Humor: Humor is also usually seen as positive but, really, jokes are basically negative—in the sense they almost always are about things that a person should not do, because they are prohibited, disgusting, or just plain stupid.[46]
Decisiveness: Similarly, we tend to think of decision-making as positive. But those moments in which we make a choice (and which we describe as an ‘act of free will’) may in fact be exactly the opposite; that moment in which ‘you make your decision’ may simply be the moment at which you turned off the complex processes that you use for comparing alternatives.
Pleasure: If we look at a mind as a playground in which many methods compete then the more pleasure we feel (in the Single-Self sense), the more negative may be its total effect on the rest of one’s mental processes! For, what actually happened may have been that some particular process seized control, and then turned off a lot of the rest of your mind. This, as every addict knows, makes it hard to wish for anything else. We’ll say more about this in Chapter §9.
There are other ways to disable resources than attempting directly to suppress them. One way to suppress a resource is to activate one of its competitors. For example, you can hold off sleep by arranging to get into a fight. Another trick is to repeat a stimulus until your opponent no longer responds to it—as in the old tale of “The Boy who Cried Wolf.”
Parenting: Consider how much a person must do in the course of raising a child. You must feed it and clean it and work to protect it—to guard it and clothe it and teach it and help it; for years, you must sacrifice wealth and attention. What kind of incentive could make one forego so many other enjoyments and goals, to become so selfless and other-directed? Such strong constraints, if imposed from outside, would seem cruel and unusual punishment. Clearly natural selection favored those who evolved ways to suppress those mental Critics; no person obsessed with those handicaps could bear to endure such prolonged distress—and would end up with fewer descendants.
Beauty: We tend to see Beauty as positive. But when someone says something is “beautiful” and you ask, “What makes you attracted to that,” your respondent may act as though under attack, or explain that ‘there’s no accounting for taste’, or childishly say, “I just like it.” Such answers suggest (as we saw in §1-1) that their liking comes partly from critic suppression. We all know that if one but tries, one can always uncover some blemish or flaw.
Mystical Experience: If you could turn most of your critics off, you then would have fewer concerns or goals. And if this occurs on a large enough scale, then your whole world may suddenly seem to change—and everything now seems glorious. If you’d like to experience this yourself, there are well-known steps that you can take to induce it.[47] It helps to be suffering pain and stress; starvation and cold will also assist. So will psychoactive drugs, and meditation too may aid. Be sure to stay in some strange, quiet place—because sensory deprivation helps. Next, set up a rhythmical drone that repeats some monotonous phrase or tone, and soon it will lose all meaning and sense—and so will virtually everything else! Then if you’ve done this successfully, you may suddenly find yourself overwhelmed by some immensely compelling Presence—and then you may spend the rest of your life trying and failing to find it again; I suspect that it masquerades records or traces of early imprimers that long have been hiding, disguised, in forgotten parts of your mind.
We have many kinds of words for this—Ecstasy, Rapture, Euphoria, Bliss—and Mystical Experience. You suddenly feel that you know the Truth, that nothing else is significant, and that you need no further evidence; your mind has extinguished all its ways to question what was ‘revealed’ to you—and when later you try to explain to your friends, you find you can scarcely say anything else than how ‘wonderful’ that experience was. But if you failed to find any flaws because you had turned all your Critics off, then a better word would be ‘wonderless.’
§3-6 The Freudian Sandwich
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
and train for ill and not for good.
Few textbooks of psychology discuss how we choose what to think about—or how we choose what not to think about. However, this was a major concern to Sigmund Freud, who envisioned the mind as a system in which each idea must overcome barriers. Here is how he once envisioned a mind:
“... a large anteroom in which the various mental excitations are crowding upon one another, like individual beings. Adjoining this is a second, smaller apartment, a sort of reception room, in which consciousness resides. But on the threshold between the two there stands a personage with the office of doorkeeper, who examines the various mental excitations, censors them, and denies them admittance to the reception-room when he disapproves of them. You will see at once that it does not make much difference whether the doorkeeper turns any one impulse back at the threshold, or drives it out again once it has entered the reception-room. That is merely a matter of the degree of his vigilance and promptness in recognition.”[48]
Thus getting past that doorkeeper is not quite enough to reach consciousness. That only leads to the reception room, which he sometimes calls the “preconscious.”
“The excitations in the unconscious, in the antechamber, are not visible to consciousness, which is of course in the other room, so to begin with they remain unconscious. When they have pressed forward to the threshold and been turned back by the doorkeeper, they are ‘incapable of becoming conscious’; we call them then repressed. But even those excitations which are allowed over the threshold do not necessarily become conscious; they can only become so if they succeed in attracting the eye of consciousness.”
Freud imagined the mind as obstacle course in which only ideas that get past all those bars are awarded the title of consciousness. In one kind of block that he calls “repudiation,” an idea is deliberately condemned—and thus is rendered powerless—although one can remember rejecting it. In another type, which he calls “repression,” an impulse is blocked at an earlier stage—without the thinker knowing this. However, repressed ideas can still persist, expressing themselves in clever disguises.
Inside Freud’s three-part model of mind, many resources are working at once—but they don’t always share the same purposes. Instead, that mind is a battleground between animal instincts and social constraints. These are frequently incompatible, so the rest of the mind must struggle to find acceptable ways to compromise—and that’s often accomplished by subterfuge. One way to deal with a constraint is to suppress the resource that imposes it. Another is to disguise or re-describe it so that it arouses no Censors or Critics. Freud used the term sublimation for this; we sometimes call it ‘rationalizing’.
47
See the extensive discussion in William James’ text,