By Kevin Murphy, MSc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
“We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with some delusion and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
When you read these lines, it is as if they were written about our most recent property boom and its subsequent collapse. Yet they were written a very long time ago, in the mid 19th century. Despite that, they are still incredibly relevant. What they tell us is that the fever that gripped this country for the ten year period up to 2008 was, in the context of history, nothing new.
The lines are taken from a book called ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’. It was written by a Scotsman called Charles Mackay when he was living in London and working as editor of the London Illustrated News. The book was published in 1841 and it is a compilation of some great historical delusions that have beset countries, nations and communities.
Now you might argue that surely there has never been an example of a bank or a small group of financiers bringing a country to its knees. Yet the very first example is from France in the 1720s when the country was almost brought to bankruptcy because of a dodgy share scheme, devised and promoted by the leader of the government with the help of Scotsman John Law. It promised riches for all from trade with Mississippi and Louisiana and thereby created a frenzy of buying and selling in the stock.
At the same time, there was a similar scheme going on in England called the South Sea Bubble*, whereby a group of high ranking politicians and businessmen promised great riches from trade with the east coast of South America, despite having nothing to back it up except hype. They sold shares in their South Sea Company that reached such heights – fuelled by greed at all levels of society - that an act of Parliament had to be brought in to put a stop to it. Needless to say the whole thing came crashing down and this too almost brought the UK to the brink of bankruptcy.
The scary part is that the pattern gets repeated over and over again in the present day. An introduction by Professor Norman Stone of Oxford University says that the UK and French delusions were the forerunner of the Great Crash in 1929. And that many other forms of mass delusion have their counterparts in the modern world. But if you want a really interesting and familiar description of what an economy looks like when things collapse you’ll find it in the book where the author describes the aftermath of the Dutch tulip boom**. Yes, there was a time in history when tulip bulbs in Holland were selling for more than diamonds.
There are many other examples in the book ranging from a craze for fortune telling, to witch mania, to The Crusades, to haunted houses, to duelling among men. They all have the same thing in common. At one point or another they gripped the public imagination and for a time became the most important issues of the day, to the exclusion of practically everything else. They were delusions that operated on a massive scale.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, how this country’s obsession with property falls into this category too. For a time, the market in property rose to heights that were unsustainable but nobody cared. It was a market built on very little that could sustain it, other than hype, expectation and greed. It took over the entire thinking process of an entire nation, to the exclusion of all else. And, like the collapses in Charles Mackay’s book, when the dust settled a handful were blamed for the excesses of the many. Not everybody partied in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years, as has been suggested. For many the Celtic Tiger passed by without ever stopping at their door. But enough partied to suggest that we may have been caught up in a delusion of sorts.
It is a testament to the grip that economics has on current thinking that no-one has ever mentioned the word ‘delusion’ in the context of the Irish property experience. ‘Delusion’ may not be in the vocabulary of economists. Maybe they have other words to describe a form of madness that overtakes a nation. And yet, is there any other word for it?
The French psychoanalyst and thinker Jacques Lacan has, central to his vast and often complicated theories, a concept known simply as ‘object a’. ‘Object a’ is something we never see or touch or smell or feel or hear but it is a central part of all our lives. Its singular power is to make us want it but it does so by taking the shape of real things in the world. And not just make us want it but to desire it more than anything else. Even though it is something we can’t put a name on, it lands, much like a rare invisible butterfly, on other objects in the real world and so we believe that the thing it lands on is the thing we really want.
Property became our ‘object a’ in this country for a decade or so. Something tangible that promised riches, security, comfort, success, social status, it became the thing we most admired. The invisible butterfly of ‘object a’ landed on it turning property into the obscure object of desire.
There are two things to remember about ‘object a’, however. The first is that it emanates from deep within all of us and is a memory, an idea even, of a loss we suffer from the moment we are born. It is the lingering taste of a time when all our needs were met, when all desires were filled and all lack abolished. That is what ‘object a’ becomes for each and every one of us, a nagging memory of something lost that we seek to re-find all our lives. That’s why the real object, when we eventually fix on it, becomes so intensely important and desirable.
The second thing is that if we get too close to ‘object a’, if we get too close to the thing that will potentially quench all desire and satisfy all needs, common sense tells us but it took Dr Jacques Lacan to spell it out in his teaching, we are in danger of turning off the very fire that burns within us and drives us forward. No lack, no desire. Getting too close to our ‘object a’ therefore is a dangerous thing; it is so good it is bad for us. We see that most clearly when greed drives the citizens of a nation to clamber over one another to seek the comfort of riches. The lessons of distant and recent history are that the process ends in tears.
But ‘object a’ need not be property. Sometimes it is the opposite or same sex, sometimes it is stock market shares, or fame, or eternal youth, or the nirvana of a pain free existence through drugs. And it moves around, all the time, jumping from one thing to the next. As soon as we have captured it in one form it moves to the next thing. Faraway hills are often greener, isn’t that the old phrase?
That’s why, after the dust has settled on the property boom and its aftermath, there will be something else to take its place, hopefully after a suitable amount of time has elapsed and hopefully something that will not be as catastrophic for the economic well-being of the country. But there will be something and it will delude us into thinking that this new thing is ‘it’. Before the property boom we had the dot-com boom and after it we can reasonably expect something new that will make us forget some of the lessons of the past. Let’s hope we don’t forget all the lessons of the past. It's not that we have a problem remembering the lessons of bad experiences. But the lure of ‘object a’ simply never goes away, pushing us ever onward to re-find it in its newest form.
* The word Bubble was used in the mid-19th century to describe any scheme that grew from nowhere, had little to sustain it and could burst at any moment. The current phrase ‘property bubble’ used in connection with our economic collapse comes from this.
** Mackay, C., (1841 [1995]), ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’, Wordsworth Editions, p.95.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
The Pursuit of Happiness*
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
The pursuit of happiness is something that is an intrinsic part of every person’s story who is brave enough to come for psychotherapy. And I say brave not just in the sense of personal courage in overcoming one’s own internal fears. But courage also in the sense of being able to overcome the residue of societal antipathy toward the very act of seeking out therapy, or ‘going to someone’ as it is often put.
Yet, when you consider the vast amounts of time, money and energy spent on consumer items, on spiritual enlightenment, on bodily improvements, on escapist activities, on therapies that enourage people to ‘act out’, on medical solutions, on illicit drugs, you begin to see that the pursuit of happiness is not confined to those who take the direct therapeutic route.
But what is happiness? Is it the end goal of therapy? Is that what is being promised?
The idea of happiness was first written about by Aristotle, the Greek philosopher. He believed that the end goal of all human existence was happiness, or what he called the Sovereign Good. He believed that we are drawn, almost without any choice in the matter, into trying to find this state of bliss. For him, happiness was a flowering, a flourishing of the human individual. He believed that true happiness contained three important elements. These were wisdom, virtue and pleasure. So, in order to find happiness we had to be wise enough to know how to follow the path that would lead there; we had to be virtuous enough to do all the right things that would make us happy and we had to be able to enjoy, to know the experience of pleasure and so recognise happiness when we had it.
Now while these were the internal requirements that people needed, there were some external factors that contributed to our reaching happiness also. These included a little bit of wealth, a lot of health, some good luck and, indeed, the possession of beauty or good looks. Remember that Aristotle was writing in the context of a society that was predominantly run by men and where women were often not encouraged to get an education. It was also a society built on and supported by legalised slavery, so happiness was not for everyone.
However, that is not to take away the influence of Aristotle. If any of the above ideas about happiness seem familiar to you it is probably because his thinking has been influential in Western thought ever since. And remember, he was writing about 300 years before the birth of Christ. But it is still his ideas about happiness that, modified as they undoubtedly are, have conditioned our way of thinking about the subject today.
