V The rational chooser vs. the
characterological economy of the libido
In the introduction I quoted a passage on
the characterological economy of the libido from Civilization and Its
Discontents. In it Freud emphasizes that someone’s approach to happiness is
established by their “psychical constitution” which plays a “a decisive part, irrespectively of the
external circumstances” (Civilization 83-4). Freud gives the example of the
“narcissistic man” whose main satisfaction is found in “mental processes” vs.
the “man of action” for who the status conferred by money, positions of
prestige, and the “external world” grants happiness. At least I understand
Freud here as noting that some people are intellectuals by “nature” (i.e. based
upon their ego drive/ideal make-up produced in psycho-sexual development). They
like to think about the big questions like human nature (i.e. psychology or
philosophy) or how things work in an elementary way (i.e. physics or biology).
Although an individual might come from a culture that has a “tradition” of
valuing the intellectual over, for example, sports/combat, aesthetics/manners,
etc. and therefore might work harder to understand intellectual pursuits, he is
still different from the person with a “narcissistic” or “intellectual” economy
of the libido. Similarly, there is another character types that might want to
appear as an intellectual and would create the difference between the ‘true’
and ‘pseudo’ intellectual who’s happiness is found in “being seen as” one
instead of his ego ideal demanding perfection of thought or god-like knowledge
from him[1].
With the “man of action” I understand Freud
to be writing about people for whom their “image” is very important. It is
important that they go to “good universities” or have a “good job”, “good
salary” and send their kids to a “good school”. We’d say that such a person is
ambitious. While everyone would dynamically possess these interests, for some
individuals they have an extra economic emphasis on one or more of these traits[2].
Moreover, character traits such as being an intellectual, ambitious, shy,
endearing, vain, etc. are trans-historical. This means that we’d find them in
different cultures (American, French, Russian) and in different times
(Medieval, Ancient Greece, etc.) for as long as homo sapiens have existed in
culture[3].
As I mentioned in the introduction, Freud’s
model contrasts with the “rational chooser” model which doesn’t recognizes
these characterological differences between people. The latter simply holds
that the individual has a ‘will’ and chooses or doesn’t choose to pursue
intellectual interests or ambitious goals. Freud holds that:
Although thus humbled in
his external relations, man feels himself to be supreme within his own mind.
Somewhere in the nucleus of his ego he has developed an organ of observation to
keep a watch on his impulses and actions and see whether they harmonize with
its demands. If they do not, they are ruthlessly inhibited and withdrawn. His
internal perception, consciousness, gives the ego news of all the important occurrences
in the mind's working, and the will,
directed by these reports, carries out what the ego orders and modifies
anything that seeks to accomplish itself spontaneously. For this mind is not a
simple thing; on the contrary, it is a hierarchy of superordinated and
subordinated agencies, a labyrinth of impulses striving independently of one
another towards action, corresponding with the multiplicity of instincts and of relations with the external world, many of which are
antagonistic to one another and incompatible. For proper functioning it is
necessary that the highest of these agencies should have knowledge of all that is
going forward and that its will should penetrate everywhere, so as to exert its
influence. And in fact the ego feels secure both as to the completeness and
trustworthiness of the reports it receives and as to the openness of the
channels through which it enforces its commands (A Difficulty in the Path,
p. 141).
“The will” here is seen as informed by
multiple reports of the interest of the drives and the ego is that which
synthesized the interest of the drives (“ego interest” and “object libido”)
into something which gives the most pleasure but without going against the
agency that demands “perfection” (the ego ideal) and the inhibition of certain
acts (conscience). The ego psychologists agree with this as Milrod states
clearly that the ego ideal is formed after the Oedipus complex and has only
ethical values as its contents. However, there are two major distinctions in
pre-oedipal functioning. Ego psychologists want to claim that the ego observes
itself in order to keep the ego ideal as a separate autonomous agency. This is,
as I showed, is not Freud’s position. The “nucleus”, “grade in the ego”, or
“superordinate agency” has always been referred to as the ego ideal[4].
The second is that Milrod’s view of the ego ideal fore-runner of the wished for
self-image only allows for intellectualism to arise as a character trait in
imitation of the admired trait of a parent[5].
Unless Milrod wants to claim that the sublimation of a love for feces will
create intellectualism, or some similar erotogenic zone claim, then all
‘character’ regarding non-ethical life is formed at the phallic stage where the
wished for self-image arises. Milrod claims the child will identify with
certain “admired qualities” of its “idols”[6].
