Introduction

All our stories are about what happens to our wishes. About the
world as we would like it to be, and the world as it happens to be,
irrespective of our wishes and despite our hopes. Our needs
thwarted by the needs of others, our romances always threatened by
tragedy, our jokes ruined by the people who don’t get them. The
usual antagonism of daydream and reality. Freud redescribed this
old story, at rst, as a con ict between what he called the pleasure
principle and the reality principle, between the satisfaction we are
wanting and whatever frustrates or tempers our desire. And then,
rather di erently, as a war between the life instinct and the death
instinct, a mythic war between nurture, growth, and delight and
whatever it is inside us that seeks to destroy our love of life. Freud
was not, of course, the rst person to notice how precarious our love
of life is, how vulnerable this love is the older we get. But he was
excessively preoccupied by what interfered with the destiny of this
particular passion, a passion that seemed at once fundamental and
more vividly imagined through its failure than its success. It was
through symptoms, paradoxically, that Freud got a glimpse of what
sexuality might be; through slips of the tongue the plenitude of the
unspoken revealed itself. And as a very late Romantic, Freud found
the passions and perplexities of the child exemplary; the child with
her consuming interests, her inexhaustible questions, and her
insisting body. The child who is learning to make mistakes, guring
out how to become a person, through the curious combinations of
word and gesture, and the gaps between them.
Freud, in fact, translated back to very early childhood the
traditional story of growing up as a process of disillusionment. He
described a minor epic—a kind of ironic quest romance—going on
inside the child’s mind. The child was imagined as wanting
something essential (feeling hungry) and then, in its absence
omnipotently fantasizing the longed-for breast. Since the breast was
unlikely to appear the moment it was desired, it could nevertheless
be imagined instantaneously, according to the child’s wish. This was
the pleasure principle in action. But then, of course, the child begins
to notice that beyond a certain point the imagined breast is not
su ciently nourishing, and in actuality, not nourishing at all. So the
reality principle involves the child’s learning to defer grati cation,
acknowledging his desire as an obstacle course, because his desire
entails something other than himself. Ultimately, the child needs to
abrogate his omnipotence—abjure his magic—and learn to wait.
Accepting his dependence, and bearing the fact of his parents’
independence of him, he makes good his survival and his pleasure
by relinquishing his fantasies of self-su ciency (his omnipotent self-
satisfyings). There are perils to this process—who the child and his
parents happen to be, the transgenerational history the child crawls
into—but it is a necessary disillusionment. Being realistic is a better
guarantee of pleasure; it is an injunction to want sensibly. The child
may expect the earth of himself and others, but if he grows up
properly, he will begin to want something else. But what happens to
wanting when it isn’t wanting everything, and when it isn’t wanting
what one wants? Or, to put it another way—from an adult point of
view, as it were—how do we decide what a good story about
wanting is? And which stories will sustain our appetite, which is, by
de nition, our appetite for life? Even to want death you have to be
alive. Morality is the way we set limits to wanting; the way we
redescribe desiring so that it seems to work for us.
Kleinian psychoanalysts have been among the most lucid
exponents of the dangers of what Freud called omnipotence,1 of all
the ways a person can attack or refuse his need for other people, of
how the fantastic refuges from need are forms of emotional
starvation—megalomanias and distortions of reality born of fear.
“When omnipotent fantasy dominates,” Hanna Segal writes, “the
desired state of a airs in accordance with the pleasure principle
predominates over the realistic. Reality testing has failed …”; and
the consequence of such fantasy, she is quite clear, is
“misperception.” The child—or the adult in this all-too-available
state of mind—sees what he wants, not what is there. There is an
obvious question here about who decides, or what the criteria might
be for, what is considered an accurate perception. Indeed, this is
also a version of development—of acculturation—as punishment.
That is to say, this kind of realism always has gravity but not gusto
(like most Kleinian and orthodox Freudian writing); but a kitsch
seriousness too easily becomes the order of the day. In this story,
from the child’s point of view the world made by wanting is the
world; from the adult’s point of view the child—su ering from the
delinquency of misperception—is either not quite right, or wrong.
There is something essential the child has failed to comply with, to
observe.
There is a dilemma here that cannot be resolved merely by taking
sides. Desire without something that resists it is insu cient, wishy-
washy, literally immaterial; it meets with nothing—nothing but
itself—if it is too exactly met (as in omnipotent fantasy). But a
world that too much resists my desire is uninhabitable, unlivable. I
can only make it my own— nd myself in it—through my wanting
something from it. Thinking about a meal won’t make me full; but
neither will eating a meal I have no appetite for. Only my hunger
turns the food into a meal. So we should give two cheers for what
psychoanalysts call “omnipotence,” because it is a version of what
Blake called “vision.” And vision, in Blake’s sometimes (and perhaps
inevitably) weird sense of the word, is the necessary complement—
or counterargument, as nuance—to the very real misgivings of the
analysts. Humankind can bare too much reality; sensible wanting,
intelligible wanting, can also be the death of desire. As Freud knew,
compliance and appetite are always uneasy bedfellows. And appetite
is another word for imagination. “Nearly all of us have felt,”
Northrop Frye wrote in his great commentary on Blake,

at least in childhood, that if we imagine that a thing is so, it therefore either is so

or can be made to become so. All of us have to learn that this almost never happens,
or happens only in very limited ways; but the visionary, like the child, continues to
believe that it always ought to happen. We are so possessed with the idea of the
 duty of acceptance that we are inclined to forget our mental birthright, and prudent
and sensible people encourage us in this. That is why Blake is so full of aphorisms
like “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” Such wisdom is
based on the fact that imagination creates reality, and as desire is a part of
imagination, the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept.

