Civilisation and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur), Chapter one
part 1.2.1
How then does Freud respond to the normies, to the believers, and above all to Rolland’s oceanic feeling, as a man of science? What follows are, to me, two of the most concise and elegant descriptions of Freud’s own developed thought. As with the first few pages, he also manages to recruit ancient Rome, the dinosaurs, and quote Goethe on the way. Freud’s first substantive response to the oceanic feeling deals with ego, the second with development. In this post, I’ll think through the ego aspect.
So then. The ‘feeling’ bit of the oceanic feeling, and the role of ego here. It won’t surprise anyone that Freud puts forward a “psychoanalytic – that is to say a genetic – derivation of such a feeling.” (Mental note to self: psychoanalytic = ‘genetic derivations’)
Freud tackles the feeling in the oceanic feeling by considering what psychoanalysis’ clinical experience can report back to us about the ego.
“Normally we are sure of nothing so much as a sense of self, of our own ego. This ego appears to us autonomous, uniform, and clearly set off against everything else”(4). The ego takes itself to be, and we take our egos to be, an autonomous objective subject, a cowboy steady saddled on a horse whose Being is clearly delineated as-and-by the fella in the Stetson we take-ourselves-to-be, firmly in control of the filly, whole and bounded by the world around them (which we take to be outside), through which we move as a separate, distinct, agentic, individuals. Freud pulls no punches: “It was psychoanalytic research that first taught us that this was a delusion”. Cue my Adam Curtis refrain: ‘but they were living in a fantasy’.
For this reason alone, the idea that any person with psychoanalytic knowledge of human struggles, strivings and the motivations that reveal themselves in clinical work, should accept that we outght to be oriented by any feeling that occurs to our conscious selves strikes Freud as bizarre: a bad fit for the fabric of our psychology. ‘Thou art not that’, as Lacan would later remonstrate. ‘More than a feeling’, as Boston would sing, a couple of decades after Lacan.
Freud then describes how the ego extends far inward (to the id) and backwards in time: to our Saurian ancestors, and to our formative state of dependency. As for the id, Freud emphasises how the ego extends inward toward das ich, but with no clear boundary (Kahnemann’s later work – though with a very different epistemology and orientation – uncovers something homologous to this happening on a cognitive level, which he describes with his non-poetic language as ‘system one’ and ‘system two’). We take ourselves to be the intentional ‘I’ revealed by what our discursive chatter builds from sense continually reported back to us in a (hopefully!) fluid experience in which a seemingly bounded and agentic ‘me’ rationally operates in relation to a set of other seemingly bounded and agentic ‘youse’.
Freud contends that we can glimpse this in the throes of everyday erotic experience, those moments when “the borderline between ego and object is in danger of being blurred”. I take it that Freud is talking about fucking, climax and peak experiences, but I take it he means it’s no less the case for routine wanking, wafting daydreamy pining, or even the objectifying yearning we experience when our ogle reaches out to be all over and inside inside whatever thing we clap your eyes on and deem dreamy: ‘like jello on springs’, as Marilyn Monroe’s walk is described in Some Like It Hot.
So where feelings and ego are concerned, it’s not just that ‘something is in the saddle and rides mankind’, as Emerson aptly put it; it’s that we wish very badly to ride or be ridden by certain people. Ginuwine was at least explicit in offering himself in service of this widely held wish. And as as Tom Scholz’ lyrics – Wikipedia reckons the song was actually about his beautiful cousin who he had the hots for – opine, this is *more* than a feeling:
It's more than a feeling (more than a feeling)
When I hear that old song they used to play (more than a feeling)
And I begin dreaming (more than a feeling)
'Til I see Marianne walk away
In every ‘cousin Marianne’, in every more than the feeling in the feeling, we dream our way back toward an ‘it’ that is also in our innermost id: I dream a highway back to you, as Gillian Welch intoned.
