My favorite Groucho Marx line has always been “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” Basically, I want to be a contrarian when I grow up. In The Secret Language of Birthdays, the description of those born on November 4th (my birthday) is “The Provocateur.” It is safe to say that this very blog exists so that I can practice at contrarian provocations. But since the truest words ever spoken were “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV,” in real life the closest I get to Groucho is “Whatever it is, I am both for it and against it.”
Having constructed an entire life out of ambivalence, I would say that the most interesting thing about the condition is that, far from being undecided, ambivalence is the state of being doubly decided. Sometimes this means that my ambivalence charades as Groucho’s contrarianism. For example, when confronted with outspoken atheism I can only think how obnoxious the ill-founded certainty in materialism is in the face of the stupefying mystery that anything exists whatsoever. But when confronted with religious piety I find my thoughts turning towards a) natural selection and b) how much more I’d rather watch a college basketball game than go to church/synagogue/meditation hall etc. This presents a façade of “Whatever it is, I’m against it” consistency, but is in fact the thoroughly inconsistent condition of being both for and against religion at the same time that I am for and against scientific secularism.
It should come as no surprise that this ambivalent Episcopalian ended up with a devout Jew, which arrangement protects me in equal parts from 1) my religion, 2) her religion, and 3) the absence of religion, while exposing me to each. Along these same lines, in my professional life I work hand in glove with management, while remaining an active member of the line worker’s labor union. And while my personal beliefs about human behavior are grounded almost entirely in a Freudian psychodynamic model, in my professional practice I am a strict behaviorist. The topography of my everyday world becomes: the ayes had it, but when and for how long?
So, by way of a possible explanation of ambivalence, and given that I am off the clock and we are deep in the weeds of my personal beliefs, Freud. Note the precise word Freud uses in his landmark 1923 essay, The Ego and the Id, to describe the change that takes place in a boy once his Oedipus complex takes hold:
“… until the boy’s sexual wishes in regard to his mother become more intense and his father is perceived as an obstacle to them; from this the Oedipus complex originates. His identification with his father then takes on a hostile colouring and changes into a wish to get rid of his father in order to take his place with his mother. Henceforward his relation to his father is ambivalent.” (emphasis added)
But perhaps the die isn’t merely cast for a complicated relationship with mon pere, as Freud goes on to explain that “The super-ego retains the character of the father.” It does so because the super-ego is essentially established in the father’s image:
“The child’s parents, and especially his father, were perceived as the obstacle to a realization of his Oedipus wishes; so his infantile ego fortified itself for the carrying out of the repression by erecting this same obstacle within itself. It borrowed strength to do this, so to speak, from the father, and this loan was an extraordinarily momentous act.”
So if, connecting the dots, “henceforward his relation to his father is ambivalent,” mustn’t we also recognize that henceforward his (my) relation to the dominant element of his (my) very own psyche, the super-ego, is also fundamentally ambivalent? And if religion, workplace hierarchy, and theory qua truth are the worldly elements which carry much of the super-ego’s water in re authority, then it should come as no surprise that, as noted above, my predominant stance to each of the three is one of ambivalence.
Freud consistently held that humanity’s foremost problem can be found in our inclinations and instincts towards aggression. If he was wrong about everything else he ever said, he was indubitably quite right about this. (We don’t have religion because he was wrong, we need religion because he was right. We need somebody to command us to love our neighbors as ourselves.) But let’s suppose that Freud was also right about the super-ego:
“It is remarkable that the more a man checks his aggressiveness towards the exterior the more severe- that is aggressive- he becomes in his ego ideal (super-ego)… the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes his ideal’s (super-ego’s) inclination to aggressiveness against his ego.”
I.e., if you love your neighbor as yourself, you become your own worst enemy.
Unless, that is, you slip out the back door as your super-ego comes gunning for you through the front. Under threat, human beings have two basic choices: fight or flight. And since you have as much of a chance in a brawl with your super-ego as you did as a toddler against your dad (“As the child was once under a compulsion to obey its parents, so the ego submits to the categorical imperative of its super-ego,”), you are left with the options of submission to the aggression (“Thank you sir, may I have another” by way of an unflagging towing of whichever party line is carrying the super-ego’s water), or flight. Ambivalence, I would suggest, is exactly the latter.
We all hear what we want to hear. And, it seems, the super-ego is no different. Ambivalence trades in the paradox of being simultaneously for and against the very same thing, whereas the super-ego’s common coin is that all too familiar binary oppositional pairing: “You’re either with us or against us.” So while I very well know that I am both for and against e.g. religion, there is no receptor on the super-ego’s brain for that particular agonist, if you will. Under such circumstances, like everyone else the super-ego hears the part that it wants to hear, that, in this case, I am for religion, and, satisfied of my obeisance, leaves me the heck alone.
I say my prayers every night, try, and fail, to love my neighbor as myself each day, because I really am for religion. This is, apparently, enough for my super-ego. But I also walked out of church eighteen years ago and (almost) never looked back; dutifully escorting my wife to shul on Shabbos or Passover is just a reenactment of walking out of church, not because I’m going to synagogue instead of church, but because it is, taking inspiration from my favorite Raymond Chadler novel, something of a long goodbye. So, I really do want nothing to do with religion (although, as the saying goes, goodbye is not always goodbye).
I am ambivalent. I am a paradox. I am free. Or as free as it gets on the lam.
