Yes, Jordan, We Remember When Pride Was a Sin

Jordan Peterson on YouTube (1 July 2022)

 

 

I. 

 

The Canadian psychologist, author, and cultural commentator Jordan Peterson has had his Twitter account suspended for a recent tweet which, apparently, violated their rules governing hateful conduct. The tweet, which I don't wish to discuss in full, opened with the question: Remember when pride was a sin? 

 

It's this line - and Peterson's subsequent defence of the line - which I wish to examine here ...   

 

 

II. 

 

Speaking in a 15 minute video posted on YouTube [1], Peterson acts a little faux-surprised by what he continues to call the ban imposed by Twitter (whilst conceding that, technically, it's no such thing). 

 

He claims - again, somewhat disingenuously - to be uncertain why it is he has had his account suspended by the socal media platform: What was it, that I said, that caused such a fuss? And even more importantly, what exactly was it that I said that resulted in the ban? 

 

Now, Jordan Peterson is a highly intelligent and erudite individual, who chooses his words extremely carefully. So one can be sure that he didn't just post the tweet in a fit of irritation and without thinking; i.e., one can be sure that he knew precisely what he was saying and what the likely response would be. 

 

Peterson claims that his opening statement merely refers us to a time when, as a matter of fact, pride was regarded as a sin. And, yes, okay, there was such a time - a long drawn out period which we might refer to as the Christian era [2] - when pride, along with six other capital vices or deadly sins [3], was contrasted with heavenly virtue. 

 

Indeed, it's even true that pride was thought to be the root cause of all sins, as it's human pride which turns the soul of man away from God. And pride, Peterson reminds us, often comes before a fall into hubris, narcissism, and folly. 

 

Having said that, pride is - like other human emotions - a complex matter (as I'm sure Peterson would be the first to acknowledge). And just as there are those who regard it as a sin, there are others - including Aristotle - who view it positively and as a virtue; i.e., as a justifiable and healthy feeling of self-worth. 

 

Is it not preferable that individuals and groups take pride in themselves, rather than feel shame? I think so [4]. And clearly those within the LGBTQ+ community primarily use the term pride as an antonym for the latter. 

 

Again, I'm sure Peterson is perfectly aware of this, although he openly admits that he does not regard pride as a virtue - which is fine, that's up to him, and, as a Christian devotee of Jung, I wouldn't expect otherwise (the latter insisted that it was through pride that we forever deceive ourselves). 

 

But does Peterson really need to mock what he calls the alphabet acronym used by the above, when it's simply a convenient means of self-referral amongst a diverse group of people?

 

Personally, I don't feel that's necessary - although Peterson doesn't seem to care about hurting anyone's feelings. And besides, he has a moral and professional duty, he says, to warn those who have excessive pride - as well as those who, like me, have read too much degenerate postmodern theory - that we are heading for the Abyss; that the path we are on, in other words, leads rapidly to disaster.  

 

I don't see that sexual orientation, or sexual desire of any sort is something to celebrate or take pride in, says Peterson. Again, that's fair enough and he's entitled to his view. But, as a straight cis male, his sexual orientation and desire hasn't been subject to the same kind of stigma and persecution - hasn't had to overcome centuries of prejudice - so he would say that ...

 

The heteronormative ideal of love that Peterson subscribes to (and practices) - monogamous union between a man and a woman - has always been celebrated and taken to be both that which is natural and that which is blessed by God. He might not take pride in this fact, but he almost certainly draws some sense of identity - and a good deal of moral conceit - from it.     

 

Notes

 

[1] To watch this video on YouTube in which Jordan Peterson discusses his Twitter ban, click here. It's the first five minutes or so that are most relevant to what I discuss here (i.e., the issue of pride).

[2] Strangely, in the video above Peterson seems to suggest that the era in which pride was regarded as a sin only ended a decade ago: see 3.50.  

 

[3] As with the names of the seven dwarves in Snow White, it's often tricky to remember all the sins, so here's a reminder: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. Although not listed in the Bible as such, it's clear that God was not a fan of these things (or the behaviours that result).  

[4] Not that I would wish for people to lose all sense of shame, for shameless people are as irritating as the excessively proud and, interestingly, are often one and the same.

 

 

Repress Nothing! In Memory of Otto Gross

Otto Gross (1877 - 1920)

Otto Gross - the maverick psychoanalyst and utopian anarchist whom radicals and exponents of free love continue to revere - died 100 years ago today: from pneumonia; aged 42; in a Berlin hospital, having been found lying in the street, starving, penniless, and half-frozen to death.

