By Jon Cogburn
One of the epiphanies near the end of Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company involves the proper typology of neuroses. The protagonist/narrator is finally able to sustain a romantic relationship because his girlfriend convinces him that his obsessions, ticks, compulsions, and avoidances fall into three categories:
- Absolutely unacceptable,
- Endearing,
- To be worked on.
I can attest that this is a useful conceptual scheme, albeit incomplete in at least two ways. What about:
- Acceptable, and not endearing, but such that "working on" them only makes them worse,
- Endearing, but only because of a lifetime of strategies (such as being a comedian) that make the neurotic himself seem less absolutely unacceptable,
The first suggests the need for more categories, while the second suggests the need to subcategorize.
With respect to unacceptability, one could do worse than to divide in terms of the reason the neurosis is unacceptable. The overwhelming majority of absolutely unacceptable neuroses are only unacceptable because they make living in a desensitized society too difficult. This suggests:
- Absolutely unacceptable, because society makes it too inconvenient to the neurotic.
Much of the plot of In the Pleasure of My Company involves the protagonist/narrator dealing with problems in this category. He's just barely functional and not thriving. In the way of most novels, and I think most lives too, he finds salvation in love. The narrator does not suffer from the following:
- Absolutely unacceptable, because harmful to others.
I think that much of the fear of the neurotic is because of the fear that some of her neuroses fall into this category. As with most such responses to the mentally ill, it's radically unfair. If we exclude personality disorders, the mentally ill aren't particularly harmful to others. And most of the behavior that is truly unacceptable because harmful doesn't easily count as a manifestation of mental illness.
As with much else, the new DSM makes it hard to even conceptualize this issue, due to the astonishingly stupid categorization of mental health as those mental states and dispositions which best help you get along and thrive in the society in which you find yourself thrust by your accident of birth. But even an account of mental health which allowed the possibility (or rather, admitted the actuality) of sick and harmful societies, it would be mistaken to apply the illness metaphor to every variety of harmfulness. To be fair, the stupidity of the DSM applies here too, but only in extreme cases. If you are enough of a jerk, then it's really that you're sick because you have a personality disorder.
In any case, another important division, ignored by the psychologists and which crosscuts Martin's threefold division is between:
- Somewhat reasonable, from a moral or aesthetic point of view.
- Wholly unreasonable.
The neurotic comedian (redundant phrase?) can only be understood as embarking on a desperate attempt to convince others that her neuroses are really somewhat reasonable. By poking fun at the causes of her neurotic pain, the audience becomes complicit in the neurosis. Yeah, people who talk on their cell phones in the restaurant really are bad! This results in the audience not seeing those neuroses as wholly unreasonable. And by poking fun at herself, the audience stops seeing the comedian's neuroses as absolutely unacceptable because harmful to others. Look at how pathetic I am. I am no threat.
The somewhat-reasonable,-from-a-moral-or-aesthetic-point-of-view/wholly-unreasonable division is related to another:
- Accommodatable.
- Non-accommodatable.
This one is highly context sensitive. Most neurotics have a circle of close friends and a subset of family members who accommodate some of their even wholly unreasonable neuroses. It's OK to ask a friend to spit out their gum because it makes your skin crawl. They don't mind. But it's very hard to request that of a non-friend, even one you work with. One, gum chewing doesn't really fall into the category of neuroses with a moral point. Two, the downside to non-friends suspecting the extent of your mental illness issues is too great. Again, this is why we have comedians.
If you google "link between neuroses and creativity" you find many theories trying to explain the nature of this link, as well as the way it ties to the link between creativity and the abuse of substances that grant a relief from the pain caused by over-sensitivity. My going theory about all of this is that the Greeks were onto something with this business of the muse bringing you melodies, ideas, bits of language, plot twists, visions, characters, equations, etc. Creativity requires a kind of radical openness* that makes it hard to tune things out. And the stuff you can't tune out then gets in the way of the muse as well. Schopenhauer's lovely essay on noise gets this one basically right, and is a key example of the first charge of the neurotic comedian, to convince the rest of the world that there is a moral and/or aesthetic point to her neurosis.
