You Don’t Have to Be Perfect

According to Karen Horney and the existentialists, the blessing of an imagination can turn into a curse, because life is never as rewarding as we can imagine it. If life is rewarding enough, imagination can be a source of pleasant fantasies (plus good ideas and memory, which seem to be its purpose). When life lets us down, we have a tendency to compensate by creating an idealized life, with a perfect version of ourselves in it; neurosis or psychopathology is the investment of energy into polishing our perfect image instead of trying to improve our actual situation. Neurosis is choosing the blue pill (from The Matrix).

Horney teaches us that it’s hard to tell perfectionism when we see it, because it varies so much from person to person, and also because any act can be undertaken in the service of reality or in the service of idealization. You can study extra hard for a test to feel genuine pride in doing well, or you can study extra hard to avoid the humiliation to your neurotic pride that a pretty good grade would inflict. Neurotically, you can give money to panhandlers and feel like a saint; you can snub panhandlers and feel like the very definition of self-reliance. Healthily, you can give out of generosity or you can snub because they are annoying. We all promote our own perfect image some of time; people said to have personality disorders do so almost all the time.

In Erving Goffman’s terms, we are all of us trying to play a role all of the time and we are constantly avoiding having our performance discredited. A role we try to play is pathological if it would be discredited simply by our humanity, or by the laws of nature—in other words, if it is bound to be discredited. If you want to lose weight, you have to accept the laws of thermodynamics. For some people, this is too much of a blow to feeling special, so they complain instead that they have tried everything, that their own metabolism is somehow an exception to the law of conservation of energy. If you want to control your spending, you have to accept the rules of arithmetic. If you want to stop procrastinating, you have to accept the inexorability of time. Dieters, procrastinators, and overspenders don’t want the treatment to work, because to them, the cost of being ordinary is worse than the benefits of the treatment. They want the treatment to work only if it works by magic.

Another problem—at work, in love, in relationships—relates to the way we manage blows to the image of our idealized self. First and foremost, we deny that such a blow has occurred, which maintains the image of perfection or specialness that we are claiming. Perhaps your reaction to the previous paragraph was that your procrastination, weight problems, or overspending are not related to maintaining an image of yourself as an exception to the laws of nature. Perhaps your reaction was colored with indignation about the implications. Isn’t it interesting that indignation implies indignity? We get indignant when our dignity is tarnished with the ordinary brush.

We tend to monitor our portrayal of ourselves as special or perfect and react in character to moments when we can’t quite pull it off. Superhero types, comfortable with their own aggression, get angry at others who doubt their claims. Interacting with them socially is like interacting with someone who is armed to the teeth; you have a tendency to bite your tongue when they tell you how amazing they are. This reads as submissiveness and makes them feel even more superior. Saintly types, repeatedly debasing themselves, get caught in an act of self-indulgence and atone by lowering themselves even further. Others take advantage, which reads as selfishness, making them feel even more saintly. Mystic types, who claim not to need other people, get found out as ordinarily concerned with the reactions of others, and ditch you to prove it’s not true. You pursue them, which reads as clinging dependence, making them feel even more extraordinarily independent.

Strangely, it may be easier to deal with our own imperfection than with others’. It’s strange because we are so much more invested in our own sense of being special and we have so much more evidence to support it. (Every magical thought that ever came true bolsters your own sense of specialness, but similar thoughts of other people are not available to you.) To manage your imperfection, you need to observe how reality has provided you with real rewards and perfection has provided you only with the relief of not being found out. (If you are so far gone that you have come to believe that you are in fact perfect, nothing will work until you crash.) You can put down the terrible burden of specialness, what Ecclesiastes calls a striving after wind, and enjoy nourishment and work and sex and the company of others. The method is simply to laugh at yourself when you claim special consideration, the laugh of affection that a loving parent gives a child who says he can fly—“Wouldn’t that be great?”

With others, mutual laughter is also the best medicine, but some people with personality disorders don’t believe that such mutuality is possible (good therapy proves that it is). They despise their real self so thoroughly that they don’t believe in nourishment, camaraderie, or enjoying the fruits of their labors. Except in therapy, which starts with an agreement that the relationship’s purpose is to change them, they must typically either be catered to or avoided. However, in the interests of preserving a sense of perfection, they can often be induced into pretending they are laughing at themselves, and this can afford their friends and colleagues a modicum of maneuverability. For example, the man who must always be right can “prove” that is not so by learning to graciously acknowledge a mistake and keep his claims about how he was actually right after all to himself. The gracious moment, though false, may be enough for a friend who otherwise enjoys his company.