Interview with Professor Donald Carveth
Donald L. Carveth is an Emeritus professor of Sociology and Social and Political Thought and a Senior Scholar at York University, Toronto, Canada. In addition to his private practice as a psychoanalyst, he has been a training and supervising analyst at the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis, and is a past director of the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis and a past Editor-in-Chief of the “Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis/ Revue Canadienne de Psychanalyse,” which he helped found. He is also the author of Psychoanalytic Thinking: A Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice (2018) and The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience (2013).
He was interviewed by Mahmoud Elalfi, a researcher at GCAS, on the 15th of August 2023 to discuss his work, which touches upon a wide range of psychoanalytic thought. The interview follows the release of his most recent book, Guilt: A Contemporary Introduction (2023). Along with the discussions on guilt, the superego, and conscience, the conversation goes into a variety of topics including existentialism, psychoanalytic ethics and goals, Kleinian theory, dialectical thinking, authoritarianism, and theology. Throughout the exchange, personal anecdotes also come up, many figures (sometimes fictional) are mentioned, and some intellectual journeys get retraced.
_______________________________________________________________________
Mahmoud Elalfi It's quite a pleasure to be talking to you; congratulations on your new book!
Donald Carveth Thank you. I'm pleased with the book because the Routledge demanded that the writers of this series produce a maximum of 40,000 words. This was very good for me because, coming out of the university, I've always had a fairly high academic style, very wordy, so this forced me to concentrate my thought and to write very clearly and succinctly, which had a good effect on me, I think.
M.E. And it's definitely not your first work on the topic of guilt, so maybe we can start from there. I believe I've seen you cite somewhere Nietzsche's claim that all philosophy is a form of confession. Would you say that this applies to your work on guilt as well? Does it have any personal connection to you?
D.C. Oh, definitely. What was Nietzsche's phrase? A “disguised subjective confession”? I think that's true, in a way. But in another way, it's not personal. It's true in the sense that I have pretty much always been preoccupied with guilt, and struggled with multiple types of guilt: political guilt, personal guilt, sexual guilt, every kind of guilt, you know. Well, that makes it sound like I'm confessing that I'm a very guilty man, but no, because I believe we're all guilty. You see, this is a series of books for Routledge. There's a book on eating disorders, a book on depression, one on envy, another on projective identification, and so on. So, on the surface, it looks like someone might write a book on whatever, and Carveth is writing a book on guilt—that this is just another topic. But guilt is not just another topic. This is what I've learned and what really came home to me in the course of writing this last book: guilt is a dimension of human existence.
I've always known that I have been a bit of an existentialist. Many years ago, I was very preoccupied, I suppose, with Jean-Paul Sartre, and then from Sartre I went back to Kierkegaard, and then from Kierkegaard I came up to Heidegger. And so I've always known that, philosophically, I was existentially oriented, but I guess I've come to realize that this existentialist element is also central to my psychoanalytic vision, and guilt is a category, an element, of human existence. It's not just an emotion like other emotions; it's something that we all have to struggle with. It's intrinsic to being human. I mean, our animal cousins don't suffer from this; they don't have symbolic consciousness. They don't have the self-awareness to be plagued by guilt. But I think human beings are, and, of course, most human beings render much of this guilt unconscious. So a central part of the psychoanalytic process is helping patients become aware that they are guilty and to help them become aware of how they are punishing themselves, and then help them sort out how much of this guilt is justified and how much of it is unjustified; how much of this guilt is due to their own actions and fantasies and how much is induced in them by others.
M.E. This reminds me of your assertion that Kohut's “Tragic Man” is still Freud's “Guilty Man” underneath. The way I understand it is that it is not only because guilt is existential, but also that guilt is active in the constitution of Tragic Man in one way or another. It does seem to me that Tragic Man deals with shame, for example, that guilt somehow plays out in the relationship to the self.
