Freud's Helplessness

good afternoon everyone thank you for coming my name is Tony krd and is the director of the Townsend Center at Berkeley it's a pleasure to welcome you all this afternoon I want to say a special word of thanks to our colleagues in the English department have been very generous in allowing us to use this handsome maude Fife room this afternoon for those of you who aren't familiar with the room or the location about an hour from now you'll hear the company Lee singing out five o'clock calling the other scholars busily at work elsewhere to their rest but we'll be then proceeding to what I expect will be a very lively set of questions following Adam Phillips talk some of you know the Townsend Center in recent years has developed a program devoted to the humanities and the public world and these have been lectures and panel discussions seminars with prominent writers intellectuals and artists all focusing on the connections between the lives that we publicly live and share our civic lives in many instances and some of the more inwardly directed concerns of the humanities and you may have noticed or maybe not in which case I'll call it to your attention now that this afternoon's talk by Adam Phillips on Freud's helplessness might better be situated as part of a hypothetical series antidote to that one about the public world being as its title suggests about a figure who was far more drawn to contemplate our private worlds than to anything public about us although of course that's not entirely true and those distinctions break down rather rapidly so the idea of a forum on the humanities in the private world might seem like a bit of a redundancy standing in for a joke but if there's anyone who could disprove that thought I think it would have to be Adam Phillips he's formerly the Chiefs I'll try out psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London and the author of a wide range of books about our not so private lives with fascinating titles like Houdini's box going sane and on flirtation they treat an astonished a broad range of subjects from the poetry of Emily Dickinson Dickinson being one of the escape artists of Houdini's box to the matters of worrying boredom tickling and so forth truth be told he has in fact ventured into questions of politics in his book equals but mostly has remained adherent to a broadly psychoanalytic interpretation of Socrates dictum that the that only the examined life is worth living there's plenty of examination in his work but never at the expense of a prose that is always fascinating supple and surprising in many ways Philips as you may know is the general editor of the new penguin edition of the selected works of Sigmund Freud and a contributor to the London Review of Books as well as many other publications before turning the microphone over to him and by way of doing so I thought I'd just share with you one of those strange kind of weird moments that can only happen in the Google age I was searching under Adam Phillips a couple of weeks ago for some information about some of this earlier works and was presented initially with three sort of starred results the first was a book entitled monogamy the second the Book of Mormon another testament of Jesus Christ which no doubt is something to say about monogamy or not and the third entitled red-hot monogamy it seems that all of these are available or were then new and used from prices ranging from 9.50 nine cents to a penny the real Adam Phillips is of course also the author of monogamy which the New York Observer described as characteristically playful brilliant and profound those are indeed the words that come to mind in describing him and I now have the great pleasure of welcoming Adam Phillips to the podium thank you very much the paper is called Freud's helplessness and the epigraph to the first section is from Auden's poem Mundus at infants we should never dare offer our helplessness as a good bargain without at least promising to overcome a misfortune we blame history or banks or the weather for but this beast dares to exist without shame I am myself alone Richard Duke of Gloucester the future Richard the third boasts towards the end of the third part of Shakespeare's Henry the sixth and to modernly as there's the ambiguity of his being both by himself and only himself but he was also living in what we've come to call an enchanted world of spirits and demons and indeed of God there was a limit set to how alone he could claim to be and indeed a limit set to how much of his singularity he could claim to no conscience is but a word that cowards use he suggests in a covert acknowledgment of his own cowardice and of what we might want to think of as a disavowed part of himself he's registered the word but only as a word and only as a word used by others I am myself alone as a boast rather than a plaint is the description of what Richard thinks he's been able to dispense with it's the claim of a character one critic is called a sardonic narcissist a narcissist is a person whom the need for others is a conundrum the sardonic are in the words of the OED bitter scornful and mocking Richard we can say implicitly but consistently ablates his own helplessness his language about himself in all its tortuous and subtle dissimulation insists on his own invulnerability or rather it is an attempt at invulnerability which is always linked with sadism so it's of interest I think that one of Shakespeare's three uses of the word helpless is in Richard the third the other two are in the comedy of errors the first use of helplessness cited by the OED is 1731 and it is I imagine of some significance that it's a first used in the 18th century the word is used early in the first act by lady Anna she's brought the dead body of her father-in-law King Henry the sixth the man who within the space of the play will become Richard the third has had both her husband and his father murdered and will eventually marry her but at this moment in the play she's faced with a king's body and the impending catastrophe looking at his wounded body and weeping she says lo in these windows that let forth our life I pull the helpless balm of my poor eyes she's helplessly crying and her tears the helpless balm can't help the dead king or herself what she can't help but express the tears she is shedding on no help her helplessness is no help to her it is of course a familiar tapas that helplessness can't be helped and is no help consider Beckett's ill scene ill said quote she sits on erect and rigid in the deepening gloom such helplessness to move she cannot help and the in effect reality of tears is a continual theme in this case her tears can either bring him back to life nor stem the evil that is Richard nothing can make her tears helpful balm indeed helpless balm is a contradiction in terms because if its helpless it isn't balm at all in this desperate scene nothing can be done helplessness is tantamount to hopelessness Lady Anne can refer to the Kings dead body as a holy load but again to our modern or other secular years it could be as such scenes more obviously are in Shakespeare's later tragedies in miniature a scene of what we might have learnt we've learnt a call from Webber disenchantment the acknowledgement that there is no redemptive magic can we experience helplessness can we notice that there may be such a thing as helpless balm without needing to reinsure of the world that is to say without talking of religious providential ism of one kind or another or now of the wonders of science and technology or indeed of art can we acknowledge our helplessness and do without what liova sorry is called the culture of redemption how has it come about that something so fundamental to our being as helplessness is akin for us to hopelessness Richard we might think Anna's Freud did think enacted a maligned solution to his own helplessness what would a benign solution be why to put it as starkly as possible does our helplessness so often tend to make us what we call bad in some character types met with in psychoanalytic work in 1916 Freud uses Richard the third as his example of what he calls the exceptions those people whose neuroses Freud writes quote were connected with some experience of suffering to which they had been subjected in their earliest childhood one in respect of which they knew themselves to be guiltless and which they could look upon as an unjust disadvantage the privileges they claimed as a result of this injustice and the rebellious it engendered had contributed not a little to intensify the conflicts leading to the outbreak of their neurosis end of quote the exceptions have suffered something they could do nothing about and made a privilege of necessity they've been inspired so to speak by a bad bat of helplessness Richard in his opening soliloquy says as paraphrased by Freud quote Nature has done we grievous wrong in denying me the beauty of form which winds human love life owes me reparation for this and I will see that I get it I have a right to be an exception to disregard the scruples by which others let themselves be held