by ADAM PHILLIPS
Lacan said that there was surely something ironic about Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself – because actually, of course, people hate themselves. Or you could say that, given the way people treat one another, perhaps they had always loved their neighbours in the way they loved themselves: that is, with a good deal of cruelty and disregard. ‘After all,’ Lacan writes, ‘the people who followed Christ were not so brilliant.’ Lacan is here implicitly comparing Christ with Freud, many of whose followers in Lacan’s view had betrayed Freud’s vision by reading him in the wrong way. Lacan could be understood to be saying that, from a Freudian point of view, Christ’s story about love was a cover story, a repression of and a self-cure for ambivalence. In Freud’s vision we are, above all, ambivalent animals: wherever we hate we love, wherever we love we hate. If someone can satisfy us, they can frustrate us; and if someone can frustrate us we always believe they can satisfy us. And who frustrates us more than ourselves?
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Hamlet, we all remember, wanted ‘to catch the conscience of the king’. For catch the OED has ‘to seize or take hold of, to ensnare, to deceive, to surprise … to take, to intercept … to seize by the senses or intellect, to apprehend’; the term derives originally from hunting and fishing, though it also had in the 16th century our modern connotation of to ‘catch out’. It would have been a very revealing thing to do, to catch the conscience of a king. ‘Conscience’ at the time didn’t only have our modern sense of internal moral regulation but also meant ‘inward knowledge or consciousness’; the dictionary cites a 1611 usage as meaning ‘inmost thought, mind, heart’. To catch the conscience of a king would be radically to expose his most private preoccupations and, in the words of the dictionary, to expose ‘the faculty or principle which judges the moral quality of one’s actions or motives’.
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