Now by contrast, we have Freud. His writings began much more recently in 1895. His idea of happiness is of a quite different order. He believed that when we sought pleasure, a stepping stone to happiness, we were actually seeking to reduce tension or excitation within our bodies and our minds. We were returning to a place of contentment, so to speak, and the pursuit of happiness was designed to restore calm to our internal economy.
But he also added an important point. From birth and early infancy on, we lose a place of perfect contentment by virtue of growing older. We don’t quite know what it is we have lost but we know we have lost something good. Eventually we forget that we have even lost it. But a trace memory lingers on and this memory of what we lost, in terms of an all-satisfying existence, prompts us to re-find it over and over again throughout our lives. It is, if you like, a form of Aristotle’s thinking but in reverse. Instead of being pulled by the promise of happiness that our rational minds tell us is out there, Freud’s thinking was that we are set on a trajectory from the earliest moments of our lives to find again something that we lost and that had once provided us with blissful happiness.
If one goes with Aristotle’s view, then the assumption is that most people will eventually find happiness, using wisdom, virtue and pleasure to make it happen. Yet, while some people do find happiness in their lives, one could say that human kind is more characterised by its discontent rather than by its feelings of happiness or contentment. Very often people are at their most discontent when they have reached a point of contentment, and usually they seek out a new mountain to climb in order to put themselves back into a place of striving and longing, in order to experience the satisfaction of reaching happiness once again. It’s an intrinsically human thing. Often too, you’ll find that many people know that the route to happiness is to follow some simple rules like: don’t go to jail; don’t harm anyone; be faithful in your key relationships; don't use drugs; use food and alcohol in moderation; keep physically and mentally fit; do things for others occasionally; have some form of religious or spiritual faith; the list goes on and on.
The point here is that people broadly know what they should do to make themselves happy. They have the knowledge, in the Aristotelian sense of the word, of what is necessary. Yet they never seem to quite put the knowledge into action, or if they do it all falls apart after a while. This, then, is the more Freudian concept at work. We are driven to re-find something but we are not sure what it is. We seek it here, we seek it there. We think the other has it and want it from them. We think it is in a bottle or in a drug. We think sex will do it. We think fame, or money, or status, or power have the answer. And yet, the answer is not outside of ourselves. Nor is the answer, when we do find it, ever the place of absolute bliss either.
That is why psychoanalytic thinking does not promise happiness to people. In fact, it considers it fraudulent to do so. Rather it seeks to help people open their eyes and see things as they really are. The business of living is occasionally flawed, occasionally beautiful, but ultimately human, with all that that entails. The pursuit of happiness is about knowing that perfection is never achievable and so the question turns to discovering who you really are and being able to be happy with that.
* The above blog is based in part on a paper I presented to The Associaton for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland’s 17th Annual Congress, ‘How to Act - Ethics and the Psychoanalytic Clinic in a Culture of Suppression and Demand' held on Saturday, December 4th 2010 at Independent College, 60- 63 Dawson St., Dublin 2.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
The pursuit of happiness is something that is an intrinsic part of every person’s story who is brave enough to come for psychotherapy. And I say brave not just in the sense of personal courage in overcoming one’s own internal fears. But courage also in the sense of being able to overcome the residue of societal antipathy toward the very act of seeking out therapy, or ‘going to someone’ as it is often put.
Yet, when you consider the vast amounts of time, money and energy spent on consumer items, on spiritual enlightenment, on bodily improvements, on escapist activities, on therapies that enourage people to ‘act out’, on medical solutions, on illicit drugs, you begin to see that the pursuit of happiness is not confined to those who take the direct therapeutic route.
But what is happiness? Is it the end goal of therapy? Is that what is being promised?
The idea of happiness was first written about by Aristotle, the Greek philosopher. He believed that the end goal of all human existence was happiness, or what he called the Sovereign Good. He believed that we are drawn, almost without any choice in the matter, into trying to find this state of bliss. For him, happiness was a flowering, a flourishing of the human individual. He believed that true happiness contained three important elements. These were wisdom, virtue and pleasure. So, in order to find happiness we had to be wise enough to know how to follow the path that would lead there; we had to be virtuous enough to do all the right things that would make us happy and we had to be able to enjoy, to know the experience of pleasure and so recognise happiness when we had it.
Now while these were the internal requirements that people needed, there were some external factors that contributed to our reaching happiness also. These included a little bit of wealth, a lot of health, some good luck and, indeed, the possession of beauty or good looks. Remember that Aristotle was writing in the context of a society that was predominantly run by men and where women were often not encouraged to get an education. It was also a society built on and supported by legalised slavery, so happiness was not for everyone.
However, that is not to take away the influence of Aristotle. If any of the above ideas about happiness seem familiar to you it is probably because his thinking has been influential in Western thought ever since. And remember, he was writing about 300 years before the birth of Christ. But it is still his ideas about happiness that, modified as they undoubtedly are, have conditioned our way of thinking about the subject today.
Now by contrast, we have Freud. His writings began much more recently in 1895. His idea of happiness is of a quite different order. He believed that when we sought pleasure, a stepping stone to happiness, we were actually seeking to reduce tension or excitation within our bodies and our minds. We were returning to a place of contentment, so to speak, and the pursuit of happiness was designed to restore calm to our internal economy.
But he also added an important point. From birth and early infancy on, we lose a place of perfect contentment by virtue of growing older. We don’t quite know what it is we have lost but we know we have lost something good. Eventually we forget that we have even lost it. But a trace memory lingers on and this memory of what we lost, in terms of an all-satisfying existence, prompts us to re-find it over and over again throughout our lives. It is, if you like, a form of Aristotle’s thinking but in reverse. Instead of being pulled by the promise of happiness that our rational minds tell us is out there, Freud’s thinking was that we are set on a trajectory from the earliest moments of our lives to find again something that we lost and that had once provided us with blissful happiness.
If one goes with Aristotle’s view, then the assumption is that most people will eventually find happiness, using wisdom, virtue and pleasure to make it happen. Yet, while some people do find happiness in their lives, one could say that human kind is more characterised by its discontent rather than by its feelings of happiness or contentment. Very often people are at their most discontent when they have reached a point of contentment, and usually they seek out a new mountain to climb in order to put themselves back into a place of striving and longing, in order to experience the satisfaction of reaching happiness once again. It’s an intrinsically human thing. Often too, you’ll find that many people know that the route to happiness is to follow some simple rules like: don’t go to jail; don’t harm anyone; be faithful in your key relationships; don't use drugs; use food and alcohol in moderation; keep physically and mentally fit; do things for others occasionally; have some form of religious or spiritual faith; the list goes on and on.
The point here is that people broadly know what they should do to make themselves happy. They have the knowledge, in the Aristotelian sense of the word, of what is necessary. Yet they never seem to quite put the knowledge into action, or if they do it all falls apart after a while. This, then, is the more Freudian concept at work. We are driven to re-find something but we are not sure what it is. We seek it here, we seek it there. We think the other has it and want it from them. We think it is in a bottle or in a drug. We think sex will do it. We think fame, or money, or status, or power have the answer. And yet, the answer is not outside of ourselves. Nor is the answer, when we do find it, ever the place of absolute bliss either.
That is why psychoanalytic thinking does not promise happiness to people. In fact, it considers it fraudulent to do so. Rather it seeks to help people open their eyes and see things as they really are. The business of living is occasionally flawed, occasionally beautiful, but ultimately human, with all that that entails. The pursuit of happiness is about knowing that perfection is never achievable and so the question turns to discovering who you really are and being able to be happy with that.
