Knowing and Not Knowing

By Kevin Murphy
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.


The recent exposure of a high profile celebrity paedophile in the UK shocked British society. How did nobody know what he was up to? How could such a high profile person get away with the scale of abuse for such a long period of time?
These are valid questions. But looked at from the perspective of this country where we have had respected members of this community doing the same thing for even longer, it is a more familiar phenomenon if not equally shocking.
The central and simple question common to both jurisdictions is how did nobody notice? It’s a question that gets its power from the retrospective point from which it always gets asked. Looking back, with the knowledge we now have, it seems astonishing that abusers were allowed to do what they did without any hint of suspicion falling on them. And, equally, how many of them were so often nearly caught only for someone with the power to expose them deciding that nothing bad was going on. So the answer to the simple question is an equally simple word that is regularly used in psychoanalysis but rarely used anywhere else: disavowal.
The dictionary definition of disavowal is: To disclaim knowledge of, responsibility for, or association with something. That’s what the dictionary says but this definition assumes we disclaim knowledge and responsibility purposely or consciously. Not every one who looked away when abusers were in their midst did so knowingly. Not every one who failed to act, did so out of unconcern. Which brings us to our next question: How can this happen?

Psychoanalysis has long recognised that we can choose to ‘not know’ without even knowing we’re doing it. When the celebrity UK paedophile was abusing children, good people were not consciously turning away from what they saw; they were unconsciously doing it. Why? Because to acknowledge that they saw what they thought they saw would have been too real, too overwhelming, too much to bear. And because nobody else signalled any suspicion they felt justified in their judgement.
That’s why in psychoanalytic usage, which expands on the dictionary definition, the term "disavowal" is often translated as "denial". It denotes a mental act that consists in rejecting the reality of a perception on account of its potentially traumatic consequences. Note that in this definition the reality of a perception takes places first in order for it to be rejected secondarily.
But people will say to themselves, wait, there’s no way we could have spotted what that man was up to and walked away knowing he was abusing young girls. That’s true, but that is to assume that you would have consciously acknowledged what the person was doing. You would have needed a moment in which it was crystal clear in your thinking so that you could say, ‘Hey wait a minute, this man is not doing good things here and it must stop.’ These situations, in reality are never clear, so we tend to disavow them. We see something odd, but only partially, and so our instinct is to shove them out of our minds because we are not sure what it is we really saw. And when it comes to anything sexual that we don’t understand, it is usually the first thing to get shoved out.
The cleverness of nearly every paedophile is to play directly at this instinct in all of us to see, half understand what we are seeing, recognise the inherent unpleasantness of it if turned out to be true and then look other way, telling ourselves we didn’t really see what we thought we saw. All of this happens in a split second and is over before we’ve even had a chance to think about it properly. It is how we automatically defend ourselves against unpleasant things. Part of the paedophile’s pleasure, on the other hand, is gained, not just from what he does to his victims, but in turning the scrutiny of sensible others away from his actions knowing they are confused and uncertain of what it is they might suspect him of. The clerical child abuse over decades in this country is an illustration of this very thing.
While disavowal works at its strongest in areas of sexual matters, it is not confined to them. Every time you come across good people standing by while bad things happen and continue to happen, you will find some form of disavowal. In contemporary society, you’ll find it cropping up in the most unusual places; in government, in civil life, in relationships, on committees. A current but more extreme example that comes to mind is the recent mass killing in the US that has brought gun laws back into the spotlight. Yet the pattern there has always been one of consistently forgetting about the problem very quickly once the publicity has died down. These are all forms of disavowal.
We can even have it in terms of our relation to ourselves. We can know something needs to be done and yet it never gets done. We can understand that our lives might be better if we stopped doing this or started doing that, and yet we never seem to do it. To understand it, and to spend time coming to see it in ourselves, is an important first step in being able to ensure we in our own small way learn to deal with disavowal. That, in turn, means we can move closer to recognising it when it occurs in the wider world around us and allow us to maybe do something positive about it.

The Allure of Pornography

By Kevin Murphy,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

Pornography is an enjoyable and necessary part of human life; an activity that free, liberated people can engage with as they wish. It represents an openness around sexuality that is refreshing and unrestrained, and it provides very visible answers for anyone who has any questions as to how the sex act should be conducted. It should be applauded not criticized for the work it does in the democratization of sex. It allows access to the viewing of sexual acts to all adults. Any attempt to stifle the free sexual expression that pornography symbolises is an attempt to bring us back to the dark ages when sexual issues were forbidden from being discussed. Pornography is the ultimate freedom.

I think that more or less sums up the position of those on the side of pornography. They are sentiments you will no doubt have heard in one form or another. And, of course, pornography is no longer pornography, it is adult entertainment.
Well, it is certainly that, even if you might quibble with the nature and content of the entertainment on offer. But one thing is certain, sex sells. There are no shortage of users for this form of ‘entertainment’, the scale of the pornography industry is enormous and there are plenty of candidates willing to tell you that it is healthy and wholesome. But is it?

I’m not arguing from a moral or religious point of view or from the concern about the commercial exploitation of one gender or another. Rather I am taking a view from the perspective of mental health and mental wellbeing. So let’s have a look at some of the things that pornography users talk about when they present themselves in the clinical setting. First and foremost, it is predominantly men. Women, in my experience, may use internet pornography but they seem to use it in a way that does not have them seeking help to get away from it.

