This is another short collection of essays by Phillips around the theme of giving up. Phillips begins, “We give up, or give something up, when we believe we can no longer go on as we are. And so a giving up is always some kind of critical moment…. Giving up, in other words, is an attempt to make a different future…. Giving up is at once a risk and a prediction.” He continues by describing the feeling of wanting, “It would be crude, but not wildly inaccurate, to see human history as a history of creatures tormented by their appetites…. Acculturation, we can see, has now become the really quite quick proliferation of wants…. Parenting and education teaching us what to want, and what to not want…. Modern people, we take it—at least in so-called detraditionalized societies—leave home to find, and to find out, what their parents can’t give them; the family circumscribes and defines and tries to fashion the child’s wanting, and then the modern child’s wanting exceeds what the family can provide…. Anyone who can satisfy us, anyone who can make us feel better, is going to be the same person who frustrates us and can make us feel worse…. In this account, we are always found wanting—in a state of dependent, and therefore ambivalent, need for others—and we are always and only preoccupied by what we need and want.” Phillips always selectively riffs (and attempts to modernize?) Freud, while paying due respect to the master, “Fulfillment and non-fulfillment of a vital necessity or desire, Freud suggests, may not be as different as they seem; the satisfaction of a wish and the frustration of a wish both entail suffering…. If wanting sustains us, it also threatens to destroy us; if not wanting starves us, it keeps us safe. In the Freudian story, what you most want is what you must not have.”
Phillips has an essay on the feelings involved with being left out. He explains, “It was Freud’s contention that we are involved in the lifelong project of leaving ourselves out of our own lives, that we can only survive by exclusion. Our unconscious includes us and excludes us at the same time…. In Freud’s view, people want to have as little in common with themselves as possible…. No one is remotely acceptable to themselves. Human beings, as Freud sees it, are radically at odds with who they take themselves to be…. He was looking at what we are tempted to leave unattended to in ourselves and others, at our passion for ignorance, our fear of our own desire…. Already knowing, or thinking we know, what we want is the way we manage our fear of freedom. Wanting not to be left out may tell us very little about what we want, while telling us a lot about how we evade our wanting…. There are all the ordinary accidents and catastrophes and frustrations of childhood: being left out of the satisfactions one seeks, the safety one requires, the unmet needs, the unrecognized preoccupations that will inform the child’s entire life…. We are likely to imagine that we are left out of the thing we think we most need. Tell me what you feel left out of and I will tell you what you think you want…. An identity is what you are left with, what you come up with, after being left out: it is a self-cure for alienation. Desiring and thinking and questioning and imagining are what we do after the catastrophe of exclusion. We are shocked into necessary forms of self-identification. We try to make ourselves recognizable to ourselves and others.”
Finally, Phillips deals with the concept of projection, “From a psychoanalytic point of view traditional distinctions begin to attenuate and blur; there is no them and us, the sane and the mad, the good and the evil, the primitive and the sophisticated, reality and fantasy; or there is no them and us now, because we are described, by Freud, as projecting the unacceptable, the inadmissible, parts of ourselves, of which there are many, into other people. That what we are also really up against is the unacceptable and inadmissible in ourselves.” Freud, himself, proclaims, “We have recognized that it is not scientifically feasible to distinguish between what is psychically normal and psychically abnormal.” Phillips concludes, “What would it be, Freud gets us to wonder, to live in a society that believed in the unconscious? What could it possibly mean to believe in the unconscious? Which, of course, is not like believing in God, or love, or justice. It would be to believe that we are largely unaware of who we are, and that we mostly want to keep it that way because we are too disturbed by who we experience ourselves as being.”
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