It is an existential condition that we never know the internal state of another being with certainty.
Andrea Celenza, Transference, Love, Being
The superego, which has all too easily passed into ordinary language as the secular equivalent of the conscience, has had a rather chequered career as both an idea and as one of the main ‘characters’ in our so-called internal world. Originally deemed by Freud to be the voice of the restrictive and forbidding father internalised by the Oedipal child (the father who stops the child, in this literally familiar scenario, from sleeping with the mother), the superego seemed to relish its part as the punitive, mean-minded killjoy that supervised our lives, using guilt and shame to keep us on the straight and narrow. Its astonishing power revealed the strength of our wish to be inhibited and controlled (just think of the scale and scope of guilt and shame in our everyday lives).
Those early optimistic Freudians who saw psychoanalysis as a force for liberation described it as a treatment in which the superego itself was tempered, tamed, reconsidered and revised. Sándor Ferenczi, Freud’s inspired follower, even went so far as to suggest that the aim of psychoanalysis is the dissolution of the superego. He invited us to imagine what our lives would be like if we were not so willing to submit ourselves to extrinsic, restrictive and severe authorities and more willing to work out our own personal morality (it being assumed that one definition of development is the freedom to choose by whom one wants to be judged). Echoing this, the Kleinian psychoanalyst Roger Money-Kyrle suggested that the aim of analysis was to prove the ‘irrelevance’ of the patient’s inhibitions, making us wonder what our inhibitions are irrelevant to and what, if our inhibitions are irrelevant, is relevant.
Both the psychoanalytic idealists and the psychoanalytic realists agree that we are suffering from excessive – very frightened and frightening – self-control and are intimidated by our instinctual life. In other words, we are persecuted by our assumed natures as instinct-driven creatures. The Freudian idealists, admittedly a bit thin on the ground between and after two world wars, seemed to be saying: let’s find out what our lives would be like if we were less intimidated by our putative natures, less paranoid about who we happen to be, more embracing of our appetites, less traumatised by our destructiveness. The realists asserted that we have very good reasons to be frightened of our supposed nature. All evidence suggests that we are desperate, greedy, rivalrous, cruel and predatory creatures, and that to make life bearable we need appropriate internal and external constraints. The question, as always, is whether so-called human nature is described as fundamentally benign or malign – something to be welcomed or something to be dreaded (or both). Some people no longer believe in binary oppositions or dualisms, preferring and promoting more nuanced and various descriptions. And if we’re anti-essentialists, we no longer believe that there is anything that we are fundamentally; nor, by the same token, are we going to straightforwardly accept stories about human nature. We are more likely to wonder who needs us to believe these stories, and why we, and mostly they, will be better off if we do. Essentialism, when it isn’t useful and true, is coercive control.
This is all a roundabout way of wondering why we crave being controlled by such authorities. Psychoanalysis – and most, if not all, political theory since Plato – answers these questions, and pragmatism affirms that we need to go on asking them if we would like to go on working out what we want to make of ourselves. So far, it seems, we have made monsters of ourselves as the only animals that, as Auden pointed out, enjoy harming ourselves and others. The way round this intolerable and apparently irredeemable problem is to realise that the term superego – and its precursor, conscience – refers to the part of us that has no curiosity about ourselves. It’s the saboteur of curiosity about ourselves. And that part of us, like a narrow-minded fascist, has only one project: to destroy our pleasures in being alive by trying to kill our curiosity (or by making us frightened of our curiosity, which amounts to the same thing).
