It refers to an underlying emotional attitude in which the contradictory attitudes derive from a common source and are interdependent, whereas mixed feelings may be based on a realistic assessment of the imperfect nature of the object.
Love and hate – a too simple, or too familiar, vocabulary, and so never quite the right names for what we might want to say – are the common source, the elemental feelings with which we apprehend the world; and they are interdependent in the sense that you can’t have one without the other, and that they mutually inform each other. The way we hate people depends on the way we love them, and vice versa. And given that these contradictory feelings are our ‘common source’ they enter into everything we do. They are the medium in which we do everything. We are ambivalent, in Freud’s view, about anything and everything that matters to us; indeed, ambivalence is the way we recognize that someone or something has become significant to us. This means that we are ambivalent about ambivalence (and the forbidden, we should remember, is an object of desire, which is why it is forbidden), about love and hate and sex and each other and ourselves, and so on. Wherever there is an object of desire, in this account, there is ambivalence. But Freud’s insistence about our ambivalence, about us as fundamentally ambivalent animals, is also his way of saying that we are never quite as obedient as we seem to be: that where there is devotion there is always protest; that where there is trust there is suspicion; and that where there is self-hatred (guilt) there is self-love. We may not be able to imagine a life in which we don’t spend a large amount of our time criticizing ourselves and others; but we should keep in mind the self-love that is always in play.
We are never as good as we should be; and neither, it seems, are other people. Indeed, a life without a so-called critical faculty would seem an idiocy, though quite what kind of idiocy is not entirely clear. What are we, after all, but our powers of discrimination, our taste, the violence of our preferences? Our insufficiency is patent (though we do need to bear in mind that to feel not good enough is to have already consented to the standard we are being judged by). Clearly, self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves. ‘It often happens,’ Swift wrote, ‘that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work, and there is no farther occasion for it’ (Examiner, No. XIV, 1710). The lie that self-criticism can so easily be – the relentless misnaming of the self – seems to require endless reiteration, like the propaganda that it is.
And, by the same token, nothing makes us more critical, more confounded – more suspicious, or appalled, or even mildly amused – than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless criticism; that we should be less impressed by it. Or at least that self-criticism should cease to have the hold over us that it does. One reason, for example, that we might be less impressed, less in awe, of the part of ourselves that criticizes ourselves, is that there is one very striking fact about it, which I will come back to. The self-critical part of ourselves – which Freud calls the ‘superego’ – is remarkably narrow-minded; it has an unusually impoverished vocabulary; and it is, like all propagandists, relentlessly repetitive. It is cruelly intimidating – Lacan writes of ‘the obscene superego’ – and it never brings us any news about ourselves. There are only ever two or three things we endlessly accuse ourselves of, and they are all too familiar; a stuck record, as we say, but in both senses – the superego is reiterative. The stuck record of the past, it never surprises us (‘something there badly not wrong’, Samuel Beckett’s line from Worstward Ho, is exactly what it must not say). It is, in short, strikingly unimaginative; both about morality and about our selves – the selves it insists on diminishing. 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. We might think that something terrible had happened to him. That he was living in the aftermath, in the fallout of some catastrophe. And we would be right.
II
Hamlet, we should remember, wanted to ‘catch the conscience of the king’, and thought the ‘play’ was where it could be caught – ‘The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’. For ‘catch’ the OED has: ‘to seize or take hold of, to ensnare, to deceive, to surprise … to take, to intercept … to seize by the senses or intellect, to apprehend’; it also had, in the sixteenth century, our modern connotation of ‘to catch out’, but the term derives originally from hunting and fishing. Clearly it would be a very revealing, perhaps overexposing, thing to be able to do, to have been able to catch the conscience of a or the king (and especially, perhaps, in 1604, when James I’s kingship was in question); conscience did not then have simply or solely our more modern sense of some kind of internal moral regulation but also meant ‘inward knowledge or consciousness’; the dictionary has, for 1611, ‘inmost thought, mind, heart’. To catch the conscience of a king would be to radically expose his most private preoccupations and, in the words of the dictionary, it would be to expose ‘the faculty or principle which pronounces upon the moral quality of one’s actions or motives’. These definitions are interesting not least because they raise the question of just how private or inmost or intimate conscience is supposed to be. And questions about what we should want to know about a king, or indeed about any authoritative voice (about, say, James I, and what his religious affiliations might entail). We might wonder, for example, whether conscience itself has a conscience, and so on. Morality, one might think – not to mention the religion of state that the king represented – would have to be public. And yet these definitions contemporary with Hamlet intimate that one’s morality might also be the most private thing about oneself – private from the authorities, given that the language of morality was the language of religion, and Hamlet was written at a time of considerable religious divisions; but also, perhaps, private in the sense of hidden from the self.
