Phillips is one of today’s foremost psychoanalysts. He seems to have more questions than answers. He does not come out with empirical statements. Instead, he ruminates and offers possibilities. His lead essay, “Laying Down the Law”, is on living a life of pleasure- not in an immoral sense, but purely away from shame, on one’s own terms. “All our ideals for ourselves- all our aims and aspirations and beliefs- are by definition restrictive.” Forbidding yourself in life is hard work. It is constant struggle. The unforbidden life is a life lived for oneself, instead of for others and the outside world. It is, as Oscar Wilde suggests, the life of the true artist. Art is not craftsmanship. Art is not rational. It is beyond what can be explained. It is divine madness. And in that it makes us feel fully alive. “The forbidden coerces desire. It makes something strangely alluring. It makes us obedient, but it also makes us dream (often at the same time). To abide by a rule you have to have in mind what it would be to break it.” It sets limits and boundaries and dares us to cross them. “The law forbids being open to an open future; the open future of who we may be, and of who we may want to be.” The one confined to laws is the one who settles. It is morality dictated by the majority- the morality of religion, today especially secular religion. Morality is the straightjacket of the other. The only real morality is a free morality, a subjective morality, a morality of the self and for the self. In his second essay he states, “obedience is the unforbidden pleasure that gives us something by forbidding us something else- something often of ultimate value. At its most minimal it forbids us from thinking about the pleasures our obedience might exclude. It narrows our minds, narrows our picture of ourself…” It too is restrictive. And obedience starts at youth, in the home. “The non-complaint child is free to find out what the mother’s range might be, and, by the same token, what his range might be. The compliant child resigns himself; the non-compliant child risks himself: the compliant child consolidates; the non-compliant child experiments.” Obedience takes the world as it is, as a given. The obedient lives within this world instead of trying to mold it to his will. “Obedience becomes the unforbidden pleasure that forbids so much…. But the forbidden can also depend upon the intimidation being disguised as something else- protectiveness, chosenness, destiny, love; obedience here signifying being loved, chosen, protected, destined in some way. Obedience, then, is unforbidden pleasure sponsored by the forbidden pleasure of intimidation.” Obedience then, whether to God or to one’s parents or to the State or to society, is often a trap. It is foisted on you as for your own good. “When we live in a state of unconscious obedience we don’t think of ourselves as being obedient, we think of ourselves as being realistic, or normal, or reasonable. We live as if we know what life is really like. The most pernicious obedience is the obedience we are unaware of.” We live as if the boundaries to life are not even there. Phillips, in his third essay, critiques self-criticism. It too is limiting. It is narrow-minded. He says of Freud’s superego, “were we to meet this figure socially, as it were, this accusatory character, this internal critic, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel.” Instead of limiting ourselves and our morals, we need to overinterpret the world- to come at it from different angles, from our different selves. “Tragic heroes always underinterpret, are always emperors of one idea.” And that idea is given to us at birth or even from inside the womb. “Shame is as much about being exposed as about what is exposed…. Guilt, that is to say, is not necessarily a good clue to what one values; it is only a good clue to what (or whom) one fears…. The child says to the parents, ‘I will be what you need me to be, as far as is possible, in exchange for your love and protection…. Safety is preferred to desire; desire is sacrificed for security.” Self-criticism is contracting, while we should be expanding our ideals, creating multiple selves. “In Freud’s language we could say that we free ourselves of our parents’ ideals for us by beginning to use the available culture to make up our own ego-ideals, to evolve a sense of our own affinities beyond the family, to speak a language that is more our own.” The unsuccessful child lives on in the shadow of the parent- playing their own life by the rules of the parent’s game. They have become the tragic hero trapped in the singular criticism of their own superego. It is of their own making. In his eponymous essay Phillips seeks to explicitly contrast forbidden and unforbidden pleasures. “To forbid something, that is to say, is an omniscient act; it attempts to establish a known future, a future in which certain acts will not be performed, and from which certain thoughts and feelings will be excluded.” It is diktat, not suggestion. The lines are, however, malleable. “Apart from the incest taboo, and its displacement paedophelia, all the rules seem to be made breakable.” Forbidding creates a line, but a line that can be crossed. Phillips seeks to dismantle the psychoanalytic idea that all unforbidden pleasures are mere sad substitutes for forbidden desires. That unforbidden pleasures might be ordinary does not make them anything less-than. Perhaps “we have done it all the wrong way round; we have used the forbidden pleasures to tell us what the unforbidden pleasures are, rather than allowing the unforbidden pleasures to be a way of discovering one’s true likes and dislikes?” By forbidding do we create the very problem we wish to eliminate from the world? “The tyranny of the forbidden is not that it forbids, but that it tells us what we want- to do the forbidden thing. The unforbidden gives no orders.” We are again back to original sin- the fall of man. And “each of these religious forms assumes that the pleasure we can take in each other is insufficient; that something transcendent or supernatural is required to really keep us going.” Phillips final essay, “Life Itself”, examines how one is to truly live. “However painful one’s life turns out to be- however painful one believes that life really is- it is possible that we have been forbidden from enjoying our lives, or from enjoying them as much as we might. Indeed, our sense of injustice- including all of our personal and our more obviously political grievances- is based on this simple idea: that we are being refused possible pleasures.” This is the dichotomy between the individual and society. The busybody is the one trying to mold the world to fix the deficiencies in himself. But what if man, even in his perfectibility, is not good enough? Schopenhauer posits, “What gives to everything tragic, whatever the form in which it appears, the characteristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment.” He was a Buddhist. In Greek myth Dionysius’ companion Silenus states to King Midas, “wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.” Is it us or our world that makes life so impossible? “Either we seek, or have been educated to seek, the wrong satisfactions, or we are living in the wrong world, a world utterly unsuited to our nature.” In which case, is it better that we had never been born? This is a very different state than dying, it is a state of never having been at all- never having had to exist to begin with. “That the pleasures do not offset the suffering. That we did not ask to be born- it was not our desire, it was not one of our demands…. Good parents wouldn’t bring their children to unbearable life. And if they have, they must be sadists, they must be monsters: evil monsters, or naive monsters, or both…. [for] why would God or our parents create creatures that they had forbidden from enjoying their lives?” Life becomes a waiting game: waiting for something better, waiting to attain perfection, waiting for death. This is the life of forbidden pleasure. It either subsumes you or you relegate it into the deep crevices beyond consciousness- but you never reject it for it is the one thing which frames you; it creates the world in which you inhabit. And the only relief is to break free: to appreciate the unforbidden as the real pleasure in life- and the attainable one.
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