A Century of
Psychobabble
December 9, 1999
He
never lets you down. A reporter asked: “How much of the pain
you went through last year was self-inflicted and how much due to
excesses by other people — political, and Mr. Starr’s excesses,
sir?”
Clenching his jaw, Bill Clinton replied
snappishly: “Well, the mistake I made was self-inflicted, and the
misconduct of others was not.” Clinton was guilty only of a
“mistake,” victimizing only himself, while Kenneth Starr and
the Republicans were guilty of injurious “misconduct.”
Presidents have to make many tough
decisions, such as whether to drop their trousers in the Oval Office, and
Clinton admits he goofed on that one. But those who tried to determine
whether he perjured himself and obstructed justice committed, in his
mind, more serious offenses. When Bill Clinton wrestles with his
conscience, there can be only one winner.
“Mistake” is the language of
self-exculpating psychobabble, used by indicted mayors and baseball
players caught gambling. It suggests a single, almost involuntary act, not
a deliberate pattern of action involving concerted attempts to deceive the
courts and the public.
![[Breaker quote: From
Freud to
Clinton]](breakers/991209.gif)
Clinton is obsessed with his
“legacy,” as if that were separable from what in the Kennedy
era was called a president’s “image.” Clinton’s
“image” will be what it already is: an absurdly bawdy one. He
will forever be remembered and imagined as the middle-aged adolescent
sneaking a girl into the Oval Office for sex games. He is the only president
to spawn a virtual industry of dirty jokes, humiliating his wife and
daughter. He still uses his “mistake” (it was “only
about sex”) to distract us from the associated lies and crimes
pursuant thereto.
It’s somehow fitting that a
century of psychobabble, launched by Sigmund Freud, should end with
Clinton. Since Freud, psychology has tended toward a determinism that
denies moral responsibility, since we are governed by
“unconscious” drives and fears.
Today every literate person knows how
to use Freudian lingo: id, ego, superego, unconscious, subconscious,
Oedipus complex, penis envy, phallic symbol, castration anxiety,
oral-anal-genital stages of development, repressed memory, displacement,
father figure, projection, sibling rivalry, wish-fulfillment fantasy,
trauma, polymorphous perversity, neurosis, denial, reality principle, and
of course that ultimate “mistake,” the Freudian
“slip.”
These dubious concepts have cluttered
our powers of expression. We didn’t really need Freud to tell us that
our desires are often at war with our consciences, or that children fight
with their siblings. Most of his other “insights” — that,
for example, little girls wish they had male parts — are now widely
recognized as nonsense.
Still, Freud has spread the notion that to
diagnose all is to forgive all — and that we can earn absolution for
our sins by diagnosing ourselves as helpless beings in the grip of dimly
understood motives. Freud convinced an age that worshipped science that
he had found “scientific” explanations of the human mind,
just as Marx claimed to have invented “scientific
socialism.”
This ideology was as fraudulent as
Marxism, but even more contagious. It permeates modern culture, including
pop culture. The Freudian faith still burns brightly in literary criticism
and biography; it sounds “deep” and “knowing,”
and has given new life to the ever popular sport of motive-hunting.
Philosopher Colin McGinn writes in The New York Review of Books
that
Freud offers “the heady joys of explanatory omniscience.... Freud
makes us feel we are party to the dark and thrilling truth about ourselves,
brave spirits in a blind world. It is all very appealing, very worldly and
wised-up.”
The beauty of Freudianism is that it
works two ways, arbitarily, and without any regulating method. You can
use it to excuse, as when Hillary Clinton said her husband had been
“scarred by abuse” as a child; or you can, with equal
convenience, use it to accuse, by reductively “diagnosing” an
enemy without seeming overtly hostile: instead of calling him evil, you
can “expose” him as “sick.” (He’s no good,
but, poor fellow, he can’t help it.)
Even totally baseless assertions about
the unconscious mind can’t always be easily falsified. This too is
convenient for the purpose of seeming sophisticated.
Freud’s real legacy is one of
repression: the repression of common sense.
Joseph Sobran
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