So it is predominantly male, at least in the confidential setting of my private practice, and the predominant feature is that they wish to get away from using it, to stop altogether. I find this an interesting phenomenon. Pornography is a ‘pleasure’ product – like so many products on offer in our culture – and yet here we have men saying they are indulging in too much pleasure and want to stop. That’s because too much pleasure is the same thing as un-pleasure. And we never know we’ve crossed the dividing line until it’s too late. That’s something we never hear debated much these days.

The next feature worth mentioning is that they find they cannot stop using it. It has become a compulsion, an addiction if you like. And like all addictions, it is a way of regulating our internal pleasure economy, as one analyst describes it. The problem is that this chosen method of regulation of our pleasure gets out of control and instead of us controlling it, it controls us.

The next point to bear in mind is that some men come to realise how destructive internet pornography is to their real relationships. When so-called perfect bodies are engaging in so-called perfect sexual acts and giving all the impressions of getting so-called full satisfaction from it, it is difficult to get one’s real life experiences to match. Real life is not always like that. So pornography creates an illusory ideal. And illusory ideals can be one of the most destructive elements in our thinking. We can never reach them, they never go away and the uncomfortable tension between these two positions can last indefinitely. Men will often tell you that their real life partners just do not excite them after watching pornography.

The other psychologically destructive point is that pornography is not real. You’d be surprised at the number of people who disagree with this statement. No, they will say, pornography is real, there are real people on screen, I can see them! The key words here are ‘on screen’. It is a virtual world, a world of make believe, where fantasies of male potency and pleasure can be acted out without consequences. There is no engagement with a real, living person, no relationship is forming, and even more importantly no real lessons in how to love or engage sexually with another human being are being learned. Rather it is a repetitive exercise that eventually takes on the form of an unsatisfying cyclical experience that is devoid of human contact.

But bear in mind, the choice of pornography for most men is made for this very reason. It is a move away from reality, away from the demands of the real other person, into a world of imagination where no demands are made and no expectations are imposed. Unfortunately, the impersonal, self sufficient, self pleasuring gain, for those who do come for therapy, has long ago been far outweighed by the loss involved. And what is the loss?

Pornography remains a solitary act, an essentially empty pleasure which draws us in with great promises that are never delivered. At the end of it we remain the same as we were when we started; isolated, questioning and alone. There is no enrichment worth speaking about, other than a momentary, facile pleasure. When this experience comes to dominate the experience of users of pornography, they then seek therapy. Or when some other real life interruption ‘jolts’ them out of the fantasy.

The lure of the forbidden, though, always has a certain cache, a certain alluring gravitational pull. To combat this, you will hear some pornography users talk about it as if it were an active, directed choice. They make it sound like the kind of thing that men of action do, a kind of taking control of one’s pleasures in a rational, almost heroic way. All men do it (by implication, all men of action) and so do I, you’ll hear them say.

And yet internet pornography – an industry of massive scale – is a passive act. There is no action involved here. Even interactive pornographic experiences are ultimately virtual in nature – there is no real interaction and it ultimately involves passive viewing. It is essentially the passive viewing of others’ enjoyment, one in which we share only at the level of a visual experience. We can certainly join it as a masturbatory experience, as practically all men do, but it is still not ours, it is somebody else’s. This passive position usually sits at odds with most men’s view of themselves as being active and in control of their lives. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find examples from other parts of their lives where they watch and secretly engage with other people’s experiences. But, on the other hand, if you were to look for the first possible examples of where the urge to view others having sex might arise in a person’s life, you might find yourself asking if it has Oedipal roots.

Which brings me to my last point. There are many different forms of pornography on the internet. You can probably find every sexual taste catered for in some form or another. Most involve consenting adults while others are in the realm of serious violence against vulnerable women and children, cynically masquerading as liberal sexual practices. Not all forms of pornography mean the same thing. Some people are looking to escape the real world of human relationships; some believe an ultimate form of pleasure exists and it is only a matter of finding it; others use pornography to deal with anxieties that masturbation might comfort; others still are engaged in more complicated relations of domination and submission; and those who seek to hurt are giving free rein to the basest instinct of all, the violent urge to destroy lives.

Generally speaking, for most men pornography is a pleasure-seeking escape into fantasy from reality. Until, that is, for some it becomes a reality they have difficulty with and so their daily lived experience becomes impoverished and problematic as a result. The allure of pornography is that it offers forbidden pleasures along with the promise that the ‘freedom to enjoy’ is as simple as turning on a computer. But freedom to enjoy is a much bigger thing. It involves understanding what we want to enjoy, how we want to enjoy, and with what real, other, consenting person we might choose to enjoy. If passive and solitary viewing of the sexual acts of others on a computer screen were the answer, we’d have been recommending it long ago.

The Other Side of Love

By Kevin Murphy,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

Of the many reasons why people choose to engage with therapy, you often find the issue of love somewhere in the background. Either in terms of its absence in people’s current life, or in terms of its absence in their earlier lives. A common experience you’ll hear spoken about is, having found the right person and fallen in love with them, they are not being loved back in return.

