‘Love Thy Neighbour As Thyself’ But I Hate Myself                                 A short story by Peter Cheevers published by Ether Books in 2016 I sat in this oasis of solace, luxuriating in that supreme high - the sense of being understood. Rupert sat opposite me, a quizzical look on his face, as if hovering high above the earthbound business of the consulting room. “You can’t hate yourself all the time?”                                                                                             “No, of course I don’t hate myself all the time,” I laughed guiltily, omitting to say that actually I did; well, most of the time. “Oh, you know it is...how can I say? it is...punctuated sometimes like this when we come to the gym but in the main I live under a kind of barrage of self criticism.”                                            We were sitting in the Cafeteria of the Health Centre having a latté, the waitress having plonked the two coffees down and departed with that mechanical mantra of the waitering class ‘Enjoy'.  She had returned to chirpily enquire in a twang, “Can I get you guys anything else?” Coming to this Gym fairly regularly I had thought her attractive for some time, so I broke the ice by asking where she came from; she blushed and rather shamefacedly said “Luton.”                                                                     “Interesting what you say about hating yourself.  But you don’t fall for that, do you?”                             I looked at him, ‘Rupe’, he of the public school and Oxbridge. You could tell by his parental designation of Rupert, his class. I wasn’t Wayne but I was Paul, an ex-athlete, who had given up my youth from the age of seven to make it as a tennis player only to call it a day at 21 after failing to get on the Tour and exhausted by travel and makeshift accommodation from Kuala Lumpur to Bournemouth. The sad reality dawned on me and my over-ambitious father, that I would never make it beyond Challenger tourneys and Qualifiers; or ‘Quali’s’ to the initiated on the Circuit.                So by default I had become a tennis coach at a select tennis club and that is where you meet people like ‘Rupe’. It was an even-handed arrangement, he got more top spin on his forehand and more control on his backhand volleys and I benefited from his erudition. “You don’t mind me asking you about this...I mean if you want me to make an official appointment at the...your consulting rooms?”                                                                                                                         “Not at all...don’t be silly, my serve has improved immeasurably that is priceless to me,” and he gave a Falstaffian type chortle. ‘So what do you feel when you are in your self-disgust mode?’ he was back to his urbane enquiring self.                                                                                                                              “Failure, failure! my conscience, or whatever barks at me.”                                                                           “Conscience?” he had a half smile on his face, not condescending, but interested.                                  “Oh you know what I mean... that voice inside you.”                                                                       “What, thwarting you?”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  “Yes, intimidating you.”                                                                                                                         “Right, right.” Rupert looked across at the anxious athlete as he drifted from his references, yes, far away from those endless psychoanalytical tomes for there was an inner voice beckoning him now, a voice that greatly interested him, for as far as Rupert was concerned anyone who could have a ‘vision’ of a host of angels in a tree in Peckham Rye was of worthwhile interest to him. He looked at the athlete this well read, but needlessly perplexed young man and drew on William Blake, what was it now?...yes.                                                                                                                                            Folly is an endless maze;                                                                                                                                                    Tangled roots perplex her ways...                                                                                                                  He quickly returned to the task at hand. “So you are quelled by this inner voice, as if there is an affray going on in your head?” There was the clichéd analytic pause as Rupert looked at him to gauge if the athlete was getting this.                                                                                                                                “Oh you know a kind of inner dispute...disturbing the peace; your peace.”                              “That’s right.’ I looked at him a star metropolitan turns if ever there was one. ‘Rupe’ was how any man would like to look at 50; tall, slim, a slightly arty look with hair long enough to defy conservative labelling. “Can I go on?” ‘Rupe’ put out the palm of his hand in a Jesus supplication mode and I went on with my Hail Mary type lament. “What can I say, this inner voice goads me; makes me feel dissatisfied...dismal really.”                                                                                                                                         “You’re not alone most people have a sense of chagrin about their inner voice.”                                          “Chagrin?”                                                                                                                                                    “Oh you know people are irked, peeved by being reminded that they are not up to much. But you know if someone on the street had been needling you like that what would you do?”                                  “Give him a kick in the bollocks.”                                                                                                              “Or, call a policeman.” We both laughed. The girl from Luton stood by the serving hatch casting discreet glances trying to catch the athlete’s eye.                                                                                                                                                                                                       “Seriously,  I know what you are trying to describe it is like an internal violence, like some in-house busy body, as if there was some mastermind of fault finding in one’s head.”                                                                                                                                                           “But what do you make of all this...inner stuff?”                                                                                      “The ongoing self-criticism that...well...oh, I think...let me see...let me talk in general terms, the internal, that self critical voice in yours and anybody’s head, is in league, complicitious with the external. The result of this alliance in people as they go about their daily lives with the self critical watchman in their heads making them feel abjectly down. Invariably, one is never good enough.”                                                                                                                              