How to Be a Bad Person

Freudian psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster had her second child. We do not know her. We have never met her. But we are happy for her and her family. Having a child is a blessed and joyous experience. Even if we are not immediately involved, we wish the new parents all the best. 

Such a wish has nothing to do with wish fulfillment. It is the right thing to do. It makes us good people. Nothing about it is complicated or unusual. And yet, Webster, in her yeoman efforts to pretend that Freud is still relevant, regales us with the psychic torments that led her to the momentous decision. 

Apparently, being a Freudian means you need to analyze yourself in order to do something fundamentally normal, even banal-- to have a second child.

So, in a New York Times essay, Webster shared her psychic torments. Apparently she needed psychoanalysis to free herself from them, the better to undertake the effort. Also, she did not have a sufficient sense of shame to keep her torments to herself.

In her words:

The boundary was set in stone, one that spoke to a stillbirth in the family before my birth, a vague decree that having children was expensive and imprudent, some image of what it meant to be a “good” girl (i.e., not sexual), a criticism of my family where I was the only child, a feeling that I would jeopardize my career, and the necessity that I get behind this desire without cover.

Regretfully, Webster chose to wrap her joyous experience in theoretical gobbledygook. We did not need to know about any of this. We would rather be good people and not waste our time mitigating joy with an absurdist mediation about her psycho heroics. 

Truth be told, she was asking us to admire her heroics and to affirm that psycho analysis helps people to have second children. Trust me, people have long been having second children without mastering the art of free association. 

To be fair, Webster is arguing that psychoanalysis taught her how not to be a good person. One does not want to imagine that her lame theorizing tells her that having a second child makes her a bad person, but she seems to draw this conclusion.

Being a good person, something that Webster disparages, means having good character, being trustworthy, loyal, reliable and responsible. It means avoiding shame by keeping your pants on in public, by keeping your private parts and your private thoughts and experiences to yourself. Some things you ought not to share.

If you want to be a bad person, be unreliable, irresponsible, untrustworthy and disloyal. Make manifest your lack of moral character.You go back on your word; you fail to show up on time; you become a model of indiscretion; you are rude, crude and lewd. 

But, then after you have learned how to lose friends and alienate people, the question of your moral being will rise up and force you to practice something called virtue signaling. You will be positively asocial, but you will compensate by joining a cult that rejects and denounces society.

Then, you will militate against fossil fuels, you will engage in radical anti-racist training, you will hate Donald Trump, you will become a vegan, you will replace plastic with paper straws. You are not becoming a better person, but you are becoming a narcissistic lout, unwilling to follow the same rules as everyone else. Then, when anyone thinks ill of your bad character, you can denounce him as judgmental.

Anyway, Webster wants us to become bad people. But, if we want to do as she says, we will become gnarly and churlish, graceness and nasty. And we will tell you that Webster is a pretentious fool.

I will mention in passing that I have written two books and countless blog posts about topics like shame and guilt. For those who despair at the theoretical drivel offered by a Webster I happily recommend my books, Saving Face and The Last Psychoanalyst. They are available on Amazon.

Dare we mention that Webster thinks that having a second child is transgressive. Thus she suffers from a mindset that befalls those who gullibly accept Freudian theory. 

So, after a lot of hard work in analysis, she discovered that she wants what she wants because she wants it. Nothing like a pseudo profundity to make you look like a serious thinker.Wow!

What I found, after much work in analysis, is that there is no justification possible, no matter how hard I tried to find it. I want what I want because I want it. You have to live with your choices which are more or less inexplicable to others.

The choice to have a child is anything but inexplicable. It is normal. It is built in to one’s marriage vows. That is why said vows must be consummated. Or, as Shakespeare put it, “the world must be peopled.” You do not have a child to fulfill your heart’s desire; you do so to fulfill a moral obligation.

And then there is this speculation, a reflection worthy of a bad person. One suspects that Webster was over forty when she had her second child. She is currently in her mid-forties.

The point is barely relevant, but having a child at that age is generally more difficult and potentially more complicated than having a child two decades sooner. So, we are especially happy that she had a presumably normal and healthy child at an advanced age, though she might have mentioned the point.

Could it be that she occluded the issue in a singular act of Freudian repression.

Strangely, Webster never mentions the male who is part of the process of conception. Didn't his desires matter? Presumably she is married, but she erases her partner from the process. Was the child conceived via parthenogenesis? Nothing about her essay says that it was not. Then again, mere modesty might have caused her to say nothing about how the child was conceived. We respect her for being a good person.

But, Freudian theory being what it is, what really matters is your desire. If the purpose of analysis is to help you to discover what you desire, then it reduces to a lyric from a group that used to be called The Spice Girls.

Remember when they intoned-- Tell me what you want, what you really, really want.

So, Webster makes her second child into a transgressive act. She continues to want to maintain her good standing in the Freudian cult, a cult is built on a theory that sees transgression as the source of all desire. According to the theory, you really, really want to copulate with your mother. The reason being, the act is forbidden.

So, she did something that was not forbidden, but was prescribed. And this made her question her membership in a Freudian cult. We can only hope that she will overcome her tendency to make her own desires, as inarticulate as they may be, the only issue. What about her partner’s desires? What about his contribution to the intramarital conversations?

In any event, we hope that pointing this out does not make us a bad person. 

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