In psychoanalytic work one is repeatedly confronted with the task of persuading the patient to renounce a pleasurable gain which is close at hand and directly achievable. He is not asked to renounce pleasure altogether; perhaps no one can be expected to do this, and even religion has to justify its demand that a man should bid farewell to earthly pleasure by promising him more commendable pleasures in incomparably greater measure in some world beyond this one. No, the patient is merely asked to renounce such satisfactions as are invariably followed by some form of damage, he is asked to do without temporarily, to learn to exchange the immediate pleasurable gain for one that is better safeguarded, even if deferred. In other words, he is to learn, under his physician’s direction, to progress from the pleasure principle to the reality principle, progress which distinguishes the mature adult from the child. In this work of education we can hardly say that the superior understanding of the physician plays any crucial role; as a rule he is able to tell the patient nothing that his own understanding cannot tell him. But knowing something intuitively is not the same thing as being told it by someone else; the physician assumes the role of an effective other; he makes use of the influence that one human being can have over another. Or: let us remember that it is customary in psychoanalysis to implant something original and strongly rooted in the place of something derivative or modified, and let us say that in his work of education the physician uses some of the components of love. In this resumption of his education he is probably only repeating a process made possible in the first place by the patient’s original upbringing. Next to dire necessity, love is the great educatrix and the unfinished person is induced by the love of those closest to him to respect the commandments of necessity and to spare himself the punishments meted out for transgression.
When one demands of a patient the temporary renunciation of satisfaction with regard to some pleasure, a sacrifice, a willingness to accept suffering for a time for the sake of a better end, or even just the decision to submit to some necessity standing for all necessities, one sometimes encounters individuals who have a particular motivation for struggling against this expectation. They say that they have suffered, gone without for long enough, that they have a right to be spared any further demands and will no longer submit to some unpleasant necessity, for they are exceptions and they intend to stay that way. In one such patient this claim had developed into a conviction that a particular providence was watching over him and would protect him from painful sacrifices of this kind. The physician’s arguments have no force against inner certainties so forcefully expressed; yet initially his influence falters as well and he has no choice but to seek out the sources which feed this damaging prejudice.
Now, it is undoubtedly true that everyone would like to consider themselves an ‘exception’ and claim prerogatives that do not apply to other people. For this very reason, however, it is necessary for an individual to produce a special justification, one not available to everyone, if he announces himself to be a genuine exception and behaves accordingly. There may be more than one such justification; but in the cases I have investigated it was possible to prove that they had one characteristic in common, namely the fate that had befallen them early in life: their neurosis was connected with something they had experienced or suffered in their very earliest years, of which they knew themselves to be innocent and which in their judgement put them at an unfair disadvantage. The privileges that they assumed as a result of this injustice and the obstreperousness resulting from it had contributed in no small part to the aggravation of conflicts that later led to the outbreak of neurosis. The attitude to life outlined here was made complete in the case of one such patient when she learned that a painful organic complaint that had prevented her from realizing her life’s aims was congenital in origin. As long as she considered this complaint to be something she had acquired in later life, by chance, she bore it patiently; but once it had been explained to her that it was something she had inherited she became rebellious. The young man who believed that a special providence watched over him had been the victim of a chance infection by his nurse in infancy and had consumed the whole of his later life in demands for compensation, for accident benefit, so to speak, without the slightest idea as to what his claims were based on. In his case the analysis, which reconstructed this state of affairs on the basis of faint remnants of memory [Erinnerungsresten] and the interpretation of symptoms, received objective confirmation through statements made by his family.
For reasons that will readily be understood I am unable to communicate any further details of these and other case histories. Neither shall I comment on the obvious analogy with the deformation of character brought about by long susceptibility to illness in childhood, nor the behaviour of whole peoples whose past is heavy with suffering. I shall not pass up the opportunity, on the other hand, to refer to that figure created by the greatest of poets, in whose character the claim to be an exception is so intimately linked to and motivated by congenital disadvantage.
In the opening monologue of Shakespeare’s Richard III, the Duke of Gloucester, who later becomes king, says:
But I, that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up –
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me, as I halt by them –
[…]
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.1
On first impression we may fail to notice any connection between this programmatic speech and our chosen theme. Richard appears to be saying nothing more than: this idle age bores me, and I wish to amuse myself. However, because I am misshapen and cannot therefore sport as a lover I shall play the villain, pursue intrigues, commit murder and do whatever takes my fancy. Such frivolity of motivation would stifle any trace of sympathetic interest in the spectator if there were nothing more serious hidden behind it. But then the play would also be a psychological impossibility, for the poet must know how to create a secret background of sympathy for his hero if we are to feel admiration for his audacity and skill without experiencing an inner contradiction, and such sympathy can only be rooted in understanding, by which I mean our sense that there is something inside us that we perhaps share with him.
For this reason, I think, Richard’s monologue does not say everything; he merely drops hints and leaves it up to us to follow up those hints. If we undertake this work of completion the appearance of frivolity disappears and Richard’s bitterness, the detail in which he describes his misshapen form come into their own, so that we see what it is we have in common that compels us to feel sympathy even for this villain. What he is saying is: Nature has committed a grave injustice in denying me the comeliness of form that wins the love of others. Life owes me some compensation and I shall have it. I can claim to be an exception, disregarding the moral scruples which deter others. I can commit injustices because an injustice has been done to me – and now we feel that we ourselves could become like Richard, indeed, that on a small scale we already are like him. Richard is a gigantic enlargement of this single aspect which we can find in ourselves, too. We all believe that we have good reason to rail at Nature and Fate for the disadvantages meted out to us in infancy, at birth; we all demand compensation for early offences committed against our narcissism, our self-love. Why did Nature not give us Balder’s golden locks or Siegfried’s strength, the high brow of the genius or the aristocrat’s noble profile? Why were we born in a parlour and not in a king’s palace? We should succeed just as well in being handsome and refined as all those whom we envy for these qualities.
It is the poet’s art, however, and an economic subtlety, that he does not make his hero express all the secrets of his motivation out loud, leaving nothing to our imagination. In this way he obliges us to supply them ourselves, providing occupation for our intellectual activity, diverting us from critical thought and holding us fast in our identification with his hero. In his place an amateur would give conscious expression to everything he wished to express and then find himself face to face with our cool intelligence in all its freedom of movement, thus making it quite impossible to deepen the illusion any further.
Let us not leave the ‘exceptions’ behind, however, without giving some thought to the fact that a woman’s claim to privilege and liberation from so many of life’s compulsions has the same basis. As we know from psychoanalytic work, women regard themselves as having been damaged in infancy, shortened by a length and reduced in value without having done anything to deserve it, and many a daughter’s feelings of bitterness towards her mother are rooted in the reproach that she was brought into the world a woman and not a man.
1. [Translator’s note: All quotations from Shakespeare follow the Arden editions.]