234 Ideals in the Modern World
to learn to answer: You don’t love me enough because no one can
possibly love me as much as my regressed self, my childhood self,
calls out to be loved. You are not my Soulmate, because there is no
Soulmate. The idea is a rank illusion. When the patient knows this,
he is on the way to being cured. But he has not been made whole
as he hoped. He has been made aware of the inevitability of par-
tial being, of partial presence (at best), and of partial love. The cure
is not constructive but deconstructive. Freud, like Derrida and
every cultural critic who believes that the art (or the life) in front of
him refers inevitably to something else, is skeptical about the desire
for presence. He detests— and perhaps he fears— unity of being.
And why should he not detest unity? To the Freudian mind, unity
is always forged; it is a counterfeit that leads to overreaching today
and to despondency in the future when all the illusions come to
light. For Freud there is the forged unity of erotic experience, when
the individual believes, as he puts it, that “I and you are one in the
same.” We eventually fall away from that dream, abandoned on
the cold hillside, “alone and palely loitering.” We thought we
were looking for completion and inspiration; it was only the old
Oedipal urge, combined with the hunger to leave behind our poor
and isolated selves.
We can also seek unity of being by fusing ourselves with a group,
under the auspices of a leader, who himself takes the place of the
superego. We transfer to him our right of self- determination. He
thinks for us. He takes over the faculty of judgment. What he as-
sumes, we assume; what he derides and denounces, we abhor. The
leader in the so- called civilized pre sent is not at all unlike the leader
of the primal horde, whom Freud describes in a few sharp strokes.
Though the members of the group were bound by vari ous ties of
allegiance and love, “the father of the primal horde was free. His
intellectual acts were strong and in de pen dent even in isolation, and
his will needed no reinforcement from others. Consistency leads us