* The above blog is based in part on a paper I presented to The Associaton for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland’s 17th Annual Congress, ‘How to Act - Ethics and the Psychoanalytic Clinic in a Culture of Suppression and Demand' held on Saturday, December 4th 2010 at Independent College, 60- 63 Dawson St., Dublin 2.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Greed is Not Good
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
An interesting aspect of the financial crisis that is besetting this country at the moment, and one that has been curiously overlooked by most commentators, is the predominant involvement of men. Now, given that men still hold the lion’s share of top jobs, that might not be surprising. But that is not what I mean.
When you examine the factors that led to the Irish economic meltdown you come across a particular pattern. One small sector of the banking world, run by men, found a marvellous way of earning huge profits by over-investing in property. Then the rest of the banking sector, run by men, decided to follow. And when the bubble burst, everyone was over-exposed and the rest is by now familiar to all of us.
So putting it simply, a male group mentality was at work here. It ensured that one small group, who were small players in the overall market, sought to shake off its small status and outdo everyone else. And then the bigger players decided they were not going to be outdone by these minnows and became just as reckless in their lending.
This male group mentality effectively saw everyone go over the cliff at the same time, and take the economy with it. It was a mindless adventure that showed a complete disregard for common sense or, dare we say it, ethical behaviour*. Why would a group of highly paid, highly educated men behave that way? Did they so desperately want to succeed?
Operating not only at the helm of the reckless banking sector but also in Government and in the regulatory authorities we find almost exclusively men. Accepting this, why then were there no male voices shouting stop? Why was their such an unspoken agreement that everything was fine when patently things were not? Are we to assume that that is simply how things go? Because if we accept this then by definition we have to accept that the same thing will happen again in the future. Equally, if we throw our hands up and say that this is simply the reality of the commercial world then we are effectively declaring it an ethics-free zone and that too becomes problematic.
So, if the current recession is bad news for the reputation of the banking sector, the Government and the regulatory authorities, it is also bad news for the reputation of men. Something prompted an arrogant, blindly reckless approach to conducting business. Something ensured that the men at the top of these organisations stop acting out of duty to the common good and focus exclusively on the sole interests of their own and their shareholder's remuneration. In doing so they put everyone’s wellbeing in jeopardy. Something made transgression of the rules an acceptable thing to do.
Now you will probably hear someone say that if women ran the system we might well have ended up in the same position. Well, that’s true, we might have. But we can never know that with certainty until that day comes. What we can say with certainty is that men were in charge and this is categorically how it ended up.
So what was it about these normally staid male bankers that prevented them from seeing sense, from shouting stop, from engaging in unsound and at times unlawful activities? And remember, we saw a similar male dominated system at work in church child abuse scandals but that is a different day’s work.
Focussing on the financial world for now, the generally agreed twin engines of global capitalism are greed and fear. Greed is the pursuit of profits beyond any measure of limit. Fear is the panicked flight from the possibility of losing what one believes one has already gained. Translated in psychoanalytic terms, greed in this case is the excessive pursuit of the ‘thing’, the lost thing that will satisfy all desire, fill up all lack, eradicate all unpleasure. Freud called it Das Ding, and it is ultimately an attempt to re-find an infantile nirvana. Fear, in this case, is the neurotic terror that arises with the prospect of this imaginary nirvana being closed off to us forever.
Also at work between these two poles is the essentially male characteristic of wanting at all cost to be the undisputed possessor of the phallus, the symbol of sexual power. Now that’s not to say that women don’t want to be sexually powerful either. They do, but psychoanalytically they tend to want it in more diffuse ways than men. They want it as an overall experience in their lives - one that is usually bound up and woven into key relationships. Profit-focussed men, on the other hand, usually want it by way of tangible objects. And usually in a single-minded way that can ignore broader issues such as rules or the greater good . That’s where money and possessions come in - they offer the perfect, culturally endorsed objects on which such men can fix their desires.
It is interesting, therefore, but perhaps not surprising, that practically no man (one or two brave souls perhaps) within the financial sector seemed willing to jeopardise his place within that mostly male group system by raising a warning flag. No one appeared willing to risk being seen as less than a man by suggesting that the party was not actually a party and that it might end in tears. Or that a limit (if not in law then at least in common sense) had been crossed for which a price would have to be paid.
And, we must also not forget, that psychoanalytically speaking men are formed differently to women. Those who take up the position of men go through separation from their mothers or primary carers in a more blunt way than women. And the first person they have as a male role model ie their father, is usually an imagined competitor for the same woman’s attentions. Girls too have to separate from the all providing love of their mothers but they become Daddy’s girls until they reach an age when societal and cultural prohibitions subtly guide them back to mother. The passage to adult womanhood is not as direct, blunt or as nakedly competitive as it is for men while still containing plenty of pitfalls to throw the route to adult female development off course.
The point being that men’s single mindedness, their competitiveness in regards to other men, their focus on objects to acquire or win or achieve, their diversion of sexual energy into making money can be good things at times. In our current climate they were ingredients that led to disaster because an extra ingredient was missing.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that human beings possessed the power of reason to secure our happiness and to provide us with a good will. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that a good will has nevertheless to cope with the problem, uniquely human, of unruly desires. And if you class greed as an unruly desire, our banking community, who were not alone in this, failed spectacularly to deal with this form of unruliness. The way of dealing with this, Kant said, was duty - the necessity to act out of reverence for the law. He said an action done out of duty (the result of human reason and a good will) has a moral worth, but action out of inclination (our self interest) does not.
French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Dr Jacques Lacan came along a little later and said a number of things in this regard. For too long, the concept of good has been confused with the concept of pleasure, and he believed they are not and should not be considered the same thing. Being guided by what is pleasurable is not the same thing as acting for the good. He said that a more ordinary measure would be to carefully examine our own motives, find out what it is that makes us act, question what our true desires really are and in the process come to see just how truly human we are. This, he believed, could well be a principle for good that might be valid for all.
To do anything else, to continue linking good with pleasure, might well be to adopt as a universal rule the proposal that we have the right to enjoy any person whatsoever, directly or indirectly, as the instrument of our pleasure. And, if memory serves me correctly, the last person to propose that idea was the Marquis de Sade.
* The Associaton for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland’s 17th Annual Congress, ‘How to Act’ - Ethics and the Psychoanalytic Clinic in a Culture of Suppression and Demand. Saturday, December 4th 2010. Independent College Dublin, 60- 63 Dawson St., Dublin 2. Keynote Speakers: Ian Parker and Christian Dunker. Ian Parker is Professor of Psychology in the Discourse Unit at Manchester Metropolitan University and a practising psychoanalyst. Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker is Professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology of the University of São Paulo, Brazil and a practising psychoanalyst.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
An interesting aspect of the financial crisis that is besetting this country at the moment, and one that has been curiously overlooked by most commentators, is the predominant involvement of men. Now, given that men still hold the lion’s share of top jobs, that might not be surprising. But that is not what I mean.
When you examine the factors that led to the Irish economic meltdown you come across a particular pattern. One small sector of the banking world, run by men, found a marvellous way of earning huge profits by over-investing in property. Then the rest of the banking sector, run by men, decided to follow. And when the bubble burst, everyone was over-exposed and the rest is by now familiar to all of us.
So putting it simply, a male group mentality was at work here. It ensured that one small group, who were small players in the overall market, sought to shake off its small status and outdo everyone else. And then the bigger players decided they were not going to be outdone by these minnows and became just as reckless in their lending.