The view I understand Freud’s work to be suggesting is much more radical than
this. Moreover, it recognizes the earlier psychoanalytic matching of character
traits and erotogenic zones but it doesn’t derive the traits from
‘adultomorphic’ impressions of the infantile thought processes in the child’s
relation to his own body. Instead, it links them to the primarily related,
inter-subjective creation of the mind (the ego being derived from the id) that
happens to be paralleled by bodily zones.
The criticism arises of how the pre-oedipal
child (and the pre-phallic/wished for self-image child) can somehow understand
perfection or have some notion that it wants to be an intellectual or be
interested in the “big questions”? If it can’t even formulate such questions in
speech how can this interest be fixated in the child? The answer to this is
that these people work from a metaphysical assumption that we are primarily
separate as opposed to being social animals which means that they must
over-value linguistic based consciousness. They fail to see the humans are
primarily social animals and dependent upon their caregivers and that mind is
formed inter-subjectively. Earlier parental images or imagos aren’t based upon
the cognitive understanding of the parent being god-like (as if the child is a
little theologian). Instead it is based upon the child’s feeling of
connectedness to a parental imago (a libidinal tie). At the Oedipus complex the
child ‘depersonalizes’ the parents into father-substitutes in the community that
he seeks education from and tries to hide immoral acts from in social anxiety.
In the castration complex he tries to present himself as a rival who possesses
the knowledge, skill, or wisdom of the “class of fathers” in the community
present the image to others that he should himself be a leader in his field of
knowledge or work[7]. However,
with more precision we can say that the relation to the parents already carries
the social relations the child will have with others outside of the insular
family setting. The child is already embedded in the social because it is
primarily a social animal. In philosophical terms this creates a social
ontology in which ego drives and ideals reference the individual’s
connection/libidinal ties to others in individual relationships and others in
terms of interacting with the social body in general. Again, the child doesn’t
understand ‘reality’ in some cognitive way. Rather social reality, in terms of
how he is or is not treated by others, is the standard. I’d like to recall that
Freud posited the superego in higher animals and based this on their social
organizations possessing a leader. The ability these animals display to pick up
on the social reality of their leader must be part of our early cognition and
anyone who has been around young pre-verbal children has seen the amount of
‘checking-in’ they do with their mothers before leaving her sight.
The pre-oedipal ego ideals similarly have
“depersonalized” relations that will determine whether an individual is
connected (the double identification, or fusion) with the social body. These
earlier parental images feel more powerful than the phallic-Oedipal relations,
and correspondingly are depersonalized to represent more fundamental ties to
the social body than the phallic-oedipal class of fathers who are the educators
in one’s community. Instead of the phallic class of fathers in one’s community,
there is the anal class of fathers who are the pillars of society itself. As
the person suffering from the phallic-castration complex rivals the fathers in
the community at the anal-castration complex he rivals the kings, presidents,
popes, geniuses, etc. who provide the rules or ruling ideas to a culture[8].
The cult leader who splits off from society to start his own society, the intellectual
who touts a new model of thought opposed to the classic paradigms taught in
academia are examples of those who rival the anal fathers and whose ego ideal
regresses from the demand for status or recognition among phallic fathers to
the anal fathers. From this anal level a more fundamental interaction with the
human world at large designates the oral libidinal tie or derpersonalization.
The oral castration complex sees the individual in a rivalry with the human
world for possible worlds in the forms of living alone in a monastery, alone in
nature, creating alternative worlds in art (novels, paintings, etc.)[9].
The individual who has regressed to the oral ego ideal doesn’t feel the demand
of competing with anal fathers and having his own group to control, adopt his
idea, or treat him as god-like. Instead he is contented with his supremacy in
imagination[10].
Along with the ego drives the object drives can similarly be plotted in this
social ontology so that individual phallic love moves to anal orgies down to
personal relationships that exist only in the imagination of the schizoid[11].
I am highlighting these levels of social
ontology by directing attention to individuals who have clearly regressed
(‘introversion of the libido) in regards to the demand of perfection that
motivates them. In individuals who haven’t regressed these demands of
perfection can still be an important factor in their character or economy of
the libido[12].
