Adam Phillips · Is curiosity good for us?

It is an existential condition that we never know the internal state of another being with certainty.Andrea Celenza, Transference, Love, BeingThe superego, which has all too easily passed into ordinary language as the secular equivalent of the conscience, has had a rather chequered career as both an idea and as one of the main ‘characters’ in our so-called internal world. Originally deemed by Freud to be the voice of the restrictive and forbidding father internalised by the Oedipal child (the father who stops the child, in this literally familiar scenario, from sleeping with the mother), the superego seemed to relish its part as the punitive, mean-minded killjoy that supervised our lives, using guilt and shame to keep us on the straight and narrow. Its astonishing power revealed the strength of our wish to be inhibited and controlled (just think of the scale and scope of guilt and shame in our everyday lives).Those early optimistic Freudians who saw psychoanalysis as a force for liberation described it as a treatment in which the superego itself was tempered, tamed, reconsidered and revised. Sándor Ferenczi, Freud’s inspired follower, even went so far as to suggest that the aim of psychoanalysis is the dissolution of the superego. He invited us to imagine what our lives would be like if we were not so willing to submit ourselves to extrinsic, restrictive and severe authorities and more willing to work out our own personal morality (it being assumed that one definition of development is the freedom to choose by whom one wants to be judged). Echoing this, the Kleinian psychoanalyst Roger Money-Kyrle suggested that the aim of analysis was to prove the ‘irrelevance’ of the patient’s inhibitions, making us wonder what our inhibitions are irrelevant to and what, if our inhibitions are irrelevant, is relevant.Both the psychoanalytic idealists and the psychoanalytic realists agree that we are suffering from excessive – very frightened and frightening – self-control and are intimidated by our instinctual life. In other words, we are persecuted by our assumed natures as instinct-driven creatures. The Freudian idealists, admittedly a bit thin on the ground between and after two world wars, seemed to be saying: let’s find out what our lives would be like if we were less intimidated by our putative natures, less paranoid about who we happen to be, more embracing of our appetites, less traumatised by our destructiveness. The realists asserted that we have very good reasons to be frightened of our supposed nature. All evidence suggests that we are desperate, greedy, rivalrous, cruel and predatory creatures, and that to make life bearable we need appropriate internal and external constraints. The question, as always, is whether so-called human nature is described as fundamentally benign or malign – something to be welcomed or something to be dreaded (or both). Some people no longer believe in binary oppositions or dualisms, preferring and promoting more nuanced and various descriptions. And if we’re anti-essentialists, we no longer believe that there is anything that we are fundamentally; nor, by the same token, are we going to straightforwardly accept stories about human nature. We are more likely to wonder who needs us to believe these stories, and why we, and mostly they, will be better off if we do. Essentialism, when it isn’t useful and true, is coercive control.This is all a roundabout way of wondering why we crave being controlled by such authorities. Psychoanalysis – and most, if not all, political theory since Plato – answers these questions, and pragmatism affirms that we need to go on asking them if we would like to go on working out what we want to make of ourselves. So far, it seems, we have made monsters of ourselves as the only animals that, as Auden pointed out, enjoy harming ourselves and others. The way round this intolerable and apparently irredeemable problem is to realise that the term superego – and its precursor, conscience – refers to the part of us that has no curiosity about ourselves. It’s the saboteur of curiosity about ourselves. And that part of us, like a narrow-minded fascist, has only one project: to destroy our pleasures in being alive by trying to kill our curiosity (or by making us frightened of our curiosity, which amounts to the same thing).It may be worth wondering, at least from a psychoanalytic point of view, what it is about intimidation that we enjoy. There is, after all, no shortage of things to be frightened of, but why do we find fear so addictive and compelling? Why do we seem to be the only animals that hate and attack our own nature? Or, to put it the other way round, what are the problems that our stories about so-called human nature claim to answer? Our curiosity may be or could be one of the best things about us (though when we describe someone as a curious person we can sometimes mean that they are a bit odd, as though we admire curiosity but it