Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations
By Maria Popova
BrainPickings.com
OUR SELF-CRITICISM, TO BE SURE, COULDN’T BE ENTIRELY ERADICATED — NOR SHOULD IT, FOR IT IS OUR MOST ESSENTIAL ROUTE-RECALCULATING TOOL FOR NAVIGATING LIFE. BUT BY NURTURING OUR CAPACITY FOR MULTIPLE INTERPRETATIONS, PHILLIPS SUGGESTS, SELF-CRITICISM CAN BECOME “LESS JADED, MORE IMAGINATIVE AND LESS SPITEFUL".
[There is a] fine but firm line between critical thinking and cynical complaint. To cross it is to exile ourselves from the land of active reason and enter a limbo of resigned inaction. But cross that line we do, perhaps nowhere more readily than in our capacity for merciless self-criticism. We tend to go far beyond the self-corrective lucidity necessary for improving our shortcomings—instead, berating and belittling ourselves for our foibles with a special kind of masochism.
Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves. Freud termed this droll internal critic superego, and Phillips suggests that we suffer from a kind of Stockholm syndrome of the superego:
Nothing makes us more critical, more confounded — more suspicious, or appalled, or even mildly amused [ :)]— than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless criticism; that we should be less impressed by it. Or at least that self-criticism should cease to have the hold over us that it does.
Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves. Freud termed this droll internal critic superego, and Phillips suggests that we suffer from a kind of Stockholm syndrome of the superego:
Nothing makes us more critical, more confounded — more suspicious, or appalled, or even mildly amused — than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless criticism; that we should be less impressed by it. Or at least that self-criticism should cease to have the hold over us that it does.
But this self-critical part of ourselves, Phillips points out, is “strikingly unimaginative” — a relentless complainer whose repertoire of tirades is so redundant as to become, to any objective observer, risible and tragic at the same time:
We know virtually nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves before we have a chance to see ourselves (as though in panic).
The more persuasive, the more compelling, the more authoritative, an interpretation is, the less credible it is, or should be. The tyranny of the superego, Phillips argues, lies in its tendency to reduce the complexity of our conscience to a single, limiting interpretation, and to convincingly sell us on that interpretation as an accurate and complete representation of reality:
Self-criticism is nothing if it is not the defining, and usually the overdefining, of the limits of being. But, ironically, if that’s the right word, the limits of being are announced and enforced before so-called being has had much of a chance to speak for itself.
We consent to the superego’s interpretation; we believe our self-reproaches are true; we are overimpressed without noticing that that is what we are being. You can only understand anything that matters — dreams, neurotic symptoms, literature — by overinterpreting it; by seeing it from different aspects as the product of multiple impulses. Overinterpretation here means not settling for one interpretation, however apparently compelling it is.
What Phillips is advocating isn’t the wholesale relinquishing of interpretation but the psychological hygiene of inviting multiple interpretations as a way of countering the artificial authority of the superego and loosening its tyrannical grip on our experience of ourselves:
Authority wants to replace the world with itself. Overinterpretation means not being stopped in your tracks by what seems most persuasive [or authoritative]; it means assuming that to believe one interpretation is to radically misunderstand the object one is interpreting.
The superego is the sovereign interpreter… [It] tells us what we take to be the truth about ourselves. Self-criticism, that is to say, is an unforbidden pleasure. We seem to relish the way it makes us suffer [without wondering] who or what is setting the pace; or where these rather punishing standards come from.
Under this docile surrender to self-criticism, Phillips cautions, our conscience slips into cowardice:
Conscience…the moralist that prevents us from evolving a personal, more complex and subtle morality; that prevents us from finding, by experiment, what may be the limits of our being.
How has it come about that we are so bewitched by our self-hatred, so impressed and credulous in the face of our self-criticism, as unimaginative as it usually is? And why is it akin to a judgement without a jury? A jury, after all, represents some kind of consensus as an alternative to autocracy…
We need to be able to tell the difference between useful forms of responsibility taken for acts committed, and the evasions of self-contempt… This doesn’t mean that no one is ever culpable; it means that culpability will always be more complicated than it looks; guilt is always underinterpreted… Self-criticism, when it isn’t useful…is self-hypnosis. It is judgement as spell, or curse, not as conversation; it is an order, not a negotiation; it is dogma, not [a possibility].
Our self-criticism, to be sure, couldn’t be entirely eradicated — nor should it, for it is our most essential route-recalculating tool for navigating life. But by nurturing our capacity for multiple interpretations, Phillips suggests, self-criticism can become “less jaded, more imaginative and less spiteful.”
