Tag: shame

Telling The Truth

 

Neil Strauss, who wrote The Game, an account of the pick-up artist (PUA) subculture which I discussed in an earlier post has just published his new book, The Truth. The book describes, as I understand it, with a great deal of candour and personal courage, his process of transitioning from what we might call an obsessively promiscuous lifestyle to a committed open (or at least, not fully closed) relationship with his wife Ingrid. It’s Strauss’s journey, but also – certainly by the provocative title – seems to purport to be more than that.

I should say that these remarks are not based on a reading of the new book, but mostly just on what he said in his recent podcast with Daniel Vitalis. It may be, therefore, that I misrepresent Strauss to a certain extent (which I’ll gladly correct if I can be convinced of it); but in any case, what I will go on to describe and then criticize in this article is a position, I think, that many men are adopting, from whatever angle they come at it, in response to certain obvious facts of our social biology, namely our non-monogamous nature and our desire nevertheless to form deep and intimate bonds with members of the opposite sex, combined with the cultural reality they encounter. This is therefore not a book review, but a critique of that position. It isn’t necessary to listen to the podcast to understand my comments, though I do encourage you to.

Many of Strauss’s erstwhile PUA fans will no doubt be ready to poo-poo the book as a cave-in, and Strauss himself states in the podcast that some have seen it as a defense of monogamy, even a repudiation of his earlier persona, which he insists it is not. That’s fair, though he does bear responsibility for this inevitable media spin (which he doesn’t seem to have been too concerned to avoid). Strauss’s point seems to be that obsessive promiscuity is unsatisfying and successful polyamory hard to pull off, polyamory itself being, in a certain number of cases, a lifestyle choice or label which covers up an inability or unwillingness to go deep in relationships. This being so, Strauss might best be seen as a “pragmatic monogamist” who construes the term not as prohibiting extra-dyadic sex but as requiring, as I understand it, such sex to take place, if it does, on terms which are mutually agreed within the couple and transparent. He puts this forward in the discussion simply as the position to which he has come, not as a universal model, though given this his marketing seems disingenuous. I interpret him as not being opposed to polyamory, but simply skeptical of it in practice.

It might seem that Strauss and I share a lot in common; I too have written about some important misgivings related to the way polyamory is conceptualized and lived in practice (or, let us say, some of the practices which the word is used to cover) and I agree with him on the importance of commitment, communication, transparency etc, at least in that ideal world in which we decidedly do not live.

There is, however, something rather unexamined, it seems to me, in Strauss’s discourse. Vitalis illustrates this in the podcast when he speaks of his sense of shame at hiding extra-dyadic dalliances from his partner, a position he is very uncomfortable being in because he feels it lacks integrity. I would certainly agree with this, but even if we have to live our life as best we can within the constraints we have inherited, it still behoves us to examine this sense of shame critically, something neither Strauss nor Vitalis in the podcast hints at doing. Vitalis, however, offers himself a clue as to the origin of his sentiments in describing his attitude as a child towards his mother: ever fearful she would fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, he was very careful to avoid doing anything which might provoke such an overreaction. As children, of course, we seek to please our mothers because we need their love. Our mothers, on the other hand, often simply take from us what they want, being far more skilled and better placed to obtain it due to being adults and in a monopolistic position of authority. We need to be very careful to avoid the widespread error of reproducing this asymmetry in our adult relationships, and especially of doing so unconsciously, failing to recognize this as a cultural construct rather than an innate difference of social biology.

It will inevitably happen from time to time, in a dyadic relationship, that some courses of action in which the man is inclined to engage may cause discomfort to the woman. This should (ideally) be discussed, of course, and it also needs to be recognized that the woman may have insights into this situation which the man lacks; these should be listened to. However, it cannot be that the man simply does not engage in actions which make his partner uncomfortable; that she has some kind of veto on his behavior (or he on hers). The position of discomfort has a lot to teach us, and ensuring the comfort of the other at all times is a very unrealistic demand to place on oneself. This applies no less in matters sexual than in any other sphere of life. If one backs off from confrontation simply because one fears it, then one loses an essential part of ones freedom and ability to live an authentic life. We cannot rescue monogamy with the artifice of imposing upon it unhealed parent-child patterns of behavior.

In my life, I have seen that it is important to listen and communicate, but it is also important to be brave: not only important for oneself, but also for the relationship and the other. An implicit and festering situation of subordination strikes me as a major risk factor for relationship longevity. I share their desire to be open, though I do not think this is an ethical commandment; indeed, sometimes (as Dan Savage never tires from pointing out) exactly the opposite may be true. However, I am also going to do things which make my partner uncomfortable if those are things which I am convinced I need to do. I will take into account her vulnerabilities and the long run, but they are only factors among others.

