Somewhere in The Western Canon, Harold Bloom, the Yale English professor who in the 90s made the decision – probably shrewder than it was brave – to oppose postmodernism and defend the castle instead, says that Shakespeare “invented” the modern human.

Moreover, Shakespeare invented the modern human by virtue of one neat trick: the device of over-hearing.  Bloom points to the number of times Shakespeare has one set of characters speaking about something confidential in the centre of the stage while one or two other characters are in the bushes nearby, and deliberately or accidentally, overhear the conversation.

One of the classic examples is Twelfth Night where Maria, pretending to be Olivia, writes a letter to Malvolio, the cross-garter’d, and has Sir Toby and Andrew Aguecheek hide and “observe his construction of it.”

By this one innovation, Bloom suggests, Shakespeare expands exponentially the possibilities of plot and complexity of response because now there are plays within plays; or to put it another way, relationships within relationships.

Thus, ambiguity was born.

The other figure credited with inventing the modern human is Sigmund Freud.  You may not agree with Freud’s theories, you may think there are better psychoanalysts or you may think he’s a misogynist or a complete nutter.  In fact, each generation since his death has seen his theories go in and out of favour, and his status vacillate between founder of psychoanalysis and prose stylist.

Yet none of this matters. Nothing changes the fact that Sigmund Freud never had an unoriginal thought.

Before Freud, there was no unconscious, no drives, no interpretations of dreams, no understanding of the pre-eminent role of human sexuality; all this, and much much more he invented.  He was, and is, a giant of human history and I’m grateful I was a psychology undergraduate just before another long devaluation of his stocks ensued and the Skinnerians took over.

Which is why I was brought up short by a tiny snippet I read in February, to wit that William James — himself a psychologist and brother of the more famous Henry — later in his career called psychology

a nasty little subject.

Thereafter, James turned his attention toward religion and philosophy, “the passions that governed the rest of his life.”

The snippet appeared in a book of snippets, Lapham’s Quarterly on the theme of religion.  I’ve sometimes heard Lewis Lapham on Radio National’s The Book Show, but hadn’t read his journal before.

Is psychology “a nasty little subject”?  What did James mean by this?  I’m not sure, but I think there’s something in it.  It also reminded me how one of my friends, a psychologist, visibly shudders whenever I ask if she’d return to practice.  She always says, “It doesn’t help anyone.”

What also brought me up short about this snippet is that I’ve started reading religion and philosophy too.  In fact, aside from browsing Mr Lapham’s beautiful pictures, the only other thing I managed to read in February was a book about the Desert Fathers by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, based on the speech that captivated me in 2008.

The ideas in the book, called Where God Happens, are extraordinarily stimulating.  One of the most interesting discussions is about the common issues of our contemporary world which Dr Williams identifies as “the longing for individuality, the pressure to conform, the fascination with the will and the reduction of the will to choices in the market.”

He introduces the distinction made by the Russian Orthodox writer, Vladimir Lossky, between the “individual” and the “person.”

The person is what is utterly unique, irreducible to a formula, made what it is by the unique intersection of the relationships in which it’s involved … However, the individual is just this rather than that example of human nature, something essentially abstract.  It can be spoken of in clichés and generalities.  It is one possible instance, among others, of the way general human capacities or desires or instincts operate.

And whereas we might tend to think that choice belongs to the realm of the personal – “that the choices we make are the distinctive thing about us, what tells us and others who we are” – Dr Williams says Lossky see choices as “some of the least distinctive, even the least interesting, things about us.”

We might even say that the mature human being is not the one who has the most choices available but the one who apparently makes the fewest choices, who freely does what he or she is, without self-consciousness or self-assertion, without anxious fretting about what would be more authentic.

*****

Images: all from Lapham’s Quarterly; Jain pilgrim praying to a statue of Lord Bahubali, 1993 (photo by Raghu Rai) (top); The Angelus, by Jean-François Millet (middle); Evening at the Golden Temple, Amritsar, by Derek Hare, 2000 (bottom)