| | | The ego is not master in his own house. Sigmund Freud |
by Stanley
Don’t blow your nose on the table cloth or into your fingers, sleeve or hat. Don’t stir your sauce with your fingers. Don’t spit so far that you have to look for your saliva to put your foot on it. Don’t wipe your greasy fingers on a piece of bread or on your coat. Don’t fowl staircases, corridors or wall hangings with urine. Don’t relieve yourself in front of ladies or before doors and windows. Don’t spit bones, eggshells or rinds onto the floor. Don’t pick your nose while eating. Don’t clean your dirty plate with your fingers. Don’t lift meat to your nose to smell it. Don’t fall on food like a pig. Don’t wolf your food so that your cheeks bulge like bellows.
You might wonder who on earth might need such coaching.
These are just a few pieces of good advice in books of etiquette from the Middle Ages. That such advice needed to be given provides an insight into the level of behaviour that was normal at that time. Even upper class people were much more, shall we say, ‘spontaneous’ than we are. Rules of manners like this were the beginning of that taming of behavior, of aggression and sex, of naked love and war, of the primal instincts – the beginning that process of the repression Freud said was the price of civilisation. The whole taming of the instincts is reflected clearly in the history of manners[1].
People of the Middle Ages were far less worried about public displays of nudity as well; bodily functions like defecating were quite open; and there was little idea of sexual privacy. Couples would copulate in full view of strangers, relatives and children. Then rules of behavior were gradually adopted, first among the nobles as a distinction of class, percolating downwards by imitation to the common people. For the nobles it was important to distinguish one’s class from the peasants; and this became internalized and enforced as a sense of shame.
This whole process of formalizing and domestication is the gradual acquiring of conscience, what we know as the superego, a sort of second nature. Our children acquire this second nature early in life and quickly learn how one is supposed to be and act – ‘how it is done’ and what is just ‘not done’. This formalizing process took hundreds of years to become socially ingrained; it takes only the first few years of life to impart the whole package to a modern child.
Before this formalizing process had civilized us, people of the Middle Ages were just like untrained children, very volatile and impulsive, one moment joyful and the next ferocious; ‘a moment ago they were joking, now they mock each other, one word leads to another, and suddenly from the midst of laughter they find themselves in a fierce feud. Much of what appears contradictory to us – the intensity of their piety, the violence of their fear of hell, their guilt feelings, their penitence, the immense outbursts of joy and gaiety, the sudden flaring and uncontrollable of force of hatred and belligerence – all these, like rapid changes of mood are in reality symptoms of one and the same structuring of the emotional life.’[2] Or perhaps one should say, they are symptoms of their unstructured emotional life compared to us, for whom civilized rules have been formalized and built into the very fabric of our collective psyche – so much so that we don’t even think about it, so that it really is second nature to us.
A good example of the apogee of formalization was the court etiquette of King Louis XIV’s France. The Palace of Versailles in the 18th century was dominated by a fantastically intricate mosaic of protocols. Codes of behavior at the table were a vast frozen network of precisely defined procedural etiquette. In fact that’s where the word ‘etiquette’ comes from. One day the king arranged with his gardener a system of signposts to stop nobles and courtiers walking on the gardens. These signs were known as ‘etiquettes’ – the French for ‘tickets’, or ‘signs’.
Similarly, symptoms in an individual of an over dominating super-ego is where life becomes rule-bound down to the most minute detail and where certain rituals, like hand washing, have to repeated to ensure absolutely cleanliness. Life can become completely dominated by precise rules of doing the most ordinary things. We call this OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). The thought of any kind of slipping of standards evokes intense anxiety and the fear that the instinctual level might break though – triggering a breakdown of control with monstrous consequences – what Freud called ‘the return of the repressed’. It can be compared on a social level to the French revolution, where the lower levels (i.e. the peasants) did indeed break through with all the consequent bloodshed and chaos of the so-called Reign of Terror.