One might carry a morality, live as if a certain morality were true, without quite knowing what it was. It would be like a morality that had no texts to refer to; nor even knew, perhaps, that reference was required. It could be like certain versions of Protestantism (the inner light is not a reading light). And at its most extreme the ‘faculty or principle which pronounces upon the moral quality of one’s actions or motives’ might have no discernible or remotely popular cultural moorings. So in speaking one’s mind one might be speaking all sorts of other minds, some recognizable, some not. Hamlet, Brian Cummings writes in Mortal Thoughts, ‘far from speaking his mind, confronts us with a fragmentary repository of alternative selves, and searches within for the limits of being’. Once we have the idea of alternative selves, we will have questions about the limits of being, about what or who we can take ourselves to be. If conscience can be caught – like a fish, like a criminal – it might become part of that fragmentary repository of alternative selves that resembles a troupe of actors. If the play is the thing, then we can say that it was useful to have a cultural form in which the conscience of a king – or indeed of anyone; conscience itself being like a king – could be caught, exposed, seen to be like a character. And therefore thought about, and discussed and argued with. What does the conscience of the king look like? Who, or what, does it remind us of? Being able to reflect on one’s conscience – being able to look at the voice of conscience from varying points of view – is itself a radical act (and one that psychoanalysis would turn into a formal treatment). After all, if the voice of conscience is not to be obeyed, what is to be done with it?
Freud, it is worth remembering, used Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) as, among other things, a way of understanding the obscene severities of conscience (he hadn’t coined the term ‘superego’ in 1900: he first used it in The Ego and the Id in 1923). In what seems, in retrospect, a rather simple picture of a person, Freud proposed that we were driven by quickly acculturated biological instincts, tempered by controls and prohibitions internalized from
the culture through our parents. Conscience, which Freud would later incorporate into his notion of the superego, was there to protect and prohibit the individual from desires that endangered him, or were presumed to. In Freud’s view, we have conscience so that we may not perish of the truth – the truth, that is, of our desire. Hamlet was unusually illuminating for Freud because it showed him how conscience worked; and how psychoanalytic interpretation worked; and how psychoanalysis could itself become part of the voice of conscience. It showed too that conscience was voracious in its recruitments. ‘The loathing which should drive [Hamlet] on to revenge,’ Freud wrote, ‘is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish.’ Hamlet, in Freud’s view, turns the murderous aggression he feels towards Claudius against himself; conscience is the consequence of uncompleted revenge. Originally there were other people we wanted to murder; but this was too dangerous so we murder ourselves through self-reproach, and we murder ourselves to punish ourselves for having such murderous thoughts. And we have to be clear about this: Freud is using Hamlet to say that conscience is a form of character assassination, the character assassination of everyday life. We are continually, if unconsciously, mutilating and deforming our own character. Indeed, so unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we are like without it. We know virtually nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves before we have a chance to see ourselves (as though in panic). Or, to put it differently, we can judge only what we recognize ourselves as able to judge. What can’t be judged can’t be seen. What happens to everything that is not subject to approval or disapproval, to everything that we have not been taught how to judge?
