Beyond the Pleasure Principle Read Free

this domesticated madness and does what he can to explain it. He says that when we fall in love, all of the infantile fantasies about power and pleasure are reactivated. They have been dormant, but they have never died, and they are resurrected, a little like the horror-movie spooks who rise up when their burial ground is accidentally disturbed. The old wishes come once again to the fore and they dominate life. Love is pathology, at least romantic love. Married love, which takes place under the reign of that sour deity, the Reality Principle, is far less interesting to Freud. So Freud would disabuse us of our erotic illusions and make us more sober, or at least capable of some measure of irony at the point when we are once again about to drown ourselves in Eros.
    An effective, flexible super-ego (assuming that such a thing exists) is, one might hypothesize, the source of whatever ironic vision we can apply to our own experience. Super-ego irony entails distance, detachment, a sceptical sense that we are not so different from anyone else, that we are as ripe for humiliation as the next person. And, more than that, such irony suggests the possibility that we are, despite protestations, not so different from our former selves: that we are likely to behave as disastrously in the present as we have in the past.
    In love, the reigning super-ego suffers usurpation. In love, Freud says in
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
(1921), the lover puts the beloved in the place of the Over-I. The lover becomes the standard for judgement. What the beloved finds admirable, or interesting, or just noteworthy, is splendid behaviour. Like being drunk, which also suspends the super-ego, at least until the next morning when it can assert itself with redoubled force (the great essay on the psychology of the hangover is yet to be written), being in love lets us displace our own internal monarch and put a lord of temporary, blissful misrule on the throne. Alas, when we rememberour various erotic abasements, it is through the unforgiving agency of the true super-ego, the one based on harsh parental prototypes, which has retaken the seat and glares bitterly at the past. Love, too, has its morning after. (Sometimes it lasts for years.) But for a while, ludicrously, absurdly, exaltingly, we feel free.
    To love, according to Freud, is to ‘over-estimate the erotic object’. What is the nature of this so-called over-estimation? To over-estimate someone is, presumably, to see them as larger than they are in themselves, or to others – or (maybe more to the point) than they would be to Freud, who was, to say the least, a rather harsh judge of character. And naturally the first over-magnified figures in life were the parents, the mother in particular, who looms over the child. ‘The mother's face,’ says Wallace Stevens, ‘is the purpose of the poem’ and, Freud would add, of much more besides. We, males and females alike, seek her, according to the Freudian wisdom, from one end of our lives to the other. So we are anxious and dissatisfied when monogamous – the sole object that we invest in is never the right one, the original one. But we tend to be equally unhappy with promiscuity. For here the original object is pursued in a series of substitutes, none of whom brings full satisfaction. As Philip Rieff puts it: ‘Freud acutely understood the intimate connection between libertine and ascetic behaviour. Both are excesses, deriving from an imperfect emancipation from childhood's insatiable love for authority figures… If from Freud we may infer that monogamy is not a very satisfactory arrangement, the results of his science may also be taken to show that man is a naturally faithful creature: the most inconstant sexual athlete is in motivation still a toddler, searching for the original maternal object.’ ( p. 166 )
    So, erotically, we repeat. We continue time and again trying to regain an illusory former happiness. And too, perhaps, we