Eleven Aphorisms On "Over-Reacting" and Fetishizing "Balance"

Is there anything lazier than accusing someone of "over-reacting?" That is a failure of imagination at the best of times, but now during this pandemic even more problematic. Or is it?

Herewith are eleven "aphorisms" on the ideas of "balance" and "over-reacting" from the sometime child therapist and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, easily the most prolific, provocative, and interesting psychoanalyst writing today. All his books are worth your time.

(For some other aphorisms from Phillips that I put together, see here. For notes on Phillips' biography of Freud, see here. On the problem of distinguishing between terrorists and experts, see here. On his excellent book Unforbidden Pleasures, see here. For extended thoughts on Missing Out, see here.)

Here are some aphorisms I put together from On Balance:

Phillips begins by noting that (1)"When we talk about many of the things that matter most to us...we soon lose our so-called balanced views....Indeed, the sign that something does matter to us is that we lose our steadiness."

He rightly cautions--and this pandemic is surely the clearest example of this we are ever likely to see--that (2)"There are situations in which it is more dangerous to keep your balance than to lose it." 

For the toilet-paper collectors and other hoarders: (3) "Consumer capitalism has taught us to be phobic of frustration."

And yet: (4) "Our reaction to other people's excesses is an important clue to something vital about ourselves." 

And perhaps hoarders can be understood after all: (5) "Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of helplessness." 

These "excesses" are also highly valuable for they offer us clues, pathways into our unconscious mind: (6) "Our excesses are the best clues we have to our own poverty; and our best way of concealing it from ourselves."

From what perspective dare we judge others as excessive? Do we really have the capacity for such vision, Phillips asks: (7) "There is something God-like about describing someone's behaviour as excessive."

God, in fact, as Freud famously showed in Future of an Illusion, is one onto whom we endlessly project all sorts of desires, not least to be rescued from a capricious world of "nature" that seems sometimes (as now) to want to kill us: (8) "We have delegated to a figure called God all the excesses we find most troubling in ourselves, which broadly speaking are our excessive love for ourselves and others, and our excessive punitiveness." 

Is it our sense of helplessness that leads us to blame others rather than questioning ourselves? Phillips thinks so: (9) "We are more inclined to blame the world for letting us down than to notice just how unrealistic our desires are." 

A common theme across many of Phillips' books (10): "We can't bear the complexity of our own minds, with their competing needs and desires and beliefs and feelings." Instead, we would rather be "'the emperor of one idea'" (Wallace Stevens).

God forbid that we should see this pandemic require armed force to restrain us and maintain social order, but that is far from outside the realm of the possible, including in people who might regard themselves as entirely rational, modern, scientific, secular, and not at all "religious" (11) "People become violent, lose their civility, when something that is fundamental to them is felt to be under threat....We are all fundamentalists about something."