that I would value would start from somebody's own account and sense of what they think is wrong with them what they think they're suffering from if I was then to say Allah or God obsessional compulsive disorder it's in me we would then have a big problem on our hands but if the conversation can be elaborated in a way that there isn't the kind of authority suggested by pathologize ation but there is somebody who know something about something in other they have the experience of having done firstly this sometime then I think you're onto the possibilities of a conversation you might value but I think it's entirely it's entirely to do with whether this is a conversation you feel is worth having just that and hopefully within that conversation the the world of injunctions can be tenderized can be loosened I've got a question and around the fascinating topic we started with of morality without prohibition morality are based on desire and it struck me that utilitarianism is meant to be that project you start off with positive desires and then you do some calculations and you come out with some results and that's why a lot people think it's not it's not a real morality it's a political theory and Bentham was proud of that fact he wanted to get rid of morality so if it leads into rational choice theory and leads into all sorts of scientistic pathways apart from the other kinds of criticisms that be made of utilitarianism do you think the utilitarian way is the right way to start on a project of a morality or a non morality based on desire I think you know I don't I think I think it is useful and illuminating for people to be able to find out or to have conversations in which they can discuss what they take to be the things I matter most of them and either what makes them happy or happier or where their enjoyment is and the imagined consequences of this what I think it would be unwise to do would be on the basis of that to legislate to say I know what will produce the great savage there its number or that I'm going to assume that we're sufficiently similar such that would all want to do this or we'll all value this particular ideal so I think that I think that the it's as though psychoanalysis might prepare you so to speak to go back into the world and see if you can make the kind of consensus you want so it'd be like a preliminary to something but it wouldn't be something you come out of knowing what's best for other people I mean it's likely wild says in the soul of man and socialism which is that selfishness is knowing what other people should want selfishness is meat is needing everyone to agree with me but that's agreeing with Bentham and if you had a as anywhere cloud sourcing mechanism for generating all these new guides for action how about that don't I'd sound oh dear just got one here I just wonder if there's a danger of complicating all this I mean if one cannot afford all the time all the money to go through the process of psychoanalysis not going to do you out of business but if one can't afford that process isn't it possible to develop a degree of self-awareness where basically the bully is seen off the conscience is befriended and that the whole process of orders and severe intimidation become more like Mike the conversation you suggested we should have and the kind of suggestions I mean I'm just fruiting one thing to give a more concrete example I suppose is the 12-step fellowship the 12 steps where people take their own inventory you know it's suggestions it's not orders they they monitor themselves they you know just so they don't completely off the tracks isn't that possible to be done on one's own oh yeah I mean I would I wouldn't want to you for one moment to think I'm suggesting that psychoanalysis here is the answer I just think it's one way and one language for discussing these issues I mean in a way I would hope that people would develop other ways of doing it I mean the money problem is really a big deal here because insofar as people are curious about it of course they depend upon people charging them very little if they don't have any money well if they don't do that they shouldn't be doing it it should be entirely means related because once the psychotherapy health service is destroyed which is being then everything is going to depend upon analyst not loving money more than their patients and who knows where that's possible but I certainly think it would be much better if psychoanalysis gave people the tools to do something that wasn't psychoanalysis that it could be moved on from or the good bits of it could be used in different kind of social groups and so then it would cease to be in any sense a stronghold of some supposedly enlightened wisdom the conversation would go on I my understood you saying towards the end of your talk that the one of the reasons why with we have to think of ourselves as an object is in order to be loved or in order to be because of this dependence we have I I wonder whether this goes counter to another idea we need to think of ourselves as an object for fear of non-existence for fear of the self being only a construct and I mean nature famously said the self is in neurosis and it may be are these two ideas incompatible I wonder I agree with that I mean I think that it the point may be that one feels safe enough to be able to to be an object and a subject that you can allow yourself to be used as an object consenting Lee and and entrusting yourself to somebody else as an object it be guaranteed that you won't be harmed in a way you don't want to be but I think the problem is when one or somebody gets stuck in object status either out of fear of loss of love if they don't or out of fear of their own complexity I think maybe sometime we should stop how long how long does this event go on for anybody know are there any authorities here who can tell thank you

Channel: London Review of Books (LRB)

Views: 58,147

Rating: 4.8391962 out of 5

Keywords: Adam Phillips (Author), Psychoanalysis (Field Of Study), Sigmund Freud (Author), Hamlet (Play), Jacques Lacan (Author), self-hatred

Id: a8mcaCWGFmg

Length: 71min 2sec (4262 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 03 2015

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Perhaps initially