In his book on Isaiah Berlin, the political philosopher John Gray describes what he calls Berlin’s ‘agonistic liberalism’ as a ‘liberalism of conflict among inherently rivalrous goods’; a liberalism in which it is assumed that, because there is never only one good that we seek, there will always be conflict; and where there is no conflict there has been tyranny. By persuading us that forbidden and unforbidden pleasures are not inherently rivalrous goods, that we should be suspicious of our desire for the unforbidden pleasures, psychoanalysis may have oversimplified us, given us an impoverished picture of our pleasure-seeking, and of ourselves as pleasure-seekers. Psychoanalysis, it seems, has repressed the unforbidden, refused to elaborate it, wanting to not take it too seriously; or has simply interpreted it as a refuge from, or a disguised, watered-down version of, the real, horrifyingly exciting thing: forbidden desire.
It is possible that privileging forbidden pleasures grossly narrows the pleasures people can take in each other; overdetermines and confines their moral thinking about what they want to do to and with each other; and so has prevented psychoanalysis from helping people to develop new styles of relating, or what Michel Foucault called ‘new relational modes’. The forbidden has perhaps been overly forbidding (the very idea of the forbidden may, for example, be a way of making us hate sex, as some kind of unbearable ordeal). And perhaps there is nothing more conservative – in both senses – than a commitment to certain versions of the forbidden (the desire for justice, for example, in its various political forms, is not, it should be noted, intrinsically a forbidden desire). What would our lives be like – and what would the therapy and practice of psychoanalysis be like – if we took forbidden pleasures and unforbidden pleasures as inherently rivalrous goods? That is, if we didn’t take it for granted that forbidden pleasure was the real pleasure, or the only real pleasure? If we thought of people seeking a multiplicity of pleasures, without a pre-assumed hierarchy of pleasures? None of this, it should be said, necessitates relegating the erotic. It is, after all, worth remembering, in the psychoanalytic way, that many of the pleasures of childhood are unforbidden.
We can do a number of different things with the category of the forbidden, as we can with any of the familiar binaries that we have learned not to be too impressed by. Forbidding is censorship at its most hyperbolic. And it has forbidden our thinking about the unforbidden (‘… sun destroys / The interest of what’s happening in the shade’, Philip Larkin wrote in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’). We are familiar, now, with the more celebrated, more researched, more historicized, story about what ideas about sanity have done to and for ideas about madness, or indeed, about the rational and the irrational as having been mutually defining. Or about how heterosexuality has formed and deformed homosexuality, and vice versa. It should be no less integral to psychoanalysis – and not only to psychoanalysis – to track the effects of privileging, if not always preferring, the forbidden pleasures to the unforbidden ones. It can always, after all, be two-way traffic. The parts of ourselves that desire forbidden pleasures might have a lot to learn from the parts of ourselves that desire the unforbidden. The seekers of unforbidden pleasures may know something about pleasure that has never occurred to the transgressive; about the pleasures, for example, of not being single-minded. Or about what the pleasures that don’t require courage might be able to tell us about the pleasures that do; about what the pleasures of fellow-feeling, say, or of friendship might have to do with erotic relations, and their inevitable violence. Or about the difference between intimidation and pleasure; or the difference between mastery and skill, and what the alternatives to mastery might be. And we don’t always need to think of pleasures as comparable; only when competition becomes more important than exchange in human relations do pleasures seem merely rivalrous. There is the intelligence of knowing what one can bear and enjoy, and the intelligence of knowing what one thinks one should be able to bear and enjoy.
It is my impression, and it is only that, that even though analysts are not supposed to encourage their patients to talk about anything specifically, they encourage their patients to talk rather more about their forbidden pleasures than their unforbidden ones. So the unforbidden pleasures are taken to be a clue about the other kinds. Analysts may tend to listen out for trauma, and for forbidden desire; and, indeed, for the trauma of forbidden desire. But when everybody supposedly knows the only currency is the forbidden, what are we going to be able to hear and to say? If, as Isaiah Berlin wrote in Four Essays on Liberty, ‘the necessity of choosing between absolute claims is an inescapable characteristic of the human condition’, then it is worth wondering what would happen – what psychoanalysis would sound like, and what the wider culture would be like – if it took the pursuit of unforbidden pleasures as one of a person’s absolute claims, or as one of the absolute claims everyone has to deal with.
