Canceling Freud

Part two of my interview with Don Carveth on restoring conscience to superego, and our escape into a "mania for reproachment"

Don C: So a patient comes and says, “I'm terrible, a wretched person.”  So okay, let's study first.

We have to keep in mind that there's a very good chance that he's simply, see, some of the early 1920s Freudians understood this, that he may be pleading guilty to a lesser crime.

So, you know, he might start talking about, well, I think I maybe feel a little guilty about turning to porn and masturbation. Meanwhile, he's been screwing his secretary and his colleague’s secretary for who knows how long. Patients often, when they tell you their sins, they're telling you the top layer.

Eventually, we may get down to the bottom layer. Now, I'm not laughing at him. I'm not challenging him. I'm listening. Okay, but I'm not assuming this is the end of the story.

Darren: What about, could there be guilt about fantasies of hurting, of rage against others.

Don C: Well, narcissists are full of narcissistic injury all the time. Every little slight makes them hate, right? So, you know, they're, they're constantly feeling narcissistically injured and, and they have a whole lot of narcissistic rage.

We all have a bit of it. Some people have a moderate amount. Some people have a great deal. I have to be on the lookout for that because one my blind spots is that I want to think well of my patients and I can too quickly look away, or I can minimize.

Now I've been working with a kid, who's actually the son of a colleague, and he was a drug dealer, and he got caught. And now charged with conspiracy, because he was involved with a bunch of other people. He was trafficking and the cops closed in. And so he's been waiting for well over six months for this thing to finally come to court.

I started working with him and I like this kid. He's a big, good looking 22 year old blonde hair. He's charming and it's I don't feel it's the false charm of the psychopath. I don't feel he's conning me.  

So I forced myself to be skeptical,but I don't think he's a really bad kid. I think he's been driven by terrible anger at the way he was displaced when his brother was born. It's as if the parents just dropped him. And they treat the brother entirely differently than the way they've treated him.

I mean, it's shocking to me that this colleague who's an analyst is raising her kid and doesn't understand why her kid is so angry. Of course he's angry and he now understands that it's all driven by anger. He understands that he has been rather suicidal at times, driving his car at ridiculous speeds late at night on the highway, almost not even caring whether he kills himself or not or somebody else.

And he's starting to understand how he has been self sabotaging because his hatred of his mother and father and brother have made him feel terrible about himself and he's been out to punish himself and he became addicted to opiates. But to his credit, he used Suboxone and he cured himself of his addiction.

So it turns out that the legal case isn't nearly as bad as it looks like he may now get six months house arrest and he may have to wear a bracelet on his but it doesn't look like he's actually going to jail, which is good because he would be meat for the hardened convicts, right?  I hate to think of this kid getting raped in prison and everything.

But back to the early Freudians, they got a lot of things right.  They also saw that the superego is not just out to whip you, it's like the mafia, you got to pay it protection money. If you, if you pay me off in this way, I'll let you sin over here. Okay. If you injure yourself and break your leg, then you can go to the orgy on Saturday night.

Or you contribute so much money to the church…this is the Protestant Reformation. Luther was disgusted by the fact that the church was selling forgiveness.  

So there are ways to bribe the superego. Also, the superego is like a corrupt priest. It will whisper in your ear, Here's a good opportunity for your favorite kind of sin. No one's looking. Go ahead. Do it. Life is short, says the superego.  And if you're stupid enough to hear it and you go and do it, then the superego pulls out the whips.  It invites you to sin so it can whip you. 

Darren:  Let's say a patient has an experience of expressing some anger with parents and there's retribution for this from dad, or anxious withdrawal or denial from mom. Do you think do you think that person starts to learn, “my anger is destructive because I either get attacked, or I'm too much for mom” and so on?

Don C: I can't risk acting it out. I can't risk letting people even know I'm angry because they'll withdraw from me further, they'll reject me more, or they will outright punish me. So what am I going to do with it? It automatically gets turned on me, and now this is pure Freud. What is the origin of the superego?

Id aggression, turned back from others, onto me. That is the core of the superego. Id aggression turned around and dumped on me. Now I'm beating myself instead of beating my Oedipal rival.

Darren: I work with a lot of guys who have trouble with porn or other sexual compulsivity, and they talk about an unstoppable urge.

Don C: Yeah. I'm not a biological drive theorist in the sense but I talk about the id, the aggression that fills the id for me is reactive aggression. It's reactive to frustration and derailment in early infancy.

I don't believe infants come into the world with an innate capacity to react to frustration with aggression, but they don't have an aggressive drive that has to find an outlet, like the urge to urinate. If you don't urinate, something's going to bust, you know. Aggression is not like that.

The more frustration in childhood, and I distinguish between basic frustration, which is existential and universal, and surplus frustration due to inadequate parenting. So everyone is going to have some reactive aggressivity because life is frustrating. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

You're going to die. Your faithless mother is going to produce a sibling, whore that she is, speaking from an Oedipal point of view. So there's plenty that's going to frustrate you and make you very, very angry. But then there's the surplus frustration. Mother's alcoholic, father's never home, whatever.