A sad and premature (arguably all-too-predictable) end to the life of a charismatic drug-addict who spent much of his adult life in and out of psychiatric institutions and who rejected all caution and restraint; a man who was even evicted from the community of bohemians at Ascona for trying to instigate orgies at which participants could openly explore their bisexual desires. [1]    

Inspired by his readings of Max Stirner, Nietzsche and Kropotkin, it's said that Gross influenced in turn many artists and writers with his neo-pagan (and proto-feminist) attempt to revalue all values, including D. H. Lawrence - which, of course, is where my interest in him comes from, rather than his relationship to Freud and Jung, who basically thought him a hopeless madman about whom the less said the better.

Lawrence, of course, never met Gross and doesn't directly refer to him in his writings. [2] But his wife, Frieda, had had an affair with the latter in 1908 (at the same time that Gross was also involved with Frieda's sister, Else) and so a lot of his revolutionary ideas to do with politics, culture, the unconscious and human sexuality, were transmitted via her. It's almost certain that Lawrence also read Gross's letters to Frieda (which she treasured throughout her life):

"They affirmed the idea of the saving sexual relationship outside the bonds of society: they stressed how a sexually liberated woman could escape the trammels of the ordinary and be an inspiration for intellectual and striving men; they showed a passionately thinking man struggling to come to terms with the new and to escape the past. In many ways, they offered Lawrence the themes for his next eight years of writing; and (above all) they offered a way of thinking about Frieda [whom Gross regarded as the woman of the future]." [3]

Having said that, it's important to stress that Lawrence would have mistrusted (and disliked) Gross in person and to note that he soon saw through his idealism - including his sexual and political idealism.

And for us, living here in 2020, does Gross's thinking still trouble, still challenge? Or does it only bore and depress? Unfortunately, that's a question that some also ask of Lawrence ...

Notes

[1] Perhaps more interesting from a thanatological perspective, is the fact that Gross affirmed the sovereign freedom of the individual not merely in sexual terms, but also as the right to be ill and to die in a manner (and at a time) of their own choosing. He regarded neurosis and suicide as legitimate expressions of protest against a repressive social order.    

[2] Lawrence gives us a fictionalised representation of Otto Gross in his unfinished novel Mr Noon (written 1921-22); the character of Eberhard appears in Part II of the work. 

[3] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 443-44.

See also: John Turner, Cornelia Rumpf-Worthen and Ruth Jenkins, 'The Otto Gross - Frieda Weekley Correspondence: Transcribed, Translated, and Annotated', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, (Summer, 1990), pp. 137-227. Click here to read online. 

The Gods Have Become Our Diseases

Cover image - by the author's daughter, Flavia Tower - 
to the first UK edition (Victor Gollancz, 1971)

I.

"We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases."  

- C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (Collected Works, Vol. 13)

  

In this crucially insightful passage, Jung provides the key to understanding Daphne du Maurier's short story 'Not After Midnight' - a tragic tale of two ruined lives: by Silenian dipsomania in the case of a brutish American collector of antiquities, Mr. Stoll; and by pederastic satyrism in the case of the English schoolmaster and amateur painter Timothy Grey.

II.

Grey, who narrates the tale, begins by informing us that he has, in fact, recently resigned from his teaching post at a boy's prep school, "in order to forestall inevitable dismissal" [56].

The reason he gave for his resignation was ill health. But Grey doesn't specify what the nature of his sickness is, or why it should make his dismissal inevitable. He simply says that it was caused by a "wretched bug picked up on holiday in Crete" [56]. Clearly, however, it's more than a funny tummy ...

Has he, perhaps, caught some kind of sexually transmitted disease? Is that the universal complaint from which he suffers? A dose of the clap would seem to be a possibility, but Grey is keen for us to know that the bug he caught "was picked up in all innocence" and was not due to "excess of the good life" [56].     

It also seems possible that Grey is, in fact, referring indirectly to what some consider a perverse disorder; did he resign because repressed homosexual desire had manifested itself and become known to his fellow teachers and pupils? The following statement lends credence to this:

"My complaint is universal, and has been so through the ages, an excuse for jest and hilarious laughter from earliest times, until one of us oversteps the mark and becomes a menace to society." [56]

Actually, this explanation - although mistaken - is nearer the mark. But what Grey suffers from is not the flowering of an all too human sexual predisposition; his erotomania is the result, rather, of divine madness - or what Grey describes as a form of insidious evil.