The athlete leaned forward with an intense look of interest. Rupert regarded at the troubled young athlete who had it all going for him, handsome, intelligent, keenly bookish in that auto did act way, with an insatiable curiosity which if cultured could take him far beyond his tennis coaching lot. This athlete, his Coach, his face set and bursting with curiosity and here Rupert meandered off as he often did during analysis to his solace, William Blake.                                                                                                                          The human face a furnace sealed....                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Rupert chastised himself for drifting, “Right’, so how do you go about...dealing with it?”                                      “Well, we can’t be masochists in the face of a sadistic self critical self, can we? That’s for sure.”                                                                                                                                                           ‘Right...so how do you deal with it?”                                                                                                  “Well...I mean passive, isn’t it, this one tone soliloquy; this, well... this inner voice is not amiable is it? More often than not it is antagonistic and usually has a jaundiced or even spiteful repertoire. Think about it. It is a kind of purgatory that we subject ourselves to and it is just not a way to live, is it?”                                                                                                                                                   I looked at Rupert, he seemed distant as if musing about something but he is always a bit like that.                                                                                                                                            “So endeavour to define what this irritating voice inside your head is nagging at you about, rather than accepting it is some kind of perpetual Greek chorus. And write your thoughts down, that is very beneficial.”                                                                                                                                       “Write down about what I...lack?”                                                                                                                                                Or what you presume you are lacking. Oh dear, one is never good enough.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              The girl for Luton collected the coffee cups and gushed, 'Oh thanks, thanks very much,' when she saw the tip. The two men smiled at her.  “Well, the problem is we live under the burden of faultlessness, flawlessness, in our ever more demanding hedonistic culture. And culture, especially Capitalist culture has desire in its DNA and desire once aroused is insatiable.” Rupert, he of the roguish grace, his brow quizzically frowned with epistemic authority looked to see how the athlete had taken that. But the athlete was silent in the face of this eloquence. So Rupert went on:  “But who is saying to you that you are a terrible person. Because here’s the thing...we fantasise if we imagine ourselves to be charioteers...drivers of the chariots of our own inner discourse.”                                    “Sorry, I don’t get that.”                                                                                                                           “Well, our inner discourse comes to us in language, we employ language I mean you could even argue that language uses us rather we using language, I mean there is only so much on the language shelves and we draw down what we can, yes?”                                                                                        “Fine, got that.”                                                                                                                                            “So as users of language we reach up to the stacks for we are, like it or not, under this kingdom of language and this inner discourse, or chattering can induce a kind of distracted prattling in us all.”  Rupert chastised himself for being too wordy after all he was Songs of Experience and that athlete sitting opposite him was a Song of Innocence.                                             .                                                  “So how do you deal with it?” Was the athlete getting a bit testy?                                                                                               Rupert paused and drew on the poet’s voice in his head.                                                                                                             I was angry with my friend:                                                                                                                                                           I told my wrath, my wrath did end.                                                                                                                                                                I was angry with my foe:                                                                                                                                                           I told it not, my wrath did grow.                                                                                                            “Talking about it as you are doing now, yes talking therapy, where physiological change can take place and where physiological effects such as a reduction in blood pressure can ensue. I have seen some remarkable recoveries come from people just sitting down and talking, providing they have an interested listener, who is not waiting to pounce to get in his own two penny worth.” I can ;oes awales at night and But Mr. Polly's interior, the things that have gone
into it and the emotions that rise out of it, are only typical of anentire life that has, to quote Macaulay's eulogy of the Britishconstitution, thought nothing of symmetry and much of convenience whimsical as the wind
 hear them grow. They both chuckled at the absurdity of how most people interact, while the girl from Luton stood poised at the serving hatch holding her silver tray as if she was part of a timpani ensemble in a youth orchestra.                                                                                                                        ‘Sorry to be slow on this but this...inner voice, the self, the ‘I’ is just language is that what you are saying?                                                                                                                                               “What else could it be? The problem is, the ego and its bed fellows, has been given a quasi metaphysical status, and we have come to believe and accept that there is a homunculus...”                “What’s a homunculus?”                                                                                                                                “What we believe to be a little man or woman in the brain who is our umpire, adjudicating or evaluating and once enlisted into this kind of thinking we no longer go about our daily lives as functioning or as gratifying wholes but...”“What, we are divided?”
