A Truth for All

Recently invited to the London Review of Books Adam Phillips became over-excited. Between you and me he got rather carried way. Foolishly, we thought to give him some helpful advice.

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Of course there’s a problem. But so attractive is this drug, and so innocuous the side effects, that he persuades himself that no, it’s alright, I’m OK; there is no problem; it’s perfectly fine; it’s under control. No, really, I’m alright. Hey! come on, what you’re saying, I’m not hooked. Look. Can’t you see? Haven’t I just changed the prescription… 

There are reasons people have (and want) theories about human nature – theories taken to be universal in application – and reasons we find essentialist theories so compelling. Once you know what to start with you have some idea of what you can do; once you know where to start from you can work out where to go. But all essentialist theories – theological, political, psychoanalytic – require you to believe a lot of other things in order to believe them (to believe in the Judeo-Christian God, say, you have to believe that the world was created, and that there is such a thing as omnipotence). In order to believe the psychoanalytic story about misogyny you have to believe that there is essentially nothing more to people than their instincts (and their mothering), and that human development is subject to uncontroversial, normative standards (those who have been fortunate enough to have had good enough mothering will be OK, despite the fact that what is OK, what is good enough, and what mothering is are all debatable and contentious).

There is nothing deep inside us, Richard Rorty once remarked, that we haven’t put there ourselves. So even though, at least for some people, psychoanalysis, and psychology more generally, have interesting things to say about misogyny, they also run the risk of naturalising it (misogyny is deep inside us because our mothers are). But what is deep inside us, in this odd spatial picture, is what Manne calls ‘prevalent cultural narratives’…

Freud like Christ was an artist.1 His case studies are parables, that tell important truths about a human condition shared by billions yet unique to each individual. Such stories encapsulate insights; though, as with every work of literature, they are but snippets from a humanity rich in variation and endless in its fluidity. The bus stops beside two houses alone on the moor. A woman gets on, pays and chats to the driver, while we watch an elderly gent shooting at the TV with a child's gun. He looks so serious in his suit, tie and waistcoat. As regular as an army drill. Attention. Aim. Fire. The engine revives. The woman sits down, and we drive away from a harmless massacre… Freud’s tales portray a small cohort of the population, the freaks and creeps, the oddballs of any society. Highly localised, we find them in the wild suburbs on a city’s edge; a place we never visit, unless accompanied by a tour guide. And on our right are the remains of The Step, a 1960s Brutalist building, designed by Max Steinwasser. He wanted to recreate the vertiginous excitement of the times. Note how on this side the flats are built like a staircase, but as we circle around we see how the roof is one gigantic concrete block, creating a massive overhang. You see; yes, yes? You see it, its…it’s a step! Steinwasser himself described it as a Jacob’s Ladder for the 20th century. He wanted to produce that sense of an exhilarating despair when we… We are more interested in the exotic specimens on the streets, their clothes a bad collage of poor taste; their talk a foreign dialect. There's a shiver of frightening pleasure when one young lad stares into the coach. Are these characters dangerous? We are too shy to ask the tour guide, who is talking about Heaven and a breakdown of links? of communication?… Why’s that geezer pointing at that piece of piss, this native comments to a friend, who, we now notice, has Tarkovsky on his t-shirt. Stalker?

It is an odd fact that Freud, his insights far narrower than Christ’s (or Karl Kraus’s; Phillips is to quote him later), should have been once hailed as a Newton; his stories scientific theories as solid and permanent as concrete. The epoch made him so. For the scientist, having kicked the artist out of the temple, is the seer of our modern world. Yet we feel sorry for Freud. He was unlucky. An artist he had to pretend to science. And then his disciples proliferated, and became very popular, making the scientists - another peculiar lot - ferociously jealous. Very quickly they took their revenge: during the 1970s they marched Dr Freud out of his own laboratory. Sacked, he lost face, and the artists, who had relied on him for their ideas, deserted his cause. Disgraced, shunned, poor, he slept on the streets until an old people’s home invited him in; where he pays the rent by telling his tales every Thursday afternoon; the Bingo Club won’t miss it for the world. A few disciples hang on. But they no longer believe what the old man says. They go their own way, adapting, as they must, to the times. It is why Adam Phillips no longer talks about diagnosis and cure, but speaks the language of religion. Now, it is an act of faith to believe we are ruled by the unconscious; that naughty child once ubiquitous in a bourgeois nursery. The old master’s ideas have ceased to be simply true; a scientific theory supported by the evidence. No. Today, we have to believe in them to keep these concepts alive. Psychoanalysis, the most successful religious cult of the 20th century, has come to recognise its own nature. Heavens above! The old man smiles, laughs, gets up from his chair, invites the attractive lady to dance… Injected with a burst of life he now follows his young disciples, who leaving their homeland in biology - a worn out seam - have migrated to culture, this century’s new unconscious. The super-ego has become the id. 

Phillips himself has matured. He too now recognises the danger of the universal statement; although, if we are precise, we should thank the past for that. The past fictionalises all things until even the most obtuse no longer believe they are true. In contrast, science, like all guardians of the truth, exists in a perpetual present. The moment it stops growing, developing, changing it will die; to become just another story amongst a million others; from which we take our pick, choose a favourite… So Phillips knows the risks. But he cannot help himself. A new bunch of ideas comes along and - arm in arm, shouting, singing and laughing down the street, short skirts dancing in the breeze - he finds them infectious. He loses his head. Suddenly he’s amongst them, joking, giggling, jumping up and down: back to his adolescence! that fabulous time when everything we believe is real. Junking the idea that we are driven by deep irrational drives - its ancient stuff, out of date, decrepit - he embraces his new friends, copies their talk, willingly succumbs to the “prevalent cultural narrative” they are creating around them. Who wouldn't want to join this band of young, happy souls? We watch his intellect - aware of its own history - trying to restrain this sudden enthusiasm; alas…that first sentence but a half-hearted pull on the reins…it is not strong enough to restrain this untamed stallion. Later he will try again - he writes about some men - but it is hopeless, he cannot control a horse that has been given its head. Oh balls! Why do I find new ideas so compellingly attractive? Because once again you have found the secret code to human nature, Mr Phillips. You will not give it up.

