Part 9

The meaning of gourmandism then suddenly flashed on me. What passions must this man have suppressed, how much must he have renounced, before his craving for pleasure had found new delights in this roundabout way! Behind this monomaniac delight in eating, thought I, there must lurk a great secret.

And such was indeed the case. My amiable host was really his wife’s prisoner. While he was residing in the capital he had begun to indulge in a perversion. His vice grew on him to such an extent that it threatened to destroy everything, health, fortune, mind, ambition, personality, spirit, everything. There was nothing left for him to do but to tell his wife all and implore her assistance in saving him. The virile woman soon hit on the only remedy. He became her prisoner. They broke off all relationships that bound them to their social group. Most of the year they spent in the country and lived in the city only two or three winter months. The time was spent in eating and card playing, to which fully half of the day was devoted. He was never alone. At most he was permitted to take a short walk in the country. His wife had charge of the family treasury, with which he had nothing to do. Of course, this did not cure his pathological craving, but it made gratification impossible. And gradually there began to develop in him the pleasure for delicate dishes. In this indirect way he satisfied a part of his sensuous craving. Thus he transformed his passion. His meals took the place of the hours spent in the embraces of a lover. For him eating was a re-coinage of his sexuality.

Is this an exceptional case, or is this phenomenon the rule? This is the first question that forces itself on our attention. An answer to it would take us into the deeps of the whole sexual problem. But let us limit ourselves for the present only to what is essential for an answer to our immediate question. Between hunger and love there is an endless number of associations. The most important is this: both are opposed by one counter-impulse, namely, disgust. Both love and hunger are desires to touch, (to incorporate or to be incorporated with the desired object); disgust is the fear of doing so. Love is accompanied with a counter-impulse, a restraining influence, which we call shame. But this very feeling, shame, is manifested by certain primitive peoples in connection with eating. In Tahiti, says Cook, not even the members of the family eat together, but eat seated several metres apart and with their backs to one another. The Warua, an African tribe, conceal their faces with a cloth while they are drinking. The Bakairi are innocent of any sense of shame in connection with nakedness, but never eat together.

The Viennese psychiatrist Freud, the Englishman Havelock Ellis (“The Sexual Impulse”), and the Spanish Sociologist Solila, regard the sucking of the breast by an infant as a kind of sexual act which creates permanent associations between hunger and love. And the language we speak has coined certain turns of expression which bring these connections out unmistakably and which have great interest for us as fossilisations of primitive thought processes and as rudiments of cannibalism. Note, for example, the following expressions: “I could bite her”; or, “I love the child so I could eat it up!” But we express even disgust, aversion and hatred in terms of eating, e.g., “I can’t stomach the fellow,” or, “he turns my stomach,” “she is not to my taste,” etc.

On the other hand the names of certain dishes reveal connections with other emotional complexes than the pure pleasure of eating. There is an everyday symbolism which we all pass by blindly. Let him who has any interest in this subject read Rudolph Kleinpaul’s book, “Sprache ohne Worte” (Language without Words). This symbolism plays a much more important rôle than we are wont to admit. For it alone is capable of interpreting the puzzling names of the various delicacies on the bill of fare. We are cannibals, for we eat “Moors in their ‘Jackets’” (a fine revenge on the tawny cannibals!) “poor knights,” “master of the chase,” “apprentice-locksmith,” and many more of the same kind. “Bridal roast” holds an important place in the menus of the whole world. Social inferiority is compensated for by numerous royal dishes ... e.g., steak-a-la-king, cutlet-a-la-king, chicken-a-la-king, royal pudding, etc., etc. One who will take the trouble, as Kleinpaul did in his “Gastronomic Fairy-tale,” to follow up these things, will discover many remarkable links with unconscious ideas. We are really hemmed in on every side by fairy tales. Every word we speak, every name we utter, has its story. And the many fairy tales in which children are devoured by wolves, witches, man-eaters, and sea-monsters, together with the tales in which so much is said about man-eating cannibals, reveal to us a fragment of our pre-historic past in which love and hate actually resulted in persons being eaten. In their naïveté our children betray this very clearly. When the little ones eat maccaroni, noodles, or similar dishes, they often make believe they are eating up somebody.