back I may do wrong myself since wrong has been done to me end of quote the exceptions in Freud's examples are not the agents of their undoing their victimhood becomes a form of entitlement for Richard it is in a sense an opportunity to invent his own morality or at least to exempt himself from the morality of others either I'm curtailed of this fair proportion he says in the famous soliloquy quoted by Freud cheated a feature by dissembling nature deformed unfinish'd sent before my time into this breathing world scarce half made up and that's so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I halt by them Freud as we shall see comes back to the stark image of being sent before our time into this breathing world scarce half made up richard freud remarks quote is an enormous magnification of something we find in ourselves as well it's an image of Richards original helplessness it is a predicament inflicted like Lady Anne's helpless bomb of Tears he couldn't help it happening to him and this became through his self cure for it no help for him or others none of us choose our feature we all think we have reason to reproach nature and our destiny for congenital and infantile disadvantages for it writes commenting on Richards soliloquy we all demand reparation for early wounds to our narcissism our self-love Freud as we shall also see turns this fundamental situation what we make out of our original helplessness into an explanation of the origins of culture of morality of religion and of art if we all have a sense of ourselves as helplessly disfigured in early childhood we must have a picture a sense of what it would be not to be so disfigured the if only life that will inform our grievance something was done to us or as in Richards case it was as though something was done to us and we were helpless either it couldn't be helped or no help was available helpless then means unprotected it means in this context having an impotence foisted upon us and organizing a life around that fact in this story it's clearly not part of our narcissism part of our self-love to be helpless in this way or it's part of a negative narcissism the specialist conferred by my exceptional suffering and if it wasn't for this helplessness we would not suffer in the way we do what is being conjured here is a counter image of invulnerability the opposite of helplessness in this equation it is our helplessness that makes us so narcissistically vulnerable that makes our self-love so precarious the hell of the narcissist surged freedom and once remarked is the tyranny of his need for the other there is helplessness in other words and there is the lure of self-sufficiency of creating the illusion that be everything to oneself and yet of course in a certain sense helplessness is where we start from or as object relations theorists put it dependences where we start from either we can't get round the fact that as Winnicott put it all philosophers were once babies i want to consider in this paper freud story about helplessness with a view to making a case for it a case for helplessness is something we shouldn't want to think of ourselves growing out of we can become more competent but we shouldn't imagine that we can become less helpless the wonderful phrase learned helplessness reminding us of course that it can be learned and also unlearned moral philosophy charles taylor writes and sources of the self has tended to focus on what is right to do rather than what it is good to be on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life it has no conceptual place left for the notion of the good as the object of our love or our allegiance or as Iris Murdoch portrayed it in her work as the privileged focus of attention or will and a quote in psychoanalysis the question I think has always been about what it is right to do about helplessness rather than about helplessness as integral to the nature of the good life or indeed as the object of our love or our Allegiance I think it should be the privileged focus of our attention they're probably not of our will in the story I'll be telling and that Freud in some ways tells and in some ways doesn't acknowledgement of dependence is no more of a solution to helplessness than the injunction to pull up your socks and this is partly because helplessness is more often than not assumed to be the problem or what we are suffering from rather than a pleasure a strength or a virtue it's not something as it were three cultivate we do not think of development as a project in which we want to become increasingly helpless or one in which we elaborate and sophisticated see for helplessness one of the moral questions assured in by psychoanalysis is what kind of good are the things we can't help but say or do or feel or think or desire I want to add to this the question what good is helpless a question that perhaps inevitably exercised Freud indeed virtually everything Freud wrote was about not only what can't be helped and what can but also and more in Stingley about the moral consequences of our helplessness so what is called helplessness and what good if any could it be in a section of Freud's early project for a scientific psychology entitled the experience of satisfaction for all is trying to give an account in neuronal terms of how the infant the rudimentary person manages the stimulation of appetite it's an interesting passage not least because it shows for it using the language of science in a way that leads him into the language of morality in the terminology the project we see that once the experience of satisfaction becomes the topic the language of neurology becomes permeable to moral preoccupations what Freud calls relief of tension discharge turn inevitably into questions about the good about adequate ethical objects and moral motives Freud Freud is working out an account that it's not how he would have put it of what the philosopher Alastair MacIntyre calls quote the distinctive virtues of dependent rational animals whose dependence rationality and animality have to be understood in relationship to each other when freud talks of the experience of satisfaction he's talking in the first instance of what is conducive to survival and in the second instance as it were to put it rather more ambitiously about what might be conducive to human flourishing satisfaction is the word the experience that links what we've learned to call our desire and our obligation and Freud unsurprisingly can't talk about any of this without invoking the idea of helplessness without indeed making the helplessness of the human infant the heart of the matter this is a long quote experience shows for it rights keeping things as empirical as possible that once appetite occurs the first path to be followed is that leading to internal change eg emotional expression screaming or vascular innovation but no discharge of this kind can bring about any relief of tension because endogenous stimuli continue to be received in spite of it here a removal of the stimulus can only be affected by an intervention which will temporarily stop the release of quantity in the interior of the body and an intervention of this kind requires an alteration in the external world eg eg the supply of nourishment or the proximity of the sexual object and this as a specific action can only be brought about in particular ways at early stages the human organism is incapable of achieving the specific action it's brought about by extraneous help when the attention of an experienced person has been drawn to the child's condition by a discharge taking place along the path of internal change eg the child's screaming the path of discharge that requires an extremely important secondary function is of bringing about an understanding with other people and the original helplessness of human beings is thus the primal source of all moral motives when the extraneous helper has carried out the specific action in the external world on behalf of the helpless subject the latter is in a position by means of reflex contrivances immediately to perform what is necessary in the interior of his body in order to remove the endogenous stimuli the total event then constitutes an experience of satisfaction which has the most momentous consequences in the functional development of the individual end of quote the picture is of the desiring helpless subject filling from within with stimuli and seeking in the first instance relief through physical expression this reflex magic fails because the stimuli of desire keep coming what Freud calls the release of this quantity can only be affected by an intervention by someone else someone outside these specific actions put in inverted commas by Freud can only be brought about in particular ways the supply of nourishment or the arrival of the sexual object depending upon the attentiveness the quality of attention of someone else and their generosity the essential thing without which the child quite literally would not survive is provided by someone else desire is made viable by its recipient it's worth noting that by waiting here in this way the supply of nourishment