In other words, he's in the process of becoming-satyr, rather than merely coming out - and that's a much more problematic proposition within modern European culture; for whilst homosexuality has been decriminalised (and is, in fact, now thought of as something to celebrate), paedophilia certainly hasn't (and isn't).

III.  

Grey's problems begin when he bumps into the physically intimidating and drunken figure of Stoll, who gives him a gift; a drinking vessel which, whilst empty of libation, was nevertheless still able to intoxicate:

"It was a small jug, reddish in colour, with a handle on either side for safe holding. [...] The body of the jug had been shaped cunningly and brilliantly into a man's face, with upstanding ears like scallop-shells, while protruding eyes and bulbous nose stood out above the leering, open mouth, the moustache drooping to the rounded beard that formed the base. At the top, between the handles, were the upright figures of three strutting men, their faces similar to that upon the jug, but here human resemblance ended, for they had neither hands nor feet but hooves, and from each of their hairy rumps extended a horse's tail." [88]

That night, Grey has queer dreams from which he struggles to awaken; dreams that "belonged to some other unknown world horribly intermingled with [his] own" [89]:

"Term had started, but the school in which I taught was on a mountain top hemmed in by forest [...] My boys, all of them familiar faces, lads I knew, wore vine-leaves in their hair, and had a strange, unearthly beauty both endearing and corrupt. They ran towards me, smiling, and I put my arms about them, and the pleasure they gave me was insidious and sweet, never before experienced, never before imagined, the man who pranced in their midst and played with them was not myself, not the self I knew, but a demon shadow emerging from a jug [...]" [89]

Grey decides the rhyton is a source of magical malevolence and that the terrible dreams which it induced were utterly foreign to his nature - but one can't help wondering about this; perhaps it simply enables one to become who one is ...

Later in the tale, we discover that Stoll has also left Grey a bottle of home-brewed drink, which, surprisingly, he agrees to try:

"It was like the barley-water my mother used to make when I was a child. And equally tasteless. And yet ... it left a sort of aftermath on the palate and the tongue. Not as sweet as honey nor as sharp as grapes, but pleasant, like the smell of raisins under the sun, curiously blended with the ears of ripening corn." [91]

He even drinks the stuff for a second time; from the demonic jug, which, on reflection - and under the influence of Stoll's home-brew -, now appeared rather beautiful:

"I don't know how it was, but somehow the leering face no longer seemed so lewd. It had a certain dignity that had escaped me before. [...] I wondered whether Socrates had looked thus when he strolled in the Athenian agora with his pupils and discoursed on life. He could have done. And his pupils may not necessarily have been the young men whom Plato said they were, but of a tenderer age, like my lads at school, like those youngsters of eleven or twelve who had smiled upon me in my dreams [...]" [97]

Grey continues:

"I felt the scalloped ears, the rounded nose, the full soft lips of the tutor Silenos upon the jar, the eyes no longer protruding but questioning, appealing, and even the naked horsemen on the top had grown in grace. It seemed to me now they were not strutting in conceit but dancing with linked hands, filled with gay abandon, a pleasing, wanton joy." [97]

It is only upon discovering the body of Stoll beneath the waves - "grotesque, inhuman [... swaying] backwards and forwards at the bidding of the current" [99] - that Grey, with understandable panic, decides to fling the jug into the sea:

"Even as I did so, I knew the gesture was in vain. It did not sink immediately but remained bobbing on the surface, then slowly filled with that green translucent sea, pale as the barley liquid laced with spruce and ivy. Not innocuous but evil, stifling conscience, dulling intellect, the hell-brew of the smiling god Dionysus, which turned his followers into drunken sots, would claim another victim [...] The eyes in the swollen face stared up at me, and they were not only those of Silenos the satyr tutor, and of the drowned Stoll, but my own as well [...] They seemed to hold all knowledge in their depths, and all despair." [100]

IV.

The point of the tale is this: becoming-Greek in a Classical sense certainly opens up a whole new way of life and a whole new world of experience, but from the moral-legal standpoint of today it spells trouble, putting you at risk of a lengthy prison sentence and of having your name added to the sex offenders register.