Freud’s way of formulating this shows us how conscience obscures self-knowledge, and he intimates that this may be its primary function; that the judged self can only be judged but not known; and that guilt hides the self in the guise of exposing it. This then allows us to think that it is complicitous not to stand up to, not to contest, this internal tyranny by what is only one part – a small but loud part – of the self. So frightened are we by the superego that we identify with it, we speak on its behalf, to avoid antagonizing it (complicity is delegated bullying). Tragedy is the genre that shows us what is at stake in contesting and abiding by conscience, and its related terms. So in this play, or rather, in one way of seeing this play, Hamlet is arguing with his own and other people’s consciences, with unique eloquence and subtlety.
Hamlet, Freud intimated, has such complex self-rumination and such relentless self-accusation – the two becoming virtually synonymous, the so-called internal world being among other things an ongoing revenge tragedy – because of the violence he has been unable to enact. The drama is internalized. Hamlet’s battling with his conscience – not the voice of conscience alone but the voices called up in Hamlet to contest it – is the drama of the play. So Hamlet, we should notice, is a genius of self-reproach, because of the dialogues with his conscience that he can engage in. In this play – and in this sense literature might be the thing to catch the conscience – the dialogues around and about self-criticism seem like one of the most imaginative things we can do. Hamlet captures our imagination because of what has captured his imagination, and the ways in which it has captured his imagination. It is the links between self-criticism and what Brian Cummings called the ‘limits of being’ that Shakespeare dramatizes in Hamlet. Indeed, it is only because our consciences are as they are – are the kind of artefact we have made for ourselves – that there is such a thing as tragedy at all. Tragedy, one could say, is the cultural form in which we have been trying to reveal something not about the real horror of life, but about the horror of life lived under the aegis of a certain kind of conscience. Self-criticism is nothing if it is not the defining, and usually the overdefining, of the limits of being. But, ironically, if that’s the right word, the limits of being are announced and enforced before so-called being has had much of a chance to speak for itself. The Freudian superego is the limit that forbids you to discover your own limits. It is pre-emptive in its restrictiveness. Hamlet’s conversation with himself and others about conscience allows him to speak in ways no one had quite spoken before.
It is, then, of some interest that Freud chose Hamlet to start really thinking about conscience, and that thinking about conscience requires thinking about tragedy. There is, it dawned on Freud, something we may need to be freed from. After interpreting Hamlet’s apparent procrastinations in the play with the new-found authority of the new-found psychoanalyst, Freud then needed to add something by way of qualification that was at once itself a loophole and a limit. ‘But just as all neurotic symptoms,’ he wrote,
and, for that matter, dreams are capable of being ‘overinterpreted’, and indeed need to be, if they are to be fully understood, so all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single impulse in the poet’s mind, and are open to more than a single interpretation.
It is as though Freud’s guilt about his own aggression in asserting his interpretation of what he calls the ‘deepest layers’ in Hamlet – his claim to sovereignty over the text and the character of Hamlet – leads him to open up the play, having closed it down (the Freudian superego always has a sovereign interpretation of our behaviour; we consent to the superego’s interpretation; we believe our self-reproaches are true; we are overimpressed without noticing that that is what we are being). You can only understand anything that matters – dreams, neurotic symptoms, literature – by overinterpreting it; by seeing it from different aspects as the product of multiple impulses. Overinterpretation here means not settling for one interpretation, however apparently compelling it is. Indeed, the implication is – and here is Freud’s ongoing suspicion, or ambivalence, about psychoanalysis – that the more persuasive, the more compelling, the more authoritative, the interpretation is, the less credible it is, or should be. The interpretation might be the violent attempt to presume to set a limit where no limit can be set (if one interpretation ‘explained’ Hamlet we wouldn’t need Hamlet any more: Hamlet as a play would have been murdered). Authority wants to replace the world with itself. Overinterpretation means not being stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by; it means assuming that to believe one interpretation is to radically misunderstand the object one is interpreting, and indeed interpretation itself.
