The new Arden Hamlet glosses ‘conscience’: ‘some commentators argue that conscience means “introspection” here rather than a sense of morality … Certainly the context indicates that Hamlet means “fear of punishment after death” rather than “innate sense of good and bad”.’ The ambiguity, as I have said, between conscience as inner mentation as opposed to conscience as inner morality is integral to the matter at hand. The question is whether there is more to our inner worlds than our sense, innate or otherwise, of good and bad. Or indeed, whether there are multiple, or competing, or largely unconscious, moralities that we live by unwittingly. Hamlet makes us wonder: if conscience makes us cowards, what is conscience like? Cowardice, after all, may be, as the dictionary puts it, the ‘display … of ignoble fear in the face of pain, danger or difficulty’, a coward being a ‘pusillanimous person’, someone ‘wanting firmness of mind … mean-spirited’ in Chambers modern dictionary. Cowardice is deemed to be unimpressive, inappropriate, shameful fear. We are cowardly when we are not at our best, or as we should be, when frightened. There are, in other words, acceptable and unacceptable versions of fearfulness; and this means we should be fearful in certain ways, and fearful of certain objects. Fear, like everything else, is subject to cultural norms. So if conscience makes cowards, it demeans us; it is the part of ourselves that humiliates us, that makes us, in that horrifying phrase, ashamed of ourselves. But what if it makes the very selves that it encourages us to be ashamed of? What if it makes us into humiliatable objects by always underinterpreting, by being so starkly narrow-minded? As Hamlet famously tells us, sometimes conscience torments us by stopping us killing ourselves when our lives are actually unbearable. It can, as Hamlet can’t quite say, be a kind of torturer; even making us go on living when we know, in a more imaginative part of ourselves, that our lives have become intolerable. Conscience, that is to say, can seduce us into betraying ourselves. Indeed, in Freud’s figure of the superego, as we shall see, it is the part of our mind that makes us lose our minds; the moralist that prevents us from evolving a personal, more complex and subtle morality; that prevents us from finding, by experiment, what may be the limits of our being. So when Richard III says, in the final act of his own play, ‘O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!’, a radical alternative is being proposed. That conscience makes cowards of us all because it is itself cowardly. We believe in, we identify with, this starkly condemnatory and punitively forbidding part of ourselves; and yet this supposedly authoritative part of ourselves is itself a coward.
We are afflicted with its cowardice. Conscience is intimidating because it is intimidated. What, we might wonder – and this was to be Freud’s question – is our conscience intimidated by if it is not intimidated by God? And how is it, and why is it, that morality as we have conceived of it is born of intimidation? What other kind of morality might there be? If it is, as Richard says, ‘coward conscience’ then we might be fearing the wrong objects in the wrong way. If we have been living by a forbidding morality, what would an unforbidding morality look like? We have to imagine not that we are cowardly, but that we have been living by the morality of a coward. So this too we need to consider: that the ferocity of our conscience might be a form of cowardice. Clearly there are moralities inspired by fear, but what would a morality be, or be like, that was inspired by desire? It would, as Hamlet’s great soliloquy perhaps suggests, be a morality, a conscience, that had a different relation to the unknown. The coward, after all, always thinks he knows what he fears, and knows that he doesn’t have the wherewithal to deal with it. The coward, like Freud’s superego, is too knowing. A coward – or rather, the cowardly part of ourselves – is like a person who must not have a new experience (a character in one of Norman Mailer’s novels says, ‘you learn everything fighting your fear’: conscience says, this is a fear you can’t fight). Hamlet is talking about suicide, but talking about suicide is a way of talking about experiences one has really never had before.
Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards –
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’ is also the unknown and unknowable future, ‘bourn’ reminding us that our relation to the future is also a continual ‘being born’, as well as something we have to find ways of bearing. One of the ways we bear the unknownness of the future is to treat it as though it was, in fact, the past; and as though the past was something we did know about (Freud would formalize this idea in his concept of transference; we invent new people on the basis of past familial relationships: as if we really knew those people and could use that knowledge as a reliable guide). This fear of death, and of the unknowable future – the fear that it will be, one way or another, only punishing, as our conscience instructs us – makes us cowards. There is, we should note, in this so-called melancholia no expectation that the unknown will be either better than expected, or wholly other than the way it can be imagined. ‘The native hue of resolution’, something perhaps more innate (the dictionary has, ‘natural to a person’), is then ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’. As if to say, thinking like this – thinking as conscience makes us think – is like an illness; if there is a pale cast of thought, there must be or could be a bright, or brilliant, or full-blooded cast of thought; ‘cast of thought’ reminding us of the cast of a play, and that thoughts might be cast like actors are cast; thoughts in role, thoughts as playing parts, thoughts as scripted. Conscience as scripted can never be out of character; and we may never be quite able to work out who wrote the script. It is likely, in the context, and in the moment of the play, that Hamlet, as the Arden editors Anne Thompson and Neil Taylor say, is talking about fear of punishment after death; the life after death as conceived by the contested Christianities that Shakespeare inhabited. But Hamlet is also talking about, in the context of this play – a play acutely self-conscious about its own theatricality – how conscience feeds us our lines, and whether, indeed, conscience feeds us our best lines; especially given its pale cast of thought.
