Wordsworth savors the beautiful in nature, and seeks out scenes that both awaken and calm his soul. Natural: what exactly does that mean? To Wordsworth, nature brings peace, harmony and tranquility. He has a sense that the cultural environment has utterly taken over and repressed what is natural in him, and in all city dwellers, whether they know it or not. He’s been living in London, the dismal city, and it’s flattened his spirits: too many people, no common feeling, dirt and grime and grit. He drinks in the beauty that surrounds him, and he begins to feel restored. He has been away from his childhood home in the rural Lake District of England, his green world, for five years and now he is back. The poem that inspired the readers of the volume most was “Tintern Abbey.” It’s a narrative and reflective poem, about a hundred and fifty lines long, the subject of which remains all too relevant: it’s about depression and the attempt to recover from depression. Late in the 18th century, William Wordsworth changed Anglo-American poetry by publishing Lyrical Ballads, in collaboration with his (then) dear friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And there was a profound reaction against it. This has happened before in cultural history, though the terms were quite different. We’ve become over-cultivated, overly dependent on technology we live in the abstract, rather cerebral world that the Internet epitomizes. Nature, the green world, is often absent from our lives. The major new technology that most of us encounter every day is of course the Internet, which is almost a pure artifact of culture. It’s almost too obvious to be worth saying, but over the past years our lives have become more and more indoor lives, and more and more technology based. Maybe one solution to super-ego woes is simply to step outside, especially if there happens to be a swathe of green around. But here I want to focus on one such response, what we might call a second or renovated phase of Romanticism. There are many ways we might go about attenuating the pressures of the super-ego, and in a forthcoming book, “The Unwelcome Guest,” I’ll enumerate a number.
#Harsh superego how to#
I must do better, better, better! Says Zizek, “No wonder, then, that Lacan posits an equation between jouissance and super-ego: to enjoy is not a matter of following one’s spontaneous tendencies it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty” ( How to Read Lacan). And alas, it also takes masochistic joy in its own self-lacerations. Behind a sober, high-minded mien, it takes unmitigated joy in the sufferings of the fallen.
But in fact it revels in seeing others punished. It masquerades as a disinterested, even a noble force. To Zizek, the super-ego is a figure of “obscene enjoyment.” It pretends to be virtuous, righteous, an upholder of admirable laws both public and private. Zizek follows Jacques Lacan, who also sustained a protracted interest in the idea of the over-I, though he radically modifies Freud’s conception. Another is the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. Phillips is one of the few contemporary public writers who takes Freud’s idea of the super-ego seriously. It would be helpful to all if they might be delivered from it. But one must recall, not only do they inflict pain, they are in pain themselves. It’s easy to smile or half-smile at such figures. Or maybe it’s better to say that he’s the death of it, and that really charms everybody.
He tells them about his new Twitter campaign to rid the world of speech crimes, and thought crimes to boot. They ask him who he thinks the administration’s biggest racist is. They clap him on the back when he arrives. He is “strikingly unimaginative both about morality and about ourselves-the selves he insists on diminishing” ( Unforbidden Pleasures).īut now, I fear that when the Over-I goes to a party what he finds are more super-egos. (I elaborate on Phillips rather freely here.) I’m reminded of a pop song lyric: “My Momma don’t like you and she likes everyone.” Well, in Phillips’s riff no one much likes the over-I either. He’s a complete bore and no one really likes him and he has to go home. In Phillips’s essay, the super-ego turns up at a party.
We too often live, to cite a phrase of Robert Boyers, in a tyranny of virtue. Cancel him! Fire her! Send them off to re-education! Harsh reflexive judgment and enforced guilt abound. I believe that in many ways we live in a culture of the super-ego, amok with cruel judgment and harsh punishment.
The super-ego, of course, is what Freud calls the interior agency that judges us, often unconsciously, often in punitive, even sadistic fashion. In a marvelous essay on self-criticism, Adam Phillips writes about what it would be like if the super-ego left the confines of a particular psyche and went out into the world as an individual.
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