RICHARD SENNETT
359
idealize being able to express our feelings openly or feeling free to do so .
Habermas's model of open communication has its vulgar counterpart in the be–
lief that social institutions are bad at the moment when they get in the way
of human expression. One example of that vulgar belief
is
Germaine Greer's
Fe–
male Eunuch.
Liberation of one's feelings is basically a familistic ideal. Libera–
tion from one's feelings
is
a nonfamilistic ideal . The first refers to the possibility
of experience in which anything one wants , any sensation one has , can be re–
ceived by others ; that is, liberation of one 's feelings presupposes an ac–
cepting environment, one in which interest in whatever one does feel , and
appreciation for it, will be shown by others. The model for such an accepting
environment is the child displaying himself to an audience of adoring par–
ents. Liberation from one's feelings , on the other hand , refers to the possi–
bility of experience which is impersonal, experience in which the person ob–
serves a convention, plays a role, participates in a form; the classic locus of
such liberation is the city, its classic name cosmopolitanism.
But the contrast cuts further . The self-conscious display of newly
discovered feelings to an accepting environment is usually a post-Oedipal
phenomenon-that is, it follows upon the child's first consistent declara–
tions of his own independence . The display of behavior in which the child
participates in a social form with impersonal conventions is usually a pre–
Oedipal experience- it follows upon the child's discovery that he can en–
gage in games. Game-play involes pleasure in the observance of a form, a
convention not dependent upon individualized , momentary impulse . Con–
servative critics of the modern culture of a boundaryless self usually base
their attacks on the notion that this culture is regressive and childish . The
real problem is that the terms of modern bourgeois personality are not re–
gres~ive
enough; these terms do not permit the adult to call upon the most
fundamental and earliest of the social impulses, the impulse to play. The re–
proach one ought to make to the notion of liberation of the self is that these
energies of play remain dormant as the adult regresses only to that point
where the self-conscious declaration of his own feelings was an event his
protector-parents accepted, even cherished .
It
is this most fragile, withdrawn
moment of family history which becomes enshrined as a cultural ideal when
we dream of free self-expression.
A society in which liberation of self replaces liberation from the self as an
ideal has obliterated any possibilities of self- transcendence from its moral
life. Instead of transcending the self, one makes it into a comprehensive
standard of reality. One does not balance public against private ; instead,
one assumes that one
is,
that life is authentic. when one focuses in–
ward, taking moments of self-disclosure in the family to be the reality in
