As I wrote in the last post, I’m a tangle of complexes. Why didn’t I know this before? Lately I’ve been examining how my own self-awareness has changed over the years. I suppose you could call this self-awareness-awareness.
For years I would sometimes have bad moods of a particular kind, and during those moods my thoughts would turn to violence. Sometimes while walking in town on my way to or from work I would slip into a self-righteous rage, but lacking a very good reason for it I would fantasize about people offending me more than anyone in fact was doing, and about what I would do to them if this happened (normally involving a beating of some kind, but nothing so bad as murder or the inflicting of permanent injuries).
Occasionally I would get a nasty look from a driver as I crossed a road too slowly for their liking, and that would set me off on an internal rant about arrogant BMW drivers. I would imagine that they had been much more obnoxious than they had been, and fantasize about causing damage to their car by kicking it or launching my umbrella, like a javelin, through the back window as they drove away.
It never occurred to me in those moments that my thoughts were unreasonable, and later, when I had calmed down, I would not think about it again. Such was my lack of self-awareness that I didn’t even begin to look for reasons, and thus missed the obvious. Over the past few years I have pinned down the cause of these moods: nicotine withdrawal. I felt those feelings when I hadn’t had a cigarette for a while.
The realization began when I gave up and used nicotine gum as a replacement, after initial scepticism about its efficacy. Varying the amount of gum I chewed in one day, I began to see how my moods were changing. It’s old news, but I had not appreciated, or not believed, that my addiction was mainly chemical. I imagined that I somehow transcended chemistry, controlling my moods and behaviour with conscious mastery, that until then I had chosen to keep on smoking, free of any base animal influences.*
I honestly never understood what people meant when they talked about the effects of coffee or sugary foods. I thought that I was always in control, and I didn’t notice how my body and mind changed with the action of these substances. The main exception is alcohol, the effect of which is so overwhelming that it cannot be ignored even by me; but I suppose I always viewed it as something special, something extraordinary. I completely failed to notice the more subtle changes.
Now I’m reading Freud, and the explorations into my self continue. Not only does he reveal another hidden influence that I had never taken seriously, partly controlling my behaviour and thoughts, namely the unconscious mind; but this also prompts me to ask why I, normally an introspective and thoughtful person, would fail to see the obvious chemical agencies causing my mood swings. And this leads me to the idea that there is some combination of complexes within me that obliges me to ignore the evidence. For some reason, I do not want to face the facts of my biology. Related to this is my complete lack of interest in epilepsy, despite the fact that 1. I have had it since adolescence, and 2. I am normally very interested in neuroscience.
Before reading The Psychopathology of Everyday Life I was quite unfamiliar with Freud, except for the more or less vague references that appear throughout our culture. I had read an excerpt from Civilization and Its Discontents, and I was fascinated by it, but I didn’t really understand it because all the theory was out of context.
Despite other things we might know about him, honesty and humanity shine through in his writing, and he can be very persuasive. It was just the same with Ernst Gombrich and Jacob Bronowski. The experience of reading Freud is similar, because of the serious, unpatronizing, liberal and rational attitudes that they all share.
Over the past few days I have bashed my hand on a particular door handle in my flat, on two separate occasions, never having done it before. Wasn’t it just simple clumsiness? I do sometimes have difficulty resisting the temptation to pronounce “oh come on Sigmund, that’s a bit far-fetched,” but on the whole I’m beginning to appreciate how great he was, and I plan to go into this more in later posts.
*Another surprising thing I discovered when I began to chew nicotine gum was that the dominant taste in cigarettes, and the slight feeling of burning in your mouth, is not, as I had presumed, from the hot smoke. It is the nicotine itself.