Do you remember from a few years ago the advertising slogan for cream, `naughty but nice'? I was interested to be told recently that the originator of this phrase was none other than Salman Rushdie, the author of Midnight's Children, The Moor's Last Sigh and, most famously, of The Satanic Verses. That set me thinking. It seems to me that RushdieÐprobably deliberatelyÐhas captured a lot in those three words. They say something about eating, eating disorders and even the human condition. (Clearly such literary associations bring out the pretentious in me).
An animal can in some sense be said to experience the nice' bit. Eating is a basic and powerful drive. Any animal for which we would want to claim some consciousness or subjectivity would have in its repertoire of mental states something like yum, yum, that's good'. Indeed, I have known cats who seems to be able to manage something along the lines of `this is not bad but I really can't understand why you are offering me tinned stuff when you know that I would much prefer the coq au vin that you are having'. And we are all animals.
Animals can manage the naughty' bit too, although some of them seem to struggle with it. (But then don't we all). Learning that something is bad or aversive is not complicated. What is probably beyond the grasp of cats and dogs and even perhaps of chimpanzees is the thought that something can be naughty and nice. The cat may get the cream but it does not get the guilt and would not get' the slogan. That is all just too dif®cult. Whereas for us, much of the time, the dif®cult thing is not to get too caught up and stuck in webs of mixed feelings and con¯icting emotions. We pay a price for our higher order thinking although we would not want to change places with our pets. (OK, well sometimes we would).
Our patients play out these essentially human dramas in the very basic arena of food and eating. Much of the complexity of life is crammed into nesting sets of naughty but nice'. As clinicians we need to get to know more about the biology of both nice' and `naughty' but my guess would be that only psychology will tell us much about the combination. Psychology and literature tooÐnice one, Salman.