Beyond the Pleasure Principle (3 page)

The narcissist, even if doomed to be merely a walking illusion created by others, a sex symbol as it were, which is actually a mere signifier until it is invested with meaning from outside, is a crucial element in our imaginative lives. The narcissist testifies to the human hope that life will not be all drab continuities and predictable expenditures. And yet, because we seek transformation from another, outside ourselves, we're doomed to disillusion.

But is it possible to liberate the erotic drive from the demands of the past, and to be either a monogamist or an inconstant sexual athlete without the obsessive hunger that's never slaked and that makes every erotic affair fall so far short of expectation? Freud was once moved to remark that satisfaction, upon some examination, proves to be unsatisfying. (How happy can human Eros be, a Freudian might ask, if some of us can substitute buying experience, consumerism, for sexual experience and be identically unhappy with both?) If the possibility for erotic happiness exists, it is not one that Freud, preoccupied as he was with regression and the past, ever succeeded in envisioning. But we should pursue the question ourselves, keep it on our horizon: what would it mean to loosen the erotic drive, if not to detach it fully, from the old obsessions? Perhaps there is no free love, no Eros without human cost, but can love ever, through exertion or through canny realization, be liberated from the compulsion to repeat the past?

To Freud, sexual love always entails love of authority. In love, the object after all takes the place of the super-ego. If the extreme form of anaclitic or dependent erotic love is an infantilization of the self, then the extreme form of love for authority comes when the subject is willing to abase himself to the tyrant. The sycophant and the follower are the political incarnations of the prostrate lover. Freud's theory of sex is also a theory of politics. When the narcissist is hungry
for power, we submit, but erotically. When he drives for erotic domination, we swoon; courtly lovers speak of monarchs of the heart. The sado-masochist, debased by uniforms, badges and rank, is, alas, an active sexual prototype that looms before us all.

Love for authority sublimates Eros, makes it less immediately perceptible, often because Eros, under such conditions, is homosexual and therefore anxiety-provoking. Yet Hitler said it himself: he made love to the masses who came to him in waves. All of those serried ranks at Nuremberg, lovingly filmed by Leni Riefenstahl, stand at firm attention, but their hearts are blazing away. They are being wooed and won by one of the great lovers of all time.

We yearn for erotic absolutes and political absolutism. Dictatorship, the rule of the talker who never stops, the super-ego so sure of itself that it never needs to brook contradiction, or pause for an answer, resonates so fully with our childhood fantasies about a protective force far greater than ourselves that it can hypnotize us, make a whole nation into sleepwalkers.

Democracy, American style, which Freud despised, supposedly inverts the longing for the father, repudiating what we most desire, without understanding what is at stake in that repudiation. We replace obeisance to the rule of the leader with obeisance to the rule of the crowd and think highly of ourselves for it. In America, we invert, and repeat by reversal. We never learn to remember and to work through our primary fixations.

Who is the tyrant? The tyrant is the political equivalent of the common day-to-day narcissist. Fired by a love for public power and a wish to sway the masses to action rather than to Hollywood-style adoration, the authoritarian figure capitalizes on the same needs as does a diamond-cold beloved. He is the omnipotent father resurrected. Freud believed that the murder of the primal father had begun civilization. After that deed, guilt attached us all to various father substitutes. But one does not have to concur with the fable to see how the roots of religion, and also of most forms of politics that revolve around the leader, might go back to the first investments in authority.

For Freud, politics in their essence are authoritarian politics;
reaction will always assert itself after any revolution, for we yearn to live within a system of total control. As Blake knew, but disliked knowing, tyranny and sycophancy are very nearly the standard state of human life, the default conditions to which we tend by a gravitational force. What Blake called the Orc Cycle, the circuit from rebellion to tyranny and back again, is to Freud the way of the world.

