The deal we make with our parents.

But how has it come about that we so enjoy this picture of ourselves as objects, and as objects of judgment and censorship? 

What is this appetite for confinement, for diminishment, for unrelenting, unforgiving self-criticism? Freud’s answer is beguilingly simple: we fear loss of love. Fear of loss of love means forbidding certain forms of love (incestuous love, or interracial love, or same sex love, or so-called perverse sexuality, or loving what the parents don’t love, and so on). We need, in the first instance, the protection and co-operation of our parents in order to survive; so a deal is made (a contract is drawn up). The child says to the parents: ‘I will be as far as possible what you need me to be, in exchange for your love and protection.’ 

As with Hobbes’s story about sovereignty, the protection required for survival is paramount: everything must be sacrificed for this, except one’s life. Safety is preferred to desire; desire is sacrificed for security. But this supposed safety, in Freud’s version, comes at considerable cost: the cost of being turned into, by being treated as, an object. We are made to feel that we need constant critical scrutiny. We must be cram-packed with forbidden desires, if so much censorship and judgment are required. We are encouraged by all this censorship and judgment to believe that forbidden, transgressive pleasures are what we really crave; that really, essentially, deep down, we are criminals; that we need to be protected primarily from ourselves, from our wayward desires.