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  • IntroductionReframing Vulnerability: “so obviously the problem…”?
  • Simone Drichel (bio)

I’m prepared for everything, I’m armed against everything, nothing will hurt me anymore. I’ve become invulnerable. Like Siegfried, I have bathed in dragon’s blood, and no linden leaf has left a single spot of me unprotected. I’m inside this skin for the duration. I will die inside my invulnerable shell […].

—Christoph Hein, The Distant Lover

“so obviously the problem …”

Discussing Freud’s reflections on helplessness in “The Helpless,”1 the second of four small essays on what he calls, with a nod to John Keats, our “Negative Capabilities,”2 prominent British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes, “all of what we think of as our moral problems spring from the fact that we are helpless subjects. And helplessness, or our relation to it, is something Freud thinks we need to get right.” We do “the very worst things,” Phillips continues, “when we get it wrong; we start doing things like believing in God, or abiding by religious teachings, or adopting preposterous moralities. Or punishing/exploiting other people’s vulnerabilities or ideologies, or believing that we are exceptional creations rather than just another species of animal” (144). Given this rather bleak scenario, the stakes in getting helplessness right could hardly be higher. But what does it mean to get helplessness right? What does it mean, even, to be helpless? And are these in fact the right questions, the right terms, in the context of a special issue on vulnerability? Is being vulnerable the same as being helpless? Or have we taken a wrong turn already, in the opening paragraph, before we have even had a chance to get under way in our consideration of vulnerability?

Adriana Cavarero, for one, may certainly object that we have. According to her, “although the scene of infancy links them and makes them coincide, ‘vulnerable’ and ‘helpless’ are not synonymous terms” (30). As infants we are both helpless and vulnerable; however, while we outgrow helplessness, we are never not vulnerable: “vulnerability is a permanent status of the human being, whereas finding oneself helpless […] depends on circumstances” (31).3 And yet Phillips, by contrast, seems to have no qualms about using the terms interchangeably: positing “invulnerability” [End Page 3] as “the opposite of helplessness” (130), he implicitly equates helplessness with vulnerability and, unlike Cavarero, further proposes that we may think of helplessness not as something we grow out of but “as something we grow into,” asking, “what if we thought of ourselves as getting progressively more helpless as we got older? And of helplessness as something we grow into, partly by becoming aware of it?” (156). Helplessness, in this reading at least, appears to be coterminous with vulnerability, suggesting that we are perhaps not necessarily on the wrong track if we follow Phillips a little further on his foray into understanding what it might mean to get helplessness right.

According to Freud, says Phillips, helplessness “is the most important thing about us” (140). Our helplessness is both original and constitutive: as infants we depend on our caregivers for physical and emotional survival; and although our needs and desires certainly evolve and change shape as we mature, we cannot ever be said to grow out of them.4 And neither should we want to, Phillips argues; that, in fact, is the point his essay aims to demonstrate: “I want to consider in this essay,” he says, “Freud’s story about helplessness with a view to making a case for it; that is, as a case for helplessness as something we shouldn’t want to think of ourselves as growing out of” (130). Crucially, the very fact that a case needs to be made for helplessness signals, of course, that it is more commonly thought of as a state we would very much like to grow out of—a fact Phillips himself takes as a starting point for his discussion in the first essay in the “Negative Capabilities” series, “The Horse”:

Our lives are always threatening to be too much for us; what Strachey [in his introduction to Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety] calls “the accumulation of excitation” is what renders us helpless. In this...

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