On the other hand, David Foster Wallace's essay on cruise ships can only be read as a dialectical counterpoint to Schopenhauer. Wallace the neurotic finally gets a space where his neuroses are catered to, and he ends up just being that much more sensitive and equally miserable. It's very, very funny and insightful, but ultimately grim, especially given how things turned out for Wallace. Note that Wallace is doing the other job of the neurotic comedian. Ha! Ha! Look how pathetic I am. I can't possibly be a threat.
I went to college in the late 1980s, the last days of the university professor. Back then, before neoliberal predations (assessment, "running it like a business," faculty/administrator class division, privatization, etc. etc. etc.), the main function of the university give neurotics a place where they didn't have to be comedians to survive. To be fair, some of the professors of that era were very, very funny, because humor was their survival strategy growing up in a society both irritating and senseless (Monday Night Football. Orange Julius at the Skating Rink. Moral Equivalent of the Founding Fathers. Toll Road. Trickle Down. Televisions. Public Squalor. Nancy Reagan's Astrologer. Private Opulence. I'm Proud To Be An American Where At Least I Know I'm Free. Why's that dog all alone on a chain all day?). But in the university setting they didn't have to be funny. They could be math professors instead, wandering around on foot staring into space with minds open to Plato's heaven, grinning maniacally when things are going well up there. And nobody calls the cops, throws a soda pop can at their head, yells "faggot" at them, or even blares a car stereo. The lacks of soul crushing architecture and other forms of aesthetic pollution combined with pedestrian friendliness and control over one's time made it an ideal place for creative neurotics to do something for the most part worthwhile. Those were good times, and those of us still clinging onto the remnants of that social arrangement are pretty lucky. We'll see how long it lasts. The sharks are circling and something tells me that the coming social arrangements are going to be even less kind to the neurotic and the comedian. Perhaps neurotics always think this kind of thing though.
[Notes:
*At some point I want to do a blog post about rearguard phenomenologists who characterize phenomenology as "radical openness." While I'm all in favor of radical openness, I think it's confused. Yes partaking well in a philosophical tradition requires creativity/openness, but so does partaking well in auto mechanics, mathematics, sculpture, and the presence of God.]
certainly some aspects are seen as immediately/obviously threatening but I think that just plain strange is estranging for most folks and the not one of us is (as we see daily magnified thru media) gut reaction is deep and wide, not sure I would (always) pair creativity with openness many of our most creative folks are deeply possessed/driven by a single inchoate urge/impulse that can be quite consuming and in a way be a sort of tunnel-vision, like good amphetamines…
http://radioopensource.org/the-shock-of-the-new/#
https://edmooneyblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/18/thoreau-cavell-and-anxiety-of-influence/
In critique, I think I would rather say that the category of ‘neurosis’ and the category of ‘obsessions, ticks, compulsions and avoidances’ (the union of?) are not extensionally identical, and that the latter is a more useful identification of the problematic phenomenon. The category of ‘neurosis’ doesn’t accurately pick out the problem, in that it is bound up with other perhaps psychiatric connotations (or considerations), and what is wanted here is something having to do with practical accommodations in a “relationship”. One question is, what perhaps causal property do the referents of the expression “obsessions, ticks, compulsions and avoidances” have that would unify a category that includes all of them; another question is, are there any other kinds of problems that also belong in this category but are not covered by the previous four subcategories. So I think it’s better to not use the term ‘neuroses’ here. Does the DSM allow, e.g., for the normality of the lack of a desire to make a lot of money, or a rejection of the principle of “money makes the man”, or of the idea that one should submit to the conventional norms of “getting ahead”? Obstacles blocking the achievement of personal (and laudable) goals are a different matter.
