Читать книгу Admirable Evasions - Theodore Dalrymple - Страница 9

CHAPTER ONE

If all the antidepressants and anxiolytics in the world were thrown into the sea, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. once suggested should be done with the whole of the pharmacopoeia, if all textbooks of psychology were withdrawn and pulped, if all psychologists ceased to practice, if all university departments of psychology were closed down, if all psychological research were abandoned, if all psychological terms were excised from everyday speech, would Mankind be the loser or the gainer, the wiser or the more foolish? Would his self-understanding be any the less? Would his life be any the worse?

It is not, of course, possible to give a definitive answer to these questions: the experiment cannot be done. But it would be a bold man who claimed that Man’s self-understanding is now greater than that of Montaigne or Shakespeare. How many of us would dare to claim in public that he had greater insight into his fellow creatures than the Swan of Avon? He would be laughed down immediately, ridiculed and ignominiously driven from the platform: and quite rightly so. Such arrogance would have its reward. As to life having improved, how much of the improvement is attributable to psychology? We owe incomparably more to improved sewers than to psychology.

Yet implicit claims to superior knowledge and understanding are by no means uncommon. More than one school of psychology has claimed to have achieved deeper insight into human nature, conduct, emotion, and distress than ever before. In 1802, the French philosophical physiologist Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis said confidently that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. Two hundred years later, the acclaimed neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran said essentially the same thing, though in more words, as if verbosity indicated progress:

Even though it is common knowledge, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life – all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love lives, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards as his or her own intimate private self – is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in our heads, in our brains. There is nothing else.

So everything in human self-understanding is over bar the shouting: only the details have yet to be filled in. Before long, if there is sufficient research funding, there will be no more puzzles and no unpleasant surprises, no agonizing dilemmas in human existence; the question of the good life will have been settled once and for all, indubitably and scientifically, without the necessity of endless and unprovable metaphysical speculations. To understand all will no longer be to forgive all, for there will be nothing to forgive; everyone will behave reasonably in the first place, which is to say, in accordance with the dictates of the scientifically proven good life. History will come to an end, this time not by virtue of the triumph of liberal democracy throughout the world, but by that of the triumph of psychology and neuroscience. Man will no longer pass on misery to Man, as in Larkin’s poem; he will pass on knowledge instead, knowledge and wisdom being of course by that stage coterminous. Indeed, knowledge will secrete wisdom as the liver secretes bile.

I don’t believe it, and I’m not sure that I would want to live in such 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, Mankind would still be living in caves.

I 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 a treatment long and expensive enough, people will always find that it did them at least some good, for otherwise they would have wasted their time and money, and would look foolish – even to themselves.

Recently I was sent for review a book by a woman who had been in analysis for twenty years, with four or five sessions a week, in all about four thousand. Four thousand hours of talking about oneself! Full marks for endurance, if not for choice of subject matter. Whether it did her any good is, of course, a question that cannot be answered definitively. What she would have been like without it must be a matter of fruitless speculation. The author, Barbara Taylor, is a historian who suffered no serious traumas in her life except that of her own personality and the consequences thereof. In the book she recorded some of the interchanges she had with her analyst, who seems to have been a lot more communicative if not necessarily more profound in his utterances than most orthodox analysts. I presume she must have written them down immediately after they took place:

SHE: Why [do I keep coming to the analyst]? Is it just to torture myself?

HE: Sometimes.

SHE: Why else? Why else would I keep coming here? I’m just making myself suffer more! Why else would I keep coming here?

HE: You have different reasons at different times.

SHE: What reasons?

HE: Well . . . to get revenge on your parents. To get revenge on me, their current representative.

SHE: Ah. Yes. [I have heard this so many times, it doesn’t mean anything.]

HE: And because you’re waiting for a miracle.

SHE: A miracle? [This is more interesting. Is he offering? Maybe there’s something he can do for me that he hasn’t done yet.]

HE: Yes, the miracle that will make you the baby your mother really wanted, the sort of baby she could really love, so that she would look after you properly.

SHE: Oh. That miracle. [Why is there never anything new?]

HE: And sometimes it’s because you want to know the truth.

SHE: The truth? What truth?

HE: About what happened to you.

SHE: I know what happened to me.

HE Do you?

SHE: [Do I?]

This, I presume, must have been one of the highlights of twenty years of analysis, or it would not have been selected for inclusion in the book. Behind the self-obsession of the analysand and the portentous banality of the analyst’s interjections lies the idea, self-exculpatory, that we are victims of our past, about which we can do nothing (unless, that is, we pay an analyst for four thousand sessions). Indeed, a British psychoanalyst called Adam Phillips wrote in a recent book, Becoming Freud, that childhood is inherently catastrophic and the past is, in his typically inelegant phrase, “unrecoverable from.” (Psychoanalysis, it seems, does wonders for a man’s prose style: it renders it labyrinthine without subtlety.) There is no place, then, for human agency, except the kind that leads you to talk about yourself in the presence of another for twenty years. Shallowness can go no deeper.