On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored

Adam Phillips

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9780674417960
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

In a style that is writerly and audacious, Adam Phillips takes up a variety of seemingly ordinary subjects underinvestigated by psychoanalysis--kissing, worrying, risk, solitude, composure, even farting as it relates to worrying.He argues that psychoanalysis began as a virtuoso improvisation within the science of medicine, but that virtuosity has given way to the dream of science that only the examined life is worth living. Phillips goes on to show how the drive to omniscience has been unfortunate both for psychoanalysis and for life. He reveals how much one's psychic health depends on establishing a realm of life that successfully resists examination.

- 1 -

On Tickling

The ear says more

Than any tongue.

W. S. Graham, “The Hill of Intrusion”

“If you tickle us, do we not laugh?” asks Shylock, defining himself as human as he begins to “feed” his revenge. And what is more ordinary in the child’s life than his hunger for revenge and, indeed, the experience of being tickled? From a psychoanalytic point of view it is curious that this common, perhaps universal, experience has rarely been thought about; and not surprising that once we look at it we can see so much.

An absolute of calculation and innocence, the adult’s tickling of the child is an obviously acceptable form of sensuous excitement between parents and children in the family. The child who will be able to feed himself, the child who will masturbate, will never be able to tickle himself. It is the pleasure he cannot reproduce in the absence of the other. “From the fact that a child can hardly tickle itself,” Darwin wrote in his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, “or in a much less degree than when tickled by another person, it seems that the precise point to be touched must not be known.” An enigmatic conclusion, which, though manifestly untrue—children know exactly, like adults, where they are ticklish—alerts us to the fact that these “precise points” are a kind of useless knowledge to the child, that they matter only as shared knowledge. They require the enacted recognition of the other.

Helpless with pleasure, and usually inviting this helplessness, the child, in the ordinary, affectionate, perverse scenario of being tickled, is wholly exploitable. Specific adults know where the child is ticklish—it is, of course, only too easy to find out—but it is always idiosyncratic, a piece of personal history, and rarely what Freud called one of the “predestined erotogenic zones.” Through tickling, the child will be initiated in a distinctive way into the helplessness and disarray of a certain primitive kind of pleasure, dependent on the adult to hold¹ and not to exploit the experience. And this means to stop at the blurred point, so acutely felt in tickling, at which pleasure becomes pain, and the child experiences an intensely anguished confusion; because the tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax. It has to stop, or the real humiliation begins. The child, as the mother says, will get hysterical.

In English, the meaning of the word tickle is, so to speak, almost antithetical, employing, as Freud said of the dream-work, “the same means of representation for expressing contraries.” The Oxford English Dictionary cites, among nineteen definitions of the word, the following: “In unstable equilibrium, easily upset or overthrown, insecure, tottering, crazy . . . nicely poised.” Other definitions describe a range of experience from excessive credulity to incontinence. The word speaks of the precarious, and so of the erotic. To tickle is, above all, to seduce, often by amusement. But of the two references to tickling in Freud (both in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality), it is used as virtually synonymous with stroking: included, quite accurately and unobtrusively, as part of the child’s ordinary sensuous life. Describing the characteristics of an erotogenic zone, Freud writes:

It is part of the skin or mucous membrane in which stimuli of a certain sort evoke a feeling of pleasure possessing a particular quality. There can be no doubt that the stimuli which produce the pleasure are governed by special conditions, though we do not know what those are. A rhythmic character must play a part among them and the analogy of tickling is forced upon our notice. It seems less certain whether the character of the pleasurable feeling evoked by the stimulus should be described as a “specific” one—a “specific” quality in which the sexual factor would precisely lie. Psychology is still so much in the dark in questions of pleasure and unpleasure that the most cautious assumption is the one most to be recommended.²

Freud is certain here only of what he does not know. But in the light of his uncertainty, which provokes the most careful questions, what is the most cautious assumption we can make about these specific pleasures called tickling and being tickled? In the elaborate repertoire of intrusions, what is the quality—that is to say, the fantasy—of the experience? Certainly there is no immediate pressing biological need in this intent, often frenetic contact that so quickly reinstates a distance, only equally quickly to create another invitation. Is the tickling scene, at its most reassuring, not a unique representation of the over-displacement of desire and, at its most unsettling, a paradigm of the perverse contract? Does it not highlight, this delightful game, the impossibility of satisfaction and of reunion, with its continual reenactment of the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration?

A girl of eight who keeps “losing her stories” in the session because she has too much to say, who cannot keep still for a moment, suddenly interrupts herself by saying to me, “I can only think of you when I don’t think of you.” This same, endlessly elusive child—elusiveness, that is, the inverse of obsessionality—ends a session telling me, “When we play monsters, and mummy catches me, she never kills me, she only tickles me!”

“We can cause laughing by tickling the skin,” Darwin noted of the only sensuous contact that makes one laugh. An extraordinary fact condensing so much of psychoanalytic interest, but one of which so little is spoken. Perhaps in the cumulative trauma that is development we have had the experience but deferred the meaning.