But I liked best your last paragraph about the university as a safe place for quirky people whose thinking is not governed by the conventional norms and are thus likely to be the object of suspicion and hatred by conventional society, as evidenced in some studies recently of Trump voters in Scott Walker’s Wisconsin. Reorganizing the university on neoliberal management norms is one way of getting these anarchistic freaks under control; getting them to restrict their attention to what’s directly “useful” for society as conventionally understood is another. Constructing over time the cognitive instruments that make it possible for scientists and scholars to effectively solve the problems of the world and to alleviate human suffering, of that there seems to be no comprehension from the forces at the gate. They must be made to “be like everybody else”.
there are no neuroses in the DSM/psychiatric world and in Freudian circles they are part of the normal human condition, the idea(l) of university as a sort of safe space for broken toys (one could wish for anarchic, than there might be some revolutionary spirit or at least some active resistance and not just passive-aggressivity ) is on some level appealing and I’m sure we can all think of praise worthy individuals but the overall actuality is just a place without much in the way of thoughtful (and tested) standards of practice/accountability and the support staffs of secretaries, accountants and all end up paying the psychic toll of having to keep the thing running in something like an orderly fashion.
https://syntheticzero.net/2014/05/30/avital-ronell-on-the-test-drive/
Ooh thanks. These are fantastic comments.
I’d be really interested to study the history of the concept of neurosis. With at least Woody Allen movies it’s entered part of some people’s folk theory of mind. Allen almost certainly got the concept from all of those decades in Freudian Therapy, where dmf notes it is still in use.
When concepts like this stick it might be in part because they do perform enough of a useful categorical function to where it’s at least pragmatically justifiable for us to treat them as reflecting the way reality is carved up.
These kinds of questions don’t have easy answers in part because there are all sorts of heterogeneous reasons for going on in various ways linguistically. One of the issues the extent to which the new conceptual vocabulary and associated beliefs helps us make sense of conceptual behavior prior to the introduction of the new vocabulary and beliefs.
In graduate school a colleague of mine, Sarah Pessin, claimed that you could best understand some ancient Jewish religious and (if I remember right) philosophical texts by understanding the authors as talking about neurotics, who (according to those texts) were actually closer to God because their oversensitivity to stimuli makes them more sensitive to the presence of God.
I don’t know if that’s true, but I do think it reflects something admirable in certain strains of Jewish culture (my mother’s paternal inheritance is Ashkenazim). Being oversensitive and complaining about things are not immediately taken as character flaws. The oversensitive complainer often has valuable wisdom to impart and is also likely to be the funniest, most clever, person in the room. And being an oversensitive complainer does not in any way rob you of human warmth.
Here’s a test you can perform. Usually philosophers know about the stereotype of Kant who obsessively took his walk at the same time each day, found certain noises (like the Lutheran choir down the street practicing) to be painful, and could only sleep if his manservant bundled him up in blankets so tightly he couldn’t move. This kind of thing is common knowledge. But if you actually dig into the accounts of his life you also find out that at any gathering you could hear where Kant was before seeing him because that’s the place where people would be laughing. These latter kinds of facts about Kant’s personality are usually presented in biographical accounts as a surprising corrective of the view that Kant was this dour, almost monstrously mechanical creature (consider academic views of people on the autism spectrum prior to Temple Grandin’s efforts and the intense world hypothesis).
But I think if you are Ashkenazi Jewish (and I’m not trying to implicate any thing about people of Sephardic heritage, I just don’t have enough cultural experience) or have lots of friends or family who are Ashkenazi, there’s nothing at all surprising about the revelation that Kant was very funny and people liked to be around him. I’m *not* saying that all or most Ashkenazi are neurotic, just that the neurotic has a different place in the culture. I suspect that the things I find laudible about the university come from my sensitivity to this, I see the university as having once replicated part of what I love most about my own Jewish heritage.
I realize I might be totally off here and that what I’m writing trades in stereotypes. Also note that I’m Presbyterian and having cousins of a different religion/ethnicity doesn’t prevent you from engaging in damaging orientalist speculation with respect to that ethnicity. I also might be being mislead by Kant’s own being so much less anti-semitic than everyone else in his cultural millieu (in particular his publicly raising money for Mendelssohn and private decency to Maimon). Maybe me seeing him as a friend of the Jews makes me think of him the way I think of some of my favorite people in my own family.
