eBook - ePub
Admirable Evasions
How Psychology Undermines Morality
Theodore Dalrymple
This is a test
Share book
- 128 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Admirable Evasions
How Psychology Undermines Morality
Theodore Dalrymple
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
In Admirable Evasions, Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures.Dalrymple reveals how the fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is necessary to the formation of human character. Instead, they promote self-obsession without self-examination, and the gross overuse of medicines that affect the mind. Admirable Evasions also considers metaphysical objections to the assumptions of psychology, and suggests that literature is a far more illuminating window into the human condition than psychology could ever hope to be.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Admirable Evasions an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Admirable Evasions by Theodore Dalrymple in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Psychology & Mental Health in Psychology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
CHAPTER ONE
If all the antidepressants and anxiolytics in the world were thrown into the sea, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. once suggested should be done with the whole of the pharmacopoeia, if all textbooks of psychology were withdrawn and pulped, if all psychologists ceased to practice, if all university departments of psychology were closed down, if all psychological research were abandoned, if all psychological terms were excised from everyday speech, would Mankind be the loser or the gainer, the wiser or the more foolish? Would his self-understanding be any the less? Would his life be any the worse?
It is not, of course, possible to give a definitive answer to these questions: the experiment cannot be done. But it would be a bold man who claimed that Manâs self-understanding is now greater than that of Montaigne or Shakespeare. How many of us would dare to claim in public that he had greater insight into his fellow creatures than the Swan of Avon? He would be laughed down immediately, ridiculed and ignominiously driven from the platform: and quite rightly so. Such arrogance would have its reward. As to life having improved, how much of the improvement is attributable to psychology? We owe incomparably more to improved sewers than to psychology.
Yet implicit claims to superior knowledge and understanding are by no means uncommon. More than one school of psychology has claimed to have achieved deeper insight into human nature, conduct, emotion, and distress than ever before. In 1802, the French philosophical physiologist Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis said confidently that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. Two hundred years later, the acclaimed neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran said essentially the same thing, though in more words, as if verbosity indicated progress:
Even though it is common knowledge, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life â all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love lives, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards as his or her own intimate private self â is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in our heads, in our brains. There is nothing else.
So everything in human self-understanding is over bar the shouting: only the details have yet to be filled in. Before long, if there is sufficient research funding, there will be no more puzzles and no unpleasant surprises, no agonizing dilemmas in human existence; the question of the good life will have been settled once and for all, indubitably and scientifically, without the necessity of endless and unprovable metaphysical speculations. To understand all will no longer be to forgive all, for there will be nothing to forgive; everyone will behave reasonably in the first place, which is to say, in accordance with the dictates of the scientifically proven good life. History will come to an end, this time not by virtue of the triumph of liberal democracy throughout the world, but by that of the triumph of psychology and neuroscience. Man will no longer pass on misery to Man, as in Larkinâs poem; he will pass on knowledge instead, knowledge and wisdom being of course by that stage coterminous. Indeed, knowledge will secrete wisdom as the liver secretes bile.
I donât believe it, and Iâm not sure that I would want to live in such a world if it were true. How dull everything would be! Life would be a perpetual Caribbean cruise aboard a luxury liner on a calm sea in clement weather. Mankind would be bored for lack of causes of unhappiness and would soon sink the boat on which he was cruising: for Man is not so much a problem-solving animal as a problem-creating one. Pascal said that all of Manâs misfortunes come from his inability to sit quietly in a room: but he did not claim to have found a way to enable him to do so, or suggest that this inability comes from anything other than his inherent nature.
The first psychological scheme of the twentieth century to provide the common man with the illusion of much expanded, if not yet complete, self-understanding, together with the hope of an existence free of inner and outer conflict, was psychoanalysis. Then came behaviorism, after which there was cybernetics. Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology were next; and now neuroscientific imaging, together with a little light neurochemistry, persuades us that we are about to pluck out the heart of our mystery. Suffice it to say, by way of deflation of exaggerated hopes and expectations, that 10 percent or more of the population now takes antidepressants, a figure all the more remarkable as the evidence is lacking that they, the antidepressants, work except in a very small minority of cases; rather the reverse. That they are taken in such large quantities is evidence more of dissatisfaction with life than of increased understanding of its causes, as well as of the spread of superstition regarding neurotransmitters and so-called âchemical imbalances.â These latter are to the modern person what alien spirits to be exorcised or the ego, id, and superego once were: things not seen but strongly believed in, as providing explanations for unwanted feelings, experiences, and behavior, as well as the hope of their elimination. Superstition springs as eternal in the human breast as hope.
So absurd does Freudianism now seem to us, so self-evidently false, that we forget what a hold it had on our self-conception only a few decades ago. W. H. Auden was right in saying, in his poem to mark Freudâs death, that he was âa whole climate of opinion,â and that if he was, in the opinion of the poet, âoften . . . wrong and, at times, absurd,â he was nevertheless working along the right lines and had much extended our self-understanding, for:
in a world he changed
simply by looking back with no false regrets;
all he did was to remember
like the old and be honest like children.
