guilt – Becoming Human

The fear of rejection and the power to say no

If you have a fear of rejection, it is very likely that you also have a difficulty to say no to people and to take your life in your own hands.

This is not simply because, by saying no, you fear rejection by the person who (at least implicitly) asked you for something. It is because you have lost touch with your own power to reject.

This follows from the insights of object relations theory, whose best known theorist and advocate was Melanie Klein. Essentially it works like this. Human potentiality includes a wide repertory of emotional resources, but some of the less “pleasant” of these, like the ability to drive through a personal agenda single-mindedly, we reject at an early age: because they seem to us to be associated with the failure of a caregiver to attend to our emotional or physical needs. Because these attributes are perceived properties of the neglectful caregiver, we disqualify them as properties of ourselves. Essentially, biology presents us with a full palette of emotional resources, but we select from these some and exclude others in order to construct an ego ideal (i.e. a mental representation of our ego) which provides us with comfort by reassuring ourselves that we are not like our tormentor.

In the process, however, we alienate from ourselves an innate part of our emotional repertory. This is not to say that we necessarily do not express those emotions at all (and therefore neither is it to say that we cannot repeat exactly the same emotionally destructive process with the next generation). However, these unwanted emotions remain isolated within the psyche and cannot ally themselves with the part of ourselves which we do accept and which corresponds to the ego ideal. When we express those emotions, we do so in a way which is monochrome and does not serve our goals, and we experience guilt, shame and regret.

The rejected emotions which are separated out from the ego and assigned to the neglectful caregiver contribute to form the Object which is the core concept of the theory. In order to minimize the painfulness of similarity, we deny to the Object the “positive” emotions which we find in ourselves. Thus the Object is completely other and unrelated to ourselves. However, the Object is not the caregiver, but merely a mode in which the caregiver presents him- or herself, at certain times, to the infant. When the caregiver gives the infant what it wants (i.e. his or her behavior is ego-syntonic), he or she remains represented as an object of trust. The caregiver is therefore mentally represented by two Objects, one of which is categorically desired (the libidinous Object) and the other of which is as categorically rejected (the rejected Object).

The infant is initially unaware of any overarching concept of personality of the caregiver, but merely perceives and experiences one or other of these modes. Anyone who has small children will know that at one moment they can be all over you, tender and loving, and in the next moment mad at you if they do not get what they want. This characteristically infantile reaction is possible because the infant still lacks the concept of singularity of personhood and it certainly persists until the age of five or six, and frequently goes on to characterize stressful reactions to the other throughout adult life.

As cognitive development allows a more complex representation of the caregiver to take root, these Objects remain in the preconscious mind as incarnations, on the one hand, of those parts of our emotional repertory which we embrace and, on the other, those parts which we reject. The libidinous Object becomes the later object of romantic desire, that is, it extends its role from ego-ideal to “alter-ideal”. The alter-ideal, of course, because it is imcompatible with biology, is as impossible to realize as the ego-ideal, and therefore destined to cause the inevitable shipwreck of souls and relationships. Meanwhile the rejected Object is in a very real sense the alter-ego, containing within it that part of our biological repertory from which we have cut ourselves off.

The alter-ego manifests itself in multiple ways. When developmental factors have given rise to a strong alter-ego, it is imbued with extraordinary, frightening powers. The alter-ego is able to threaten us in ways far more menacing than the caregiver ever could, because it is constructed solely from the “negative” (i.e. ego-dystonic) material we found in the caregiver, with none of the ego-syntonic “good”. It surfaces as a monster in our nightmares, denying us the opportunity to appropriate any of its attributes as part of ourselves. But it also lurks behind every instance of ego-dystonic social behavior which we encounter growing up and in our adult lives. Minor setbacks and modest, negotiable obstacles, to which the healthy ego is resilient, become repeated proofs to us of the reality of the menace posed by the alter-ego and its absolute power over our lives. We no longer represent situations or the disposition of their protagonists realistically, determining to what extent they are favorable or unfavorable and solliciting a measured neo-cortical response. Instead, each situation is a manifestation of those immanent demonic forces which no more than tolerate our vitality within their own predetermined limits. Provoke them, and we are not merely disadvantaged, but ruined.