It may be worth wondering, at least from a psychoanalytic point of view, what it is about intimidation that we enjoy. There is, after all, no shortage of things to be frightened of, but why do we find fear so addictive and compelling? Why do we seem to be the only animals that hate and attack our own nature? Or, to put it the other way round, what are the problems that our stories about so-called human nature claim to answer? Our curiosity may be or could be one of the best things about us (though when we describe someone as a curious person we can sometimes mean that they are a bit odd, as though we admire curiosity but it makes us uneasy). It is certainly something in children that amazes and amuses us. And yet, as I say, we are tempted to sabotage this part of ourselves. The superego, as described by Freud and Klein, is an essentialist: it pretends to know exactly who we are, and, in making us guilty and ashamed, implicitly claims to be telling us the truth about ourselves. When we feel guilty or ashamed, we are rarely free to wonder whether we actually believe we have done something wrong. The function of guilt and shame is to stop us being able to think or see things from contested points of view; we give up the democracy of our own minds. When we feel guilty and ashamed it seems impossible – or evasive, or irresponsible, or cowardly – to be curious about our guilt and our shame. They appear as unquestioned and unquestionable states of mind.
What would make someone, anyone, phobic of their curiosity? What might be endangering about curiosity? The obvious answer is that one doesn’t know where it will lead, and that translates as moral and emotional perplexity. I may find myself feeling things or wanting things or thinking things or discovering things that unsettle me. Curiosity is direction without a destination, as though the questions about curiosity are always: ‘Where will it end? Will it end? And will it end well (whatever well is taken to be)?’ Curiosity, almost by definition, may have no sense of an ending. And, in a different way, we have little sense of why, how and when our curiosity begins; of what inspires it and why we consent to it, if and when we do. In the unconscious selective attention of everyday life – whatever or whoever happens to interest us or attract our attention – there is a crisis of choice. At any given moment, are we going to follow our curiosity when we may have little sense or knowledge of the value of what we notice we are tempted by?
Curiosity, that is to say, poses a very interesting and ordinary moral problem – a description of every love affair and every demand we make: can we afford to pursue something or someone that we cannot know the value or the meaning of beforehand? We may simply be averse to curiosity because it is always a kind of risk. Certainly, to be curious is to recognise that there is something we want that we are lacking; it’s a benign acknowledgment of dependence, of our inability to be self-sufficient. It confirms what we always already know: wanting is a wish to predict the future and we cannot predict the future – often or always we know too little about it. We can only be curious, in other words, if we are not omniscient. And abrogating our omniscience – whether it be the omniscience of knowing everything or knowing nothing – is always harder than it seems. It can feel as though curiosity exposes our helplessness and our appetite, which are always inextricable. Curiosity reveals how little so-called self-control – not to mention self-sufficiency – we might have, or even want.
We might say that in being curious we are dependent on our curiosity being satisfied, but this is also a way of escaping curiosity: we want to assuage our anxiety about curiosity by trying to bring it to an end – preferably a pleasurable end – or by persuading ourselves that we know, in some absolute sense, what we are curious about. I probably do know what I am curious about, but what I am less likely to know – or more likely to be unconscious of – is why this, of all things, has incited my curiosity. Our fear of curiosity may be that it exposes us too much to that which is enigmatic about ourselves and others. (We can’t say, ‘tell me what makes someone curious and I will tell you about them,’ though ‘I am my curiosity’ is something someone might say about themselves.) ‘Do what nobody else can do for you,’ Thoreau suggests in a letter, as if to say not only that we can’t depend on other people for everything we want and need (as we did as children), but also that not everything can be delegated. It’s important to have a sense of what other people can’t do for you, and therefore of what you shouldn’t or can’t demand of them. In so far as we are frightened of our curiosity, we will be inclined to delegate it to others, to get other people to be curious on our behalf. But then we are likely to be curious about their curiosity, and envious of their freedom to be curious and the pleasure they may get from it. It’s notable that curiosity in others can make us envious of – and curious about – the pleasure of others (curiosity, in other words, can feel too much like a forbidden pleasure). We are understandably keen to distinguish voyeurism, for example, from our other cultural interests.