with a proximity of the sexual object Freud is making them equally urgent needs make us wonder what happens to the sexually desiring subject the helpless subjects recalls him if his sexual need is not attended to given we know what happens to the unattended baby but in some ways it's a simple point the helpless subject needs help help is not something added on afterwards it is integral there is no position no stage or state before helplessness and there is no stage before what we call help is required but then Freud makes his remarkable statement almost as an afterthought this path of discharge that is the scream the emotional expression that acquires an extremely important secondary function bringing about an understanding with other people and the original helplessness of human beings is thus the primal source of all moral motives the first function of The Scream is an attempt at evacuation at a discharge of stimuli which can't work but the secondary function is as an appeal a medium of communication or contact between the helpless subject and the person looking after him it brings about an understanding with other people presumably because it stimulates the other person to work out to imagine what it might be that the helpless subject is in need of it makes the other person think about what might be good for the helpless subject and presumably about whether it's good for this other person to try and provide what is needed the original helplessness Freud writes is thus the primal source of all moral motives moral motives might be construed as predispositions or reasons or causes to pursue the good it's a usefully ambiguous phrase in the translation is the original helplessness of human beings the primal source of all moral motives in the infant as helpless subject or does the infant's helplessness and the sexual adults helplessness call up moral motives in the recipient does our original helplessness makes make us moral or is morality prompted leanness by the way we respond to dependent others Freud is making a link between our original helplessness and the primal source of all moral motives as though he's saying without original helplessness there have been moral motives as though however it works morality is what we've invented what of what has been summoned up in us by our helplessness because we are originally helpless subjects thereby linking the hungry infant with the desiring sexual adult for it is more than intimating not merely an original helplessness but an enduring or constitutive helplessness because we are originally helpless subjects we can't separate out obligation from need we cannot help but consider what we need to do to for and with the people upon whom we depend to be a helpless desiring subject is to be implicated to be enmeshed in and inextricable from a world of moral considerations and one of the things of course that this will involve us in our attempts however long or desperate or intermittent to want to separate out desire and obligation the way we tend to do this is to disavow ur helplessness once we keep helplessness in the picture put it as Freud does in the middle of the picture we can't dissociate appetite and morality you can only say as Richard does I am myself alone as a boast rather than as a statement of despair if you found a way of creating the illusion that you are not in any way what Freud calls a helpless subject a subject who needs help who is indeed only a subject at all because he has been helped it is original helplessness that leads us to that makes necessary the idea of the good but of course Freud doesn't say the original helplessness of human beings is thus the primal source of all good moral motives he just says morality is bound up with helplessness so it's worth recalling Charles Taylor's comment quoted earlier that quote moral philosophy has tended to focus on what is right to do rather than what it is good to be on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life morality we might say now is what we've tended to do with original helplessness morality is what we've made out of it it is at least in Freud's view but these are my words not here's our self cure for better and for worse for the fact that we are helpless subjects and the problem we might say is that we've tended to be or have been tempted or inclined to be more like Richard and by that I mean we could begin to see that much of our discontent with morality much of our sense when it exists that morality is alien rather than integral a foreign body forced Adonis to deprive us of our real satisfaction comes from the ways in which we can use morality to deny abolish refuse disparage trivialize and punish our original helplessness or to put it another way or to put it the other way around any morality that does not affirm desire and value helplessness is merely punitive that any reality that's not on the side of helplessness that can't bear to see its pleasures and its strengths is going to feel estranging so we need to consider what might have to happen to original helplessness that might make it a vice rather than a virtue a persecution rather than a boon what would make us so averse to what is so original about us and at least in the passage from the project for it has a fairly obvious answer to this question helplessness becomes persecution is made into a problem by being insufficiently responded to if the hungry infants needs are not at least recognized if not always actually met if the sexually desiring adult finds no object attentive to his desire helplessness becomes intolerable something has to be done with it it might be turned for example into omnipotence or bitter scornful mocking behavior which may be the same thing but this is the reassuring common sensical account one that's been taken up in various versions of object relations theory it's not our nature that is the problem but it's our parenting that makes it so you'll notice in this account that helplessness is the precondition for being helped as an experience in itself as in the developmental theories of psychoanalysis it's not a good one it is what it leads to that is of paramount importance that is the possibility being understood and the generational a vocation of all moral motives helplessness is the precondition for human bonds for exchange you have to be helpless subject in order to be helped in order to be understood in order to become a moral creature helplessness in other words can make us good and so by the same token if you can't experience helplessness you're precluded from these fundamental human experiences to get back or to be brought back to helplessness is to be brought back to these things so we shouldn't underestimate from this point of view the conscious or unconscious desire for helplessness that must exist alongside the wish to refuse it we could indeed think of ourselves as suffering from an incapacity or a refusal of states of helplessness precisely because they reconnect us with these things that helplessness makes possible logically of course states of helplessness are to be avoided Freud gives us a picture both of why they might be desired and the risks of desiring them for Freud it's only this helpless subject that's capable of experiences of satisfaction these experiences he describes as having quote momentous consequences in the functional development of the individual no helplessness no satisfaction helplessness that is so difficult to find a picture involved for the adult that is not simply terrifying is the precondition for satisfaction if we lose or forget or a press or project or attack this original helplessness we quite literally lose in Freud's terms the real possibilities for satisfaction we become one of the exceptions like Richard without helplessness there can be no possibility of satisfaction and without the possibility of satisfaction there can be no aliveness no point helplessness Freud is suggesting is the most important thing about us and yet as he also says helplessness is the very thing that we are prone to magic away largely through religion but also through art and morality and so by implication by theory if we can't bear helplessness we can't bear satisfaction there is a plot against helplessness which turns out to be a plot against satisfaction real satisfaction Freud implies depends upon living without illusions without the wishful magic of religious beliefs the experience of satisfaction literally depends upon our living in Weber's disenchanted world a world without omnipotence in it the psychical origin of religious ideas for it writes in the future an illusion which are given out as teachings are not precipitates of experience or end results of thinking they are illusions fulfillments of the oldest strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind the secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes and we already know the terrifying impression of helplessness and childhood aroused the need for protection for protection through love which was provided by the father and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father but this time a