In the old days, when we listened to the artists, it didn’t matter very much. When Karl Kraus writes…

‘Some women are not beautiful, they just look as though they are.’

…we smile, turn away and pick up George Eliot. Such a view - it is so partial - doesn’t sink down into the psyche to become a permanent story, a “prevalent cultural narrative”; for we often see attractive women who are not beautiful; while too many repel with their ugliness (body and/or soul). Is Kraus’ aperçu therefore false? No. Because in those moments when we are susceptible to romance, or greedy with concupiscence, this phrase is true: all women beguile us. This is the sorcery of literature. It uses the particular to express the universal, which is always anchored to the local detail; its metaphors boats tied to the harbour wall. There are no laws here. No absolute truth. When we release the boat, and sail out into the estuary, we leave the insight behind, sadly waving at us from the shore. She has enlivened our stay, in this small fishing port, giving us a few days of happiness. Never to be seen again. Yet that last scene will stay in the mind: wiping away the tears as she smiles in the rain, we watching her washed from view. Bye bye sweet times… An aphorism captures a fleeting thought or an ephemeral emotion and sculptures it inside a phrase. Fixed in an image - the writer’s marble - what it captures is unique and fluid; though everyone - hopefully - will have this experience at least once in their lives. The cultivated sensibility, responsive both to the peculiarities of the feelings and to the generalising turn of the mind, it also has a grasp of the relations between them, knows and plays with these distinctions; it is aware that Kraus’ apothegm cannot be true for every man and for all time. Not so our pedants from the polytechnic…

And so on and on and on. When misogyny isn’t horrifying or dispiriting, it is unrelentingly boring.

Phillips has confused the writer with the scientist, Kraus with Freud. (We also suspect a literary prejudice: Kraus has some of the best lines on his Viennese neighbour.) Kraus is crafting literature; he is not laying out a scientific law. This poor reviewer doesn't know the difference, so suffused he is with the “universal” (or “essentialist”) spirit; this need to treat all phenomena as if they are a branch of applied mechanics. Literature is about the unique, the odd, the exceptional, also the humdrum; all of whom embody truths about the human race; some of which will resonate with the reader, when written with elegance and wit; the style essential to the profundity. Science, in contrast, is about the general and the average, and is best done in a workman’s prose. 

We suspect that the omnipresent reference to “essentialism” (its current prevalence is “unrelentingly boring”) arises from a misunderstanding both of the difference between an aesthetic generalisation and a scientific law and about the nature of generalisation itself; a general idea (or observation) identifying patterns and trends only.2 A general statement is a wise monarch, liberal with the domestic lives of her subjects; she is no tyrant who desires that all act and think like him. Yet even within this beneficent reign there will be petty authoritarians and intolerant officials; or to remove the metaphor… Do you hear the workmen dismantling the room?… There are things that can be described in a scientific way - the generalisation is both universal and secure. Such notions usually apply to the average person: buy an iPhone and you will become its slave is very close to a truism these days. Other things will remain forever sui generis: the reading habits of Will Self. What is needed is a cultivated judgement that can distinguish between such different aspects, these different levels of explication in the social field. The triumph of science has created a bias in favour of the explanatory, which then generates a need for universal precepts; whose often fragile foundations are overlooked: they are not strong enough to contain the weight of the human animal, so vast in its variety. For those who see the shaky generalisations - the false absolutes - of the past there is the tendency to dismiss all such general statements as untrue; these characters unable to distinguish between a trend and a law, an idea that is relative as opposed to one that is absolute (so much journalism flounders on this distinction). Here is one reason for the fashionable rage against “essentialism”. Another is the ongoing fight (I feel it in myself) against a scientific explanation of our very being; this feeling especially strong amongst those who can be so explained: the commonplace, the follower, the mediocre, the copier, the member of a group. We can also blame the recent expansion of the universities; which has increased the number of mediocrities who both teach and study there; intellectual formulas and ideological clichés littering the campus grounds. The resemblance to the 1960s, which also saw a rapid rise in the university population, with its attendant intellectual nihilism that sought its salvation in slogans, is striking. The results are as expected. To be average in a society that attacks the very idea is to encourage the abuse of that which reveals the stultifying truth. We scream and punch and kick at the “essentialists”, call them fascist; David Holzman, who made a film in the hope it would make him interesting, curses the camera because it shows he has nothing to say.

We need the subtleties of literature, where the one and the many jostle together in a friendly crowd; there is pushing and barging, and - ouch! - someone stands on my foot; but we smile, make a joke, and carry on, hustling away; when, suddenly, it is so unexpected  - WOW! - I take a hit of ecstatic joy, almost falling down with excitement. It is literature that captures those rare moments when the unique and the universal fuse; when a sentence (a phrase, a paragraph, a whole damn book) becomes the deepest philosopher, our most intimate friend. It’s like making love to a stranger.

Karl Kraus we can take anywhere. Dr Freud must stay in his surgery.

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1.  Though the specific reference to instincts and mothering indicates that John Bowlby is the influence here.

2.  For an excellent discussion of this common confusion see Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism.