Becker—Birth (ii)

Ernest Becker
The Birth and Death of Meaning
(1970)

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[27]

Chapter Four

THE INNER WORLD

Introduction to the Birth of Tragedy

"The great fundamental . . . Doctrines . . . are . . . taught so early, under such circumstances, and in such close and vital association with whatever makes or marks reality for our infant minds, that the words ever after represent sensations, feelings, vital assurances, sense of reality—rather than thoughts, or any distinct conception. Associated, I had almost said identified, with the parental Voice, Look, Touch, with the living warmth and pressure of the Mother, on whose lap the Child is first made to kneel, within whose palms its little hands are folded, and the motion of whose eyes its eyes follow and imitate—(yea, what the blue sky is to the Mother, the Mother's upraised Eyes and Brow are to the Child, the Type and Symbol of an invisible Heaven!)—from within and without, these great First Truths, these good and gracious Tidings, these holy and humanizing Spells, in the preconformity to which our very humanity may be said to consist, are so infused, that it were but a tame and inadequate expression to say, we all take them for granted."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1825, p. 207)

...

[28]

...theoretically all objects in nature have some "interiority" even though we experience only their outside. Gustav Fechner... wrote a widely read book on this topic a century ago, a book that influenced a thinker of the stature of William James. Fechner, in his scientific work, wanted to prove that there is an equal part of soul for every particle of matter—something today's laboratory psychologists conveniently forget about the great man. He said that all objects have interiority, even trees. Why not say that a tree leans on a fence because it feels weak, or soaks up water because it is thirsty; or that it grows crookedly because it is stretching toward the sun? ...

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Indeed, why not say so? Apparently there is not reason not to :

mentalistic expressions from everyday language, such as thinking, knowing, believing, desiring, intending, and so on. How can we be sure that these terms are appropriate? Do they correspond to the actual intentional states held by others around us? ... According to Dennett (1983; 1987) we do not need to be sure. He argues that in order to understand phenomena in the world, one can adopt various strategies or “stances”, corresponding to different levels of theorising...

...“that fox digs a hole because it wants to build a nest” or “bird X believes that bird Y is hiding food”. Dennett argues that usage of everyday language is not problematic in such cases, as long as one keeps to the appropriate level of theorising. ... one can perfectly well make use of everyday mentalistic vocabulary as long as one is dealing with questions of some beings’ behaviour in their social environments, and not with the “lower level” mechanisms and physical processes underlying social living.

(Max van Duijn, The Lazy Mindreader, p. 35)

How very...dualistic!

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Bodies and Artifacts (interlude)—Freud's Body-Ego

Freud
The Ego and the Id (orig. 1923)
trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey

I think we shall gain a great deal by following the suggestion of a writer who, from personal motives, vainly asserts that he has nothing to do with the rigours of pure science. I am speaking of Georg Groddeck, who is never tired of insisting that what we call our ego behaves essentially passively in life, and that, as he expresses it, we are 'lived' by unknown and uncontrollable forces. We have all had impressions of the same kind, even though they may not have overwhelmed us to the exclusion of all others, and we need feel no hesitation in finding a place for Groddeck's discovery in the structure of science. I propose to take it into account by calling the entity which starts out from the system Pcpt. and begins by being Pcs. the 'ego', and by following Groddeck in calling the other part of the mind, into which this entity extends and which behaves as though it were Ucs., the 'id'.

... We shall now look upon an individual as a psychical id, unknown and unconscious, upon whose surface rests the ego, developed from its nucleus the Pcpt. system. If we make an effort to represent this pictorially, we may add that the ego does not completely envelop the id, but only does so to the extent to which the system Pcpt. forms its [the ego's] surface... The ego is not sharply separated from the id; its lower portion merges into it.

But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id. We at once realize that almost all the lines of demarcation we have drawn at the instigation of pathology relate only to the superficial strata of the mental apparatus—the only ones known to us. ...

We might add, perhaps, that the ego wears a 'cap of hearing'—on one side only, as we learn from cerebral anatomy. It might be said to wear it awry.

Stephenson, PTMC—Work and Play and Work

William Stephenson
The Play Theory of Mass Communication
(1987 edition)
(orig. 1967)

The child at play, Freud writes, is like a poet; both "rearrange things" in their worlds "to suit them better." Both child and poet distinguish between the real world of painful emotions, frustrations, hurts, and obduracies, and the play world, where these real-world fears and hurts are transmuted into humor, pleasure, and delightful wish-fulfillment. Play is escape from what goes on painfully in the real world. That something of the kind occurs is certain. But Freud overlooked the other half of fantasy, which "rearranges" not only things but the self to suit itself better. The self may grow, develop, and restructure itself in daydreaming and fantasy. The emotions that we did not realize we were capable of, the very things that Freud set out to explain, are an intimation of a growing self, of rearranging within oneself, rather than transmogrifications of painful experiences. Freud saw only mental sickness in daydreaming. The child wants to feel "grown-up," and thus plays. The adult gives up such playing, he thinks, but may daydream instead. We all create fantasies, as long as we live; but, for Freud, the more "normal" we are the less daydreaming we do. I would rather say that the more we work and live by work, in Freud's inner-directed world, the less we have time for daydreams. But by the same token the development of self is likely to have stopped when we lose ourselves in work.
(pp. 200-201)

This is an odd turn near the end of the book. Suddenly Stephenson has performed the same historically-specific pigeonholing of

work

from which he has been seeking the whole time to liberate

play
.

Would it not be better put to say that truly

losing oneself

in

work

affords one much the same potential for

development of the self

as does the ideal of

subjective play
?

And by way of much the same process?

It seems to me that the anti-ideal of work to which Stephenson appeals here, to work as pure necessity imposed on the self from without by the dark forces of social control, this anti-ideal need not be accepted ipso facto, and indeed is not accepted now nearly as readily as it was in 1967. Work-as-pure-necessity sounds terrible, sometimes it is actually terrible, but it is still possible to lose yourself in it, to be constructively "rearranged" in and through work, whether or not the overall experience is pleasant or even tolerable. This, at least, has been one of my enduring takeaways from several stints in the security industry, and from inumerable musical engagements which had me pining for my old TSA job by the time they were through. I can't really manage pure play-escape either, though I suppose it's time to accept that I'm in the minority (while nonetheless holding out stubborn hope that this reflects a culturebound rather than an essential condition of humanity). The maintenance lady at the Resort who enviously tells us we're "working at playing" is not all wrong; and it is precisely this rare opportunity for balanced playwork which I so value about the job from which I've been furloughed for the past year and a half, much to the incomprehension of both co-workers and outside acquaintances who know just how individualistic and self-regarding I am.

Stephenson again:

No doubt all this can be projected upon the poem [Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock], metaphysical, Freudian, Marxian, and the rest. But I would agree instead...that the poem is largely unadulterated fun. ... The incident is trivial, but the human delight is enormous. ...

Instead of dull Marx, nasty Freud, or ponderous metaphysician, all dealing with problems in the real world, Pope gives us a poem to play with in the mind, with joy, wit, fun, delight, freedom...all in step in unalloyed fantasy.

This is subjective play, regarded as pure communication-pleasure. Pope wrote with no thought of hurt or gain...he was having fun, as a child has when it plays. If we are so minded, and so open to joy, reading the poem gives us the selfsame satisfactions. And this is the core of our theory.
(pp. 199-200)

So the poet was merely

having fun, as a child has when it plays
?

This commits precisely the fallacy Sennett warned against in his Debussy anecdote. It is as if the obvious speciousness of so many accreted interpretations has cowed the author into an equally severe overeaction in the other direction.

One can only hope that somewhere between the too-knowing interpreter and the blissfully ignorant child there is a whole world of what can only be called adult self-development, conspicuous by its absence here just as it is in most academic/educational settings.

From Sutton-Smith's introduction (1987):

We live in a world in which the economic distinction between play and work exercises its own evaluational coercion; where the scientific distinction between object and subject also exercises its epistemological coercion over the way we come to think about play. But, to the contrary, the movement of players in and out of play is often much more indistinct...
(p. xiii)

[Stephenson] would find little disagreement if he stated that the individual purpose in all of this is self-enhancement. There is not much power to the "explanation," however, since little is known about self enhancement. Stephenson does stress the importance of the player's freedom of choice in self-enhancement and that concept has become a salient twentieth-century way of defining a person at play: Play is something one does with freedom, or when one is moved by intrinsic motivation. This was also a major point made by Huizenga.

The problem with this stress on freedom of choice, however, is that it is also a culturally-relative reflex to our traditional distinction between work and play—assigning pain to the former and pleasure to the latter. ... Since the event of philosophical, political and poetic romanticism at the turn of the Nineteenth century, Western culture has idealized the freedom supposedly found in art and play... The contrary case would seek to show that although modern play is not usually seen as an obligation, its players are often coerced by their own addictions to the excitements of gambling and contests of a physical or intellectual nature. Inner compulsions may still exact what society may not longer require. None of this need deny that subjective play is what mass communication is about, though it does suggest that we need to modify Stephenson's defense of his position.
(pp. xiv-xv)

The most serious recent critique of Stephenson's work is simply a reiteration of the view that he overlooks the great extent to which the public is manipulated through the mass media, something of which he is quite aware. He does not suggest that this does not occur only that, even if it does, the populace is also engaged in mass communications for the purposes of its own play. It is a fact that those who are addicted to certain kinds of play are made vulnerable by their own enthusiasm... They are exploited...but they are still at play. Once we divorce play from the romanticism of free choice and idealistic notions of value, there is less need to see any contradiction between a player's addictions to his or her own excitements and the efforts of others to manipulate those needs for their own profit.
(p. xvi)

The Genetic Fallacy in Art and Life—Author's Disclaimer/Preface

(2020-21)

The bulk of the forthcoming essay was written between four and five years ago. That time already seems more like a past life. I abandoned this project when I realized that I could not (and possibly no one could) bring off its full demands in an intellectually responsible way. Also when I remembered that I have grown to hate reading things like this. Also when I accepted that this was a desperate lunge toward equilibrium borne of a living situation which had become unpleasant. It arises most directly from this latter consideration. After CalArts, I rented a room in a North Hollywood apartment for about four years. (Later I would learn that almost everyone who moves to LA rents a North Hollywood apartment for some similar stretch of time.) My apartment-mate was a Valley native almost exactly my age whose backstory and views could not have been more different from mine. Our more intense political discussions are among my most valued as well as my most traumatic memories. Supposedly this was and is exactly what a Divided America needed to be doing more of. Frankly I think we might just have another civil war if we all did intentionally what I did accidentally. I for one have had my fill for a good while. Give me time for about 500 more books before I next confront the specter of an alt-right cohabitant. Politics aside, I grew to deeply respect this guy for bootstrapping himself after being dealt a really terrible hand in life. I also realized that underneath all the bluster he was off-the-charts brilliant. I consider him an intellectual equal and often wondered if he was not in fact my superior. I am not one to confuse education and intelligence. No one who has been to graduate school should need any clearer empirical demonstration that the one does not follow from the other. To my detriment, it seems that I veritably radiate the contrary impression; either that or there are just certain things anti-academic people like to say about people who finished college, whether or not these things are true. If the latter, then they stand guilty of projection, that most Freudian of thought crimes, and Freud's ghost gets to have a chuckle at their expense while the ghost of Ernest Jones whacks him off. If the former, then maybe I just need to be more mindful of managing impressions, and maybe ghosts don't actually whack each other off. Anyway, about my roommate, curiosity eventually turned into avoidance when I found that subtleties of context and idiom made discussion of anything more than the weather extremely difficult for both of us. In between breakthroughs, we spent way too much time hammering out semantic and historical baselines. While I was making my great leap into books, he did almost all of his reading on the internet (as I formerly did too) and openly questioned my frequent trips to retrieve materials from the library. The library was but a five minute walk away. Susan Sontag used to go there after school to work on her editorials for the North Hollywood High School newspaper. I thought that was cool. He thought it was part of the problem. One time I got him to at least consider the usefulness of public libraries by invoking the specter of a tech company monopolizing the electronic distribution of "books." But by that time I was just bluffing, trying to survive rather than thrive. Needless to say this made the discussions even less constructive than they had already become. Finally, as Trump's 2016 candidacy gained momentum, my cohabitant became enraptured, he seemed to identify personally with the man, and the frankly racist test-balloons which he had previously learned not to float over my airspace gradually reemerged as well-rationalized "racialist" aircraft carriers. Alienation of affection set in. It was felt, and it is felt still. The only other people I know who voted for Trump did so with little to no enthusiasm, the same level of enthusiasm with which I voted, in my first one of these obscene spectacles, for Al Gore. One such unenthusiastic maybe-Trumper whom I work with told me in the course of a comparatively tame political conversation that I go "straight out of the liberal playbook." This recapitulated my old roommate's assertion that I would agree with him/them if only I could reject the lies I had been taught in school. That is reason enough to post this, albeit a reason I wish I didn't have. They won't read it and wouldn't understand it. Those are facts and not insults, empirically tested ones no less against which the next countervailing evidence will be the first, and against which offense taken is merely creeping doubt projected. Neither education nor intelligence nor the twain can guarantee understanding; and understanding, though it is a practical necessity, is not a moral quality. Sometimes I too do not understand, literally or otherwise, what these gentleman are on about and I can't find my way there by any available route that I can see. Their opinion of me, apparently, is that I have not bothered to look, and that my education has consisted of passively-ingested propaganda. The two of them actually are as different from each other as I am from each of them, but they have this opinion of me in common, along with their contempt for the public libraries and used bookstores where I have sought and found many things which they remain ignorant of. The first time I said I was going to the library after work, my co-worker told me "You have a disease." That is an insult. (Technically it's also a microaggression, which I do believe is a real thing, even though I'm skeptical of multiculturalism, the Situationists, government arts funding, the anti-gentrification movement...) This essay was one attempt to reckon with all of these issues and more, all at once, complicated yet further by the burden of its concurrent therapeutic, equilibriating function, resorted to instinctively after one too many invitations to a debate on the genetic diversity of American Blacks, a debate for which I was and probably will remain ill-prepared, I confess, to take any informed position at all. The exercise here was to explore what such mutual ill-preparedness means without moralizing about it. This is not easy to do. I think it might be impossible. Certainly it is impossible for anyone to think that you have achieved it unless you engage in some serious impression management. All these misgivings and others aside, following an emergent pattern here, another frozen essay is hereby defrosted, heated, and served. Just don't start any civil wars.

Freud — The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (ii) — Superstition and Suspicion

[244]I would distinguish myself from a superstitious man, therefore, as follows: I do not believe that an event not caused in any way by my own mental life can tell me any hidden facts about the future structure of reality, but I do believe that an unintentional expression of my own mental processes can reveal some hidden factor which itself belongs to my mental life alone. I may believe in outer (real) chance, but not in fortuitous inner (psychic) actions. A superstitious man will see it the other way around: he knows nothing of the motivation of his fortuitous actions and slips, he believes fortuitous psychic factors exist, and he is inclined to ascribe a significance to outside fortuitous events that will make itself felt in reality, and to see chance as a means of expression for something hidden that is outside him. There are two differences between me and the superstitious man: first, he projects a motivation on to something outside him, while I look for it within myself; and second, he interprets chance as some incident that has happened, while I derive it from an idea. However, what seems to him concealed corresponds to the unconscious in me, and we share an urge not to see chance as solely accidental but to place some kind of interpretation on it.

