The Horse and The Rider
What happens is so far ahead of our
Thoughts, our intentions, that we can never catch
Up to it or ever really come to know it.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Intimacies, a dialogue-in-book-form by a practicing psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, and a psychoanalytically-inclined writer, Leo Bersani, is about just that: intimacies. Note: Intimacies. Not Intimacy. The pluralization of the noun (a noun which, upon reflection, we almost always encounter in the singular, as if there were only one kind, universally recognized, universally desired) is a sly allusion to the book's revolutionary raison d'etre: to imagine alternatives to the one-size-fits-all story of intimacy we sell and celebrate in the Western world. The authors approach their task by “considering psychoanalysis as an inspiration for modes of exchange that can only take place outside of psychoanalysis” (Intimacies 4). The idea is that by uncovering “new ways of being present to another person," we might be able to expand beyond our single, socially sanctioned vision of intimacy toward an as-yet-unimagined plurality of intimacies.
In her book Desire/Love, cultural theorist Lauren Berlant explores why it might be that, when it comes to intimacy, we're all telling one tale. Her multi-layered analysis centers upon the ways the "heteronormative love plot," at least in the U.S., has been "legally and aesthetically privileged," creating a context that not "only supports it morally and organizes state, medical, educational, and commodity resources around it, but considers it the generic (the default, the natural) form of sexuality itself. (44; 21) "There is," continues Berlant:
a long history of using the signs abstractions and institutions of "love" as signs and sites of propriety, so that the "generic" subjects imagined in a love plot tend to be white, Western, heterosexual, and schooled to the protocols of "bourgeois" privacy" (112).
That such a history dovetails conveniently with the historical interests of capitalism, imperialism, racism and patriarchy is not the subject of this essay. For our present purposes, it will suffice to note that this "long history" urges every member of Western society to aspire toward the "two-as-one intimacy of the couple form," in which "desire will lead to love, which will make a world for desire's endurance"; furthermore, that despite ongoing attacks from a variety of radical camps and critics, the world of conventional intimate behavior remains utterly enmeshed in the fabric of our social imaginary (6-7). That a fantasy promising an end to the antagonisms and anxieties of erotic life continues to be popular should comes as no newsflash. Berlant's more subversive point, however, is that these same antagonisms and anxieties, if faced and embraced, might open the way to other stories – other intimacies and experiences, that might give new momentum to what Foucault famously called “the undefined work of freedom” (“What Is Enlightenment?” 46).
Intimacies is interested in those other stories – not just in the possibility of telling them, but in the reasons we might not be. The book wastes no time in diagnosing those reasons on page one of the preface: "It is the contention of this book," writes Phillips:
"that psychoanalysis has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy” (vii).
"The contention," says Phillips, but not the subject. Intimacies assumes that the cultivation of self-knowledge is the unfortunate legacy of “psychoanalysis,” and that this is not in fact conducive to intimacy. Having thrown down the gauntlet, the book takes off to attempt a “working out of a new story about intimacy" – one, presumably, not based on self-knowledge (viii). Before setting sail for utopia, however, it might be prudent to take a closer look at the extraordinary claim made above: that we have been misled; that self-knowledge will not help us cultivate intimacy in our lives.
That this is the case is by no means self-evident to the vast majority of human beings. On the contrary, the connection between self-knowledge and intimacy, between finding oneself and finding love, is esteemed in virtually every segment of society that has something to say about how we live, from the fantasies of art, to the sermons of religion, and the counseling of the mental health industry. This essay aims to linger over the questions raised by Phillips’ contention: What's wrong with self-knowledge? Why would we be interested in forms of exchange, of intimacy, of desire, that are indifferent to personal identity?
The answer is tied up in the reasons Phillips and Bersani have for asserting that psychoanalysis has "misled" us. Intimacies is built on the perceived failures of a counter-story about the self and its desires, the negation of which gives the book its energy. To unearth the differences between these two stories, we’ll need to begin where both stories begin; in a sense, where all stories begin: at birth.
The Ego: A Sketch
In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud offers of an overview of the ego's development. He starts with the infant at the breast that "has not as yet distinguished his ego from the external world as the source of sensation flowing in upon him" (27). At this early stage the infant's sense of itself is coextensive with the world. One could say there is no ego, or conversely, that everything is ego.
