At the high tide of Freudianism, it was widely believed, at least by intellectuals, that mankind had made great advances in self-understanding. After Freud’s death in London in 1939, W.H. Auden wrote that:
…he quietly surrounds all our habits of growth
and extends, till the tired even in
the remotest miserable duchy
have felt the change in their bones and are cheered
till the child, unlucky in his little State,
some hearth where freedom is excluded,
a hive whose honey is fear and worry
feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape,
while, as they lie in the grass of our neglect,
so many long-forgotten objects
revealed by his undiscovered shining
are returned to us and made precious again…
In 1945, Cyril Connoly, the eminent literary critic, published an essay titled Psychoanalysis, which began by saying roundly: ‘Psychoanalysis leads to the most profound discoveries man has made about himself’.
This, of course, is the veriest nonsense, and the reader of today, ploughing through Freud’s cases histories, is most likely to ask himself how anyone could ever have believed such stuff. This is a question for cultural historians. We now know that Freud cured no one, that he was financially exploitative, that he published what he knew not to be true, and that he treated his followers as the leader of a cult treats inferior acolytes. He was a highly intelligent, even brilliant, man, but his piercing insights, when he had them, had nothing to do with his theories but with the common-sense and close observation of a highly cultivated man. La Rochefoucauld did not need psychoanalysis to tell him nearly a quarter of a millennium earlier than Freud that there is in the misfortune of our friends something not entirely displeasing.
Psychoanalysis has been followed by other theories to explain ourselves to ourselves; among the sillier was behaviourism, that treated man as if he were a laboratory rat, or even amoeba. Nevertheless, the idea has persisted that until the end of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the scientific study of psychology, man’s self-understanding had been primitive and simplistic. If total understanding was not yet, it was just around the corner, awaiting a few technological advances to make it possible. Nowadays, we think that we understand evil if a certain part of the brain fails to light up, or lights up too strongly, when a person is put in a new-fangled, super-hi-tech scanner. We don’t need stories about the serpent and the Garden of Eden any more.
I offer a sonnet by Shakespeare, number 138, as evidence that the view that psychological sophistication began with the establishment of psychology as a science is false and untenable, and might even be the reverse of the truth. The first two lines alone are sufficient to illustrate that psychological sophistication existed in 1599, when the sonnet was first published in a collection titled The Passionate Pilgrim:
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies…
The mind of the poet is clearly not a straightforward processor of logic, then, and since I surmise that he wrote to be understood, he almost certainly expected that his readers’ minds were not straightforward either, and were perfectly capable of understanding what he wrote.
The sonnet is addressed to the poet’s mistress, the Dark Lady, who is young by comparison with him. Much modern commentary on the sonnet takes it that it refers directly to the false position of an older man and a faithless mistress, known to be such; but I think this is a rather crude or reductive interpretation. It is not untrue, but it is not the whole truth. It is literal-minded, like supposing that Gray’s Elegy is about country churchyards, and not about the fleetingness of existence and the ultimate littleness of human ambition. Gray’s poem, by the way, does not cease to be great because what it says is not new, indeed expresses a thought that is age-old. As Pope put it:
True wit is nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d,
Something, whose truth convinc’d at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
Surely, Shakespeare’s lines return us to something that we both know and often fail to acknowledge, namely that we often assent to what we also know to be untrue. And while Shakespeare is clearly writing about the particular situation in which he found himself, he is not simply writing autobiography; he is referring to a universal aspect of the human mind—universal, that is, in the sense of it being possible for everyone, not that everyone is in exactly the same position all the time.
In Shakespeare’s case, of course, the motive was more personal: in subsequent lines he explains why he believes what he knows to be untrue:
That she may think me some untutored youth,
Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties.
In other words, he wants to appear naïve in his lover’s eyes because, if he were to tell her that he knew all along that she was lying, their relationship would come to an end, which obviously he does not want to happen.
This does not mean that he keeps the fact that she lies at the forefront of his mind constantly:
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past their best,
Simply I believe her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
Why should an element of untruth necessarily enter into human relations? Shakespeare asks:
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
The answer is obvious:
Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
It should be obvious on a moment’s reflection that what is true of love is true also of many other situations. It is because of a child’s propensity to repeat what it is told that we are wary of what we say in front of it, even—or perhaps especially—if what we say is nothing but the truth. The child has not yet learned that truth may be wounding and that there are, in social situations, considerations other than truth that must be taken into account. A doctor, for example, quickly learns, or ought to learn, that the unvarnished truth is not suitable or salutary for all patients in all situations, even if the doctor ought to have an underlying preference for telling the truth. Medical ethicists who make a fetish of patient autonomy, which requires invariable truth-telling, overvalue truth, so great is their disdain for, or condemnation of, paternalism. Of course, paternalism can go too far, and in the past often did so; it requires judgment for its proper exercise. Where there is judgment, there is error.
No one can suppose that Shakespeare did not value truth. Apart from anything else, he is in this sonnet elaborating what he takes to be a truth, namely that human life cannot be lived entirely in the open, in utter frankness. If we wish to maintain good relations with others, there are always many simple truths that on both sides must be suppressed. Voltaire said that the way to be a bore is to say everything: it is also the best way to be a boor. Thus, when we meet someone, we do not say, ‘My word, how badly you are dressed!’ and we know that compliments uttered to us on his part may not be entirely sincere. Furthermore, this is as it should be.
The sonnet ends with a couplet that reinforces the proper place of untruth in human life:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
This couplet again points to the complexity of the human mind. The relationship between the lovers is maintained by lies, known to be such; and yet ‘by lies we flattered be’.
Flattery works, of course, because the object of it wants to believe that the flatterer is speaking true. It is delightful to be told that something one is, something one does, or even something one has, is marvellously good. The wish quickly becomes the thought and then the belief, and even the most outrageous and obviously false flattery is often not without its gratifying effect. It is flattering to be thought worth flattering.
Shakespeare’s sonnet indicates the convolutions of the human mind, in a way very much more sophisticated than most modern psychologising. The situation it describes is labyrinthine and not easily to be made linear, like life itself. It is an example of
Something, whose truth convinc’d at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
Theodore Dalrymple, a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist, is a contributing editor of City Journal and The New English Review.