- 2 -

First Hates: Phobias in Theory

His radical solutions were rendered vain by the conventionality of his problems.

George Santayana, My Host the World

In his chapter “Instinct” in Psychology: The Briefer Course (1892), William James writes:

The progress from brute to man is characterised by nothing so much as by the decrease in frequency of proper occasions for fear. In civilised life, in particular, it has at last become possible for large numbers of people to pass from the cradle to the grave without ever having had a pang of genuine fear. Many of us need an attack of mental disease to teach us the meaning of the word. Hence the possibility of so much blindly optimistic philosophy and religion.¹

James, of course, is always looking for good transitions, for the passages that work for us. Like Freud, but for different reasons, he is wary of the progress in civilized life. For Freud, civilization compromises our desire; for James here, it compromises our fear. If civilization protects us, or overprotects us, the absence of danger can make us unrealistic. We may need an attack of mental disease as the only available reminder of “proper occasions for fear.” Without proper occasions we lose the meaning of an important word. This mental disease that James recommends, partly from his own experience, or rather the real fear that it entails, should temper speculation, setting limits to the naive ambitions of metaphysics.

But fear, especially at its most irrational, perplexes James in an interesting way; it connects for him three of his most consistent preoccupations: blindness, optimism, and the doing of philosophy. Because, unlike Freud, he doesn’t see fear and desire as inextricable, he is more openly puzzled. Even though “a certain amount of timidity obviously adapts us to the world we live in,” he writes, “the fear paroxysm is surely altogether harmful to him who is its prey.” After considering the virtues of immobility—the insane and the terrified “feel safer and more comfortable” in their “statue-like, crouching immobility”—James refers at the very end of his chapter on fear to “the strange symptom which has been described of late years by the rather absurd name of agoraphobia.” After describing the symptoms, which “have no utility in a civilised man,” he manages to make sense of this puzzling new phenomenon only by comparing it to the way in which both domestic cats and many small wild animals approach large open spaces. “When we see this,” he writes,

we are strongly tempted to ask whether such an odd kind of fear in us be not due to the accidental resurrection, through disease, of a sort of instinct which may in some of our more remote ancestors have had a permanent and on the whole a useful part to play.²

The “disease” returns the patient to his instinctual heritage; but this heritage is now redundant because, in actuality, there is nothing to fear. Agoraphobics, James suggests, are living in the past, the evolutionary past (“the ordinary cock-sure evolutionist,” James remarks in his droll way, “ought to have no difficulty in explaining these terrors”).³ The agoraphobic is, as it were, speaking a dead language. So to understand agoraphobia in James’s terms, we have to recontextualize the fear, put it back in its proper place, or rather, time. There is nothing really irrational about phobic terror; it is an accurate recognition of something, something that Darwinian evolution can supply a picture for. Fear itself cannot be wrong, even if it is difficult to find out where it fits.

A phobia nevertheless is, perhaps in both senses, an improper occasion for fear, an enforced suspension of disbelief. James’s description of the agoraphobic patient “seized with palpitation and terror at the sight of any open place or broad street which he has to cross alone” is a vivid picture of a phobia as an impossible transition. And it can be linked—as a kind of cartoon—with one of James’s famous notions of truth; the agoraphobic becoming, as it were, the compulsive saboteur of some of his own truth. “Pragmatism gets her general notion of truth,” James writes in his book of that title,

as something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our experience may lead us towards other moments which it will be worth while to have been led to. Primarily, and on the common-sense level, the truth of a state of mind means this function of a leading that is worth while.⁴

The agoraphobic is the figure of the compromised pragmatist. The threshold of experience between this one moment and the next is aversive. He wants to go somewhere—or, in James’s more suggestive terms, be led somewhere—but he is unable to find out whether it is as worthwhile (in both senses) as he thinks. The terror, or the inability to hold the terror, preempts possible future states of mind, and so precludes their evaluation. A phobia, in other words, protects a person from his own curiosity.

“Agoraphobia,” Freud wrote in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess in 1887, “seems to depend on a romance of prostitution.” Despite James’s misgiving about its “rather absurd name,” and despite its being Greeked for prestigious legitimation, agoraphobia seems rather nicely named. The agora, after all, was that ancient place where words and goods and money were exchanged. Confronted with an open space, as James and Freud both agree, the agoraphobic fears that something nasty is going to be exchanged: one state of mind for another, one desire for another. But the phobia ensures a repression of opportunity, a foreclosing of the possibilities for exchange (“a projection is dangerous,” the psychoanalyst André Green has written, “when it prevents the simultaneous formation of an introjection”; in a phobia one is literally unable to take in what one has invented). The agoraphobic, that is to say, knows—Freud would say unconsciously—what the space is for, or what he wants to use it for. It then ceases, as though by magic, to be an open space, or what James calls a pluralistic universe.⁵ It simply leads into the past, into the old world.

