A LOOK INSIDE SELF-CRITICISM OR WHY WE ARE SO SELF-CRITICAL!

Freud’s Ambivalence: what we think conscience is, it isn’t, what it isn’t, it is.  Self-hate, then, is it self-love?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

March 17, 2015 (St. Patrick’s Day)

As a boy, Freud was an avid reader.  He taught himself Spanish so that he could read Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” in its original Castilian.  We early readers are influenced all our lives with what we read when young.  Freud is no exception. 

Years later, Freud would write, in describing the “ego” and the “id”:

“Between the persons’ conscious sense of themselves, and their more unconscious desires (“Don Quixote” as metaphor), 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.”

The “ego” is the deluded fantastical mad knight of “Don Quixote” who, like all realists, is utterly plausible to himself, while operating out of his tree.  Meanwhile, the horse (“Rosinante)” is at once a parody of, and an expose, of the horse as elemental force.  And where does the horse go?  It goes home to desire.  The “id ” is the horse, while the “super ego,” sometimes down to earth, sometimes relevant, sometimes gullible is “Pancho Panza,” there but not there, holding the reins of the horse, but not in control.

Not to belabor the point, but Freud often used metaphor from his early reading such as the “Oedipus Complex” and “Electra Complex” compliments of Greek tragedy.

Krishnamurti once put it plainly, “Freud’s anxiety and guilt became adopted by the world as its own.”  I use this a preface to what follows.

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French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan observes, “It is ironic that Jesus Christ preached love thy neighbor as thyself because of course people hate themselves.”  The way people treat one another – in many cases with a good deal of cruelty – would suggest they, indeed, love their neighbors as they love themselves.  Lacan was implicitly comparing Christ with Freud.

Freud treated the Jesus Story about love as a cover story or self-cure for ambivalence: whatever we hate we love, whatever we love we hate.  If someone can satisfy us, they frustrate us, and if someone can frustrate us we believe they can satisfy us, while who frustrates us more than ourselves?

Ambivalence is the Freudian sense does not mean mixed feelings.  It means opposing feelings.  Contradictory attitudes are derive from a common source and are interdependent whereas mixed feelings are based on a realistic but imperfect assessment of love or hate or whatever. 

With ambivalence, you cannot have love without hate, or hate without love.  They are interdependent.  According to Freud, we are ambivalent to everyone and everything that matters to us.  In fact, ambivalence is how we recognize that someone or something has become significant to us.  Stated another way, we cannot help but be ambivalent about ambivalence.

We are never as obedient as we would like to think we are.  Where there is devotion, there is also buried protest; where there is trust there is suspicion; where there is self-hatred and guilt there is self-love.

Self-criticism with which we are programmed to think as a good thing is not.  Self-criticism can be our most sadomasochistic way of loving ourselves. 

We are never as good as we should be, but neither are other people.  We fain thinking others are smarter, more able, more gifted, more advantaged than we are so we can retreat into sadomasochistic self-idolatry. 

The self-critical part of us, the part that Freud calls the “super ego” is remarkably narrow minded.  It is relentlessly repetitive, and cruelly self-intimidating.   As Lacan says, “We are stuck, a stuck record of the past, unimaginative about morality and about ourselves.” 

People so inclined, and that may be the majority, think something terrible has happened to them that they are living in the aftermath of a terrible fallout, of some catastrophe, and because they think it, they would be right.

Freud read a lot of Shakespeare as a youth as well as Cervantes, both 16^th century artists, when “conscience at the time didn’t only have our modern sense of internal moral regulation, but also meant inward knowledge of consciousness.” 

Then (16^th century) the language of morality was the language of religion (Christianity).   Even then ambivalence was evident as religion divided the self from the hidden self, an unconscious morality with no discernible cultural moorings. 

Being able to reflect on our conscience, being able to look at the voice of conscience is a radical act.  If not obeyed, what is to be done with it?

Conscience is driven by acculturated stimulation tempered by controls and inhibitions from culture through the parents.  Put another way, the “super ego,” the “Morality Principle” is the domain of parents, but not exclusively.  It is also derived from the influence of peers, priests, teachers, pundits, gurus, heroes, idols, and sometimes, but not as frequently today, by God in the sanctuary of some religion. 

The “super ego’s” primary role is there to protect us from ourselves by prohibiting desires that may endanger us.  There may be other people we would like to find dead but murder endangers us and so we murder ourselves in self-reproach and punish ourselves for having such murderous thoughts.

Freud sees conscience as a possible force to character assassination, the character assassination of everyday life.  