But, “something too much of this.” Let us turn our attention again to the epicures, the little progeny of a great race. It is not difficult to divide them into five classes according to which one of the five senses is being chiefly gratified during the eating process. First, there are the “Voyeurs,” to use the term so aptly coined by the French with reference to a phenomenon in the sexual sphere. They must “see” before they can enjoy. To see is the important thing with them. The dishes must be served neatly and must look inviting. They are the admirers of the many-coloured adornments on patisserie, of torts, cakes, and puddings built in the shape of houses, churches, towers, animals, wedding-bells, etc. They reckon their pleasures by the colour nuances of their foods. Their chief delight is in the fore-pleasure derived through the eyes. (This is clearly implied in the popular phrase “a feast for the eyes.”)

Not quite as common are the listeners “who are thrown into a mild ecstasy by the sizzling of a roast, the cracking of dry crumbs, and the fiz of certain liquids.” Numberless are the “smellers” whose sensitive noses drink in the aroma of the foods as their chief delight, whereas the eating, as such, is performed mechanically, as an unavoidable adjunct. Such persons can revel in the memories of a luscious dish, and many of their associations are linked with the olfactory organ. The pleasure in offensive odours, such as arise from certain cheeses, garlic, rarebits, and wild game is to some extent a perversion nutritional instinct and betrays innate relationships to sexual aberrations, as are unequivocally indicated by certain popular ditties and college songs. The folk-lore of all nations teems with hints at such things.

An important group, the fourth, is that of the “toucher.” As we know the tongue of man is the most important of the gustatory organs, even though it has not that primacy and importance which it has in many animals. Such “touchers” derive their greatest pleasure from the mere touching of the food with the tongue. They prefer smooth and slippery foods, e.g., oysters which they can suck down, and they love to roll the food around in their mouths. It goes without saying that these persons are also “tasters,” as indeed the majority of eaters are. But for all that, these have their own peculiar traits; whereas the feeling of fullness or satiety is to many persons a kind of discomfort, and a full stomach gives rise to a disagreeably painful sensation, to these “touchers” a full stomach means the most delightful sensation the day has to offer.

Of the “gourmands” (literally “the relishers”) we need not say much. The whole world knows them; to describe them many words and phrases have been coined, e.g., sweet-toothed, cat-toothed, epicures, etc.

As might have been expected, these various forms are often combined in one person, and your genuine gourmand eats with all his senses. We need only keep our eyes open at a restaurant to observe that most persons show some trace of epicurism. Very few resist the temptation to follow the platter the waiter is carrying to some table. (Almost every one likes to see what his neighbour is eating.) We may be discussing art, politics, love, or what not, yet watch carefully how much the person serving is taking for himself or dishing out for the others, and how little he is leaving for us. Most of the time in these cases we are the victims of an optical deception. Our neighbour’s portion always seems bigger than ours. Hunger and envy magnify the other person’s portion and minimise ours. And is it not an everyday experience that we order what our neighbour is eating? “Waiter, what is that you served the man over there? Bring me the same!”

How a person eats always reveals something of his hidden personality. In the case of most human beings at meals the same thing happens that one may observe at the menagerie during feeding-time: the peacefully reposing lion becomes a beast of prey. That is why beautiful women become ugly when they eat and lose their charm, cease to become interesting when they are seen eating. It is not a meaningless custom that we honour distinguished persons by dining them. By so doing we create a situation in which there is no superiority and in which we feel ourselves at one with the great man and on a level with him.

Much more complicated than the psychology of the ordinary eater is that of the gourmand, who always seems even to himself to be an exceptional kind of person and who has in unsuspected ways enlarged the sphere of possible pleasures. In most of these cases we shall find that they are persons of whom life has demanded many renunciations. Just as the habitual drinker rarely stupifies himself because of the pleasure he takes in drinking but mostly out of a desire to drown in unconsciousness a great pain, to draw the veil over some humiliation, disillusionment, failure, or disappointment, so the gourmand likewise compensates himself for his lost world. He has the same right to the pleasures of life that others have. Well for him that he is capable of securing his portion in this way!