This male group mentality effectively saw everyone go over the cliff at the same time, and take the economy with it. It was a mindless adventure that showed a complete disregard for common sense or, dare we say it, ethical behaviour*. Why would a group of highly paid, highly educated men behave that way? Did they so desperately want to succeed?
Operating not only at the helm of the reckless banking sector but also in Government and in the regulatory authorities we find almost exclusively men. Accepting this, why then were there no male voices shouting stop? Why was their such an unspoken agreement that everything was fine when patently things were not? Are we to assume that that is simply how things go? Because if we accept this then by definition we have to accept that the same thing will happen again in the future. Equally, if we throw our hands up and say that this is simply the reality of the commercial world then we are effectively declaring it an ethics-free zone and that too becomes problematic.
So, if the current recession is bad news for the reputation of the banking sector, the Government and the regulatory authorities, it is also bad news for the reputation of men. Something prompted an arrogant, blindly reckless approach to conducting business. Something ensured that the men at the top of these organisations stop acting out of duty to the common good and focus exclusively on the sole interests of their own and their shareholder's remuneration. In doing so they put everyone’s wellbeing in jeopardy. Something made transgression of the rules an acceptable thing to do.
Now you will probably hear someone say that if women ran the system we might well have ended up in the same position. Well, that’s true, we might have. But we can never know that with certainty until that day comes. What we can say with certainty is that men were in charge and this is categorically how it ended up.
So what was it about these normally staid male bankers that prevented them from seeing sense, from shouting stop, from engaging in unsound and at times unlawful activities? And remember, we saw a similar male dominated system at work in church child abuse scandals but that is a different day’s work.
Focussing on the financial world for now, the generally agreed twin engines of global capitalism are greed and fear. Greed is the pursuit of profits beyond any measure of limit. Fear is the panicked flight from the possibility of losing what one believes one has already gained. Translated in psychoanalytic terms, greed in this case is the excessive pursuit of the ‘thing’, the lost thing that will satisfy all desire, fill up all lack, eradicate all unpleasure. Freud called it Das Ding, and it is ultimately an attempt to re-find an infantile nirvana. Fear, in this case, is the neurotic terror that arises with the prospect of this imaginary nirvana being closed off to us forever.
Also at work between these two poles is the essentially male characteristic of wanting at all cost to be the undisputed possessor of the phallus, the symbol of sexual power. Now that’s not to say that women don’t want to be sexually powerful either. They do, but psychoanalytically they tend to want it in more diffuse ways than men. They want it as an overall experience in their lives - one that is usually bound up and woven into key relationships. Profit-focussed men, on the other hand, usually want it by way of tangible objects. And usually in a single-minded way that can ignore broader issues such as rules or the greater good . That’s where money and possessions come in - they offer the perfect, culturally endorsed objects on which such men can fix their desires.
It is interesting, therefore, but perhaps not surprising, that practically no man (one or two brave souls perhaps) within the financial sector seemed willing to jeopardise his place within that mostly male group system by raising a warning flag. No one appeared willing to risk being seen as less than a man by suggesting that the party was not actually a party and that it might end in tears. Or that a limit (if not in law then at least in common sense) had been crossed for which a price would have to be paid.
And, we must also not forget, that psychoanalytically speaking men are formed differently to women. Those who take up the position of men go through separation from their mothers or primary carers in a more blunt way than women. And the first person they have as a male role model ie their father, is usually an imagined competitor for the same woman’s attentions. Girls too have to separate from the all providing love of their mothers but they become Daddy’s girls until they reach an age when societal and cultural prohibitions subtly guide them back to mother. The passage to adult womanhood is not as direct, blunt or as nakedly competitive as it is for men while still containing plenty of pitfalls to throw the route to adult female development off course.
The point being that men’s single mindedness, their competitiveness in regards to other men, their focus on objects to acquire or win or achieve, their diversion of sexual energy into making money can be good things at times. In our current climate they were ingredients that led to disaster because an extra ingredient was missing.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that human beings possessed the power of reason to secure our happiness and to provide us with a good will. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that a good will has nevertheless to cope with the problem, uniquely human, of unruly desires. And if you class greed as an unruly desire, our banking community, who were not alone in this, failed spectacularly to deal with this form of unruliness. The way of dealing with this, Kant said, was duty - the necessity to act out of reverence for the law. He said an action done out of duty (the result of human reason and a good will) has a moral worth, but action out of inclination (our self interest) does not.
French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Dr Jacques Lacan came along a little later and said a number of things in this regard. For too long, the concept of good has been confused with the concept of pleasure, and he believed they are not and should not be considered the same thing. Being guided by what is pleasurable is not the same thing as acting for the good. He said that a more ordinary measure would be to carefully examine our own motives, find out what it is that makes us act, question what our true desires really are and in the process come to see just how truly human we are. This, he believed, could well be a principle for good that might be valid for all.
To do anything else, to continue linking good with pleasure, might well be to adopt as a universal rule the proposal that we have the right to enjoy any person whatsoever, directly or indirectly, as the instrument of our pleasure. And, if memory serves me correctly, the last person to propose that idea was the Marquis de Sade.
* The Associaton for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland’s 17th Annual Congress, ‘How to Act’ - Ethics and the Psychoanalytic Clinic in a Culture of Suppression and Demand. Saturday, December 4th 2010. Independent College Dublin, 60- 63 Dawson St., Dublin 2. Keynote Speakers: Ian Parker and Christian Dunker. Ian Parker is Professor of Psychology in the Discourse Unit at Manchester Metropolitan University and a practising psychoanalyst. Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker is Professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology of the University of São Paulo, Brazil and a practising psychoanalyst.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
The Answer is in the Small Details
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
People will often tell you that they have a poor memory. They can’t remember details of their life, particularly the further back they go. They assume it is a natural thing, or perhaps, a hormonal imbalance. In some cases people will tell you that, actually, there are things they don’t want to remember. Think of the number of people who believe the past, their past, should be left alone, that it is best not to ‘go there’. This attitude stems from a very distinct attitude to memory. That, like the sleeping giant of children’s stories, it must be allowed to slumber on undisturbed.
Equally, it’s surprising how many people don’t want to remember and aren’t aware of it. That’s because the poor memory that so many proclaim to have is, in reality, a desire not to know. This is probably what differentiates psychoanalytic psychotherapy from so many other therapies being offered today. One of its central beliefs is that memory is an essential element in recovery. That's not to say that we are on the hunt for trauma that never happened or to concoct false memories. No, the issue is ordinary memories, small things, little details of one's life that actually happened. There is a wealth of knowledge about ourselves tied up in those small details.
Yet consider for a moment how many therapies have been devised since psychoanalysis first opened up the field in the late 1800s that allow people avoid the challenge of remembering. Cures, if that is not too strong a word for it, are being offered all the time that convince people there is no need to ‘go there’. I have a difficulty with relationships in my life, so let’s fix relationships. I have a fear of intimacy, so let’s focus on intimacy. I am sad all the time, so let’s work on being happy. If we cut the heads off all the dandelions we certainly will have what looks like a perfect lawn. But the dandelions are still there under the surface, ready to emerge again.
There is another group of people, very common in therapy rooms, who will tell you that there is nothing to remember. They can see it all clearly and they believe that honestly there is nothing much to talk about. This group of people are labouring under a very similar misconception as those who tell you have they have a poor memory and can’t recall much. This latter group achieve exactly the same result as the first group – they stay away from the detail of their past life - but with a uniquely different avoidance tactic. They refuse to consider detailed memories from their lives because they have already decided there is nothing of value to speak about. What they never allow themselves realise is that once they talk about a particular memory, the very act of speaking transforms it in such a way that new aspects of it emerge, aspects that were, yes, forgotten. Buried behind the seemingly obvious pictures of their past life are hidden details that only emerge when attention is focussed on recounting them.
