What We Say and Don't Say

By Kevin Murphy M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

I was listening to someone give a talk recently about how he found the business of making friends almost impossible. This person said he had few friends and believed that he had an inability to make new friends. He further believed this inability stemmed from a number of things: he was not well practised in speaking socially, he believed he was not ‘hip’ enough and he had a family history of poor social relations. As a result he considered his life to be lonely and friendless.
When one hears someone say this about themselves you can safely assume it is an unpleasant place for them to be. This person knew well the experience of being in groups, or in the workplace or out socially, and how the human landscape seemed filled with people who had good friends. Everyone seemed happier than he, everyone had stronger bonds in their relationships, everyone had at least one good and trusted friend.
The goal this person had in life, and one which he was getting no closer to achieving, was to have good friends around him, people who would call in and say hello, people who would phone and ask how he was, people he could ask for advice or share details about his life, people who cared and who believed he mattered. It was an ongoing, identifiable goal.
But the puzzle, according to this person, was how to make friends. Did you impress them so that they liked you? Did you make up stories to make your ordinary life seem less ordinary? Or did you get lucky and just happen to find people who would find you interesting no matter what? Did age have a part to play? Were the best friends really the ones we made as children? Was there an age we reached when it was impossible to make friends? And was there even such a thing as real friendship?
This person had not made friends when he was a child. He saw this as further proof that he was destined to live out his life friendless and alone. His home life had been quiet and uneventful. It was a house to which people did not ‘drop in’. He learned to be self-sufficient.
And so, you could say, the one thing he didn’t have was the thing he wanted most. In that regard, he was no different to most of us. When something is out of reach, it generally is what we want.
If this person was to seek therapy what would be on offer? Well, there are many different therapeutic approaches that can be chosen. There are the short term therapies that might encourage the person to immerse themselves in as many social situations as possible, take notes, compares moods and reactions. The goal here would be to habituate the person to the glare of social scrutiny and the requirements of interacting with others. A style would be decided upon, one that would dictate the pace at which any new relationships would be developed. The person would have to ensure that they did not come across as needy, otherwise it would have negative effects. They would have to practise their listening skills, learning as much about the other person as possible. They would have to practise their communication skills, bone up on areas of interest so they would have conversational resources to deploy.
Then there would be the more integrative, or humanistic, approach which would see the therapy as a way of making the person feel whole and wanted and strong, so that eventually they could face the outside world with a greater degree of confidence and self-belief. It would involve slightly longer work, designed to improve self confidence, self esteem and help them understand that making friends can be difficult for others also. It would seek to place them in contextual parity with the type of people they were trying to have as friends. The work of the therapist would be to actively bring these effects about.
And then there would be the psychoanalytic approach, which is the therapy I practice. Psychoanalysis doesn’t go into the areas that I outlined above. It is based on the idea that other things are at work when a person presents in the consulting room with difficulties such as this. The hidden drivers of our actions and ideas determine what we do and who we are.
So without knowing any further details, the first thing you can say from a psychoanalytic point of view is that this person is repeating a behaviour over and over again. The repetition tells us one thing: whatever set of ideas is at work, that they are unable to make friends, unworthy to have friends or that they will always be lonely, it is both persistent and continuous. This is who this person believes themselves to be and something in their thinking is set up to repeat the message over and over again.
Secondly, because this person’ s sense of who he is has been operating ineffectively for a long time, we are into the realm of identity. When we speak of identity we are talking about a person’s sense of who they are for themselves and for others, and there is a difference between the two. Since psychoanalysis believes that identity is a composite structure, that is, we gain our identity by incorporating little pieces of all the significant people we experience directly or indirectly, the next question would be, Who are these significant people? This can take us not just laterally across a person’s life but also vertically back into their past and even to the generation before.
So far we have been working on the basis that the person is dedicated to fulfilling the ambition of having friends, that they have a clear goal. But what if they don’t? I ask this because in the course of this person’s talk he let slip an interesting notion. Thinking about what his life would be like if his ambition was achieved - if he had numerous friends who called on him, included him, supported him - he said it would be ‘complicated’.
Now we have a glimpse of the opposite drive at work. Psychoanalysis believes that we are often at the mercy of competing and opposite drives. Here was someone who had been adamant about what they wanted and yet they could see that achieving this goal might also be problematic. Now we are not just dealing with someone who has a problem making friends. Now we have had a glimpse of another side of the issue. The person has suggested they have a problem, not in making friends, but in managing relationships, in feeling comfortable enough in themselves to enter into relationships with others in a relaxed and trusting way. It suggests a more deeply conditioned view of relations with others as problematic and possibly a cause for avoidance. Ultimately, it represents a reason not to want to achieve what he originally said he wanted to achieve.
In short, and it is not only in situations such as this that you come across such things, we often find people wanting something and not wanting it at the same time. Psychoanalysis has been to the fore in recognising this aspect of human experience for a long time. We can say that we desperately want something fixed and yet we can hold on to the 'status quo' with both hands. Some aspect of our lives or our thinking or our behaviour can deeply upset us and yet we can be most reluctant to allow it to be changed.
That’s why psychoanalysis does not set out to ‘cure’ but to listen. What we actually say we want is only one half of the equation, if you like. Yes, psychoanalysis listens to what is being said, what is demanding to be changed. But it also listens to what is not being said, and what is demanding not to be changed. Because somewhere between the two is the true desire, the true wish that is trying to find expression.