As time goes on, the infant becomes aware that some sensations – those issuing from the body – are always present; whereas others – above all, the über-desirable mother's breast – are not. In this classic psychoanalytic account, the dawning of this realization marks the beginning of “differentiation,” the process by which the infant begins to build the boundaries of the ego. Working by trial and error, it learns to distinguish between all that is internal (what belongs to the ego) and external (what emanates from the outer world). The necessity of categorizing the general mass of stimuli into these two categories is doubly urgent: on the one hand, the infant needs to identify those objects in the caretaking environment it desires; on the other hand, it must separate itself from the bombardment of stimuli causing pain and displeasure. "A tendency," Freud writes, "arises in the ego to separate from the ego everything that can become a source of such unpleasure, to throw it outside and create a pure pleasure-ego which is confronted by a strange and threatening ‘outside’” (28).
But this is only half the story. For the ego, in making these distinctions, is also learning to contend with the so-called id, the “unconscious mental entity” for which the ego “serves as a kind of façade" (26). The ego is beginning to grasp that some of the suffering it experiences issues from within, from the pressure the unconscious drives are exerting on the subject. We can imagine the ego here as a battalion under pincer attack, flanked on one side by assaultive reality and on the other by the appetitive unconscious. In his book Sex on the Couch, the philosopher Richard Boothby elaborates on the process: "The ego," he writes,
"functions to categorize things and persons in the outside world (those with whom I identify versus those with whom I conflict), but even more importantly the ego discriminates between contending forces of my own desire (those of my impulses on which I will act versus those which I will refuse and repress). Fundamental to this conception of psychic structure is Freud's assumption that we are animated by a great heterogeneity of impulses. We are, at some basic level of ourselves, a chaos of conflicting urges. Ego thus refers to the restricted economy of impulse that grounds my feeling of having a stable and predictable identity. The ego selects from a range of impulse energies and leaves the others behind. "Id" names the remainder of my urges and incipient acts that have been excluded from the ego and held in repression" (71).
In this description, the ego’s top priority is to create the “feeling of having a stable and predictable identity.” To do this, it must work double-time to categorize the stimuli from the "things and persons in the outside world" and from the "contending forces of my own desire.” But how does it know? Upon what basis is the ego able to judge what the self desires? How, if the ego’s very sense of itself is to be culled from "a great heterogeneity of impulses" is it to decide which of those impulses will provide the basis of a more stable ego? The striking thing about this character-building project is the way that the ego, in ordering, excluding, and suppressing the impulses of the id, is not just arbiter, but augur; it "knows" about itself even as – or before - that self is formed.
Actually, it doesn't. But imagine what would happen if it stopped pretending it did: if the id were to have its way (so the ego believes) then the so-called pleasure principle would be the only law on the books, and what the infant's ego – increasingly on guard against incoming threats from the hostile world – is beginning to grasp, is that this might do more harm then good. As Freud writes: "unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment" (44-45). In this version of the Freudian story, it is not so much the experience of desire that is the problem, but rather, the experiences desire might engender. "An appetite," says Phillips, "is fearful because it connects you with the world in very unpredictable ways" (The Paris Review 60).
And so the ego, fearful of its own appetite and wary of the world, in need of reliable selection criteria, trains its attention on the one available certainty: the past. When Freud famously proclaims in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” that, "the finding of an object is in fact a re-finding of it," he is not just describing a child in search of the lost pleasures of the breast; he is also showing us a subject trying to render an unpredictable appetite more predictable, and an uncertain future more certain (88). In this portrait, the ego’s greatest desire – if we allow ourselves to imagine it desiring, too – is the desire for self-knowledge; that is, as Phillips declares, the desire for a “self constituted through prior and assured knowledge of what it desires” (Intimacies 94). But, Phillips continues, a self in search of the already familiar and the already known “can only be constructed by the repudiating, by the censoring and punishing and trivializing of (unconscious) desire." Phillips’ verb choices present a wholly less flattering image of the ego than Boothby’s, which are: “select,” “restrict,” and “discriminate.” In the latter account, the ego is a kind of connoisseur making sensible calculations to better its enjoyment; in the former, an anxious tyrant, on guard against anything it doesn’t recognize, whatever is new.
The discrepancy in tone between these descriptions implies a question: Are we happy to trade in some of our desires for an increase in stability? Do we prefer the pleasures of the past (or at least those substitutes that try to repeat them) over our anxieties about the future? These might be different ways of asking: do we want to trust the ego? The various ego-psychologies, which began to institutionalize psychoanalysis as a form of therapy in the 1920’s, would say: yes. Sure, it’s a full time job maintaining order in the psyche, but somebody has to do it, and the ego does it well enough. Ego-psychology’s goal was to help the unhappy subject with “adaptation.” Not adaptation of the self to the demands of one’s roving sexuality, but rather, adaptation of one’s sexuality to the demands of a self embedded in a personal history and societal context. Happiness was the end, psychic and genital normalcy the means. In Phillip’s own words, the story of the ego-psychologies is “a story about sexuality that is in fact a story about the sacrificing of sexuality” (96).
