Equals
Please see my page on Adam Phillips for more. Some quotes below:
If the best thing we do is look after each other, then the worst thing we do is to pretend to look after each other when in fact we are doing something else. One of the many disturbing things about psychoanalysis - as a description of who we are, and as a kind of help - is that it shows us why it is often so difficult to tell these things apart. Or rather, it shows us that this distinction, upon which most of our morality depends, is often spurious because we are always likely to be doing both things at once (and several more). Love is not enough, because love is fraught with hatred. It is to what is being taken when we take care of another person that Freud drew our attention.
On Being Laughed At
That modern societies, like the modern individuals that constitute them, are the site of competing claims makes conflict inevitable. What it doesn’t in and of itself explain is how we can get such pleasure from cruelty. If cruelty is the worst thing we do, what then is enjoying our cruelty? To be able to laugh at another person, to learn to do this, would seem to be a remarkable cultural artefact (if not necessarily an impressive cultural achievement). Sociability without mockery and teasing and taunting would be both dreary and verging on the pointless….
We may, unless we are consensual sado-masochists, deplore humiliation, or claim to; but we cannot help but enjoy what we cheerfully call making fun of people. We are always reassured when people can, as we say, laugh at themselves. There is a violence we do to ourselves and others that is both enlivening and strangely consoling. There is the good mockery of everyday life that regulates our self-importance, and so relieves us of too much responsibility for the world. And there is the bad mockery that foists something upon us that we would rather, if we could choose, protect ourselves from.
Laughing at someone is - like all real pleasure - a stolen pleasure. But when we laugh at someone they feel stolen from.
…
So what is this daylight robbery that at its best is simple teasing, and at its worst is degrading humiliation? As ever, it must be impossible to speak for every case; generalisation makes a mockery of differences. And yet to describe laughing at someone as stealing is also to say that it takes from them their protection from being stolen from. As though somebody were to take photographs of you that you couldn’t stand, and then circulated them. What has been stolen is your freedom to supervise, to control the representations of yourself. The other person or people no longer care to protect, or wholly disregard, the images of yourself that you believe you need to sustain you. Humiliation strips the self of its safeguards; ordinary teasing frees the self of its safeguards.
It is a question, as it often is, of anticipated catastrophe; what, we must ask, is the imagined devastation that will occur if the mocker doesn’t mock? If he isn’t laughing at his victim, if he stops arranging his humiliation, what does he fear might happen? What might they do together? The so-called psychological answer might be, he will see too much of himself, too much of something about himself, in his chosen victim. The political answer would be, he would turn democratic. What mockery reveals, in other words, is the emotional terror of democracy. That what is always being ridiculed is our wish to be together, our secret affinity for each other.
Around and About Madness
When the British psychoanalyst John Rickman…remarked that madness is when you can’t find anyone who can stand you, he was asking a couple of questions. Firstly, what makes us feel that we can’t stand someone? And this becomes, for the sake of diagnosis as it were, a question about how we know, about how we describe what it is about them that we can’t stand. And secondly, what do we tend to do when we can’t stand someone? Answers to the second question constitute what we now call the history of madness, which is more or less a history of fear, at least in the modern era.
In the other modern account, madness is described as a person’s ingenious though debilitating self-cure for the obstacles thrown up by his individual development. And as all development is deemed to be traumatic these mad solutions will turn up, to a greater or lesser degree, in everyone’s life (these solutions are normally called a person’s character)…. In the depths, in our hearts, as passionate creatures we are mad; in excess of the cultures we create, and always beyond our most searching descriptions of ourselves. In this view, who we are is a mockery of what we make, because who we are is fundamentally uncontainable (all our cultural forms are just ways of getting away with something). The notion that we are truly and deeply mad is, of course, far older than the notion that, given a chance, we are eminently sane…. And the ways we have found to protect ourselves or cure ourselves - called defences, or symptoms, or eccentricities - are themselves mad…. So the sponsors of this account are always, one way or another, trying to make a case for some kinds of madness being better than others; the madness of sexual love for example is preferred to the madness of agoraphobia, or obsessive-compulsive working habits, and so on.
If you can’t find anyone who can stand you, you can’t find anyone who believes you’ve got anything they want. Groups consist of people who, for better and for worse, need each other’s company. What we call madness highlights our infinite anxieties about exchange with other people. The anxiety of influence is as nothing compared with the anxiety of exchange.
The Soul of Man Under Psychoanalysis
Eliot writes: It is human when we do not understand another human being, and cannot ignore him, to exert an unconscious pressure on that person to turn him into something that we can understand: many husbands and wives exert this pressure on each other. The effect on the person so influenced is liable to be the repression and distortion, rather than the improvement, of the personality; and no man is good enough to have the right to make another over in his own image.
This is the quotation from Eliot rewritten: It is human when we do not understand ourselves, and cannot ignore ourselves, to exert an unconscious pressure on ourselves to turn us into something that we can understand: many husbands and wives exert this pressure on each other. The effect on the person so influenced (oneself, that is) is liable to be the repression and distortion, rather than the improvement of the personality; and no man is good enough to have the right to make another over in his own image.
Making It Old
Trauma is when the past is too present; when, unbeknownst to oneself the past obliterates the present. It is the traumatised person - all of us, to some extent - who says that there is nothing new under the sun; that nothing ever changes. It is the art of art to make the past bearably present so that we can see the future through it. The problem, in other words, is not in making the past present, but in making the past into history.
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