D.C. You said that quite well. I believe that underneath Tragic Man, there is a buried Guilty Man. I mean, Eric Erickson said that before 1950 patients came thinking they knew who they were and who they ought to be, but they were having trouble being it, and they wanted help from the therapist. After 1950, people come not knowing who they are or even who they ought to be; so that's Tragic Man. He comes and he doesn't know who he is. He doesn't know who he ought to be. So we start working with these people, with modern, or perhaps it would be better to call them postmodern patients, and it may take some years, but it's like peeling the layers off the onion. Eventually, we get down to the guilt; the guilt emerges. In the new book, I gave the example of Albert Camus' L'Etranger [The Stranger]. He's a classic Tragic Man. He's indifferent; he's empty. And what I'm saying is that psychoanalysts seem to have lost their ability to see the guilt behind that indifference. He may be indifferent, but he still manages to kill somebody and he still manages to get himself killed. And so from my point of view, Meursault, Tragic Man, is a frozen man who is in need of therapeutic thawing. And, as I said in the book, I can imagine having him on my couch and seeing emerging gradually his rage, and then his guilt, and then his tears as he melts. And so we come down to guilt and self-punishment beneath Tragic Man. That's what I believe.
M.E. Which probably brings us to the topic of guilt evasion.
D.C. Yes, that is a very huge topic. Because, you see, I don't believe it's just our patients who are guilt-evading; the whole field of psychoanalysis is. Freud did not evade it. Freud and his early followers had a keen sense of how guilt and self-punishment were at the core of what psychoanalysis is about. But, you know, very early on, analysts started moving away from that. I think it was in 1960 that Joseph Sandler was astonished that analysts were no longer categorizing their clinical material in terms of the concepts of “guilt” and the “superego” in the indexing of cases at the Hampstead Clinic. A few years later, Jacob Arlow in New York made exactly the same observation. So analysis was moving away from guilt and away from the concept of the superego. To some extent, psychoanalysis had early on been emphasizing the unconscious agency, how we unconsciously contrive to re-find our childhood suffering. You see, for classical psychoanalysis, we are not just victims. Yes, we are victims of parental and environmental failure, but psychoanalysis focused on what we do with this victimhood because we often unconsciously contrive to keep it going. This is the repetition compulsion. Having been victimized, we now continue to seek victimhood, or we reverse roles and victimize other people because trauma generates rage, and rage gets turned on oneself. But the analytic eye was on how unconsciously, instead of transcending and growing, we repeat. But this insight has been marginalized. It's been pushed to the side by later psychoanalysts and by the revisionist schools of self-psychology, relational psychoanalysis, intersubjectivity, and trauma theory, which certainly focused on our victimhood, but kind of lost touch with our agency. And I think this guilt evasion has been happening in psychoanalysis for many decades.
M.E. I do feel like guilt evasion is a concept that is very useful in talking about the collective. Also, since we are on that level, authoritarianism crosses my mind; do you have thoughts on it?
D.C. Oh, authoritarianism. That's another big topic. It's interesting that you should ask that because I've just been asked to write for the “Free Associations” journal; they're having a conference around the end of September, beginning of October, and it's all about authoritarianism. What really strikes me is that people who are concerned with justice and politics, both on the left and the right, rarely mention authoritarianism, and I must say that I think I kind of forgot about it myself. I have not had enough self-awareness of how issues of authoritarianism are central to my ethical outlook. As a young man, as a graduate student, when I was a leftist Trotskyist, I left Trotskyism because I saw the authoritarianism and manipulation. The students would be having a meeting of the committee to end the war in Vietnam, but the Trotskyists would meet several hours earlier and plan how to manipulate the students' meeting, and I was very turned off by that. I seemed to be intrinsically oriented towards democratic, anti-authoritarian values. So I then moved on to a kind of anarchism, Bakunin... Kropotkin... and then I found Noam Chomsky, who became a hero for so many years. But I am anti-authoritarian. The thing is, there's the authoritarianism of the right, but now there's the authoritarianism of the left, the so-called social justice warriors who don't seem to really often give a damn about due process or care much about free speech. They shut down people who've been invited to universities to speak. I mean, this is authoritarianism.