more powerful one thus the benevolent rule of a divine providence lays our fears of the dangers of life the establishment of a moral world order ensures the fulfillment of the demands of justice which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish fulfillment shall take place end of quote this is as many people have noticed a rather sweeping account of religion but over 30 years after the project once again everything comes out of the helplessness of childhood though certain things have now changed first of all the original helplessness of human beings has become for the older Freud the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood and what this helplessness produces is not here the experience of satisfaction but the illusions of religion with its all too plausible morality that is merely a wishful concealment of our real helplessness faced with the dangers of reality now helplessness only prompts us to obscure its existence it's not the route to satisfaction but the route to a knowing self-deception and this deception can only be made complete by wheeling on a spurious father figure in the project it was at least implied that the infant's helplessness would be met by the mother and the adult sexual desire would be met by a satisfying real object of no specified gender here the solution to helplessness which is in fact an evasion of it is a faked up father Freud we might infer now believes that the majority of modern people can only turn against helplessness saddest action and truth they take refuge in religion and it's morality because unlike to help the subject of the project they can't bear or bear with their own helplessness it makes them invent a cartoon character a parody a man without disabilities a man beyond help the epigraph to the second section of this paper is from Paul L wah and it is there is another world but it is in this one there are let us say two solutions that Freud proposes to our original human helplessness a good one and a bad one in the good one helplessness is the precondition of satisfaction the only way it tooks to the experience of satisfaction and by the same token the only way to morality in the bad one the experience of satisfaction is replaced by the experience of feeling protected helplessness issues in the wish to be protected from the experience of helplessness not to feel it to acutely helplessness is not recognized so to speak as a predisposition toward sense of satisfaction it's as though someone who said I need a drink and the other person has replied it's not a drink that you really need you need your thirst be made safe or is if someone has said I'm hungry and the other person has replied no you're terrified so helplessness leads to satisfaction or to self-deception it produces understanding between people at best or misunderstanding and in both versions it leads to morality the undisclosed morality of Freud's phrase in the project the primal source of all moral motives or the morality Freud clearly despises of the religiously consoled it is one might say the difference between those who can bear being children and those who can't believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood religion for Freud is the false solution to human helplessness the human helplessness that Freud is keen to insists lasts throughout life it just begins in childhood and satisfaction is the right solution or perhaps we should say the right but either way all of what we think of as our moral problems come out of the fact that we are helpless subjects and helplessness or our relation to it is something Freud thinks we need to get right and we do the very worst things when we get it wrong we start doing things like believing in God or abiding by religious teachings or adopting preposterous moralities or believing that we are exceptional creatures rather than just another species of animal obviously if frustration makes us aggressive and we turn against our own satisfaction we are unconsciously cultivating our violence by disavowing our helplessness our fundamental response to our own helplessness is to create an enchanted world a world in which we seek protection from our helplessness but not engagement with it biologically speaking Freud writes in his paper on leonardo da vinci in 1910 religiousness is to be traced to the small human child's long drawn out helplessness and need for help and when at a later date he perceives her truly for lawn and weak he is when confronted with the great forces of life he feels his condition as he did in childhood and attempts to deny his own despondency by a regressive revival of the forces which protected his infancy it almost as though the child underestimates his helplessness or the what adulthood brings is a sense of just our helpless we really are it's important it's important I think that Freud nowhere suggests that we grow out of our helplessness indeed he suggests here that we grow into it or that it's something that can be realistically overcome of course it can't be for Freud religion is a poor solution to an endemic to a biological problem it's because we are helpless when confronted with what he calls the great forces of life that we engage in this imaginative activity called religious belief in Freud's view our helplessness doesn't diminish over time but we become progressively more disturbed by it so terrorized are we by it that we will seek safety rather than satisfaction magic rather than nourishment disavowal rather than acknowledgement we seem in Freud's view at least to be the animals who are tormented by our helplessness the animals for whom it is or it has become the abiding preoccupation and in explaining this in inhibition symptoms lank and anxiety in 1926 for it has recourse to or rather seems to allude to Richard the third soliloquy that he quoted in his paper on the exceptions the biological factor he writes that makes us so prone to neurosis as a species is the long period of time during which the young of the human species in it is in a condition of helplessness and dependence its intrauterine existence seems to be short in comparison with out of most animals and it is sent into the world in a less finished state as a result the influence of the real external world upon it is intensified and early differentiation between the ego needs promoted moreover the dangers of the external world have a greater importance for it so the value of the object which alone can protect it against them and take the place of its former intrauterine life is enormous Lee enhanced the biological factor then establishes the earliest situations of danger and creates the need to be loved which will accompany the child throughout the rest of its life end of quote Richard described himself as deformed unfinish'd sent before my time into this breathing world Freud's human animal is too briefly in the womb and sent into the world in a less finished State and Freud of course intimates there may be a sense in which we are all deformed by our protracted helplessness and dependence this left Richard with a grudge and a supposed entitlement to avenge himself at least in Freud's view what is the grudge what form does the revenge of the humanimal take the value of the object that can protect it is enormous Lee enhanced and the need to be loved will accompany the child throughout the rest of his life what sense then does it make to think of ourselves deformed by our dependence what picture of ourselves might we have if we were not so deformed the long period of time that the human species is in a condition of helplessness and dependence leads to what we might call an idealization of the protecting of yet I an unrealistic apprehension of it and a craven as' and enslavement to being loved Richard we might think of it as idolizing himself and enslaved to being hated this helplessness that accompanies our throughout life calls up in us the wish for a protective object that distorts perception and a terror of the loss of love in other words at its best under one kind of description our helplessness involves us with others it weaves us into the human community but its worst under another description it makes an abject it makes us abject and infinitely exploitable creatures we will do anything for love and protection as though our original helplessness the defining feature of ourselves throughout our lives at worst corrupts us and at best makes us morally pragmatic rather than moralistically principled if we live in a condition of dependence and helplessness and what this leads us into is spurious self-deceiving religious consolation or the secular equivalents how could we not end up hating our and other people's helplessness how could we not end up thinking the absurd paradoxical thought that the very thing that makes us what we are ruins our lives this at least is one of the places that Freud leaves us the catastrophe of being a human being is that we are irredeemably helpless creatures and that means helpless to do anything about our helplessness we are essentially helpless and that is the very thing that makes our lives impossible it is a mark