In his work Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud’s main thesis is that there is a fundamental tension between civilisation and the individual. ‘The primary friction, he said, stems from the individual's quest for instinctual freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and instinctual repression’. [3] , [4]
The process of formalization continued right through the Victorian era with all the recognizable symptoms of emotional rigidity and repression of personal spontaneity. For every aspect of social life: marriage, property, courtship, inheritance, kinship, etiquette, class boundaries, dress, body functions and sexuality - all were tightly circumscribed by a network of intricate conventions and inflexible principles. Transgression evoked great anxiety, and any hint of moral slipping would place one beyond the pale of society. This was the civilizing and formalizing process rapidly becoming an illness.
Something had to give. And it did – slowly and thankfully without a guillotine. The cracks first began to manifest around the end of the Second World War and we are now living in an age where there has been an astonishing reversal of the long formalization period we have outlined, a most remarkable u-turn in what was a long, one-way historical process. This reversal has been called deformalization.[5] The new trend was very clear by the 1960s. Since then we have been experimenting with the de-construction of many social formalities, seeing how far we can let go of the rigidity of a super-ego dominated life, how far and in what way we can risk freeing our emotions without destroying the best of our social cohesion. For example, conservatives the world over regard the rules of marriage and family as the cement that holds civilisation together, yet married couples are on the brink of becoming the minority, with only 51 percent of American adults currently married.
Freud’s discovery of the superego and civilization’s discontent was just the beginning of the process of deformalization. Although he never imagined this process as possible, he unwittingly helped set it in motion. Psychotherapy became the cutting edge of the experiment of allowing the whole gamut of human emotions to be made visible. Along with all the very human feelings that previously had to be hidden. This was revolutionary and a first in the history of civilization.
In my view, this experiment was most clearly implemented in the psychology of Carl Rogers in what became known as person-centred psychology. The principles of counselling Rogers establish – like non-judgmental positive regard – were the first direct effort to undo the rigidity of the super-ego of the ancien régime so that life could be lived in greater harmony with the instincts; and indeed lived with a greater faith in human nature. Person-centred psychology was part of the more general social movement of deformalization and the timely expression of it.
However, in recent times there has been a counter-revolutionary revival of conservatism in two distinct areas. The first is in the rise of Right Wing Christianity; and the second is the attempt to alter the purpose of psychotherapy, to limit freedom expression for the sake of socially conventional behaviour. Both these counter-revolutionary movements are reactions to the ‘dangerous’ freedoms we have gained since the 60s, especially in relationships and life styles – but more importantly in the freedom to be emotionally honest; for we had begun to deal with our wayward emotional impulses and those of others in a new open handed way without of judgment and censure.
The conservative reactions to these new freedoms are motivated by the same apprehension: the terror of falling down the slippery slope into chaos. For the Right Wing religious movements, the rule-bound super-ego is represented by God who actually wrote the rules Himself; and since these rules come from the Almighty they are immutable.
The other counter-revolutionary trend is more hidden, but just as subversive. In many counselling agencies, while pretending to care for the individual, the emotional freedom of the person is no longer primary. Therapy becomes rule-bound and is designed to train the superego into proper social performance. There has to be a ‘satisfactory’ outcome to therapy and it must be accomplished within a certain number of appointments. The purpose of psychotherapy is more and more indirectly determined by a government department. Sessions are structured by cognitive goal-making and the emphasis is on ‘results’ – all suitably documented in written reports; consequently the boundaries of confidentiality are no longer respected. Psychological growth does not evolve; it is overseen and designed – designed with the purpose of ‘curing’ social problems. Therapy has become ‘social work’ and, in the final analysis, answerable to a government department for funding.
Therapy is now the place you go to have your super-ego updated so that you can soldier-on without being a difficult citizen.
But more of this in the next blog.
[1] Elias Norbert. The Civilization Process. Cambridge, Mass; Blackwall
[2] Elias, ibid.
[3] Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents.
http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents
[4] Freud did not conceive that there could also be an instinctual
drive towards sociability. SR
[5] Wouter, Cas. Informalisation: Manners and Emotions since 1890. London, Sage