There is no inherent reason to be ashamed of ones interest in pursuing any kind of relationship with another person, nor of actually doing so where this does not constitute a material and real (rather than unilaterally imagined) threat to the investment each partner has made in the primary or reference relationship. In this regard, it is irrelevant whether this behavior causes discomfort and even whether it brings about the end of the primary relationship entirely. One may certainly refrain from a course of action in order to avoid those outcomes: but consciously, not based on shame. One must, at the same time, also understand that change and challenge brings growth and new opportunities. If one shies away from this out of fear, the relationship will stagnate and may anyway eventually perish. One would want to be quite confident that in the long run the asymmetry in the relationship is not going to give rise to resentment, the rising tide of which may – and I think often does – pass unperceived under the radar of ones social identity until it is too late.

Strauss argues that we have neuroplasticity and our biology is not the last word. Of course this is correct. But any ability we may have to pursue any sort of relationship which may loosely be called monogamous still begs the question of why we should do so. There may be pragmatic grounds – including that it is a better personal choice than a life of obsessive-compulsive unsatisfying sexual liaisons and that it is a socially stable reference point, an available (if adaptable) paradigm: the path, in other words, that it sounds like Strauss has trodden. But such grounds are no more than that; they are not “The Truth”.

Monogamy and personal growth

As I have noted before, mankind has an amazing and innate skill for manipulation through shame, which implements an effective evolutionary strategy designed to ensure group coherence and the passing on from one generation to the next of epigenetic knowledge about the world. Emotional manipulation is particularly easy for persons in positions of authority.

This skill, or Achilles’ heel if you will, has been exploited by agrarian societies in order to solidify the social relations of economic production. They have done so in two main ways, one of which Aquarian society is well aware of and in the process of abandoning, but the other of which remains largely normative and unquestioned.

The institution of whose corruptness we are well aware is religion. Organized religion cynically latches on to mankind’s inherent sense of awe and numinosity, and channels it into a vehicle which commands subservient obedience. True religion is a demand-side, or better collective experience, but the supply side has used threats, misrepresentation and coercion in order to dominate it.

We have been fighting this and pushing it back for centuries. In the Enlightenment we coined the idea of separation of church and state, choosing, no doubt opportunistically, to ignore that this is a complete nonsense: church and state have always been simply two aspects of each other. Whenever a religious movement has really challenged the basis of the agrarian state, it has either been short-lived and brutally repressed, or rapidly co-opted, and thereby denatured, by the powers that be. As Marx stated, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.”

We have been much less willing to dethrone the second pillar of social subservience: the family. Should we be in any way surprised to learn that this institution is one of those  dearest to a religion whose founder stated “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters–yes, even his own life — he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26)? We should not be surprised: the intentions of the religion and of its founder are diametrically opposed to each other.

I am not, however, going to get into a lame exegesis of statements I am not concerned to defend. The point I wish to make is that human nature displays a tribe-building instinct which social authority has deemed is allowed expression only through the institution of the family.

That institution and its rules have of course varied from place to place and changed significantly over time. For most of human history it has not implied complete restriction on the sexual freedom of men, but it has ensured that women occupy a subservient place in society, essentially reducing them to one more item of property in the estate of their husband.

The social allocation of women – what we may term the bridal economy – has, of course, reduced men’s sexual freedom indirectly, by making many women sexually unavailable, but there has always remained the institution of the brothel, and enough “shared” women with no choice other than to populate it due to unfortunate circumstances in their lives. However, this is no more than a valve to let off what would otherwise be an unbearable build-up of pressure due to the power of male sexual drives. A brief liaison with a prostitute in a brothel, even when relatively free from shame, hardly allows for satisfaction of the complete sexual instinct, which requires relationship and connection. Indeed, the sexual drive itself is only the basest component and the easiest to gratify. Thus it remains the case that within all systems where women are treated as property, the sexual instinct of both sexes, in its full sense, is almost completely repressed.

Repressed, of course, is not the same as forgotten, as many utopian attempts at reconstituting polyadic communities over the centuries attest. Free love has often been subversive and remains so today. Friedrich Engels wrote that “It is a peculiar fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes to the
foreground“. As Reich can testify, the idea of sexual pleasure as an organizing principle of society has hardly been universally welcomed.

Monogamy and its historical variants have served the goal of social control not only by repressing sexuality and the empowering vitality which it engenders. Families are perfect units to tax, both for money and for soldiers. They are associated with transgenerational property rights, the defence of which necessitates compliance and docility. They are also far less robust than tribes to the losses of individual members, meaning that those members must be risk-averse. Lastly, the family unit is naturally self-propagating. Children are conditioned into it and their economic incentives are aligned with it.