As such, psychoanalytic psychotherapy is the opposite of those therapies that say if you can get rid of the symptom you are cured. Naturally, it is an attractive proposition. A person who goes to pieces in the company of strangers is looking for a handy tip to help them cope. A person suffering from depression is looking for the secret to happy thoughts. A person who is afraid all the time is looking for a quick way to be confident. A person who can not engage sexually with another human being is looking for the ‘right way’ of doing it. This approach suggests that the complaint or symptom is ‘outside’ of me, not really part of me, and it can be fixed with a bit of tinkering that won’t really necessitate me getting involved much at all, other than following a few simple instructions.
The psychoanalytic approach, the first and original form of psychotherapy, sees all the psychical symptoms of the modern age as the result of faulty ideas that operate unseen in the background of our minds. They are active at the unconscious level and wield enormous influence over our choices, decisions and interpretations of who we are and how our lives operate. These ‘ideas’ are formed by the often unnoticed experiences, the trivial happenings, the off-hand comments, the insignificant hurts that are part and parcel of everyday life. It doesn’t always have to be traumas. We don’t notice them because we bury them as soon as they happen, we repress them automatically in some cases. And often the ideas that result from these experiences cause the problems. We might have been too young or too afraid or too distracted to process the experiences fully. We usually repressed the experiences so quickly and so effectively that we were not even conscious of doing it. But those experiences were stored away.
French psychoanalyst and lecturer the late Dr Jacques Lacan said many insightful things but two are of relevance here. The first was his description of the unconscious mind as the ‘memory of everything we have forgotten’.
We file things away, store them, and sometimes actively wish to forget them. But in our unconscious mind they remain part of us, part of our experience and part of our ideas that inform the way we live our lives. Whenever we make a life choice and can’t figure out why, it is the effect of buried memories at work. Whenever we do something that goes against our better nature or against what we know to be the right way of doing things, it is the effect of buried memories at work. And whenever we find ourselves repeating the same negative patterns over and over again, it is the effect of buried memories at work.
And it is not the memories themselves. Rather it is the imaginary ideas that we have attached to these memories – ideas about who we are, where we deserve to be in life, how it is that we are seen by others, whether or not we deserve success or failure, whether we will ever find love or whether we even deserve to find love and so on and on. These exert powerful and unseen influences on our ability to be happy with who it is we are, and on the choices we make that ultimately guide the direction of our lives.
We de-fuse the effect of these memories and these imaginary ideas in psychoanalytic psychotherapy by giving them articulation in speech. And the more we speak about the life we have had, and the one we want to have, and about the imaginary ideas that surround us in our daily lives and in our dreams, about the insignificant and often trivial details of experiences we have had, the more we loosen the grip that misconceived ideas have on us. Think for a moment about a real person that you know, someone you believe is perfectly happy and fulfilled and has achieved what they want in life. Is that person, in your view, trapped by ideas that are dragging them down? Is that person expending vast amounts of energy holding back knowledge of themselves by suppressing memories or believing the memory of their past is just a hazy blur? The answer is probably not. In rock and roll terms, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. In psychoanalytic terms, it is the word for re-finding what was lost. To quote Jacques Lacan again, we do not remember because we are cured. We are cured because we remember.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
People will often tell you that they have a poor memory. They can’t remember details of their life, particularly the further back they go. They assume it is a natural thing, or perhaps, a hormonal imbalance. In some cases people will tell you that, actually, there are things they don’t want to remember. Think of the number of people who believe the past, their past, should be left alone, that it is best not to ‘go there’. This attitude stems from a very distinct attitude to memory. That, like the sleeping giant of children’s stories, it must be allowed to slumber on undisturbed.
Equally, it’s surprising how many people don’t want to remember and aren’t aware of it. That’s because the poor memory that so many proclaim to have is, in reality, a desire not to know. This is probably what differentiates psychoanalytic psychotherapy from so many other therapies being offered today. One of its central beliefs is that memory is an essential element in recovery. That's not to say that we are on the hunt for trauma that never happened or to concoct false memories. No, the issue is ordinary memories, small things, little details of one's life that actually happened. There is a wealth of knowledge about ourselves tied up in those small details.
Yet consider for a moment how many therapies have been devised since psychoanalysis first opened up the field in the late 1800s that allow people avoid the challenge of remembering. Cures, if that is not too strong a word for it, are being offered all the time that convince people there is no need to ‘go there’. I have a difficulty with relationships in my life, so let’s fix relationships. I have a fear of intimacy, so let’s focus on intimacy. I am sad all the time, so let’s work on being happy. If we cut the heads off all the dandelions we certainly will have what looks like a perfect lawn. But the dandelions are still there under the surface, ready to emerge again.
There is another group of people, very common in therapy rooms, who will tell you that there is nothing to remember. They can see it all clearly and they believe that honestly there is nothing much to talk about. This group of people are labouring under a very similar misconception as those who tell you have they have a poor memory and can’t recall much. This latter group achieve exactly the same result as the first group – they stay away from the detail of their past life - but with a uniquely different avoidance tactic. They refuse to consider detailed memories from their lives because they have already decided there is nothing of value to speak about. What they never allow themselves realise is that once they talk about a particular memory, the very act of speaking transforms it in such a way that new aspects of it emerge, aspects that were, yes, forgotten. Buried behind the seemingly obvious pictures of their past life are hidden details that only emerge when attention is focussed on recounting them.
As such, psychoanalytic psychotherapy is the opposite of those therapies that say if you can get rid of the symptom you are cured. Naturally, it is an attractive proposition. A person who goes to pieces in the company of strangers is looking for a handy tip to help them cope. A person suffering from depression is looking for the secret to happy thoughts. A person who is afraid all the time is looking for a quick way to be confident. A person who can not engage sexually with another human being is looking for the ‘right way’ of doing it. This approach suggests that the complaint or symptom is ‘outside’ of me, not really part of me, and it can be fixed with a bit of tinkering that won’t really necessitate me getting involved much at all, other than following a few simple instructions.
The psychoanalytic approach, the first and original form of psychotherapy, sees all the psychical symptoms of the modern age as the result of faulty ideas that operate unseen in the background of our minds. They are active at the unconscious level and wield enormous influence over our choices, decisions and interpretations of who we are and how our lives operate. These ‘ideas’ are formed by the often unnoticed experiences, the trivial happenings, the off-hand comments, the insignificant hurts that are part and parcel of everyday life. It doesn’t always have to be traumas. We don’t notice them because we bury them as soon as they happen, we repress them automatically in some cases. And often the ideas that result from these experiences cause the problems. We might have been too young or too afraid or too distracted to process the experiences fully. We usually repressed the experiences so quickly and so effectively that we were not even conscious of doing it. But those experiences were stored away.
French psychoanalyst and lecturer the late Dr Jacques Lacan said many insightful things but two are of relevance here. The first was his description of the unconscious mind as the ‘memory of everything we have forgotten’.
We file things away, store them, and sometimes actively wish to forget them. But in our unconscious mind they remain part of us, part of our experience and part of our ideas that inform the way we live our lives. Whenever we make a life choice and can’t figure out why, it is the effect of buried memories at work. Whenever we do something that goes against our better nature or against what we know to be the right way of doing things, it is the effect of buried memories at work. And whenever we find ourselves repeating the same negative patterns over and over again, it is the effect of buried memories at work.