And then in the institutions of psychoanalysis, there is authoritarianism. Some of the older training analysts are old patriarchal authoritarian personalities, and they figure they know what psychoanalysis is, and what it's about, and they can be quite authoritarian in the way they conduct themselves towards candidates. There's a huge power differential between the senior training analysts and the candidates who are in training, so I don't mean to exempt the institutions of psychoanalysis from critique. The institutions are in need of reform. They need critique, but it should be responsible critique and it requires open dialogue.
M.E. So do you perhaps also see links between guilt evasion and authoritarianism?
D.C. I think guilt evasion and authoritarianism are linked. I mean, if one was not engaged in guilt evasion, one would feel guilty for one's authoritarian tendencies. We all have authoritarian tendencies because we all have a superego, and the superego is intrinsically authoritarian. Where does it come from? The authorities. We internalize the parents and their superego; they are the authorities. We're not seeing them accurately; we're screening them through a whole series of childhood fantasies. They may not, in reality, be as authoritarian as we imagined that they were. We often get a very distorted vision of the parents but we internalize that vision, and we all have this inner authoritarian voice that is very strict and punitive, quite distinct from conscience. Conscience has a bite; it wants to get us back on the correct ethical path, and it will disturb our sleep and haunt us until we do turn around and head back onto the proper moral path, but it doesn't want to whip us. The superego just wants to whip us. It's a sadistic, authoritarian part of the self. We can't get rid of it entirely, but mental health means moving closer to conscience, embracing conscience, and strengthening ourselves by being in sync with conscience, and now we can stand up to the superego because we know we are good people. We know we're not perfect, but we know we're doing our best. The superego is out to abuse us, but we acquire the ability to say “Back off” to it; “Shut up”; “I'm not listening to you”; “You're a sadist”; “Get out of here.” We acquired the strength of character to be able to do that and now it can't inhibit us. It can't interfere with our work or our love. It will never go away; we can't demolish it. Freud at one point talks about demolishing it, and Ferenczi and Abraham agree with him that we need to eliminate it. No, you cannot eliminate it. It reminds me of what Jesus said: “Think not that I come to abolish the law and the prophets; I come not to abolish but to fulfill,” which I take him as saying I come to strengthen the conscience, which can then stand up to the superego the way he stood up to the law of the temple at that time. He broke many of those laws: he hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors; he hung out with the wrong people, you know, and he defied much of the law, the Sabbath. “Man is not made for the Sabbath; the Sabbath is made for man,” he says, and he gets himself crucified in the process. But he stands for conscience against superego. Yet you can never eliminate the superego because, as he says, we need the law; we need a book of rules. But the book of rules should be disciplined by the conscience. That's my position, and I admire the great whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange and all of these people who find the courage to defy the superego establishment, which is so often in the wrong morally.
M.E. Which is why I think you don't consider psychoanalysis as a work towards adaptation.
D.C. Yes, health often refuses adaptation. Joyce McDougall started writing about “normopathy.” Eric Fromm, actually very early on I think, wrote a book on the pathology of normalcy, and Christopher Bolas writes about what he calls normotic illness. These are socially adapted people who are sick because they have adapted to a sick society. I must say that early Lacan agreed and affirmed this. He was very much against ego psychology, because he had a rather one-sided view of it as promoting adaptation, and he was partly right; their language was kind of headed in that direction. They had a lot of good things to offer, however, but Lacanians think ego psychology is all bad. It's kind of a splitting, right? It's not all bad; defense analysis is brilliant, right? We need the defense analysis ego psychology offers. But they were emphasizing adaptation, and so was Harry Stack Sullivan. People often think Eric Fromm belongs to the culturistic school with Sullivan and Horney, but he was very different from them. I mean, Sullivan did associate adaptation with mental health while Eric Fromm was an existentialist. You know, there are strong parallels between Fromm and Jean-Paul Sartre; there are many differences, but there are parallels, and he certainly did not confuse health with adaptation. He wrote a whole book on that, The Sane Society; should have probably been called “The Insane Society.”
M.E. So, the distinction between the superego and the conscience is evidently very important to you. Is that something that you felt is missing in general from psychoanalytic discourse?