of our resistance to our helplessness that we deem the inevitable to be catastrophic as though anything we don't make ourselves must be bad for us the third and final section to the paper has an epigraph from Jeffrey Hill's essay the eloquence of sober truth and it is that innate incompetence which hooker had called this our imbecility Freud is making a distinction dirt I'm it's a distinction that gets lost that at first sight seems rather crude our original helplessness either leads optimally as it were to the experience of satisfaction or to the experience of religious belief to essential sensual satisfactions of appetite or to magic but in making this distinction by setting up these countries Freud is opposing protection to satisfaction our helplessness that is the helplessness of appetite can lead us in the direction of the experience of satisfaction provided by a tent of others or our helplessness our helplessness in the face of the dangers of the external world and the great forces of life among which our appetite can lead us in the direction of protection from unreal figures and magical beliefs but this is not simply a version of our need for safety contending with our need for excitement for all is saying that our helplessness can force us into sacrificing sacrificing by displacing the experience of satisfaction which for Freud in his early formulation in the project is itself a pre fundamental precondition for psychic and physical survival the experience of helplessness in other words can make a sacrifice our lives can lure us into a nihilistic pact if you give up on the experience of satisfaction you can be protected of course we don't want it to be a stark as this we can as we say have both and yet Freud I think is showing us something harsher so there's something about our experience of helplessness that there is perhaps something about the way helplessness is described is presented in our culture at this time that makes us want to give up on our desire and for something that can supposedly reassure us but not fundamentally satisfies as though the quest for the experience of satisfaction leaves us unprotected and we will give up on satisfaction in order not to face this something about our helplessness or its description precipitates us into a delirium of compulsive protection seeking as though we believe we can be protected from the great forces of life in Freud's view we are the animals who are uniquely vulnerable oversensitive one might say to what living entails we are sent into the world in a less finished state than other animal the dangers of the external world have a greater importance for us and we require barriers between ourselves and our desires as Freud puts it early differentiation between the ego and the it is promoted but is this special pleading in this account are we rather like Richard the exceptions but in this case the exceptions in the whole of nature it's not of course difficult to see why Freud at the time and place of writing should feel his own and other people's unsuited Ness in fitting 'no stew the world they found themselves in protection would be privileged of a satisfaction for jews and many others in europe in the 20s and 30s fundamental human satisfactions might feel increasingly remote there would be what we might think of in short as new forms of helplessness new pictures and experiences of helplessness political economic and in frauds language psychic and these very experiences could lead to radical read ascriptions of the helplessness of infancy or what the consequences of helplessness can be helplessness could only become horrifying it might be increasingly difficult to find and perhaps it's always been difficult to find inspiring pictures of helplessness or accounts of helplessness that would make it sound in Charles Taylor's words something good to be an object of our love or our Allegiance no one says things now like he's a wonderfully helpless man or there was something impressively helpless about the way she dealt with that and yet Freud I think was beginning in the project to make the case or a case for helplessness for the fact that without the experience of helplessness there could be no possibility for the experience of satisfaction without the possibility of the experience of satisfaction life was futile indeed one way of seeing what Freud thinks of is the magic of religious belief is that it contains a long term wish within it that one day I will feel sufficiently protected so I'll be able to get back to to start up again on the quest for the experience of satisfaction I'll be able to sort out my helplessness secure myself from it so the life of appetite can begin again but in the meantime I'm going to have to believe in God the fantasy of ultimate redemption at least in psychoanalytic terms might lead in a disguised picture of what when I can allow myself to start desiring again in the belief my desire will be met in Freud's picture of appetite both sexual another in the project to desire to be hungry or sexually alive is to risk one's life an education in helplessness if such a thing were possible and you might say we're already already over educated in helplessness would be an education in moral risk and mortal risk clearly a lot depends on what we feel about helplessness on what to put it as confounding ly as possible can be done about it or with it could be for example in the pragmatist way which is not the psychoanalytic way use it to get from A to B without the very idea of using it becoming a denial of its nature what to use William James's language might helplessness be good for in the project after all Freud was telling us that helplessness was good for the experience of satisfaction if that is what it was good for and that that was what was originally meant for of course it seems odd to instrumentalize helplessness but perhaps this is something we can't help but do and this in itself may be instructive Freud says in the instances I've cited that helplessness is good for the experience of satisfaction and good for making us magical i religious it makes us in chant the world with supernatural agents and forces but for it is also saying that helplessness never stops that in fact we get progressively more helpless so we might say helplessness is only temporarily transformed by satisfaction but that religious belief creates the illusion that it's permanently transformed we are helpless but our helplessness is grounded by help the infinite help of God and developmental theory in psychoanalysis Bob's us off with the sense that helplessness can be progressively transformed because what Freud is urging us to imagine is what our lives would be like if we lived as if we were all helpless all the time and that this helplessness was a very thing we sought to conceal or obscure or deny that helplessness has no solution there's no holding it at bay or growing out of it that prior to sexuality or aggression or dependence there is helplessness as a way of life a way of being that we are helplessly desiring creatures that our original in both senses and fund emot-- senses and fundamental helplessness could be recognized and acknowledged and even to some extent met indeed this is where object relations theory attachment relational psychoanalysis and other stories about dependence come in but in all these pictures our helplessness is not temporarily relieved or swage or removed it is just that so-called relationship is one of the things we do with or about our abiding and presiding helplessness and if L if helpless is simply what we are there is no other way of being no way of being anything else how and why have we made it such a problem or to put it the other way around why have we not seen it in Taylors words as something good to be not just bad to be indeed we have in a sense to find the good as that which relieves us of our helplessness or makes it bearable so when Charles Taylor asked in sources of the self what is it about the human subject that makes him recognize and love the good one answer could be the subjects original helplessness our helplessness makes the good and the idea of the good integral essential to our survival and well-being whether the good is God or the mother or ideological commitments or moral convictions or as we say a meeting of needs there is an obvious religious point here which has broader implications fallen man was utterly helpless Taylor writes and could do nothing by himself the point of harping on the helplessness and depravity of mankind was to throw into the starkest relief the power and mercy of God who could bring about a Salvation which was utterly beyond human power and what is more still wanted to rescue his unworthy creature beyond all considerations of justice and of grow our helplessness then in this usefully generalizable description for God here we could put the mother the parental couple the saving ideology and so on is the precondition for our ideas are good one could almost say it makes the idea of the good possible even plausible without our original such a thing would never have occurred to us but there