Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2 page)

In the early period of deep dependency a rich inner life begins: the child's complex human character starts to take shape. The infant – etymologically, the one who cannot speak – lives in a world of images and desires, great pleasures (he is, potentially, a polymorphous pervert) and body-wrenching wants. Giant figures, godlike in their power (as proportionately grand as the figures on the movie screen that bring these grown-up demi-gods themselves back to thrilling infancy) loom over the child, capable, it seems, of satisfying all wants. Where they are, dressed out in their full potency, is Eden, a world of perfection. Filled up with mother's milk the baby experiences a blissful satisfaction that will be a standard for all requited love to come. In the father's voice, the child senses a power that unerringly protects and guides. That voice will return later in life with every experience of what the eighteenth century called the sublime – in Wagner and Beethoven, say, thunderously assertive, as though they were rendering the thoughts of Jove and, too, in the voice of every plausible purveyor of Truth, each subject (as Lacan has it) who is supposed to know.

But gaps open up too. Mother is distracted and looks away; father fails some elementary test. And into the gap between desire and delivery come fantasy, wish, yearning, and resentment as well. So like all paradises, this one is eventually lost. But to Freud, the psyche is profoundly conservative. He says over and over that we will never willingly give up a satisfying libidinal position once we have inhabited it. If we lose such a position, we will strive to restore it in dreams, in fantasy, through neurosis, or – with every semblance of probity - in what appears to be well-ordered adult life. We regress where and when we can, and what we regress to is the dream of perfect authority and love. We do so again and again, for reality, even the best-made reality, is too poor for our hopes. In his attempt to surrender unconditionally to the primal dream, the opium-eater is the prototype of all humanity.

Love, says the narrator of Céline's
Journey to the End of the Night
, is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite – ‘and frankly I have my pride’. Freud would concur in the general denigration of love, I suppose, but he would doubt that much of anyone, even the rancid Céline, could always sustain his pride in the face of Eros. Perhaps Freud's most unpleasant remark on love comes in his paper on the transference. ‘It is true’, Freud writes there, ‘that the love [that the patient develops for the therapist] consists of new editions of old traits and that it repeats infantile reactions. There is no such state which does not reproduce infantile prototypes. It is precisely from this infantile determination that it receives its compulsive character, verging as it does on the pathological. Transference-love has perhaps a degree less of freedom than the love which appears in ordinary life and is called normal; it displays its dependence on the infantile pattern more clearly and is less adaptable and capable of modification; but that is all, and not what is essential.’ (‘Observations on Transference Love’,
Standard Edition
, vol. XII, p. 168).

So the obsessive love that arises in therapy is a little bit madder than the love that arises in everyday life, but not very much. In saying so, Freud seeks to explain a peculiar situation that occurs all the time in experience, but that we often take in our stride. The fact that people of all sorts do the most bizarre and unexpected things
for love, that they live in a haze, abase themselves, act in outlandish ways, is something we simply accept as normal. In
The Symposium
, Plato's great dialogue on love, it's suggested that someone who has fallen in love is really little different from one who has fallen physically ill.

Freud sees this domesticated madness and does what he can to explain it. He says that when we fall in love, all of the infantile fantasies about power and pleasure are reactivated. They have been dormant, but they have never died, and they are resurrected, a little like the horror-movie spooks who rise up when their burial ground is accidentally disturbed. The old wishes come once again to the fore and they dominate life. Love is pathology, at least romantic love. Married love, which takes place under the reign of that sour deity, the Reality Principle, is far less interesting to Freud. So Freud would disabuse us of our erotic illusions and make us more sober, or at least capable of some measure of irony at the point when we are once again about to drown ourselves in Eros.

An effective, flexible super-ego (assuming that such a thing exists) is, one might hypothesize, the source of whatever ironic vision we can apply to our own experience. Super-ego irony entails distance, detachment, a sceptical sense that we are not so different from anyone else, that we are as ripe for humiliation as the next person. And, more than that, such irony suggests the possibility that we are, despite protestations, not so different from our former selves: that we are likely to behave as disastrously in the present as we have in the past.

In love, the reigning super-ego suffers usurpation. In love, Freud says in
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
(1921), the lover puts the beloved in the place of the Over-I. The lover becomes the standard for judgement. What the beloved finds admirable, or interesting, or just noteworthy, is splendid behaviour. Like being drunk, which also suspends the super-ego, at least until the next morning when it can assert itself with redoubled force (the great essay on the psychology of the hangover is yet to be written), being in love lets us displace our own internal monarch and put a lord of temporary, blissful misrule on the throne. Alas, when we remember
our various erotic abasements, it is through the unforgiving agency of the true super-ego, the one based on harsh parental prototypes, which has retaken the seat and glares bitterly at the past. Love, too, has its morning after. (Sometimes it lasts for years.) But for a while, ludicrously, absurdly, exaltingly, we feel free.

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.