Beyond the Pleasure Principle Read online

  To love, according to Freud, is to ‘over-estimate the erotic object’. What is the nature of this so-called over-estimation? To over-estimate someone is, presumably, to see them as larger than they are in themselves, or to others – or (maybe more to the point) than they would be to Freud, who was, to say the least, a rather harsh judge of character. And naturally the first over-magnified figures in life were the parents, the mother in particular, who looms over the child. ‘The mother's face,’ says Wallace Stevens, ‘is the purpose of the poem’ and, Freud would add, of much more besides. We, males and females alike, seek her, according to the Freudian wisdom, from one end of our lives to the other. So we are anxious and dissatisfied when monogamous – the sole object that we invest in is never the right one, the original one. But we tend to be equally unhappy with promiscuity. For here the original object is pursued in a series of substitutes, none of whom brings full satisfaction. As Philip Rieff puts it: ‘Freud acutely understood the intimate connection between libertine and ascetic behaviour. Both are excesses, deriving from an imperfect emancipation from childhood's insatiable love for authority figures… If from Freud we may infer that monogamy is not a very satisfactory arrangement, the results of his science may also be taken to show that man is a naturally faithful creature: the most inconstant sexual athlete is in motivation still a toddler, searching for the original maternal object.’ (p. 166)

  So, erotically, we repeat. We continue time and again trying to regain an illusory former happiness. And too, perhaps, we repeat our former humiliations as punishment. If the incest wish informs every desire, then desire must be chastened time and again. Every erotic hope is a hope for the mother or the father, and such hopes require retribution. The super-ego, Freud's often depraved agency of inner authority, may even push us towards erotic failure and suffering so as to confirm its harsh rule. Thus we repeat out of libidinal desire, and repeat out of a desire for punishment; the Over-I and the It assert themselves at the expense of the bewildered self.

  Near the end of the third chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes a scene from Tasso which, he says, illustrates the repetitive nature of erotic wounding. Tancred, the hero of Gerusalemme Liberata, unknowingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel when she is disguised in an enemy's armour. After she is buried, Tancred makes his way into a magical forest, which fills his army with fear. He slashes with his sword at a tree, but blood rather than sap flows from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, cries out that he has wounded her again.

  We inflict erotic wounds, inadvertently, unconsciously, as Tancred does. And we feel them to the quick, in Clorinda's way. Try as we might, the Freudian wisdom says, we can never find a love that does not set the wheel of primal ambivalence in motion. In love, we reopen the narcissistic wound again and again, as each new object does to us what the parent has done, falls short of perfection, or thrusts us aside for another. And because we activate primal fantasies in others, we probably wound as often as we are wounded.

  Is all of this reduction back to the mother and the father too simplistic to sustain belief? If so, one might look at Freud's thoughts on Eros from another perspective. One might consider them as a sort of mythology of origins. Imagine that, rather than trying for some empirically reliable vision, Freud looked around him at what he took to be human erotic folly, and tried to find a metaphor that would capture what he saw. Thus he might be taken to be saying something like this: ‘People act as if they're still in love with their parents. They act as though in some fundamental way they're still infants. Only a myth that is that grotesque and that hyperbolic will get you close to seeing how strange and disturbing the situation really is.’

  What makes an object lovable in the most obsessive way? What makes us compelled to over-estimate it? Narcissism. The narcissist is the one who can transport us away from our standard vision of the day-to-day and convince us that extraordinary things are possible. The narcissist, says Freud, in the great essay ‘On the Introduction of Narcissism’ included in this volume, is the one whose satisfaction comes not from loving, but from being loved. When such a figure is beautiful or powerful, then his sway over those around him is boundless. He returns them to the dream of perfection.

  The narcissist exudes charisma, in the secular rather than the sacred sense. He needs nothing and no one but himself. The narcissist sends off a glow of sheer inviolability. Nothing gets to him. Nothing daunts him. His being is unified, coherent and composed: the narcissist has transcended all painful self-division; he is never prey to ambiguity and anxiety. Of the incomparable Alcibiades, a paragon of narcissism, Plutarch writes that ‘In the midst of [his] displays of statesmanship, eloquence, cleverness, and exalted ambition, [he] lived a life of prodigious luxury, drunkenness, debauchery and insolence. He was effeminate in his dress and would walk through the marketplace trailing his long purple robes, and he spent extravagantly… He had a golden shield made for him, which was emblazoned not with any ancestral device, but with the figure of Eros armed with a thunderbolt… The people's feelings towards him have been very aptly expressed by Aristophanes in the line: “They long for him, they hate him, they cannot do without him.”’

  It is magical, the sense of perfection the narcissist brings, and we believe that by gaining the narcissist's love or at least his recognition, we might share in his numinous life. As Freud observes, ‘[I]t seems clearly apparent that narcissism in an individual becomes magnetically attractive to those who have altogether relinquished their own narcissism, and who are casting around for object-love. The fascination of the child rests to a great extent on its narcissism, on the fact that it is sufficient to itself and impervious to others; so too does the fascination of certain animals that appear to show no interest in us, such as cats and the great beasts of prey.’ (‘On the Introduction of Narcissism’, p. 18). From the Homeric gods to our current celebrities, the centrality of narcissistic personalities to culture is beyond debate. Without them we might all die from hopelessness, perish of boredom. With them, we alternate from intoxication, sometimes mild, sometimes not, to rank disillusion. Is there any crowd as disconsolate as the one seeping from a starlit Hollywood movie into the sad light of the everyday?

  The narcissist exploits our longing to be bewitched. They enchant us with the possibility that we are the one who will really share in their glow, or break it down and turn them, as though through a reverse enchantment, once again into a common mortal like ourselves. But alas, narcissism in another, which initially is so exhilarating, is over time demoralizing. It provokes despondency, as we recognize that the glowing one doesn't need us at all. Beautiful women, great criminals, superb jesters, Helen of Troy, Balzac's Vautrin, Groucho, never seem to be defeated – or inevitably turn gap into gain, trump defeat with their wit or beauty. But they do so alone and independently. They do not require our assistance in the least.

  When the narcissist does break down and show need, then he is one of us, and his fascination is gone. At the moment when the narcissist becomes human and returns the love of one of his worshippers, he turns from prince to frog, no longer fit for worship. A narcissist, void of self-love, tends to be void, in that he has never had to cultivate anything but the capacity to fascinate. Inwardness is not part of his game. When the narcissist enters erotic life, he creates the quest, the romance, poems, humiliations, great deeds, and rank unhappiness. When what the narcissist captures is political power, the result is tyranny.

  The narcissist is one of Freud's great archetypes, memorable and illuminating. Yet are absolute narcissists to be found in experience? Is it possible that the narcissist is simply an illusion sustained by the lover, the one who wants the old perfect archetypes to reappear in life, and will work to create them out of whatever promising material comes to hand? To Freud, we weave our dreams whenever we have the chance, awake or asleep. Can't narcissists themselves fall under the spell of others, and be turned into dependent or anaclitic lovers by the presence of
this or that more apparently self-contained and self-delighting being? Emerson tells us that we create perfection in others by being afraid to own up to our own powers. Not recognizing our particular genius, we project it outside. The presence of the narcissist as an absolute type in Freud, rather than a projection, a creation by wishful illusion, suggests that Freud, the most severe interpreter, may have been himself taken in by the kind of glowing promise and perfect love that he also seeks to debunk.

  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 provi
des 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.