Prince Harry’s endorsement of therapy will likely turn some of us off ever seeking it out. Insisting that therapy has changed him for the better, he is urging his family to partake so that they too can ‘speak his language’ of simultaneously loaded and empty terms – such as ‘authenticity’. ‘If I didn’t know myself, how could members of my family know the real me?’ he said. This non-sequitur subverts the conventional wisdom that sometimes others can know you better than you know yourself.
Yet tiring as all the Prince’s interventions are, a peremptory dismissal of psychoanalytic practice would be a mistake. In fact, psychoanalysts would probably refuse to accept the Prince is speaking their language anyway. Psychiatrist Dr Max Pemberton said that Harry is ‘promoting yet another quack therapy’ and has ‘forfeited any right he might have had to be seen as a credible representative for mental health charities’. Fortunately for those in need of professional help, Harry has profoundly misunderstood the very thing he endorses. It’s not just about you. It’s about our shared society.
Prince Harry is not alone. Many more have misunderstood Sigmund Freud’s famous and strangely plausible (especially for women) thesis that boys have an unconscious sexual infatuation with their mothers. While it titillates every bored psychology student, the serious lesson of Freud has been lost through the ages – no thanks to his successors.
Thinkers who followed in his wake tended to interpret repression as something to mitigate against, condemning structures that might perpetuate some form of self-restraint. Freud was particularly displeased with Wilhelm Reich. Once a protege of Freud’s, Reich began to develop and test ever more radical, dangerous and perverted treatments. Paired with his sexualpolitik, it suffices to say his career, and life, did not end well (in jail, actually).
Philip Rieff predicted the rise of the ‘therapeutic man’ who is ‘born to be pleased’ with ‘nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of wellbeing’. Sound familiar?
Freud described Reich as ‘passionately devoted to his hobby-horse, who now salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis’. While, as Adam Phillips points out in an excellent essay, Reich thought that society was only as good as the involuntary orgasms of individual members, Freud was interested in the more complex task of stabilising society by training individuals to voluntarily practice ‘renunciations of instincts’.
Another fraudulent Freudian who eschews inhibition for the sake of unbound desire is Simone de Beauvoir. Here’s is her take on marriage: ‘I think it’s a very dangerous institution – dangerous for men, who find themselves trapped, saddled with a wife and children to support; dangerous for women, who aren’t financially independent…’
De Beauvoir’s dim view of marriage stems from her withering appraisal of dependency altogether. For her, dependency is an undignified status that detracts from the most important feature of human life – individual autonomy. But are two mutually dependent people such a problem for freedom? What if we saw the discipline required to be a faithful spouse as upholding the determination of both individuals to achieve security and stability? More broadly, what if we associated self-restraint less with prudishness and censorship, and more with responsibility, or even civility?
It is here that Reich and de Beauvoir part ways with Freud. The social liberalism that stemmed from the 1950s and is morphing into an indignant therapeutic defence of feeling free does not have its roots in Freud. Despite its allure, Freud did not consider ‘unbridled gratification’ a sustainable way to live, warning that it ‘something penalises itself after short indulgence’.
Freud did in fact influence one thinker in the opposite direction to Reich and de Beauvoir: Philip Rieff. Once married to Susan Sontag, Rieff lived a comparably sedate life, teaching sociology at the University of Pennsylvania for more than 30 years. An understudied and largely forgotten thinker, he predicted the rise of the ‘therapeutic man’ who is ‘born to be pleased’ with ‘nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of wellbeing’. Sound familiar?
Prince Harry is Rieff’s ‘therapeutic man’ par excellence. In Spare, Prince Harry gifts anyone looking to test his shallow therapeutic outlook with the following passage:
We are primarily one thing, and then we’re primarily another, and then another, and so on, until death – in succession. Each new identity assumes the throne of Self, but takes us further from our original self, perhaps our core self – the child… there’s a purity to childhood, which is diluted with each iteration.
This nostalgic call to return to some original self, an undiluted prototype from Eden, is pickled in therapeutic brine. It is sealed off from any summons of loyalty, obligation or discipline – those higher things that challenge our instinct to live according to every carnal twitch.
Rieff sought to recover respect for behaviours such as reticence, secrecy and concealment of self. He observed that these were once aspects befitting of a virtuous man – but now they have come to be seen as pernicious pathologies. While Rieff’s therapeutic man is beholden to indulge each and every individual desire in the name of authenticity, the virtuous man freely chooses self-restraint. He inhabits roles and makes himself seen. He answers summons and happily conforms to the right cultural norms and social expectations. The roles we all play in our families, communities and national life are not – as Prince Harry might suggest – counterfeit or diluted selves, but the only way to live happily. Ironically, this is also the ultimate goal of therapeutic man.
The therapeutics would have you believe that resisting the summons of duty is a minor offence; a simple expression of a personal preference to live autonomously (read, isolated) and authentically (read, indulged). But actually, resisting the summons of duty is a violation of cosmic proportions, and self-destructive too.
Rieff – and Freud – knew this; that living isolated, indulged and evading duty would not only depress the individual but destabilise wider society too. We can see this with a quick glance at our own social order. The whims of the therapeutics are well served by current trends that seek to destroy bonds of trust between families and communities, inherited from history, that sustain our common life now and for future generations.We erase history that doesn’t fit our fantasy; slough off the domestic care of children and older people; eliminate biological differences between the sexes; and expunge national borders.
It’s time to take Rieff’s tonic. Inspired by a conservative reading of Freud, we must respond to the restraining forces that emerge from our associational life with others and deter us from toppling statues or leaving our spouses. This is not inhibition; this is order. We must face our fear of responsibility if we want to live genuinely free from the unceasing demands of our own desire.
Of course, this poses a political challenge. How can the state shape a social order that facilitates – rather than undermines – self-restraint? Marriage, for instance, is not the dangerous institution de Beauvoir bewailed, but one that orientates both parties away from themselves and towards some common good – not only between themselves but society as a whole, especially if you do your bit to save us from demographic collapse.
Other structures can bestow similar advantages. The associational life maintained by places such as youth clubs, playing fields and village halls build reciprocity, trust and a well of social support. And the same goes for the patriotic bind that comes with national identity and national security.
The state should be in the business of creating opportunities for people to answer the summons of civilisation and participate in associations beyond themselves in the family, community and the nation. A system of taxation that supports the care economy in every household; economic planning that protects local industry and pride of place; a ban on pornography.
If you baulk at the thought of the state taking an interest in such affairs, then you have an over-realised liberal view of the state, and its proper role to pursue a substantive vision of the good life. If market forces and state services were made to strengthen mediatory institutions in civil society, then a whole new political regime would unfold. Some call it post-liberal. I call it plain conservatism. It could happen. It’s what Freud would have wanted.
Comments