Even today, there is a doctrine of humanitarian intervention into the affairs of state, but families are very largely self-governing, not as a result of any liberal conviction but rather because they are so constitutive of the greater whole which is the state. But if monogamy were intrinsic to our species, why would we need so many institutions to enforce it?

We sleep around, but we feel guilty, just as we used to feel guilty for not going to church. This is a sure sign of having been manipulated into believing that the behavior in question is inconducive to the welfare of the group. If we believe the exact contrary to be the case, then it behooves us to be courageous.  We need to reject the traditional institution of marriage with the same joyful iconoclasm as many of us reject the institutions of the church.

Certainly, we will need to find other ways to structure our lives remaining compatible with the need for community, companionship, allowing each person independence, and rearing emotionally healthy children. This is a vast project with no map to guide the way, and it is easy to fall back on what is tried and tested, even if the result of testing conventional monogamy in its modern form has been to show that it is an enormous failure. Whatever institutions we may invent going forward, however – and I use as always the word ‘institution’ to mean not only form but also content – such institutions will need to be compatible with human nature and aspirations, or they are not worth having.

The confinement of sexual expression, and indeed frequently of all expression of adult intimacy, to one single other person, together with the societal assumption that this will, always and everywhere, be the case, is a pillar of oppression which we need to pull down if we purport to be on a spiritual path. This alone, however, is insufficient because it considers only the sexual dimension and ignores the aspiration – often passed over by some of the more austere thinkers I have quoted – to live in deep community and to raise children together in love. Given our biological nature, this is frequently hard to realize other than within institutions which have the form of dyadic relationships with dependent children, and I am not arguing that everyone is obliged to follow a more utopian path whatever the practical difficulties. Within that structure, it must, however, be absolutely clear that commitment does not translate into exclusive focus and that other loves, on the part of persons equally conscious and enlightened, are considered an enrichment, and welcome.

The fear of rejection and the power to say no

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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.

Self-doubt and the other

When I was 19, I had my first real intimate relationship with a girl. She was 17, we were not really in love, but I liked and cared for her a lot. We lived in different parts of the country, so I didn’t get to see her a lot. We had spent a few evenings kissing, cuddling and petting, and an evening came when we took it a bit further. For me it was a beautiful and very pure experience, it had seemed to me that she felt the same way, and so I was shocked when, a few days later, I got a letter from her which was angry and bitter, in which she said she had felt violated, that it was disgusting and dirty and so forth. This outburst of shame took me quite by surprise, as there had been no hint of it before, and it really knocked me for six, undermining my anyway precarious self-confidence vis-a-vis the opposite sex for many years to come.

Today I know how to give pleasure to a woman and have done so with many different partners. I believe I have a sense of boundaries and of tempo and can tune into what is going on in the body and mind of whoever is receiving my touch. I feel female arousal in my own body. This sense is not infallible, but even with persons who have difficulties articulating their desires and boundaries, it rarely happens that there is such a breakdown in communication that, ex-post, I and my partner have totally different assessments of what has gone on. Yet something similar happened recently, and it exposed this old pain. It is not simply the pain of rejection: much more important is the existential self-doubt engendered. How is it possible that I was so wrong about what was going on? If I cannot trust my own instincts, how can I navigate relationships with the openness, tenderness and respect to which I aspire? Am I doomed to bring pain when I want to bring pleasure, and suffering when I want to bring healing? Is my caring self-image just in fact, as perhaps the other accuses, a rationalization of cynical pursuit of my own desires?

A certain degree of skepticism in this regard is undoubtedly healthy. There are always moments when we misread signals and are caught up in our own discourse. The experience of the other is a vital reality check and it is precious when there is enough trust and openness that neither party feels compelled to distort their experience out of fear of the sensitivities of the other.

Nevertheless, the notion that there can be one event, but two different experiences of it, is to be mistrusted. Experiences of intimacy go largely beyond the boundaries of the self. When we think like this, we are unaware that we posit a notion of mind and will which is absolutely culturally determined and very clearly wrong. People are not, as we are assuming, atomic actors with single points of view: they are, as we know, complex and self-contradictory.

Sexual arousal does not bring us into an altered state of reality in which we cannot make safe judgments; it brings us into a state where we abandon to our desires. Whether the judgments we make in this state are the ones we rationally should wish to make really depends on how integrated our personality is, or to put it another way it depends on our level of consciousness. Although in sexual arousal we are more authentically and fundamentally us than how we are likely to behave under other conditions, this does not mean that this authenticity cannot generate fundamental conflicts in the psyche which lead us to view, and even to recall, an event ex-post in a way inconsistent with how it was lived in the moment. Nor, of course, does it mean that momentary consent morally suffices; a caring and compassionate partner should always form their own view of what is in the best interests of the other and allow this view to override, if necessary, even the perfect harmony which the moment may engender.