The essential leader, whose reign recurs interminably through time, is the latterday descendant of the primal father, whom Freud describes this way: ‘his ego had few libidinal ties; he loved no one but himself, or other people only in so far as they served his needs. To objects his ego gave away no more than was barely necessary… Even today the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic, self-confident and independent.’ (
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Standard Edition
, vol. XVIII, pp. 123–4)

Everything that matters is past, according to the psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious, says J. H. van den Berg, ‘and there is nothing new’. One might add that, from Freud's perspective, any attempt at the new will probably stretch the resources of the psyche too far and compel us to lapse back into the lowest ebb, a regressive phase of the repeating cycle of submission and revolt. Rebellion is beside the point: rebellion, in Freud, is a tribute to the power of the wish for domination, in that trying to rid ourselves entirely of that wish is little different from capitulating entirely and embracing it. The Freudian humanist seeks a disabused middle state.

Although Freud wrote during the period of Nazi ascendancy and was eventually forced to leave Vienna to save his life (his sisters, who stayed behind, died in concentration camps), Germany is not the nation that comes in for the most Freudian invective. That distinction belongs to America. Whenever there is an occasion to say a bad word about the United States, Freud takes it, and when an occasion isn't manifest, he's inclined to fabricate one. Freud disliked America because all of the principles on which the nation is founded are affronts to deep human truths, at least as Freud conceived them.
America, the proud democracy, is distinctive and distinctly foolish, for having tried to do away with hierarchy. Its people assumed that everyone was a king, that all were equal. But to Freud, the only way that a people can develop, or even maintain stability, is by accepting individuals of the leader type who tap into the old Oedipal fantasies, but who, not being exclusively narcissistic, can guide the masses to higher ways of life. In sane politics, as in sane love, the old archetypes still preside, though in sublimated forms.

Fascism and communism, or what we might summarily call transference politics, have perhaps a degree less freedom than the liberal, enlightened politics that evolve in the world and are called normal; they display their dependence on the infantile pattern more clearly, and are less adaptable and capable of modification; but that is all, and not what is essential.

Non-transference politics, to be effective, cannot stray too far from the old patterns. Without authentic leaders, societies devolve into mediocrity and, when under pressure, into barbarism. It is clear that Freud saw himself as one such leader. How Americans could be so interested in psychoanalysis without a corresponding sense of how far they'd strayed from its basic lessons was something that continually puzzled him.

The result of throwing off, or pretending to throw off, the addiction to the leader, is that one will hunger for authority and will seek it, without self-awareness, in odd places. The American becomes a crowd animal, starved of order and truth and finding them in consensus. (Freud provides psychological explanations for much of what de Tocqueville thought he saw in America.) But because he does not know that subjection is what he seeks, there is no opportunity to submit the drive for authority to critical scrutiny and to do what Freud commends in his central paper ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’ – to recall and diagnose love for the authoritarian rather than simply repeating it in displaced forms. The psychiatrist, says Freud, ‘prepares himself for a constant battle with the patient, in order to keep within the psychic domain all those impulses that the patient would prefer to divert into the motor domain, and regards it as a therapeutic triumph when he successfully uses the
remembering process to resolve an issue that the patient would rather get rid of in the form of an action’ (‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’, p. 39).

Freud even goes so far as to denigrate American love affairs for their lighter than air quality. Nothing is risked, nothing can be lost. The American in love, presumably, cannot have primal hopes engaged, at least at the outset, and by the time that he does, it is too late. Then he's fallen all the way and is lost in the glorious authoritarian world that is regressive Eros. In America there is no psychological mean, no area where we can engage the primal fantasies and also put them at a distance. One of the many reasons that Freud so admired England may have been that in its constitutional monarchy, all the primal fixations are there to remember and to work through, manifest as they are in harmless ceremonial forms. The monarchy is theatrical, peopled with surrogates, and thus allows a sort of free national psychoanalysis to be ongoing. Citizens can displace political fantasies onto the royal family in much the way that patients displace them onto the therapist through the transference. Is it possible that in America people displace their psychodramas onto their celebrities and thus leave the politicians a little more unenchanted space in which to work? Freud would never have allowed as much: to him America is an eternal disaster.