makes us uneasy). It is certainly something in children that amazes and amuses us. And yet, as I say, we are tempted to sabotage this part of ourselves. The superego, as described by Freud and Klein, is an essentialist: it pretends to know exactly who we are, and, in making us guilty and ashamed, implicitly claims to be telling us the truth about ourselves. When we feel guilty or ashamed, we are rarely free to wonder whether we actually believe we have done something wrong. The function of guilt and shame is to stop us being able to think or see things from contested points of view; we give up the democracy of our own minds. When we feel guilty and ashamed it seems impossible – or evasive, or irresponsible, or cowardly – to be curious about our guilt and our shame. They appear as unquestioned and unquestionable states of mind.What would make someone, anyone, phobic of their curiosity? What might be endangering about curiosity? The obvious answer is that one doesn’t know where it will lead, and that translates as moral and emotional perplexity. I may find myself feeling things or wanting things or thinking things or discovering things that unsettle me. Curiosity is direction without a destination, as though the questions about curiosity are always: ‘Where will it end? Will it end? And will it end well (whatever well is taken to be)?’ Curiosity, almost by definition, may have no sense of an ending. And, in a different way, we have little sense of why, how and when our curiosity begins; of what inspires it and why we consent to it, if and when we do. In the unconscious selective attention of everyday life – whatever or whoever happens to interest us or attract our attention – there is a crisis of choice. At any given moment, are we going to follow our curiosity when we may have little sense or knowledge of the value of what we notice we are tempted by?Curiosity, that is to say, poses a very interesting and ordinary moral problem – a description of every love affair and every demand we make: can we afford to pursue something or someone that we cannot know the value or the meaning of beforehand? We may simply be averse to curiosity because it is always a kind of risk. Certainly, to be curious is to recognise that there is something we want that we are lacking; it’s a benign acknowledgment of dependence, of our inability to be self-sufficient. It confirms what we always already know: wanting is a wish to predict the future and we cannot predict the future – often or always we know too little about it. We can only be curious, in other words, if we are not omniscient. And abrogating our omniscience – whether it be the omniscience of knowing everything or knowing nothing – is always harder than it seems. It can feel as though curiosity exposes our helplessness and our appetite, which are always inextricable. Curiosity reveals how little so-called self-control – not to mention self-sufficiency – we might have, or even want.We might say that in being curious we are dependent on our curiosity being satisfied, but this is also a way of escaping curiosity: we want to assuage our anxiety about curiosity by trying to bring it to an end – preferably a pleasurable end – or by persuading ourselves that we know, in some absolute sense, what we are curious about. I probably do know what I am curious about, but what I am less likely to know – or more likely to be unconscious of – is why this, of all things, has incited my curiosity. Our fear of curiosity may be that it exposes us too much to that which is enigmatic about ourselves and others. (We can’t say, ‘tell me what makes someone curious and I will tell you about them,’ though ‘I am my curiosity’ is something someone might say about themselves.) ‘Do what nobody else can do for you,’ Thoreau suggests in a letter, as if to say not only that we can’t depend on other people for everything we want and need (as we did as children), but also that not everything can be delegated. It’s important to have a sense of what other people can’t do for you, and therefore of what you shouldn’t or can’t demand of them. In so far as we are frightened of our curiosity, we will be inclined to delegate it to others, to get other people to be curious on our behalf. But then we are likely to be curious about their curiosity, and envious of their freedom to be curious and the pleasure they may get from it. It’s notable that curiosity in others can make us envious of – and curious about – the pleasure of others (curiosity, in other words, can feel too much like a forbidden pleasure). We are understandably keen to distinguish voyeurism, for example, from our other cultural interests.If acculturation means teaching people what they should be curious about, and the ways in which they should go about being curious, then we are all likely to have a strong sense of what acceptable curiosity is. But forbidden curiosity is a paradoxical idea, a more paradoxical idea than forbidden desire, because forbidden curiosity is far easier