For rational choosers, mental illness is only regarded as something wrong with
the body (brain) while the mind as a unitary, rational thing exists apart from
it. Freud instead made the Copernican revolution to say we aren’t rational
choosers but instead we are driven to find happiness in certain ways. Reason
exists but it is secondary and directed to the practical questions of how to
realize our desires which are primary and based upon our libidinal ties qua
social ontology. So instead of seeing psychosis as something bodily Freud
courageously saw this as a necessity for seeing the mind in parts (even though
it may subjectively feel whole). Thus he compares the normal person who has a
physical illness to the psychotic in how they function. He writes:
Closer observation
teaches us that he also withdraws libidinal interest from his love-objects: so
long as he suffers, he ceases to love. The commonplace nature of this fact is
no reason why we should be deterred from translating it into terms of the
libido theory. We should then say: the sick man withdraws his libidinal
cathexes back upon his own ego, and sends them out again when he recovers.
‘Concentrated is his soul’, says Wilhelm Busch of the poet suffering from
toothache, ‘in his molar's narrow hole.’ Here libido and ego-interest share the same fate and are once more
indistinguishable from each other. The familiar egoism of
the sick person covers both. We find it so natural because we are certain that
in the same situation we should behave in just the same way (Freud, ‘On
Narcissism’, p. 82-3, emphasis mine).
Freud compares the bed-ridden person
suffering from a toothache or the flu to some people suffering from a regressed
psychosis in that both can be motivated to do no more than sit around all day
and satisfy impulses to eat and drink
(and often with the latter, smoke). Both ego and object libido are
expressed in fantasy or imagination while after the oral/primary narcissistic
stage they are expressed separately at the anal stage: “Defaecation” Freud
writes, “affords the first occasion on which the child must decide
between a narcissistic [egoistic] and an object-loving attitude (Freud, ‘On
Transformations of Instinct’, p.130; Abraham, ‘Contributions to Anal Character’).
With both the person suffering from the flu and psychosis there has been a
relinquishment of higher forms of the ego ideal that demand perfection that is
observable in the outlined forms of prestige in community, the ruling people or
ideas of culture, (etc.). The physically ill person will have his ideals emerge
again but the psychotic has ‘foreclosed’ these ideals and can’t regain them
without help from the outside[13].
I have offered a simple sketch of how we
can conceive of pre-oedipal ego ideals in relation to primarily relatedness or
a social ontology. The ‘intellectual’ discussed above has a connection to the
‘big ideas’ or being god-like in knowledge. Again, this isn’t in relation to
the child understanding the concept of perfection or god or ‘big ideas’, but
instead is a libidinal tie to the figures who represent the pillars of society.
The content of this knowledge or power will be filled in retroactively by the
more developed cognition of later stages. In addition, what counts as the ‘big
ideas’ will develop in culture. In ancient Greece the brightest minds were
producing such things as the Pythagorean theorem which a grade school student
learns now. Those who strive for the anal phallus today are working on quantum
physics or something else that represents learning the secrets of God. However,
as Freud expresses in ‘On Narcissism’, having these ego ideals doesn’t mean
that one has the capability of sublimating and thereby living up to them[14].
The demand for an ideal for perfection in thought is described by one
analyst as the plight of the autistic character: “One of the means used by some autistic characters to
avoid rejection and loneliness is suggested by both
the environment and by thinking through deduction: the
achievement of perfection. For, he reasons, if he discharges with perfection
what he is usually rejected for, then he will not be rejected.
But the very essence of the autistic character's plight, that is, non-engagement,
presents a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to learning how to achieve
perfection: there is no one available to teach perfection, or there is no one
whom he dares ask to teach it. The autistic character, however, does
surmount this to an extent by becoming his own master teacher: by an
enormous psychic feat (using incalculable energy) he stretches
his thinking processes to their outermost reaches to
derive knowledge of content and technique. And then he teaches
himself—he is, for that matter, forever reminding himself, coaching himself,
and even testing himself. But for all of this, he is never sure that he has
done something perfectly or even well, for his master teacher—his thinking—alas
has known of little but his own ivory tower (Bernstein, ‘The Autistic
Character’. p.542). To the extent that being acknowledged as achieving
perfection in thought is the goal then it is a demand of the ego ideal. To the
extent that ‘thinking through deduction’ or certain cognitive style gives
pleasure in itself and has an economic significance in an individual then the
ego drive as opposed to the ideal is relevant in the character.
[2] Freud writes of such
instincts “which cannot possibly be attributed to every human being. The
dynamic conditions for its development are, indeed, universally present; but it
is only in rare cases that the economic situation appears to favour the
production of the phenomenon” (Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.42).