If I got it wrong all those years ago, it was not in the way I long supposed. My first girlfriend gave consent, and the experience was beautiful, for both of us, in that moment. Knowing what I know now, I could have detected the fragility in her psyche which was to force her subsequently to reevaluate that event in a way inconsistent with the truth of her own experience, and thus negate her own authenticity. This is anything but uncommon: it is, indeed, a frequently reoccurring pattern of events. We all feel shame ex-post and a need to project the responsibility for that shame onto the other. I could have said, at that time, yes, we are perfectly in tune and I perfectly perceive what in that moment she desires, and yet chosen another and wiser path. Except of course that I was totally unprepared by my experience of life to exercise such wisdom and far too caught up in the beauty of my own creation of the moment, as contingent intimacy fused in my perception with cosmic oneness. Even still, had I at least perceived her later reaction for what it was – one which her psychological integrity fully required of her, and which had nothing to do with me at all, I could still have both salvaged my own self-confidence and, perhaps, the relationship. My instinct could be trusted, but it also had limits only wisdom could overcome.

Many of us deeply desire to be great lovers, or therapists, or fathers, or leaders in whatever walk of life. We deeply care about the well-being of others. This is our highest goal in life, and we are totally dedicated to it. But we are brought up with the notion that only perfection is enough and we are deeply insecure. We do not realize that this desire of the heart is its own perfection, and so the reaction of the other challenges our sense of self, we become defensive, and create walls between ourselves and the other. What is imperfect about us in that moment is only our wounded ego – not our technique, sensitivity or value as a human being. If we aspire to be true healers, we should acknowledge and heal that wounded ego in ourselves with at least the same compassion as we would do so in the other.

Myths of forgiveness

In this article I will summarize a recent piece appearing on netzwerkb.org, a german language network for victims of sexualized violence. I understand from the comments that Barbara Rogers, author of the unmissable resource “Screams from Childhood“, intends to publish a full translation so in the meantime these are just highlights (under my own responsibility).

The author argues that it is inappropriate to pursue or encourage, in a therapeutic context, forgiveness of the perpetrator, and identifies in this context three myths.

The first myth is that forgiveness, processing and reconciliation vis-à-vis the perpetrator might have a healing effect on adults who suffered violence in childhood. To do so amounts to taking away the voice of the abused child which it is only in the process of recovering. This is especially dangerous if the perpetrator remains a person with whom the victim is likely to be in contact. Forgiveness may result in a certain feeling of release from the feeling of guilt the victim may feeling as a result of the social pressure to forgive which the victim cannot attain. This ability to process is portrayed as a virtue. However, it is really an act of fear which restores the relationship of power between perpetrator and victim and may well lead to retraumatization.

The second myth is that forgiveness, processing and reconciliation makes the world a better place. This finds its roots in religious traditions, which idealize masochism. Religion needs this myth as a foundation for the existing world order of repression, whereby victims continue to provide resources to political elites. This makes the world a worse, not better place.

The third myth is that forgiveness reduces anger, hatred and the desire for revenge. Forgiveness is identical to repression of these feelings which also the child could not express. Forgiveness doesn’t reduce these feelings but only perpetuates the cycle by shifting them to the next generation.

In the comments, the point is somewhere made that what the author is talking about is not in fact real “forgiveness”. I think that’s in some sense true. When forgiveness equates to compassion it is certainly a final stage of liberation. However, the word is so laden with patriarchal values and power to manipulate through the superego that this is a sense it assumes almost never in practice. Therefore I fully agree with the authors that first we must reconnect with our anger, hatred and sadness and the call to forgive is, in this context, both in a true sense impossible and as a practical matter utterly misguided and inappropriate.

Conscious, embodied anger is one of the most powerful phenomena to observe in a person – it’s beautiful, breathtaking and can be extremely erotic. By contrast, fawned forgiveness elicits in others a natural reaction of repulsion. This is because we know inside that the angry person is right, and is possessed of extraordinary power to change and bring healing. With this we instantly identify. The “forgiving” person, on the other hand, seems to invite us to continue to feel shame about our own burning sense of injustice in order to live a quiet but insipid life. This is really just an extension of the social control which has kept our anger buried and allowed manipulation and abuse to continue. The “forgiving” person is therefore on “their” side; the angry person, ours.

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.