And it is not the memories themselves. Rather it is the imaginary ideas that we have attached to these memories – ideas about who we are, where we deserve to be in life, how it is that we are seen by others, whether or not we deserve success or failure, whether we will ever find love or whether we even deserve to find love and so on and on. These exert powerful and unseen influences on our ability to be happy with who it is we are, and on the choices we make that ultimately guide the direction of our lives.
We de-fuse the effect of these memories and these imaginary ideas in psychoanalytic psychotherapy by giving them articulation in speech. And the more we speak about the life we have had, and the one we want to have, and about the imaginary ideas that surround us in our daily lives and in our dreams, about the insignificant and often trivial details of experiences we have had, the more we loosen the grip that misconceived ideas have on us. Think for a moment about a real person that you know, someone you believe is perfectly happy and fulfilled and has achieved what they want in life. Is that person, in your view, trapped by ideas that are dragging them down? Is that person expending vast amounts of energy holding back knowledge of themselves by suppressing memories or believing the memory of their past is just a hazy blur? The answer is probably not. In rock and roll terms, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. In psychoanalytic terms, it is the word for re-finding what was lost. To quote Jacques Lacan again, we do not remember because we are cured. We are cured because we remember.
Monday, August 30, 2010
A Little Trust Goes a Long Way
By Kevin Murphy, MSc,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
I was talking to someone* recently who had concerns about the faithfulness of their same-sex partner. This person couldn’t relax in the relationship because of an inability to trust them. Everything the partner did involving other people, particularly others who might become love rivals, was treated with suspicion and inevitably led to bad feeling and often rows.
It reminded me of someone else who once asked me in another context – this was a person* whose long time partner had had numerous secret affairs - whether trust was necessary in a relationship. It might seem like a curious question to ask. Is trust important in a relationship? Most of us, standing in an objective position, would say unequivocally that yes trust is essential in relationships. It was even cited by golfer Tiger Woods’ ex-wife as one of the reasons she decided on divorce.
We might even go so far as to ask can one have any quality of relationship where there is no trust? Yet the person who asked me this question had lived for years with excuses, being persuaded they were imagining things and that, ultimately, they were the one with the problem.
It reminded me of someone else * whose relationship collapsed because their partner did not believe they were fully loved by them. This person had, in reality, been head over heels in love with that partner but had never shown it. You could say that an inability to trust had been at the root of that problem too. Except now the trust was curiously taking place in what you would expect would have been a much more positive setting.
This notion of trust turns up in many guises. It is not enough to say that a person is not trustworthy and therefore we cannot allow ourselves trust them. Sometimes we find ourselves in relationships with people who, in fact, are trustworthy and whom we do, in fact, love. It is we who have the problem.
The more traditional concept of trust arises in those situations where we implicitly trust partners who, unfortunately, abuse that trust and cheat behind our backs. In such situations we are usually constantly asked to do the very thing we are already doing i.e. trust the person even more.
The reality of human relationships is that there are no guarantees. We enter into them, mostly, in good faith and with a good deal of trust. We have no choice. But when we find ourselves unable to trust enough to allow ourselves fully communicate our feelings to the other person, then we have a problem.
Equally, if we cannot allow ourselves trust enough to enjoy what is otherwise a loving and faithful relationship, then equally we have a problem.
And, also, if we find ourselves trusting in a cheating partner so much that we ignore the evidence of our instincts and often our eyes, then we have a problem in this situation too.
In these situations, trust is like a target that we all aim at but in some cases either overshoot with too much force or else we fall far short of it because we didn’t apply enough. So why is trust such a difficult thing to get right?
When trust is absent from a relationship, the ordinary things are difficult. Being together, speaking to the person, relying on the person, enjoying the person’s company; it effects all aspects of our ordinary interactions. This tells us the fundamental place that it occupies in terms of its importance to human relationships.
Trust is something we learn very early on in our lives. We are in the care of others far longer than any other form of life on the planet. With loving parents it usually never becomes an issue. But if anything upsets the delicate balance of our early relationships – anything from outright aggression to casual indifference – then it reflects in our later adult relationships. It is interesting to note how much emphasis modern media – magazines, movies, music, novels – puts on relationships, particularly romantic/emotional relationships. It is equally interesting to note increasing divorce rates and rising demand for relationship counselling services. When you add into the mix the changing face of community and family structures and the changing styles of parenting, you begin to see how our learning about relationships as we develop might have changed over the decades.
But trust is not just about us and the other person. In the first instance it is about us and our relationship to ourselves. If we have confidence we can allow ourselves trust in others. If we have self-belief we can sustain ourselves better against the collapse of trust. And if we have a little courage we can allow ourselves love in a way that fully includes the other person rather than holding back waiting for the worst to happen.
* Details excluded in order to ensure confidentiality.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
I was talking to someone* recently who had concerns about the faithfulness of their same-sex partner. This person couldn’t relax in the relationship because of an inability to trust them. Everything the partner did involving other people, particularly others who might become love rivals, was treated with suspicion and inevitably led to bad feeling and often rows.
It reminded me of someone else who once asked me in another context – this was a person* whose long time partner had had numerous secret affairs - whether trust was necessary in a relationship. It might seem like a curious question to ask. Is trust important in a relationship? Most of us, standing in an objective position, would say unequivocally that yes trust is essential in relationships. It was even cited by golfer Tiger Woods’ ex-wife as one of the reasons she decided on divorce.
We might even go so far as to ask can one have any quality of relationship where there is no trust? Yet the person who asked me this question had lived for years with excuses, being persuaded they were imagining things and that, ultimately, they were the one with the problem.
It reminded me of someone else * whose relationship collapsed because their partner did not believe they were fully loved by them. This person had, in reality, been head over heels in love with that partner but had never shown it. You could say that an inability to trust had been at the root of that problem too. Except now the trust was curiously taking place in what you would expect would have been a much more positive setting.
This notion of trust turns up in many guises. It is not enough to say that a person is not trustworthy and therefore we cannot allow ourselves trust them. Sometimes we find ourselves in relationships with people who, in fact, are trustworthy and whom we do, in fact, love. It is we who have the problem.
The more traditional concept of trust arises in those situations where we implicitly trust partners who, unfortunately, abuse that trust and cheat behind our backs. In such situations we are usually constantly asked to do the very thing we are already doing i.e. trust the person even more.
The reality of human relationships is that there are no guarantees. We enter into them, mostly, in good faith and with a good deal of trust. We have no choice. But when we find ourselves unable to trust enough to allow ourselves fully communicate our feelings to the other person, then we have a problem.
Equally, if we cannot allow ourselves trust enough to enjoy what is otherwise a loving and faithful relationship, then equally we have a problem.
And, also, if we find ourselves trusting in a cheating partner so much that we ignore the evidence of our instincts and often our eyes, then we have a problem in this situation too.
In these situations, trust is like a target that we all aim at but in some cases either overshoot with too much force or else we fall far short of it because we didn’t apply enough. So why is trust such a difficult thing to get right?
When trust is absent from a relationship, the ordinary things are difficult. Being together, speaking to the person, relying on the person, enjoying the person’s company; it effects all aspects of our ordinary interactions. This tells us the fundamental place that it occupies in terms of its importance to human relationships.
Trust is something we learn very early on in our lives. We are in the care of others far longer than any other form of life on the planet. With loving parents it usually never becomes an issue. But if anything upsets the delicate balance of our early relationships – anything from outright aggression to casual indifference – then it reflects in our later adult relationships. It is interesting to note how much emphasis modern media – magazines, movies, music, novels – puts on relationships, particularly romantic/emotional relationships. It is equally interesting to note increasing divorce rates and rising demand for relationship counselling services. When you add into the mix the changing face of community and family structures and the changing styles of parenting, you begin to see how our learning about relationships as we develop might have changed over the decades.
