25 Jul Learn to become inconsequential | Part B’ (BRETT KAHR)
Freud summarized his epic observations thus:
I propose to describe how the universal narcissism of men. their self-love, has up to the present suffered three severe blows from the researches of science.
a. In the early stages of his researches, man believed at first that his dwelling-place, the earth, was the stationary centre of the universe, with the sun, moon and planets circling round it. In this he was naïvely following the dictates of his sense-perceptions, for he felt no movement of the earth, and wherever he had an unimpeded view he found himself in the centre of a circle that enclosed the external world. The central position of the earth, moreover, was a token to him of the dominating part played by it in the universe and appeared to fit in very well with his inclination to regard himself as lord of the world.
The destruction of this narcissistic illusion is associated in our minds with the name and work of Copernicus in the sixteenth century. But long before his day the Pythagoreans had already cast doubts on the privileged position of the earth, and in the third century BC Aristarchus of Samos had declared that the earth was much smaller than the sun and moved round that celestial body. Even the great discovery of Copernicus, therefore, had already been made before him. When this discovery achieved general recognition, the self-love of mankind suffered its first blow, the cosmological one.
b. In the course of the development of civilization man acquired a dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom. Not content with this supremacy, however, he began to place a gulf between his nature and theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself he attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent which permitted him to break the bond of community between him and the animal kingdom. Curiously enough, this piece of arrogance is still foreign to children, just as it is to primitive and primaeval man. It is the result of a later, more pretentious stage of development.
[…]
We all know that little more than half a century ago the researches of Charles Darwin and his collaborators and fore-runners put an end to this presumption on the part of man. Man is not a being different from animals or superior to them; he himself is of animal descent, being more closely related to some species and more distantly to others. The acquisitions he has subsequently made have not succeeded in effacing the evidences, both in his physical structure and in his mental dispositions, of his parity with them. This was the second, the biological blow to human narcissism.
c. The third blow, which is psychological in nature, is probably the most wounding.
Although thus humbled in his external relations, man feels himself to be supreme within his own mind. Somewhere in the core of his ego he has developed an organ of observation to keep a watch on his impulses and actions and see whether they harmonize with its demands.
[…]
two discoveries – that the life of our sexual instincts cannot be wholly tamed, and that mental processes are in themselves unconscious and only reach the ego and come under its control through incomplete and untrustworthy perceptions – these two discoveries amount to a statement that the ego is not master in its own house. Together they represent the third blow to man’s self-love, what I may call the psychological one. No wonder, then, that the ego does not look favourably upon psycho-analysis and obstinately refuses to believe in it.
(‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’, 1917)
Copernicus forced us to realize that the earth revolves around the sun. Darwin helped us to recognize that we cannot trace our ancestry back to Adam and Eve. And Freud insisted that we do not control our own minds. These three revolutions constitute an overwhelming attack on the narcissistic concept of man as centre of the universe.
The experience of being a grandiose baby, who comes to regard himself or herself as the exalted child of a deity, and who believes the planet earth to be the best address in the universe, may be pleasurable at some level. But eventually, in order to come to terms with the life that we do have as ordinary, hard-working, ageing people of finite means and capacities, we must abandon our infantile, megalomaniacal, narcissistic self-image, and learn how to be one of billions of fellow citizens, in a large solar system, all of whom will one day die. As Freud explained:
Just as a planet revolves around a central body as well as rotating on its own axis, so the human individual takes part in the course of development of mankind at the same time as he pursues his own path in life. But to our dull eyes the play of forces in the heavens seems fixed in a never-changing order; in the field of organic life we can still see how the forces contend with one another, and how the effects of the conflict are continually changing. So, also, the two urges, the one towards personal happiness and the other towards union with other human beings, must struggle with each other in every individual; and so, also, the two processes of individual and of cultural development must stand in hostile opposition to each other and mutually dispute the ground.
(Civilization and its Discontents, 1930)
In order to be mentally healthy, one must aspire towards greater creativity of course, but, similarly, one must also come to accept the fact that how- ever brilliant one’s paintings, poetry, musical compositions or scientific experiments; however stunning one’s face and figure; however large one’s wallet; someone else will always outdo us. Freud observed that when confronted with great writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain and Émile Zola, inter alia, we cannot avoid ‘the feeling of one’s own smallness in the face of their greatness’.
Life Lessons from Freud
Brett Kahr