It would be difficult to put in a few words anything more inapposite about Freud, anything in fact more opposite to the truth than these lines, which capture so precisely and at the same time endorse the illusion of an age. Freud was undoubtedly brilliant, a good writer and a very cultivated man, but his career, certainly once he stopped looking into the nervous system of eels, belonged more to the history of techniques of self-advancement and the foundation of religious sects than to that of science. It is historically certain that he was a habitual liar who falsified evidence in that way that Henry Ford made cars; he was a plagiarist who not only did not acknowledge, but actively denied, the sources of his ideas; he was credulous of evident absurdities, as his relations with Wilhelm Fliess prove; he was a self-aggrandizing mythologist and a shameless manipulator of people; he could be financially grasping and unscrupulous; he was the founder of a doctrinaire sect and a searcher-out and avenger of heresy who would brook no opposition or competition, and who called down anathema on infidels as intolerantly as Mohammed; in short, he was to human self-understanding what Piltdown Man was to physical anthropology. Insofar as Freud was sensible or profound, when for example he said that the maintenance of civilization depended upon restraint and the deliberate frustration of raw desire, no deep analysis of the human psyche was necessary to reach such conclusions, for they were available to any reasonably intelligent person who took the trouble to reflect for a moment upon the human condition; nor were they original, very far from it; they were the commonplaces of a million sermons.
Freudâs claims to have been a scientist do not stand up to scrutiny for a moment, and his writings are now so unconvincing that it is a historical conundrum as to how anyone could ever have been convinced by them or to have taken them seriously in the first place. (When he arrived in England as a refugee from Austria he was immediately made a Fellow of the Royal Society, the highest scientific honor the country had to offer.) To read a prolonged case history by Freud is to wonder at the non sequiturs, the leaps of faith, the illogic, the arguments from authority in which they abound, but which were not, apparently, apparent to generations of readers. And although Freud was personally conservative in his manner and morality, except where his incestuous adultery with his sister-in-law was concerned, his effect, if not his intention, was to loosen Manâs sense of responsibility for his own actions, freedom from responsibility being the most highly valued freedom of all, albeit one that is metaphysically impossible to achieve. For Freud powerfully alienated men from their own consciousness by claiming that what went on in their conscious minds was but a shadow play, and that the real action lay deep beneath it, all undiscovered (and undiscoverable) without many hours of talking about oneself in the presence of an analyst who might from time to time offer an interpretation of the real meaning of nonacceptance, which would itself be interpreted as resistance in need of further analysis, and so on more or less ad infinitum.
It had long been no secret that men do not always act for the reasons that they say they do, that they easily deceive themselves as much as others, that their motives are frequently (though not always) secret, mixed, and discreditable, that they project onto others the very illicit wishes and desires that they themselves have. King Lear, whose words were written nearly three hundred years before Freudâs ârevelations,â said:
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back.
Thou hotly lustâst to use her in that kind
For which thou whippâst her.
No one, surely, can have reached adulthood without having realized that human existence is not an open book, that much about ourselves and others remains hidden from us; at the same time, it should not have escaped creatures endowed with reason and powers of self-reflection that it is often possible by means of taking thought to discover much about ourselves and others that was not immediately evident to us, and that the better and more honest we are at taking thought, the more we shall discover.
But psychoanalysis is not so much reflection as a kind of shallow gnostic divination. It starts off with the hypothesis that all thoughts are born equal, at least in deeper psychological significance, and that the conscious attempt to discipline them, to winnow the true from the false, the important from the trivial, the useful from the useless, actually inhibits or prevents the achievement of self-knowledge. The only discipline that is necessary for the achievement of the latter is the abandonment of discipline (free association), which admittedly is not easy to achieve for intelligent people who have hitherto acted on the supposition that disciplined thought is desirable and important.
The result was and is all too predictable. Psychoanalysis, as well as death, becomes a bourn from which no traveler returns: and like anything indulged in for a long time, concern over the small change of life becomes a habit, and an irritating one, that inhibits interest and taking part in the wider world. It is a poor center of a manâs attention, himself; compared with psychoanalysis, haruspicy or hepatoscopy (divination by entrails or the liver of sacrificed animals) is harmless to the character, for though it is absurd, it at least is limited in time. Psychoanalysis becomes an ingrained habit of mind that must itself be overcome, often with the greatest difficulty, if the person undergoing it is not to torment himself and others for the rest of his life with seeking the hidden meanings of utterances such as âGood morningâ and âHow are you today?â (so easily interpreted as a wish that the person thus addressed may drop dead). True, Freud once said that sometimes a cigar is only a cigar â not a coincidental choice of object to remain only itself, for he was an inveterate smoker of cigars â but he did not provide a criterion for discerning when a cigar is only a cigar and when it is a phallic symbol undergoing fellatio (presumably when it was smoked by others, not by himself). It is hardly surprising that the world comes to seem for the analysand an infinite regress of symbols, a labyrinth, a hall of mirrors in which images of himself stretch into the confined infinitude of his mirrored chamber. If psychoanalysis had been invented by cavemen, Mankind would still be living in caves.
I do not mean by this to imply that the human mind is straightforward, that we are aware immediately and at all times of all the reasons for our thoughts and actions. A momentâs reflection should be enough to show that this cannot possibly be so. We do not even know where our thoughts come from: but we know that we can think, and that we can direct our thought and discipline thoughts once they have arisen, check them for veracity, decency, consistency, etc.
It is also true that our utterances, even trivial ones, can sometimes unintentionally reveal something important about the way we think. For example (an example I have used before), people who stab someone to death with a knife often, indeed usually, say âThe knife went in.â It is hardly a wild surmise that this way of putting it distances the perpetrator from his responsibility for his action, a disagreeable thing to reflect upon and full of the direst legal consequences, turning a voluntary and even long premeditated action into a chance event determined by the disposition of physical objects. The knife guided the hand rather than the hand the knife; as Edmund (in King Lear) puts it, âAn admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!â We all do it at times in our lives; indeed our first response when accused (by ourselves or others) of wrongdoing is to find exculpatory circumstances to explain it, or rather to explain it away. But thanks to the mindâs marvelous and subtle ability to think in parallel tracks at the same time, we have a still small voice telling us that our excuses are bunk. That is why so much anger is both real a...