#38: Freud, sublimation, and your toxic attachment to your inner critic
You're totally on board in theory with the idea of being kinder to yourself - it's just that your self-criticism helps you succeed, right? And while you recognise that overwork is a problem, you can't make time for rest, because then you'd fall behind, wouldn't you? Friend, don't take this the wrong way, but you have no idea what you're on about. The habits and thoughts that you think are helping you aren't doing that at all. They're making you miserable. You need to get rid of them - it's just that it's so hard to think clearly about them and what's wrong with them, and decide what to do instead. Your Academic Imperfectionist godmother is going Freudian in this episode - we're going to whip your unconscious into shape.
Episode transcript:
Does your inner critic tell you that you’d never survive without her? Listen to this.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
A couple of weeks ago, I was at the How The Light Gets In festival in Hay-on-Wye, where - among other things - I gave a talk on how philosophy can help us live better lives. A special hello to you if you happened to be there. One of the things I spoke about during that talk was the importance of being compassionate towards ourselves. In the question and answer session afterwards, someone asked something that comes up again and again in coaching sessions and, to be honest, in any discussion about self-criticism. It was this: Isn’t it important to be at least a bit mean to ourselves, so that we can stay motivated? Because if we’re too kind and accepting to ourselves, won’t we just give up and stop trying?
Now, let me say, first of all, that I’ve talked about this exact issue before, in episode #23: The way you’re trying to motivate yourself is all wrong. There’s no need to listen to that episode before this one, but you might want to check it out if you’ve been tempted to think along these lines. It seems to be endemic among the people I coach - perhaps even among academics in general, or just among ambitious people in general - that we think that being horrible to ourselves is an essential part of motivating ourselves. This isn’t true at all. As I said in episode #23, the evidence points to self-compassion and kindness being more effective motivators than self-criticism. But you don’t even need to look at the evidence to see this because you know it already, at least when it’s applied to motivating other people, rather than yourself. You know you wouldn’t try to motivate your child, or your employee, or someone you were mentoring by being horrible to them. You understand intuitively that encouragement and support are what’s needed to help people do well. If you want to help someone succeed, you need to help them build up their confidence and reach for the stars, not stamp on them and grind them into the dirt. That’s just obvious, right? We have no trouble at all grasping that - except when it comes to thinking about how we motivate ourselves.
One thing that these reflections reveal is that this tendency towards self-criticism isn’t something we’ve arrived at through carefully thinking about how we can best motivate ourselves, deciding that self-criticism is the answer, and then working to develop that capacity. None of us has deliberately developed our capacity for self-criticism at all. It’s just something we have. Something we’ve picked up as we’ve grown. It’s sometimes possible to see where it comes from - perhaps, with the help of a psychotherapist, you might come to realise that your own self-critical voice is the result of your having internalised criticism that you received when you were younger from a parent or a teacher or a peer group. Wherever it comes from, it’s certainly not the case that at some point in your life you’ve reflected on your problems with motivation or something else and thought, ‘What this problem needs is a bit more self-criticism - let me carve out some time in my busy schedule to work on getting better at that.’ But even though you haven’t intentionally developed your self-criticism habit as a result of having decided at some point that it would be useful, you have nevertheless, along the way, come to believe that it’s useful. But why?
For a helpful perspective here, we can look to the work of Sigmund Freud, the so-called father of psychoanalysis. A central feature of Freud’s thought was, of course, the idea that some of the problematic ways we think, feel, and behave can be explained by our unconscious thoughts and desires. Since we frequently don’t realise what our unconscious thoughts and desires are, let alone why we have them, it can be difficult to change the way they influence our conscious lives. Psychoanalysis is a tool that helps people discover, make sense of, and change their unconscious thoughts and desires.
One idea that Freud talked about was sublimation. Sublimation occurs when we have morally problematic (or otherwise unacceptable) beliefs or desires or behaviours, which get directed down some socially acceptable channel. In other words, we deal with those problematic behaviours not by getting rid of them, but by turning them into something acceptable. Freud was apparently first inspired to think about sublimation when he read The Harz Jouney by Heinrich Heine, which tells the story of the 19th-century German surgeon, Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach. According to Heine, Dieffenbach, rather horribly, enjoyed cutting the tails off dogs as a child. Freud was struck by the relationship between this disturbing childhood pastime and Dieffenbach’s later career as a surgeon, and it led Freud to remark, ‘There someone does the same thing during his whole lifetime, first out of sadistic mischief and later to the benefit of mankind. I thought one could appropriately call this change of significance of an action “sublimation”.’
What’s interesting about sublimation, for our purposes here, is that the initial, problematic impulse doesn’t go away. It doesn’t need to. It just gets redirected and redefined as something positive. It earns its place in the life of the person who experiences it. It’s easy to say ‘It would be better if people didn’t have the desire to mutilate gentle animals’ when the desire in question doesn’t lead to anything good. But it’s much more difficult to claim that it would be better if people didn’t have that sort of desire if it turns out to be just one side of a coin, the other side of which involves being motivated to do a lot of good in the world - and Dieffenbach, who made some important contributions to medical fields like reconstructive surgery techniques and blood transfusion, certain did a lot that was good.