[3] I think there is a case for saying that some new character traits
have been created since culture has developed to the present day, but my point
here is that literature from ancient Greece and ethnographies of primitive
cultures shows that we have the same types of people. By the word primitive I
mean the fact that the status of their political economy, mathematics, and
technology is much more basic than ours. This doesn’t mean that their culture
is somehow less healthy or inferior to ours. I think there are good cases to be
made that some earlier cultures produce less mental illness and allow for more
happiness.
[4]
But these melancholias also
show us something else, which may be of importance for our later discussions.
They show us the ego divided, fallen apart into two pieces, one of which rages
against the second. This second piece is the one which has been altered by introjection and which contains the lost object.
But the piece which behaves so cruelly is not unknown to us either. It
comprises the conscience, a critical agency within
the ego, which even in normal times takes up a critical attitude towards the
ego, though never so relentlessly and so unjustifiably. On previous occasions we have been driven to the hypothesis
that some such agency develops
in our ego which may cut itself off from the rest of the ego and come into conflict with it. We have called it the ‘ego
ideal’, and by way of functions we have ascribed to it self-observation, the
moral conscience, the censorship of dreams, and the chief influence in repression.
We have said that it is the heir to the original narcissism in which the childish ego enjoyed
self-sufficiency; it gradually
gathers up from the influences of the environment the
demands which that environment makes
upon the ego and which the ego cannot always rise to; so that a man, when he
cannot be satisfied with his ego itself, may nevertheless be able to find satisfaction in the ego ideal which has been
differentiated out of the ego. In
delusions of observation, as we have further shown, the disintegration of this agency has become patent, and has thus
revealed its origin in the influence of superior powers, and above all of
parents. But we have not
forgotten to add that the amount of distance between this ego ideal and the real
ego is very variable from one individual to another, and that with many people
this differentiation within the ego does not go further than with children
(Group Psych, p. 109-10, emphasis mine).
[5] Just as the child strove to be “one with” an admired object representation in imitative identification, he now
strives to become “one with” admired qualities in the wished-for self image (Milrod, The concept of the self, p. 15).
[6] Ironically, for the criticisms leveled against ego psychologists by
Lacanians, their position is hardly different from this. They may focus more on
the claim that the signifier implanted in the child determines the direction he
may go in his life, more than the identification that produces it, but its
effectively the same.
[7] As I discussed, there are levels of father substitutes from primary
school onward. The masculine protest/castration complex defusion from
phallic-father substitutes sees the individual attempting to present an image
of superiority. He no longer takes on more of the accumulated knowledge, skill,
or wisdom in his historical civilization but feels that he is superior as is.
‘Maturation’ is blocked in the ‘libidinal tie’.
[8] Abraham reminded us that the child on his pot, on his throne,
as it is said, is sovereign” (102) “On the subject of sublimation,
Freud [in Civilization and Its Discontents] said that all of human
civilization could be considered as an attempt at
the sublimation of anal erotism” (105). “ Anal object relation is therefore a social
relationship par excellence. Considering that the anal person
defines himself through others, we can ask ourselves how this relationship with
that manifold other, i.e. society, evolves for him” (108). “He is
identified with the other elements of the hierarchy including the
principle of absolute domination, personified by a God or a 'charismatic
chief'” (Grunberger, ‘Study of Anal Object Relations’, p. 109). Good
cultural examples to disambiguate the phallic and the anal levels comes from Star Wars in which the phallic father is
represented in his ‘bad aspect’ by Darth Vader (direct commander of the troops)
and the Anal father is represented by the Emperor. Additionally, in Lord of the Rings there were rings made
for all the different kings but one ring that controlled all of those rings. Also,
in Highlander, there are many
‘immortals’ living among regular humans but secretly waging a battle against
each other in which there can only be one.
[9] Some artists can also functionally live alone and force all their
feelings to exist through the books they write, paintings, or music. In this
sense the monastic religious adherent can be viewed as making his life a piece
of art where the artist lives through his art. Early analysts have
impressionistically cited the relationship to the oral mother as the prototype
for this relation but this is ‘adultomorphic’ and attributes cognitive
awareness to the child it can’t have. It’s only by seeing the human being as
primarily related instead of primarily individual that this kind of relation
can exist as a libidinal tie to the social body that can be filled in by
content from one’s culture and later cognitive development. Edmund Bergler
writes:
“However, according to my conception, the writer's type of
neurotic orality is not greediness and a wish to ‘get’ in the
repetition of the child-mother situation, but rather a spiteful
desire for oral independence,
whereby the artist identifies himself with the
‘giving’ mother out of aggression toward her, and thus
eliminates her. He achieves oral pleasures for himself through
‘beautiful’ words and ideas. In its deepest sense, it is a desire to
refute the ‘bad’ pre-cedipal mother and the disappointments
experienced through her, by establishing an ‘autarchy’ (Bergler, On a Clinical Approach to the Psychoanalysis
of Writers, p. 46).