James and Freud use explanation in quite different ways. For James the question is not so much, Is it true? as How would my life be better if I believed it? For Freud the first question—the unconscious question, so to speak—is, What do I want? and then, What fantasies of truth do I need to legitimate it? But because for James there can never be any knowing beforehand, he cannot presume to universalize his conclusions. And this is because there is no end to them; in this sense he is a freer associationist than Freud. “It is enough to ask of each of us,” he concludes in his great talk “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” “that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.”⁶ The risk for the phobic person, as for the psychoanalyst, is that he has already used his explanations to delimit his opportunities.

. . . a face which inspires fear or delight (the object of fear or delight) is not on that account its cause, but—one might say—its target.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

The question of where the fear belongs—or what it is worthwhile to fear—is one that occupies both the phobic person and his interpreter. Freud himself at one point speculated that childhood phobias of small animals and thunder could be “the atrophied remainders of congenital preparation for real dangers that are so clearly developed in other animals.”⁷ If Freud and James agree here, with Darwinian common sense, that phobias are derivative forms of self-protection, that phobic terror is irrational only insofar as it has missed its target, they radically disagree about what there is to fear and where it comes from. They fill the agoraphobic space—its empty page, so to speak—in quite different ways.

James’s open space, for the agoraphobic, evokes phylogenetic memory; Freud’s open space evokes personal memory (and memory for Freud is always of desire and the parented past). James’s open space may be full of potential predators, but in Freud’s open space a person may turn into a predator. “The anxiety felt in agoraphobia,” Freud writes in 1926,

(a subject that has been less thoroughly studied) seems to be the ego’s fear of sexual temptation—a fear which, after all, must be connected in its origins with the fear of castration. As far as can be seen at present, the majority of phobias go back to an anxiety of this kind felt by the ego in regard to the demands of the libido.⁸

For the agoraphobic the open space represents the setting for a possible incestuous sexual encounter punishable by castration. Because sexuality begins in incestuous fantasy, it always smacks of the forbidden. So the phobic scenario, in Freud’s view, appears to invite an illicit reenactment from the past, a place where, quite unwittingly, a memory could be cast. For the agoraphobic to go out is to give the past a future, to bring it forward, so to speak. What the phobic fears, unconsciously, is not only the replication of this truant past, but also its modification in ways that cannot be anticipated. If one loses the replica, one might lose the original. These phobic scenarios are like antiepiphanies in which memory, rather than being released into images and atmospheres, is frozen into terror. Whereas the epiphany, in the Proustian sense, is contingent and surprising, the phobia is reliable. The phobia, which hoards the past, can be the one place in a person’s life where meaning apparently never changes; but this depends upon one’s never knowing what the meaning is.

Given the insistence and the mobility of the libido in Freud’s account, any occasion might be a proper occasion for fear. Desire—or what we can, in a different language, call parts of the self—insofar as it is experienced as intolerable has to be put somewhere else, projected into hiding. There it can be acknowledged in terror, but never known about. The profoundest way of recognizing something, or the only way of recognizing some things, Freud will imply, is through hiding them from oneself. And what is profound, or rather of interest, is not only what one has hidden but also the ways one has of hiding it. We know only, of course—as in a phobia—about the repressions that break down. So it is as though, from a psychoanalytic point of view, our unbearable self-knowledge leads a secret life; as though there is self-knowledge, but not for us. For Freud, what has to be explained is not why someone is phobic, but how anyone ever stops being anything other than phobic.

A “no” from a person in analysis is quite as ambiguous as a “yes.”

Sigmund Freud, Constructions in Analysis

An acutely claustrophobic man in his early forties—although his phobia has increasingly focused on the theater, which he has always “loved”—remembers, in an otherwise desultory session, a childhood memory. At about age eight he goes to the oculist, and one of the tests he is made to do “to find out about his coordination” is to look down something like a telescope and with his hands put the dog he sees into the cage that he sees. He does it successfully and with real pleasure; and the oculist, a “benign man,” says to him, “Well, you’ll never be able to join the RAF!” Understanding that he will never be able to be a pilot, he is “shattered,” “although until that moment it had never occurred to me that I wanted to.” And then he adds, sarcastically, that as an adult he has always been really excited about traveling in airplanes. It is clear to both of us that this is something of an ambiguous triumph.

I remind him that his terror in the theater—the fantasy he desperately wards off, and so “sees” instead of the play—is that he will jump off the balcony (he had confessed to me in our first meeting, with some satisfaction, that he always sat in the circ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. On Tickling
• 2. First Hates: Phobias in Theory
• 3. On Risk and Solitude
• 4. On Composure
• 5. Worrying and Its Discontents
• 6. Returning the Dream: In Memoriam Masud Khan
• 7. On Being Bored
• 8. Looking at Obstacles
• 9. Plotting for Kisses
• 10. Playing Mothers: Between Pedagogy and Transference
• 11. Psychoanalysis and Idolatry
• Notes
• Credits
• Index