“Yes, as subjects we are divided, the unconscious mind being hell bent and bound to have its say in a sort of team work as if were a group effort of cooperation.”                                                                                                         “So if we ‘cut to the chase’ the inner voice is ....just language.”                                                                                                   “That’s right, yet we live under this umbrella of...ego, id, superego, libido...under the illusion they are entities.”                                                    .                                                                                           “And what about mind, spirit, soul?”                                                                                                              “Well, that holy trinity...although real to a vast amount of the population they are illusions too, as neurotheology will go on to prove...technology waits for no man.”                                                          “So how has this...I mean how have we ended up with these beliefs?”                                                              “You could blame it on the Americanisation’ of psychoanalysis, but let us defame our American cousins, let us call it a historic mishap that took place on the other side of the pond; scream if this is becoming too much of a lecture.”                                                                                                        “No, no, please it is very interesting,” the Song of Innocence’s face was full of enthusiasm.                “Ok...Psychoanalysis became an industry after Freud and notions of ego etc were cemented into its fabric. By consensus Ego psychology became the psychological model that has been inculcated into how we regard what goes on inside our head. And this psychoanalytic consensus of what goes on in our heads is closest to the way most people like to think about themselves when they interact between their conscious and unconscious. But the soul, spirit, mind, id, ego, libido are kind of                                                                                                                                  ventriloquists of the unconscious... metaphysical things that goads us?”                                                                                                                                      “So...so...what’s the course of action?”                                                                                                   “To stop this chattering?...you have to undertake a kind of...chimney sweeping...” and the athlete watched him pause momentarily and if he could climb inside his head he would have seen Rupert conversing with some ancient looking man sitting in a tree in Peckham Rye surrounded by a host of angels.                                                                                                                                                       In soot you sleep. So your chimneys you sweep,                                                                                        for endless sweepers Dick, Joe, PAUL, and Jack,                                                                                     have all been locked up in coffins of black.                                                                                                  ‘Well the thing is not be an impassive foster parent to this bawling inner insistence that you are just the worst person in the world. We lobby this inner voice in a kind of taking of our emotional pulse because we feel we have a kind of vital lack in the human condition...the id, ego and all that as  reference points are kind of Freudian traffic lights, dotted about in our ancient thinking corridors. Now the athlete saw Rupert’s his face more animated, seizing on the advent of the new with real fervour.  “You see  there has been a kind of Reformation in psychoanalysis of course the Freudian Bible still exists but there has been a Protestant kind of reaction, say from Lacan in France...do you know him?”
“No, no,I will give you one of his books...anyway he was a kind of psychoanalytical Luther, vehemence who recognised and asserts the power of language. It is a return to a psychoanalysis that denies the authority of the established psychoanalytic place of worship. For too long we have been subjected to the notion of the inner voice who determines how we feel about ourselves. It is a bit like someone with a foghorn in the distance hailing you, ‘Hey you!’ and this is presumed to underlie behaviour. So like sightless beings we go in our white stick way being hailed by this inner voice till we find ourselves in self caused emotional traumas. But cutting to the chase as you put it, if I can stretch the metaphor, there is no need to circle our wagons against this alien for people are constituted by language and society.’ And Rupert repeated it with heavy emphasis ...”people are constituted by language and society. So you should keep under surveillance this supposed inner judge or regulator.
