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Every week, we invite you to explore a striking theme from a great psychoanalyst to reveal its depth and richness. These lapidary, often provocative formulas open up new perspectives on the intricacies of the human psyche. By deciphering these quotes with rigor and pedagogy, we invite you on a fascinating journey to the heart of psychoanalytic thought to better understand our desires, anxieties and relationships with others. Ready to dive into the deep waters of the unconscious?
This quote is from S. Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis. It succinctly encapsulates the complexity of the human condition.
Regarding Freud, there is a well-known anecdote related to this quote: a lady comes to meet the Viennese psychoanalyst and asks him, “Tell me, Herr Professor, how can I be a perfect mother?” To which Freud replies, “Whatever you do, Madam, you will never succeed!”
By asserting that we “always do it wrong,” the inventor of psychoanalysis highlights our unconscious tendency to endlessly replay the same scenarios, particularly in our relationships. We have a tendency to unknowingly reproduce situations that echo unresolved childhood conflicts, even if they caused us suffering. This is evident, for example, in the narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, who distresses Albertine with his obsessive jealousy, reactivating the torment of his relationship with his mother. Whatever we do, we fall into the same emotional dead ends, especially in our romantic relationships.
We now understand how, in these relationships, we are all inhabited by a fundamental ambivalence, torn between movements of love and hate, which make them profoundly disconcerting, despite what we consider to be our “good intentions.” It is this unconscious “love-hate” (J. Lacan) that drives us to hurt our loved ones despite ourselves, as theorized particularly well by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein after Freud, when she emphasized the early presence of primary aggression in infants, which is a source of guilt that persists into adulthood and hinders relationships with others. This unconscious guilt lives within all of us and can develop into an unconscious need for self-punishment, leading to failure and sabotage, as if we are compelled to repay an obscure debt. This can be observed in the heroine of Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia, Justine, whose suffering drives her to sabotage her own wedding on the day of the ceremony.
Freud’s aphorism also suggests the existence of a fundamental “failure” in human communication. As Jacques Lacan further explored after him, language inevitably creates misunderstanding between people. Words never convey exactly what we want them to, and meaning always partially escapes us, making every exchange an adventure. Deep down, we never truly understand each other, which is why it often feels like we “always do it wrong” when communicating with others.
Freud’s formula also resonates with his definition of education as an “impossible profession,” highlighting the inherent difficulty of the educational act: despite the best intentions one may believe they have, the parent or educator is always confronted with the failure of their attempts. Despite claims of “good” intentions, adults will always get it wrong with children, as they unconsciously pass on their own unresolved traumas, and these will tend to repeat themselves from generation to generation, unless they confront their own childhood suffering and make a conscious effort to avoid perpetuating it. Until this work is done, they seem doomed to always more or less get it wrong with their offspring, hence Freud’s pessimism.
This is, moreover, the tragedy of the “black pedagogy” denounced by psychoanalyst Alice Miller. In her book For Your Own Good, published in 1980, she shows how traditional methods of repressive education, based on punishment and humiliation, are rooted in the idea that the child is naturally bad, capricious, and stubborn, and that these predispositions must be broken. Parents then resort to violent methods, justifying them with the expression “but it’s for your own good!”, driven by a grave misunderstanding of the child’s psyche. In reality, they are unconsciously reproducing the patterns in which they themselves were raised.
Pediatrician Anne Tursz had this to say: For Your Own Good unfortunately remains highly relevant in France. Although corporal punishment is likely less common, public opinion is clearly not opposed to it, as it overwhelmingly rejects the enactment of a law prohibiting it, a law adopted by most European countries. Not only is there no real boundary between “abuse” and “ordinary educational violence,” but the persistence of forms of repressive pedagogy raises a much broader question: that of the poor status of children in France, a country where they are not considered subjects of rights.”
Arthur Rimbaud’s mother loved her son, but she was a harsh educator, emotionally undemonstrative and very devout, concerned with providing a normative education. Rimbaud would carry great suffering from this. He expressed his feelings in a poem that begins:
“And the Mother, closing the book of duty,
Walked away satisfied and very proud, without seeing,
In the blue eyes and under the prominent brow
The soul of her child given over to repulsion.”
This quote from Freud has the primary merit of reminding us, with the force of his thought and clinical experience, of the painful flaw that constitutes us as subjects. Behind its apparent pessimism, it is ultimately a reminder of the humility that must animate us in the face of the enigma we are to ourselves and to others, just as they are to us, whether they are children or adults.