D.C. Absolutely. It became evident to me very early on. Well, let's go back. My first training was as a sociologist, so when I first became involved with social science I was plagued by the problem of sociological relativism which was pervading the field of sociology— the whole idea that there is one morality on this side of the mountains, but over there on the other side of the mountains people have an entirely different morality. “But what is the true morality?” I wanted to ask, and then, of course, the answer that sociology gives is that there is no such thing as true morality, because morality is entirely a social construction. So I was resisting this relativism in sociology before I became a psychoanalyst. And then I became a psychoanalyst, and I found that exactly the same kind of relativism pervades the field of psychoanalysis. You can only criticize one superego from the standpoint of another superego. And as I put it in the most recent book, the problem is that “there is no judge to judge the judge.” I mean, James Strachey talked in the 1930s about how analysts discovered the patients' superego, which is usually very harsh and critical, and how one of the goals of analysis is superego modification, but he failed to tell us how to know in what direction. Should we make the superego more strict? Should we make it less strict? How do we know? Where does the knowledge come from that tells us in what direction to modify the superego?
The analysts were not asking themselves this question. So I began to posit conscience as a separate element of the psyche because it is conscience that tells us in what direction the superego needs to be modified, and certainly for most analysts, the superego needs to be moved away from sadism, away from death towards life, away from cruelty towards kindness, away from hate towards love. And so I began to realize that although psychoanalysts claim some kind of value neutrality, this value neutrality is absurd. Psychoanalysis has never been a value-neutral practice; we stand for life over death, love over hate, kindness over cruelty. I mean, this is the core ethic underlying all psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic practice. But we've been too ashamed. The way I put it in my 2013 book [The Still Small Voice] is that while others fail to practice what they preach, psychoanalysts fail to preach what they practice.
M.E. So you don't shy away from admitting the ethical character of psychoanalysis, let's say.
D.C. Not at all. I see it as central, and I'm trying to get analysts to see this and acknowledge it. It's important for psychoanalysts to come out and admit that we are an ethical practice.
M.E. But then there might be challenges when taking up the idea of conscience, because it can play itself out in many ways, and it can be hard to decide what counts as love or kindness, for example. Do you think that it's therefore part of the psychoanalyst's work to arrive at suitable interpretations in collaboration with the analysand?
D.C. Well, I think both the analyst and the analysand need to read philosophers. I mean, to me, it seems the questions you mentioned, that we may all be against cruelty in favor of kindness, but what does that mean? What counts as love or kindness? That becomes a philosophical task, it seems to me. Now, I don't mean that it's confined to professional philosophers. I think all human beings have to be philosophers to some degree, and I think that the analytic dialogue involves some of that. But I think we count on both the analyst and the analysand to be reading and to be thinking along these lines. I don't think the analyst and the analysand should have to invent the answers to all of these questions, but, certainly, these ethical questions are part of the dialogue between the analytic couple, for sure.
M.E. And could it be that someone might not “have” a conscience?
D.C. I think conscience is always there. I think that even the most severe psychopath has a conscience; he has just learned how to bury it. He has learned how to gag it and bind it. What are those three monkeys? “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” I mean, he is very talented at silencing his conscience. So it looks like there is no conscience, but I don't believe that. Take Winnicott's concept of true and false self. Some people have a very buried true self; they are very estranged from the true self, but that doesn't mean they don't have a true self. Seems to me as long as one is alive, as long as the heart is still beating, there is a true self; it's just deeply, deeply buried—so the same with the conscience.
M.E. In your work, you talk a lot about the movement towards conscience in terms of Melanie Klein's paranoid-schizoid (PS) and depressive/reparative (D) positions; why do you think this is so central?