Or you’ll often hear about a repeated resistance towards entering relationships for fear this very thing will happen; it is a powerful unspoken fear that can sometimes keep people in and out of relationships most of their lives, and mostly out. Love, despite what the romance novels and magazines will tell you, is not a self-explanatory human phenomenon. When it goes right yes it is the simplest thing in the world.

But when it doesn’t work properly it is a complex, confusing experience. This less talked about side of love represents a profound puzzle for more people than you’d think. And while the circumstances are always particular to the individual, the questions it poses are generally on how to find it, how to keep it and how not to be hurt by it.

It is fascinating how often love is written or spoken about and yet very little time is spent on the question of what actually goes on when we love someone or they love us. Yes we know that our emotions go into overdrive, that we can often feel elevated, inspired, confident and happy. These are all wonderful things that spur us on to find love. That’s when it goes right.

But, as we see from examples all around us, love can also go dismally wrong. Freud, in one of his texts, famously listed a number of paths to human happiness and one of them was falling in love. Yet interestingly, he added that love was also the most high risk path to take because the happiness it provided could be taken away at a moment’s notice. Anyone jilted, or deserted, or cheated on, or even bereaved knows how this feels.

So we have this thing called love between two people, between men and women, women and women, and men and men. What is it? Some call it a madness, others call it the salvation of the human race. Others still believe it does not exist in any true form. And yet, if we listen to the major discourses that are going on in contemporary culture, you could reasonably assert that the attainment of love is among the highest goals set by contemporary society. Just think of the amount of time and money invested, by both sexes, in making ourselves worthy of someone else’s love. Not all of it is vanity or narcissism; wanting to love and to be loved is a fundamental human desire.

Finding thinkers who understand love and who can put an understandable shape on this enigmatic desire is not the easiest of tasks but one person who has some very interesting ideas on love and its place in human experience is, surprisingly enough, a philosopher. The late Jean Paul Sartre’s most famous work is Being and Nothingness, one the founding texts for a philosophical movement called Existentialism. Put simply, the philosophy of our being in the world, our existence. It’s probably not the first place you’d think of looking to find out about love. Yet here are some of the things he says.

In his view, the human relationship is not simply a benign, harmless, fully empowering experience. We need others but there is a push and pull going on all the time. We need the other person but we want to be free of them too. We want to master the other person, be the boss if you like, but they in their own way want to master us too. So while being human is about being someone for others, or in this case a special other person, there is an almost unnoticed conflict running through the heart of human relations, no matter how much we love someone. When you hear someone say they can’t understand why they argue so much with their partner when they are so much in love, this is why.

Sartre also says the notion of finding someone with whom we can become ‘one’ is a strong and necessary ideal that drives us to find love. But he says we need to be wary of that ideal and remember that if such a unity were to truly exist, the thing that makes the other so attractive to us i.e. the fact that they are different and unique and refreshingly ‘other’ than us, would disappear. We’d be left with what? Someone very different to the person we fell in love with.

So becoming everything the other person wants you to be in the relationship might seem like the perfect formula for success. But in reality you are turning yourself into someone very different to the person you were who began the relationship, to the person you were who attracted your partner at the outset.

Sartre is possibly most interesting when he talks about what it is that we look for in another when it comes to love. In the first instance, the thing that draws us to another, apart from their looks, prospects, biological suitability and so on, is that they represent for us a model of freedom. This is an interesting concept when you considered the attraction that the lives of the rich and famous have had for generations. Behind the glitz and the glam, these people probably represent icons of freedom. And not just financial freedom but an almost indefinable freedom whereby they have truly made themselves into what they perhaps always wanted to be. Or so we imagine. Let’s be wary of this too because our successful idols tend to be all too human, just like the rest of us.

Nevertheless when we love we want some of this freedom that the suitable or chosen ‘other’person represents both for us and, we presume, for everyone else in the world. But here too there is a paradox. By wanting it for ourselves, we tamper with this very freedom by trying to contain it if you like, and so there is always a risk of damaging the very quality we were attracted to in the first place. We want to ‘own’ that freedom, or at least share in it, but we want it to remain free at the same time. As Sartre says, the lover does not want to possess the beloved as a thing, instead he or she demands a special type of ownership: he or she wants to possess a freedom as freedom. (See p.478, Being and Nothingness, Washington Square Press, 1956).

This is a hard one to manage and it is probably the reason why love is such a difficult game to play, as the song says. This sense of freedom's indefinable place at the heart of love is probably also the reason why so many love relationships lose their magic for one or other partner after time. Owning the freedom that attracted us can make that freedom less attractive, we can inadvertently tarnish it, in other words. So how does one get around this? For Sartre we almost have to imagine ourselves into the place of being the new reason why this freedom in the other person exists. We didn’t cause it, certainly not, because it was probably there long before we ever came along. But we want to be the continuing reason why it burns brightly and strongly. As Sartre says, ‘in love, the Lover wants to be “the whole World for the beloved”.

So when love goes right, yes it is about wanting to love and be loved by someone special, that much is certain. It is a two way street. We want to love someone but we also want that someone to love us in a way that perpetually re-creates us through a freedom that was freely given and remains true. On this point Sartre says, ‘if the Other loves me, then I become the ‘unsurpassable’ which means I must be the absolute end (for the other). In this sense I am saved from instrumentality’. By this he means that the loved person becomes different to all the other instruments of satisfaction in the world; he or she becomes special, unique.

