All humans carry a potent charge of aggressive energy and Freud believed that in the deployment of this energy, we generally have only a pair of choices. (Although there is another way that I’ll come onto later.) Either we bottle-up the aggression, turn it on ourselves, inflicting a self-abusive narrative of doing something wrong for whatever it is we are feeling or experiencing. Our alternative, is to aim our aggression outwards towards the world at large and begin large or small-scale wars.
In today’s Asian Age, there is a tragic story of a middle class wife who committed suicide by hanging herself from the ceiling fan. Suicide is always an extreme version of aggression turned inward. The person is both a murderer (of themselves of course) and a victim of being murdered (by themselves of course). Yet at the same time, there is a passive aggression towards those who are left behind – often hurt, bewildered, and likely to spend the rest of their lives wondering what they could have done to prevent this.
Intensive bottling-up feelings, Freud believed, is a result of an overbearing “super-ego”, a part of oneself that issues overtly strong, often fixed messages of how one should behave. Clients I see struggling to release themselves from the edicts of the superego often speak in a very tightly bound narrative – “I don’t like music”, “I have to stay with my husband even though he beats me”, “I’ll enjoy my life once I retire”. Their language lacks creativity and often one sense’s an overriding sense of guilt should they do what truly makes them happy. Perhaps rigid on their path that fits well with social norms, but perhaps not themselves, one often feels in the presence of a kind of masochism, a commitment to suffering and stubbornness that can infuriate others. But as a French psychoanalytic teacher once reminded me, “never underestimate the lengths a masochist will go to, to be attacked”. Masochists essentially get pleasure in being attacked – that’s their perversion, their “thing”.
The parting words of a man to his wife (who I knew), shortly before he committed suicide by standing in front of a train, were “I will do something that will make everyone hate you”. Suicide always involves others in this way. Yet, the headline of today’s article, of the woman who has hanged herself from the ceiling fan, reads “Cops arrest husband for woman’s suicide”. Her aggression not only turned inward, but outward, the result being that her husband is punished and imprisoned for something that she did. I find this law rather absurd and in need of some review, particularly in light of the psychology of suicide and its violent element of punishing others.
We have choices if we find ourselves in miserable situations. When Brian Keenan was held hostage he told the world on his release “you can always take power – whatever is happening to you – even if it is a refusal to eat for a while”. There is often a way out, that doesn’t involve this level of harm. This woman has probably hurt her family members as well as her husband in a way from which they will likely never recover. I find myself wondering if this law may in fact punishes people who are terribly distraught already.
Whilst either one purge oneself of inner tensions by going to war in some way or another, or bottles-up to a degree that leads to a deep malaise or depression, Freud pointed out there is another way. And that way is the arts of sublimation. In the acts of sublimation, we convert our instinctual energy into writing, painting, science or some other artistic creation. But Freud also pointed out that it is only those with intelligence and intellectual ability that are able to convert in this way. Yesterday, at the Taj Hotel bookshop, opposite the Gateway of India, I came across a fantastic magazine called “Adbusters” (see Adbusters.org). It is a creative sublimation of energy and rage about the “perfect” idols and images in fashion and beauty advertisements. One for example shows two rather perfectly carved faced boys, advertising Burberry clothes, with the text changed to “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”.
So if you are feeling flooded by rage and like going to war over something or feeling deadened by the life you are living, sublimate! Put down the bar of chocolate and the remote control. Maybe that piece of prose, play with paints and colours, or pick up the drum you played as a child might give you a more creative solution to what it is that is troubling you. And if you don’t know how to do that perhaps you need to see a psychologist.
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