It cannot, of course, even in the terms of its own argument, be a

“fact” that imagination creates reality. But it can be a useful wish, a
ction of proli c consequences. Certainly, desire and passive
acceptance seem unpromising as alternatives, though for Blake—and
in psychoanalysis for Freud, Ferenczi, Winnicott, Milner, and Searles
—they were productive antagonists (or “contraries,” in Blake’s
language). By concentrating too scrupulously on what wishing
disavows, analysts have denied what wishing a rms. The child,
after all, is making a promising world for herself. The visionary, or
the child, or infantile sexuality, or the dream, or the joke, or the
unconscious itself, are all, among many other things, gures for an
alternative to passive acceptance, for the possibility of remaking, for
revision as a way of protecting our pleasures.
What Blake called vision Freud redescribed as dreamwork when
we are asleep and erotic life when we are (more or less) awake. To
“have” an unconscious is to have work going on behind the scenes,
to be subject to what André Green calls “kinds or forms of reasoning
which lead us astray.” These stranger ways of thinking that inhabit
us are like the uno cial (or illicit) work we do on our experience.
Revealing the idiosyncrasy of our desire—or what in di erent
languages might be called our madness, or our passion, or our
imagination—the odd sense we can make of things is both a
consummate gift and an ironic competence (no one could be better
at living your life than you). These other ways of thinking that lead
us astray have their own disruptive vitality, though we often
experience our exuberance as dismay, our leases of new life as
dread. There is, in other words, a way of describing our inner
anomalies as signs of life, and no less terrifying for being so. We
may know what is on our minds, but not what is on the other minds
inside us. In this sense we are as separate from ourselves as from
other people.
This capacity for transformation, for the imaginative and often
bizarre refashioning of everyday experience, was originally the
child’s unerring, ineluctable talent for making something of his own
from whatever he nds (the given is inert until it becomes the
made). Revision with a view to satisfaction is the child’s project
(and so psychoanalysis asks, by the same token, what resists
revision, what will redescription not change?). Children are fervent
in their looking forward to things, whereas adults can lose a sense of
what is there for the taking. The child, it seemed to Freud, was the
virtuoso of desire, for whom the meaning of life could only be its
satisfactions. And yet it was this appetite—the individual’s lifeline—
that seemed most under threat from within and from without: from
the death instinct, and from what Freud referred to rather abstractly
as culture. Psychoanalysis, in other words, was about what killed
people’s appetite, about how we are most intimidated by the only
thing that can sustain us. So it was to the fate of interest—of that
imaginative hunger called curiosity, which is part of what I’m
calling the love of life—in each person’s life that Freud turned his
attention. Having things to look forward to, making things to look
forward to, he realized, can become a lost art. To forget the
pleasures of anticipation is to forget memory itself.
If we are to go on making and taking our pleasure, Freud implies,
there are three things we have to be able to do: involve other
people, make good our losses, and enjoy (or at least tolerate)
con ict. This is the imaginative resilience, the ruthlessness we must
foster, or our spirits will ag. It is, perhaps, one of the more rueful
ironies of the psychoanalytic vision, that pleasure should seem such
a tall order, that to secure it we have to meet such stringent (moral)
demands. Indeed, what Freud maps out is the complicated
relationship between our struggle for pleasures and our struggle for
survival. It is, of course, nonsense from a Darwinian point of view,
and logical from a Freudian point of view, that they could be at
odds with each other (there are laws of nature but not laws of
happiness). And yet, if one of the virtues of psychoanalysis is that by
speaking up for con ict it allows people su cient complexity, one
of its complementary vices is a certain blind spot—an unwillingness
to sponsor people’s potential for ease (things are only di cult if you
can’t do them). Amusement is there if you want it. It is one of the
most striking things about children that, in their play, good things
can come easily.
Psychoanalysis is about what stops good things coming easily,
about how we have to acknowledge, but also how we seem to need
to create, accurate obstacles to satisfaction. It is a story about
uency and its interruption. About what people are inspired by, and
how this can turn into a feeling of being driven. It is the supposition
of this book that inspiration is the best word we have for appetite,
and that appetite is the best thing we have going for us (children are
visionaries simply in their commitment to rst things rst). It is
appetite that makes things edible, just as it is imagination that
makes lives livable once they are economically viable. And, as
children take for granted, lives are only livable if they give pleasure:
that is, if we can renew our pleasures, remember their intensities.
And so be delighted by hope, not merely persecuted or protected by
it.