D.C. It's good that you ask that question. Look, I just finished reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which I read as a young man, but I have recently reread it. And since I finished it, I've gone back; I can't seem to put the book down. I've gone back many times to listen over and over again, because I'm legally blind so I depend on audible books, and I listened to those last two chapters, because, to me, they're the most important part of the book. So the book is this whole complicated narrative of this young man who by today's psychoanalytic standards has a severe narcissistic personality disorder. He's grandiose, omnipotent, and he's mixed up in a way with Nietzschean ideas of the Overman, a superman who is somehow beyond the ordinary rules and laws that govern ordinary people. He feels that there is no God, and Dostoevsky famously says “If God is dead, anything is permissible,” and so he decides he's going to act on this. He slays an old woman, a pawnbroker, and while he's killing her, someone comes in and he kills the younger woman too. Much of the book, then, along very Freudian lines, is about his unconscious guilt and his anxiety. He's in a persecutory state. From beginning to end, he's in the paranoid-schizoid position because that's where narcissism and omnipotence are anyway. But towards the end, he is loved by a young woman who follows him all the way to Siberia once he's sentenced, and she can't see him very often. They're not in a romantic love situation; he was very kind to her at one point, and she follows him. And, you know, she waits outside the prison, and sometimes he looks out a window and he sees her standing there, and finally her devotion to him causes a bit of a landslide to begin to happen in his mind. At the very end of the book, he breaks down; he's on his knees, holding her legs, and he's weeping; they're weeping together. This is the breakthrough out of the paranoid-schizoid position. He's finally developing a heart.
So, I think Melanie Klein's paranoid-schizoid and depressive/reparative positions are two fundamentally different psychic organizations. I think that since the 1950s, in the West, we have been in a cultural regression, and most people are operating much more in the paranoid-schizoid position. People talk about how Christopher Lasch in the 70s wrote about the emergence of the culture of narcissism. Well, narcissism is a key feature of the paranoid-schizoid position, and narcissism I define as self-obsession. It takes two forms: grandiose and depressed, but even if you're depressed, you're still obsessed with yourself. To get your mind off yourself and be able to see the other as real and to care about the other, that's a huge breakthrough. And that's what happens at the very end of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, and I wish he would write that second volume about the struggles of Raskolnikov; now that he's had the breakthrough, he's going to have tremendous guilt. He's going to have mourning, and he's also going to find love and, and some degree of peace, because he has actually had this breakthrough.
But yeah, we all oscillate between the two positions; we don't want to be either/or about this. I mean, everybody experiences the paranoid-schizoid position, but our patients mostly come to us in it, and even neurotic patients who may have clearly reached the depressive/reparative position, who have at least landed there, can't hang on to it and are falling back excessively. Our job is therefore to help them move more thoroughly into the reparative position. Some of our patients, the very borderline ones, are very ensconced in PS, and the work is very difficult with them. Psychosis is a different matter. Psychotic patients, if they've had a psychotic break, may very much be in the paranoid-schizoid position, but, depending on the nature of the psychosis, they can sometimes come back into the reparative position much more quickly than borderline patients do. It's sometimes much easier to treat someone who's had a psychotic break than it is to treat a chronic borderline patient.
M.E. It's interesting that you brought up love in relation to the breakthrough into the depressive position because I know you also think that, let's say, one form of love, which is passionate love, dwells more in the paranoid-schizoid position.
D.C. Yes, yes. Well, Freud certainly thought that the state of being in love was kind of psychotic. I mean, he thinks people are crazy when they have fallen in love, and I think most of us would agree. But I'm thinking of the title of a great novel, A Fine Madness. Falling in love is madness, but it's a fine madness. I mean, who would want a life without having gone crazy in love? But you can't stay there because it is kind of mad, and very often when you pull out of that, you turn away from that relationship altogether, and you say to yourself, “What could I have been thinking?” But sometimes you come out of that and you're still with that person and you stay with the relationship, but you move it into the reparative position. And now you're loving in D, not just crazy-loving in PS.
M.E. So you see the other person more as a whole?
D.C. Yeah, warts and all as we say. You build the relationship, although you know it's going to be a deficient relationship and that there are going to be problems and flaws. But that's the nature of human existence outside of Eden. And if you're lucky, in the more mature relationships, you can recover. You want to be able to recover moments of those blissful states of being in love, and from time to time to keep the relationship alive.
M.E. This reminds me of the “Neo-Kleinian Theory: Dialectical Re-vision” chapter in your 2018 book [Psychoanalytic Thinking] where you engage with Bion's idea of the oscillation between both positions (Ps ↔D), but propose that it still needs a higher synthesis that recognizes what is “creative and life-enhancing in both” (PsD).
