Twenty years ago, I went out for lunch with a work colleague, whom I will call A. She had grown up in a working-class family, had done well at school and university, and was building a career for herself in the financial services industry. Despite her successes, she told me that she felt unsure about her place in the world because when she left home to go to college aged eighteen, her parents had told her that she had been adopted when she was a baby. They had never met, nor did they know the names of her biological parents. Around the time we had lunch, recently introduced legislative changes offered adults who had been given up for adoption the right to initiate contact with their biological parents, and A told me that she had decided to do this. She loved the people who had brought her up and said that she would always think of them as her mum and dad, but she was curious about the story behind her adoption and wanted to know the identities of her biological parents. She had decided to take the risk that comes with moving from ignorance to knowledge.
I think things worked out well for A. I remember speaking to her a year or so later, and she had been in contact with both of her biological parents. They had met at university in the early 1970s and when her mother became pregnant unintentionally, they had agreed that they would give up their baby for adoption immediately after birth. The couple had later split up and both now had children with their new partners, but both were very happy to meet the daughter whom they had given away. As A commented, I started this process with one family and have ended it with three. They were all very different, but she felt she belonged to each of them, and was relieved that her risky decision had worked out.
Searching for the truth about our past does not always end this well. Another young woman I know, let me call her B, decided to contact her birth mother when she was in her twenties, only to discover that she had been in and out of prison and had a history of drug addiction. Her mother’s response, on becoming reacquainted with the daughter she once gave away, was to press her to send money. While A’s risk taking led to happiness, B’s risk taking worked out less well. In some cases, losing touch with family members can turn out for the best, and rediscovering them can be a source of pain. We often feel a deep burden of responsibility for our parents and siblings, far greater than for our friends and neighbours to whom we have no biological relationship, irrespective of whether these family members have provided us with care and support.
A long time ago, I heard an interview with a risk expert, who listed the dangers we encounter in everyday life and how we should think more carefully about the way we live. I remember she said taking more care crossing the road was probably the biggest single way to improve longevity in Britain. Nowadays, less alcohol and fewer calories would probably be above road safety at the top of the list. In the interview, she was asked, given that the world is such a dangerous place would we not be better off if we all stayed at home? Not at all, she replied, few of us realise quite what dangerous places houses can be. More recently, a friend wrote a report for the British railway authorities on the risks of travelling by train. In most years, in the United Kingdom you are more likely to die falling down a flight of steps leading to the platform than from an accident involving a moving train. Life is inherently risky, and not doing very much is sometimes the riskiest option of all.
In his essay The Uncanny Sigmund Freud tells this little tale about getting lost:
Strolling one hot summer afternoon through the empty and to me unfamiliar streets of a small Italian town, I found myself in a district about whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Only heavily made-up women were to be seen at the windows of the little houses, and I hastily left the little street at the next turning. However, after wandering about for some time without asking the way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence began to attract attention. Once more I hurried away, only to return there again by a different route. I was now seized by a feeling that I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad to find my way back to the piazza that I had recently left and refrain from any further voyages of discovery.
There are three reasons why I like this story. First, there is something gently comic about an early-twentieth century Viennese haut bourgeois – no doubt wearing a light-weight suit, a tie, and a hat – unintentionally wandering into the red-light district of a small Italian town and then, despite his best endeavours, finding himself repeatedly drawn back there by the irregularly laid-out side streets, suggesting to the watching women a greater interest in their trade than he would have wished to reveal. There is here a heightened element of confusion and embarrassment that draws on the tension between both class and national identities: the hesitancy of the rich client in the presence of the poor prostitutes, together with the reserved northern European confronted by his uninhibited southern counterparts.