What does this mean for you? Well, i’d like to invite you to think about how many of your own behaviours and thought patterns might be the results of sublimation. Your tendency to self-criticise certainly looks like a good candidate. Simply attacking oneself for no reason doesn’t look like a very good thing at all, right? It’s the mental, self-directed equivalent of cutting the tails off dogs. But if you can convince yourself that you need your self-criticism in order to remain motivated, then things look different. Best to keep the self-criticism. Feeling miserable and attacked by yourself is just the price you have to pay for being driven to strive for your goals.
There are other candidates too. Perhaps you’re someone who finds family life overwhelming, and who uses work as a means of escape - that’s something I’ll admit to having done in the past. Sure, it’s unhealthy to hide from your domestic problems, but look at the progress you’re making in your career as a result! Another candidate is the unfortunately widespread tendency to work and work and work to the point of burnout and ill-health. We do this - I at least would argue - because our sense of self-worth is bound up with our professional achievements in a way that is not very healthy at all. But it can be difficult to let go of that way of relating to our work when the flip side of it is remaining competitive in a job market where there’s always someone willing to put in a little bit more effort. And, of course, there’s our old friend, perfectionism, which is just a mess of anxiety and fear of failure masquerading as something much more noble: having high standards, pushing ourselves outside our comfort zones, being conscientious and meticulous, and so on.
So, what’s the problem here? Is there a problem here? Well, yes there is. These sublimated impulses are harming you. You harm yourself when you attack yourself through self-criticism. You harm yourself (and others) when you neglect your family. You harm yourself when you work yourself to the point of exhaustion. You’d actually be better off if you didn’t have these impulses - but you have mixed feelings about that, don’t you, because these impulses come with a load of really clever PR that makes you convinced that they’re actually making your life better, on balance, despite the problems they cause for you. But here’s the really tricky thing. It’s not that PR job that’s convincing you to keep them. In other words, it’s not because of the positive aspects that you keep those impulses. You keep them simply because they’re safe - they’re part of you (even a harmful part) and because it’s unsettling to get rid of them.
How do I know this? Well, you know how hard it is to see that things like this are problematic when they’re part of ourselves, so let’s go back to viewing them as aspects of other people. Imagine you had to write a guide to life; specifically, a guide to how to be successful in the ways that these problematic, sublimated impulses supposedly help you succeed. This would be a guide for someone younger than you, or more junior, to follow in your footsteps and do well in the sorts of ways you have done well. When writing this guide, would you advise this younger, more junior person to cultivate the sorts of impulses that you’ve managed to sublimate? I’m guessing not. Let’s return to Dieffenbach as our example. Would a guide to how to make a valuable contribution to medical science need to include the advice ‘try to get into mutilating animals during your childhood’? Duh, of course not. Why? Well, obviously, and as I’m sure you have no problem recognising, there are plenty of routes to contributing to medical science that don’t involve mistreating animals. Mistreating animals is not the only route to this end, nor even the best one, nor even a reliable one. If you’re just starting out and working out which character traits to cultivate in order to work towards this goal, this would be a really really bad one to choose.
Likewise, if you had to write a guide for younger or more junior people on how to stay motivated, there’s no way you’d be tempted to include the advice to be really self-critical. You might even be tempted to do the opposite: to include advice about how to cultivate assertiveness, confidence, that sort of thing. You get the idea - I’ll leave you to apply the same lesson to the other sublimated impulses I’ve talked about here, and to any others that you might have identified in yourself. Your lesson is this: you are way too attached to your bad habits. You’ve allowed them to justify their existence with their seriously ropey PR, and you’ve waved them through because you’re attached to them, because you can’t see how attached to them you are, and because it’s a big, scary task to think about what you might replace them with if you were to try to get rid of them.
So, how do you get rid of them? Well, you can go to therapy, which is probably a great idea in general as well as for dealing with this particular issue - but you know how I like shortcuts that you can implement right now and start seeing results. The advice I’d like to leave you with is this. Next time you stumble across a pattern of thought or habit that is making you miserable but which you’re afraid to get rid of - the sort of pattern of thought or habit that leads you to think things like, ‘I don’t like this, but I need to put up with it because otherwise X will/won’t happen’ - ask yourself whether you’d advise a younger or more junior version of yourself to cultivate that pattern of thought or habit. If your response is ‘no way!’, then have a think about what advice you might offer that would help them achieve the same result in a healthier, less painful way. I bet you’ll have no problem at all coming up with sensible-sounding solutions. You might be in the habit of telling yourself, ‘I don’t like neglecting my family, but I need to do it because otherwise I won’t progress in my career’, but if you imagine offering advice to someone else who wanted to work towards a similar goal - someone you care about and for whom you want the best - you’d probably take a more sensible view of things and say something along the lines of, ‘Progressing in your career and investing in your family life are both important to you, so prioritise carving out time in your schedule to work on both of these things’. Not rocket science, is it? At least, not when you’re steering someone else’s ship rather than your own.
You really don’t have to put up with the habits of thought that make you miserable. Be brave. Get rid of them. Invest some time in finding a better way. It’s worth it, I promise.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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