is a familiar moral move here that is worth noting helplessness has to be characterized as depravity or lack or weakness to make the good look good it's reminiscent of Nietzsche's striking point in on the genealogy of morals when he writes of our quote will to establish an ideal that of the holy God and to feel a palpable certainty of our unworthiness with respect to that ideal what if our casting of helplessness as weakness as a form of depravity has produced spurious forms of strength of the good as that which relieves us all or even conceals our helplessness when when Freud implies in the project that we can satisfy each other but not save each other we might take him to be saying satisfaction cumulative Lee experienced or even satisfaction risked canmake helplessness a strength indeed if as freud does you make the experience of satisfaction and the frustration that leads to it into the constitutive human experiences then helplessness that is the helplessness of appetite of desiring is our fundamental strength without it there is no frustration and therefore no possibility of the experience of satisfaction is helplessness only a good if and when we are helped so if the good was to be formulated not as an overcoming of helplessness or a compensation for it or denial of it the good in other words was not itself believed to be without helplessness as God is what would it be like and my invoking of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals is of course a warning in the background because the risk is in promoting helplessness as a virtue as an original strength that we might simply be elaborating what Nietzsche calls in his distasteful and exhilarating way the slave revolt in morals the tyranny of the weak over the strong what he thinks of the corrupt and corrupting quote intelligence introduced by the powerless can we in his terms which I think a useful here quote approach the problems of morality in high spirits by making the case for helplessness or does considering the sheer scale of our helplessness make us feel weaker as though even talking about helplessness could drive us to despair or to sentimentality or to object relations or to drink why in short does helplessness make us think of consolation rather than inspiration why is it associated in our minds more with being tortured than being high-spirited with being desperate rather than being available with SNM rather than with abandon you can either resent the way life is ordained or be intrigued by it The Critic Denis Donohue rather grandly wrote I think we're inclined and perhaps even encouraged even educated to resent our helplessness to be frightened of it rather than intrigued by it there is of course one sensor which our helplessness is not ordained we're not born helpless we become helpless for the first years of our life it never occurs to us so to speak that helpless is what we are helplessness is something that over time we learn about ourselves it becomes the word we might use for certain experiences and then it seems once we've got the idea helplessness becomes the thing the condition that we're always trying to do something about because we seek to relieve our helplessness we think of it as something that we suffer or suffer from but what if we thought of ourselves as getting progressively more helpless as we got older and helplessness as something we grow into partly by becoming aware of it and in order to do this we might have to broaden the analogy horizon after all we don't think of ourselves as relieving our need for oxygen by breathing whereas we do think of ourselves as relieving our hunger with food we can't satisfy our need not to be helpless so by way of conclusion I've got two suggestions both in the spirit of Freud's the creative writer and daydreaming the true ARS Poetica freud writes in this paper lies in the technique by which the artist overcomes our repulsion which certainly has to do with the barriers that arise between each single ego and the others I take it that there is something about our helplessness the pictures we have of ourselves as helpless that we find repulsive and that the barriers that arise between each single ego and the others is in part at least a consequence of our disavowal our original helplessness that is the thing we have most originally in common with each other such that the acknowledgement of this helplessness in common makes all such barriers between us seem wildly unrealistic so my two suggestions are firstly that any psychoanalysis that privileges knowing over being inside over experience narrative over incoherence diminishes if not actually forecloses are real acknowledgement of helplessness if we thought of our helplessness as like a figure inside us as to use Hilary putnams phrase from another context a being who breaks my categories in a way we were willing to risk we would not be only trying to overcome it but as Freud intimated in the project we would be trying to sustain it we would think of our helplessness as sustaining us there being nothing else ultimately that could do so it would not simply be one of the best things about us but it would be the thing the condition without which we could not be who we are in this picture there's no version of ourselves that's not helpless even if in different area of our lives there are different forms of helplessness we are helpless in different ways and my second suggestion following on from this is that helplessness leads us to automatically into talking about dependence and now of course attachment when I was working on a ward for dying children a mother once said to me pointing to a daughter we are relying on her now after all the doctors after all the help that is available we are ultimately helplessly dependent on our own bodies on their sustaining vitality or lack of it no other body is available but the body we happen to be there can be virtues in necessity and in the fact that there are necessities thank you thank you for the beautiful movie talk Adam Phillips has agreed to take questions for a while and there will be I believe some diapers available for you at various points in the room so once you're acknowledged if you would just wait a second so the microphone can reach you and everyone can then hear the hear the question hi I'm Abe misunderstood you but I understood you to say that heart spirits away helplessness I maybe I got that phrase wrong but I wanted you to talk a little a little bit about the your view of art here do you think of it for example is what you called secular consolations religions double how do you think of the relationship does art evoke helplessness does it satisfy us because it makes available helplessness I don't actually have a view about art but what I was referring to was Freud suggesting that art can be used in the way that religious consolation can be that is to say it can be used to deny preclude foreclose the experience of helplessness not that it's intrinsically that but that it could be used for that and I think what Freud is trying to try to show us in a way partly by exaggeration is the repertoire of ways we have that are culturally sanctioned and valued that may actually be a refusal of the thing he feels is most valuable about us so I think that's the point it's about the use of it hi it's Kasia hi I'm wondering about the status of the word satisfaction in your account because helplessness we are most helpless in relation to our finitude to things that cannot be overcome or satisfied in any way and if we're thinking about desire which is another word that surfaced at various moments at least from a Lacan Ian's point of view there would be no status no capacity to satisfy that either and so Freud telecom talks about taking pleasure in our dissatisfaction I think there is a distinction here and there which I think you you're alluding to which is that helplessness can't be satisfied desire when we desire there's the possibility of the approximation of satisfaction but of course it's the it's the gap that makes that sustains desire but I think the point that the papers making is that we can't satisfy our helplessness but our helplessness is the consequence of things that allow us a certain amount of satisfaction does that answer your question yeah I think the word satisfaction implies something total yeah no I wouldn't I mean it would be misleading to think that was the implication of the paper I don't feel that because it wouldn't be that anything could be a swage or ultimately appeased it could be temporarily as it were held at bay I think would be the best it might be hoped for but that this would be an ongoing project Adam I'm wondering about the errata cessation of helplessness that is to say the various kinds of the sphere of the sexual as a place where people are in fact quite happy to be temporarily helpless and go to great lengths to make themselves helpless I mean it may be that the sexual ization of helplessness or eroticization of it is the best thing we've come up with so far to make it a viable experience and that seems to be a wonderfully ingenious artifact that one is able