But trust is not just about us and the other person. In the first instance it is about us and our relationship to ourselves. If we have confidence we can allow ourselves trust in others. If we have self-belief we can sustain ourselves better against the collapse of trust. And if we have a little courage we can allow ourselves love in a way that fully includes the other person rather than holding back waiting for the worst to happen.
* Details excluded in order to ensure confidentiality.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
The Dreamer is the Key to the Dream
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
You don’t often hear people talking about dreams in public. It rarely makes it onto the topic list of chat shows. You don’t overhear it in coffee shop conversations between friends. Yes dreams will get a cursory mention here and there but apart from a few details and a shrug that usually suggests ‘how weird is that’, they have almost been relegated to the realm of not really being part of our lives. They happen, they can disturb us but they are ultimately seen as trivial and are quickly forgotten.
Part of the reason for this is that our logical, scientific world has no place for dreams. Dreams do not tell us what it is they are trying to say in any coherent or easily understandable way. And that is enough for them to be ignored.
In contrast, I’m reminded of tribes such as the Sambia in Papua New Guinea, or the Quiche Maya in Central America, or the Aguaruna in Peru and many other indigenous peoples who all view dreaming as an experience of the soul leaving the body at night. Indeed, the Sambia make dream interpretation part of their shared, spoken culture from childhood onwards. As such, the pictures that the ‘soul’ sees on its flight in dreams are to be afforded a respect and an attention that you don’t find in the Western world. We simply don’t believe in any of that.
And yet, psychoanalysis and its understanding of the unconscious was founded on dreams and dreaming by Sigmund Freud. It does not view dreams as the soul leaving the body at night. Rather, it sees dreams as a representation of our inner lives, often disguising our real wishes in order to add to the puzzle they represent.
You will find many therapies today that seek to interpret dreams using various different means in order to crack the code, so to speak. The puzzling nature of dreams is not a good enough reason to ignore them. Quite the opposite, in fact. The can be a valuable route to understanding, or the 'royal road' to the unconscious as Freud once called them.If someone is having difficulty in their lives, the content of their dreams can often give a rare insight into the hidden depths.
I was speaking to a man recently* who said he was having the same dream for a very long time. It wasn’t taking place every night but it always contained the same figures and the same ultimate result: he woke up in a sweat, terrified. He came to me and asked me to interpret the dream. He had heard that dream interpretation was an essential part of the theory of psychoanalysis. He had also heard that it involved listing the elements of the dream and then deciphering what they meant according to a check list of symbols.
There is a form of dream interpretation that uses a check list of symbols but contemporary Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis sees things a little differently. The meaning of any dream depends not on the configuration of symbols and their generally applied meanings. The meaning of a dream depends on who is dreaming it.
So it is less to do with the things that are happening in the dream, although they are important, than on who it is who is having the dream. The man in question was repreatedly having the same very frightening dream and yet his life was effectively trauma free. He had no ugly experiences, nobody had abused him, he was successful in his career and his relationships were solid.
In such circumstances you might ask, how could this be? To get to the bottom of this conundrum, some therapies would probably spend endless hours going over and over the contents of the dream in order to put meaning and sense on them. Instead, our work together focussed not on the dream but on this man’s life. After patient and lengthy work we discovered something in his past that had never been resolved, something he had forgotten about, and something he had only remembered when prompted by an association he had during one of our sessions.
It became clear to this man that he had spent a long time repressing a set of experiences that he had never quite forgotten but had never considered to have had any effect on him. And yet, when he recounted them in our sessions he was aghast at how he could have missed their importance.
The dreams he was having were particularly related to his unique set of experiences in an earlier part of his life. These experiences had been effectively ‘forgotten’ and would have remained that way were it not for the insistence of the same dream occurring repeatedly.
The anxiety that had built up around his earlier experiences had remained untouched and was effectively seeping out into his dream life. His daily life remained unaffected. He had ensured this would be the case when he first believed he had dealt effectively with the original unpleasant experiences. But his dreams were telling him otherwise, in a way that was impossible to ignore.
I mention this example in order to illustrate two popular misconceptions about dreams and their interpretation. Firstly, they are important and while they should not be obsessively attended to, they should not be ignored either. Dreams that affect us should be paid attention to because they occur for a reason that is usually directly related to some part of our inner lives. Secondly, the meaning of any dream is less to do with the 'symbols' and what they purportedly mean and more to do with who is having the dream. The unique and particular details of the life experiences of the dreamer are the keys to unlocking the dream.
*Details of this person have been changed to ensure confidentiality.
Note: The next blog will appear on Tuesday August 30, 2010.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
You don’t often hear people talking about dreams in public. It rarely makes it onto the topic list of chat shows. You don’t overhear it in coffee shop conversations between friends. Yes dreams will get a cursory mention here and there but apart from a few details and a shrug that usually suggests ‘how weird is that’, they have almost been relegated to the realm of not really being part of our lives. They happen, they can disturb us but they are ultimately seen as trivial and are quickly forgotten.
Part of the reason for this is that our logical, scientific world has no place for dreams. Dreams do not tell us what it is they are trying to say in any coherent or easily understandable way. And that is enough for them to be ignored.
In contrast, I’m reminded of tribes such as the Sambia in Papua New Guinea, or the Quiche Maya in Central America, or the Aguaruna in Peru and many other indigenous peoples who all view dreaming as an experience of the soul leaving the body at night. Indeed, the Sambia make dream interpretation part of their shared, spoken culture from childhood onwards. As such, the pictures that the ‘soul’ sees on its flight in dreams are to be afforded a respect and an attention that you don’t find in the Western world. We simply don’t believe in any of that.
And yet, psychoanalysis and its understanding of the unconscious was founded on dreams and dreaming by Sigmund Freud. It does not view dreams as the soul leaving the body at night. Rather, it sees dreams as a representation of our inner lives, often disguising our real wishes in order to add to the puzzle they represent.
You will find many therapies today that seek to interpret dreams using various different means in order to crack the code, so to speak. The puzzling nature of dreams is not a good enough reason to ignore them. Quite the opposite, in fact. The can be a valuable route to understanding, or the 'royal road' to the unconscious as Freud once called them.If someone is having difficulty in their lives, the content of their dreams can often give a rare insight into the hidden depths.
I was speaking to a man recently* who said he was having the same dream for a very long time. It wasn’t taking place every night but it always contained the same figures and the same ultimate result: he woke up in a sweat, terrified. He came to me and asked me to interpret the dream. He had heard that dream interpretation was an essential part of the theory of psychoanalysis. He had also heard that it involved listing the elements of the dream and then deciphering what they meant according to a check list of symbols.
There is a form of dream interpretation that uses a check list of symbols but contemporary Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis sees things a little differently. The meaning of any dream depends not on the configuration of symbols and their generally applied meanings. The meaning of a dream depends on who is dreaming it.
So it is less to do with the things that are happening in the dream, although they are important, than on who it is who is having the dream. The man in question was repreatedly having the same very frightening dream and yet his life was effectively trauma free. He had no ugly experiences, nobody had abused him, he was successful in his career and his relationships were solid.
In such circumstances you might ask, how could this be? To get to the bottom of this conundrum, some therapies would probably spend endless hours going over and over the contents of the dream in order to put meaning and sense on them. Instead, our work together focussed not on the dream but on this man’s life. After patient and lengthy work we discovered something in his past that had never been resolved, something he had forgotten about, and something he had only remembered when prompted by an association he had during one of our sessions.