There is that which we are unable or unwilling to talk about because it is forbidden (‘censored’, to use Freud’s word); and there is that which resists or is recalcitrant to articulation – what Seamus Heaney called ‘pre-reflective lived experience’, and we might call the pre-symbolic or proto-symbolic experience of the younger child. But between these two dramatic and poignant forms of self-protection and inevitable opacity there is something both more accessible and less patent; that which we wouldn’t bother to elaborate – it might have seemed too trivial, too bland, too everyday and too ordinary to make anything of: neither forbidden, nor apparently obscure. These unforbidden pleasures may be more or less taken for granted, and by the same token enjoyed as unconsidered trifles, relatively conflict free (unless we assume they are merely sublimated forms of forbidden pleasures). There are the pleasures we mostly don’t have, and can’t easily talk about; and there are the unforbidden pleasures which we either don’t bother to talk much about, or talk about all too fluently; without apparent shame, or guilt, or much embarrassment (pleasures unrelated, say, to economic gain or prestige). Indeed, we all too easily think of the unforbidden pleasures as especially sociable ones (more broadly sociable, more communal). It has been one of the mixed blessings of British psychoanalysis – part of its interest, and for some people part of its resistance to Freud – that it has spoken up for these unforbidden pleasures (of affection, of friendship, of play, of imagination). That it has wanted to make the unforbidden pleasures as interesting, as intriguing, as formative, as the forbidden pleasures. And in Marion Milner’s work to have even made the erotic of a piece with the unforbidden.
V
‘One of the central puzzles of English history,’ the American historian Ethan Shagan writes in The Rule of Moderation, is ‘how England came to represent reason, civility and moderation to a world it slowly conquered.’ Freud, who was himself, interestingly, an Anglophile, didn’t want psychoanalysis, as we know, to be thought of as a Jewish science (though, just to adequately complicate things, Ernest Jones notes in his biography that Freud had a ‘long-standing admiration for Oliver Cromwell’ and that ‘Cromwell’s reintroduction of the Jews into England must have been a considerable factor in this’). And, of course, when psychoanalysis came to England in the early years of the twentieth century – that is, before Melanie Klein, the Freuds and other European émigrés arrived – it was not a predominantly Jewish profession. And none of the prominent members of what later emerged after the Second World War as the Middle or Independent Group – most notably Winnicott, Rycroft, Milner, Khan, Laing, Klauber, Lomas – was Jewish. England was, in other words, both congenial and very foreign to Freud’s psychoanalysis, as Freud’s psychoanalysis was to the English. Psychoanalysis, that is to say, arrived in an England that had come to represent ‘reason, civility and moderation’ to a world that it had quite recently slowly conquered. It was the England of Darwin and Darwinism – and Freud himself was committed to Darwinian biology – but Darwin himself in his English way was a paragon of reason, civility and moderation while his ideas slowly conquered the world. And England was also a country, as many peo
ple have pointed out, with a literary tradition preoccupied by childhood. In retrospect it is not surprising that psychoanalysis would find a home there; and not surprising that psychoanalysis would be changed in the process, most notably through the pioneering of child analysis by Klein, Anna Freud, Winnicott and John Bowlby.
By the end of the Second World War, the British analysts, as they were now referred to, had learned a lot about early development from children evacuated during the war, and from their mothers who had had to go out and do war work while their husbands were away. But the Middle or Independent Group – unlike the warring Kleinians and Freudians in the British Society – would come to represent, for better and for worse, something akin to reason, civility and moderation to the psychoanalytic world. If, in psychoanalysis, only the exaggerations are true, in this version of British psychoanalysis, exaggeration – the metaphysical, the non-empirical, the enthusiastic – was suspect (Winnicott was a paediatrician, Bowlby was interested in ethology). As is well known, none of them took up Freud’s idea of the Death Instinct, and all of them took the (observed) so-called mother–infant dyad as seriously, sometimes more seriously, as they took sexuality (in England, at least, they were not going to sacrifice reason, civility and moderation to sexuality). And all of them, implicitly in what was called their developmental object relations theories, were critical of the conquering of the world that was colonization, and more recently fascism; implicitly because none of them was overtly political. But their developmental theories were a critique of imperialism. The psychoanalytic child they described was a born imperialist who needed to become a democrat. They wanted relationships, not exploitative forms of gratification; they wanted the cooperative, not the predatory, in human relations. So they were all radically anti-imperialist in their accounts of mothering and adult sexuality, and, indeed, in their accounts of the role of the analyst; the child’s adapting to what cannot be adapted to without distortion and deformation was their theme (slightly less guarded was Masud Khan’s implicit critique of colonialism in his theory of perversions). Imperialism, colonization, had become the newly forbidden, the culturally unacceptable that psychoanalysis would be recruited, in Britain, to explain and to ameliorate. It would be too crude, but partly true I think, to say that it was the potential imperialism of sexuality – and the wish to see satisfaction as collaborative and mutual – that informed these British analysts’ theory and practice; and that could make mothers and babies, paradoxically, their preferred objects of psychoanalytic desire. This made their writing seem at once Freudian and profoundly anti-Freudian at the same time; and often somewhat anti-Kleinian (the Kleinians were the new imperialists, colonizing the minds of their patients). But it is possible to see now that what they were doing was trying to link, or even to make compatible, Freud’s theories about sexuality and the forbidden – the Oedipal and pre-Oedipal predicament of the Freudian child – with the unforbidden pleasures of infancy and childhood. They were trying to join the language of British romanticism to the language of Freudian psychoanalysis; a language that, as Freud acknowledged, was originally based on Darwinian biology, but which privileged exchange over competition in human relationships. Competition is limiting in ways that exchange need not be.