The key to disarming the alter-ego is realizing that it is a concoction of our own minds, and simultaneously as much an abstraction, as remote from actual human subjects, and as significant a force in our behavior, as the ego-ideal. The alter-ego is constructed out of those elements of our biological repertory for which we as small infants found no use, like left-over bits of Lego whose place in the puzzle we could not devine, and which we have accordingly moulded into a grotesque, residual form. This omnipotent demonic force could only be formed in such a way; nothing in real life corresponds to it. If it is able to menace us in ways in which no real human being could, it is because we have given it the force to do so, simultaneously denying that force to ourselves. That is why we fear rejection, equating it to a cataclysmic annihilation of our selfhood, and it is the same reason why we cannot say a healthy no to others.

It seems that this trick of splitting the ego which we play on ourselves also has its limits. We know that we do not conform fully to our ego-ideal, and secretly we intuit the truth that the demon is actually part of us, and suspect that we are as unlovable as it is. That is why, as the cartoon (courtesy of atrandomcomics.com) illustrates so well, the person whose alter-ego towers over her ego needs constant reassurance that she is accepted by others, and yet never really believes it. The ego-ideal is frequently designed to procure acceptance, and so held in place by both carrot and stick. Although it seems primary, because a failure to bond effectively with the caregiver has such damaging effects for ego development, it may also be that the fear of rejection is only one of the fears that can be expressed in this way. For the moment, however, I know too little of others’ demons to feel myself on firm ground speculating further.

In conclusion. When you encounter your demon, don’t run away; stop, and admire its force. It has, as you surely realize, amazing powers, even if, stranded as they are in an incorporeal mental representation, unempowered by embodiment, they serve no purpose other than gratification of its infinitely sadistic desires at your expense. The demon is extremely scary, but it is also magnificently beautiful. It invites to contemplation in awareness of its having been composed, Frankenstein-like, from left-over bits of yourself. You have given it the superhuman powers it has over you; they are your own powers, so invite them home. Alienated from you, yet dependent for its existence upon that alienation, and existing only in your mind, the demon can only threaten you. It is unable to act in any other way. Reincorporated, however, its powers are available to you for all of the purposes you design. It is no longer condemned to an autistic, emprisoned existence but can become part of an harmonious whole.

Jealousy

Today I took my little boy to the childminding service at the school which is organized before classes start.

By way of background, I am probably the most obsessed person in the known universe on the subject of the attitudes of adults towards my children (and in fact all children). I am infinitely sensitive to the frequent occasions when those adults project their own neuroses and unresolved emotions onto the kids. When I see or feel it, there is no room for compromise. I am also in love with my little boy. I rely on him for most of the spiritual enlightenment I am ever likely to obtain. He is amazingly charming, almost always happy and playful and he has a really tender side also. He’s three (nearly).

Despite being impossible to please, I am pretty happy with the school. It’s not perfect of course, but it could be a lot worse. We feel comfortable sending him there.

The lady in charge of the childminding service seems to love him particularly. Whenever he arrives, he is greeted with open arms and a warm heart. As I love him and care for his wellbeing, what more could I want?

So, where I stand on this is pretty clear.

To my surprise, though, this morning, how I feel about it apparently is not. Continue reading “Jealousy”

Dear woman

A friend of mine just posted this video on Facebook, in which a group of men issue their apologies to women for (unconscious) male aggression over the centuries. My friend suggested (to paraphrase) that it was a sign of a hopeful convergence between the sexes.

I would strike a slightly discordant note, however: while I don’t disagree with any of what they say, I do have a problem with the meaning being given to it, because it does not invite women into a similar introspection.

I do not believe that there is an imbalance between masculine and feminine energy, for me such a statement intuitively violates a law of nature similar to the first law of thermodynamics and Newton’s third law of motion. Such an imbalance cannot exist. All there is, is a lack of consciousness.

As men have perpetrated violence on women, so women have done so on men. They have merely done so on the next generation left to their safekeeping. The violence has been a defiguration of our shared humanity for both sexes. At the heart of men’s unconscious violence against women is the reflected anger of their mother against their masculinity which they absorbed as children. No-one started that, and we can only heal it together.