Inexperienced humanitarians long for the time when eating will be superfluous, when a few pills of concentrated albumin combined with a few drops of some essential ferment will supply the necessary energy for our mental and physical labours. What a stupid dream! If such a time ever came, how unhappy humanity would be! The most of mankind, truth compels me to say, live only to eat. For them “eating” is synonymous with “life.” With the discovery of such pills the wine of life would be drawn. No! No! No! If there were no such thing as eating we should have to invent it to save man from despairing. Eating enables one who has suffered shipwreck on Life’s voyage to withdraw into a sphere which once meant the greatest happiness to all human beings and still means it to all animals. One takes refuge in the primal instincts where one is safe and comfortable, until Mother Earth again devours and assimilates him before she awakes him to new life. We are all eternal links in an unending chain of links.

And that is the whole meaning of eating: life and death. Every bite we eat means a quick death for myriads of living things. They must die that we may live. And so we live by death until our death gives life to others.

It’s no mere accident that Don Juan is summoned from the feast to his death.

ARE WE ALL MEGALOMANIACS?

There is no sharp dividing line between health and disease. One shades off into the other by imperceptible gradations. Disease grows out of health organically. There are a thousand transitions from the one to the other; a thousand fine threads link them together, and often not even the best physicians can determine where health ceases and disease begins. As Feuchtersleben says, there is no lyric leap in the epic of life. Nor do delusions make their entry unheralded into a well ordered mental life. Delusions slumber in all of us and wait for their prey. The quiet normal being is just as subject to them as the raving maniac with rolling congested eyes. We need only open our eyes understandingly upon the bustle and tumult of life to be able to exclaim with Hans Sachs: “Madness! Everywhere madness!”

Every form of insanity, one may say, has a physiological prototype. Melancholia takes for its model the little depressive attacks of everyday life; mania has its prototype in the unrestrained enthusiasm of the baseball “fan”; and even the various forms of paranoia, the true insanity, have their typical representatives among normal persons. To bring out this kinship we need no better example than that offered by the delusion of greatness. This delusion is so bound up with the requirements of the human psyche, so organically knit together with the ego, that it constitutes an indispensable element of our ethical consciousness. Every one of us thinks himself the wisest, best, most conscientious, and so forth. Each one thinks himself indispensable. It is this delusional greatness of the normal person which makes life tolerable under even the hardest conditions. It gives us the strength to bear all our humiliations, disappointments, failures, and the “whips and scorns of time.”

Of course we are very careful to conceal this delusional greatness from the rest of the world. We all have our secret chapels in which we offer daily prayers and into which no one, not even our nearest, is permitted even to glance. In this chapel our idol sits enthroned, the prototype of majesty, “our ego,” before whom we bend our knees in humble supplication. But out there--in the world without--it is different. There we play the role of the humble, respectful, subservient fellow. We swear allegiance to alien gods and mock our ego and its powers.

But sometimes the delusional greatness breaks out with pathological elementary force. We ought to keep our light under a bushel, trudge along with the multitude, day in, day out. Then all would be well. But destiny must not lift us to heights where our behaviour cannot escape observation and every one of our thoughts will be deduced from our actions. Success must not narcotise us to the extent of depriving us of that vestige of self-criticism which we so imperatively need in whatever situation life may place us. Success does not pacify the roaring of our megalomania. Success goads it with a thousand lashes of the whip so that it becomes restive and escapes from the security of the preserves of the soul. Is this still a healthy manifestation? Or are we already in the realm of the pathological? Is it the first delusion or the ultimate wisdom?

