Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

'PLEASURE IS FORBIDDEN!' 153
'Pleasure is forbidden!'
Paul Tournier, a Swiss psychotherapist, believes, like other psychoanalysts,
it can be assumed that strict parents are largely responsible for
instilling in their children the idea that everything that gives pleasure is
sinful. Many parents told him that one thing they remembered from their
upbringing was the principle, 'Pleasure is forbidden!' Thereafter the
adult cannot enjoy anything without a bad conscience spoiling his
pleasure.
'People who have been brought up with this idea burden themselves
with heavy duties or unnecessary sacrifices, their only object being to
allow themselves some subsequent pleasure without a bad conscience.
They keep complicated mental accounts, behind which anxiety is always
present in some degree .... ,24
Tournier points out that this compulsive behaviour has little to do with
Christianity, which in principle does not conceive God as a being who
begrudges his children any kind of pleasure, even if it is undeserved. The
feeling of guilt is, indeed, regarded as a definite sin, that of melancholy.
Here we would attempt a wider interpretation. Anyone who is familiar
with the anxiety and fear of various primitive peoples-a feeling to
which they always succumb whenever they have been lucky-and who
also knows the extreme laxity with which these people are so often
brought up, is unlikely to see over-strict parental control as the chief
cause of a bad conscience about pleasure and happiness. What is
involved is rather the primeval anxiety in man arising from the experience
of envy. It has little to do with any particular culture or form of
society, or with the type of upbringing, though these may intensify or
diminish it. Though strict, puritanical parents may, by their remarks and
the values they represent, induce feelings of guilt in their children, they
are themselves the victims of their own anxiety about envy. And if this
were to be referred back to the parents' parents, we would be involved in
an infinite regression.
The condition of anxiety, the feeling of guilt, the fear of a retributive
catastrophe (Polycrates' ring)-all this is a combination of superstition
and empirically verifiable (Le., realistic) anxiety about another person's-usually
a neighbour's-envy. More precisely, nearly all super-
24 P. Tournier, Echtes und falsches Schuldgefuhl, Zurich and Stuttgart, 1959, pp. 15 f.