Those who romanticise the pre-Christian past in all its pagan splendour and think the gods of Olympus were a splendid bunch, should maybe read a bit more history and acknowledge the tragic nature of Greek mythology in which incest, rape, murder, and sodomy (in its widest sense) were the norm.*

*Note: Some readers - with knowledge of my background in Dionysian philosophy and an openly pagan past - might be surprised (even disappointed) by this conclusion. But I would remind them that even a youthful Nietzsche, writing in The Birth of Tragedy, wasn't for frenzied excess and promiscuity overriding every form of law; he warns against the savage urges of lust and cruelty and advocates for their aesthetic sublimation.  
 

See: 

C. G. Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 13: Alchemical Studies, ed. Gerhard Adler, trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Princeton University Press, 1983), 'Commentary on "The Secret of the Golden Flower"', para. 54. 

Daphne du Maurier, 'Not After Midnight', in Don't Look Now and Other Stories, (Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 56-100. All page references given in the text refer to this edition.

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (Penguin Books, 1993).

This post is for Maria Thanassa.

On the Origins of a Solar-Phallic Landscape

S. A. von Hell: A New Day (c. 1985-87)

Someone very kindly emailed to say how intriguing and strangely affecting they found my solar-phallic landscape painted sometime in the mid-1980s and featured on a recent post [click here]. They also requested that I provide some background to the work which, as they rightly assume, wasn't merely imaginative ...

Primarily, the picture has its origins in the work of the writer and artist D. H. Lawrence, who once confessed in a letter to a friend:

"I put a phallus [...] in each one of my pictures somewhere. And I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality. I do this out of positive belief that the phallus is a great sacred image: it represents a deep, deep life which has been denied in us, and is still denied."

This brief remark encapsulated my philosophical aesthetic at the time and provided a kind of mini-manifesto.

Secondly, the picture was very much influenced by my love of Killing Joke, particularly during the period beginning with Fire Dances and ending with Brighter Than a Thousand Suns. I bought the three albums released before this period - and the first two albums that followed - but my beautiful obsession with the band was at its most intense and uncompromising between 1983-87, i.e., the pagan years, when I subscribed to an eco-apocalyptic model of Romantic primitivism tinged with Nazi occultism.

The oak tree foliage at the side of the picture was an idea I took from the cover to the Killing Joke single from which I also lifted the title, A New Day (1984) - see image below. 

Finally, the painting was born also of my reading of Jung's writings on the solar phallus and the collective unconscious; in other words, it was meant to be an image with archetypal significance. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, let me try to briefly explain ...    

One of Jung's favourite stories concerned a paranoid-schizophrenic patient with suicidal tendencies named Emile Schwyzer, who had spent most of his life in and out of mental institutions; a man who believed that stars were composed of dead souls and that the Earth was flat and surrounded by infinite seas.

One day, Schwyzer reported a particularly striking hallucination, in which the sun seemed to possess an erect penis that moved back and forth and caused the wind to blow. This vision stayed with Jung, although he was unable to fathom its meaning until he became aware of a similar solar-phallic image within the ancient Roman mystery religion centred on the god Mithras. Then, it all made perfect sense and everything clicked into place; here was a compelling piece of evidence for the existence of a collective unconscious.   

At the time - i.e., in the mid-1980s, when I thought Jung was a genius rather than a crank - I was happy to buy into all this, despite numerous problems with the actual details of the story and with Jung's celebrated theory (a theory that has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese, as James Hillman acknowledges).

What Jung is essentially doing, is extending Kant's categories of reason to the production of fantasy; archetypes are conceived as categories of the imagination and analytic psychology is thereby revealed as a form of transcendental idealism with mytho-hermeneutic knobs on. Not my cup of tea at all; certainly not now, when the last thing I would paint - if I were to ever pick up a brush again - would be a solar-phallic landscape.       

Notes 

The letter by D. H. Lawrence to Earl Brewster (27 Feb 1927) can be found in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 648-49.  

(E. G. Records, 1984) 

All of My Life is All I'll Give You: Un/Holy Reflections on the Case of St. Nietzsche (A Guest Post by Símón Solomon)

Nietzsche Icon from Ryan Haecker's 
blog Transhuman Traditionalism 

I.

'How is negation of the will possible? How is the saint possible? This really seems to have been the question that started Schopenhauer off and made him into a philosopher.'

- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, §47 

In concert with these Kantian-looking questions, Nietzsche conjoins his taskmaster in tragic aesthetics, so that, guilty by association, Schopenhauer's questions become Nietzsche's questions too. That they are also two questions he collapses into one yields, in effect, a pseudo-singularity that differs from itself. To insert ourselves between them, to read Nietzsche against himself by insisting on their analytical separability, we must therefore ask:

(i) What if sainthood were not only the personification of the will's renunciation?