'Thus to want to be loved is to want to be placed beyond the whole system of values’, to be everything for the lover. Or as he puts it, ‘I must no longer be seen on the ground of the world as a ‘this’ among other ‘thises’, but the world must be revealed in terms of me’. That’s why you’ll hear someone in love telling their partner, ‘you mean the world to me’. And that is a freedom, freely given, that loses none of its magic by being either offered to another,shared with another or received from another.

Sex Abuse as Perversion

By Kevin Murphy MSc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

We’ve had a great number of inquiries in this country into institutional and clerical sex abuse. The most recent one, The Cloyne Report, is consistent at least in that it reinforces the picture of Ireland that has emerged from earlier inquiries. Abuse was perpetrated on the vulnerable and those most in need of protection and care. It was done by those in positions of power which, in the case of the clergy, was usually unquestioned. The task of bringing the truth to light was a long and arduous one. The abused were not believed and the abusers were not inclined to own up to the truth of what they had done. And, perhaps unnervingly, the abuse was perpetrated by those who were concealed or protected behind the veil of ‘doing good’. Their credentials were never in doubt, their intentions never questioned and, often, they were simply moved to another location and allowed continue their abusive activities by the Church.
There are any number of perspectives from which to approach the issue of the systematic clerical sexual abuse of innocent children in this country. But at the core of it all there is a running theme that never really gets highlighted. For men or women, whether they are of the cloth or not, to have carried out the kinds of abuse they did means they are perverse. Now that’s a word you will have to search long and hard to find in the acres of coverage that the sex abuse scandals have produced. But perhaps that’s not so unusual.
Perversion is not something that is studied or written about or given as much prominence by other branches of psychotherapy as it is by psychoanalysis. That in itself is a curious thing. The word began to fall out of popular discourse from some time around the mid 20th century, probably in the post-War period. Then in the Sixties with sexual freedom it became downright unpopular to even consider it. And yet behind the scenes it was going on all the time until it burst upon us in the past 15 years. It seemed to take people by surprise, as if we didn’t know what word to put on what was happening. Well, we didn’t. And the Church, in particular, has been regularly criticized for being so unprepared in its response. Yet how could it respond to something whose name had been effectively forgotten by society as a whole? How could it respond when it appeared to know practically nothing about the grim reality it was supposed to deal with?
Perversion, in the psychoanalytical sense, is when someone who has been profoundly affected by their upbringing acts out sexual fantasies on another person, almost exclusively against that person’s will. The reason they choose a sexual act is not so much the pleasure they get from it directly but because they know their actions carry such a social and moral taboo that the kick from breaking rules, and indeed being able to experience boundaries being broken very clearly, is all the greater. So, in this sense perversion has a paradoxically intimate relationship with the law, both written and unwritten. The priesthood was not chosen simply on the basis of allowing easy access to victims; its position as symbol and representative of law was essential too.
In most if not all cases of clerical sexual abuse the perversion has been of the sadistic rather than masochistic kind. It is rare to read of a priest having an act of suffering inflicted on him by a child. But the examples are abundant of things being the other way. The sadistic pervert has no interest in the person or child they are abusing. The person is merely an object that allows them achieve their goal. This is often a crushing experience in itself for victims.
And what is the goal of true perversion? Well the perverse act seeks to re-enact a very particular fantasy. The pervert must see and experience the anxiety they are causing in the other person. This anxiety is going to be the signal that triggers all sorts of pleasures for them. Any sexual satisfaction after that is merely a bonus. And even witnessing this anxiety in the other is not the end of it. It is done in the compulsive and unconscious hope of reducing their own massive anxiety.
The pervert is a conundrum. Externally they appear calm, nice, friendly, understanding, at ease with the world. Yet internally, they are continuously haunted by anxiety on such a scale that it often takes the complete violation of another human being to temporarily banish the demons. Psychoanalytically understood, this massive internal and very secret anxiety is there because at some early phase in their development they remained both sexually and psychically attached to the mother-figure in a way that was not healthy for them. Their life was and is, in a very real sense, not their own and their search is for continuous independence through evoking again and again the moment of separation in a staged, often sexually explicit way. It is not a pretty picture and from the outside it does present a confusing face: violence behind calmness; complete human disregard behind empathy; sexual voraciousness behind sexual abstemiousness. A study in the March-December 2011 edition of the Irish Journal of Psychology found that the clerical child sex abuser is a man with low self esteem, who denies sexual drives and sexual interests, but who is interpersonally agreeable and empathically concerned with others. He is more conscientious and has fewer psychological vulnerabilities, such as neuroticism, loneliness and sensitivity to personal distress. The study doesn’t go as far as to say so but this mix of characteristics makes him a frighteningly efficient predator.