[10] As a general arc that corresponds to the psychosexual stages, the auto-erotic
stage would correspond to getting into a rivalry with “3-d reality” for
autistic shapes and sensation as the work of Frances Tustin has outlined. While
the oral individual in solitude is still experiencing others in imagination the
autistic child has a reduced realm of sensations. It seems likely to me that
this arc would continue to another stage where any sense of pre-conscious
reality is rivaled by the sense of unconscious contents. This would be the
important regression point for psychosis.
[11] Two people coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction,
in so far as they seek for solitude, are making a demonstration against the herd instinct,
the group feeling. The more they are in love, the more completely
they suffice for each other. Their rejection of the group's influence
is expressed in the shape of a sense of shame. Feelings of jealousy of
the most extreme violence are summoned up in order to protect the choice of a
sexual object from being encroached upon by a group tie. It
is only when the affectionate, that is, personal, factor of
a love relation gives place entirely to the sensual one, that it
is possible for two people to have sexual intercourse in the presence of
others or for there to be simultaneous sexual acts in a group, as occurs
at an orgy. But at that point a regression has taken place to an
early stage in sexual relations, at which being in love as
yet played no part, and all sexual objects were judged to be of equal value,
somewhat in the sense of Bernard Shaw's malicious aphorism to the effect
that being in love means greatly exaggerating the difference
between one woman and another (Group Psychology, p. 140-1).
There
normally develops a faculty for self-evaluation and reality appreciation, which
enables the child to recognize certain aspects of the parental images as
something he has not yet reached but wishes to become. Here we see a type of
ego ideal- we might call it the normal one- which will lead to attempts
gradually to bring about a realization of these aims, as soon as the
individual’s growing strength and capacities will permit it (Annie Reich, Early
Identifications, p. 221)
Forever close to magic imagery and yet indispensible to the ego, the
ego ideal is eventually molded from such idealized object and self images. The
separate though concomitant building up of an ego ideal composed of idealized
parental and self images and of realistic ego goals as well as realistic self
and object representations, appears to reflect the child’s simultaneous
acceptance of the reality principle and his resistance to it…. The prominent,
strange, and precious quality of the ego ideal is its unreality and its
distance from the real self. Although we are ordinarily perfectly aware of
this, the ego ideal exerts a tremendous influence on our realistic behaviour.
The vicissitudes of the ego ideal reflect, of course, the development of
infantile value measures. Its deep unconscious core harbors derivatives of
early notions of value, such as the idea of eternal happiness, of glamour and
wealth, or physical and mental power and strength; notions which do not yet
have the quality of moral ideas but, partly surviving in our ego goals, may
play a paramount role in patients whose superego has never matured (Jacobson, The Self and The Object World, p.
110-2).
[13] This isn’t to say that the psychotic is untroubled and happy without
ideals. Anyone who as worked with them will know they have immense suffering
and the ideal have been relinquished but this is brought about by defenses and
with the experience of supreme persecutory and depressive anxiety.
[14] A man who has exchanged his narcissism for homage to a high ego
ideal has not necessarily on that account succeeded in sublimating his
libidinal instincts. It is true that the ego ideal demands
such sublimation, but it cannot enforce it; sublimation remains
a special process which may be prompted by the ideal but the
execution of which is entirely independent of any such prompting. It is
precisely in neurotics that we find the highest differences of potential
between the development of their ego ideal and the amount of sublimation of
their primitive libidinal instincts; and in general it is far harder to
convince an idealist of the inexpedient location of his libido than a
plain man whose pretensions have remained more moderate. Further, the formation
of an ego ideal and sublimation are quite differently related to the causation
of neurosis. As we have learnt, the formation of
an ideal heightens the demands of the ego and is the most powerful
factor favouring repression; sublimation is
a way out, a way by which those demands can be
met without involving repression (On Narcissism, p. 94-5).
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