The danger is that we may become ventriloquized by a story we have told about ourselves and believe to be vested with the prestige of an authoritative interpretation. Freud thought he found “an intimate connection between the story of a patient’s sufferings and the symptoms of his illness.” The story was at once an attempt at pain management and a cause of our suffering. We do not want our pain (except for when we do), but, Phillips reminds, we express enormous wishfulness in our descriptions of pain. We have much invested in these descriptions and in the picture of reality they convey. We have considerable incentive, psychically and socially, to build a durable discourse for the self and its suffering. New experience confirms rather than alters the narrative logic.
Though this “self-talk” is no one’s doing but our own, often much of it ends up set against oneself. In “Against Self-Criticism,” the remarkable central essay of Unforbidden Pleasures, Phillips pulls at a rotten thread woven within our stories of self. There is a powerful capacity in us — Freud called it “superego” — that prejudges us, which is an intractable stereotyper. This part of our mind pulls away to condemn of the rest of the psyche, which presumes knowledge of the worth of our wishes and of the compromises our wishes make with reality. “The superego […] casts us as certain kinds of character,” Phillips writes, “it, as it were, tells us who we really are; it is an essentialist; it claims to know us in a way that no one else, including ourselves, can ever do.” Superego says that underneath our efforts and best intentions lies something more suspect. Why, Phillips will beg us to ask, does it respect effort and intention so little? And how did it acquire this claim on the actual?
Within the superego’s narrow discourse, few things seem as appropriate as the deferral of self-love, as delaying an undaunted mode of life. “So frightened are we by the superego,” Phillips writes, “that we identify with it: we speak on its behalf to avoid antagonizing it.” A bureaucratic voice drones on within consciousness, passionlessly employed in our own service. Its repetitive soliloquy drowns out other interpretive possibility, offers stop-gap satisfactions of self-knowledge that stop us from other kinds of knowing. Our stories of why we are inadequate tend to be our least imaginative and yet our most convincing. We feel duty-bound to believe the tales, issuing as they do from a register of ruthless certitude. We are, to tweak a line from Stevens, the emperors of not enough ideas about ourselves.”
How my heart sings 