In any case, I should have been a little more balanced in my statements about the DSM above. I do think it’s a complete mess, but I don’t think that that’s the fault of psychologists (at least not mostly). What’s rather (mostly) happened is that the scientific study of human behavior has revealed how enormously complicated human behavior is, including and especially our creative ability to figure out creative ways to mess up our lives.
The tragic peregrinations of successive DSM’s has made me a mysterian about the so-called “easy” problems of mind. Even the problems that don’t seem to directly involve the place of consciousness in a seemingly material world involve teleology in a way that causes problems for our scientific understanding.
I don’t think that therapy is ever going to get much better than the kind of think Seneca did in his letters to Lucilius, which is to say that therapy is applied virtue ethics, couched in folk categories of the sort in which Seneca expressed himself. Academic clinical psychologists want to end virtue ethics with the risible belief that mental health is nothing over and above thriving in society. This allows them to be unreflective about the normative.
Practicing therapists are anything but unreflective about the normative, but the triumph of the quantitative and death of classical learning in the academia have made it impossible for most academic clinical psychologists to even recognize the extent to which therapy is a normative endeavor. Thus the DSM’s beautiful and I think ultimately doomed attempt to come up with a periodic table for humans.
A psychologist friend of mine told me that the real job of the DSM is to make it possible for people who need professional help to get support from their insurance companies. Your suffering isn’t real and worthy of treatment unless it comes along with a scientifically arrived at DSM number. As a result, we have to do things like medicalize grief, because the alternative in the United States is that people momentarily felled by grief can’t get any professional help.
Canguilhem realized that even physical health was a normative concept. I think he’s difficult to read because he didn’t quite figure out why medical institutions had to pretend that it is not a normative concept.
this “A psychologist friend of mine told me that the real job of the DSM is to make it possible for people who need professional help to get support from their insurance companies.” is correct for clinicians without prescription powers, and so this is a system of massive fraud and as often goes with such happenings legions of rationalizations, tragic that so many well intentioned people end up feeding into a system that they don’t believe in and that in some ways undermines their efforts (there are pragmatic takes on existential therapies that don’t trade in virtue ethics and just help folks to come to terms with their life situations, but you can’t get paid as a licensed and insured professional for such services) and in this way are not unlike many well meaning academics, so what keeps people from organizing resistance and from reorganizing their work relations? been going back to Guattari on these matters but sadly he doesn’t really have answers (tho at least he was asking the questions) that satisfy.
(1) Yeah, I’d love to spend some serious time thinking about these issues and getting more familiar with different clinical approaches., though I don’t know if I’d be able to come up with anything helpful or interesting.
I realize that a lot of smart people who know more than me would disagree, but I tend to assimilate existential approaches to a kind of applied virtue theory, with just a distinctive set of virtures that the therapist is inculcating (getting the . The danger of thinking of therapy along Senecan lines is that in a world that clearly distinguishes between real instrumental values and illusory external ones, makes therapy just look like a kind of programming where the therapist is just using rhetoric (in the pejorative sense we Socrates attacked) to manipulate the patient. And, as far as I understand it, one of the real virtues of existentialist models is when working well they avoid the negative aspects kind of thing pretty well. [Need to read Adorno and Horkheimer as well as Guattari with this in mind.].
(2) Since I’m traveling I didn’t have time to respond to your comments about neurosis above. I want to say that the kind of canonical neurotic creative type we get in the manifest image includes both over-sensitivity to stimulus and the kind of mono-maniacal obsessions that you mention. I think that the two traits can come apart. The kind of nerd completist who collects manga and goes to conventions is obsessive in the same way as a creative type, but still largely consumes rather creates media. And there are a lot of people who are just really, really grumpy who are oversensitive and also don’t create very much.
I don’t think that oversensitivity and mono-mania are sufficient either. The mono-mania has to be directed towards practices relevant to ultimately creating things and the oversensitivity has to be directed at the spiritual realm, for openness to the muse, and to the unnoticed aspects of the material realm relevant to the creation at hand.