What could be done for a psyche, or for a culture, in love with oppressive authority, or with outmoded fantasies about Eros? How can you bring the cycle of illusions and vastation to an end, if not for the masses who are by Freud's account bound to be lazy and stupid, then at least for promising individuals, those who need to bear the burdens of civilization, and whose health is, accordingly, most precious?

Freud attacked this problem from as many sides as he could. In his writings he tried to direct people away from crippling religious beliefs, from the longing for the primal father, who would take the place of a richer and more complex super-ego, and for the longing for the mother, which, in
Civilization and its Discontents
(1930), Freud implicitly equates with the ‘oceanic feeling’, the sense of
being overwhelmed by an enveloping presence – a regression, in other words, back to the undifferentiated world of the id and the womb. The sublime and the beautiful are primary aesthetic experiences because they arise from – and with some luck transform – the first fantasies of authority and of love.

In
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
(1921), Freud reflected on hypnotism and taught us – W. H. Auden praises him for looking deeply into the most common things – how close this apparently harmless diversion was to being enthralled by the fascist orator, by the general or by the charismatic teacher. He showed in that book how difficult it is to sustain the later acquisitions of the psyche, ideals and rationality. He argued that we want to sink back into easy pleasures and easy hates by letting a masterly object take the place of the super-ego, and acquiescing to what appears to be discipline, but is really the indulgence of early and brutal desires. To Freud, the greatest human pleasure conceivable would perhaps be found in committing barbarous deeds with the full approval of the Over-I. To destroy the Jews, the gypsies, the queers, and to do so not with an aching conscience, but in the name of the Father and Fatherland, what human pleasure could exceed that?

For the individual caught in erotic repetition, there was of course therapy. In therapy, Freud plays with fire. For in order to disabuse us of our reliance on authority in its most overbearing form, Freud, and the therapists who followed him, assuming the role he composed for them, effectively masquerade as that authority. The therapist puts on a disguise which can easily corrupt the wearer, that of omniscience, of the subject who is supposed to know. The result can be that the man comes to be defined by the mask. It shapes and distorts, or maybe simply confirms, the contours of his face. The authoritarian pose never left him, says Auden, in part because within the drama that is therapy, Freud was willing to be what he most feared and despised – the figure who promised complete truth and endless love. The result of activating primal fantasies was the transference, a state of emotional vertigo not unlike falling in love. There was then the work of allowing the patient to aim her richest hopes and fears at the analyst and showing her that none of them,
ever, could be realized in experience and that she would have to accept the Freudian compromise: half truths, partial pleasures.

The therapist, in this understanding, becomes whatever the patient needs and wants him to be. To maintain his own emotional health, the therapist has got to recognize that in therapy he is not himself; his godly status is a hallucination shared by all of his most adept patients, but pertaining in no way to the facts of the case. What rich dissonances between the world of the consulting room and that of the street must then arise. How can even the most self-aware analyst not occasionally succumb to the desire that Sartre thought was at the fulcrum of bad faith, the desire to be god?

At one point, in an analysis that seemed to be sinking into failure, Freud cried bitterly to his patient: ‘We are getting nowhere because you do not think it worth your while to love an old man.’ Perhaps the old man was too palpably mortal for this patient, not a deity who lives forever. He was simply a grumpy, undernourished codger, with bandages on his jaw from all the cancer operations, with two chows and a bourgeois living room and too many books.

If Freud's myths of love and power and repetition have some bearing on experience, then questions remain: is there anything to do about this distress save for reading Freud scripturally, or entering therapy, save, that is, for finding an old man worthy of love and becoming a good deal like him? The problematic of love and authority and of the hunger to repeat is Freud's great legacy to us; and his solutions are manifold, but they all take us back under the rule of the grey deity, the Reality Principle. He leaves us without charisma, without anything akin to the glowing world that the myths and the movies both in their ways deliver. Do we have to give up all glories and live the nobly stoical Roman life that Freud seemed finally both to accept himself and to commend for others?