If acculturation means teaching people what they should be curious about, and the ways in which they should go about being curious, then we are all likely to have a strong sense of what acceptable curiosity is. But forbidden curiosity is a paradoxical idea, a more paradoxical idea than forbidden desire, because forbidden curiosity is far easier to enact than forbidden desire. Thinking about curiosity as something we do might make us wonder what kind of action imagining, or researching, is. Freud promoted the idea that we are all really and originally curious about sexuality, that the sexual is what makes us curious. And even though this is clearly, as we say, ‘empirically true’, it also keeps curiosity in the realm of the knowable and, to some extent, the predictable. So, there is a paradoxical sense in which Freud reveals something important about curiosity while reassuring us that we already know what we are curious about (though Freud makes it clear that when it comes to sexuality, it is never entirely clear what it would be to satisfy our curiosity about sex). But curiosity as something that needs to be domesticated, to be given a known and knowable target, and yet at the same time as utterly enigmatic, is what Freud intimates. We need to know where curiosity is going, and why; but this knowledge is always a somewhat compromised or ironised knowledge, as though our curiosity is always potentially the part of ourselves that can threaten to waylay who we think we are and want to be. Following our curiosity may be a way of acknowledging the sheer scale of our unconsciousness of ourselves. And, as with at least the Freudian unconscious, which it is unwise to idealise, it would be misleading to idealise following our curiosity as an unequivocal good or morally reputable activity.
Curiosity is better described as risk, with all that implies; and that implies not knowing what it implies. You know something is a risk because it has unknowable consequences. You know something is a risk when you have to relinquish a need for any kind of certainty or guarantee. You know something is a risk when it excites and disturbs you. To live a curious life, to live a life committed to and not betraying your curiosity – a more interesting project, I think, than Lacan’s proposal that we shouldn’t betray our desire – means living a life of what John Stuart Mill called, in a book appropriately titled On Liberty, ‘experiments in living’. And so we should perhaps be alert to what might be the distinction between following one’s desire and following one’s curiosity – curiosity being potentially the more ample and inclusive term.
Curiosity, then, is not merely the antidote to certainty or absolute truth, or to passion or conviction, but also the antidote to modesty, humility, self-doubt and knowing what you want; the antidote, that is to say, to any kind of knowingness. This is why the psychoanalytic phrase for curiosity is free association. When Freud encouraged his patients to say whatever came into their minds, as uncensored as possible, he was encouraging them to acknowledge how little they knew of what they had to say; and how little they could know beforehand of its meaning, whether to themselves or others. In his ‘Two Encyclopedia Articles’, Freud writes:
The treatment is begun by the patient being required to put himself in the position of an attentive and dispassionate self-observer, merely to read off all the time the surface of his consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of the most complete honesty while on the other hand not to hold back any idea from communication, even if 1. he feels it is too disagreeable or if 2. he judges that it is nonsensical or 3. too unimportant or 4. irrelevant to what is being looked for. It is uniformly found that precisely those ideas which provoke these last-mentioned reactions are of particular value in discovering the forgotten material.
What is this, if not an incitement to – and a provocation of – curiosity? Curiosity, then, is the precondition for free associating; and free association is one of the forms that curiosity takes. Curiosity is the cause and consequence of free association – the not needing to know beforehand what it is you have to say. In Freud’s description of this attentive and dispassionate observer, nothing in the patient’s mind is to be left unspoken. As if to say, we simply haven’t been curious enough about what happens to come into our minds; as though all our thinking and imagination have gone into dismissing and discrediting our thoughts and words. We have been intent on inventing and adhering to criteria that keep us quiet; what comes into our minds is judged to be either disagreeable, nonsensical, unimportant or irrelevant, as part of the project to conceal what Freud calls ‘the forgotten material’. By describing what free association entails, Freud suggests that we believe there is a rule we have to live by: don’t be unduly curious about yourself, and don’t share with yourself or with anybody else what you are curious about and what you have discovered through your curiosity. And Freud, of course, implies that what we have been hiding from ourselves about ourselves may be the most important things about us. Psychoanalysis, Freud more than implies, is the encourager and facilitator of our curiosity. What he can’t quite bring himself to say, for understandable reasons, is that psychoanalysis is more of a curiosity profession than a helping profession. What Freud, like everyone else, cannot promise or even suggest is that our curiosity is always good for us, or on the side of our happiness or our health. The curiosity that the psychoanalytic method facilitates is always of ambiguous moral and emotional value. Free associating is one of the things that we can do – one of the things that psychoanalysis adds to our repertoire – but it’s not a prescription of the way we should always speak.
