Self-consciousness and the Psoriatic Personality: Considering Updike and Potter

"Don't be so self-conscious." Like so many other troublesome injunctions ("Don't think of pink elephants," "Control that itch"), this one--in ignoring its inevitable production and exacerbation of that which it would enjoin against--works most effectively as an evaluation and a chiding. "Don't be so self-conscious" evokes a particular scene, in which nearly always it is an adult (parent, teacher, coach) who, generating the self-replicating mortifications of self-consciousness, excites herself or himself with disciplinary irritation to heights of unselfconscious pleasure. Former adolescents know--and, knowing, cannot help themselves--how endangering it is to be self-conscious.

"Yes, but if only he/she/the work were more self-conscious." Academics know that the review of job applications often enough leads search committees to sigh their wishes for greater candidate self-consciousness. Yet this sage hallway observation--when I make it or when others do--overturns the evaluation of self-consciousness it once seemed the worthy project of the whole of my adolescent world to teach. The self-conscious job candidate would seem to embody the opposite of the mortified and abject self-consciousness urged to repudiate its very being; commanding attention by directing attention, masterful because disarming, the self-conscious job candidate risks arrogance in search of approbation. Complicate this by the notion that the debilitations of self-consciousness in personality may become pleasing self-attentions that textuality makes desirable. If "self-consciousness" is no longer the nearly technical term it once was in literary study, it nevertheless retains in criticism, in conversation, and in the popular arts press a valence that is more positive than not, and it remains available for naming and characterizing the work that, self-conscious, is attractive rather than annoying--perhaps attractive even though annoying.

I mean in this essay to ask, in a naïve voice, how can there be these two versions of self-consciousness? How can "self-consciousness" denominate them both? But, living in the world, one recognizes these questions as ill-formed and ill-disguised exclamations, remnants of an adolescent's inability to make herself clear; one knows--because it does--that "self-conscious" can do that work of naming, and that the two versions of self-consciousness can exist at once and in sequence, inhabiting or being inhabited, serially, by rotating selves and texts. The better question--and the more accurate accounting of my task--involves thinking out the unheimlich association of self-consciousness with self-consciousness, articulating their mutually supportive operations, considering the ways in which literary self-consciousness expansively includes mortification in its sense of mastery.

Almost unimaginable without its somatic correlates, the self-consciousness I have identified as debilitating implies a posture, a manual array, the intensity of blood's color in a complexion; and I have not been alone in thinking of self-consciousness as that state which is most clearly about living in a body, inhabiting one's skin. In some medical, psychological, and imaginative literature, self-consciousness has been associated with the skin condition called "psoriasis," and psoriasis has sometimes (cooperatively) proven a means by which writers have embodied and thought out the matter (the materiality) of self-consciousness. Beginning with a psychological account of the "psoriasis personality," this essay examines psoriasis and self-consciousness in two texts: John Updike's memoir, Self-consciousness, which contains a lengthy discussion of his psoriasis, and Dennis Potter's six-hour teleplay, The Singing Detective, first broadcast on the BBC in 1986 and broadcast on PBS in the United States in 1988, in which a severe form of psoriasis, similar to Potter's own condition, has hospitalized the protagonist. As authors with psoriasis, Updike and Potter may be understood to have turned to self-consciousness as a response to their sense of the publicity of skin disease (people with psoriasis are looked at), and popular representations of the two cannot seem to...