(ii) What if martyrdom were something other, something stranger, than the instincts' resentful atrophy?

(iii) Might the saint even be that inculpable being, incorruptibly defenceless, who is innervated by a god?


II.

'Up to now the most powerful people have still bowed reverently before the saint, as the riddle of self-conquest and of intentional final sacrifice. Why did they bow? In him they sensed - and, so to speak, behind the question mark of his fragile and lamentable appearance - the superior strength which wished to test itself in such a victory, the fortitude of the will, in which they knew how to recognise and honour their own fortitude and pleasure in mastery once more.'

- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, §51

In this exemplary aphorism, Nietzsche bears witness to the figure of the saint as a kind of limit-figure, in which the ascetic ideal - the nadir of the slavish revolt against which he stockpiles his anti-Christian dynamite - folds back upon itself into a mystical spectacle of the will to power. We might think here of Jung's crucial insight that les extrêmes se touchent; an observation that further demands Nietzsche be received as the ground-breaking psychologist he claimed himself to be, presenting as he is an early object lesson in the psychodynamics of projection. 'They were honouring something in themselves', he discerns, 'when they venerated the saint'.

Or, as Zarathustra declared, 'You want to create the world before which you can kneel: this is your ultimate hope and intoxication'.

Just as Rudolf Otto identified terror and fascination as the two drivers of religious awe, such overmastered reverence conceals, on Nietzsche’s diagnosis, a diabolical distrust: a hermeneutics of suspicion avant la lettre freudienne. What the men of power learned from this 'monster of denial' and unnatural contrarian was thus a new kind of dread, a new fear of power's self-overcoming.

In other words, they encountered in the saint a kind of fiend or force field, an unsurpassable adversary, atrociously empowered by 'a burning eye in a body half destroyed' [Human All Too Human, §141]. The will now bore a power that brought them, the non-saints, to a standstill. If the saint was a question mark, as Nietzsche tells us, whom they felt compelled to question, its crook sent back no echo.

In Tears and Saints, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran offers the stirring speculation that 'Nietzsche’s greatest merit is that he knew how to defend himself from saintliness. What would have become of him had he let loose his natural impulses? He would have been a Pascal with all the saints’ madnesses.'

Of course, a wholly undefended Nietzsche would still have been Nietzsche, but for Cioran a Pascal-pacified Nietzsche, the Pascal Nietzsche envisioned as 'profound, wounded and monstrous' [Beyond Good And Evil, §45] and who antedated Wagner alongside Schopenhauer as one half of the four couples who did not refuse him, the sacrificer, in his 'descent into Hades' [Human All Too Human II, §408].


III.

As to the demono-maniacal Nietzsche's infamous sign-off in Ecce Homo, 'Dionysus against the Crucified', was what defeated him what also broke his youthful Lieblingsdichter, the mad poet Hölderlin: the monotheistic cult of the Cross plunging into the imperishable circus of the Greeks that revolved around it eternally? The image of the Bacchic Jesus, the horned Christ, is a demonic thought, truly beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche may not have been a Christian, or, perhaps, was a kind of mortified Christian - 'a man whom the grace of God has not touched’ as Eric Voegelin described him - but nor was he simply a nostalgic pagan, a satyr of the wine-god: the god of ecstatic dissonance, of wine, women and tears.

As Rouven J. Steeves has noted, Nietzsche was not unambiguously 'against' Christianity, or laying siege to the Nazarene with the sorcery of Greek ecstasy. Rather, as something 'even more primordial', his agon channelled the free spirit of Luther via Pascal, mingled with his self-styled Dionysus as a creative principle of life, to become a kind of Jobian Prometheus - an anti-ass, a world-historical beast, a fire-breathing Anti-Christ.

'Dionysus against the Crucified' signals, we suggest, a kind of divine double-crossing, an impossible authorship: a Dionysus crucified; the dying Christ dionyised. The German gegen, however can also signify 'towards': Dionysus towards the Crucified. And toward the end, Nietzsche signed himself as the Crucified One ...

In the German language, weinen and wein, tears and wine, share a common root. Drinking and dying are given together for those who dare to speak with a forked tongue, before they are driven mad. Here is the close of Nietzsche’s pious and tormented 1863 schoolboy poem, 'Before the Crucifix'.