These guys’ gesture I appreciate and respect, but it tends to be the only perspective we get to see. It feels, to me, too much like they are saying sorry to mama because they are still childishly dependent on her love. I like the vulnerability, but I feel a lack of masculinity in the voices and expressions. These look like the nice guys who, for good reasons which women will never tell you to your face, are not getting any sex. Their masculinity is problematic to them and a source of guilt. Any convergence with the feminine results only from a lack of polarity.

In my experience also, those women who have a great appetite for this kind of mea culpa, and they are many, are often doing so out of an unconscious and unreflective misandry of their own (a word I am surprised to discover in fact exists – and that says a lot). They are not only punishing their sons for the sins of their fathers, they are punishing their own father for his emotional absence during their formative years. I can’t help feeling it is dangerously facile.

For my part, I deeply regret and weep over a state of the world in which men deny their nurturing, expressed as protection and honoring, to women, and in which women deny their nurturing, in the form of physical intimacy, to men. However, it is not my fault, nor the fault of any of the women I encounter, and, if it were, I would forgive myself and them.

What’s the big deal? Thoughts on resistance

I’ve recently been led to reflect on the question of what it is that makes us so afraid of looking inside to the circumstances which lie historically at the origin of our neuroses – frequently to the point of utter terror and/or total blindness even to the fact or possibility of repression. After all, we frequently face much more objectively threatening circumstances in life, like major illness and operations, with much more stoicism.

It is not a question that I think standard psychoanalytic theory really has an answer for. Sure, we are afraid to dismantle the ego. However, this unremarked importance of the ego simply appears as exogenous or as a mere mediator between the pleasure and reality principles. Its apparent tendency to calcify very early on is not really explained. One might link this to a biological developmental calendar, but then the apparent successes of therapy in sometimes bringing down the edifice would be very surprising. Why then do we freeze emotions in the body and hold them down long after the apparent, original need to do so is past? Why can’t we (or at least why don’t we), like the animals, just pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and move on – years and decades after the event? When you think about it, it is really, really strange that humankind is the only species that appears to have this strange dysfunction of its innate healing capacity. And even if we have some idea of how to unblock it, we have little idea of what gets it blocked in the first place.

I can only offer some clues as to how it appears to me.

At the basis, we need to remember that our species has evolved in small, interdependent tribal groups, and what mattered for the survival of our puny organism was being smart and acting in concert. This has led, via mechanisms which I shall perhaps discuss on another occasion, to an unparalleled emotional attunement to other members of the group. Most of this, of course, is a deep mystery – we do not know why we have a spiritual instinct and in what ways it differs from other species, and we do not know why it is so important for us to receive and to give love. These things I will have to take as a given, at least for now.

The Rousseauian view, expounded also by Osho, and perhaps bought into by Reich – all for their own reasons which I understand – that “observed” man is the product of social processes which have perverted the pristine and beautiful natural state of man, has, I believe, to be dismissed as naive. Freud was not wrong in believing that civilization required a sort of suppression of natural drives. On the contrary, the mechanism of acculturation is innate in our species and even what most defines it; it is not maladaptive; it is just misfiring under the conditions of modern life.

If we are happy enough to trace cerebral patterns back to reptilian times, I believe we should be a bit more accepting of our less remote ancestors and what they have bequeathed us. A scientific view of our, or of any, species cannot consist in simply choosing (and idealizing) one forebear over others. Thus, we cannot identify with certain bonobo traits merely because we do not like those of chimpanzees. That we do not like the warlike, selfish part of our nature certainly tells us something, but it does not disprove its existence – only the lengths to which the acculturation process goes to redefine and rechannel this truculence through mechanisms which are entirely social – social learning processes which result in the transmission of norms of behavior from generation to generation and group to group, norms which constitute as important, though far more diverse, a part of our patrimony as what is chiseled on our DNA.

If Darwin, evolutionary psychologists and classical economists have all made a mistake, as argued in Sex at Dawn, it is a perfectly understandable mistake, deriving from first-order principles which one may not like (for the reasons I just mentioned) but must defer to. In all higher species we see collective behavior which is imposed by social mechanisms on instincts which are far more egoistic. And ultimately, this process of acculturation is what has led to the second stage of evolution and the emergence of a creature such as man. Indeed, only social learning processes can result in cooperative behaviour – it cannot be innate.

So: guilt and shame are primary emotions and manipulation of them is a primary process.