to do that it the only other thing that might be worth saying alongside that is what is it about it that requires a rata cessation to make it a viable experience or what would it be like if we did in a rot size absolutely brilliant talk and I think about the if we imagine our current culture which we were a world of voracious appetites and incredible violence we have missed this basic point and and I I just try to imagine is there some but a global community some consciousness that might keep us from this from where the path that we seem to be on well I don't know that but I do think that I do think two things one is it seems to be capitalism is really made for children and the other thing is that what we need in a way is persuasive and eloquent accounts in praise of frustration that a really a really good case needs to be made for the value of frustration that isn't to do with moral uplift that would be my plan if I had one at the your talk I think calls for a certain certain amount of free association in the listener and in terms of the discourse at least of MIDI cat Northern California parents at this time the word helpless enters your enters one's own language at least my language when my children actually need help less in other words that the the when a child is truly helpless as a parent right or someone who has charge of that child you don't think of them as helpless and that the the word helpless activates somehow that question of of needing help more needing help less and becomes a kind of almost a term of of rebuke encouragement and so you know helplessness free associating a little bit is what I think the parent of an adolescent learns to do it's a kind of state of of paying attention but not paying attention too much well just to associate to your point two things occur to me one is that one's own children's helplessness is unbearable at some level and so one question would be why that is and presume it's partly because our own is unbearable that's if we started from the position there was a fundamental solidarity of helplessness it's easily when our children were helpless we'd be think they're being people like us the other point I think is to do with the ray with the helplessness the parents interests the child because very often it seems to me again on the one hand you'd think of course parents are helpless interracial children that's the point on the problem but the other bit of it which i think is more subject to as it were social engineering is that a lot of the rage a lot of the helplessness that adults feel with children is narcissistic rage that the child in these moments is a fronting the adults picture of what they need the child to be and that that too is a potentially instructive experience not that we can all be sort of Rhoda's thinkers at the moment of which are children Eric tantrums but we it seems to me it's possible to reflect on the way in which one is scandalized by one's child having desires that one doesn't want to include and that also must be part of the helplessness deal it seems to me that would be fundamentally acknowledged and that of course one of the difficulties are being a parent is you have to frustrate your children and one is helpless to do anything else and it couldn't be otherwise indeed the quest to satisfy one's children is a terrible thing terribly distracting thing and that was the end of my sermon on childhood I would like to ask a question which follows director on the previous one there's a marvelous professor in the psychology department here whose name I can't remember which she wrote a book called the scientist in the crib I don't know whether you're familiar with it well the the thesis very briefly is that the the child in the first three or four years of life is training its parents and I thought she she she said there's a lot of recent study which reinforces this and and so it to me it brings the question of what you really mean by helplessness because the idea is that in some rather obvious senses the child is helpless but in fact by the age of four it's in control and the parents have been trained more or less to satisfy the needs but you're not familiar with the world I wonder it it to me it gives it this question about you use the word helplessness a great deal but in some sense the children are often dominant by the age of four yes but the wish to dominate would seem to me to be a primal self cure of a helplessness I mean I see I wouldn't I mean training wouldn't be my word but I can see the point of the thesis you described there clearly is a sense in which children enable their parents to parent them or that parents and children get used to each other in a certain way but in order for this thesis as you described it to work the parents have to have a willingness to be trained in other words our capacity to take this in now the way in which it seems not necessarily consciously no not less a consciously but one of the ways in which this has an enable image is that we are all helpless both in our desire but also in our relative capacities to articulate our desire and in terms of what our desires evoke in other people in the recipients so that I mean I could put this simply by saying there's no such thing as an immaculate communication and that will always be true by the nature of language if you said it mean so that I think that you know there's a paradoxical thing involved in the parenting of young children because obviously they don't speak we then assume that speaking helps you desire of course it does in a certain sense but it also doesn't there's they're different sets of ambiguities but certainly the parent is having to imaginatively meet the young child's need and every parent knows this can be very very difficult simply because there is a helplessness in the face of human it doesn't mean people cut because people do all sorts of things people have brought up children for millions of years nevertheless there is a fun there is a helplessness in it that I think is structural could you say more about what you meant when you said we should try and teach frustration as a good or something to that effect what about thinking actually that it is not a good that we can cultivate because that would tend towards masochism but just an inevitability that we have to learn to live with and sooner or later we'll have to face yes it's a sooner or later that's a problem isn't it because there are magical solutions to frustration which are called on epitopes or missions or self-sufficiency or a certain picture of narcissism I mean it see this is a difficult thing to think about isn't it because if you take the basic picture of waiting you could think on the one hand that it's as though waiting can go several ways when I'm waiting for some day I'm looking forward to seeing I can look forward and look forward and look forward and beyond a certain point they turn into somebody I hate don't want to see and can't face when they arrive so the question is what can one do in one's waiting that sustains the desirability of the object say now in one set of descriptions and psychoanalysis it is precisely in the waiting that the interesting things happen that often the wish to gratify oneself preempts what the waiting might produce so that it's as though in the waiting one have been an omniscient state of mind as in I know what I want I'm waiting for it whereas in the waiting period it seems to me the less noble or the surprising desire might turn out or turn up so I think the case for frustration is to do with improvisation probably it's to do with it's something about what you can bear to let yourself feel and think when you're in something without turning a state of waiting to suspended animation it would be like waiting and not waiting at the same time but not denying either state two things come to mind one is I said to my soul be still and wait without hope but also a meditation practice where you are forced to wait and not act through a lot of various kinds of unpleasurable I would imagine that there must be a lot of spiritual practices that are about precisely this issue of on the one hand finding ways of waiting or transforming the waiting into experience into a non waiting experience as though you can want something more than the wanted object of desire I want to go back to this notion actually you use the term suspended animation um and I want to get away from the notion of waiting which seems to be very different from helplessness it seems to me that the term helplessness with which is I think proliferating in the last 10 years or has proliferate in the last 10 years has a great deal to do with post 9/11 consciousness and the notion of forces that one is helpless to have any impact on so that takes me away from the notion of dependence as well I think that there's a big difference between the term helplessness and the term dependence in its links dependence assuming that there is some other and that's the move toward satisfaction that that you were talking about that one can some object of desire that one can connect with or object of protection that one