When you put together the profoundly innocent child of a Protestant British romanticism with the infantile sexuality of the Freudian child you get the Middle or Independent Group in British psychoanalysis. The child of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Blake is notably and naturally kind, sympathetic and full of fellow-feeling, and he has a virtually instinctive capacity and need to forget himself, to absorb himself in things (and people) other than himself. Given the chance he loses himself in nature, in books, in games. He or she is by nature both solitary and sociable and so hates – as the novels of Dickens, Eliot and D. H. Lawrence make poignantly clear – tyranny, submission and injustice. The child is not without vigorous, even daemonic, antisocial energies – the energy that could be for Blake ‘eternal delight’, and the energy that Wordsworth knew to be also violently destructive – but what is pointedly recognized about this romantic child is his natural kindness and his desire to forget himself, to lose himself, to become absorbed. And the extraordinary vitality of his desire; both his keen and amused hedonism, and his ruthlessness. He has an openness to the world that growing up endangers, and that endangers him in the contemporary economic and political reality of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It is the adults who do the terrible, forbidden things; in growing up natural innocence is replaced by unoriginal sin. But it is the intensity of these unforbidden pleasures of childhood that the romantics and the novelists promote; and that is taken up, wittingly and unwittingly, in the Freudian work of Winnicott, but more particularly in the work of Marion Milner. What Winnicott started off with his idea of play – that, crucially for him, was an essential capacity undisrupted by instinctual desire – Milner elaborated in terms of the child’s capacity for absorption, and all that that entailed. In Milner’s work – and we should remember that she was supervised by Melanie Klein and analysed by Winnicott – the forbidden and unforbidden pleasures of childhood are seen to be interanimating, inextricable, and never mutually exclusive. Indeed for Milner, pathology involved the splitting of the forbidden and the unforbidden. For Milner, as a psychoanalyst, there is something before transgression, before the forbidden; something unforbidden that partly makes the forbidden possible; or is the precondition for the experience of forbidden desire.
VI
Concluding her 1956 paper ‘Psychoanalysis and Art’, Milner put her cards on the table. ‘The central idea of my paper,’ she wrote,
is that the unconscious mind, by the very fact of its not clinging to the distinction between self and other, seer and seen, can do things that the conscious logical mind cannot do. By being more sensitive to the samenesses rather than the differences between things, by being passionately concerned with finding ‘the familiar in the unfamiliar’ (which, by the way, Wordsworth says is the whole of the poet’s business), it … brings back blood to the spirit, passion to intuition. It provides the source for all renewal and rebirth, when old symbols have gone stale. It is, in fact, what Blake calls ‘each man’s poetic genius’.
We might baulk now at the anachronism of some of the language, or perhaps of the central idea; even though, in Freud’s mythology, it is the work of Eros that Milner was describing. But I want to use Milner’s conclusion here as an emblem of what I am talking about. From this account we could say: the forbidden is the apotheosis, the final formulation of the supposedly not-me, of the wished-for not-me. It draws an uncrossable line; it separates me from what I want, but should not want. But the unconscious mind, in Milner’s almost old-fashioned picture, is ‘more sensitive to the samenesses rather than the differences’; is not ‘clinging to the distinction between self and other’; has a passion for finding, in Wordsworth’s words – and it is not incidental that Blake and Wordsworth are invoked here – ‘the familiar in the unfamiliar’ (and that could mean, in this context, finding the unforbidden in the forbidden; or acknowledging that forbidden pleasures can be distortions or perversions of unforbidden pleasures). Milner’s version of the unconscious mind is not, it should be noted, primarily seeking forbidden (incestuous) pleasure, it is seeking unforbidden reunions; the pleasures of sameness, not the pleasures of transgression (where there is no difference there can be no transgression). This is Milner’s theme. The recovery of oneself as a part of one’s world, rather than an exile from it (the forbidden exiles us from ourselves, for better and for worse). These are the formative experiences for her; not the horrifying, exciting urgencies of incestuous desire, but what she named, quoting the art historian Bernard Berenson, ‘the aesthetic moment’.
It is what she called the ‘central idea’ that emerged in her great paper of 1952, ‘The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation’:
The basic identifications which make it possible to find new objects, to find the familiar in
the unfamiliar, require an ability to tolerate a temporary loss of sense of self, a temporary giving up of the discriminating ego which stands apart and tries to see things objectively and rationally without emotional colouring. It perhaps requires a state of mind which has been described by Berenson as ‘the aesthetic moment’. ‘In visual art, the aesthetic moment is that fleeting instant, so brief as to be almost timeless, when the spectator is at one with the work of art he is looking at …’
Unforbidden Pleasures Page 11