D.C. Yeah, I think I'm a great admirer of Bion, but he seems to have associated creativity with the paranoid-schizoid position in a way and I see it the other way around, so he was kind of confused in that one area, and Ronald Britton tends to follow him in that. But certainly, Bion, by making the arrows go both ways, recognized that mainstream Kleinian theory was engaged in a kind of splitting, PS [paranoid-schizoid position] was bad and D [depressive/reparative position] was good, and so he forces us to recognize the good in PS, like falling in love, but also the bad in D. In D you can have the pathology of seeing all sides to every question to the point where you're paralyzed. In order to act, we sometimes have to put on some blinders, make a choice, and be willing to suffer the consequences of that choice. But we can't reflect forever, we must act and that requires a certain capacity for something like splitting. I mention a colleague who wrote a paper called “In Defense of Splitting,” and he couldn't get it published, because analysts are so into thinking that splitting is wrong, which is ridiculous! I mean, if you're going to survive, you have to distinguish the poison berries from the edible berries. So, yeah, I think we need a much more dialectical understanding of PS and D and overcome that either/or thinking.
M.E. I'm curious, when did you start thinking in this dialectical manner, or how did it become part of your thinking?
D.C. Well, I have a friend who has known me for many years since I was quite young, and at some point as a university student, or certainly maybe as an early graduate student, I used to get teased by her and by other friends, because I was always talking about trying to arrive at point C, neither A nor B, but “we got to get to point C.” So I seem to have recognized this fairly early on. You know, a classical Freudian would ground it in the child's relationship with the parents. Father is point A, mother is point B, I'm trying to get to point C, which by the way, is the capital of my last name, C: Carveth. I'm trying to get to myself, you know. Am I going to be loyal to father at mother's expense? Or am I going to be loyal to mother at father's expense? No, I'm trying to get to point C, Carveth, where maybe I can find myself separately from both mother and father. But you carry that into thinking and you wind up a Hegelian. I mean, Hegel was always trying to get beyond thesis and antithesis, and I think he was really onto something. I think that's the way philosophy evolves, and much evolves in this way.
M.E. Maybe we can go back now to the ethical dimension of your work; I wonder if you think it has anything to do with your theological side. You know, even the title of your 2013 book, The Still Small Voice, has this theological undertone to it.
D.C. Yes, it does. It does, in contrast to the new book, in which I went out of my way to write it as much as possible in a completely secular language, although I just had an interview with Harvey Schwartz for the IPA podcast “Off the Couch,” and he made the point, which was a surprise to me, that he counted the number of times that I mentioned God, and the word God still appears many times, apparently, in the new book. Of course, I was raised in the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church, but I lost it all at about age 14. But then in my 40s, around the time that my son was born, you know, both of my parents died, and then within a year, I became a father. That shook the foundations, and I kind of went back to church, high Anglicanism, because there you call the priest father. I was scared to death of becoming a father, of being a father. How am I going to father? I wanted to hang out with fathers! And then it died down. The way I talk about it now is that when I'm in the paranoid-schizoid position [PS], I'm something like an evangelical Christian. When I go in for surgery, I'm in PS; I'm praying and I wake up praying, you know, but then, if I survive, I settle down and pretty soon I'm back in the depressive/reparative position, and there I am an enlightenment rationalist, I'm a scientist, and I can't stand woo-woo magical thinking. So these are two different sides of me.
And people say, well, which is it? You can't have it both ways! And I say, well, you know nothing about psychoanalysis, because Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis both say that we have to have it both ways; there is no unitary self. This is, you know, when Freud says “We're bringing them the plague,” as he pulls into New York Harbor in 1909. What is the plague? The plague is that we are inherently contradictory; we will never be unified; there is no unity. So we have to learn how to live our contradictoriness in a sublimated way. We want to shape our contradictoriness as best we can, but we can never stop being contradictory beings, and that's one of my contradictions. Well, I'm very ambivalent about the church like Kierkegaard; institutional Christianity is something else. I'm glad the churches are there. They speak the words, they read the words in the church, thank God for that, but I don't go very often. And in addition to the good words they read, there's a lot of BS that they also read there, and so I'm not a churchy Christian; I'm a Kierkegaardian, kind of mostly secular Christian, but not always secular. The magic comes back in those moments of PS. But in the current book on guilt, I tried to keep that out, because I don't want to lose my readership. If I start using Christian categories, I'm going to lose, you know, more than 50% of my readers. And I don't believe we need God in order to be good. You can be a good person, move into the depressive/reparative position, strive to work against your narcissism, and develop what Winnicott calls the capacity for concern or care. We don't need God for this. You don't need religion to be a decent, loving human being. I wanted to make that point very clear.