When Phillips accuses psychoanalysis for having "misled us," as he does in the preface to Intimacies, it is precisely against this vision of the ego as a normalizing force recruited to serve the heteronormative love plot’s promise of stability that he is taking a stand. Bersani, too, peppers pot-shots throughout the book’s pages: “if we dismiss (as it seems we should) the more or less optimistic psychoanalytic theories between Freud and Lacan…”; “Psychoanalysis is certainly not—at least not in its most original and profound discoveries—an ego-psychology. (60 ; 69)” While neither critic would deny the indispensable function the ego plays in self-preservation – both in its efforts to evaluate the stimuli coming from the world, and in the full-time job of protecting the subject from the drives – they each have grave doubts about supporting the ego in its project of maintaining a coherent, plausible narrative.
Their doubts issue from the question that we can find lingering, so to speak, behind the question of the ego: the question of the id. The question of desire. Do you want to contain it, corral it, and suppress it in exchange for coherence and “normalcy”? Or do you want to let it flow through you, take you somewhere, disrupt your narrative, in exchange for more vitality, or, in the words of Donald Winnicott, “more aliveness”? Phillips and Bersani are not as much interested in the moral dimension of this question as they are in its ethical one, insofar as their position is a response to the Socratic query: “What is the good life?” For both critics, the good life is the life led, as much as possible, by desire; the life that maximizes its own aliveness. This, however, is always going to be a source of conflict, because the cultivation of modern identity calls for the sacrificing of desire – a sacrifice neither critic is too interested in making. “Identity without desires,” writes Phillips, “is a futile passion” (94).
Those familiar with these writers’ work might detect a double entendre in that phrase, “futile passion.” The superficial reading would, of course, be something like this: a life that heeds the anaesthetizing comforts of identity over the enlivening cries of the appetite is not a life worth living. But there is a greater irony at play. To savor it, we’ll need to introduce a different reading of the Freudian ego, one that Bersani sees running through Freud’s work like an underground river. For Bersani (with Phillips cheering on in the background) the institution of psychoanalysis, and even Freud as a reader of his own work, has misinterpreted its original findings, which in fact offer two contradictory models of desire, two different processes of libidinization (Berlant 51).
In what we might describe as the “domesticated” Freudian model, desire is a drive that puts pressure on us to move from sensuous autonomy to a relation with the world; at first, to the breast of the mother; later, to secondary objects that enables the subject to repeat the experience (19). While acknowledging desire’s fundamental restlessness, this model assimilates sexuality to the uniting power of Eros and narrativizes it in a progression through the stages of infantile sexuality (The Freudian Body 64). Here, desire lends itself to the aspirations of stable identity and non-ambivalent intimacy.
In the second, more radical model, desire is a drive that is not so much in relation to objects as it is in excess of them or beyond them. The term for this excessive desire, a term we inherit from Lacan, is jouissance. It is a word that “accompanies the ‘unfathomable aggressivity’ at the heart of both the other’s love for me and my love for the other” (Intimacies 61). More disturbingly still is Bersani’s take on jouissance, which he reads as a source of masochistic pleasure for the (secretly) suicidal ego.
Bersani reads this out of “the more powerful and more radical line of thought in Freud’s work,” citing, in particular, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and its Discontents (63). In his view, Freud represses the discovery that the “so-called aberrational ‘part’ of sexuality – masochism – may be the ‘whole,’” because it throws a wrench into the clarity of his dualist mode of thinking. (90) “The possibility,” writes Bersani, in a comment on Freud’s gloss:
“of exploiting the shattering effects of sexuality in order to maintain the tensions of an eroticized, de-narrativized, and mobile consciousness has been neglected, or refused, in favor of a view of pleasure as nothing more than the reduction of all tension and the evacuation of all excitement” (63-64).