Seeing this helps enormously, because there is no need any more to feel – well – guilty about feeling guilty. It is hardwired into our species to feel guilty when we fall short of social expectations, as it is hardwired to manipulate this feeling in order to obtain and maintain group cohesion.

I guess we would all like our children to be generous and patient. But that is not their natural state. Even allowing for incipient neurosis at the earliest stage, I do not believe any child anywhere on the planet has ever been born naturally sharing and thinking of others. Indeed, this is implicit in the standard developmental model, and pretty much a logical evidence: the child first has to develop a concept of self before it can develop a concept of others; the concept of the other can never be ahead of the concept of self and there is thus always a self-bias. So, the younger child must learn, and the adult or older child must teach.

What drives the young child to accept the social yoke, and what approach to childrearing optimizes the transmission of needed social norms? On the child’s side, this can only be the need for love and acceptance. I do not see any other candidate. That the sense of self is impacted by social disopprobrium – for when being reprimanded, however patiently and lovingly, the child will feel such disopprobrium – is natural. From its standpoint, love and acceptance are maximized and guilt is minimized when the child is aligned to social norms. In fact, I would even go further than this – it is not just the sense of self which is impacted, but the very fact of self. A human being living in isolation is not human.

Trying to bring about such alignment must, however, take account of the child’s natural rebelliousness and nascent sense of self. If the primary motivation to align is love and acceptance, it is obvious that bringing about long-term alignment through fear and violence is an inferior and unstable recourse, because love and acceptance create bonds which fear does not. However, fear and authority are not maladaptive either – they are highly adaptive to situations of stress and highly effective in such situations. The balance has just been lost because the circumstances in which we have evolved to exist are no longer those in which we do exist – and this estrangement becomes self-reinforcing. The child learns to suppress aspects of its behaviour which are perfectly healthy and unthreatening to the group, just because the former-child-now-adult can’t handle them. This repression and these patterns of behaviour maximize its payoff in terms of acceptance under the circumstances which it is powerless to change. However, they do so at a tremendous cost in terms of vitality, which is passed on to the next generation.

So to return to the question with which I started, it must be that the energy which cathects the fear of confronting our inner traumas when we start to do so, i.e. the energy of resistance, is the same energy which holds the neurosis in place at other times, i.e. when it is unchallenged. In other words, our fear is our neurosis. It follows that it is functionally identical to the fear experienced in response to the primal events – ultimately, in almost all cases, the fear of losing the sense of belonging and thereby of what it is that defines our nature as human.

And yet: we will not. Objectively, no such risk exists as adults, certainly in a therapeutic situation, when all the traumatizing factors belong to the past. Why is this not obvious?

I think I detect the reason, and it is this. In fact, our desire for love and acceptance is never met. It was not met during our formative years, and it is still not met today, because the endemic character of neurosis means that there is almost no-one able to love as we are meant to be loved and as we need to be loved. This is why we cling on to the strategies we learnt as children, although in no absolute sense did they work either then or now – they merely optimized subject to inordinate constraints. In fact, we are not failing to substitute them by a better strategy: there is no better strategy available to us. We have also chosen partners subject to the requirement that our strategies to gain acceptance initially worked with those partners. We have grown up emotionally paralyzed because of a lack of nurturing and we realize that we, all of us, continue to face the same situation, and whilst the needs of an adult are not those of a child, the meeting of those adult needs is the only thing that can start to demine the unexploded ordinance buried in our past.

It’s Catch 22.

The notion that we as adults are sufficient unto ourselves and can get all the sustenance we need from our physical environment, with no need for comfort, touch, contact is just a perpetuation of the lie and the violence at the heart of humanity’s traumatized existence.

Love and compassion are necessary to our physical and mental health as a species, and they are necessary to the therapeutic process and personal growth. Our mind, that place where we feel in control, because it works so well without others, strives after technique, but such technique is meaningless and ineffective without compassion, and secondary when compassion is present.

Facing our traumas is terrifying because we are innately afraid, under prevailing and persistent conditions of emotional starvation, to lose the little acceptance we have won in the world, and with which we reluctantly content ourselves. We lose sight and faith that anything more is possible, even though we know, deep down, that this way of existing is impoverished, is not satisfying and is not human.