Second, Freud tells this story to illustrate one of the meanings of the experience of the uncanny, in this case, our sense of helplessness when trying unsuccessfully to leave a place, just as in a dream we sometimes find ourselves desperate to run away from something but however much we try, we remain stationary. This suggestion would be unremarkable, except that a few pages later Freud makes the strong claim that psychoanalytic theory shows that “every affect arising from an emotional impulse – of whatever kind – is converted into fear by being repressed” and, further, that one subset of those things felt to be frightening are those cases where the frightening element is something that has been repressed but now returns. “This species of the frightening” Freud says, “would then constitute the uncanny, and it would be immaterial whether it was itself originally frightening or arose from another affect.” Which invites the reader to ask the question, what was the original source of the fear that, having been repressed now returned to Freud when he stumbled back into the small town’s red-light district?
Freud is a provocative writer, but one who was also highly self-aware. He must have understood, when he included a story about himself in this essay, that he was not only making fun of himself, now sixty years old, for his respectability and social status; but that he was also exposing himself to scrutiny by the reader when he revealed elements of his repressed fears. This is the third reason I like the story, because it shows Freud’s willingness to subject himself to the rigour of his own theoretical investigations, thereby foregoing any pretention to be immune from the diseases of the mind that he diagnosed. Unlike the standard Western medical model in which a healthy and knowledgeable doctor cures a sick and ignorant patient, Freud’s psychoanalytic model suggests that we are all patients, trying to solve the many puzzles of our behaviour through careful discussion. While some of us might have made more progress than others, none of us is immune.
The sources of our fears and the mechanisms by which they are repressed are Freud’s great subjects. We might think he focused too much on sexuality or child/parent relationships, or that his sample of patients was insufficiently wide ranging to base anything but equally narrow conclusions. Nonetheless, I think that he is right to argue that in our adult lives we frequently struggle to escape from the influence of fears that we developed in childhood. His point was that although we all start out as ignorant, we are never innocent: from our earliest conscious moments, we adjust our expectations according to our interpreted experience of the world. As we grow into adults, our ignorance can be replaced with knowledge, but our deepest emotional responses which predate our learned knowledge also influence the way we think about and manage risk in our lives.
When I reflect on my conversations with A and B, I remember feeling ambivalent about their respective quests. I understood their curiosity, their desire to know the truth, to find out who it was who had conceived them, and why their biological parents had felt the necessity of giving them away to be brought up by others. Here was a mystery to be uncovered, a puzzle to be solved, it was obvious why they would want to know the truth. There were clearly some risks involved – that the process of discovery might make them sad or resentful and, in addition, it might cause upset to the parents who had adopted them – but in both cases, it seemed to them that the risks were worth taking. However, they also shared a supposition, one which I do not find compelling, that to know who you are you must know where you come from, that our identities are constituted primarily by our histories.
The lingering power that a person’s past can exercise over their present and their future is one of the great insights of Freud’s work. One reading of his essays, both his early clinical studies and the wide-ranging social studies he published in later life, is that we are all trapped in the prison of our misunderstandings, drawn from the emotional experiences of childhood, over which we had little or no control. We do not have the ability to reinvent ourselves in later life, nor is it possible to re-organise society at large, nor the family or kinship units of which it is comprised, in more healthy ways. The best we can do is to accommodate ourselves to our fates, using the psychoanalytical process to work through our complex childhood histories, during which our characters and habits have formed. We might be able to mitigate the worst excesses of the past, but no more. It is a philosophy that is humane, but deeply pessimistic.
There is another reading of Freud’s work, which considers him not as the scientist he aspired to be, but more like a novelist, who draws our attention to the ever-present risk of self-deception about our ability (and desire) to live free and happy lives. His description of the sufferings of his patients and their struggle to understand the sources of their discontentment, are similar in certain respects to the stories of George Eliot, Henry James, and Leo Tolstoy, which draw attention to the constraints of social class, convention, and family structure upon those who wish to create a new and good life for themselves. Likewise, Freud’s contemporary, Thomas Mann wrote about the ways in which our sense of our inheritance – whether character, culture, or wealth – might drive us to live and act in ways that made us permanently unhappy. This interpretation of Freud warns us of the dangers of allowing ourselves to be determined by the past, and it draws our attention to the complexity of the process by which we might overcome the power of history, through dialogue and reflective action, and through the acquisition of knowledge.