I assume that this conscious ignorance and unconscious understanding of the motivation of psychic fortuitous events is one of the roots of superstition. Because a superstitious person is ignorant of the motivation of his own fortuitous actions, and because that motivation is clamouring to be recognized, he has to accommodate it in the world outside himself by displacement. If there is a connection of this kind it will scarcely be confined to this one case. In fact I believe that a large part of any mythological view of the world, extending a long way even into the most modern forms of religion, is nothing but psychology projected into the outside world. The vague recognition (it might be called endopsychic perception) of [245]psychic factors and circumstances in the unconscious is reflected--it is difficult to put it any other way, so here I must call on the analogy with paranoia--is reflected in the construction of a supernatural reality, which science will transform back into the psychology of the unconscious. The myths of Paradise and the Fall, of God, good and evil, immortality, and so on, could be understood in this way, turning metaphysics into metapsychology. There is less of a gulf between paranoiac and superstitious displacement than may at first glance appear. When human beings first began thinking, as we know, they felt compelled to resolve the outer world, anthropomorphically, into a diversity of personalities in their own image; the chance events that they interpreted in superstitious terms were therefore the actions and expressions of persons. They were just like those paranoiacs who draw conclusions from the trivial signs they observe in other people, and like all those healthy people who, correctly, judge character by the fortuitous and unintentional actions of their fellow men. Superstition seems misplaced only in our modern, scientific but by no means complete view of the world; as the world appeared to pre-scientific ages and peoples, superstition was legitimate and logical.

Relatively speaking, therefore, the Roman who abandoned some important enterprise if he saw birds flying in the wrong formation was right; he was acting logically in line with his assumptions. But if he abstained from the enterprise because he had stumbled on the threshold of his door (un Romain retournerait [a Roman would turn back], as they say), he was definitely superior to us unbelievers, and a better psychologist than we are, despite our current efforts. His stumbling showed him that some doubt existed, something in him was working against his enterprise, and its power could impair his own ability to carry out his intention just as he was on the point of performing it. One can be sure of success only if all mental forces are united in making for the desired aim. ...

[246]Anyone who has had the opportunity of studying the hidden emotions of the human mind by psychoanalytic methods can also contribute some new ideas about the quality of the unconscious motives expressed in superstition. It is particularly easy to see how superstition arises from suppressed hostile and cruel feelings in neurotics, who are often very intelligent but afflicted with compulsive ideas and obsessions. Superstition is to a high degree an expectation of bad luck, and anyone who frequently ill-wishes other people, but has repressed such ideas because he has been brought up to wish them well instead, will be particularly likely to expect bad luck to descend upon him from outside as a punishment for his unconscious ill-will.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. Anthea Bell, pp. 244-246

The crucial distinction here is inner- as opposed to outer-directed psychology. Freud here quietly levels a devastating critique of those who project their otherwise healthy skepticism exclusively onto the outside world and not at all back upon themselves. In today's colloquial terms this amounts to worrying about things you can't control, a sure recipe for frustration if not for madness itself, as well as for the peculiar condition, raised earlier in the work, of social actors who know (or seem to) others better than they know themselves.

I don't know that I myself can make any exceptional claims to self-knowledge, but as an introvert mired in lifelong estrangement from the tyranny of extroversion which seems to run the world I was foist into at birth, I certainly am apt to posit a privileged position here for my comrades in inner-directedness, and I can certainly conjure my fair share of anecdotes in which excess gregariousness is accompanied by obvious deficits of self-scrutiny. And since introversion and gregariousness are, of course, not mutually exclusive, I would head the list with my own more gregarious moments, which seem not merely to suggest but in fact require a temporary relaxation of filters. As pertains specifically to public social interaction I indeed identify unapologetically with that ever-trendy neologism, the "ambivert," and as I have slowly learned to negotiate the social world and become more familiar (if not truly more comfortable) with its demands, the compulsive talker has made ever more frequent appearances and the wallflower ever fewer. This has indeed been profitable for both my self-knowledge and my relationship to this external social world; but it has also confirmed for me beyond a reasonable doubt that I am almost sure to regret the things that pop out of my inner extrovert's mouth, and often times profoundly so. I definitely like myself less as the filter has become leakier with age, and I'm afraid that is probably a meaningful observation.