Tragic heroes always underinterpret, are always emperors of one idea. And the tragic hero is always the enemy of what Freud calls, and calls for – overinterpretation. Hamlet, we could say, is a great overinterpreter of his experience; and it is this – the sheer range and complexity of his thoughts; his interest in his thought from different aspects – that makes him such an unusual so-called tragic hero, and that gives Hamlet, I think, its unique status. ‘Emerson was distinguished,’ George Santayana wrote, ‘not by what he knew but by the number of ways he had of knowing it.’ Freud was beginning to fear, at this moment in The Interpretation of Dreams, when he was writing about Hamlet – and rightly, as it turned out – that psychoanalysis could be undistinguished if it had only one way of knowing what it thought it knew. It was dawning on him, prompted by his reading of Hamlet, that psychoanalysis, at its worst, could be a method of underinterpretation. And to take that seriously was to take the limits of psychoanalysis seriously; and indeed the limits of any description of human nature that organizes itself around one essential metaphor. The Oedipus complex – a story about the paramount significance of forbidden desire in the individual’s development – was the essential psychoanalytic metaphor. Comparing Hamlet with the psychoanalytic readings of Hamlet as an Oedipal crisis would soon more than confirm Freud’s misgivings about the uses and misuses of psychoanalysis. Indeed, it confirms Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s point in Anti-Oedipus that the function of the Oedipus myth in psychoanalysis is, paradoxically, to restore law and order; to contain within a culturally prestigious classical myth the
unpredictable, prodigal desires that Freud had broached, and which psychoanalysis threatened to unleash.
So there is Cummings’s distinction between the notion of Hamlet speaking his mind as opposed to his speaking a ‘fragmentary repository of alternative selves’; and there is Freud’s authoritative psychoanalytic interpretation of Hamlet highly qualified by his subsequent promotion of ‘overinterpretation’; and Shakespeare’s and Hamlet’s troupe of actors who will perform a play that will be the thing to catch the conscience of a king. And there is of course Hamlet’s question in the famous soliloquy in which he tells us something about suicide, and something about death, and something about all the unknown and unknowable future experiences that death also represents. And he does this by telling us something about conscience. Or, rather, two things about conscience.
The first quarto of Hamlet has, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,’ while the second quarto has, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards.’ If conscience makes cowards of us all, then we are all in the same boat; this is just the way it is. If conscience simply makes cowards we can more easily wonder what else it might be able to make. Either way, and they are clearly different, conscience makes something of us; it is a maker, if not of selves, then of something about selves. It is an internal artist, of a kind. Freud will say that the superego – which, as we shall see, is both similar to and different from conscience – is something we make, which then, in turn, makes us into something, into certain kinds of people (just as, say, Frankenstein’s monster makes Frankenstein into something that he wasn’t before he made the monster). The superego, I will say, after Freud, casts us as certain kinds of character: it, as it were, tells us who we really are. It is an essentialist: it claims to know us in a way that no one else, including ourselves, can ever do. And, like a mad god, it is omniscient: it behaves as if it can predict the future by claiming to know the consequences of our actions (when we know, in a more imaginative part of ourselves, that most actions are morally equivocal, and change over time in our estimation; no apparently self-destructive act is ever only self-destructive; no good is purely and simply that). The superego is the sovereign interpreter, and it forbids what Freud calls, usefully, ‘overinterpretation’, the word making us wonder what the standard of proper or sufficient interpretation might be if this (psychoanalytic reading) is overinterpretation, and overinterpretation is required. What is the norm, and what kind of norm is it, if this excess is necessary? The superego tells us what we take to be the truth about ourselves. Self-criticism, that is to say, is an unforbidden pleasure. We seem to relish the way it makes us suffer. It gives, and has given, unforbidden pleasure a bad name. Unforbidden pleasures are always the pleasures we don’t particularly want to think about; we just implicitly take it for granted that each day will bring its necessary quotient of self-disappointment. That every day we will fail to be as good as we should be; but without our being given the resources, the language, to wonder who or what is setting the pace; or where these rather punishing standards come from. How can we find out what we think of all this when conscience never lets go?
Unforbidden Pleasures Page 7