But what does it mean to say that causing anxiety in another person is done to reduce their own inner anxiety? When a sadistic pervert ( as opposed to a masochistic one) is carrying out his acts of sexual abuse, violation, humiliation and so on - and because by definition he has chosen a person who is unwilling - he is seeking to illicit a sign in the victim that a limit has been reached. And remember a limit is a boundary along which a law, written or unwritten, is usually laid down. This limit is usually when the victim says stop, calls for the help of a parent or makes some other gesture or sign that what is happening is unpleasant or unacceptable. For the perpetrator this is the moment he is looking for, this is what all the grooming was for, when the boundary line between two important things becomes obvious, when the victim signals that this is not what they want and they vitally want something quite the opposite. It is here that they are being separated by the pervert from the thing they want most in the world, the thing most precious to them at that moment. It can be mother, father, safety, bodily integrity, peace of mind, ordinary life without nightmares, their favourite doll or train set, untrammelled confidence, wholeness of spirit, self-belief, an absence of confusion, their right to innocence. And in the moment of separating them from it, the pervert psychologically speaking gets a clear glimpse of what that most precious thing is. There are many, many ways he can see or imagine he sees this. It is a re-enactment of the act of separation from something precious; the pervert through his victim gets to see the moment that failed for him, the moment when he failed to separate off from his most precious thing and so was condemned to a life of not being his own person, but somebody else’s.
Psychoanalytic theory has been constantly evolving the notion that the perverse individual is formed as a result of this unsuccessful passage through a crucially important moment in every child’s development. Each and every one of us has to learn at a very young age, and at an unconscious level, that we must separate emotionally and psychologically from our mothers, even though mother is the source of all comfort for most of us. If we don’t somehow take on board this idea, we remain attached in a way that is unhealthy for us, not in moral sense but in the psychological sense that while being oddly comforting it is also deeply anxiety provoking. Helping us to separate is usually father or a father figure (which need not be a man). And helping him out in this regard is mother herself, or what the late English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called the ‘good enough’ mother who can signal to her child that while she loves him/her unconditionally she also has her own desire in life. If the child remains convinced that he/she is the only thing that can fulfil mother, we have the beginnings of a problem. What starts out as a comforting notion, begins to be burdensome (because no-one can fulfil that role) and eventually massively anxiety provoking (because one’s life is not one’s own).
The thing that makes perverts differ from other folk who start out deeply caring for their mothers is that they can’t get away, and often don’t want to get away, from an uncomfortably close relationship and one that has not always been a positive experience for them. They then begin staging acts on others that re-route their anxieties about this into causing equal anxiety on their usually defenceless victims. The reason the grooming of victims is so important is because it ensures the victim becomes ‘defenceless’ either in a physical or psychological sense, mirroring the defencelessness that the perverse person has always felt about their prototype relationship with mother. The universal law that insists we all separate from mother at a profoundly personal and unconscious level (even though consciously loving her and caring for her all our lives) is behind it all. The pervert is re-enacting his unique position with regard to this law, he is bringing to life the boundaries of this law because he compulsively but unconsciously believes it will allow him separate from mother and dispel his anxieties. Except it never works, and that’s why it must be repeated again and again.
Where did this cruelty come from? How did mostly men and some women in religious orders get such a taste for debasing vulnerable women and children? These were the polar opposite of the values and beliefs they were supposed to represent. Weren’t clerical abusers supposed to be well educated and come from good stock, good families? It seems ridiculous to imagine they were all abused as children and so repeated the abuse on others. What makes far more sense is that they, like generations of perverse characters before them, had profound disruption to a seemingly simple but deceptively complex ‘moment’ in their development in learning how to treat mother with love and respect while being able to become their own person. A new study that compiles the personal histories of these offenders to see if there are common patterns in their childhood experiences would make interesting reading.
For victims, it is often a major step to be able to say ‘I was sexually abused’. But that’s not the end of it. The grip of sexual abuse on its victims long after the abuse has stopped is due to the finer detail with which the abuser stitches his handiwork together. Usually a campaign of conditioned defencelessness has been waged on them long before any abuse takes place. The antidote, if that’s the right word, lies in unpicking the threads of that stitching one by one, bravely and slowly and carefully, so that eventually all that remains of a masterwork in cruelty is a collection of loose threads that no longer have a dominating effect on the larger fabric of someone’s life.