Freud -- The Pschopathology of Everyday Life (i) -- Know Thyself

"In this and similar incidents, I have concluded that actions unintentionally performed are bound to be a source of misunderstanding in human intercourse. The perpetrator, who has no idea that there is any intention linked to them, does not credit himself with one, nor does he consider himself responsible for them. The second person concerned, however, since he regularly draws conclusions about the intentions and attitudes of the first from such actions, knows more about that first person's psychic processes than he is ready to admit himself or thinks he has imparted. He will be indignant if faced with any such conclusions made on the basis of his symptomatic actions, declaring them groundless, since he was unaware of having any intention to carry them out, and he will complain that the second person misunderstands him. Such misunderstandings, strictly speaking, actually arise from too great and too subtle a process of understanding. The more 'edgy' two people are, the more likely they are to give each other occasion for disagreements, each denying his own responsibility for them while taking it as proven for the other party. This may well be the penalty we pay for our inner dishonesty in allowing ourselves to express certain ideas only through the devices of forgetfulness, inadvertent and unintentional actions, ideas that, even if we cannot control them, we would do better to admit to ourselves and to others. In general, it may be said that everyone is always psychoanalysing his fellow men, and as a consequence learns to know them better than they know themselves. The way to carrying out the famous injunction to know thyself is through studying our own apparently fortuitous actions and admissions." (Ch. IX, trans. Anthea Bell)

On one hand, this is a powerful admonition towards a radical honesty which is deeper and more utilitarian than that of simply blurting out whatever comes to mind. The latter merely sows the seeds of diversionary conflict, revealing much to the recipient and little to the issuer, thereby perpetuating a particularly volatile inequity of understanding. Rather, it is actually "our own apparently fortuitous actions" rather than those quite conscious and summary blurtings out which afford the greatest opportunities to build self-knowledge, and the barrier to working through them ourselves is not public but private inhibition.

On the other hand, this is a deeply presumptuous theory whose full implications are rather bleak. How is dialogue possible at all when alter, as a rule, is accorded a privileged status vis-a-vis ego's own internal operations? Is this not precisely the leap which leads inexorably to radical empiricism, denialism and gridlock? Is this not a how-to manual for diversion into endless litigation of personal motives and biases instead of debating ideas on their merit?

The implied subordination of ego's self-knowledge to alter's gathered observations is very much of a piece with the wider questioning of individual subjectivity. Those inclined toward such questioning can wiggle out of some very tough rhetorical spots by deploying this tactic; how to constitute ourselves as subjects, after all, when we cannot even prove to others around us that we mean what we say? Infinite regress is a constant danger here, and so ultimately we tend not to push each other or ourselves too hard. We suspend the armchair psychoanalyzing when something fundamental has to get done, because it would never get done if we litigated every slip of everyone involved. (By "we," of course I mean "non-politicians.") While Freud indeed presages the parallactic era here, he was not actually living in it yet, and neither, I hasten to add, are very many of us now actually living in such a milieu; that is, not if we can imagine any non-oppressive social utility for experthood and authority, including self-knowledge. And so while I do think this passage should knock more than a few heedless extroverts off of their self-constituted high horses, the ultimate admonition here is not to close ourselves off to those who might judge us but rather to open ourselves up to ourselves; to smooth out disparities of understanding not by withholding but by releasing, first and foremost within, at which point subsequent release to our social surroundings is no longer conditioned (or at least not so severely) by self-repressions.

Of course the Professor has not, yet, furnished us with a means of distinguishing "those paranoiacs who draw conclusions from the trivial signs they observe in other people" from "those healthy people who, correctly, judge character by the fortuitous and unintentional actions of their fellow men." Do such means exist? Here is a chicken-and-egg question if there ever was one. And yet with so little honesty and directness to go around in the post-industrial, post-positivist, post-individual-subjectivity, post-purpose social world we presently inhabit, it is not a question any of us can afford to simply ignore. Neither self- nor common-interest is served that way. For Freud here, we telegraph to others the things we're unable or unwilling to face up to within ourselves. But even if we can't control the outflow of information, let alone the manner in which it is subsequently interpreted by external social agents, we can at least cultivate an internal environment of ruthless introspection, self-analysis, self-therapy, and self-evaluation; and only then, having earned the privilege, we might check our work simply by asking around strictly among those who have done the same for themselves. (Writing is my outlet of choice for the introspective phase of this process, whether or not anyone reads. But thanks for reading.)