The delusion of greatness penetrates whole classes of humanity, infecting them like a subtle poison against which there is almost no immunity. We have only to refer to the “affairs” of all kinds of artists of the first, second, and third rank. The delusional greatness of the artist usually appears along with the belittling mania displayed by his confreres, his immediate competitors. The higher we esteem ourselves, the more we depreciate our fellow climbers. That is the reason why the artist, drunk with his own ego, loses the power to be just, to measure the work of others by any but an egocentric standard. Should any one venture to show this megalomania its true image in the calm mirror of justice, he would be characterized a malicious enemy. In the struggle to maintain the hypertrophied ego-consciousness the delusion of greatness is assisted by a willing servant: the delusion of persecution.

Along with the artist class there are many other vocations which to a certain extent gratify the delusion of greatness. In some callings this is a kind of idealistic compensation for the poor material returns. The megalomania of the Prussian officer, or the American professor (who are the butts of even the so-called harmless comic-journals) is an example. A close second to this is the megalomania of certain exclusive student organizations, patriotic megalomania, etc.

We can no longer escape a generalization. We note that delusional greatness is a compensation for some privation or hardship. This is especially illuminating with reference to that patriotic delusional greatness which has nothing whatever to do with a wholly justifiable self-consciousness. The self-consciousness of the Briton emanates from his proud history and the imposing power of his nation. But we note that it is especially small nations, who ought in reason to be very modest, who are guilty of a tremendous self-overestimation. And they do not scruple to invent an illustrious past which is calculated to lend some show of historic justification for the national delusion. Exempla sunt odiosa.

This mechanism teaches us how to estimate folk-psychology. A people behaves like an individual. So that our findings with reference to the psychology of individuals may be applied to whole races, and vice versa.

And here we note that the individual’s delusional greatness invariably has one and the same root: it is an over-compensation for an oppressive diminution of the ego-consciousness. The daily life about us offers innumerable proofs of this assertion. Persons particularly prone to delusional greatness are those who suffer from certain defects and who in youth had been subjected to painful, derisive, scornful, or depreciative criticism. Amongst these we find especially the halt, the lame, the partly blind, the stutterer, the humpbacked, the red-haired, the sick, etc.--in short, persons with some stigma. By the mechanism of over-compensation such individuals may manifest inordinately ambitious natures. Is it accidental that so many celebrated generals--Cæsar, Napoleon, Prince Eugene, Radetzky--were of small stature? Was it not precisely this smallness of stature which furnished the driving power that made them “great”? Instead of looking for the essence of genius in peculiar bodily proportions (which Popper finds to be in a long trunk and short legs!) it would prove a more gratifying task to ferret out those primary factors that have brought about an unusual expenditure of psychic energy in one particular direction.

A very brilliant and suggestive hypothesis (advanced by Dr. Alfred Adler) attempts to account for all superior human gifts as an over-compensation for some original “inferiority.” Even if this principle may not prove true in every case, it can be demonstrated to have played a part in the development of many a case of superior merit in some field of mental endeavour. We are all familiar with largely authentic anecdotes about distinguished scholars, who have just managed to squeeze through in their final professional examinations. In their case, too, by over-compensation a conviction of their inferiority brought about a heightened interest in their work and this interest then became permanently fixed.

Unawares we have wandered from the delusional greatness to true greatness. But who will presume to decide what is true greatness and what delusion? How many discoverers and inventors were ridiculed and their imposing greatness stigmatized as delusion, and how many intellectual ciphers rejoiced in the applause and the worship of their contemporaries! It is this fact which encourages a megalomaniac to permit the criticism of his contemporaries to “fly by him as the idle wind which he respects not.” If it is not true that all greatness is ignored, the opposite is true: every ignored person is one of the great ones. At least he is so to himself. Delusional greatness unites both criticism and recognition in a single tremendous ego-complex.

The roots of this delusion, as of all purely psychic maladies, are infantile. There was a time in the lives of all of us when we were the victims of a genuinely pathological delusion of greatness. In the days of our childhood we were consumed by a longing to be “big.” At first it was only the desire to be a “big man,” to be grown up. A little later and our desires fluttered across the sea of our thoughts like sea-gulls or flew like falcons into the unknown vast. We were kings, ministers of state, princes, ambassadors, generals, trapeze artists, conductors, firemen, or even butlers.