Admirable Evasions. Theodore Dalrymple
a world if it were true. How dull everything would be! Life would be a perpetual Caribbean cruise aboard a luxury liner on a calm sea in clement weather. Mankind would be bored for lack of causes of unhappiness and would soon sink the boat on which he was cruising: for Man is not so much a problem-solving animal as a problem-creating one. Pascal said that all of Man’s misfortunes come from his inability to sit quietly in a room: but he did not claim to have found a way to enable him to do so, or suggest that this inability comes from anything other than his inherent nature.
The first psychological scheme of the twentieth century to provide the common man with the illusion of much expanded, if not yet complete, self-understanding, together with the hope of an existence free of inner and outer conflict, was psychoanalysis. Then came behaviorism, after which there was cybernetics. Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology were next; and now neuroscientific imaging, together with a little light neurochemistry, persuades us that we are about to pluck out the heart of our mystery. Suffice it to say, by way of deflation of exaggerated hopes and expectations, that 10 percent or more of the population now takes antidepressants, a figure all the more remarkable as the evidence is lacking that they, the antidepressants, work except in a very small minority of cases; rather the reverse. That they are taken in such large quantities is evidence more of dissatisfaction with life than of increased understanding of its causes, as well as of the spread of superstition regarding neurotransmitters and so-called “chemical imbalances.” These latter are to the modern person what alien spirits to be exorcised or the ego, id, and superego once were: things not seen but strongly believed in, as providing explanations for unwanted feelings, experiences, and behavior, as well as the hope of their elimination. Superstition springs as eternal in the human breast as hope.
So absurd does Freudianism now seem to us, so self-evidently false, that we forget what a hold it had on our self-conception only a few decades ago. W. H. Auden was right in saying, in his poem to mark Freud’s death, that he was “a whole climate of opinion,” and that if he was, in the opinion of the poet, “often . . . wrong and, at times, absurd,” he was nevertheless working along the right lines and had much extended our self-understanding, for:
in a world he changed
simply by looking back with no false regrets;
all he did was to remember
like the old and be honest like children.
It would be difficult to put in a few words anything more inapposite about Freud, anything in fact more opposite to the truth than these lines, which capture so precisely and at the same time endorse the illusion of an age. Freud was undoubtedly brilliant, a good writer and a very cultivated man, but his career, certainly once he stopped looking into the nervous system of eels, belonged more to the history of techniques of self-advancement and the foundation of religious sects than to that of science. It is historically certain that he was a habitual liar who falsified evidence in that way that Henry Ford made cars; he was a plagiarist who not only did not acknowledge, but actively denied, the sources of his ideas; he was credulous of evident absurdities, as his relations with Wilhelm Fliess prove; he was a self-aggrandizing mythologist and a shameless manipulator of people; he could be financially grasping and unscrupulous; he was the founder of a doctrinaire sect and a searcher-out and avenger of heresy who would brook no opposition or competition, and who called down anathema on infidels as intolerantly as Mohammed; in short, he was to human self-understanding what Piltdown Man was to physical anthropology. Insofar as Freud was sensible or profound, when for example he said that the maintenance of civilization depended upon restraint and the deliberate frustration of raw desire, no deep analysis of the human psyche was necessary to reach such conclusions, for they were available to any reasonably intelligent person who took the trouble to reflect for a moment upon the human condition; nor were they original, very far from it; they were the commonplaces of a million sermons.
Freud’s claims to have been a scientist do not stand up to scrutiny for a moment, and his writings are now so unconvincing that it is a historical conundrum as to how anyone could ever have been convinced by them or to have taken them seriously in the first place. (When he arrived in England as a refugee from Austria he was immediately made a Fellow of the Royal Society, the highest scientific honor the country had to offer.) To read a prolonged case history by Freud is to wonder at the non sequiturs, the leaps of faith, the illogic, the arguments from authority in which they abound, but which were not, apparently, apparent to generations of readers. And although Freud was personally conservative in his manner and morality, except where his incestuous adultery with his sister-in-law was concerned, his effect, if not his intention, was to loosen Man’s sense of responsibility for his own actions, freedom from responsibility being the most highly valued freedom of all, albeit one that is metaphysically impossible to achieve. For Freud powerfully alienated men from their own consciousness by claiming that what went on in their conscious minds was but a shadow play, and that the real action lay deep beneath it, all undiscovered (and undiscoverable) without many hours of talking about oneself in the presence of an analyst who might from time to time offer an interpretation of the real meaning of nonacceptance, which would itself be interpreted as resistance in need of further analysis, and so on more or less ad infinitum.
It had long been no secret that men do not always act for the reasons that they say they do, that they easily deceive themselves as much as others, that their motives are frequently (though not always) secret, mixed, and discreditable, that they project onto others the very illicit wishes and desires that they themselves have. King Lear, whose words were written nearly three hundred years before Freud’s “revelations,” said:
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back.
Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind
For which thou whipp’st her.
No one, surely, can have reached adulthood without having realized that human existence is not an open book, that much about ourselves and others remains hidden from us; at the same time, it should not have escaped creatures endowed with reason and powers of self-reflection that it is often possible by means of taking thought to discover much about ourselves and others that was not immediately evident to us, and that the better and more honest we are at taking thought, the more we shall discover.
But psychoanalysis is not so much reflection as a kind of shallow gnostic divination. It starts off with the hypothesis that all thoughts are born equal, at least in deeper psychological significance, and that the conscious attempt to discipline them, to winnow the true from the false, the important from the trivial, the useful from the useless, actually inhibits or prevents the achievement of self-knowledge. The only discipline that is necessary for the achievement of the latter is the abandonment of discipline (free association), which admittedly is not easy to achieve for intelligent people who have hitherto acted on the supposition that disciplined thought is desirable and important.
The result was and is all too predictable. Psychoanalysis, as well as death, becomes a bourn from which no traveler returns: and like anything indulged in for a long time, concern over the small change of life becomes a habit, and an irritating one, that inhibits interest and taking part in the wider world. It is a poor center of a man’s attention, himself; compared with psychoanalysis, haruspicy or hepatoscopy (divination by entrails or the liver of sacrificed animals) is harmless to the character, for though it is absurd, it at least is limited in time. Psychoanalysis becomes an ingrained habit of mind that must itself be overcome, often with the greatest difficulty, if the person undergoing it is not to torment himself and others for the rest of his life with seeking the hidden meanings of utterances such as “Good morning” and “How are you today?” (so easily interpreted as a wish that the person thus addressed may drop dead). True, Freud once said that sometimes a cigar is only a cigar – not a coincidental choice of object to remain only itself, for he was an inveterate smoker of cigars – but he did not provide a criterion for discerning when a cigar is only a cigar and when it is a phallic symbol undergoing fellatio (presumably when it was smoked by others, not by himself). It is hardly surprising that the world comes to seem for the analysand an infinite regress of symbols, a labyrinth, a hall of mirrors in which images of himself stretch into the confined infinitude of his mirrored chamber. If psychoanalysis had been invented by cavemen,