Life and Death in Ireland

By Kevin Murphy MSc,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

There’s been a great deal in the media recently about suicide and depression. In terms of the former, we have an alarmingly high incidence compared to our European partners. And the latter seems to be universally accepted as the root cause of the situation. Depression and suicide; they sit oddly with our reputation, and indeed our perception of ourselves, as a happy-go-lucky country that likes a drink and a laugh. So which are we: the country with an alarmingly high rate of suicide or the happy nation?
I ask that question not to confuse but to tease out something that has been a striking feature of some suicides according to reports in the mainstream media. Again and again you read the testimony of the people close to those who died in which they say that there was no sign that anything was wrong. They may even have been speaking to the person only hours before their final act and everything seemed ok. It is, on the face of it, an unnerving and puzzling aspect. What, if anything, are we to understand from it?
Well, let’s work our way back from the unavoidable fact of successful suicide. It begins with the painful truth that someone ends their own life. We can reasonably assume that this is not an easy thing to do. We can also reasonably assume that in order to do it one has to be consumed with a weight of negativity that is directed purely and solely towards oneself. Yes, there are cases where revenge against others can be a strong element but there is no getting away from the fact that the final act of ending life is directed against one’s own being, against the self. And when you further consider how instinctual it is to avoid danger and stay alive, we must also include a strong motivation to do it as being a key feature.
If we take these ideas and go back to my first point, then we have a picture of two contrary realities being lived out. One is an outward facing display of everything being alright, not giving a hint of any intention to end one’s life. And the other is an inner lived experience, and presumably a lonely one at that, characterised by a growing negativity towards oneself that will eventually end in death by one’s own hand. As an aside, it is interesting how this double positioning at the level of the individual matches a similar duality in terms of how we present as a nation: happy out but with a seemingly dark inner core. So why, in the case of those individuals who succeed in ending their own lives, is there no bridge between these two realities? Why does the inner come eventually to dominate and put an end to the outer? And why is there no route that might let human support, comfort and healing have a chance at creating some positive and far less drastic outcomes?
You don’t need a university degree in psychotherapy to understand that two realities being lived at the same time represent an enormous strain on any individual. It is a conflict, pure and simple. And this is happening at a time when there is great work being done to bring about awareness of depression and of the harsh reality of suicide for those left behind. There are free helplines, doctors, counsellors, psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, self help groups, as well as public campaigns and media debate of these issues. It seems there is one other feature we have to add to our picture so far. The people who give no hint of their anguish and who succeed in ending their own lives do not appear to reach out for these options.
What is it about depression, particularly depression that gets intolerably bad, that makes this action impossible for some? Is it simply the stigma of having it? We certainly have heard a lot about that in recent times. Is the admission that speaking about depression requires a step too far? It would certainly seem to be the case. The choice of constantly pretending that everything is fine is the choice that eventually leads to death for some. It gives us some idea of the grip this idea can have. The choice not to speak, to portray an acceptable, presentable face to the outside world, is so important in some people’s minds that it, in effect, accompanies them to the grave. What are we to make of that?
The person with suicidal depression is a person deep in sadness yet also deep in fear. This fear is twofold: firstly the depth of their depression must never be discovered by anyone else and, secondly, as a result it can never be fully accepted by the individual themselves. The sadness, on the other hand, is seen as a form of un-shiftable truth that cannot be undone, by anyone. It is a profound fatalism, if you like. They wonder how could it be fixed when it’s a problem of the mind and probably the very soul. ‘Who is qualified or able to get inside my mind and fix it? No one can do that. My situation will continue for as long as I can bear it.’ And that’s ultimately what life becomes, an endurance until it cannot be endured anymore.
You often hear people use the bits of information they have picked up from scientific circles or from the internet, or both. Depression is a case of chemicals in the brain; ‘my chemicals are out of balance’. But if that’s the case couldn’t a discreet prescription from a doctor solve that? Using the same logic, a supply of pills, which are essentially chemicals, could reinstall the missing chemicals and the problem should be solved?
Equally, you will often hear people say ‘Oh it’s genetic, my grandfather had it, and my own father, so it’s no surprise I have it too. No one can fix something that is hereditary.’ Here we see again how a seemingly reasonable explanation of an ailment, always a reassuring thing, can bring with it a hopeless fatalism at the same time. If something is in the DNA, that’s nice to know but it also implies it can’t be fixed. And in this way the depressive cycle is re-energised once again. If you are prone to profound sadness then this approach is guaranteed to get you there fast.

