If you're on Facebook or Twitter or anything like that you'll have seen loads of memes about the importance of self-care and self-value. Things like the image above.
But lately I've been thinking: but what if I'm not any of those things i.e. enough, worthy, capable? Is telling myself I am going to make me?
So I was interested to read an article mentioned in a newsletter from Austin Kleon. I say 'read'; I read the first few paragraphs, found it all too intense and baffling and long, and skipped to the end, on the premise that you first summarise for the reader what you're going to say, then you say it, then you sum up.
The article is called Against Self-Criticism by Adam Phillips from the London Review of Books in 2015. The first bit that got me was this:
Nothing makes us more critical – more suspicious or appalled or even mildly amused – than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless criticism, that we should be less impressed by it and start really loving ourselves.
Precisely my thoughts, I nodded as I read.
It went on to say:
But the self-critical part of ourselves, the part that Freud calls the super-ego, has some striking deficiencies: it is remarkably narrow-minded; it has an unusually impoverished vocabulary; and it is, like all propagandists, relentlessly repetitive.
There are only ever two or three things we endlessly accuse ourselves of, and they are all too familiar; a stuck record, as we say, but in both senses – the super-ego is reiterative.
. . . the absurd and obscene super-ego is a character we mustn’t take too seriously.
As that is the point he ends on, despite me having skipped a huge chunk, mostly about Freud, Hamlet, and Don Quixote, I'm fairly sure he is encouraging us not to be too self-critical, as indeed the title suggests.
6 comments:
Don't they say we are often our own worst critics? Can't be good for us.
If we talked to others the way we talk inwardly to ourselves, we'd be horrified!
I noticed that part about the impoverished vocabulary and it struck me as being weird! Is it true?
The super-ego is beyond me in the early morning and any time to be frank.
Self criticism is brutal sometimes. We wouldn’t be as unkind to others.
"too self-critical" - It seems to me that we each judge what is too self-critical. As such, who are "they" to tell me that I am overdoing it? (Similar words could be written about being "too weakly self-critical" I suppose.
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