“So all that ego stuff is just tosh?”                                                                                                             “The ego never existed as a lucid, coherent entity. From the Freudian outset, it was composed of false interjections.  The notion of a superior free floating autonomous ego is a mirage; it is the mental illness of man’s willing to accept the existence within one of another,                                                                                                                          an alien. Ego psychology has pointed itself in the other direction, what did Rousseau say?  ‘Everywhere man is in chains’ yet people clasp their ego chains to them instead of unshackling themselves from ancient manacles. End of lecture.”                                                                     “No, that was great, thank you very much.”                                                                                                  Rupert, the long haired analyst stood in his state of the art track suit. Now he and the athlete made their way down the corridor to the exit till they heard a padding running after them, they turned to see the girl from Luton holding a piece of paper which she awkwardly handed to the athlete, and then she gauchely blurted “There’s my number if you want to...I am having a party next week...and if you want to come along...well..you know...sorry.”  So the girl from Luton fled back down the corridor with that voice ringing in her head rebuking her; castigating her for exposing herself in that impulsive way.  Oh God, oh God, what he think of me?                                                                         Rupert smiled benignly at this exchange as he looked back at the fraught and profoundly embarrassed girl padding back down the corridor; he drew on his inner voice.                                                                                                                                                  The child wept in vain                                                                                                                                For the parents had bound her in an iron chain                                                                                          The athlete shook the analyst’s hand at the exit and said, “See you next Wednesday and don’t forget try to change the grip on the volley, and move your feet, you know tennis is not all upper body."                                                                                                                                                          “Yah wolh, mein herr.”                                                                                                                      “Sorry, you know what I mean.”                                                                                                                “Of course, of course. See you next Wednesday and have a good week.”                                                                                                                       “You too.”
Then the athlete walked to his car thinking he should have asked how ‘the girls were?’ for he had coached Rupert’s daughters too, both just graduated from the hallowed halls of Oxbridge, despite his enthusiasm they made it plain that he was an OK ‘guy friend’ but never a boy friend. One had even loftily enquired of him in an Antoinettish way did he think ‘sport was the brioche of the working classes?’ Although always courteous, it was plain that they were not into ‘jocks’. Fuck it, fuck my lot, it would be coaching at schools this afternoon and his inner voice castigated himself about the days duties ahead of him; he would never get over abandoning his tennis career, never. He clutched the girl from Luton’s phone number in his hand but this was no time to sing, for once again, that inner voice had brushed his wing.===============================================    

That is why the physical act of writing things down is so important, keep a diary,
Oh really why’s that?.
   There God is dwelling too.
 THE CLOD AND THE PEBBLE  ‘Love seeketh not itself to please,   Nor for itself hath any care,But for another gives its ease,   And builds And I made a rural pen,
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.And all must love the human form,   In heathen, Turk, or Jew.a heaven in hell’s despair. Immigrants And their sun does never shine,   And their fields are bleak and bare,And their ways are filled with thorns,   It is eternal winter there.And naked they conveyedTo caves the sleeping maid.  THE FLY For I dance,And drink, and sing,Till some blind handShall brush my wing.The angel Soon my Angel came again;
I was armed, he came in vain;For the time of youth was fled,And grey hairs were on my head.
And it bears the fruit of Deceit,Ruddy and sweet to eat,And the raven his nest has madeIn its thickest shade.Vain brainINFANT SORROW  My mother groaned, my father wept:Into the dangerous world I leapt,Helpless, naked, piping loud,Like a fiend hid in a cloud. Struggling in my father’s hands,Striving against my swaddling bands,Bound and weary, I thought bestTo sulk upon my mother’s breast.