(3) I love your point about the academic support staff needed to make the whole thing work. It could be the basis for an excellent campus novel.
Have you read Lester Bangs’ on the Clash just as they were getting big enough to play larger places? He’s really excited about all of the brouhaha and just almost taken in by the old rock and roll promise that the band are an integral part of some new better community. But Bangs can’t help but notice how much work they are creating for the hotel staff with their penchant for having food fights every night. The whole “Épater la bourgeoisie” thing only remotely works because the people making bank convincing the rest of us to do it are in facet epatering both the lumpenproletariat and the bits of the bourgeoisie lower down the ladder than them.
A few years ago I read a book by a highly educated maid. One day she was underpaid to clean the house of a repulsively dirty Marxist who was well known in academic circles. She was pretty excited because she had read some of his books. When he actually got home while she was doing the cleaning she commented on how much she’d liked one of his books and he was so freaked out that the scene ended badly. His books about the possibility of liberating the a-literate were for other academics who invited him to conferences. But his life wouldn’t really work without a-literates laboring in the vast infrastructure to get him to those conferences and see to his physical needs before, during, and after those conferences. He just couldn’t handle having a literate person cleaning the encrusted shit off of his toilet.
One could make a lot of things of this phenomena, the shit-encrusted-toilet Marxist just being an extreme case of something commonplace. I would love to turn some novelists loose on it so that they can see what happens when it becomes explicit. At the very least we’d probably understand our Trumpian present and future a little bit better as a result.
I suppose that there is some sense in which prioritizing attending to the phenomena at hand and coming to terms with (fleshing out) choices, consequences, and their surrounds/environs is a kind of guiding virtue for the clinician that is project-ed onto the analysand, a commitment to the lived-faith that the real pains (affordances and resistances to borrow a bit of JJ Gibson) of one’s current form of life are better to work thru than the anxieties of carrying on as usual, there is a sense in which the analytic scene than becomes a kind of lab/workshop of exposure therapy tho with an orientation that is as present focused and open-ended as it is a work of recalling.
Sure wasn’t suggesting that the mono-maniacal is the only way just trying to widen the scope, really we need an updated psychology of complexes (Rorty has some interesting views on this in his Irony, Contingency book).
I used to run an EAP that included a university and the shifting of responsibility & anxiety from faculty to staff was pretty intense and grim, my better half is an accountant for a medical grad school and she sees it daily in her interactions with admin, faculty, secretaries, etc.
Would no doubt make for good novels, but I parted ways with Rorty over his faith in the transformative powers of fiction, never could get him to see that the habits needed for reading are not the same skills needed for dealing with actual people (one would think that just attending a faculty meeting, or party, in an english dept would cure anyone of such commitments but cog-biases are hard to hack), part of why I engage with researchers of enactivism like: http://uow.academia.edu/DanielDHutto
safe travels and a good break, d.
It’s odd. I’m reading Seneca’s letters to Lucilius now and his exhortations about the transformative power of philosophy are pretty grimly funny to anyone who has been to a faculty meeting, or party, in a philosophy department.
I want to still be on Seneca’s side here and just conclude that my colleagues and I are doing it wrong and to the extent that we’re doing it right we would be even worse people without philosophy. Maybe one could defend Rorty by saying something similar about English departments and fiction?
Truthfully, I’m pretty skeptical about the transformative power of anything. But with you, I think the the world would be a much worse place if it didn’t include people like Rorty who weren’t so skeptical.
always strikes me how unphilosophical folks are about their jobs/depts as academic philosophers, just as unpsychological psychology faculty are and so on, was just listening to a lecture and the speaker noted that Margaret Mead had to remind a working group of cyberneticists that they too could be a subject of their studies!
I read it along the lines of Heidegger on tools and Dewey on habits, we just aren’t aware of the enabling (and binding) backgrounds/infrastructures until they fail.
yes let a 1,000 flowers bloom.
https://syntheticzero.net/2016/12/16/the-black-box-the-world-of-cybernetics/