It’s Not Me. It’s Them.
“Everyday Unhappiness” in a Liberal Arts Classroom
This was written while I was attending “weekend program” classes at a small liberal arts college located in Waukegan, IL. This was during a time when I was living in Chicago and wanting to buttress my independent study of mainly “secondary sources” by reading “The Great Books.” I lasted two years, having finally grown weary of fighting political battles with a left-heavy professoriate and wondering what I was doing there.
This past weekend’s Shimer experience has once again forced me to confront what Philip Rieff has termed “the triumph of the therapeutic.” And I suppose it is only appropriate, given the fact that we were dealing with Freud and Piaget. Perhaps it was inevitable. Nonetheless, although I was not at all surprised by the amount of psycho-babble and “new age” lingo being utilized by the students, I still found large parts of our discussions this past weekend to have been disturbing; so much so that I had great difficulty finding a place to insert my comments, most of which would have seemed (at least superficially) hardly relevant at all.
I suppose what troubled me most was the tendency for students to personalize their particular comments, to rely much too often on their feelings rather than on their thoughts. Thus we attack Freud’s alleged sexism without the benefit of any biographical evidence to back up our claim. Our presumptions are wrought by perceptions gleaned merely by assumptions--not by any true understanding of essential concepts. The latter, it would seem to me, while not capable of exonerating Freud of his “crimes,” should have been a larger concern of ours. Once again, their historical significance should have been highlighted. So, too, the contradictions that exist at the heart of Freud’s work between his theory and the therapy prescribed. The point, as Russell Jacoby has noted, is not to play one off of the other, but to recognize that both theory and therapy exist within Freud in contradiction. Jacoby writes,
The innovations and revisions necessary on therapeutic grounds are not identical with the imperatives of the theory. Changes in the former can proceed without changes in the latter because the locus in each case is different: one takes the individual as ill, the other civilization as ill. Measures taken to cure the individual are not identical with those taken to “cure” the civilization; to a point they diverge.
So-called neo-Freudians miss this point completely. Theory and therapy converge for them. My contention is that the neo-Freudian flip is precisely what holds sway over my classmates. Both they and the neo-Freudians neglect what Adorno wrote: “In adjusting to the mad whole the cured patient becomes really sick.”
This quip of Adorno’s is both concise and profound. It captures nicely the Freudian notion that “insofar as civilization was repression, individual therapy was education in repression, albeit conscious repression.” Freud, according to Jacoby, captured these two moments himself in his concluding words of Studies in Hysteria. Citing the typical remarks of a patient who complains that
you say, yourself, that my suffering has probably much to do with my own relations and destinies. You cannot change any of that. In what manner, then, can you help me? To this I could always answer: “I do not doubt at all that it would be easier for fate than for me to remove your sufferings, but you will be convinced that much will be gained in transforming your hysterical misery into everyday unhappiness.”
It is this “everyday unhappiness” that the neo-Freudian-inspired students would like to escape. The pursuit of happiness, immortalized in the American Constitution, seems to have become an end in itself. The search continues for them; and what I fear is that, for at least a few of these modern-day “vision questers,” their paths have crossed mine--at Shimer.