The very fact that there is more than a feeling to this, that these are our worlds and deepest fascinations, and moreover that ‘all of the above’ is inside us and outside us, in the present and in the past, shows how the boundaries of ego and id, self and world, inside and outside, past and present, are not stable, constant, or intra-autonomous – is caught up in our fantasies, our wishes, our illusions, which are seductive, compelling, and mess us round. This is the stuff of our lives and thoughts; we are desiring subjects, and what and how we desire is beyond reason and ego, though always filtered back through that to make it seem as if this crazy situation makes sense.
A strictly psychoanalytic account tells us that this already delimits what we can hope and wish for, how free we can be in ourselves and with one another, how we tend to actually behave, and what really drives this behaviour. Maggie Nelson again in On Freedom, “those who thought Reichian orgasmatrons or queer orgies were going to bring about the death of capitalism or fascism always misjudged the possible relationships between pleasure, desire, capital, and power”. On the flip, Marcuse (of whom more after this set of C&ID posts) stakes everything on said orgies… overcoming sexual repression, he thought, would overcome societal destructiveness… back to Wild Wild Country, into the leather saddle with you.
From BDSM to DSM, then aliens: Freud immediately adds that with a number of ego-related pathologies – which more-or-less-overlap with what contemporary DSM language labels borderline and narcissistic personality disorders – “the boundary between the ego and the external world becomes uncertain or the borderlines are actually wrongly drawn”. Finally, although Freud does not draw so explicitly on Hegel, Kirkegaard, or Marx’ accounts of alienation (although he would doubtless have been familiar with them), he reminds us how “parts of a person’s own body, indeed parts of his mental life – perceptions, thoughts, feelings – seem alien, divorced from the ego, and others in which he attributes to the external world what has clearly arisen in the ego and ought to be recognised by it” (5, all quotes Penguin ed., McClintock translation). So it’s not just erotic fantasies and sexual experience that teach us to question the validity of how our ‘feelings’ align with our stable conscious sense of self, ordinary neuroses, as well as alienation writ large, show the many ways that inside and outside, me and you and Them, are all mixed up here, all mixed up in fantasy, which goes deep, and is both intimate and extimate (see Lacan).
Having spent some months in detailed text conversations with a high school friend sucked into the currently-prevalent online conspiracy theories, and for that matter living with the literally billions of cases in which you and I and every single one of the people around us have experienced moments erotic infatuation (at one end) as well as societal alienation (on the other), I would like to concede Freud and psychoanalysis a huge point. Freud thought this is one of psychoanalysis’ great contributions to Western thought, and I think he was right. The ego is not master in her own house; our borderlines are not stable; inside and outside are completely mixed up and confused; we continually hallucinate satisfactions, get caught up in our own discursive cerebration, live guided by invisible voices and parental figures, dissociate from threatening or unpleasant realities, and generally tend to be paranoid, horny, grasping, fixated, strung out, driven as we fundamentally are by a set of impulses which the ego is not in control of and cannot truly know, but which we glimpse in our dreams, our fantasies, the repetitious nature of our fascinations and obsessions, and of course every single one of our ideologies (to Zizek). Fromm makes a parallel point later: as for the notionally male, we do not even have ego control over who we get an erection over, and why, and when. Indeed, the discrepancy between who we desire and who we want to desire, and the tensioning question if we do desire what we desire (see Lacan’s Ethics…) show us just how entangling the wedding tackle is.
So if Romain Rolland or Osho point us to a feeling, and says that this is how one should orient one’s life and explain the basis of religious experiences, for all these ego-related reasons, we should be very fucking sceptical.
Freud didn’t put much store in feelings as a reliable guide to life. Clinical experience with humans and their ego shit lead Freud to be incredulous about guiding one’s life by the subjective truth of any kind of ‘feeling’, especially one encountered while meditating, doing yoga, or tripping at a rave after not having slept or eaten properly for a day or two. As a feeling, then, the oceanic feeling is just another delusion serving certain styles of egoic self, something we’ve grabbed hold of to order the flux of experience and the things our purview has led us toward.
But if we’re talking about an ‘oceanic feeling’, more specifically, what explains the oceanic aspect? Freud switches to the developmental account in psychoanalysis, later given much more texture by Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Nancy Chodorow, and others. Of this, more next time.