A POISON TREE  And I watered it in fearsNight and morning with my tears,And I sunnèd it with smilesAnd with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night,Till it bore an apple bright,And my foe beheld it shine,And he knew that it was mine,— And into my garden stoleWhen the night had veiled the pole;In the morning, glad, I seeMy foe outstretched beneath the tree.A LITTLE BOY LOST  ‘Nought loves another as itself,   Nor venerates another so,Nor is it possible to thought   A greater than itself to know‘And, father, how can I love you   Or any of my brothers more?I love you like the little bird   That picks up crumbs around the door.’ The Priest sat by and heard the child;   In trembling zeal he seized his hair,He led him by his little coat,   And all admired his priestly care. And standing on the altar high,   ‘Lo, what a fiend is here!’ said he:‘One who sets reason up for judge   Of our most holy mystery.’ The weeping child could not be heard,   The weeping parents wept in vain:They stripped him to his little shirt,   And bound him in an iron chain, And burned him in a holy place   Where many had been burned before;The weeping parents wept in vain.   Are such things done on Albion’s shore? Where the holy lightHad just removed the curtains of the night.
Cruelty has a human heart,   And Jealousy a human face;Terror the human form divine,   And Secrecy the human dress. The human dress is forgèd iron,   The human form a fiery forge,The human face a furnace sealed,   The human heart its hungry gorge.But to go to school in a summer morn,—   O it drives all joy away!Under a cruel eye outworn,   The little ones spend the day   In sighing and dismay. Ah then at times I drooping sit,   And spend many an anxious hour;Nor in my book can I take delight,   Nor sit in learning’s bower,   Worn through with the dreary shower.Folly is an endless maze;Tangled roots perplex her ways;   .            We both smiled as to  what was clearly post stoke man, who we had noticed being aided round       the gym by faithful wife with exercises for the day in her hand, so bored had she become with     this duty that she started dancing along to the porno disco music that streams out of these emporiums like so much effluent      So My lack of education had given me an insatiable curiosity after knowledge,.                                                                                                                                                         At ₌₌₌this self loathing time I was living on my own in a house in Barnes, the relationship with         the famous actress over, she had decamped to a television series on a distant shore and met ‘someone’.                                                                                                                                                       That is why I went into analysis.                             ­-­‘But isn’t that very...privelegd?’                                                                                                                 killed me after reading Pliny the Elder and Pline the Younger, I wa obseesed ‘No, not all it is viewed as elitist, I mean it is not some kind  middle class seminar,’ he sat there looking calm, assured. ‘. Nihil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio" (Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness Was that Seneca or Petrach, but Rupe’s cleverness was tenderised by genuine concern. I was going to study Classics if
 . Lacan translates repression as a process of metaphor formation. metaphors of domination. Human beings have no choice but to ‘submit’ to the world of symbolsLacan’s critique of ego psychology raises the question of the extent to which each of us is willing to accept the presence within of another, an alien, whether that other be linguistic, or social, or historical. It raises the question of the extent to which each of us is willing to accept a subversion of our everyday sense of ourselves as actors, and as the makers of our own lives. Doing so takes an extraordinary discipline, both for the individual and for intellectual movements. Everything in daily life pushes in the other direction, including, and especially, language We use pronouns with verbs – ‘I do, she wants, he desires’ – we speak the language of the cogito, without, if Lacan is right, being one.But Lacan’s work underscores that part of Freud’s message that is most revolutionary for our time. The individual is ‘decentred’. There is no autonomous self. What sex was to the Victorians, the question of free will is to our new Fin-de-Siècle because true responsibility is logically impossible – it’s impossible whether determinism is true or falseBut what then of our free will Again, suppose that some of those features of our mental make-up which lead us to act in the way we do are not determined in us (say by heredity, upbringing and environment, and ultimately by events which occurred before our birth can yo choos who your pres are no), but are instead the outcome of indeterministic events. How on earth could that help make us deserving of praise and blame for our actions oneself in such a way that one was ultimately responsible for how one was. In order to do this, in such a way that one became ultimately responsible for how one was, one would already have to have existed prior to one’s choice, with a certain set of preferences about how to be, in the light of which one chose how to be. But then the question would arise: where did these preferences come from? Or were they just there, unchosen preferences for which one was not ultimately responsible? To be ultimately responsible for oneself one would have had to have chosen these preferences in turn. But then one would need another set of preferences in the light of which one chose them. And so on and infitie regressOne could   x