What we don’t hear said often enough is that growing up with people who have a sadness within them, and even the jolliest of people do, can make you sad as well. Outwardly it’s going to look exactly the same as a hereditary issue or a chemical imbalance, but in reality it’s not. Nor is it permanent.
A psychoanalytic understanding of how this profound sadness takes root is that it is based on an unshakeable sense of loss. Something has been lost to the person, something they can’t put their finger on or name or describe. The person suffering is conscious only of a profound loss at the very centre of their being.
Freud in a famous paper, written in 1915 and published two years later, compared melancholia (profound and potentially harmful sadness) with mourning, the first time anyone had done so, and argued convincingly that in mourning the person knows who has been lost to them but in melancholia, which is similar to a grieving process, they are unaware of what is lost. They are unaware usually because it happens at such an early age or because it has been worked on by our powers of repression. In his paper Freud makes a number of interesting points, essentially insights he gained from his clinical work, which are just as relevant today. But before I mention these let us consider seven important assumptions that are needed to make it easier to understand what he is saying. Firstly, and most obviously, we invest emotionally in those we love. This means part of us goes into our relationships and we suffer real pain when they are ended. Secondly, we identify, become ‘like’ the people we love. The verb ‘Identify’ comes from the Latin ‘to be the same as’. Thirdly, these connections can be sometimes broken and easily so. Fourthly, when we ‘lose’ a connection with someone as an object of our love, there is a painful internal surge of emotional energy as we pull back into ourselves and retreat from outer reality to our inner reality. Fifth, our human life is full of moments of loss – from birth, through weaning, through puberty, through broken or unhealthy relationships, through bereavement and so on – and to lessen the impact on us we incorporate into ourselves something of the lost object of our love. Sixth, this loss can happen for real or imagined reasons at any age of our life. Seven, we can start to quietly attack ourselves for being responsible for this painful loss.
So, what Freud pointed out was that in severe depression very often we don’t know what or who has been lost to us. But even if we know who has been lost to us, we are not sure exactly ‘what’ we have lost in losing them as love objects. Think of the number of people with complex or troubled relationships with family members or loved ones, for example, and how their thinking remains fixed on trying to solve it. We lose interest in reality around us because we are completely absorbed in trying to figure out this puzzle.
Unlike actual mourning, the person suffering profound sadness has an extra characteristic – ‘an extraordinary’ reduction in their confidence, self regard, self belief and self respect. When we mourn the loss of a loved one, the world becomes a ‘poor and empty’ place. When we are in profound depression, it is we ourselves who become ‘poor and empty’, no matter what outward trappings we have acquired. The person sees themselves as worthless, morally despicable and expects to be punished. In believing that a love object has been lost to them, a transformation has taken place whereby the person becomes something of the thing that was lost and becomes, in turn, the target for their own anger and negativity. The picture Freud paints of this kind of sadness is completed, he says, by a capacity for life threatening behaviour or, as he puts it, by ‘an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life’. (Freud, S., Mourning and Melancholia, 1915, Standard Edition, Vol XIV, p.246.)
When all else has failed we try to return to the place where we began as infants, to a self-sufficient inner world that promises comfort. But in contrast to our first experience of it as infants, this time something of the disappointments we have encountered in reality return with us. Now it is not a nirvana but a more claustrophobic internal life plagued by guilt and condemnation and a puzzling sense of loss. It is interesting in Freud’s paper how he says this profound and potentially harmful sadness can arise not only as a result of real events but also from all those situations where we might feel slighted or neglected or disappointed. (p.251) Put another way, in profound depression the loss can be based on something real or imagined.
At an age before we even realise it, we build up a sense of ourselves through our interaction with others. This gives us an internal anchoring point, if you will. This is our ego ideal, the sense we carry within ourselves of who we believe we are and can be, not only in relation to significant others in our lives but also in the larger context of the world we live in. Whether there is trauma or not, but greater damage is done if there is trauma, it is astonishingly easy for us to pick up the message, ‘I have lost something important and so I will never be good enough to fix the sadness and unhappiness in me or others’. This simple message is very hard to shift once it becomes part of our self-belief system. It then becomes the template for all our other relationships, which is why people with profound depression get so little from their relationships and why, ultimately, their key relationships are not enough to help them fight the urge to end their own lives.
Because the person has difficulty forming a positive image of who they are, the business of engaging with others becomes problematic and consistently unsatisfying. It’s not about vanity either, more about survival. A positive ideal about ourselves is the thing that sustains us through difficult times. This ideal is created not in isolation but in the interplay with those around us whom we have loved, who have loved us and with whom we have been able to identify strongly and positively.

In the absence of indentifications with people like this – not unreachable idols but ordinary people subject to the ordinary imperfections of being human – those prone to severe depression substitute in a different kind of ideal, one without flaws that is based on perfection or infallibility. This is the dangerous one because a) it is impossible to attain and b) every failure in attaining it brings self punishment. The end result is a person for whom sadness and the unattainability of certain standards become central components in their lives, along with ever increasing self-punishment. How often do we hear of successful people die by suicide? It would seem that no amount of success can ward off the self punishment. In fact the person who dies by suicide is essentially carrying out the final act of punishment on themselves after a life, however long or short, of consistent internal punishment that they mistakenly believed they deserved.
These are weighty issues that do not often get an airing in public discourse. There is no easy cure and there is no quick cure. Medication can help and so too can psychotherapy. But psychotherapy requires people not just to talk but to give themselves permission to engage in a relationship, albeit a professional one. This second part is often the trickiest bit of the operation. Profound depression tells the sufferer that they are never going to re-find what they have lost and that they don’t deserve to re-find it. The need for another person in this context, especially a trained other, can often be seen as a further example of their own imperfection. Some prefer to remain suffering rather than see themselves in that light. But that is the very place where all humanity resides, in imperfection, in the potential to make mistakes and very often fall short of ideals. If someone suffering from profound depression can manage to allow themselves a leap of faith, to believe that going back through the route of a connection with another human being – the place where it all started – might help them re-find something of what was lost, then there is real hope that something positive can be achieved.