M.E. But would you still say that theology kind of has an insight into some dimensions of the human condition that psychoanalysis sometimes didn't quite get into?
D.C. Oh, Absolutely. Well, let me tell you the story when I'm trying to write my PhD dissertation, and I go off to the best bookstore in the city, head for the sociology section, Marxism and whatever, but before I can leave the store I go down to the basement where they have the theology section, and I'm walking out with no sociology textbooks. I'm walking out instead with a stack of books by great theologians: Tillich, Boltzmann, John Macquarie, Reinhold Niebuhr— all of these mostly existential, mostly Protestant theologians. So I'm taking those books home, and they seem to have nothing to do with my PhD thesis at all but I believe in going with your inspiration because it turned out they had everything to do with my PhD dissertation. They really enabled me to write because I found that those Christian theologians had for a long time put their finger on the major flaw in Freud. Freud naturalized human aggression and destructiveness. He thought it came from the animal, the biological in us, whereas they knew all along that it came from our freedom and our self-awareness, that it involved our symbolic consciousness, our uniqueness; the uniqueness of man is the source of his evil. Animals don't create atomic bombs and drop them on civilian cities, you know. So I learned that early on from the theologians and their total emphasis on human freedom. I mean, the Abrahamic religions, Judeo-Christian or Islamic, all are existentialist, in the sense that they all attribute freedom and responsibility to the human being, and that's crucial. Freud dismissed free will as an illusion — many times he said that— and yet, at the same time, he says the goal of clinical psychoanalysis is to set us free.
M.E. That's probably why I see you as a comprehensive thinker who brings diverse ideas into dialogue and synthesis when possible, which makes your work very rich. But to see all of this wealth of information online, you know, for people on YouTube, is quite revolutionary in my opinion. And so, my last question would be: what makes you go down the road of sharing these valuable insights online?
D.C. Well, look, I fell in love with the idea of being an educator. I'm remembering an early memory, when I was in public school, grade seven, or whatever. When there was rain on for the lunch hour, or the recess, they would send the kids down into the basement, because you couldn't go outside, and there was a girl in my class. I wasn't romantically interested in her, but I loved teaching her. So she and I would sit at these times, and I would be teaching. That's very early on. Then I get to university and I walk into my first lecture, 200 kids in a big theater, and the professor comes in, and he's standing there. He had to carry extra chairs into the room and when the class was over, all of the other kids disappeared, but not me; I went to help him carry the chairs back to wherever he had gotten them, and I couldn't sleep that night. I remember lying in bed, just realizing I wanted to be him; I wanted to be the guy at the front, talking and writing things on the board, with people writing down what I said. I knew I wanted to be a professor right then. I had already fallen in love with Freud, I already knew that I wanted to be a psychoanalyst, but then came this desire to be a professor, and I've always loved teaching. So when I retired after 46 years of teaching, I felt kind of bereft. I postponed my retirement from 65 to 69, I think. And so I'm deprived of an audience, and then I discover YouTube; that's my new audience. So I started making those video lectures, that way I could go on teaching, and people kept saying “Don, you're crazy; you should monetize your video channel,” but I've never been able to do it. I can't bring myself to do it. Because, you know, the university paid me well. University doesn't make you rich, but it gave me a decent salary for 46 years, including a sabbatical every seventh year. I felt I acquired this knowledge; I should give it back. I should give it freely back. And so that's what I've always done; I just really have a need to teach. You could call it an addiction if you want, but it's also a talent. And we enjoy displaying and deploying our talent, right?