Darren: I see.  I did want to cover one last thing, which is that in your podcasts and lectures you sound sensitive to bias, prejudice, sexism and so forth. But you also talk of how it's gone too far, and you mentioned Heinz Racker. 

Don C: Yes, Racker, and “a mania for reproaching.”

Darren: Is that a flip side of guilt, the guilt's all out there somewhere, not in here [gestures at self]. 

Don C: Exactly.  It's a tremendous defense. Instead of suffering from a beating by the superego, I embrace the superego and I identify with it and I direct it against the sinful others. It's just scapegoating. And you know, I'm a critic of woke but that's because I'm already woke. I had a sociological training. No, no one becomes a sociologist without getting woke to racism, sexism, heterosexism, classicism, or LGBTQ plus.

I support it. It's necessary. But ultra woke people have sort of forgotten that there's a whole other standard of value, democracy versus authoritarianism. The trouble is we've got woke people who are authoritarian. So I'm saying let the woke who are not authoritarian call out the woke who are. Of course it's right to be anti racist, anti sexist, but you have to pay attention to people's rights.

You have to defend free speech. You have to have a due process of law. You can't go canceling careers. You know, if the guy really is you know, fucking his students then cancel him, if he's really abusing people then sure, cancel him. But that's the end result of a long process of investigation and due process—and wow, there’s a shocking idea we used to have.  Innocent until proven guilty. That used to be the rule. Authoritarian woke people assume guilt and they cancel a guy with no trial. And the shocking thing is that our colleagues, nice liberal educated folks who sit on committees, they cave in the face of these authoritarians. They don't defend free speech.

That's my big complaint. It's all an escape. It's a way of escaping from guilt by accusing others.

Darren: What do you say to someone who will say, you know, “listen, Freud is a white, he's Eurocentric, he's a colonizer, and this essay of his talks about primitives, so we can't take him seriously.” 

Don C:  Listen, Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. But he was also a brilliant philosopher.  Jean Paul Sartre was a pervert, like he, he got Simone de Beauvoir, she taught at a women's high school, she would seduce these girls and then pass them over to Sartre, who particularly liked them if they hadn't broken their hymen.

He liked to be the one to do that. Then when he was done with them, he passed them off to his buddies. He was disgusting, but he was a brilliant philosopher. I will read Heidegger. I will read Sartre. Of course they were bastards but that doesn't ruin their thought.

Picasso, apparently a disgusting man, brilliant painter. I'm not gonna tear up his pictures because he himself was an idiot. It's the same with Freud, you know, you have to separate. Oh, I was supervising a young woman. She was hired by Smith College to teach psychodynamics the summer before last. She got there and she made it clear to the students that she was going to teach Freud, not just bash him.

She was going to teach him critically, acknowledging his sexism and his patriarchalism, and so on and so forth, but she was going to separate the wheat from the chaff. Well, they were having none of it, you know. She heard them in the cafeteria plotting and talking about how they were going to punish her. She resigned and quickly got off campus before she got hurt.

Darren: Jesus.

Don C:  It's creeping into psychoanalytic societies. I've been fired from two programs. We have three programs in my institute. We have the Institute Training of Analysts. I'm a Senior Training Analyst. No one's firing me.

But the society, which is separately incorporated made up of the people we graduate, they have a lot of resentment towards the Institute over issues regarding the training analysis and all of that. And in two of those programs, I was disinvited to teach. I had taught in both of these programs from the inception of the programs.

But I was disinvited to teach because some super woke, social worky type would attend one of my classes, and I would talk about Huck Finn. And in talking about, in his battle between conscience and superego, I would say in talking about this, if you read Mark Twain, he uses “the n word.” I'm certainly not going to use the n word.

Well, I got into trouble for saying “I'm not going to use ‘the n word.’”

Darren: Why is that?

Don C: Don’t ask me! I guess indirectly I mentioned “the n word” by saying I'm not going to use it.

Darren: Oh, you even just saying “the n word” is not safe.

Don C: It's gone crazy. But look, I don't mind the young woman, she’s passionate and idealistic. But what about my colleagues? I mean the Toronto Society had given me teaching awards twenty years ago, but they're now thinking, well, “Don's getting old and he's an old white man. And he shoots from the hip.” What matters most to them is having a program with people paying to attend it, customers, same thing in the university.  The deans don't don't protect the faculty over this kind of nonsense.

When I was chair of my department at the university, I had a guy who was giving A's for blowjobs. I took him through the whole process at the university, I blew the whistle on him.  He eventually got kicked out of the university. That's intolerable, and it's my behavior as chair to police that. But he had due process, he had lawyers, he had the whole thing. You gotta call it when it's bad like that. But now this is, some of these complaints are really just stupid, and the colleagues who should be protecting us are not doing their job.

Darren:  Well thank you for your time. I'll check out your new book too.

Don C: It’s short, very readable. It's the most readable book I've ever written.

Darren: All right. Take care, Don.

Don C: Bye.