Sigmund Freud’s popular notion that some folks are ‘Wrecked by Success’ is often used as a sour-grapes excuse for failing. Almost everyone worships Success and would love to have her in one form or another, so it is unsurprising that experts step forward on behalf of the progressive establishment with statistics in hand to deny she is a wrecker at all according to their material definition of success. Therefore worry not, get what you can while the getting is good, for you will be happy once you have enough stuff or the means to buy it to be successful. After all, or before all, America is great because every poor slob therein can get filthy rich. Ignore the statistics demonstrating that material success is exceptional, that if you are from poor folk, you will most likely remain poor. Pay no heed to intellectuals who claim they are more satisfied with life, are healthier and have happier families than those who serve the Golden Calf!
Never mind reading Freud’s essay to learn that he was talking about a characteristic he observed in plays about King Macbeth, upon whose head was placed a fruitless crown, meaning a king without an heir hence a king whose success drove him mad; observe his other, Lady Macbeth, for woman crowns the man and it also takes two to do the macabre tango. It is in the best interest of a psychiatrist to read the classics on slow days, for therein the author''s imagination may have run mad. Freud also picked up Ibsen''s Rosmersholm and discovered a talented young housekeeper who was wrecked when she successfully supplanted an honorable man''s wife. Of course Freud was always inclined to offer up patients up as well: we have a teacher who could not fill his headmaster''s shoes; perhaps because he was incompetent to do so and not wrecked by success. The root of the malady is in the Oedipus conflict found in another play. You see, kids want to replace their parents in the wrong place, and some of them may be wrecked by guilt when they do so.
No, my friends, Freud did not say that Success was a bitch who wrecks all successful people so we should hide in a hole as I did. He was speaking of neurotic people, not the successful folk so many people resent. Yes, if he were alive today, I would volunteer to be in his essay as I am success wrecked and almost dead already so I can finally expose my dark side. I lied my way into far better circumstances than I began with, and I was on the verge of phenomenal success when the fire breathing Dragon appeared in a nightmare. I had been having a recurring nightmare during my rise from the mean streets: I was on the run, accused of murder, and hiding in all sorts of uncomfortable places, including under a house without a basement. And then the Dragon provided me with my revelation. My worldly goods were already on board a freighter to the islands. I got up and threw the opportunity I had wildly dreamed of away, forsaking a tax-free offshore executive position in a virtual money laundry with my own small plane. I knew that was the critical crisis of my life. that the ideal self I had been creating was moribund. I doomed myself to the life of an impoverished writer without a goal except to learn at random, to become a brooding underground man, and to succeed at that I would have to fail: no matter how well I could think and write, I could not bring myself to submit.
I was afraid of success. Perhaps I shall provide my readers with an account of that event in a book I am planning, to be entitled ''I Should Have Been a Criminal.'' You see, my stepmother hated me from the moment she laid eyes on me, screaming at my father to get rid of me on the night I arrived at their home. She accused me of being a bad boy so many times that I became determined to prove her right, yet I could not devote myself to a felonious life because, when I was younger still, a little old lady told me my name was that of a great king, and meant ‘beloved,” so I should be a good boy because David was a good king. She did not tell me about his mean streak. And to add to my confusion, I learned from grownups that Jesus was wrecked by success, murdered because he was Good, from which I drew the conclusion that people will be punished if they are too good, not to mention too bad.
However that may be, I believe it is better to be a successful loser than to be wrecked by success. If you are absolutely good, that is, god, or greater than the greatest thing that can be thought, you will be crucified. Children are taught to be good or be punished, but if they are too good, they are betrayed and resented by others. Being too successful at anything upsets other people and results in a growing number of enemies. Why, your own resentment of successful people may cause you to believe that you shall be damned if you succeed.
There is no such thing as success without failure, or winning without losing, so why not be a successful loser instead of wrecked by success? Simone de Beauvoir, the only intellectual who actually figured Sartre out, praised Failure in her ''Ethics of Ambiguity,'' “The most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact coincidence with himself, and a perfect plenitude, the notion of having to be; would have no meaning.”
After the Dragon appeared and wrecked my career, I went underground to brood and write interminable critical tracts about anything that came to mind as if I could freely associate the cosmos into good order. Nothing was too small or too big to be criticized; the object itself was of no moment, only the attitude towards it, or rather the art of expressing it. Yes, you guessed it: I happened to be reading Flaubert when I crawled into a womb-like cell in Hawaii, where i took up existentialism again to put my existence before being,
I started a book, ''The Underground Man.'' Few people are interested in that forthcoming book at present. People who are afraid of success prefer stories about people wrecked by success; they could care less about the lower depths of successful failure; therefore, I must finish it one day or add it to my ''Successful Loser'' book, The Underground Man is one of the more successful losers, the Neurotic Type Otto Rank described as critical, arrogant, hostile, isolated, negative, and guilty. We are all that from time to time, and I confess I might occasionally be described as of that type when suffering a delusion of persecution, that humans are mean and out to get me, instead of the delusion of grandeur that affords me with this godlike life as an author, that I am a god about to be loved by all. That is, Otto Rank’s Artist Type saves me from his Neurotic Type if only I can write myself to death.
I like Rank when he is right about me, but I am moved to disagree with him on certain points. Rank thought his Neurotic Type was more afraid of death than life; that is, he will not gamble with or risk his life because he is afraid he will die: he is a coward. On the other hand, I offer that the neurotic type fears life more than death. He may prefer to bury himself alive than risk his independence in the crowd; so here I am, immured in paradise. Better yet, life is a death sentence between nothing and nothing, so the fear of death is the fear of life.
Be forewarned by a successful loser who finally looks around at the hole he has dug for himself and realizes it is a grave. Do not be crippled by ambiguity. I risked it all for dialectics and became a cynic instead of a constructive critic. I wanted to free myself from ignorance and then help others do the same, I admit for my own aggrandizement as some sort of hero. I should have devoted time to commercial success because I need to emerge from my chamber, which has been identified by a City of Miami Beach commissioner as too small, an inhumane studio no human being would want to live in; wherefore I have become somewhat depressed beholding it even though I am still a successful loser of sorts.
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By defining yourself as a Successful Loser, you have achieved that success in your lifetime now coming to a close by successfully losing.
I am a critic like you and look around me to criticize what I see but never to the point where I become obsessed because I had to earn a living, too. I would call myself a successful cruiser because I have maintained a semblance of wealth while there were many requiring me to lose all financial wealth and get into a smaller space like my parents did over a period of 30 years from their early retirement.
By not committing all the way to losing I succeed and therefore will leave this coil with the thought that my money has been well placed and will continue to grow even beyond my life, my success. If what I have written becomes famous, I hope it is after I die because I'm not sure I could put up with the pressure of success like that. it would be a real bitch for me.
Ron