The Unconscious in Our Everyday Lives

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

You’ll often hear people say that talking about things makes no difference, that it has nothing to do with real life, with the real world. Leaving aside how curious that sounds to a therapy practitioner, the comment is worth examining. What people are really saying is that therapy can have no relevance for them in their daily lives. How can it? How can an activity that takes place in a private consulting room, for one hour a week, have relevance for someone’s life? How can talking about oneself to a total stranger make any difference whatsoever?
I was reminded of this question when I visited the London Science Museum recently. It had an exhibition called ‘Psychoanalysis – the unconscious in everyday life’. The very point of this exhibition, in among all the other exhibitions on medical science, space flight and so on, was that psychoanalysis is about the everyday. It is about the small things that go to make up a life. The minor details, the trivial occurrence, the forgotten name, the misplaced phone, the favourite toy, the strange look that someone gave you, the half-glimpsed wishes that surface in day dreams and in night dreams. These are the often overlooked building blocks on which a life is built. They are also the external representatives of inner drives that we never get to see otherwise.
And that’s why talking to someone in a private consulting room has relevance to the outside world, to the everyday reality that we occupy. Because talking about the small details, the overlooked and often forgotten stuff, is the place where we find something of our true selves. The big choices, where to live, what to work at, who to marry, are all very important too. But when we ignore the smaller details, we are discarding a great deal of richness. Or put another way, if life is a great tapestry then we are ignoring the fine needle work that goes into it.
The Psychoanalysis exhibition in London, now unfortunately finished I might add, was divided into a number of sections: Play, Neuroscience, Wish-Fulfillment, The Everyday and The Uncanny. The Play section was an exhibition of how psychoanalysis is used to work with children. It looked at the work of famous child analysts Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein both of whom drew their ideas from the work of the founder of psychoanalsysis Sigmund Freud and applied them to the area of children.
The section on Neuroscience showed the increasingly ‘fertile’ collaboration between this scientific field and psychoanalysis in recent years. The most active part of neuroscience today is the focus on explaining non-conscious thought processes to explain emotional experiences. In Wish-Fulfillment they showed ancient Roman offerings to the gods that helped them achieve their wishes for good fortune, good health and so on. The point was being made that people today engage in similar activities regarding wishes and dreams even if they do so in different ways. In fact, one of the main areas of focus of contemporary psychoanalysis is on trying to identify what exactly is the wish, the true wish, of the person who comes for therapy.
There was also a Cabinet of the Everyday which had ordinary objects that we use – cars, fashion, kitchen utensils – each of which has the power to become emotionally endowed through our unconscious projections onto them. These items all have a practical use but psychoanalysis is interested in the symbolic and unconscious meanings that are part of them also.
The last section was The Uncanny which was a concept Freud used to describe how we can often feel deeply disorientated even when we are in familiar surroundings. In fact, Uncanny in German, as Freud used it , means Unheimlich which is literally translated as ‘unhomely’. We are usually in vaguely familiar surroundings when this feeling hits us. Our perceptions of the world around us become destabilised, something knocks us off our usual perch and everything begins to seem unreal.
As well as these sections in the exhibition there were numerous works of art, two of which were specially commissioned, and the others which were done by artists inspired in one way or another by psychoanalysis. It was an interesting tie-up of art and psychoanalysis because not only has the latter been used to interpret human behaviour but it has also been traditionally used to interpret literature and the arts. In short, it has been used to interpret nearly every human activity that we find in our everyday lives because it is a therapy of the everyday.

Time To Switch Off For A While

By Kevin Murphy MSc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

In my most recent blog* I was writing about what to expect in therapy and what to talk about. In the course of it I happened to mention how difficult the act of talking and speaking can be. Speaking sounds like a simple thing to do, but sometimes it is far from it. I went on to mention how, because the act of speaking can be difficult, it brings with it built-in resistances and some people will go to great lengths to avoid it. And I mentioned how we can see this going on all around us all the time, not just in terms of therapy. The most popular advances in human communication over the past decade have offered us new ways to avoid speaking. Texting and internet social sites were two new media I singled out, but you could also add Twitter and computer games and so on. It all adds up to the same thing: the reduction in actual speaking face to face between human beings.
Imagine my surprise then when I spotted an article in a Sunday newspaper recently*, entitled ‘Too Wired to Talk Like a Human’. It was about US technology guru Sherry Turkle’s new book on how technology shapes our lives. This is her third book but it is arguably bleaker, less gung-ho and less technology supportive than her first two. The new book is entitled ‘Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
Turkle, a professor of social studies and science at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), got the idea at a dinner party of friends when the guests fell momentarily silent. It was her Pauline moment when she realised that the people around her were texting, flitting in and out of the ‘now’, so to speak, with dreamy smiles on their faces.
According to the Sunday Times article Turkle is worried that massive numbers of people are surrendering to internet compulsions that may be hollowing them out and leaving them more jittery and insecure than any previous generation. Strong stuff, indeed.
The real danger, she says, is 24 hour immersion in this techno-world because thanks to innovations in broadband, it is always on, never off. We are no longer drinking, to use the term of the article’s author, from the waters of intimacy but are engaged in a tsunami of violently loud web chatter.
Turkle is quoted as saying: “Thirty years ago I envisaged this technology as playful, something we would turn on at the end of the day, but now there is no escape. It owns us.”
She is particularly non-plussed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s famous comment that privacy is dead. This means that every teenage indiscretion, and indeed every adult one too, lives on forever in cyber space. There might well be ‘forgiving’ but, it appears, there won’t be any ‘forgetting’.
She also fears we are putting our faith in false gods such as techo-toys and the uncertain nature of friendship on social networks. “We are investing in these relationships because they offer more instant gratification than friendships in the ‘real’ which take time and generosity,” she said.
But she isn’t calling for radical measures. She likes Skype and the way it connects people across the world. She does, however, fear that many will end up friendless and isolated, vulnerable to mental illnesses such as compulsions, obsessions and phobias. Her solution? We need to switch off the phone or the computer and hear the silence every now and then. And we need to do it in a way that we believe in. Then we can begin to think about communicating and connecting again in the real world, with real people.
“Right now we are too busy communicating to think, to create and truly connect. It is about finding a new balance,” she said.

• Tuesday, January 11, 2011, ‘The Only Way Out Is In’.
• The Sunday Times, January 30, 2011., News Review Section, p.6.