Under Control: the Genteel Body

Abstract

Self-control was the fundamental principle of the courtesy traditions that preceded the genteel revolution. Regulation of the body and its appetites, desires, effluvia and excrescences constituted the first step in the civilizing process, located in both the individual and society. Freud depicts resolution of the struggle between self-control and instinct as the repressive compromise between ‘civilisation and its discontents’, a phrase with special resonance in the discourse of gentility. In his own psychoanalytic terms, Freud traces self-control as the individual’s biologically grounded passage from infantile libidinous drive to adult establishment of the superego, expressed as a conscience, a sense of guilt and the capacity for remorse.¹ This vision of natural stages of psychic growth frames the view that social development occurs at the expense of individual desire. Elias refers to Freud’s interpretation, but inverts it by historicizing the regulation of the body within the social order defined by different expressions of state power. The hypothesis that external power shapes the individual psyche according to evolving techniques of power is illustrated by the history of increasingly self-managed controls over the body² Both theories illuminate the growth of human cultivation as the sublimation of animal instincts by order presented in rules imposed by the authority of kings, parents or teachers and naturalized as civil, adult behaviour.