One of the things we may fear about our curiosity is that it might prevent a more purposive life. It might license distraction and distractedness and reveal us to be capricious and whimsical rather than passionate and ambitious. A society of the curious may not be able to settle or concentrate or achieve or make a profit. And yet, noting this confronts us with the fundamental question that lurks in any discussion of curiosity: what kinds of curiosity are we – whoever we are – going to endorse, support and encourage, and what kinds of curiosity do we feel we must prohibit and condemn? That is, what do we fear discovering about ourselves, and what might we be trying not to know? Curiosity, then, is a way of thinking about our fantasies of freedom, and therefore about what we imagine our more disinhibited selves to be like. What might we find ourselves being interested in that we might fear or love or be utterly surprised by? If, when you go out, you follow your eyes or your ears or your nose rather than your intentions, where will you be and what will you have done?
Not all conventional activities require a handbook.
Stephen Mulhall, Philosophy’s Version of Pastoral
There is nothing more conventional, in a sense, than our curiosity; or rather, there is nothing more conventional than our official and admired curiosity, the curiosity legitimated by our parents, education and the cultures in which we find ourselves. Through the method of free association, Freud’s psychoanalysis revealed the sheer scale of unconscious censorship that the modern individual was subject to, and in a sense, victimised by (the most powerful and insidious forms of censorship being those that we do not regard as censorship, but think of as merely the way ‘we’ live). Be curious, Freud suggests, about what you have been discouraged from thinking and feeling about yourself and other people; but be curious in the full knowledge that you can never know beforehand what the effect of following your curiosity will be. Or you can rationalise, legitimate and justify this belief in curiosity, as Freud seems to do, by saying that, as a scientist and a doctor and a willing heir of the Enlightenment, it is in the service of the cure – our curiosity is good for us. And yet Freud was notably reticent, when he wasn’t implicitly or explicitly defending psychoanalysis, about what exactly curiosity might be good for. We haven’t been interested in ourselves, but only in disciplining ourselves; we haven’t been curious enough about our curiosity.
What Freud writes in his ‘Two Encyclopedia Articles’ is astounding in its confidence; he gives no sense of apprehension about what he might have unleashed by encouraging his patients to speak freely. We can’t help but notice in our contemporary political climate – and not only now – that when people speak freely they are more than able to articulate and enact horrifying forms of cruelty. Free speech as a political ideal – let alone as a therapeutic ideal which it must somehow mirror – has been a mixed blessing. Free speech and what is now called hate speech are allied, which can make us more and more suspicious of democratic ideals, the effects and values of pluralism, the celebration of conversation and debate, and dissenting views. Clearly the wish to be told what we should be curious about, and the ways in which we should go about being curious, is paramount. Acculturation is knowing who and what we should be interested in.
Why should our curiosity be freer than anything else about us? Can we imagine it not requiring a handbook? Psychoanalysis is a treatment that allows us to find out what might interest us other than what we are interested in. ‘I know the treatment is working,’ Winnicott once said, ‘when I have enabled the patient to abandon his invulnerability.’ Invulnerability means, among other things, that you always already know who you are and what you want. Curiosity, like psychoanalysis, can be a release from that delusion. If we are, as Emerson suggests, to ‘honour every truth by use’, then we need to consider the uses of curiosity, not to mention the uses of psychoanalysis. Curiosity, that is to say, is the secular equivalent of an act of faith.