can connect with but I think the notion of helplessness seems more to do with the fact that there isn't and seems more related to the kind of nightmare of paralysis in which something catastrophic is about to happen and one has no possibility of having an effect so I wonder if if I'm understanding your notion of helplessness as dependence well I don't know whether you are not but what I intended to say in the paper is that the risk is that the idea of dependence becomes a false cure for helplessness as though theories of dependence are manifestly meeting the problem of helplessness but may actually be shying away from it that's one point the other point is that obviously we're not short of very very bad pictures of helplessness I mean I think we can take those for granted what I'm interested in is whether there are good ones that's a desirable states of mind that one might feel to be morally good worth cultivating or creating that would involve us in a new kind of relationality both to others and to ourselves so that seems to me to be the interesting imaginative project because very quickly it seems to be when we think about helplessness we think about awful things and there's a good reason for that's not the way we've got this wrong but I think it's it's not the whole story that's all the basic model of helplessness underlying everything you've said including all the author's that you mentioned is the helplessness of the neonate and you've examined certain models of dealing with that that don't lead to such good solutions others that can be looser a magic religion etcetera etcetera but it seems to me that the one model of helplessness that is not dealt with at all in any of the authors that you mentioned or in your own thinking is the helplessness of the fact of death not being born and being helpless at that time because as you said yourself biologically for over millions of years we have developed mechanisms for dealing with that helplessness if we hadn't we would not exist as a species but we have not dealt with at all or almost at all we created for it but we know what we think of them if you've read your Freud are we we have not dealt with death to do the emptying your paper and there are lots of things I haven't dealt with I'm sure you're right about that but I do not think it's strange that we should think of that we should feel helpless in the face of death I mean that seems to me a very strange thing as though as in said it as though we would be we could come up with something else in relation to it as though we could be masterful in the face of death or undisturbed by it or I don't know what the relevant recovery would be I think one of the things I said in the paper and I thought was I'm not an authority in this paper but I do think that um one of the things that Freud is saying and I'm certainly saying is that helplessness is all pervasive that is to say it infiltrates every area of our life in which we make claims to being powerful indeed the very claims to being powerful are signs of our helplessness that seems to me to be the basic part and it's a very very simple one several times in your paper you referred to deformity that is the set that the way in which we conceive of helplessness as a condition of deformity and you raised as a question where we would derive an idea of form that is not deformed and so I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about that well I suppose that the difficult thing is to amass if I mean it and the Richard example is is used for this if we are deformed by being helpless what would it be not to be deformed well I think the answer is omnipotent to be a God to be somebody for whom this is not an issue but somebody formed this you know this wouldn't occur as a question and it seems to me that that is the this isn't really the right we're putting but that would be the self sabotaging part of the self that takes flight into the belief that this is a deformation as though there was another way of doing this and that's Richard solution if it seems me an awful lot of violent is precisely that Adam you say two things in the course of the paper and I'd like to ask you how they line up one is that there is as you tease out from Freud and original helplessness and the other I think you say is that we are not born helpless we grow into helplessness how do those two ideas line up that the our original helplessness is a view from outside so to speak in other words the baby and young child isn't saying oh god I'm helpless so that the so that helplessness is something we acquire a sense of through acculturation and that in itself seems to me an interesting part of this story because that would be obviously where one a better word education would come in why is it called helplessness or what are the implications of that so that's the link thank you yes I have no problem with feeling helpless that that may and make sense now we're so interdependent as far as models of it a couple things occurred to me one one was the holy fool or another was the idea of mystery or the idea of unknowability we can't all know everything that the the idea that we can is is itself a delusion and then in in Buddhist practice of course major hindrances are either desire or a version so it seems to me there there are models for a good helplessness no I mean I imagine there must be I just don't know what they are and those sound like good ones in listening to your talk it seems to me that the recovery movement is one of the manifestations of how society one of the ways it deals with this and also interesting that it comes out of Victorian culture do you have any experience or thought about that as a way people deal with the issue of helplessness it's sir can you say a bit more that what do you mean by the recovering the sort of 12-step program that started in Oxford in the 19th century that is now Alcoholics Anonymous and all these other offshoots of groups as a way of acknowledging helplessness and not solving it perhaps well one of the things about those kind of treatments is that they are a kind of appeal to the will that the the implication I mean it you know the self-help movement is obviously partly to do with this and it's and and that the the limitation here is that very often the things people suffer from are beyond their will which is why they're in that position anyway and you could think you know that the will is which certainly isn't a term using psychoanalysis was so to speak invented to give one the illusion that one could do things about oneself and one's predicament and one's condition indeed one might be able to do this solo and I suppose one of the things I like about psychoanalysis is that it doesn't work that it's the treatment that by decra it could never work but the ways in which it doesn't work are more illuminating than the ways in which other treatments do work I think yeah I also thought it was a brilliant talk and if I helpful it seen it felt to me that as a kind of tone poem essay is an exercise in point of view we were in the position of the helpless infant or Richard the third and that was only our only conversation ever with the world and it just struck me that there is a developmental point startling moment when the child the infant once they get when it happens when they get their head up and they actually try to put things in your mouth that that what's left out of this is an account of agency as a stage of human development that it I don't think it solves the problem of helplessness but it it initiates a different conversation between self and other that seems our usual solution to that a parallel conversation but you know I saw in the world I think it's up to right I mean I think in a way that what the paper must be thinking about is what's the play what what does agency become in the light of fundamental helplessness you know those how would you be led to read ascribe agency if you took this kind of helplessness for granted and was something that could never be overcome so there would be no story of mastery or becoming progressively less helpless in fact you'd be becoming progressively more helpless in my world and then the question we were what would the agency before or one of the things in my before would be to enable one to become more helpless it would be something like that but you're right that's the moment certainly in the child's development when they begin to have a sense of what we call on their behalf autonomy and the risk then is that that becomes kind of sacralized as the magical progressive estrangement from helplessness and therefore self-reliance autonomy and it could be actually contributed to helplessness I think you you

Channel: Townsend Center for the Humanities

Views: 18,795

Rating: 4.9101124 out of 5

Keywords: Adam Phillips, Psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud (Author), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Psychology (Field Of Study), Psychiatry (Medical Specialty), Townsend Center, UC Berkeley

Id: j3tKiWaapOM

Length: 81min 39sec (4899 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2015