Talking about conscience though – and, of course, the prospect of death – gives Hamlet some of his best lines. If conscience doesn’t feed us our best lines, Hamlet at least suggests, talking and writing about conscience might. Conscience, in its all too impoverished vocabulary and its all too serious and suffocating drama, needs to be overinterpreted. Underinterpreted it can only be taken on its own terms as propaganda (the superego speaks only propaganda about the self, which is why it is so boring, and yet so easy to listen to). Psychoanalysis was to be about whether the superego – not conscience, but akin to it – could be changed through redescription. Something as unrelenting as our internal soliloquys of self-reproach, Freud realized, necessitated unusually imaginative redescriptions. Without such redescriptions – and Hamlet is of course one – what Cummings calls the ‘fragmentary repository of alternative selves’ will be silenced. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are as nothing compared with the murderous mufflings and insinuations and distortions of the superego. Because it is the project of the superego, as conceived of by Freud, to render the individual utterly solipsistic, incapable of exchange: so self-mortified, so loathsome, so inadequate, so isolated, so self-obsessed, so boring and bored, so guilty that no one could possibly love or desire them. The solitary modern individual and his Freudian superego, a slave and a master in a world of their own. ‘What do
I fear?’ Richard III asks at the end of his play; ‘Myself? There’s none else by.’
III
Like all unforbidden pleasures, self-criticism, or self-reproach, is always available and accessible. What needs to be understood is: why is it unforbidden, and why is it a pleasure? And, following on from this, how has it come about that we are so bewitched by our self-hatred, so impressed and credulous in the face of our self-criticism, as unimaginative as it usually is? And why is it akin to a judgement without a jury? A jury, after all, represents some kind of consensus as an alternative to autocracy (when Algernon Sidney wrote in his posthumously published 1698 Discourses Concerning Government that ‘the strength of every judgment consists in the verdict of these juries, which the judges do not give, but pronounce or declare’, he was making the figure of a judge a spokesperson for a diversity of voices, not a sovereign authority). I want to suggest that guilt – apparently legitimated self-hatred – can also be a refuge. That we need to be able to tell the difference between useful forms of responsibility taken for acts committed, and the evasions of self-contempt (shame is as much about being exposed as about what is exposed). An orgy of self-criticism is always preferable to the other, more daunting, more pleasurable, engagements (or arguments: this doesn’t mean that no one is ever culpable; it means that culpability will always be more complicated than it looks; guilt is always underinterpreted). And that self-criticism, when it isn’t useful in the way any self-correcting approach can be, is self-hypnosis. It is judgement as spell, or curse, not as conversation; it is an order, not a negotiation; it is dogma, not overinterpretation. Psychoanalysis, that is to say, sets itself the task of wanting to have a conversation with someone who, because he knows what a conversation is, is determinedly never going to have one. The superego is both a figure for the supreme narcissist, and is itself a supreme narcissist. Like the referee in football, the superego is always right, even when he is wrong.
The Freudian superego is a boring and vicious soliloquist with an audience of one. Because the superego, in Freud’s view, is a made-up voice – a made-up part – it has a history. Freud sets himself the task of tracing this history with a view to modifying it. And in order to do this he has to create a genealogy that begins with the more traditional, non-secular idea of conscience. Separating out conscience from his new, apparently secular, concept of the superego involves Freud in all the contradictions attendant on unravelling one’s history. To put it as simply as possible, Freud’s parents, Freud’s forebears, like most of the people living in fin de siècle Vienna, probably thought of themselves as having consciences; and whatever else they felt about these consciences they were the more or less acknowledged legacy of a religious past, a cultural inheritance. Their consciences were one of the signs of the traditions they belonged to; their more or less shared assumptions about what to do when. Freud wanted to describe what was, in effect, the secular heir of these religious and secularized-religious consciences as the superego. In the telling image in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud writes of the individual as a ‘conquered city’, living under the regime of the superego.