It is not too hard to imagine why a model of desire that emphasizes “the shattering effects of a sexuality” that is always in excess of our rational egos, fixed identities, and normative institutions has not been warmly embraced by upholders of the status quo (Berlant 47). But what this second model of desire also implies is that no matter how much we try to control and corral our impulses, no matter how much we strive to pin our identities on an “I” in line with self and society, the excesses and ambivalence of our sexuality will waylay our best-laid plans. Not only that, but our egos, too – the supposed agents of self-preservation – are complicit in our own undoing: strange cases of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “Shattering,” writes Phillips, “has been Bersani’s word for the ego’s darker design, in which the satisfaction more truly sought is a fortifying dissolution not a monumental achievement” (Intimacies 93).
The Horse and the Rider
To become oneself, as we are so fond of saying, is not to flourish into one’s own autonomy and freedom, but rather, to accept a set of norms and rules in exchange for psychic stability and coherence. “Personal development” takes on a pejorative connotation, at least if we consider the phrase in light of its popular meaning, because the paths one develops upon are increasingly constrained by the determinations of a past one drags into the future. “A cage went into search of a bird,” Kafka famously remarked. For the ego-psychologists, as for all those who preach the gospel of “finding yourself,” growing older means giving up the search so you can keep the cage bars polished and the hinges well-oiled.
This is how psychoanalysis, in its quest for normative Life stories, has led us astray: By encouraging us to read our desires through the prism (prison?) of the past, we sacrifice the desire for the new and surrender the possibilities of the future. If psychoanalysis has a “cure” to offer our well-being, pace therapeutic practices and their assurances to the contrary, it is to be cured of our need for cures, which is another way of saying: cured of self-knowledge and the confining narratives we rehearse in our heads. The exemplary model is Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, who scrawls “I am a . . . “ in the sand at the beach, then tosses the stick aside and walks away. “You can only recover your appetites,” says Phillips, “if you allow yourself to be unknown to yourself.”
Thus, our modern identities, while indispensable to functioning in society, are not to be cemented, codified, and carefully constructed, but to be frustrated, disrupted, and broken up. The same goes for those intimacies we construct on the bulwark of personal history. Bersani and Phillips want us to “resist the project of selfhood,” with its emphasis on narrative and fixity, and open ourselves to the more mobile intimacies we might forge through the dizzying pleasures of jouissance (95). But there’s a catch: whether we do or not, jouissance will always find us.
What is to be done? If we agree that the goal is "more aliveness," and that the ego's attempts to control our satisfactions – to make them conform to our personal histories – is a way to less aliveness, then where are we to turn? The choice would seem to mean the difference between a life of damned-up neuroses or free-flowing freedom. But what, after all, are we going to substitute for personal coherence? The obvious answer would be to turn toward our unconscious desires. But this seems paradoxical. How can we begin to want something we haven't consciously accounted for wanting? Is it possible to circumvent the rational ego’s demand for satisfactions conforming to the comforts of the past?
To answer the question, we might turn to one of Freud’s more famous metaphors. In his New Introductory Lectures, Freud characterizes the struggle between ego and id as similar to the relationship between a rider and his horse:
The horse supplies the locomotive energy, while the rider has the privilege of deciding on the goal and of guiding the powerful animal's movement. But only too often there arises between the ego and the id the not precisely ideal situation of the rider being obliged to guide the horse along the path by which it itself wants to go” (New Introductory 96).
There is quite a bit of accidental humor in that "not precisely ideal situation"; but there is also a great deal of truth. The rider on top of its horse believes himself to be the master, guiding the horse to his goals, but “only too often” finds himself riding the horse where it wants to go. Now, the rider has a choice in the matter. He can work against the horse, digging his heels into its flanks while cursing under his breath, or, he can let out a cry, lean forward in the saddle, and see where the horse takes him. The former is a portrait of our fundamental helplessness, not to mention our ridiculousness when we take things too personally; the latter is a vision of the virtues of helplessness, of the joys of submitting to impersonal necessity. The choice, then, for us, as for the rider, might simply come down to this: smile or grimace. Regardless, the horse is on its way.
Bibliography:
Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love New York: Dead Letter Office, BABEL Working Group, 2012. Print.
Bersani, Leo, and Adam Phillips. Intimacies. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2008. Print.
Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Print.
Boothby, Richard. Sex on the Couch: What Freud Still Has to Teach About Sex and Gender. New York: Routledge. 2005. Print.
Foucault, Michel. “What is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rainbow. pp. 32-50. New York: Pantheon Books. 1984. Print.
Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 2005. Print.
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Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. New York: Norton, 1990. Print.
Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Print.
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Phillips, Adam. Interview with Paul Holdengräber. “The Art of Non-Fiction. No. 7.” The Paris Review No. 214. Spring 2014. Print.