Admirable Evasions. Theodore Dalrymple
do not mean by this to imply that the human mind is straightforward, that we are aware immediately and at all times of all the reasons for our thoughts and actions. A moment’s reflection should be enough to show that this cannot possibly be so. We do not even know where our thoughts come from: but we know that we can think, and that we can direct our thought and discipline thoughts once they have arisen, check them for veracity, decency, consistency, etc.
It is also true that our utterances, even trivial ones, can sometimes unintentionally reveal something important about the way we think. For example (an example I have used before), people who stab someone to death with a knife often, indeed usually, say “The knife went in.” It is hardly a wild surmise that this way of putting it distances the perpetrator from his responsibility for his action, a disagreeable thing to reflect upon and full of the direst legal consequences, turning a voluntary and even long premeditated action into a chance event determined by the disposition of physical objects. The knife guided the hand rather than the hand the knife; as Edmund (in King Lear) puts it, “An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!” We all do it at times in our lives; indeed our first response when accused (by ourselves or others) of wrongdoing is to find exculpatory circumstances to explain it, or rather to explain it away. But thanks to the mind’s marvelous and subtle ability to think in parallel tracks at the same time, we have a still small voice telling us that our excuses are bunk. That is why so much anger is both real and simulated, spontaneous and deliberately generated, at the same time. But we don’t need psychoanalysis to show us any of this; and it is equally obvious that we must exercise judgment in attributing unacknowledged motives. Sometimes an extenuating circumstance is just an extenuating circumstance (no one, of course, seeks to extenuate his good deeds).
A doctrine or philosophy insinuates itself into a culture by means of rumor as much as by persuasion occasioned by reading its founding, or even subsequent, texts: that is why Auden’s “climate of opinion” is so accurate. And the lessons drawn from the doctrine thus insinuated may not be such as the founder meant or would endorse. In the case of psychoanalysis, the lessons popularly drawn were that the slightest utterance was of the deepest significance and everything said was instinct with hidden meaning; that all human desires were ultimately of a sexual nature; that human desires acted in a hydraulic fashion, and like liquid could not be compressed, so that if they were not fulfilled they would make themselves manifest in some other, pathological way, hence frustration of desire was both futile and dangerous; and that, once the supposed biographical cause of a pathological symptom, buried deep in the individual’s past, was revealed after much digging around in the dregs of the mind, it would cease by itself, without any need for the individual’s effort at self-control.
The first lesson, the deep significance of every utterance and its supposed suffusion with hidden meaning, naturally conduces to a combination of triviality and paranoia: triviality because it dissolves the very distinction between the trivial and the significant, the former coming much more easily to the voice than the latter; and paranoia because hidden meanings are sought everywhere since they are presumed to exist and to be in need of interpretation. Neither good nor evil acts are taken at face value any longer, but are assumed to be really other than they appear, usually their opposite in fact. Thus kindness (in others) becomes hidden aggression and rudeness (in oneself) becomes a defense against the overwhelming strength of one’s own generosity of feeling. Triviality has, of course, been given a tremendous fillip by the so-called social media, in which the social contract has been rewritten to read “I will pretend to be interested in your trivia if you pretend to be interested in mine” – which of course I don’t really believe to be trivia in the first place, at least not my trivia. I am a man, wrote Terence; I find nothing human uninteresting. Thanks to the progress wrought in human self-understanding by psychoanalysis, our dictum has changed. It is now: I am a man; I find nothing about me uninteresting.
That desire, if not fulfilled, will lead to pathology makes of self-indulgence man’s highest goal. It is a kind of treason to the self, and possibly to others, to deny oneself anything. Thus there is a time and place for everything, that time being now and that place being here. It is hardly surprising that such an attitude should end with widespread and enormous personal indebtedness. When a new credit card was launched in Britain, its advertising slogan was that it would “take the waiting out of wanting.” What is waiting for what is wanted but a form of frustration? And if frustration of desire is the root of pathology, then it follows that the credit card must be the cure of much pathology. Did not Blake say “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence” and “Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”? The road to heaven is paved with fulfilled desires, and to hell with frustrated ones. How terrible then for the parents of children to stay together just for the sake of duty when one of them “needs his space” because “it just isn’t working.” As one patient of mine put it soon after he had strangled his girlfriend, “I had to kill her, doctor, or I don’t know what I would have done.” Something serious, perhaps.
As to the automatically curative nature of psychological buried treasure, belief in it is now almost as widespread as belief in miracle-working images once was among the religious. In fact, it is a sovereign excuse for continuing to do what you know you should not do, for it is obvious that the supposedly liberating buried treasure can remain buried forever, however long you dig. The fact that your bad behavior or habit, whatever it is, continues despite psychological excavation is ipso facto evidence that the buried treasure has not been found and that the search must go on because it is buried deeper. A ludicrous and dishonest pas de deux then takes place in which the therapist and the patient search for what is not there, and since absence can never be proved, it is hardly surprising that Freud wrote a paper toward the end of his life, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” that raised the possibility, no doubt alluring to some patients, of talking about yourself forever.
It might of course be said that the popular deformation of an idea or practice does invalidate that idea or practice; but I am here concerned, in this little book, precisely with the overall effect in society of psychology as a discipline or way of thought. In any case, when we look at the effects of psychoanalysis on those who may be presumed to have had a more detailed, true, or accurate knowledge of it (if, that is, knowledge of any doctrine as slippery as that of psychoanalysis can be called true or accurate), the scene is not more encouraging. For example, nine of the first Viennese psychoanalysts, one in seventeen of them, committed suicide. The personal relations of these first psychoanalysts, moreover, were not such as would recommend themselves to anyone, consisting as they did largely of backbiting, betrayal, envy, denunciation to the authorities (i.e., to Freud), excommunication, and cuckolding. Such relations would be of no account if the subject matter of the group had been meteorology, shall we say, or astrophysics, but we are surely entitled to expect that people who set themselves up as unprecedentedly expert in human relations, as having special insight into the psychology of their fellow beings, will have shown special wisdom in the conduct of their own lives. Of course, it is possible that they were peculiarly unsettled people in the first place, which explains why they were drawn to psychoanalysis; but the very least that can be said is that contact with psychoanalysis did not seem to have effected much improvement. Nor does psychoanalysis seem to have conferred wisdom or insight into wider matters: Freud was claiming as late as 1938 that his real enemy, the enemy he was really afraid of, was not the Nazis but the Catholic Church.
As for analysands, you meet some who claim that their lives were much improved by their analysis, but this is as little evidence of the truth or value of psychoanalysis as is the recent convert to Islam’s opinion of the Koran as proof of the prophethood of Mohammed. A little bit of what you fancy may do you good, but it doesn’t make it true.
In my experience, at least, analysis has at least as many harmful as good effects (I put it mildly). It turns people permanently inward and guts their language of individuality, replacing particularity by a kind of impersonal jargon. They often appear to have undergone a strange type of brainwashing. The philosopher Karl Popper accused Wittgenstein of always polishing his glasses but never looking through them; the same might be said of people who have undergone psychoanalysis. And Freud hit upon a brilliant method of keeping analysands loyal (I don’t mean that he did this deliberately): if you make