It became clear to this man that he had spent a long time repressing a set of experiences that he had never quite forgotten but had never considered to have had any effect on him. And yet, when he recounted them in our sessions he was aghast at how he could have missed their importance.
The dreams he was having were particularly related to his unique set of experiences in an earlier part of his life. These experiences had been effectively ‘forgotten’ and would have remained that way were it not for the insistence of the same dream occurring repeatedly.
The anxiety that had built up around his earlier experiences had remained untouched and was effectively seeping out into his dream life. His daily life remained unaffected. He had ensured this would be the case when he first believed he had dealt effectively with the original unpleasant experiences. But his dreams were telling him otherwise, in a way that was impossible to ignore.
I mention this example in order to illustrate two popular misconceptions about dreams and their interpretation. Firstly, they are important and while they should not be obsessively attended to, they should not be ignored either. Dreams that affect us should be paid attention to because they occur for a reason that is usually directly related to some part of our inner lives. Secondly, the meaning of any dream is less to do with the 'symbols' and what they purportedly mean and more to do with who is having the dream. The unique and particular details of the life experiences of the dreamer are the keys to unlocking the dream.
*Details of this person have been changed to ensure confidentiality.
Note: The next blog will appear on Tuesday August 30, 2010.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Parents Are Only Human Too
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
Have you ever considered the popular view of parenting? You find, broadly speaking, there are two sides to it. There are those who love their children to bits, would do anything for them, give them everything they can and who represent a model of family life. The other side of the coin is the parenting style that is abusive, neglectful , and that sees children as a burden to be resented.
There are no prizes for guessing which of the two our society likes to promote. And is it any wonder? Parents who care are to be encouraged rather than parents who don’t. The problem arises with the ideal of good parenting that emerges from this. It follows that to give everything – both emotionally and materially - and withhold nothing is good parenting. It also follows that those who cannot but who might want to give everything materially are somehow disadvantaged in this regard.
While we can argue these ideas at length, there is another point at stake here. It is that the impression is created that we can always be aware of the effects of our actions, our personalities and our responses on our children. That everything being given or withheld is within our gift to understand and evaluate. You will see this philosophy most at work in the plethora of parenting tips that flourish in the media – do this and everything should work, do that and everything should be fine. It is action-based, practical, tangible, observable and ultimately cosily founded on common sense. As if the simple act of carrying out ‘the right thing’ is enough, be it feeding, educating, playing, communicating or any other aspect of raising children.
The thing that never gets represented in any of this is the individual who acts as parent, their history, their own desires, their own failings. My point might be best illustrated by an example. I was talking with a woman* some time ago who told me that her life had been filled with anxiety and anguish despite having had a happy childhood with happy caring parents. How does that work? That is a good question. On the face of it there was no trauma, no abuse, no deprivation of any kind. And yet her adult life was stuck in a cycle of anxiety, sadness, low self esteem and broken relationships.
It was only after some time that she came to ask questions about who these people were who had raised her, yes her parents. And the questions were not around the usual clichéd ones like, ‘Did they love me?’ Rather the questions she asked were around the issue of, ‘Who were they before I came along? Who were these people at the time I was born? What were their desires, hopes, fears?’ Even at a glance you can see that framing the questions in this way offered a completely different perspective on something that often gets taken for granted.
When you next look at a glamorised photo of a loving mother with a baby, it might be interesting to do the following exercise. Ask yourself, if one was to include the complexity of that woman’s life into one’s understanding of her happiness, what possible factors would you include? If you assume her to be all-loving and perfect, what factors could have brought that about?
The woman I was referring to above discovered that her mother had actually been engaged to another man before she met her father. This first man died and her mother then met her father and married him. She loved him but the shadow of her first love was always hanging around in the background. And while her mother did everything she could to love her daughter, something of the sadness that she had experienced with the loss of her first love permeated through, almost without realising it.
This is the point I was trying to make earlier about parenting. Parents are people. They have had their own histories before they ever have children. They may well love their children more than anything in the world, but the echoes of an earlier life trickle through. Yes there is an ABC of what to do as good parents. But there is another engine at work also; one at the core of every human being, where their true but often disguised desires and wishes generate ideas, choices, emotions and actions. This is what is continually being put in place up to the moment we become parents. And this is the foundation on which we base our own parenting abilities and style on.
Before our parents ever had children, they already had a rich and complex inner life that brought them to adulthood. And before we, as their children, ever knew anything about it, it was this that formed the backdrop to our experiences of being parented by them.
*This is a composite illustration taken from a number of case histories.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
Have you ever considered the popular view of parenting? You find, broadly speaking, there are two sides to it. There are those who love their children to bits, would do anything for them, give them everything they can and who represent a model of family life. The other side of the coin is the parenting style that is abusive, neglectful , and that sees children as a burden to be resented.
There are no prizes for guessing which of the two our society likes to promote. And is it any wonder? Parents who care are to be encouraged rather than parents who don’t. The problem arises with the ideal of good parenting that emerges from this. It follows that to give everything – both emotionally and materially - and withhold nothing is good parenting. It also follows that those who cannot but who might want to give everything materially are somehow disadvantaged in this regard.
While we can argue these ideas at length, there is another point at stake here. It is that the impression is created that we can always be aware of the effects of our actions, our personalities and our responses on our children. That everything being given or withheld is within our gift to understand and evaluate. You will see this philosophy most at work in the plethora of parenting tips that flourish in the media – do this and everything should work, do that and everything should be fine. It is action-based, practical, tangible, observable and ultimately cosily founded on common sense. As if the simple act of carrying out ‘the right thing’ is enough, be it feeding, educating, playing, communicating or any other aspect of raising children.
The thing that never gets represented in any of this is the individual who acts as parent, their history, their own desires, their own failings. My point might be best illustrated by an example. I was talking with a woman* some time ago who told me that her life had been filled with anxiety and anguish despite having had a happy childhood with happy caring parents. How does that work? That is a good question. On the face of it there was no trauma, no abuse, no deprivation of any kind. And yet her adult life was stuck in a cycle of anxiety, sadness, low self esteem and broken relationships.
It was only after some time that she came to ask questions about who these people were who had raised her, yes her parents. And the questions were not around the usual clichéd ones like, ‘Did they love me?’ Rather the questions she asked were around the issue of, ‘Who were they before I came along? Who were these people at the time I was born? What were their desires, hopes, fears?’ Even at a glance you can see that framing the questions in this way offered a completely different perspective on something that often gets taken for granted.
When you next look at a glamorised photo of a loving mother with a baby, it might be interesting to do the following exercise. Ask yourself, if one was to include the complexity of that woman’s life into one’s understanding of her happiness, what possible factors would you include? If you assume her to be all-loving and perfect, what factors could have brought that about?
The woman I was referring to above discovered that her mother had actually been engaged to another man before she met her father. This first man died and her mother then met her father and married him. She loved him but the shadow of her first love was always hanging around in the background. And while her mother did everything she could to love her daughter, something of the sadness that she had experienced with the loss of her first love permeated through, almost without realising it.
This is the point I was trying to make earlier about parenting. Parents are people. They have had their own histories before they ever have children. They may well love their children more than anything in the world, but the echoes of an earlier life trickle through. Yes there is an ABC of what to do as good parents. But there is another engine at work also; one at the core of every human being, where their true but often disguised desires and wishes generate ideas, choices, emotions and actions. This is what is continually being put in place up to the moment we become parents. And this is the foundation on which we base our own parenting abilities and style on.
Before our parents ever had children, they already had a rich and complex inner life that brought them to adulthood. And before we, as their children, ever knew anything about it, it was this that formed the backdrop to our experiences of being parented by them.
*This is a composite illustration taken from a number of case histories.
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