‘We see how one part of the ego,’ Freud wrote in Mourning and Melancholia (1917), ‘sets itself over against the other, judges it critically and, as it were, takes it as its object.’ The mind, so to speak, splits itself in two, and one part sets itself over the other to judge it. It ‘takes it as its object’; that is to say, the superego treats the ego as though it were an object not a person. In other words, the superego, the inner judge, radically misrecognizes the ego; it treats it, for example, as though it can’t answer back, as though it doesn’t have a mind of its own (it is noticeable how merciless and unsympathetic we are to ourselves in our self-criticism). It is intimated that the ego – ourselves as we know ourselves to be – is the slave of the superego. How have we become enslaved (to this part of ourselves); or rather, how and why have we consented? What’s in it for us, or indeed for someone else? And in what sense is the superego Freud’s implied critique of the Judeo-Christian religions and their God?
Internally, there is a judge and a criminal, but no jury. Annabel Patterson writes in Early Modern Liberalism of Algernon Sidney, that ‘his agenda was to move the reader gradually to understand that the only guarantor against partisan jurisprudence was shared jurisprudence’. Freud’s agenda in psychoanalysis, continuing in this liberal tradition, was the attempt to create – to experiment with the possibility of – shared internal jurisprudence. Self-criticism might be less jaded and jading, more imaginative and less spiteful. The enslaved and judged ego could have more than his judge to appeal to (the psychoanalyst would be the patient’s ally in this project, suggesting juries, revealing unconsidered aspects, offering multiple perspectives on underinterpreted actions: underinterpreted, that is, by the patient himself). This, of course, was not possible, at least not in quite this way, in a monotheistic religion, or an absolutist state. To whom could the modern individual appeal in the privacy of his own mind? To which Freud would answer, through the experiment of psychoanalysis, ‘there’s more to a person – more parts, more voices, more fragmentary alternative selves – than the judge and the judged’ (or as Mill, whom Freud translated in his youth, would put it in On Liberty, ‘the interests of truth require a diversity of opinions’). There is, in effect, a repressed repertoire. Where judgement is, there conversation should be. And we can add, where there is absolute authority, there is the sabotaging of a conversation. Where there is dogma there is an uncompleted experiment. When there is self-condemnation it is always more complicated than that. Mercilessness is cowardice.
The superego, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis write in The Language of Psychoanalysis, is ‘One of the agencies of the personality as described by Freud … the superego’s role in relation to the ego may be compared to that of a judge or a censor. Freud saw conscience, self-observation and the formation of ideals as functions of the superego.’ It is useful to call the superego an agency, because it has agency; and the complementary alternatives – it is like a censor or a judge – speaks of the punitive, the forbidding and the restrictive. So, paradoxically, being forbidden something – being forbidden to speak, or to act, or to think, or to desire in certain ways – can be itself an unforbidden pleasure. As can turning oneself into an object; the object of censorship and judgement. But what is also perplexing, and adds insult to injury, is that Freud’s superego, because it is more than conscience, because it includes this traditional form, is also, in a very limited sense, benign. It is the provider and the guardian of what Freud called our ‘ego-ideals’. The ego-ideal, Laplanche and Pontalis write, ‘constitutes a model to which the subject attempts to conform’. And, once again, Freud preferred the multiple view: ‘Each individual,’ he wrote, ‘is a component part of numerous groups, he is bound by ties of identification in many directions, and he has built up his ego-ideal on the most various models.’ The ego-ideal is both composite – made up from many cultural models and influences – and divisive. It keeps alternative models at bay, but it can also be surprisingly inclusive. In this ambiguity, which Freud could never quite resolve, he was wondering just how constricted the modern individual really is, or has to be. In making the ego-ideal, at its best, the ego has overinterpreted his culture, beginning with the family; he has taken whatever he can use from his culture to make up his own ideals for himself. Whereas the superego as censor or judge, Freud believed, is simply an internalized version of the prohibiting father who says to the Oedipal child: ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ But the superego, by definition, despite Freud’s telling qualifications, underinterprets the individual’s experience (in the Freudian story the father is never imaginative enough about the son, and so vice versa). It is, in this sense, moralistic rather than moral. Like a malign parent, it harms in the guise of protecting; it exploits in the guise of providing good guidance. In the name of health and safety it creates a life of terror and self-estrangement. There is a difference, which mak
es all the difference, between not doing something out of fear of punishment, and not doing something because one believes it is wrong. 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. Not doing something because one will feel guilty if one does it is not necessarily a good reason not to do it. Morality born of intimidation is immoral. Psychoanalysis was Freud’s attempt to say something new about the police and the judiciary, about the internal legal system.
Unforbidden Pleasures Page 8