Erving Goffman wrote about this rather definitively in “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.”  He suggested that we mutilate and deform our character because we judge ourselves too harshly.  So unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we would be like without it.  “Meet Your New Best Friend” was written to combat if not neutralize this mindset.  As a consequence, we know practically nothing about ourselves, which makes us vulnerable to anyone bent on exploiting this to their advantage.

Freud endeavors to show us how conscience obscures self-knowledge.  Back to ambivalence, he says guilt hides such knowledge from us by exposing it.  This allows us to justify not standing up to the internal tyranny of the self.  So frighten are we of the “super ego” that we identify with it.  We speak on its behalf to avoid antagonizing it, which is a form of bullying.

Although religious institutions would protest otherwise, they use this fault line in us to their advantage. 

Does conscience make us cowards as Shakespeare says in Hamlet and Richard III?  If it does, it is the part of ourselves that humiliates.  Then is it the part of us that makes us ashamed of ourselves for what others may think of us, or what we are or have done?

Conscience, stated another way, can seduce us into betraying ourselves worrying more about what others think of us than what we think of ourselves.  If we do something that is bad, or even evil, and get away with it, how do we escape the self that has full knowledge of the deception?  We can’t.

If conscience makes cowards of us, it is because it is itself cowardly.  Consider this.  The cowardly part of us is like a person who is afraid of new experience.  In our minds, the past may be imperfect, the present ridiculous and the future perfect, but in reality we treat the unknownness of the future as if it were in the past of something we know, or another way of staying stuck.

Why is it such a pleasure to be self-critical?  And how has it come about that we are so bewitched with our self-hatred?  Self-criticism when it is helpful, Adam Phillips says in The London Review (March 5, 2015), is self-correcting hypnosis.  It is judgment as spell or curse.  It is an order, not negotiation.  It is dogma, not over interpretation.  It is the “super ego” operating as supreme narcissist.  It is the acknowledged legacy of a religious past, a past where parents were programmed to the narrow confines of good and evil, right and wrong, the acceptable and unacceptable, as prescribed arbitrarily by some religious or secular religious authority.  What we know ourselves to be, as a result of this conditioning, is a slave to the “super ego.”

Where there is dogma, Freud insists, there is uncompleted experience.  In another sense, he is saying that the “super ego” is more than conscience.  It is the “ego ideal.”  It is ambivalence to the wall as the “ego ideal” finds the individual over interpreting his culture beginning in the family, moving on to the church, schools, the workplace, and the nation.

This nearly destroyed me as a young man when I took my “ego ideal” to South Africa and was introduced to draconian apartheid, discovering the support system of my “ego ideal” (all the above) had deserted me leaving me naked and confused, lost and self-reproaching, staggering out of the assignment and retiring and only in my thirties (see novel: A Green Island in a Black Sea).

My internal compass, the internal prohibiting father, who says, “Do as I say, not as I do” was like a malign collective parent visiting irrevocable harm to my fragile psyche under the guise of being my protector. 

In the name of all that is sacred, in the name of health and safety, it left me exposed to a life of terror beyond my comprehension, self-estranged and self-critical to the level of obsession.  In my anger at being abandoned by my “ego ideal” culture, I punished myself as if I were the author of apartheid full of guilt and wrongdoing for brutal travesty I was experiencing in South Africa.  Guilt is not a good clue as to what one values, but what one fears.  Morality born of intimidation is immoral.  South Africa in 1968 was immoral.

Freud gives us a conceptual vocabulary (“ambiguities) and constructs (ego, super ego, id), which he with his writing skills shows how the “super ego” acts as censor, judge, and dominating, frustrating father that carries a blueprint of the kind of person we should be with the operating word “should.” 

To the end Freud never resolved his issues with ambiguity or with inner authority and individual morality.  Still, each of these ego states appears to have multiple functions to show how we are slave, the doll Adam Phillips says to our ventriloquist dummy, the object to the “super ego’s” prescription.  Phillips asks:

“What is this appetite for confinement, for diminishment, for unrelenting, unforgiving self-criticism?”

Freud’s answer, we fear loss of love.  But to acquire love, there must be sacrifice that includes abandoning pride, self-consciousness, self-regard, and the possibility of rejection or humiliation. 

No surprise, we are likely to embrace confinement preferring safety to desire, and security to experience.  This comes at considerable cost.  It finds the individual being seen and treated as an object, as a commodity, expendable, replaceable.  That then begs the question, Who Put You in the Cage? (see Kindle 2015).

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