On the floor lay a coin,
corroded and minted
with the devil’s hand and blow,
what it costs eternally, in heaven and on earth,
the soul hanging on the cross,
and, sunk deep in sin and lust,
thinking itself holy
that must yet be damned.


Author's Notes

E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. I. Zarifopol-Johnston, (University of Chicago Press, 1998). 

E. Cyblulska, 'Nietzsche Contra God: A Battle Within', Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, vol. 16 (1-2 October, 2016), pp. 1–12 (online).

C. Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. R. Manheim, (Princeton University Press, 1976).

R. J. Steeves, 'Dionysus versus the Crucified: Nietzsche and Voegelin and the Search for a Truthful Order', in Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, ed. L. Trepanier and S. F. McGuire (University of Missouri, 2011), pp. 108-136.

E. Voegelin, 'Nietzsche and Pascal', Nietzsche-Studien, vol. 25(1), pp.128-171. 


Editor's Notes

Símón Solomon is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and serves as a managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at (and can be contacted via) simonsolomon.ink

Símón appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm.

To read a sibling post by Stephen Alexander, on why it's preferable to have horns rather than a halo, click here.  

Further Reflections on the Porcupine Dilemma - A Guest Post by Simon Solomon

The metal porcupine on Freud’s desk in the study 

of his Hampstead home, now the Freud Museum. 

Photo: Nick Cunard.

In his sublime essay 'The Porcupine's Illusion', the prickly-named George Prochnik (great-grandson of James Jackson Putnam) claims that, 'when it came to his own liaison with America, Freud yearned for the warmth and communal support America promised, but then felt needled and otherwise violated in consequence of whatever proximity he did attain'.

On Prochnik's reading, Freud's apparent repression of his debt to Schopenhauer - only admitting in 1925 to having come to the philosopher 'very late in life', despite thrice name-checking him in 'Interpretation of Dreams' (1900) and Schopenhauer's theory of the will being widely regarded as prefiguring the psychoanalytic concepts of repression itself, the death-drive and the centrality of sexuality to psychic life - was motivated by Freud's scientific ambition to purge psychoanalysis of its merely philosophical contours.

An undertaking which, if true, backfired with spectacular irony, since Freud's sole public recognition in his lifetime came from the award of the Goethe Prize for services to literature. In this context, Freud's Schopenhauer complex 'became one of distance and propinquity. How much influence was required to prevent one's pen from freezing, and how much would result in one being stabbed full of holes by the writerly quills of intellectual predecessors?' Here, the porcupine problem takes on the lustre of an inter-generational Bloomian anxiety concerning how well one can bear the stab to one's pretensions of originality.

Noting that, as a rule, 'it may be said that a man's sociability stands very nearly in inverse ratio to his intellectual value: to say that "so and so" is very unsociable, is almost tantamount to saying he is a man of great capacity', Schopenhauer strikingly posited a negative correlation between the hunger for closeness and human intelligence. One endowed with sufficient intellectual warmth in himself - an interesting concept in itself when thinking types in Western culture tend to be seen as cool and remote, while emotional people are viewed as warm - would have sharply curtailed inter-animate needs, so that the heat of thought might be conceived of as a kind of libidino-cerebral surplus, a vector to the inhuman. Or, those who seem like cold fish may be always already the hottest properties ...

On his reportedly arduous hike from Putnam's mountain cabin that he was sharing with Ferenczi and Jung, the porcupine to which Freud was led by two sailor-suited young women turned out to be a fly-blown, reeking corpse. His spiny mythos would be incarnated in an over-determined rodent, death irrupting into life, as though the ambivalent truth of humanity's barbed love arises where Eros and Thanatos collide.

This would surely be enough of a psychologically sobering denouement all by itself. But the still more resonant afterword, as Prochnik vividly recollects, relates to the bronze porcupine gifted to Freud by Putnam, which can now be found on permanent display at the Freud Museum in London, where Freud died in 1939. As he attests - and in some weird and wonderful metamorphosis that pierces the skin and makes the soul sing - its quills, when rippled by the fingers, emit a 'melodic, harp-like sound'.

Our painful proximity, which implies the interpenetration of vitality and oblivion, yields to poetic music.

Notes

George Prochnik, 'The Porcupine Illusion', Cabinet, Issue 26 (Summer 2007): click here.

Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas) is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. 

To read my own take on Schopenhauer, Freud and the porcupine dilemma, click here.